Chapter 3 #7
She lay in her bed, in the plain nightgown she had bought at Formica.
Pushkin and Gorky lay asleep on either side of her.
The phone was on her chest. Her gaze was on the painting on the wall beside her, the painting of a woman with a jug.
The famous signature. I could see her hand moving across the bedsheet as if searching for a pen or a pad or a book, but it kept searching and searching and found nothing and returned to the phone in its cradle, holding it close to her.
I looked on her jagged profile and understood she was not seeing the painting at all.
She looked lost. Lost in all dimensions.
I knocked on the door, and she turned to me. “That was Maria,” she said. “Our friend is with us no more.”
The storm came to possess the entire countryside that night and the following day; it felt as if our part of Tuscany had caught a violent cold, wheezing and shivering in its bedclothes.
Oscar. The Baronessa did not come down the next morning, and so I searched for some activity to lift me from the grief that weighed me down.
I helped Vinsanda bring wood in from the shed, where it lay under a blue tarp, and watched as he built one of his amazing fires in the dining room, ready to be lit.
Nimali and I put away the glasses from the dishwasher.
I laid the table for lunch and adjusted the blue-speckled candelabra, also unlit.
Oscar. I wished we could have been there for him, as the Baronessa had planned.
And of course she had not only wanted to be there so he would not be alone; she had wanted to race to his side so that, in this awful final moment of her friend’s life, she would not be alone.
You never know the last moments you will have with someone.
My mind went back over the previous days and months, seeking to find some meaning in them, but of course there was no meaning.
He and I had last talked of love—or no, that was wrong.
That was what I wanted to be true. The last time I saw him was at the dinner table, showing us the bottoms of his shoes, and the last words I’d heard of his were how angry we all would be at him for having a little gin!
The story of Villa Coco; I understood I had it all wrong. I thought it was of a young man coming to Italy and having a fling that, during an olive harvest, turned into something more until suddenly he was offered a life in Milan. I thought I was the story. As we do when we are young.
But here was the actual story: A wonderful man was dying.
Only his best friend knew about it, and she brought him constantly out of his home and made him laugh with the same “high spirits” they had in their youth, all to brighten his final days, which she had expected to last just a little bit longer.
I was not the protagonist at all; I was merely a hired player.
My job: to be utterly charmed by him. To love him.
I had been charmed and I had loved him. A man with silver hair and a bald spot and a smile and bountiful stories and education and advice for a young American.
I was persuaded to take him out to view a Masaccio and eat fish stew and warm himself by the fire of our young romance.
And now that the story had come to an unexpected end, I had no lines written to express what I had lost.
All those years denying every pleasure for the sake of his heart.
And it was la leucemia that got him. I thought of the special salad bowl the Baronessa had found at La Formica, in the shape of a great cabbage, kept in the cabinet just for his arrival; it was brought out with great ceremony and placed before him while we all enjoyed our pastas and cheeses and roasts; he was always a good sport about it.
I thought of his renouncement of love and of pleasure in all its forms, how the excesses of his youth—sleeping with shepherds in the countryside!
—had been locked away, like sharp objects, and how he had made himself into a “very cheerful, very harmless old man.” When none of that would kill him.
It is possible he could have slept with shepherds and dined on roast lamb until the day before, and it would all have come to the same thing.
But the Baronessa, to my surprise, was of a different opinion when she came, at last, down the staircase in a gray woolen cardigan over a pale blue dress and began discussing her friend.
“It was the gin,” she said firmly, taking a pug in her arms. “He should not have had all that gin at the end. I told him it was bad. But he insisted. He said after all these years he wanted to enjoy something.”
I said, “You if anybody can understand that. Somebody at the end of his life—”
She stared ahead of her at the storm-darkened window. “He could have stayed longer. We had such plans!”
“Maybe he just wanted a little pleasure—”
“How dare he?!”
Her fist had slammed onto the prayer desk and caused a pen to tip onto the floor, where it rolled into the corner.
I thought of a little girl, in a wintry castle, being told her playmate had gone back to London and would never return.
The selfishness, the utter hopelessness of her grief broke through the mask of age as blotches of pink appeared on her cheeks, her neck and ears, as if that little girl had been there all along, trapped beneath the thin fresco of an elderly baronessa.
I took her hand and she accepted it. She did not cry. It was rage, fury I saw there.
“There was no one else,” she spat out, “who could talk about roses!”
I nodded, as if this were the only reasonable explanation for her grief.
Death tears down the veils. Of custom, of decorum, of emotions; it lays everything bare for us to see at last. Hidden in that basement made for treasures never on display.
It is released from a great broken urn. And those are the tears we shed.
Sorrow, yes, but not just sorrow. She was trying to explain that she’d loved him.
Of course we made no trip, but the Baronessa told Nimali not to unpack the bags; there would be a memorial.
The next day, the sky’s fever broke; the rain calmed, the temperature evened out, and the road became passable again.
Immediately Estelle was with us, knocking at the kitchen door in her olive-colored rain poncho and running up to see the woman who had once been her rival.
I heard them talking for a long time behind the closed door of the Baronessa’s bedroom, and I left them alone as I did other tasks.
Finally I went to the door and heard Estelle speaking in Italian:
“We can’t just do it two women alone.”
The Baronessa: “It was for Oscar. He was the whole point. Now I just don’t know.”
“Giacomo?”
A sigh. “There is a child on the way.”
“It may be time to…rethink everything.”
Silence. I thought I could hear the pugs snoring. Then the Baronessa said, “What about the American?”
“Who?”
Before they could say the name, I knocked and entered.
Estelle was sitting on the bed, her poncho thrown to the floor, where Cesare lay upon it.
Both women looked up at me with pain in their faces.
It was clear they had gone through a terrible discussion and did not care to return there soon.
But that expression was soon replaced by one of startled curiosity.
Like astronauts on a moon who may have discovered signs of life.
The Baronessa said simply: “The memorial is Saturday in Genova.”
I asked, as her assistant, if she wanted to make plans to stay the night.
“Eh?”
“Do you want to stay the night?”
She turned, and her face had transformed.
“What a brilliant idea! No, no we must not stay the night. We will tell them we are headed to a hotel in Torino. But we will not head to Torino. Because here is what we are going to do,” she said, gripping the bedsheets as she leaned toward me. “We are going to steal the urn.”
I asked what urn. Did she mean to pinch some valuable artifact of his?
“I mean the ashes.”
I gulped. “WHAT ashes?” Surely she could not mean—
“Oscar’s!” she said. “Where else would he go but here? This was his favorite place in the world.”
“But that can’t be—”
“Yes, we’ll tell them Torino. It will buy us some time. In case,” she added with verve, “they give chase!” And I understood that the only way she could handle her rage and grief was to create one final caper.
The memorial was to be held at Oscar’s apartment—which, the Baronessa told me, now belonged to Maria, along with all of his worldly possessions (“As it should be, except of course for Oscar himself”), and though it was only three days, my employer found the wait intolerable.
This impatience was set off by either boredom or its sister: dread.
For isn’t boredom merely another kind of dread—being trapped in time instead of in a place or a weakening body?
I was still learning her ways, but it should not have surprised me to see this impatience awakened, like a recurrence of malaria after years of dormancy, by the death of her dear friend.
At last the morning of our trip arrived; because it was, to my mind, a funeral, I wore one of Tonino’s black suits, and so I was surprised, as I pulled the car to the entrance, to find the Baronessa in a scarlet wool suit.
Over her shoulders was draped a camel-colored coat.
Estelle helped her into the car, and the Baronessa greeted me with the brief grin that was her signature, quickly replaced by a look of determination.
She bid goodbye to Estelle and to her dogs.
She tapped her cane against the steering wheel as one might tap a horse into motion.
I started us up the dusty path between the raked olive trees.