Chapter 3 #10
I managed my confusion with a smile. I said he did not disappoint me at all. I was leaving her service very soon, in fact.
“Her service?” he asked, seeming confused. “You mean the catalog you are makin’.”
“Of course.”
He smiled, not at me but at a painting beside me.
“Villa Coco is a very beautiful place. Full of beautiful things. What a wonderful thought, to live there.” Then his attention came back to the young American in the room and he nodded to me formally.
“Ah’ll slip away now, if you don’t mind; Ah don’t enjoy these crowds.
Work well.” He tipped an invisible hat. “And give my best to Lisabetta.”
I found my little pirate queen in the hallway, with her purse and her cane, looking at a painting of a brown and muscular bearded man, almost entirely naked, with his ear being pulled mischievously by a pale and equally naked woman.
It seemed like something from a museum. Was it possible I had seen it before?
She saw me and gestured for me to come quickly.
“Koo-koo!” I began telling her I had been chatting with her old friend Furman but did not quite know how to phrase it, or how to put to her the many questions he had raised in my mind; anyway, she was already in her own discorso: “I have been unable to do the wicked thing,” she whispered.
“I have not found the moment. And I admit I have been overcome, being here without him. Look at this, do you see the Tyrian purple he went to jail for?” I looked again at the painting, at the expression of anguish on the face of the muscled man.
Hercules. The painting for which he had risked prison (in his telling, he was set free).
She changed topics: “To have all these awful people is sadder than…Oh! Buona!” She had turned and plucked a piece of food from a passing tray, and her expression went quite gold with grief.
“La cima! You’ll never get it anywhere else. I wonder if they have the baccalà?”
“What were you and Oscar up to on Capri?”
“What a strange question.”
“I wonder if it was something more than art.”
She said nothing. I looked from her stern gaze to the painting and back again, and I think it was at that moment that I understood.
She gazed out at the crowd. “I don’t know anybody anymore.”
I followed her cue; her silence had satisfied my curiosity. “I never thought Oscar had so many friends.”
She brushed this away with a gesture. “Friends! They are his clients. I thought there would be some of mine. But all of them strangers…”
I was surprised to feel her leaning heavily against my arm.
I saw that the day was not a mere frolic after all; of course it wasn’t.
“While in my seventies I could pinch anything I liked, now with the cane and the vertigo, I’m finding I’m not the cambrioleuse I once was.
We need an unsentimental party—” I understood her immediately.
“I will not—”
“You give up too quickly,” she snapped, clearly annoyed. “Remember, Oscar was a thief, and an honest one.”
“But—”
But I was interrupted. The music suddenly ceased and a man began clapping in the main room, calling us all to gather there.
The Baronessa headed over with the others, leaving me beside the painting; I could see a little of the scene from where I stood in the hall.
People had made a space where stood a small, thin man, his head a bald globe except for continents of gray hair on either side, and he wore a set of wire reading glasses I suppose a globe also might wear.
He seemed to have a letter Oscar had left with his maid to be read aloud at this event. Oscar had planned everything.
The crowd left me no room to enter, and I could hardly hear anything. Only a few snippets came through:
“I gave my heart to the wrong…”
“…the last years of my…”
But I could make out little more. I bided my time by wandering into the foyer, looking over the various books and considering the task at hand.
I thought of Oscar and my employer and their life together in Capri, a pair of thieves, according to Pullman.
The thrill of the grift. Something that I, as a good American boy, had never felt.
But perhaps there are no limits to what a person might become if he were corrupted by a figure such as the Baronessa, whom it seemed I did not know at all.
What might I become? I was never moral, only organized.
I gazed on Oscar’s urn and thought of what to do.
The man went on for some time reading Oscar’s letter, and again a few phrases floated over the crowd:
“I did not know…in store for me…”
“…not ever get those years back…”
And once I had done what was necessary, I wandered back to the hallway, carrying my employer’s bag and coat, and saw that the reading had finished.
Nearby, I heard the sound of weeping, and to my astonishment saw it came from the enormously tall American, his face now in his hands as he sobbed inconsolably.
The Baronessa appeared, looking wide-eyed.
“This is a very surprising thing our friend has written—”
“We have to go!” I whispered, taking her arm.
“Now you are impatient? There is still—”
“We have to go!”
“But Oscar—”
“Oscar,” I said, looking her clearly in the eye, “is with us.”
I regarded her frail little figure in the hall and saw something curious in her expression, something akin to that of our very first meeting on the staircase, when she regarded me as through a lorgnette across an opera box, only this time it was with distinct recognition—as if she had at last perceived on me (a rogue pretender) the port wine stain that proved my claim.
A smile broke across her lined face. “Sacré bleu! How did you do it?”
“I thought of you and the toe!” I said. I lifted her purse with both hands, and it was visibly heavy with our dear friend’s ashes. “I just popped it in!”
She clapped her hands in glee.
Later it would be said of the luncheon that everybody enjoyed it but the host. I take their word for it; we missed the end of the event, forwent the traditional endless arrivederci (I have always said Italians would be trapped in a burning building because of the length of their farewells) and vanished down the stone staircase of the building.
Soon we were in a small piazza in the shadow of great green-shuttered buildings, decorated with graffiti and one single sundial, which must have been in sunlight when someone placed it there long ago but now sat in the perpetual shadow of its neighbors.
It seemed a fitting metaphor somehow. The Baronessa was all abuzz from my criminal activity and, even with her vertigo, had no problem navigating the narrow streets, crowded with scaffolding and public works, with great rapidity.
I barely listened to her excited words, and it was only when we were in the car that I could relax.
“I feel very jolly!” she informed me. “Our friend is coming home.”
“I’m worried someone will mind.”
“No time for second thoughts. I told Maria we are driving to Torino. You see how I can stick to a plan. By the time the lawyer finds us, Oscar will already be in bed, and nobody is going to do anything then.”
“The lawyer. What was the letter he read?”
“Ah! You missed a wonderful scene! Oscar revealed he had only truly given his heart one time, but to the wrong person.”
“Who was that?”
“You must have seen the tall man crying, just when you found me.”
I said indeed I had.
“This was the American he lived with in London. He had come all this way and Oscar had one arrow left in his quiver for him! Oh, you should have seen it. It was marvelous.”
“Did the letter say he had been lazy in love?”
She pulled her coat closer around her. “Lazy in love? Those years in London were terrible for him. They often are when each person wants something different. It was Oscar who suffered.”
“That’s awful. But the American must have known Oscar was unhappy.”
“Sad that it makes no difference. Nous sommes de mauvais tailleurs.” She smiled and looked out the window, perhaps still in the glow of brigandage.
The news of Oscar’s words shocked me a little.
He had said he was a harmless old man, well liked.
That was how he always described himself; it is how I have described him in these pages.
But there was more to him. Another lesson, if the young would have the heart to listen.
I did not think another life was possible, he had told me.
But it is always possible. Lazy in love—that was Oscar himself, years ago, in giving his heart to the American, in giving the years he had not known would be his last for romance before he decided to forswear it all.
He had not known what time would bring. You take what comes, he had said to me.
How I wished he were there to tell me what one should take instead.
She turned to me now and said, “I was too short with you before when you talked of your story. I can sometimes be impatient. And I have had my mind on Oscar all day.”
I mumbled some kind of thanks; I was too surprised by such a thing as an apology coming from her lips.
We moved along the sea again, in and out of tunnels through the rock, and passed the signs for Recco and its glorious focaccia.
She was right, of course; we would not be back.
The sun hid behind the furniture of the sky and made the afternoon dimmer than our outward journey had been; even the white marble grandeur of Carrara seemed like loaves of unsalted Tuscan bread.
We moved inland, between what must have been tree farms: ornamental plants arranged by species, growing in unnatural rows along the highway. We were nearing Lucca.