Chapter 3 #12
Christmas was on the horizon and, with it, my impending departure.
I had expected my baronessa to be readying Villa Coco for the holiday (it seemed an occasion for her favorite activity: decoration), but her response to my questions was that Natale would not be celebrated in the traditional way this year.
A tree was apparently out of the question.
I had noticed one in the village square, but to my baronessa this was an abomination.
“A tree? I had enough of Germans in the war. No, I think the house is fire hazard enough.” Nonetheless, I noticed she had Vinsanda cut pine boughs and place them in every room, a far more flammable arrangement, to my way of thinking.
St. Nicholas’s Day—December the sixth—arrived.
I came to talk with my baronessa before dinner.
I had heard presents arrived on St. Nicholas’s Day, but when I brought up the subject, she looked at me curiously.
She wore an apricot sweater and matching scarf and sat on her white sofa, a pug on either side of her like guardian lions.
“For small children,” she answered, “not us.” I asked about Santa Claus.
“HO HO HO!” she laughed. “San Nicola was a Turkish bishop who never went north of Puglia. You may visit his tomb in Bari! But I don’t think he’s bringing any present for you.
You must wait for La Befana.” Who was this?
Another look of surprise from her. “It is the old witch who brings presents on January the sixth!” Well, of course it was. Two weeks after my departure.
She had turned off the volume on the television when I entered, but from the corner of my eye I could see the visual was still on (it was her detective show), and her gaze was now and then drawn to its watery movements. Outside, I heard Ghazel and Vinsanda wrestling with a metal ladder.
“This invitation from my cousin to Milan,” she began, to my surprise. “It seems like a trip that can be delayed.”
I stood above her, hands in pockets, trying to understand. From the yard came the disastrous sound of metal falling and then familiar voices shouting.
“Why would I delay it?”
She took a deep breath but still did not meet my eye. “Oscar was to come with me on this rather important trip to Venice. But he is no longer able.”
“Are you asking me to go with you?”
“I don’t see how it changes your plans,” she said. “On the twenty-third. It’s just overnight.”
Yallah, I heard out the window, Yallah! I tried to forestall answering. “I have to think about it. I have a ticket home for Christmas. My mother said she knows of a job for me in Washington. A college friend invited me to London.”
So here it was, the moment the man with the green scarab pin had foretold.
She looked up at me again; she seemed determined. “You can as easily go to Washington or London from Venice as from here.”
“Maybe another time,” I said. “I’m a bit…eh, ahem, overwhelmed, to be honest.”
“You are picking up my cousin’s habits again. A night in Venice will let you think. As it did for Hemingway.”
“I have too much to do. I have to pack—”
“It is all the same,” she said, “to pack for one place or another. And think of Oscar. We leave two weeks from Friday by train.”
She’ll come to you and say, I have an important trip.
“I cannot, I’m sorry.”
“Eh?”
“I CAN’T!”
I saw her left hand shake slightly until she put it in her lap and covered it with the right.
“I wonder what I will do.” I walked to the doorway, unsure whether to leave her there.
She seemed so uncertain. Ghazel shouted again outside, and without lifting her head, she said to me: “Gazelle has failed again with the faina. Vinsanto is helping him with a…a snare, I think you call it. As in an adventure movie. Poof!” She made a gesture of something flying upward into a tree.
Then I heard her sigh. “Let us be honest. This faina will outlive us all.”
About a week later, I found myself deep in her closet, searching for a missing shoe: a Chinese slipper in blue and gold.
All around me hung the dresses and robes of her long life, and below, the tangled city of her shoes, some tied in pairs with ribbon but most heaped to the side in a mass.
“I bought these shoes in New York City,” I could hear her saying to Nimali from beyond the closet doors.
“I was with Allen Ginsberg and he was very, very high.” She was in “high spirits” herself that day, in her own words, and I had a sense she had achieved some secret goal; certainly she walked about in dreamy thought and giggled like a girl in love, and I felt it did not suit her.
On she went with her story about Allen Ginsberg as my fingers felt the crinkle of paper; I pulled it to me and found pink tissue and, looped within it, a triple strand of pearls.
The Marie Antoinette pearls! Of course the words came to me, from my doppelg?nger at the café.
I could sell them whole or in parts and secure a bit of my future.
I had only to pop them in my pocket, like a Tetrarch’s toe, and perhaps if what Furman told me was true, it would be a kind of karmic justice…
But do you know what? I could not do it.
I was never moral, only organized. And of course my baronessa herself had taught me how to steal, how to “just pop it in” my pocket.
But if I had lived long enough at Villa Coco to absorb its lessons, it also strangely made theft impossible.
Selling the pearls would be like selling the floor or furniture on which I depended.
For she was going to talk me into staying.
A year, another, until a dozen years would pass.
I would become so much a part of this world that I would be no longer a separate person but a character in its story, as much as the mouse that ran across the counter.
What would a mouse like me do with a triple strand of pearls?
Nothing; it would live always in the kitchen walls, as I would live always in the room of animals.
I would grow old like the man in the café; I would wear a purple scarf and a scarab pin.
I would take up smoking. I would forget my homeland as had the flamingos of Comacchio.
If I stayed, my life would become as obvious as one of the soap operas my baronessa watched late into the night…
I heard someone shouting from the other room.
I feared the worst and pulled myself from the closet to find Nimali standing over a startled Baronessa, who was sitting in a rocking chair. Nimali’s hands were in the air as if about to cast a spell. “ENOUGH!” she was shouting. “ENOUGH! ENOUGH!” Then she stomped out of the room.
I asked what on earth had happened. My employer turned to me and said she had no idea. She had been in the middle of listing precisely what Nimali was to pack, and in what manner, and was telling an amusing story about Salazar in Portugal, who had once—
“No, no, what did you say to her?”
She paused and looked out the window. “I suggested she put on one of the maid’s outfits I find at Formica.”
“You know she hates those.”
“Where did she learn that rude word? ‘Enough’?”
I stood there and wondered if anyone had ever said it to her before. “From me.”
And she began to laugh.
I held out my hand. “I’ve found your pearls.”
“Thanks God!” She clapped her hands together. “You have betrayed me with Nimali! But this has put you in my list of favorite people. You will see me wear them in Venice.”
Holding the pearls, I almost regretted my decision.
There may come a point when you want to leave, Oscar had said.
But do not go. As a favor to me and to yourself.
It will be worth whatever trouble you have to go through.
I wondered if he had seen this side of her many times.
It seemed impossible someone could be so stubborn. “I told you, I’m not going—”
“We leave a week from Friday by train.”
Estelle drove her Ape to the villa to show me my finished painting; it was too cold for me to walk to her, and the cars were once more in the shop.
My baronessa was taking a rest in her bedroom, so we sat in her parlor with its ceiling-high shelves filled with books, every one of which I had cataloged.
Estelle wore a knit wool dress in forest green that made her look somehow elven.
From her bag she brought out the little canvas.
“Estelle, you made me better-looking than I am.”
Smudges for feet, long noble legs, a generous depiction of my midsection, the torso twisted into triangles with my arms akimbo like the handles of an urn, and careful delineation of my face into angles, the kind of flattering depiction a patron might ask an artist to make of a lover, idealized.
And yet, I realized, much more mature than my years.
Not a college boy at all. The arm muscles and jaw and stern erotic gaze: a man.
She smiled. “It’s how I see you.”
“May I keep it?”
“I’ll bring it to Venice. Maybe it will tempt you to come,” she said, standing. “Otherwise, this is goodbye, Giovedì.”
“You know my name was never Giovedì.”
“It suits you, though.”
“I don’t know about Venice. But I do know I can’t stay here. And I know,” I said, looking carefully at her face, “…I know the painting in her bedroom is not a Picasso.”
She stood motionless, the portrait in her hands.
I asked, “What were they up to?”
“He wasn’t—”
“I assume he sold the real ones for her. Did she just want to keep up appearances?”
“You’ve misunderstood something,” she said.
“I’m sure I have. It’s probably none of my business.”