Chapter 3 #16
Indeed, one poor man’s foot was made entirely of white stone, making him look like a high school track star in a cast. I wondered that no tourist had cared to sign it.
Seagulls tilted above us and moved on to more promising targets.
I looked back in wonder at my employer, who wore a grim expression.
From her purse she pulled a purple stone and silently stepped forward and fit it into the base.
She stood back to judge the effect. “There, I hope you are less ashamed of me now.”
I looked upon the source of so much trouble as it sat there, nestled in the white stone of the missing foot. It seemed so insignificant now. “Is that it?”
“I am not sure what you are referring to.”
“You had it in your purse? And you’re just going to leave it there? Maybe we should…is there a mayor or something? A doge?”
“A doge! Napoleon would be amused to hear this.”
“It should be presented to the city.”
“It belongs to nobody but the Tetrarch himself. He has been reunited with his toe after eight hundred years. I should think this would be enough for anybody.”
Strangely, I felt she had a point. I said, “I’m very proud of you.” I asked if she felt a weight lifted from her.
I saw her considering this, looking back at the four grave men. “I feel like Casanova forced to pay for something he used to get for free.”
Without sentiment, she turned and had me take her past the piazzetta toward the colonnaded piazza, where an orchestra was tuning up its instruments.
To my surprise, we headed directly for the orchestra, and I could see there was a café set within the imposing building, and that it seemed to glow a golden color from within.
Each wall, I saw, was painted elaborately and protected by a pane of glass; it seemed less like a café than a chapel, and the long table set with goblets and plates, draped with white cloth, its altar.
There was no one seated inside, and the tuxedoed waiters looked at us expectantly. I now understood her formal suit.
Seeing my expression, she said, “This is the café Casanova frequented. Also Goldoni. Sometimes a bit of theater is necessary. Here you will leave me.”
“Here? How will you get back to the apartment?”
“I am not completely gaga! I will not get as lost as you will.”
“But—”
“This part, which is difficult, I must do alone.” Then she nodded to me and I watched the figure in red silk, my employer, make her slow way to the café across the cobblestones.
I imagined her wearing the clogs of her painted courtesan, stepping gingerly through high water.
The waiters went to her at once and brought her within the glass enclosure, and she seemed to have stepped into a living painting.
My baronessa predicted I would become lost, which I promptly did.
I found myself almost immediately back at the water, where a bride and groom had been taking wedding photos; it was high tide and the water kept splashing on the walkway stones, and so the bottom of her dress was irredeemably stained with mud.
She appeared to be resigned to this and lifted her ruined skirt as they made their way to a bar, where already friends seemed to have ordered her a spritz.
Across the canal, the island of Giudecca had its own pastry shop of domed churches and temples on display, shining in the reflections on the water, along which sped boats like the one that had brought us here.
Candied poles stuck out from the water, striped in yellow, red, and pale blue, and along the canals I saw “streetlamps” to light the watery roads.
Down an alley I plunged, hoping it was the right direction.
Silentium read the sign at the entrance to a church.
And indeed, in the wood-beamed passages I took, so low I had to duck my head, all was silent except the lapping of the waves.
I began to feel ill at ease; the sound of the rising water was too much like the tide of the past I could feel already dampening my feet, and the low passages too much like the future pressing down from above.
With shaking breath, I knew my old life would soon return to me, with its foolish terrors, and all I could do was remain on the perch of the present as long as it would support me.
I passed a shop with an angled window display of slippers. And all of a sudden, as something Oscar once said to me returned, a mouse ran across my heart.
I mentally felt my way back through the streets until I came again upon the store of Neapolitan delights.
There, in the window, were displayed two kinds of sfogliatelle: riccia and frolla.
It seemed strange to find them here, so far from Naples, and I considered letting this whim vanish, as Oscar had made it clear it was a treat only to be had in Naples, but then another voice came to me, and I decided I was here, the pastry was here, I wanted it, and I would not be back.
Behind the pastries stood a middle-aged woman, blond and wearing a pink paper hat; she smiled in anticipation.
And yet the choice seemed so obvious; I could not understand how anyone could choose the other.
I did not even want to know anyone who would.
I stood for a long time before I spoke my choice aloud, then headed into the street to enjoy it, and it is possible that in that moment, without even knowing it, the course of my life was set.
By the intervention of some saint, I found the princess’s door again, and, after some discussion with a moaning intercom, was let into the building and then the apartment by the maid, so remarkably like my aunt Gwen, with the same bowed head and backward way of exiting a room.
I was left alone in the dim parlor. Potted palms were lined up against each wall, and two red tufted couches sat opposite each other, at a somewhat hostile distance, and on one of them lay Pushkin and Gorky, snoring and seeming hardly to have heads.
So they had made it, presumably along with her trunks.
There I stood, lit only by the chandelier’s sphere of radiance, contemplating the great decisions I had before me—when I heard a rustling from the southward palms, like that of a creature about to emerge from a jungle, and indeed a form did appear from among the leaves, first hard to make out in the dim light, then seeming to take the shape of a great parrot clambering along its perch, turning its beak this way and that so as to get a bilateral view of the situation, and I recognized the personage atop whose head quivered one single artificial flower.
“So good…to see you,” pronounced the Princess Maria Augusta, holding out her hand into the chandelier glow, where it was lit as by spotlight. I took her hand (barnacled with rings) and kissed it. “And how is your life in Italy?”
I stepped back to give Pippa room to enter. “It has come to an end, I’m afraid. I’m only here to deliver your friend the baronessa.”
She cocked her head. “And what will you do now?”
“I may go back to the States,” I said. “Or to London.”
Her pause remained. “To learn English?”
I nearly laughed and stuttered, trying to find a response, but it turned out one was not called for:
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, striding now completely into view. I saw she was draped in shawls. “Lisabetta has her Caprice at last.” I nodded as if I understood a word of what this meant. “I am glad to have been of service to my friend. It was I who found her, you know!”
I blinked and kept a smile performing on my face.
She tapped my shoulder with a finger. “The boat,” she said. “The boat!”
I remembered my first days at Villa Coco, when my employer explained my role—I have put something in motion from which there will soon be no returning—and when she told me about the Tetrarch’s toe—it depends upon a great decision.
I said, “The Caprice…”
The smile was like a curtain festooning as it is pulled up, laying bare the stage furniture of the principessa’s bright, beautiful teeth, stained slightly blue from the red wine I saw now she held in her hand. She nodded to see my comprehension.
I released the courtliness of my speech. “That’s ridiculous!” I said, somehow infuriated by this extravagance. “She bought back her boat? How much could she use it? She’s ninety-two. She barely leaves the villa.”
I watched as the principessa crossed the room to pull the tassel of a lamp, whose delayed glow seemed like a slightly off lighting cue. She turned to face me with that same smile:
“You know she’s not going back to the villa!”
I said simply: “What?”
“Your English has greatly improved!”
“What do you mean, she’s not going back?”
“She sold it.”
“Sold it?”
The principessa gestured to the entirety of her own apartment. “Sold the house and…everything in it!”
This revelation shook me. I hardly knew where to begin, or whether to believe her. “But Villa Coco is her home! It’s her—” I did not want to say masterpiece. “It can’t be.”
“To Pullman!”
This also took me a moment. “Furman Childress.”
“Yes, Pullman.”
“She sold her house to Furman Childress.” It seemed impossible my baronessa would dispose of her collection, sell off the fruits of her talent, her “eye,” as Oscar had put it, to someone she so clearly despised.
The princess raised a finger, and there was a twinkle in her eye. “And…everything in it!”
She had to say it twice for me to understand.
The princess fairly glittered with excitement. “You know…that it was all my idea? When she told me of Oscar’s illness, and said that she was selling everything and getting the boat. I said, Lisabetta! You can’t sell Pullman…your treasures! There’s a funnier way to do it! Remember…the Queen!”
“The Queen,” I said, trying to follow.
She gestured wildly with one hand. “Do what I did with the Queen and my sofa. Give him…copies!”
I recalled my employer saying the princess was an inspiration to others—they must have cooked up this plan long before my arrival. “And Oscar?”