Chapter 3 #14
At our little station, brown shutters on yellow with Christmas wreaths above the door, I bid a silent goodbye to San Drogo.
I had already made my farewells to Ghazel and Vinsanda and Nimali (“Enough!” she shouted merrily), to Cesare and the animals in my room and, finally, to Giacomo’s ancestor beside my bed.
I packed some of Tonino’s wardrobe in my duffel for whatever life awaited me, and when my baronessa discovered how much I had left behind, I merely explained that it belonged better to that charmed place than out in the real world.
She seemed irritated, looking me up and down.
“You are mistaken about the real world.” As for my employer, there was, to my mind, an inordinate amount of preparation for what she claimed would be a one-night stay: a raiding of her closets, including the one in my room, and hours of careful study and conversation with Estelle, robes and dresses and trousers laid out on the bed and analyzed, after which the result was a number of steamer trunks packed into Duccio’s truck and sent away like naughty children.
Apparently Estelle went with them, along with Pushkin and Gorky, or at least this was what my employer alluded to as we stood in the courtyard with our luggage.
I took Estelle at her word that I would still get to say goodbye to her in Venice.
The morning of our departure, my baronessa looked for a long time at the rose-twined olives, the monuments to pugs and loved ones, the tangled forest hiding the old entrance, the olive groves and wisteria and petunias in their pots, and, at last, at the ivy-covered wall that hid Villa Coco from the world.
“Avanti!” she said briskly, and went into the car where Vinsanda was waiting, and so we left.
We spoke little on the train from Florence to Bologna, enduring the long dark tunnels in silence.
We had chosen facing seats with a table between and I had fallen asleep soon after picking up my book; she had given me Goldoni to read in preparation for my first trip to Venice, and while I found the eighteenth-century jokes amusing, it was a bit like preparing for London by reading Chaucer.
The Servant of Two Masters was the title, a comedy about a man too greedy for life.
I awakened to find my employer seated primly with her purse on her lap, staring directly at me.
I took a moment to look out the window and saw a river sparkling below.
Not a river, I realized: white butterflies in a deep valley.
I thought of my tearful goodbye with Giacomo.
Lazy in love. Oscar had not meant that I must grab what came and hold tight, but the opposite—that I must let go of what I did not want.
Let go of an offer that to anyone else might seem the height of glamour, this flat in Milan with a shared affection, perhaps even a shared child, a man to trouble himself over me, support me, adore me for who knew how long?
Long enough, for most. But not for me. I could not have told you why; I understood only that it was not what I wanted, that it was not, in my baronessa’s term, enough.
Let go of Giacomo-Giacomo. And now? Off to the unknown, a servant of no master.
My employer coughed, and I turned my attention to her, sitting in her leather seat beside the window. “So you have ended things with my cousin.”
I said I had.
“You are like the lady with the pitchfork,” she said.
“What?”
She turned her face to the window. “The lady who fixed your mattress. To end a story at the proper time. It takes an inner will not everybody has.”
I said I thought I was unlike the lady with the pitchfork.
“I think we are both in a rather poignant mood. I, too, have had a sad adieu. Perhaps you can tell me a funny story.”
“I’m not sure I can think of one right now.”
“Tell me about Porta Rossa.”
I asked what she was referring to.
“With my cousin and his wife,” she said brightly. “Estelle intimated it was like a Feydeau farce!”
Tell me a funny story. She had said this before, on our journey to Ferrara, but I had not previously understood.
That day on the train to Venice, however, I did.
Of course I was full of sorrow and confusion, but I took the details of the evening in Florence and made of them a funny story.
Not just for her; for me. Sitting with her as the landscape raced by, and perhaps inspired by Goldoni, I told her of Laurine’s conspicuous pregnancy and her arrival from the train with her girlfriend, Carlotta (“In a hunting jacket? Was she off to hunt lions? Oh, I like this very much!”), and how Giacomo had arranged two rooms at the Porta Rossa.
As we came aboveground and passed by Ferrara, I told her of our meal of too much wine and bistecca alla fiorentina (“Buona!”) and the lion-hunter girlfriend who spoke only Italian (“This was good practice for you”).
How the four of us walked into the lobby, ready to pair off to our rooms, when all of a sudden we heard Laurine’s name being called in two high, piercing, harmonizing voices: her aunts, staying on the very same floor (“Disastro!”).
I told her of being introduced as the husband of the lion hunter and, in the confusion of us all in the hallway, being forced to enter our room as man and wife while Giacomo and Laurine entered theirs, bidding the aunts good night.
Carlotta phoned her girlfriend; a lot of Italian yelling; another phone call and she ordered prosecco, which we shared.
The timid knock on the door; Laurine bearing Carlotta’s rage, Giacomo bearing mine.
How we did not talk until the next morning, and of course then had come the call from Ghazel…
I put my hand on her arm: “I forgot to tell you something you would like about her. She is a dog breeder.”
“The lion tamer?” She had become a lion tamer in my baronessa’s telling.
“And more,” I said, then paused. “She breeds pugs!”
She laughed.
I saw so clearly on the train to Venice what I could not see earlier.
Not that we were to tell only of silliness and frivolity, not at all; she herself had touched on war and death several times in a dinner conversation.
She meant the story was not funny—that I had no control over it, or had not reined it in like a wild horse to the course of my choosing, that the comedy I heard so often in her own stories was not at all the shallowness of a rich woman with nothing to worry her but the fierce gaiety of a woman who would not let tragedy bend her.
Yes, I had cried in my room after leaving Giacomo: confused, unsure, perhaps a little in love.
She was urging me to share that, but not unprocessed, unfiltered so that it remained in its crude, original form of pain and sorrow, plunked down like a bottle of homemade wine.
You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara.
Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller.
To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.
“Lift the shade higher, if you can,” she said. “I’d like to watch as we arrive.”
I did so, and asked if she could tell me what we were up to in Venice.
“Oh, it’s best not to tell until a thing is half accomplished,” she said mysteriously.
“You have pointed out yourself how superstitious I am. Look, the first seagull! By train is the best way for your first arrival. Many prefer by plane, where you then take a water taxi, but for me it is too modern, and the taxi makes one feel like a whaling vessel. No, it is best to arrive…like this.”
And so we did.
The arrival in Venice by train is quite famous, and yet it seemed impossible that I was stepping from an ordinary train station into this fantasy of water and stone—a vision covered, as if by a fire curtain before a performance, by a thick layer of fog.
I could see lights glowing through the mist, but the city I had heard and read about was not yet visible to me as I followed my baronessa down the steps and to the vaporetto stop.
There, she insisted on a “piccolo sconto” (a discount) and, playing the little old lady, she was granted one.
A boat came out of the fog, long and narrow, and once a worker had tied it to the dock, we boarded.
Again I wondered where Venice was, for all I saw was a blanketing whiteness and churning water.
Then the worker closed the gate, unlooped the rope from its mooring, and with a rumble of the engine we were off.