Chapter 3 #3
Later, after we guided the Baronessa up to her parlor to rest, Estelle confided in me that the doctor said her vertigo had not improved and that, though she had survived wars and heartbreak and pug after pug after pug, a woman her age who insisted on living in a labyrinth of statues and staircases must prepare for a fall.
With that, Estelle kissed my cheek (scent of rosemary), buttoned her green coat, and went outside to where her Ape waited.
Nimali caught my eye in the kitchen and shook her head.
I went upstairs and found the Baronessa outstretched on the white-linen-covered sofa.
Her eyelids, onionskin, were closed, and her expression was so free from the usual frenzied ideas, antic grimaces and grins, and watchful stares of daily life that it seemed I had never seen her so at peace.
A pug on her breast, sleeping, was the attribute of a saint (Catherine’s wheel or Peter’s keys), which they are never without, and with her hands folded below the creature, a thin coverlet draped over her and falling to the floor, she resembled a figure on a sculpted tomb.
She had seen the show from the fourteenth row. It seemed a beautiful way to go.
I sat there for a long time in a bentwood chair, reading the newspaper and regarding her.
Outside, the fog made the world as white as a Japanese room formed by paper screens.
I thought of how I had been racing against time, and if the end for her were not now, it would be soon, and so I had failed; I had not managed to finish the catalogue raisonné of her life.
But did it matter? Wasn’t my employment just another ruse to keep Death waiting, as one invents an important project so as to preclude dismissal, or as the rifle heiress who built one room after another onto her mansion, having been told Heaven waited on home renovation?
I smiled to think this was the way that she would choose.
And I thought of what I would do now—if the inevitable had been set in motion—and I began to miss my home.
America, with its water towers set like playing pieces across the cornfields and its vast emptinesses of space and history and memory and style and curiosity.
My reverie was ended by a sneeze from the dog—and instantly the Baronessa’s eyes fluttered open. Herself, again. Embattled with life.
Her glance came to me. “Giovedì. I must tell you about Oscar.”
“What’s that?”
“What I popped in my purse!”
I struggled to grasp what she might be saying; was she still in a dream?
“Do you not remember? I told you Oscar and I stole something of great value.”
I did remember; I urged her to say more. She gave a little laugh and uttered something I’d surely misheard. “What’s that again?”
She repeated it loudly.
“A toe?”
“A big toe,” she said, as if this explained everything. She pulled a newspaper that had been tucked, hidden, beside her and covered the pug with it; the creature did not respond. “Of one of the four Tetrarchs of Rome. I plucked it off the ground in Istanbul.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sighed and closed her eyes again as if my ignorance alone might do her in. “Then I will explain another time. I’m feeling tired today. Can you ask Nimali to make some tea?”
I did not ask Nimali; I made it for her myself. But I learned nothing more that day and assumed she was somniloquizing about Oscar and Tetrarchs and a toe, in that strange improvisation the dream-mind makes.
Giacomo called again on a Thursday; I found it awkward to have our conversation in the kitchen, since I knew Nimali understood more English than she let on (“Enough!”), and I felt each tarnished plate and goblet and ewer displayed in the cabinet was bending its ears to me.
Thus, my responses were necessarily curt.
“Hey!” I said, taking the phone from Nimali’s hand as she went back to clearing the table, one Byzantine eye on me.
“Sorry I haven’t visited,” he said. “Things have been difficult here with my parents. Let’s try again for a weekend in Florence.
This weekend. I have a room at the Porta Rossa.
We’ll be right in the center of town; I can take you to the Uffizi and you can see the Caravaggios and Botticellis and everything my cousin prevents you from seeing. And so forth and so on.”
“You know I have to ask your cousin.” I listened for the click of my employer’s intrusion.
“I will manage her somehow,” he said. “You must be nearly finished with your work by now! You leave in a month.”
“I’ll see, I’ll see.”
“And this is more than just a way to see you without my cousin. And treat you to a bistecca. I retained two rooms at the Porta Rossa. One is for us and…eh, ahem…the other is for Laurine.”
Laurine, you see, was his wife.
He was bringing me to Florence to meet his wife? So soon before my departure? Wasn’t it instead time to bring our “story” to a conclusion?
“As for my cousin,” he added, “I will manage her somehow.”
I brought him back to the subject of his wife.
“She is coming with her girlfriend, Carlotta. So you see it will be…eh, ahem…a family outing! You and I will have the day together, and they’ll come for dinner.”
“C-C-Carlotta is c-c-coming too?” I stammered. The odd arrangements of his life came suddenly into view, but it occurred to me the attendance of Laurine and Carlotta might add dignity to our farewell. Again, Nimali’s comprehending eye was on me. “The Baronessa—”
“I will manage her somehow,” he said.
I submitted to the overwhelming enthusiasm of his voice.
“I’ll bring Asiago,” he said, as one final promise.
I found myself answering: “Buono!”
With that, I ended the call. Nimali smiled and asked how was the cugino? Before I could answer, the phone rang again, twice. It was the Baronessa.
“Giovedì!” she shouted. “To the television, quick! Someone has been murdered!”
The nephew did it, in the end. The clues were a necklace and a chicken.
I was searching for clues myself, in the phone call I’d had with Giacomo. Why this mysterious invitation? Why, now, the introduction to his wife? But at least I would see, at last, the splendor of the city I had glimpsed only in passing on my arrival.
I was also searching for clues about the house and what had changed.
I remember standing in the captain’s cabin and feeling something was off.
Was it the antler coatrack that was missing?
Or the little metallic bust of Homer? The broken pot?
The ass? I looked around and studied the paintings that had so engrossed Oscar and the Baronessa months before.
Of course, I saw them almost daily on my trips through the cabin for stamps or paper or hidden light bulbs, but this time I paid attention.
Four paintings, each a sea view from a different harbor town: medieval merchants hauling crates onto wide-sailed ships, the water all a-swan, the ladies veiled and nunlike; later, rowdier Renaissance crowds gathered in reds and blues to watch a waterlogged angel rise from the waves; men in eighteenth-century frock coats bustling before gilded barges on some exotic waterfront; and, last, nineteenth-century soot-stained sky and sailors laboring behind nursemaids with parasols and prams. I tried to identify each location, but they blurred from English to Moorish to Indian fantasies, and I began to wonder if they were real places at all.
As for Giacomo’s cousin…he did not manage her somehow.
The Baronessa and I were in her parlor, cataloging decades of photographs for inclusion in a series of albums; she wanted them organized not chronologically but thematically: all the times she’d been to India, and so on.
I was trying to convince her this would not be helpful, archivally.
I was building up the nerve to ask to borrow the Mitsu-bitchy on Sunday when, to my surprise, she brought up the subject herself.
“I have heard my relative is coming to Florence. But not to here.”
“Yes.” I wondered if she had listened after all; I also wondered, from her tone, why she was so against it.
“And that he desires your company.”
I thought I would appeal to her artistic side: “It is a chance for me to see the Caravaggios. And the Botticellis.”
“My cousin is unlikely to be a helpful guide to either of them.”
“The Vasari you gave me is an excellent guide.”
But she would not accept this. “Even better would be my friend Lisa, who works at the Uffizi. It is pointless to go with all the crowds! You will spend time before minor works and miss the important ones. Do you know who was the Duke of Urbino?”
“You know I don’t—”
“See? You would miss him, and he is fantastic,” she said, picking up another photograph of Jaipur. “He chopped off his nose so it would not block his side view! For assassins! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Wonderful would be loaning me the Mitsu-bitchy.”
She looked up at me at last, and I saw shrewdness in her eyes. “But that is out of the question. Ghazel has taken it for repairs.”
“What repairs?” I said, more loudly than I would have liked. I was exasperated. “And why not take it Monday? It’s just sitting in the shop through the weekend.”
“I am going to have a rest.”
What was her angle? Merely to have me by her side? To prevent whatever romance Giacomo and I might rekindle? She herself seemed to have had many “stories.” It was hard to believe she would begrudge us our own.
“Baronessa!” I said firmly.
“I am feeling poorly. Ah! My vertigo!”
“Baronessa, I am going to Florence.”