Chapter 2 #5
Estelle laughed and announced the risotto was done and we must wash up and eat immediately. In the fuss of preparing the table, I saw the two of them having a conversation in glances and expressions. But I would not let it go. When we were seated and eating, I asked again.
“In Panarea,” she said, then turned to Giacomo. “Did she ever mention the house in Panarea?”
Giacomo said, still not looking me in the eye, “I don’t really know the story. It is…eh, ahem…a mystery. I do know she earned all her own money—”
Estelle interrupted: “She lost everything when her father died before the war. I think the stepmother took everything. So she ran away to Capri. A family friend had a house there is what she says. Lived among the artists. And started selling their art.”
“So she wasn’t rich?”
“You will meet many Italians with titles and nothing else,” said Giacomo.
“Why did she leave?”
Estelle shrugged. “When I met her she was already a rich woman in Milan. Something happened in Capri, something with Oscar, I think. And that Pullman character. Some good fortune or…escapade of hers. And she made the most of it on top of selling art. She wanted a house in Panarea, off Sicily. With a view of Stromboli erupting at night. And when she had enough, she bought one. Just a little house on the sea. It was what she thought she’d always wanted.
But it wasn’t. Eventually she sold it. But she had to buy a house in Panarea to find… the love of her life.”
“And?”
“Coco saw her one day on the water.”
The shock of this revelation astounded me. “A woman?”
Estelle laughed, and so did Giacomo.
“A boat,” he said to me. “A wooden…eh…two-master cruising through the waters.”
“A yacht!” I exclaimed.
“Not a yacht. A boat,” he said, a little annoyed. “She had a horrible name, but Coco renamed her. But at last she had her. Caprice.”
Instantly the image came to my mind of the sculpture in the entrance hall, a boat in bronze…
“Seven letters is good luck,” he explained. “My cousin had her for twenty years. I was on her many times. But then she had to sell her.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. She always says it’s not a very funny story and changes the topic.”
“Maybe it was for a man.”
He frowned. “You keep searching for a man in all this. That isn’t her story. Maybe it’s yours?”
Estelle put another bottle on the table and dimmed the lights. “I think,” she said with a mischievous smile, “we should try the Number One.”
It was the kind of potion one finds in Shakespeare.
After just one glass, the shadows took on a greenish tint and our eyes began to glow like those of deer in a field.
The fire, an odalisque, dropped the silk from its shoulder, and the flame lay before us totally nude.
We laughed until we could not stop; the music changed and we were dancing.
At one point, Estelle vanished and it was just Giacomo and me by the fire, leaning against a landscape of pillows.
The potion gave me the courage to say, “I know why you’re here. ”
“What?”
“You keep asking why you’re here. When you have business in Milan.”
“And a personal matter as well.”
“Think about it,” I said, trying to connect my words while my head was woozy. “She put us in adjoining bedrooms, and when that didn’t work she sent us here to Estelle. I’m sure she asked her to bring out the Number One.”
“Did you tell her…?”
“Giacomo, no one needs to tell your cousin anything.”
“Vabon.” He leaned back, and firelight covered him.
He had not, in Comacchio, been more than handsome to me, as much as a dozen other men.
Now, all at once, he was unique. Like a flavor, or a work of art, or a song that must be listened to a dozen times before it is more than noise and becomes our favorite.
His soft and boyish face kept changing in the firelight. Beautiful; cryptic; furious; gold.
I said, “She made you come here for me.”
“Oh…eh, ahem, really?”
“Or, rather, for you. And Ferrara. She arranged that as well.”
“What? Why?”
“I think she wants you to be happy. And maybe,” I said, chuckling, “she likes a little drama.”
“I have not often been…eh, ahem, drama.”
“And I think the sooner we indulge her, the sooner you can go home.”
He said something quietly in Italian that I did not understand. He shook his head back and forth, then looked into the flames as if deciding something—to throw himself into them, perhaps—then he turned to kiss me.
Just as I had often talked to someone in my growing vocabulary of Italian only to realize I had misunderstood a statement of theirs—that they meant precisely the opposite of my perceived meaning—in that way had I misunderstood this man.
He took me with a desperation and passion he had not shown in Comacchio, where it had all been fun and exploration.
Under the spell of Number One, Giacomo held me against the cushions and stroked my hair and put his lips all over my face and neck, staring at me with shining eyes, gasping as he unbuttoned my shirt and ran his hands over my skin.
He was hungry, rapturous, relieved; he kissed me like a soldier home from war.
I was confused and excited and let him have his way; it was so wonderful to be touched and adored, to be someone’s treasure.
At one point Estelle floated through in a white cotton nightgown, saying, “I’m glad the Number One is working.” Then she was gone again. We did not pay any attention to her.
We were of course useless the fifth day of the raccolta.
I have no memory of walking home or of finding our way into the house and delivering ourselves to our proper rooms, but, with the same relief as finding nothing broken after a catastrophic fall, I discovered some part of me (some inner manservant) had brushed my teeth, folded and put away my clothes, and even dressed me in princess pajamas.
No part of me, however, could save me from the headache that Number One had given me, like a mallet to my skull.
“La vita è dura,” Nimali said in the kitchen, in her daily report, and this time I agreed.
The thoroughly Italian remedy was a single chalky aspirina, given by Nimali with the reverence of a priest presenting the Host. It did nothing, however, to relieve my swirling thoughts about what had occurred.
Giacomo seemed to have fared better; he was already out, raking away in the remaining corner of the grove and chatting with the baker.
He waved at me and kept chatting; only when I arrived for my duty did he confide “I have a face of wood,” which I assumed meant a hangover.
When it was time for a break, we both lay down in a leaf pile and fell promptly asleep.
We were awakened by an elephant trying to bury us like game wardens; it turned out to be the Baronessa.
She was throwing sticks in order to wake us.
“To work!” she cried furiously. “We have only a few days!” She roused us to our feet and went to a tree and said she would show us how it was done.
She herself worked very badly, raking the tree as feebly as a child brushing a doll’s hair.
And yet I could see, in her glance at the two of us, that she was very pleased her plan had worked.
I wondered if she perhaps had become frustrated by her cousin’s intransigence and my own sour mood, like a zookeeper who has brought together two pandas only to find them sitting on opposite sides of the pen.
And so, with Estelle’s assistance, she had forced our hand.
That night’s dinner held an exquisite tension between me and Giacomo as we passed the salt (never hand to hand, as this was bad luck, but always in a chess move across the table) and briefly touched each other’s fingers.
The Baronessa was telling of her governess, called Madame, who wore old-fashioned ruffles and lace and had led the life, as she put it, of “an adventuress!” Her cousin and I, however, were not paying very close attention.
She said something about the governess falling from a horse in the Indochine with no doctor around and asked, “Guess what?” looking expectantly from one of us to the other.
Apparently we waited too long before saying “What?” because my employer frowned and said perhaps the story was too good to waste at a table such as this.
“No, no!” Giacomo said, leaning toward her. “Tell us what happened then.”
The Baronessa paused and shook her head. But she had no self-control when it came to her stories; the absurdity overcame her pride. “She was left with no nose!” she burst out, eyes wide. “Just two holes, which I found very beautiful.”
“She didn’t have a nose?” I asked. I was beginning to detect a drop of invention.
“No nose at all,” she said, avoiding my gaze, then leaned down to stroke the dog beside her. “This began my love of pugs.”
The phone rang loudly, and Nimali scuttered across the kitchen to claim it. A moment later, she announced to the Baronessa that it was “Signor Pullman.”
I struggled to think of who this could be until I recalled the strange man who had interrupted our luncheon before the sudden trip to Ferrara.
I looked to Giacomo, who seemed unaware of this character, then to the Baronessa, who to my surprise stood up and accepted the call (something of which Madame would not have approved before dinner guests, even ill-mannered ones).
The conversation was one-sided and in English and along these lines:
“He is proceeding.”
“I have not decided.”
“I said I have not decided.”
“By Christmas. Goodbye.”