Chapter 1 #16
“Oh, Pippa and her little house!” the Baronessa said.
“Not so little, in the end. She and I went together once to Zanzibar, in my boat. Pippa had made friends with a schoolteacher there, a remarkable woman who lived in a kind of hut on the beach. Before I knew it Pippa had bought the property next door. She also met a man on the beach and fell for him. He said he was an architect! He would design the house for her. You know her brilliant schemes. And, before we left, she also fell in love with a monkey.”
I cut in: “I don’t understand.”
She turned to meet my eye. “Then you have never known a monkey. Her name was Fatima. It was a Muslim monkey, you see. Pippa had the zoo in Stone Town take her into the monkey house and arranged to give her very special food. Then she came back to Italy while the house was being built. I did ask, Are you sure they’re giving Fatima special food?
Oh yes, she told me. But I wondered, How can they tell one monkey from another?
That upset Pippa. She said anyone could see the quality of her monkey.
You see how hard she had fallen for this monkey.
And for the architect. You know, Pippa was quite a femme fatale in her younger years. ”
Her cousin cut in: “Vabon…you said this was only a few years ago.”
“Oh yes, she could kill a man with a glance! And now I’ve lost my place in the story.”
I told her there was a monkey in a zoo and an architect.
“Oh yes! Anyway, eventually she went back. The house was complete. But of course it was all wrong. The man wasn’t an architect at all, he just fancied himself an architect, and he mixed up feet and meters.
Her little hut on the beach became an enormous treehouse.
A bedroom like a ballroom. That sort of thing.
Impossible to live in. She was very distressed about it all. ”
“And the monkey?” I asked.
“Ah, the monkey! Of course it turns out I was right. They weren’t feeding Fatima special food at all, they were pocketing the money.
Pippa went to visit her monkey and saw it all, clear as day.
Well, she took that monkey out of there.
And Pippa said goodbye to her schoolteacher friend and her beloved Fatima and left again for Italy. And she has never been back!”
I pursued again: “What happened to the monkey?”
“It lives in the house! With another monkey for company. The schoolteacher throws fruit over the wall. I can’t say what it must be like by now, but I imagine it is a very good life for a monkey.”
“Did the architect break her heart?” I asked.
“Of course not! It turned out all right in the end, didn’t it? The house was built wrong for a person. But just exactly right for monkeys. Pippa wanted to get a happy ending,” she said, “AND SO SHE DID!”
The Baronessa seemed very satisfied with her story, but I didn’t see what it had to do with love. It seemed to me nothing other than the tale of a foolish old woman and her delusional schemes.
My employer said: “Ah, eccoci.”
Here we were indeed, at a high pass where a small roadside bar, frequented by motorcyclists, served beer and focaccia stuffed with mushrooms, a delight the Baronessa told us she had not tasted in twenty years.
Northward we went onto a flat green plain where water seemed to shimmer in the distance (surely an atmospheric sprinkle or Po mirage), and we proceeded along a route marked, as for a triumphal parade, with long pink ribbons and banners.
It was only when we stopped for gas that we learned this was the next day’s route for some kind of bicycle race called the Gara Nazionale.
The Baronessa was as uninterested in this as she was in all sporting events except the Palio di Siena (a medieval, thoroughly corrupt horse race around that town’s central square) and began a droll summary of the towns we were passing through, mostly a tour guide of their ancient arts (“This one is famous for orange wool coats”; “This one is famous for majolica”) or cuisine (“And here one has cappellacci with a filling of zucca”).
She seemed to be getting nervous; I saw her checking her watch and urging Giacomo to make better time.
She had, after all, an appointment in Ferrara.
Along our route (just past another missed opportunity for Forlì), Giacomo asked me about my past, and I obliged him.
I described the suburban neighborhood of my childhood as “Spielbergian,” thinking the bike-riding preteens and cul-de-sacs of those movies would be universal; the Baronessa kept saying “Eh?” until I moved on to my parents.
I said there was really nothing out of the ordinary about them.
Or, to be honest, my childhood in general.
She seemed to consider this. “Once, in Rajasthan, my hosts made a fuss about taking me to a very special zoo, with very special exhibits. It was a long drive and very hot. I remember we arrived and I was led to the pen, which was painted all in gold, to discover it was an ordinary donkey and a deer. Exotic to someone from India!”
Giacomo asked what this had to do with American parents.
“Perhaps your parents are this to us.”
I wondered if she was comparing them slyly to a donkey and a deer.
I sighed deeply before saying we did not speak often, they did not understand me, they were scientists who saw only observable phenomena and ignored the messy inner workings of the world.
The silence in the Mitsu-bitchy allowed us to hear its own dubious mechanical clankings. Giacomo cleared his throat.
“This is not a very funny story,” the Baronessa said at last, “you must tell it again another time,” and something in her tone communicated more than her words and silenced me.
Thwack. “Not Forlì! Not Forlì!”
What Americans know of Italy is a confection of movies and food; for expedience’s sake, restaurants and filmmakers have grafted Naples to Sicily, Rome to Florence, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.
In fact, the nation is much younger than America itself; unification was achieved only in the time of Dickens.
It is the opposite of America: not a colonizer’s canvas cut into political states but ancient kingdoms brought together into one nation.
And so the passage from Tuscany into Emilia-Romagna was not like that from South into North Carolina, which, no matter how Americans may squabble, is hardly to be noticed, but more like the passage from Spain to Morocco (one I made in my later travels).
There was a change of landscape, of culture, of history, of language, and, of course, of cuisine.
So it is astounding to report that the first city I visited in Italy was not the famous Rome or Venice, or even nearby Florence, where I had changed trains, but Ferrara, which the Baronessa began to describe in her peculiar, vagrant way:
“Of course, Savonarola was born here. You cannot escape Savonarola. I wish Oscar were here to explain it all. It is famous I think for a kind of sausage and the Palazzo dei Diamanti and for the House of Este, the last member of which is who we are coming to see.”
“A friend of yours?” I asked.
“We have never met. And you will not meet him; you will be in Ravenna. I know you have been longing to see it.”
“What?” I had been longing to see Florence. I had no idea what Ravenna was.
“How can you come here and not see the Byzantine mosaics?”
“But you—”
“There is nothing like them in the world,” she said. “An Ostrogothic wonder. And it is not often you get to see the penis of Jesus Christ!”
It was not clear to me whether this was a figure of speech or the literal penis. “I thought we were here to assist you—”
She said, “I think you have perhaps overdosed on your time with me. It will be good for us to be apart.”
“I see. How far is Ravenna?”
“Not far. But first I have told Giacomo you must drive through Comacchio, which is a little Etruscan fishing village that knows it is secretly Venice. Like a scullery maid who is actually a princess.” She seemed quite proud of this comparison, but I found her descriptions were becoming as dreamlike as Ghazel’s.
“It’s not far,” added Giacomo. “We have enough time to be back to join my cousin for dinner. If the car holds out!”
“It shall,” his cousin insisted. “I have made a reservation at a fine restaurant. You must not be late.” Apparently the Mitsu-bitchy honored reservations made at fine restaurants. But it was not the first time I had known the Baronessa to hold things together by her will alone.
So this was the new plan: to leave my employer to do her business in Ferrara while Giacomo and I saw the secretly Venetian charms of Comacchio and the Byzantine wonders of Ravenna, joining her later for dinner.
I had no doubt that this scheme suited some wider purpose of hers, but what it was I could not envisage.
I carefully examined her: the stern, sharp nose beneath her sunglasses; the coils of fine white hair; the gleam of a diamond earring bezeled in gold; the red wool collar edged in tawny fur.
I do not know if it is practice, powder, or paralysis, but an aged face gives little away.
And soon we had reached the castle city of Ferrara.
While entering an American city is a slow process of submerging oneself in the shallows of car parts stores until one has entered the depths of the metropolis, entering Ferrara, or really any small Italian city, was not like that at all; from a pastoral setting we were plunged into brick-brown darkness, where tiny medieval alleys took us around churches and fortresses decorated with flags, until we were spat out at last into a large piazza, in which sat, of all things, a castle.
With a moat and drawbridge and everything. Right in the middle of town.
“Wow!” I shouted. “What’s happening?!”
The Baronessa asked if it wasn’t indeed striking.
“Is it real?”
She demurred: “This is a very Vedic question.”