Chapter 3 #2
Soon after, we had a winter visitor. He made a sudden appearance by knocking on the kitchen door and terrifying Nimali.
The Baronessa and I were having gelato and making plans to watch a murder mystery on TV; we peered from the dinner table, but I noticed she did not rise, merely nodded her head; the visitor was not for her.
He was a slight, bearded sepia-toned man in a blazer and kerchief who, when he removed his fedora, revealed himself to be bald as a hazelnut and as brown.
Although he was as slender as Ghazel, and perhaps the same age, his movements were slow and gentle compared to the other’s nervous energy—a loris compared to a gazelle—and he was talking to Nimali in a tone so quiet I could not make out what he was saying.
Both of them were focused on a small dark object in the palm of his hand.
The scent was unmistakably that of a truffle, and the Baronessa confirmed he was the tartufiere who had brought us Cesare.
She said, “I asked him to come to train him, but he says it is impossible.” Because of the chill, we were both dressed in blankets “in the goatherd style.”
“Maybe we should let Cesare just be a dog,” I suggested.
“You’re right,” she said, resigned. “It is not everybody’s duty to fulfill their destiny. But it is a disappointment. Think of the truffles!”
I pointed out that the visitor seemed to have one.
The Baronessa went on: “It is a gift to us. A very precious one, as you can imagine. He is explaining to Nimali that there are only three ways to prepare a truffle. The first, which I well know, is scrambled with eggs. It’s my preferred.
The second is with fresh tagliatelle. The third, he says, is exquisite.
You layer the slices of truffle…with anchovy! ”
“You’re kidding.”
“He says it is how the ancient Romans ate them!”
“What does it taste like?”
She paused for a moment, listening to the man’s quiet words. “He says he doesn’t know. He has never dared to risk it. Too bad, I would be curious to find out.”
“Well, we can try!”
“Where angels fear to tread?” she asked, eyes wide. “I admit I am intrigued but also afraid. Is this to be my last truffle? Then I will have it with eggs, thank you.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s not your last truffle.”
She folded her hands thoughtfully. “These notions come to one at a certain age. My last trip to Paris may have already passed. My last hamburger surely has. The last of everything is approaching now.”
“You make it sound so sad.”
She flashed her smile. “You are not considering that not all of life is a pleasure. The last trip to the dentist! The last taxes to be paid! It is not all bad, growing old! By the way, you are wearing this blanket in the wrong way.”
She took another bite of her gelato as if she had indeed had her last trip to the dentist.
And then there was the Baronessa’s vertigo, which seemed to be worsening.
One snowy day, Estelle and I took her to the doctor in town, Dr. Ibrahim.
I never met him, but I certainly knew his office, as it was next to the hair salon among whose metal drying bonnets I spent precious hours of my life, reading Oggi magazine and inhaling that particular scent of sanitizer, coffee, rosewater, and burnt hair.
On this particular occasion, I was the chauffeur and walked past the salon (a decidedly ancient lady was being led out by a middle-aged man) to linger in the piazza of our little town, a tiny tessellated trapezoid with an ancient arch, a post office, and two bars: one proto-Fascist and one proto-Communist. There was no outward difference between them except the newspapers displayed in the windows.
Elderly men sat outside each in folding chairs, arguing among themselves and judging passersby, unless there was a construction project, in which case they could all be found loitering there together, judging the progress and, political differences set aside, agreeing it was all being done wrong.
I went through the arch and found the third café: an anarchist one. I sat in the window, with a braid of garlic as my companion, sipped my coffee, and tried to read Rivista Anarchica. The Italian was knitting together nicely in my mind when, out of nowhere, it became tangled by an American voice:
“How long have you been with yours?”
“What’s that?”
Though twice my age, he was about my height and build, dressed in a much older man’s style of wool coat.
It was the man from the hair salon. Baldish, pinkish, aquiline nose, in a purple scarf with a green scarab pin.
It struck me that his elegance blurred his looks as much as it enhanced them.
He held a dollhouse espresso on a dollhouse saucer, and the spoon seemed about to topple.
He gestured with his chin toward the doctor’s office. “Your signora. How long have you been with her?”
I waved my hand. “Oh, I think you don’t— We’re not—”
“I know, I know, you’re her right-hand man,” he said, laughing a little. “Her maggiordomo. So am I.”
“Oh.”
He sat on a stool to my left and rested one foot on the rung of another stool beside it. Placing his saucer on the narrow bar that ran along the wall, he lifted the coffee and took a sip. “I’ve been with mine for fifteen years. She’s ninety-eight.”
I said that was a long time. I had been working for the Baronessa for only a few months.
“A few months.” He began to rock slightly, propelled by his foot on the stool. “How’s it going?”
It was going fine. And my position was to end at Christmas.
He chuckled. “How many pugs?”
“What’s that?”
He merely raised an eyebrow.
“Two. She has two pugs.”
More rocking, looking into the piazza. “Mine has four. Four pugs. Ninety-eight and four pugs.” He faced me again. “You won’t be leaving at Christmas.”
“No?”
A warm American smile. “Mark my words. She’ll come to you and say, I have an important trip. Stay long enough to help with that. It will be something like that, a trip or a family crisis. It will seem like an easy thing to do. After all, she’s going to die any day now, right?”
“Well—”
“And then fifteen years will pass.”
“Ah.”
“I’d planned to travel Europe, maybe try living in Paris. And here we are, at the hair salon. I haven’t had a weekend off in five years. You know the last woman I was with? Her cousin. Isn’t that sad?”
I was startled at the whole situation. I wondered if he had gotten his coffee “corretto”—that is, with a shot of grappa. “Well, it’s—”
He clattered the cup in the saucer and put up both hands in mock surrender.
“I’m sorry. You don’t know me. Forgive me.
It’s none of my business, I’m sure you’ll do great.
” His hands went down, his eyes out again to the piazza.
“But I never leave her side. I’m always with the ninety-eight-year-old contessa and four pugs. ”
“I should—”
“Look, do you want some advice?” he said, edging a bit closer and whispering. Yes, I could smell the grappa. And he was interested not in what I wanted at all but rather in what he wanted. It was to tell me to steal things.
“What?”
“Steal things. She’ll never put you in her will, never; you’re not family.
She’ll promise to, but she’ll never do it.
Steal things. You’re the one taking care of her, not her family, and they’ll drop you and the pugs off a cliff when she’s dead.
Steal things, but be careful. I took her grandmother’s jewels.
She thinks the Ukrainian maid took them, but it was me.
I took her first-edition books. Sold them all and invested it so I’ll be okay.
” I felt sorry for him as he grinned and whispered, with his scent of coffee and alcohol and lavender cologne made by the monks high on the mountain.
He seemed so glad to tell me, a stranger; he was the servant in the myth of Midas, burying his secret in a hole in the ground.
I managed, afterward, to extract myself by pretending to see my employer across the arch from us, and he paid for my coffee and his cornetto and I thanked him and felt grateful to have escaped what I thought of, then, as some old man trying to seduce me. Rather than trying to warn me.
“Things are not well,” Estelle said, supporting my employer, who wore a green suede jacket and slightly dented hairdo after her visit to the doctor.
The Baronessa seemed to struggle along the snowy walk.
Estelle wore a deep green swing coat with her gold-tinged hair floating wide.
I could see, on the other side of the arch, my new friend tipping an invisible hat to me from the café window.
“Merely dizzy,” my employer insisted. “I am fine for my age, thanks God.”
“There is no fine for your age,” Estelle said.
“Doctor Ibrahim says to me, ‘You are ninety-two, what do you expect? You’re not going to repair yourself! This is what you’ve got!’ ” Her demeanor changed as she broke into laughter.
Estelle shook her head while I opened the door of the Mitsu-bitchy. “She should stay in bed and watch her soap operas and basta!”
A dismissive sigh from my employer as she climbed into the passenger seat. “That is not my plan, as you well know!”