Chapter 2 #2
The Baronessa also pressed on me an enormous, seemingly academic tome entitled The Lives of the Artists by Vasari, in which the author describes artists past and contemporary (contemporary to him being Michelangelo), which was in fact a fascinating portrait of Vasari’s own pettiness.
At least in the first hundred pages; I abandoned it after that.
As, I think, did the Baronessa; I think she abandoned every book, which was why she got Manzoni so wrong.
She had read everything but finished nothing; she imagined the endings and that was enough.
That is, I learned, one way to go at it.
It went on in this manner, with her throwing antique books at me and quizzing me about them at dinner, quizzes for which the examiner had all the wrong answers.
Because her inventions and interpolations of novels were a literature unto itself.
Though she pressed me to learn great culture, I found the Baronessa was herself more taken by television mysteries.
Her favorite was one with a sexily bald Sicilian policeman as intrigued by food as he was by clues, and this program appeared on a rather haphazard schedule, or at least the Baronessa announced it haphazardly, mostly at dinner, when she would mention there was to be a murder that evening.
I learned that what she wanted was for me to watch along with her.
Not that I would join her in her bedroom; instead, I was meant to watch on the downstairs televisore while she watched above.
It was said to be a lesson for my Italian.
And I dutifully watched. There on the white sofa, with Cesare beside me.
At each commercial, the house phone rang (Cesare would lift his reverent eyes at my departure), and it was her—“Chi pensi sia l’assassino?
” she would ask in an excited voice—and in my own halting Italian I would offer ignorant guesses as to the murderer’s identity.
Ignorant because the show was not in Italian; it was mostly in siciliano, charming in a street scene but indecipherable to an American looking for clues.
I understood nothing; this did not matter.
She rattled off her own theories until the end of the commercial break and then rang off quickly, so we could both reenter the mystery (Cesare would lift his reverent eyes at my return).
Of all my language struggles in those days, this was the least frustrating.
I never guessed the murderer, but then again, neither did she.
We were incompetent detectives, whispering together over the phone, and for once I felt in some way her equal when I would hear her voice on the line crying: “Giovedì! Someone has been murdered!”
I grew to know more of the local wildlife than just the faina.
Now and then, on my daily walks, I would startle a black-eared hare out of the grass, and, with the sneering expression and long, ungainly limbs of an adolescent, he would lope into the field to see if I was worth running from, eventually deciding I was not.
Two kinds of deer could be found—the capriolo and the daino—flitting in the shadows of the forest at twilight or running pell-mell away from me as I approached an olive grove, but no one could identify which species it was that screamed all night in the rutting season, sounding like a horror movie.
Pheasants would sometimes cross my path, mostly the dully camouflaged females, like feathered toads in a panicked dash to the other side of the road, but sometimes also the males in their red spectacles, white starched collars, and coppery mantles, spotted in black and white, strutting along grandly like Oxford dons; I found it strange, when I asked our neighbor Duccio if he ever shot and ate them, that he shook his head determinedly: “That is for the English!” I understood they simply were not eaten in these parts, or at least not by him.
The pheasants thus walked about in total peace, without a worry in the world, like cows in Rajasthan. Or Oxford dons.
Not so the most famous resident of our woods: the cinghiale, the wild boar.
As for the boar hunters, we did not mix with them, and they did not speak to us.
They were meant, however, to respect us; the Baronessa told me they were never to aim their guns toward a habitation, but they seemed to be lazy on this point, and she brought out a sunhat with a bullet hole through it as proof.
I took to buying bright colors at Formica and wearing them the rest of hunting season, to my employer’s despair; I had no plan for this to be how I met my end.
Of course, to local Tuscans, the boars themselves were the danger; more than once Ghazel warned me about “I FILI!” at night—meaning wild boars with their children, as they were known to be vicious in defense of their young.
I did not, however, come across them. All I ever saw were the distinctive marks they left as they rooted about in muddy embankments and, once, at night, a line of them in silhouette against the moon, racing across the top of a hill.
The greatest danger I encountered was on a morning walk when I came face to face with a spiny pig, a porcospino: a porcupine.
I recall I turned the corner and found the little gentleman waddling along, late in the morning for a creature of his sort, though perhaps he’d come from a rollicking party; he certainly staggered as if he had.
I stood shocked, and it took him a moment before he caught my scent, stopped, startled, and halfheartedly lifted the white tips of his spines off his back; I heard them rattling.
It was like a drunk old soldier lifting a saber.
Seemingly satisfied by this display, he ambled off into the forest in search of the safe bed of his home.
I became acquainted, also, with more miniature Italian creatures: the various harmless garden snakes, including one that kept appearing underneath rocks, terrifying me, which Ghazel somehow managed to inform me was not a snake at all but a legless reptile (an “orbettino”), confusing all my notions of animal life and taking away none of the terror; the spiders that inhabited every corner of Villa Coco’s rooms like the silent but vigilant guards of a museum, including a particular favorite of mine, who lived in the ivy outside my window and picked her way among the leaves by lifting her long pink legs in a series of grand battements; the ants, which on dry or cold days made their way through a hole cut for the telephone line into my room, in a schoolchildren’s procession across the floor, up my side table, and into my nighttime glass of water, ruining it; the stinkbugs that ambulated everywhere like pieces of a board game come alive, and that were bright green when I first came across them and by early November, as I kept removing them from my toiletry bag and hairbrush and suit jacket, had been reupholstered in bronze, after which they vanished and troubled me no further; not to mention the tiny fleas or mites or worse of which I only ever saw the evidence of bites along my backside.
Of all of these, I mentioned one once (“There are spiders in my bedroom!”) but never spoke of any of them again after hearing the Baronessa answer airily:
“Country living!”
I was beginning to find my stride in my cataloging, having now finished the entrance hall, library, and, of course, my own room.
I had begun rotating my Tonino wardrobe with other Formica items, and deciding Giacomo was merely one last pint before the long, dry road of chastity, when one day the Baronessa made her usual entrance down the stairs, Pushkin and Gorky rolling before her, and I noticed she was dressed in a singular fashion—khaki trousers and a coat and a wide orange hat—as if she might be off to shoot a rhino.
She looked over my own outfit of pleated trousers and a fresh white shirt, both Tonino purchases of which I had become very proud. “Why are you wearing these things?”
I was startled. I wondered if I was “comme il faut.”
“I thought you wanted me to dress more…Italian.”
“This is charming,” she said, “but not appropriate for the raccolta.”
The olive harvest. I had forgotten my conversation with Oscar. I said that might be exciting to watch, but I had too much work to do. I bowed slightly and turned back to one of the vitrines—
“HO HO HO!” I heard behind me. She stood there, arms crossed, with an expression of delight. “Today you will be working for the raccolta!”
“But I—”
“We all work for the raccolta,” she told me sternly.
“Even myself. We must harvest them all within a week or so. Where do you think it comes from, the oil you use so liberally at dinner?” I had assumed it had been purchased; it had never occurred to me that the groves that studded our landscape were, in fact, our provender.
“You must put aside this affection for my treasures, as you call them. And you must change.”
And so, just as I was getting under way, I was thwarted once again.
The olive harvest: it was not at all as I had imagined it.
To begin with, I had not imagined that I would be doing it.
I thought it might be a jolly time for Vinsanda and his friends, drinking wine among the trees and singing old Italian or perhaps Sri Lankan songs, gathering the olives from the branches and throwing them into great vats.
But we were all under conscription. The Baronessa claimed the government would not let private citizens hire workers for the raccolta and that only family members could do the work; if a government inspector came along, she told us, we were all to say we were her cousins.
“Giovedì, you are now cugino Giorgio,” she informed me.
“You are from Todi.” Vinsanda cast me an expression that I took to mean this was all utter horseshit.