Chapter 1 #19
Giacomo shrugged. “Americans!” he shouted over the music. Perhaps he was drunk as well. “You always hug and kiss and pretend to be great friends and say, ‘Come visit me!’ and so forth and so on, but you don’t mean any of it. That is the heartbreaker.”
“Well,” I said, shouting in return, “I won’t tell you to come visit me because I don’t have a home.”
“You can visit me!”
“In your vast estate?”
He laughed and applauded the band. The dancers were dispersing.
“I have nothing. My father has such a house. And my wife has a house, her relative’s house.
” He looked down and cleaned his glasses.
The music had softened and the vocalist was taking a break.
“Maybe you already know, but my wife was a college friend. She had to marry, for reasons of inheritance. I have the same reasons. The houses, you see, and more than that…it’s hard to explain.
You can’t survive in Italy without family.
We cannot live the way we wish to. One day she came to me and said, ‘I have a very simple solution to our problems.’ ”
My suspicions were confirmed. “She is gay as well.”
He wore a private smile, slightly sad. “She has a…eh, ahem, girlfriend, and this is our arrangement, and so forth and so on. Of course we do not tell our families. They do not know about the girlfriend, but they also do not ask. It makes life simpler.”
It did not seem simple at all, to me. “She has a girlfriend. And you?”
“When I was very young,” he told me, “I made a proposal to God. That I would be a good boy, a good son, even though…eh, ahem. I would be perfect. And in return He would not strike me down dead.” He laughed.
I sat stunned at such an arrangement. “What did God say?”
“I never heard back from Him.”
I thought of Oscar, who had sworn off pleasures for reasons of health. With a shock, I realized I myself had done the same—for different reasons altogether.
“Still,” he went on, “I kept my part of the bargain. So that part is, for me, somewhat unfulfilled.”
“You’ve never…?”
“Oh, I have. Now and then. But no one…serious. I do my work and that is enough.” He replaced the glasses on his face and his ancestor was before me again, lean-faced and vulnerable and full of thought.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, and we heard the laughter of the owner and her friends.
“Are you not glad the car broke down? Are you not glad everything went wrong? It is…eh…a nice change. I sound stupid, I’m afraid. ”
“You don’t sound stupid,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“Is it nice to be American?” The music was starting again, the singer trying to rouse the crowd.
I had never considered this before. “I guess so.”
He smiled at that: “Except you have ketchup on pizza.”
“That’s not true! You’ve never even been to America!”
“Vabon.” He drew back slightly, seriously. “You don’t like to be teased.”
But I did.
When we emerged from beneath the metal eel, the town had changed; what before were bright canals between darkened buildings and churches became, at night, quivering pathways of reflected streetlight, as if candles floated, as during a festival, on the water’s surface.
No one was on the street, and there was nowhere to go but back to Nonna’s.
We had finished two bottles of Lambrusco, and it fizzed within us as we stumbled home; I remember he helped me over the bridge with an arm across my shoulder.
I responded by tickling him under his coat and he laughed, pulling me closer.
Who knows what foolish words we exchanged as we shuffled through the cold or made our way quietly up the staircase to the bedroom?
I only know we removed our coats in silence, then our shoes.
He unbuttoned his shirt and stood there awkwardly, then cleared his throat and looked my way, and I took it as the sign I needed.
My vow was long forgotten. I removed my hat, and the young man began to warn me of the danger I was courting.
Then he caught my eye, and no further discussion was needed.
With a smile, I threw my hat upon the bed…
That morning in Comacchio, no boatman brought flowers; it was no Dal Lake.
And yet we lay as contented as flamingos in pink salt.
I remember Giacomo opened the windows and, standing by the bedside, I had a view of the ancient bridge, the gleaming canals, and his broad body with its tangle of dark hair at the center of his chest, his princely arms spread out against the frame of the window.
He wore his glasses, and without his modern clothes, the resemblance to his ancestor seemed complete; he could have stood here two hundred years before, leaning naked against a window where his breath on the cold glass was like white smoke.
He smiled; I wondered if it was for the view or the quiet peace of the morning or for me.
He fell on the bed and we fumbled around again.
Like any abstainer, I told myself it was only one lapse.
What harm could it do? Where could it lead, anyway?
I wondered what his God would think of us.
After we dressed and went downstairs to the dining room, Nonna provided cappuccino along with homemade doughnuts; she crumpled up our thanks and threw them to the ground.
We made our way along the canal to the auto shop, where the mechanic sat outside, smoking, receiving another cake carrier of coffee as he informed us the Mitsu-bitchy was ready at last. Giacomo paid him, and we drove the short distance to Ravenna.
I found it to be a baffling place: bland, ordinary streets of shops and ice cream, at the end of which might be a worn brick church, and inside that church: wonders!
The saints in gold and lapis lazuli! A march through more uninspiring thoroughfares to a park and a low brick mausoleum, and inside: glittering stars and quatrefoils!
We did indeed see the penis of Christ two times, as he was twice portrayed nude in baptisteries, but it was hardly the highlight; the highlight was this shock of inner poetry after such prosaic exteriors.
The analogy to the human condition was too much.
At the Arian Baptistery, I brushed against Giacomo by accident, and he seemed to tremble with embarrassment or confusion.
At least, that is what I saw in his eyes, as wide and full of emotion as those of Empress Theodora, in her pearl headdress, staring down at us from the apse of San Vitale.
I thought she was the spitting image of Nimali.
Perhaps the effulgent beauty around us, as well as the raw day-after feelings, was as heavy, as delicate, as a pearl headdress.
The evening before, we had learned more about each other than just what we might look like beneath our clothes.
He had spent his youth with a variety of girlfriends, and it became clear that his experience with men was, if not minimal, rudimentary.
I was certainly no magicien du boudoir, but maneuvers that felt obvious to me simply had never occurred to him.
But this was in that particular era—long after the easily had shepherds of Oscar’s day and long before the marital affections of our present one—when everything between men of our sort was tense, hidden, whispered, confused. And exciting.
“I have a…eh, ahem…request to make of you,” he had said as we lay in darkness, ready for sleep. There was no noise outside at all; the cyclists must have been getting their rest. “Two requests.”
“Of course.”
“One is that we cannot make of this a habit,” he said. “My life is already confused with…eh, ahem…”
“Your wife.”
“And my work. I hope you understand.”
I said I understood completely.
“Vabon. It’s not that I did not—”
“Listen,” I said, propping myself up on one elbow. I could barely make out his face in the blue light. “I don’t need a complication either. This was nice. But I’m leaving at Christmas.” I did not add that I knew all too well what could happen. Handcuffs, for one thing. To be honest, I was relieved.
“Vabon. And a second request is not to mention this to my cousin.”
I said I would never dream of it, but why?
He closed his eyes. “Maybe she would approve. Maybe not. But I worry it would all get back to my family and so forth and so on. That would be a disaster.”
“I thought you were the only relative she spoke to.”
“Still, you will promise?”
I saw this had nothing to do with my employer at all, merely with his own fears. I said I would be as discreet as an eel.
“And then?” the Baronessa asked.
“That’s all, I’m afraid,” I said. “We took two rooms in Comacchio, then came back here.”
It was late afternoon by the time we arrived and found the Baronessa in the western olive grove, directing Vinsanda for the coming harvest with prolonged instructions. He stood staring at us as if he might lose his mind. I understood the feeling.
The Baronessa wore a tan belted jacket similar to ones I had seen on the wild boar hunters. Her eyes were surprisingly alert. “And Ravenna?”
“Amazing,” I said.
Giacomo stepped forward. “We saw the Arian Baptistery and San Vitale.”
She paused. “That is all you two have to tell?”
I nodded. “Amazing,” I repeated.
She said, “I see.” Her searching gaze scanned us both very sternly.
“Oh, I do remember one thing!” I said. “That the Empress Theodora looked precisely like Nimali.”
“Nimali!”
“Yes,” I said. “The eyes, you know.”
She put her hands to her mouth and burst into her version of hysterical laughter.
Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and she had to lean against her cane.
“This is what you gained in Ravenna? That the Imperatrice looks like Nimali! I am very glad the two of you have seen this vision!” I smiled at Giacomo, who did not catch my eye or speak.
I asked the Baronessa about her appointment in Ferrara, and she sighed. “It did not go as I had hoped,” she said. “And I admit I am a bit sad. I have said goodbye to an old, dear friend.”
“Oh no! In Ferrara?”
She blinked, and her expression seemed to tighten. “Oscar should have been there. But it is done, thanks God. Now!” she said, her face flashing with resolve. “You will at last be put to work!”
I wondered what “work” would entail after days of sweating in bamboo and taking a mysterious package to Ferrara, but I said nothing.
“The rooms are ready!” she exclaimed. “So you can begin this project you are so eager to finish. You will have other duties on top of this, and will not be as free for such pleasure trips as this one.”
I took a deep breath, about to say it was hardly a pleasure trip—then considered that perhaps…
She glanced at my clothing, somehow not remembering it was what Giacomo had picked out the day before. “I am glad to see that you are learning how to dress. Next you must focus on learning Italian.”
Giacomo caught my eye, and I saw a look of amusement.
But my employer was on her own course of conversation: “Now come! The veterinario is waiting in the courtyard. It is a very special day.” With these words, she began to make her way back to the main house.
I asked what this might be.
“Oh yes! Today!” she said, turning around again to face us. With an expression of delight, she threw her hands into the air. “TODAY WE SHAVE THE DOGS!”