Chapter 3 #13
For someone I had always thought of as cool and unworried, having passed the hard exams of youth and entered the tenure of middle age, Estelle looked at me with surprising emotion.
She put her hand on my arm. I did not understand what was going on around me, and no more did I understand this woman.
“Giovedì!” she said in a low voice. “Please don’t give anything away.
Just make the list as before. Please. For Oscar. ”
“The package we drove to Ferrara. It was the Picasso, wasn’t it? Oscar was supposed to handle the sale and she had to do it without him.”
Estelle swallowed heavily. “Don’t worry, nothing terrible is going on.”
“As I said, it’s none of my—”
“It’s nothing, it’s silliness. You’ll laugh.” She grinned, and whatever worry I had seen in her face was gone. “And something else…”
I asked what that might be. I was wary of her, in this newly emotional form.
“Go to Venice with our friend. She has her reasons for wanting you there. Trust me. And so do I.”
When one has resolved to leave a place, the days approach like a slow tide coming in to sweep one’s boat out to sea, and it can be a torture for the impatient.
The arrival of a new cover of snow helped divert my attention from the advancing foam.
Improbably, I was put to work in the dormant vegetable garden with Ghazel, who explained, in his usual dreamlike Italian, about planting by the phases of the moon.
But everything was dreamlike in the days before my planned departure, and I touched each corner of the property knowing I might never see it again.
One afternoon, I came across my baronessa and Pushkin and Gorky in the little grove of olives, the ones with roses trained throughout them, which of course were pruned and bare.
The world was colorless, the sky scudding with oblong clouds like a slide of paramecia.
When she heard me, she turned and said nothing.
She was dressed in absurd English tweeds.
Her hand with garden shears fell by her side; I recognized them, at last, as the ones I had seen on my first day, lying in a basket in the sun.
“I was thinking of a dear friend of ours,” she said.
I felt a tenderness I tried to push away. “Oscar…”
“Oscar? No,” she said, looking once more at the pruned roses, “I was thinking of our Cesare and the pen. Do you remember? When his face was all blue?” Of course I remembered; it was my very first morning, when so many details of the place imprinted themselves on me.
“He ate the pen. Many dream, but he acted! And look—it did not kill him.” She glanced back at me and raised the garden shears.
“So why not eat a pen every now and then?”
I shrugged and laughed. I said, “You told me everything was new to him. Just like me. That he was afraid of everything.”
She seemed affronted. “Cesare is afraid of nothing!”
I considered how different I was from the dog. “I’ve finished my cataloging,” I said.
“Eh?”
I held out the collated set of papers: the “longhand ledger” she had requested. “I said I’ve finished my cataloging—”
“Oh! May I see it?” She seemed suddenly full of intensity and grabbed the papers from my hands. I saw her tongue emerge from between her lips as a sign of concentration (a habit she shared with Pushkin and Gorky), and, with a finger, she went over every item I had so painstakingly elucidated.
I told her to notice I had not put down the toe.
“I thank you.” And then she came across an item described as Braque, red and black. “What is this?”
“You know,” I said. “The one in the parlor beside the courtesan.”
Her manner was firm. “That’s not a Braque! It’s a Gleizes.”
I laughed. “The signature—”
“I suppose,” she said, catching my eye, “I could be wrong.”
“I believe Oscar,” I said meaningfully, “would say it was a Braque.”
She put her hand on my arm. “Look at that tree,” she said in a quiet voice.
The angle of afternoon sun was such that it filled a chestnut tree as a fountain is filled with water, its ice-coated branches tilting in the spill of light.
But what amazed me more than this moment of beauty was the woman beside me.
A woman who seemed, to me, jaded about so much of life—small talk, fashion, music on the radio—but who was not at all jaded about the light in this tree.
She had seen this tree every day for forty years, had in all probability planted it, known it in spring and fall and winter, and here it stood before her: as fresh as that first day.
She was moved by its beauty. I could see that.
So little appeared to move her—she had developed either armor or immunity against all manner of insult, sentiment, or nostalgia—but she was defenseless before this simple being.
Something that had nothing, after all, to do with her.
Something she could not control, could not make beautiful. And yet was beautiful.
“We must take this list to a notaio,” she said at last. “So it is official. Will you do that?”
“A notary?”
“There is a female notary in Rignano. She looks like a murderess.” The way she said it, it sounded like a compliment.
A notary would make me officially an accomplice to whatever chicanery she and Oscar had been up to, endangering my reputation with my very first position out of college.
Something I might have cared about deeply three months before, arriving with Ghazel in the Mitsu-bitchy.
“Of course,” I said.
A quick smile. “So now your work for me is done. But I have a temptation for you. If you do the simple favor of accompanying me to Venice, I will follow your suggestion.”
As she had never followed any of my suggestions before, I asked what it might be.
“The toe,” she said. “Perhaps you are right that it belongs with the Tetrarch once again.”
“I’m proud of you,” I said.
“Ah! So the toe has tempted you!”
I could hear a car making its way down our road.
“I told you,” I said firmly, “I have not decided—”
“Eh?”
I took a deep breath. “I HAVE NOT DECIDED.” Although, to tell the truth, I had indeed decided something important.
Once again, she pretended she had not heard me. “We leave this Friday by train.”
“I cannot promise,” I insisted, “to leave this Friday by—”
“Sacré bleu!” she said, staring behind me. “What is my cousin doing here?”
“I need to talk with you!”
Giacomo and I stood on the road, by the little outbuilding that housed mysteries of water and electricity; my baronessa had been brought inside by Nimali after a terse greeting for her cousin.
The cousin himself, dressed in a thin houndstooth coat and a scarf the same purplish brown as the dead-leaf landscape, hugged himself for warmth.
His ears, nostrils, and cheeks were highlighted in red—a technique we had seen in the mosaics of Ravenna.
“We do need to talk,” I said.
A light came on in the kitchen: a sign that Nimali had begun dinner preparations. An elaborate wrought-iron-ivy shadow fell across the road. Giacomo, so tall and broad, looked somehow smaller as he rubbed his hands together in the cold before me.
I said, “She has asked me to join her in Venice.”
“What’s in Venice?”
“I don’t know. She leaves Friday by train.”
“Two days before Christmas,” he said.
I nodded.
“Come to Milan instead. We have everything ready for you.”
I could hear the words that Oscar wrote to be read at his memorial—I gave my heart to the wrong…
I did not know…not ever get those years back…
—and I struggled over how to tell Giacomo, that beautiful man who had treasured me and offered me a whole world in Milan, what was gradually becoming clear.
I was younger than he, and barely more experienced, but I had gradually assimilated the mistakes of a much older gentleman, gaining knowledge by proximity and observation as I had gained the new language I now spoke daily.
The cold air made my eyes tear up. Was I wrong?
How to know? The flush on his cheeks brought on by the chill, so like that flush in bed when he would tease me about my way of speaking (“Wow! What’s happening?
!”); the cloud on the lower rims of his glasses, fogged by his breath, so like how they would steam up after the bath; the stutter, the slow blink—these echoes confused my resolve.
And yet Oscar’s words came to me. I gave my heart…
What could I say to him? What honesty would not cause more pain?
Because I was seeking to decide not just for myself but also for him, to relieve him of the years that he would spend on a mistake.
For, as I have said, all we had heard was the overture—the first chords of our affection—and to stake a life on those, to build a home and family and invest the years of youth seemed, I am sure, precisely the brand of boldness his cousin had taught him: we were here, after all, and would not be back!
But she always implied the following: If it is what you want.
How hard to sort: what we are flattered to believe, what we hope is true, what is really true…and what we want. For all my training, I struggled to organize the muddle in my heart. And yet I knew, though it meant choosing the unknown. I knew it was not enough.
What was the price again, a heavy price, for seeing things as they really are?
“You can’t stay here,” he said.
“No, I can’t stay here. And, Giacomo,” I said, taking his hand. “Giacomo…”
He stood shivering in the twilight, hope in his eyes, waiting for my decision.
The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.
We left that Friday by train.