Chapter 3 #8
“I would have liked to wear my grandmother’s pearls,” said the Baronessa beside me. “They are said to once have belonged to Marie-Thérèse, and perhaps Marie Antoinette. People say many things about pearls. But as you know, they are missing.”
“You look lovely,” I said.
“You look very comme il faut” was her reply.
“Not in a good way,” I said. “Vabon.”
“You look like you’re going to a funeral.”
“Signora,” I said, and of course all of this was in Italian, as we were in the car, “we go to a funeral.”
She corrected me: “We are going to a luncheon. Oscar organized it long, long ago. The guest list, the music, the food. You recall he was always particular about what he ate.” It seemed to me a person would not be so particular when that person was in an urn.
I thought of the sfogliatelle he had warned me of in Naples, how I had yet to try them and how, if I did, he would never know the path my life would take.
She was still talking: “I think it is very generous of Oscar to plan things. After all, who else is going to do it? Turn right at the signora.” We had reached the old woman, shouting from her chair, like a witch in a fairy tale.
Then the Baronessa asked me if I had ever stolen anything before.
“What? No. Nothing.”
“You do not know if you have the talent until you try. This may be your opportunity.” I struggled with how to express my concerns in Italian, but she took my pause as me digesting her words. “We may have to rely upon my expertise. But this is a gamble. I am no longer seventy!”
“Vabon,” I said. “Your expertise in Istanbul?”
She turned to me and said, “Your Italian is improving, Giovedì, as your driving is not. But I am glad you are not learning Italian anymore from my cousin. He is from the Veneto, and the men there have a particular way of talking. Very high and musical like a songbird.” She did a fluty imitation of her cousin: “Vabon! Vabon!”
She could hear Giacomo’s voice echoing in my own? I began to check myself, as a hypochondriac does when hearing of a new disease. I told my employer that she found fault with all of my teachers. How was I expected to learn? “Simple,” she said. “As you will learn to steal. From me.”
The drive was only three hours or so, passing Florence and the charming walled town of Lucca and, as the Baronessa pointed out, the famous marble quarries of Carrara, cut like rice paddies into the mountainside.
“The Certosa di Pavia is all of Carrara marble,” she told me.
“They did a circumnavigazione of Italy to bring it! Today you could drive there in an hour.” I had no idea what a certosa might be, but I did know Pavia, and the idea of circumnavigating the country appealed to me.
The drive also skirts Pisa, which my passenger found delightful; Florentines have an innate aversion to Pisa.
I am told it comes from a medieval siege the Pisans waged against Florence, and it is said this time of privation is why the local bread has no salt.
This is of course absurd; that was centuries ago.
They have had plenty of time to change the recipe.
But the animosity evidently continues and is, in fact, mutual.
“A friend of mine was once in a car accident near Pisa,” my employer told me.
“The Pisa driver was clearly in the wrong, and the carabinieri agreed and told the man to pay a fine. He pointed to my friend’s Florentine license plate and declared, ‘But this bastard is not even supposed to be here!’ ”
I must not have laughed as I was meant to, because she turned to me and said:
“You seem distracted, Giovedì. Perhaps it is Oscar on your mind?”
I told her it was not, in fact, just Oscar.
I was in a state of confusion, but she would not let this rest, either, and kept prodding me.
I don’t know why—I assume she was anxious about our trip, terrified by how Oscar’s death left her in the roiling sea of old age all alone, and so clung to the closest railing at hand: myself.
I said, “Giacomo invited me to go to Milan at Christmas. When I leave here. Go live with him in the house there.”
“And his new baby?”
I said, “We would have a separate flat, but yes. Yes, with his new baby.”
She looked over at me. “An unconventional arrangement.”
I smiled. “I thought it was rather in your style.”
“HO HO HO! You think me like our Venetian courtesan!”
I told her I thought of her in no such way and said the decision was causing me great turmoil.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said.
I glanced over to see her reaction. I imagined I might have summoned up memories of her own struggles, of which I was sure there were many.
She took a long time before responding, and when she did it was not in the tone I was used to.
“Well,” she said, looking out the window. “We all have our problems.”
I say the drive is only three hours, but not if you have a certain passenger aboard.
We were making good time, and I could see the sea gleaming between the hillsides on the left, when the Baronessa intimated that she would love to visit a local toilet.
“I am reminded of my time in Manaus, you recall.” I replied as best I could that I felt similarly; the morning coffee I’d needed to brace myself for Nimali’s Italian was working its way through me.
My employer turned to me and said, “I may be able to offer us some relief at the next exit. You know, I was thinking about the Tetrarch’s toe.
” I could not follow the path her mind was taking.
She clarified: “From the four Tetrarchs of Rome.”
“Oh yes!” I said. “The statue.”
“Technically it is a sculpture group. Carved in AD 300 for Diocletian. It was in Constantinople for almost a thousand years! Imagine that! And then the Venetians went and sacked the city and brought it back as plunder. They placed it on a corner of the basilica of San Marco, right there in the piazza. Only they left little bits behind. You know they found a heel in Istanbul in 1960? Well, I went not long after, and there it was on the ground, where I suppose it had lain for centuries. The toe. Only Oscar was a witness. So I popped it in my purse. And it has been in my house ever since. The treasure you didn’t guess! ”
I said something about how I was shocked, though of course I was not at all shocked; I had learned enough at Villa Coco to find one must measure a theft before judging it. Still, to me, to steal a priceless artifact seemed like going too far.
Irritation clouded her face. “You disapprove?”
“It’s like stealing something from the Louvre.”
“What makes you think I haven’t stolen something from the Louvre?
” she replied sharply, and I did not know how to respond.
Had she? “No, of course I haven’t. That’s sticky business.
This was like taking a pebble from the beach.
We went there on a particularly memorable occasion, and I wanted to mark it. Which I have.”
I suggested she should make it a gift to the city of Venice.
“They stole the whole group themselves!” she countered. “From the Byzantines! Like your empress Theodora. To whom should I return it? Nimali?”
“That doesn’t make—”
“And yet,” she said in a mysterious tone, “you’ve made me think. I cannot keep it at the villa. Don’t put it on your list.”
I took this as a sign of my own influence: “I won’t. I’m glad you’ll consider it.”
She seemed suddenly serious. “It depends upon a great decision.” She rapped me with her cane. “Turn here! Here!”
A few harrowing turns later and we were in the bustling downtown of a fairly modern, unprepossessing seaside town.
What joy to exit the car and be relieved of the Italian language, like a tie you can remove at the end of the evening (my tie was still in place).
But it turned out she had not made me exit for a toilet; it was for the focaccia.
“It is here,” she told me, taking my arm to struggle across the uneven pavement.
The street ran along a dry canal, covered in weeds, and the buildings on the other side were the typical five-story palazzi of most small towns.
I noticed that these, instead of having actual stone cornices decorating the windows, had theirs painted on.
One building had a side whose windows were entirely painted on.
It was a remarkable effect. But we were not there to admire the local art of false window painting; we were there to enter under the rather grubby green awning of a focacceria.
Inside, the Baronessa flashed that smile of hers and asked to use the bathroom.
I was left standing before a glass counter displaying what looked like a single cheese pizza.
Behind the register stood a woman with an auburn wig rather like a faina.
Behind her was a wood oven, and all around her a dusty chaos of liquor bottles and framed photographs too small to make out.
I thought the bathroom might not be up to the Baronessa’s standards. But then I thought of Manaus…
Soon it was my turn, and by the time I returned, the Baronessa had in her hand two paper plates nearly transparent with grease. “It is focaccia. Filled with cheese.” She handed me one.
“But,” I insisted quietly, “but we’re about to have a luncheon.”
“And so?”
“A memorial luncheon. That Oscar planned.”
Her watery eyes had the exasperation of someone forced to explain to Americans not to use a spoon with their spaghetti: “Giovedì, we are here in Liguria, we are here in Recco. The focaccia is in our hands, we want it.” Her chin shivered with irritation. “And we won’t be back.”
I was facing, once again, her fury. But I understood it was not about Liguria, or Recco, or the focaccia in our hands. Of course she’s right, I thought as Oscar’s smile came to mind. All that is for certain is we won’t be back. Not at this place, this moment. Not ever.