Chapter 1 #17
Giacomo broke in with too much information: “It was built by the Este family in the fourteenth century. To protect themselves from invasion. Or maybe the…eh…plague. I forget.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s amazing.”
But the Baronessa had her doubts. “I wonder if it was very comfortable. I once was forced to live in a castle. You may let us out here, Giacomo; the hotel is avanti. Oh, look! That cretino Savonarola.” And, indeed, a large statue of the monk stood directly before us.
I did not know who he was, but, as she had said, it seemed there was no escaping him.
The Baronessa carried her own luggage while Giacomo and I contended with the cardboard package which, after she checked in, would not fit in the elevator (an antique variety made for only two people), but, saying the porter would carry it up, she bid us goodbye.
“We are to meet at dinner at half past eight,” she said, stepping into the elevator.
“At Orlando Innamorato. Enjoy! You are to see one of the wonders of the world!”
“And the penis of Jesus Christ!”
I heard her laugh. “Who knows? You might see two!”
We left the Baronessa in the elevator; her final words were a comment on the porter (“He looks just like Savonarola! There is no escaping him!”) before the accordion gate closed and she began to rise in her small capsule within the stairs.
Giacomo-Giacomo and I got into the car and made our tumbling way across the cobblestones out of Ferrara.
“What do you think of my cousin?” he asked once we were back on country roads. I noticed his fine blond hair had lost its composure in the struggle with the package; a few strands pointed straight upward.
“Well.” I was very cautious in speaking about her; I had learned any conversation might be as trapdoored as a Jacobean stage. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”
“There is not anyone like her,” he agreed, frowning slightly as he drove.
“She is…eh…sui generis. Sometimes it is like speaking to someone from a hundred years ago. She knew Man Ray and Malaparte. Graham Greene. Pablo Neruda. And that was all on Capri! Ask her about Salvador Dalí and she will tell you they went on a dinner date, and that when he turned his head, his long mustache would tickle her ear! And so forth and so on.”
“I don’t think you want to take this exit.” I was not about to be led to Forlì.
“Vabon. I thought it was the main road. But sometimes…eh…sometimes she is more modern than anyone else. More modern than I am, or you. She has no…how do you say?…no morals.”
“Morals?”
“No morals at all. That’s what my father always says.
He kept me away from her until I was thirteen, and then she…
showed up at a funeral for my great-aunt Ursula.
I remember she didn’t wear black. She wore a…
eh, ahem, a red robe. She sat directly behind me at the service.
I remember she leaned forward and whispered to me, You know, Ursula took me to my first movie.
It was The Gold Rush. Charlie Chaplin, the first man I ever found sexually attractive. ”
I laughed and wondered if she had been dressing me as Chaplin all this time.
“I found her fascinating, and, at one point, I ran away to Tuscany. And stayed with her for almost a year. My father was furious, but it was a great education for me. She had parties then, musicians and singers and artists, and so forth and so on. The things that went on! No morals. And no hang-ups. About sex or race or marriage. She is very protective of her…eh…gay friends.” He nodded to me. “And, of course, protective of me.”
I thought I understood what this married man might mean, but I had my vow. So I chose not to take this exit. “Something I’ve never asked her about, I think I’d never dare, is her love life. I understand she’s never been married. Has she always been alone?”
At this, Giacomo laughed. “I think you misunderstand. In America…ahem…you always marry. You marry for health insurance and to protect the children from shame. We do not have these problems here. Here we only marry for inheritance and if the landlady complains. Otherwise we don’t bother.
Nobody I know is married except the ones who married an American. ”
“But you’re married.”
He took this comment very seriously. “Yes, I am. That is a good example of having to marry. Ahem.”
Comacchio was a small town on the edge of an enormous wetland.
Fishing shacks dotted the landscape with great poles jutting out, from which giant nets hung on square frames, ready to be dipped into the shimmering waters.
I saw the shacks on our drive in, small but solid looking, and I had an absurd longing to live in one and wake every morning to the slightly pink-colored salt pans, make my coffee, fish and eat and sleep without a “koo-koo!” to disturb me.
Was this the life I longed for? It struck me also as intensely lonely; more and more I was missing contact beyond that of Pushkin and Gorky and Cesare in my life.
Giacomo told me that only thirty years before, flamingos had moved into the wetland as if it were a chic new spot to vacation.
Like wealthy tourists, they first came only in spring and summer but, smitten with the beauty and the price of real estate, eventually stayed on through winter and became true citizens of Comacchio, leaving Africa behind them.
It suited them perfectly; the pink of the salt became the pink of their feathers. Alas, we never saw a single one.
We parked and went on a stroll around Comacchio.
The sights of the town itself were quick to take in: no more than five or six blocks of brick and painted houses, churches, and a tower, unremarkable except that they were intercut everywhere by canals filled with the gold-green waters of the delta, which prolonged our walk and, I suppose, the daily life of the citizens so even in their modest square meterage they could circumambulate as one does in a cathedral, following the lines of a labyrinth painted on the floor.
What would it be like, to know you were secretly Venice?
I envied the town, though of course in the canals were not gondolas but the local specialty—eels—which made the waters wriggle slightly in their courses.
Yes, eels. They were the basis of the town’s famous cuisine and were its familiar spirits, beloved, much the way other towns cherish their swallows or poplars or stags; if it had been an American town, the local high school team would have been the Fighting Eels.
Along the way, Giacomo asked me about my time at Villa Coco. I began with the pozzo and went on to describe the faina and the hat on the bed—
“But this is very serious!” he said, stopping us on a bridge. The canal glowed in stripes on either side of us, a satin ribbon on a table. “You know a hat on a bed means death.”
I said that had been well explained to me.
He peered at me over his glasses and his eyes caught the gold of the water. “I hope you found a way to undo it.”
With amusement I described the solution proposed by the Baronessa.
At last he smiled. “The nearest man’s…eh…palle. Of course. What a Neapolitan solution.”
“Oscar was obliging,” I said.
“Any man would be,” he added, pushing his glasses up his nose. “With so much at stake! Ahem.”
The main sight in Comacchio is the Ponte dei Trepponti—the Bridge of Three Bridges—a remarkable meeting of two canals to become one leading into the lagoon and, from there, into the vast wetlands south of the town.
I looked up at the two massive brick towers sitting grandly above the canals, as out of place as two princes forced to eat at a wayside inn.
But we were not allowed to visit them; apparently a Miss Comacchio pageant was being held the next day, in honor of the Gara Nazionale, and the bridge was needed for rehearsal.
And indeed three teenage girls, in red, green, and white sparkling gowns, stood impatiently on the bridge, awaiting instruction.
The one in red was tallest, held herself most like a woman, and had the best dress; she would surely be the winner.
I felt bad the others had to rehearse something so clearly preordained.
We found the Mitsu-bitchy where we had left it, beside an old columned fish market, where perhaps it felt at peace, because despite many tries and entreaties, Giacomo was unable to rouse it from slumber.
We raised the hood and stared at that alien interior; neither of us knew anything about auto mechanics.
But I could recognize, from the bits of twisted wire and colored hoses mismatched to their counterparts, the odd piece of chewing gum or twine, the handiwork of Ghazel.
Giacomo found a mechanic nearby. I understood nothing of their conversation, but I watched with interest as a waiter came along the street carrying two coffees in a lidded plastic carrier meant, I think, for transporting cakes.
He took off the lid and presented the coffees to the mechanic, then made his way back into the village.
Another mechanic emerged to take his cup.
I understood this must be a daily arrangement with the local café.
I looked around and took in the brickwork and plaster, the not unpleasant scent of mud and fried fish.
I wondered what life might be if one were indeed trapped here forever, under a mystic curse, not a mechanical one, with bridges to cross and canals to walk along.
From the café door, a portly man emerged with a sandwich board, which he struggled to set up in the wind.
La Chef Consiglia!, it announced, and of course what the chef suggested was eel.
I felt a shiver go through me. Almost as if—and this was impossible—the Baronessa had arranged this all as a diabolical joke.