Chapter 3 #6
A sigh. “It is not his heart. He has la leucemia. I do not know the English.” I let out a sharp cry, which caused her to blink in surprise.
“We must prepare to go to Genova, although I do not know if they will let us visit him or if he wants to be seen.” She paused and looked at me. “You seem shocked.”
“How can he have leukemia?”
“He has had it for some time. But now it has struck.”
“But his doctor said…He said when he gets home—”
“This is because we have not told him about la leucemia.”
Her expression betrayed no emotion at all. It took a moment for me to understand, and when I did I was furious. “You knew?”
“The doctor took us into his confidence months ago. I had thought we had much longer.”
“You have to tell him!”
She asked what good would it do him?
“He should know what he has. So he can make choices. That must be a right in Italy as well.”
She was stern. “The doctor thinks it is kinder our friend believes he will get better.”
“But it isn’t!”
“You are so sure!” she said. “But our friend Oscar will not get better. He will not leave this hospital as he thinks.”
“But still…his choice of…”
“There are terrible treatments for la leucemia. Terrible, painful. Oscar will not have them—thanks God—because it was too late when the doctor discovered it. It was too late and so we decided he did not need to know. We would allow him to keep his sense of humor, to have a final adventure. But now…” She broke off.
I was enraged nonetheless and told her this was monstrous, that we could not stand by and let our friend die of cancer even if he had only weeks or days left.
I could not control myself, even as I saw her hand shaking as it held on to her cane.
When I stopped, breathing heavily, she looked at me furiously and I thought she might strike me. She squeezed her eyes tight.
“He cannot go!” she said bitterly. “He cannot! We had such plans!”
She said this, I believe, not out of a sudden surge of empathy or understanding (her empathy had led only to keeping Oscar free of the terror of death) but instead from a surge of clarity—clarity of her own terror, which she kept locked in the strongbox of the mind.
Now I had pried it free, and she called for a new plan of action:
“Give me the little green thing. I will make a call to my friend the marchesa. Nimali! The marchesa knows people in Genova, she knows the best doctors. I know how to do it. I will send one to Oscar this minute. And then…and then…” Her imagination seemed to falter as she leaned upon her cane, but she straightened.
“And then we will go to Genova. You will drive me.” Nimali appeared at the door.
“Nimali, prepariamo le valigie…” And so, after ordering Nimali to prepare her things and holding her cordless phone, already ringing this marchesa friend of hers, she made her brisk way back to her quarters.
Like a guest who has written the wrong date in their calendar, a storm blew in just in time to pause the Baronessa’s plans for Genova.
Water lashed at the windows and battered the trees until a river ran down our dirt road, cutting even deeper the old ruts, and the promise of mudslides made travel an impossible thought.
We spent the day going through the books in the Baronessa’s bedroom, one of which turned out to be a first-edition Byron (“My great-aunt knew him on Capri” was all my employer would say).
The pugs crawled on and off her lap and Cesare sat on the floor, looking up at us with adoration.
It was after a rather desolate Monday dinner (two of us with the lit candelabra, wind howling down the chimney, a roast with a knife plunged into it—basically a Gothic novel) that the Baronessa went to bed with Pushkin and Gorky.
I had returned to the kitchen to do the dishes (it was Nimali’s night off) when the phone rang. I answered.
“Please don’t put down the phone,” Giacomo said.
“This isn’t a good time. We have to keep the line free…”
“I’m sorry. I had to…eh, ahem, hear your voice.”
I put aside my confusion about our last talk and explained the awful truth about Oscar.
Giacomo was shocked and aggrieved; he asked if his cousin was handling it well and I told him about the strange agreement she and Maria and the doctor had come to about Oscar’s illness, hiding it from him all this time, sure they were doing the right thing.
And then her sudden decision not to accept Oscar’s prognosis; to find a new doctor, a new possibility; to travel there in person, as if—like some hero out of myth—she herself were the talisman to force Death to call back his hounds.
“I’ll come down right away. We need to—”
“That’s not a good idea. Giacomo—”
“I know I did everything wrong. You want—”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said, then thought of Estelle saying someday I would realize it was a funny story. “But that was too much.”
He was frantic, I could hear. “I know, I know, I should have…eh, ahem, told you before. I should have never invited Laurine and Carlotta. Somehow I thought you would understand. I forget how different our worlds are. But I never got to explain my idea—”
“I understand.”
“No no—”
“I don’t think there’s a place for me.”
He had called to tell me there was:
His idea had to do with a building in Milan.
A pink building. It had been in Laurine’s family for generations, and the recent death of a relative meant it was hers; this was the kind of luck they had been hoping for, family luck, one of the reasons they hid behind a marriage. The building was on via Abramo Lincoln—
“There’s a street named after Lincoln?”
“There is,” he confirmed, “and it is at the corner of…eh, ahem, via Beniamino Franklin. You see, you must come. We have made Americans so welcome!”
The plan was this: They would reconfigure the three floors into three connected apartments.
The lower level to present to parents and relatives as where the married couple lived with their child.
The second level for Laurine and Carlotta.
And the top floor—including a terrace garden with lemon trees and a laurel—for Giacomo and myself.
An elevator to connect them all. But I could move in right away, before renovations.
He raced on; I understood that this time he had tried to think of everything: “I’m sure you can find work in archives, now that you speak Italian.
Milan has everything. We have connections.
It’s a wonderful city, we even have Chinese food!
You could come at Christmas and we can…eh, ahem, have a look at the place.
I will get a tree. It can be our first Christmas. As a…eh, ahem…”
He could not say the word “family.” But that was, in effect, what he was offering. No one had ever offered something like this to me before: a life, complete and shared. With lemon and laurel trees on streets named after Founding Fathers.
“What about the baby?” I asked.
“You could be there with us,” he said, and I understood he was not insisting I be some uncle or second father, something beyond my imagining at that age. Simply the man who lived with Giacomo on the top floor.
He asked, “Could it be something you want?”
I live in Milan, I imagined explaining to someone at a party, on via Lincoln near via Franklin, in the pink three-story house.
“I know this seems very…eh, ahem, new to you. Very strange. But arrangements like this have been around a long time, you know, in Europe. Royal families have always done it. We are no royal family, of course, but it is the same idea. I had an uncle who lived with another woman in a connected apartment and so forth and so on. It is the way things can be.”
“I never met anybody who—”
“I will give you some time. But isn’t it beautiful, in a way? Wouldn’t it be a grand adventure?”
Who would not want it? To be so adored, to be brought into a family, to have one’s life taken care of?
Life was feeling very dear and precious to me that evening.
A building in Milan; I imagined some pink structure decorated in gold tile, an elevator within resembling the trelliswork of Versailles or a birdcage, the parquetwork of the floor swollen with age and covered with old family carpets, the walls painted gray and lit with modern lamps.
Who would even pause? Four weeks before Christmas, four weeks before my life at Villa Coco was ended.
A solution had appeared. Do not be lazy in love.
Was this what Oscar meant? To seize something beautiful when it appears?
“Giacomo, I have to think.”
He took a deep breath. “I am saying come live with me and—”
At that moment the lights in the house went off.
The telephone still worked, but I could not make out what Giacomo was saying because I was yelling that I had to go.
I hung up the phone and stumbled around the kitchen until (a miracle) I came upon a flashlight.
My first thought was to run upstairs to the Baronessa, whom I found bolt upright in bed with a candle burning beside her, saying this had of course happened just as she was about to learn who was the murderer in her show.
“There is a little house across the road,” she said, and at first I thought she was talking about the murderer, but instead it seemed in this little house was the “salvavita,” which I took to be circuit breaker.
I made my way downstairs again—I heard the phone ringing once more but ignored it—and out into the downpour, across the muddy road, and into the little house I had seen the very first day of my arrival.
Here, my flashlight lit up cisterns of water, boxes of light bulbs, and, in a white plastic box set into the wall, a series of circuit breakers.
I flipped them all down and then up again; something whirred into action, and when I went back into the rain I saw the house lit up.
Wet and tired, I climbed the stairs to the Baronessa’s room once more.