Chapter 3 #11
“You know, I have had many ‘stories’ in my life.” I could hear she was choosing her words carefully despite her blithe delivery.
“Some of the short ones meant more than the long ones. And of course we have all been with a married man.” She cleared her throat; I was listening carefully now and glanced over to her.
She looked directly at the road ahead. “With a married man. You know what you are in for. You know that he is with the other person because of a promise. About finances and inheritance and a house and friends, and he will keep that promise. But he is in love with you.” She gestured around her.
“So you get all the wonderful parts. The time in bed, the adventures and dinners, the wonder and love, they are all ahead of you! What more could you want from someone? But you must be funny, and be clear, and say you don’t want him to leave his marriage.
You just want to be with him. It is enough.
” I saw her glance over at me briefly, perhaps to see how I was hearing this.
“Decide. Enough, or not enough. The decision is yours and you cannot say later that you expected more. If not enough, then you must let him go.”
We came upon the Arno, flooded beneath the gray sky, the tops of trees poking out of it, an autumnal sight.
Dark in the distance were mountains, looking like the fur racks of Formica.
Ahead were the first signs for Pontassieve, Forlì, our little town, and as we rode up from the floodplain the sun flashed the last of its rays.
“Make a wish just before the sun sets,” she said, and sat quietly beside me as the light faded. She glanced at me, then added: “I have made a very modest one.”
Mine was considerably less so.
She went on: “I wonder if my wish will come true. Oscar cannot travel with me. That is a great loss.”
“Yes?”
She patted her handbag, where her friend resided. “We made great plans, great plans. And now he will not see them come to fruition.”
“Was Oscar an art forger?”
She did not answer me but followed some private will-o’-the-wisp: “We were going to Venice, and from there…”
“Lisabetta, he was, wasn’t he?”
She brought herself up straight in her seat, in a show of her irritation. She opened her mouth, then closed it. I wondered what was going on in her mind. Then, at last, with a little shake of her chin, she said: “He was a gentleman.”
Before I could delve further, we hit a pothole and I switched into a lower gear on the worn Tuscan road. It was a moment later that the sun appeared again.
“Look!” she cried out. “He’s back! Have you ever seen the sun do that?”
I explained it was because we were gaining altitude. Yet I was surprised; there it was, a fiery wedge between two peaks. It seemed impossible I had never seen this before, but more impossible still for a woman four times my age.
“Ci rivediamo! And now he’s setting again!” She laughed. “It’s an actor coming out for a second bow!”
“Wow!” I said in my Americanese. “What’s happening?!”
We watched as, a second time, “he” quivered on the horizon, a blazing, molten droplet, before the road descended and the light vanished once again behind the range’s black scenery.
But…
“Look!” she cried again moments later, when we rose up another incline and the sun sat there, waiting for us, ardent, fiercely shining, above the mountain.
“He is a bit of a ‘ham,’ as you say,” she said, and grabbed my arm, laughing and laughing.
We rode along quietly until the sun, one final time, spread its arms and nodded and went offstage, and the twilit countryside sat still and expectant, waiting impatiently for an encore and yet eager to be home.
She took my hand on the gearshift and squeezed it. I had not thought a woman as indomitable as the Baronessa would ever have need of someone as trivial as I.
Or I of someone as capricious as she.
“I will always say, Giovedì, this is the day I saw three sunsets.” She added: “And the day you learned to steal.”
Perhaps that was the day she ceased being, for me, the Baronessa. What did it matter if her title were “real”? What would it even mean? From then on I simply thought of her as “my baronessa.”
The next morning, I went over the catalog of Villa Coco.
It was nearly complete; I had gone through the entire upstairs and had only the captain’s cabin to finish.
Looking over what I had done, what a strange list it seemed: hundreds of items of cutlery found (so she said) over the years at Formica, along with plates and platters and a pewter tea set engraved with the name Leona that caused my baronessa to cackle whenever she saw it; serving spoons in wood and silver, corkscrews in brass and steel, antique coffee dispensers, cups, glasses, trays; stools, chairs, tables; pillows with designs of birds or pugs or medieval creatures or Arabic words (I never asked the meaning); bowls and urns and amphorae; mirrors with frames painted blue and white and others made of wrought iron or of tin stamped with designs of nettles and flowers; figurines of angels and marching soldiers and stiff pilgrim-looking men and every description of animal, some of them impossible; a metal ball divided in two for holding ice on one side and ice cream on the other (for picnics); a chair and coatrack made of deer antlers; and the art: marble sculptures of abstracted figures that joined together and glazed pottery of a woman’s breast, dioramas of some kind of dream or haunted house with wire birds flying overhead, and paintings by the dozen, few of whose creators I recognized besides, of course, the Picasso.
A life in objects—a life of junk, she would have said.
And the final object on the list: Sculpture of boat, in bronze: CAPRICE.
“Koo-koo!” came the familiar cry from down the hall. “Lunch is pronto! We are having the truffle!”
“With eggs?” I shouted, walking out to find her. I knew she claimed it might be her last.
She stood there in a turquoise kimono, one finger raised into the air. “NOT with eggs!” she said.
“With anchovies?”
She nodded.
“A jump into the abyss!” I said, laughing.
She shrugged. “I am ashamed to have shown fear of an anchovy.” Then turned away and went down the stairs with her pugs.
We had entered December and I had not made a decision about Giacomo and Milan.
I asked him not to call me and certainly not to visit; my mind was confused by Oscar’s death, by the few words I’d overheard from his letter, by the words my employer had spoken, by all that had happened at Villa Coco, and of course by my own uncertainty about my future.
Without Giacomo around, I discovered, time expanded greatly, so that my personal hours seemed to double, a fact my employer noticed, as she subsequently doubled her expectations of me, just as I was going over the final catalog.
Grocery duty and postage duty and oddball tasks around the house.
I managed to buy some private time when she said my hair needed cutting and gave me leave to visit her salon in the village.
I accepted the time off but not the venue; instead, I took Estelle up on her offer to give me a trim.
But it came with a price.
“I want you to pose for me,” she said when I asked her assistance one day in the upstairs hall. I asked what she meant. “For a painting, stupid American. And,” she added, “you will be nude.”
It is pleasant to look back on one’s younger self and the joy one took in one’s body; when I reached her house the next day, I happily shucked off my clothes and lay on the white linen pillows of her couch.
She instructed me on how to position myself, and in the end I was a male Olympia, with even a black cat sleeping by my feet.
All this confidence and ease, and yet my heart fell slightly when I saw Estelle bring out the canvas she meant to work with: about the size of a hardcover book. I would be captured in miniature.
“Um,” I said, “is that the painting?”
“I can’t make any more large work. I’m moving, you know.”
“You decided?”
She nodded and told me to stop talking or at least lose that foolish expression on my face. “I’m going to have to pack up the rest of my work. Or burn it. I was thinking of a great bonfire one night!”
“You can’t do that! Why not store them with Coco?”
She shrugged and brought out her pencil to begin her sketch. I understood the subject was somehow closed. And yet, with my days so few, I wanted to sketch a little more myself. To get down in my mind what was soon to be out of view.
“Estelle, how did you come from Algeria?”
“I came with my mother,” she said without looking up. “On a boat.”
“What kind of boat?”
“Put your arm back where it was.”
“I just want to understand you better.”
“I don’t remember the boat,” she said. “I remember the water. How terrifying it was. I remember staying with two aunts in Rome who wore nothing but black. They were terrifying too. But beautiful! They would pour me tea and dote on me and dress me up.” Estelle put down her pencil and brought out her paints; we were getting to the real work now.
“I started to dress myself up. I got to know artists, and I posed for them and was in their world. I made some hard choices. Maybe when I was your age, yes.”
I lay there trying to hold my pose while letting all her words run through my mind. I saw her lean forward to look more closely at me.
“I do not envy you your youth. I think it is a terrible time. But Visconti found me and brought me to Milan, which was a piece of luck. Better, though, Coco found me.”
“Ah!”
“The best thing that ever happened to me was coming here.”
“So why are you leaving?”
“I wonder what you will think of coming here? Later, when you’re old?” A dab of her brush onto the palette and she held it out before her, then she lowered her chin. “Stay perfectly still. I’m about to commit you to eternity…”