Chapter 3 #17
“Oh, my dear,” said the princess. “She did it all…for Oscar.”
Of course. My baronessa had known of Oscar’s illness and, with Pippa’s help, created this final diversion.
Perhaps to cling to the past or perhaps in the belief that “high spirits” might yet keep him alive.
To fool their old nemesis one last time.
Sell him all of her remaining “treasures,” each one meticulously copied and replaced.
The originals sold from Oscar’s apartment to fund a grand adventure for the two of them, one last caprice!
Except that Oscar had not made it to the end.
The principessa was eager to ask: “Tell me, did Pullman accept…the list?”
“It was notarized,” I said.
“Excellent. That was his…stipulation. An expert American archivist.”
“I see,” I said. And so at last I knew my job description.
“Yes, yes, it was all…my idea!”
I tried to stifle a laugh but failed, and it came out in an unbecoming snort.
The princess drew herself up augustly. I was about to point out how ridiculous her “idea” was, the kind of thing a group of schoolboys would come up with to taunt a rival, and full of holes such as…
But I stopped myself. Because of course that’s exactly what it was, and what was the point of telling her?
Children. Elderly, larger-than-life children, such as Oscar and my employer and Pippa herself, operating in their cartoon world of cartoon logic, cooking up a scheme that would never work except against someone as childish as themselves.
Some enemy from their youth. They lived in a sealed world of comic-strip logic, and within that world, all schemes ended as happily as a monkey’s life in Zanzibar.
Do you know? I had become so used to the whims and chaos of that villa, the walls of dogs and elephant graveyards, that it made a kind of mad sense.
I had auditioned for a role—that of the wide-eyed American scholar—and I had been a triumph.
I was, in a strange way, honored now to be in a story that my employer would tell around her dinner table…
And then it hit me that my parting from Villa Coco was not, as I had somehow imagined, an arrivederci to a place to which I would surely return, this time not as a servant but as a guest. I thought of my baronessa’s thoughtful look back. It had been goodbye forever.
I asked, “And what is her plan, I’d like to know?”
“To live her days at sea.”
I must admit that I laughed. “Our baronessa? Is going to live on some boat? I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t?”
“People don’t do things like that.”
And then the old princess, tottering from one spotlight to the next like some aged chanteuse, in her shawls and her jiggling flower, spilling wine onto the wavering terrazzo floor, said something to me that was so strange—and yet so important—that I have made it the epigraph of this tale:
“Lisabetta knows the trick to life,” she said, “is knowing what you want.”
At the time, I stood back, baffled by such a statement from her.
I had taken her for a vain, foolish, morally myopic species of flightless bird, but here, suddenly, were words to ponder.
I had considered life to be a matter of knowing what was needed, what was necessary, what was crucial to each circumstance—the mindset, I suppose, of a servant to life and not a princess or a baronessa, someone who has never bought off the rack—and so I shook my head in confusion.
But I was asking the wrong questions. And I was asking the wrong person.
My baronessa did not return until late. I had made myself a makeshift dinner from cheese and prosciutto in the “frigo” and broken off a piece of panettone on the counter; I found I could not stop myself, and was ashamed to realize I’d eaten half the cake.
Pippa herself had cheerfully bid me good night, which I took to mean she was off to bed; instead, she put on a shimmering golden cloak and headed out the door, presumably to a party or merely to walk the streets of Venice as if it were Carnevale.
I sat and drank and amused myself with a book I found on her shelves, Graham Greene in Italian; I had read it before in English and so could keep up with the plot.
A bell rang the hour from some distant tower.
I sat very still as Pushkin and Gorky mumbled to each other in their sleep.
A few minutes later, another bell rang the hour.
Who knew which one to believe? Sound of the buzzer; the maid pattered into the hall (as Aunt Gwen would have), dressed now in a flannel housecoat.
Through the intercom I heard my employer’s crackling soprano.
The maid and I waited as the elevator chugged to life, then clanked to a stop.
The maid opened the door. Somehow my employer had managed the streets of Venice without wrinkling her red suit, though her lipstick was worn away and she seemed weary beyond measure.
Beneath the veil of weariness, though, a glimmer of triumph.
“I am glad to see you found your way. I will have a glass of your wine,” my employer said, taking the sofa with Pushkin and Gorky. “I have abstained all night to keep my wits, but my wits are no longer needed.”
I poured her some wine, and she appraised it before taking a sip. I sat down opposite her and observed her for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
She smiled. “Ah, you talked to Pippa.”
“Why didn’t you tell me why you hired me?”
“Are you referring to Pullman and the house? Pippa’s wine is always awful.”
“No, no, the reason you hired me,” I said. “Me in particular.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You hired me because I’m American.”
“Eh?”
“All this time making fun of me for not knowing Italian, not knowing history or art. But in fact that’s exactly why you hired me. A young, stupid American. Who wouldn’t figure out—”
“I have nothing against the young.”
“It’s just the most ridiculous plan! Just to…stick it to Pullman for something that happened fifty years ago. I’m ashamed of you, honestly.”
“Ashamed!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t enjoy explanations,” she said without looking up. She sipped her wine and sighed deeply. “Besides, you would have played fair. It would have spoiled everything for Oscar. Are you very furious with me?”
There was a racket of someone across the courtyard battling with their shutters, a clanking, then a creaking of rusty hinges like the sound of geese. A rushing noise was perhaps a boat going by on the canal below.
“I am,” I said. “I should call your friend Pullman—Furman—right now.”
“HO HO HO! Hardly a friend. I suppose it is foolish. One last time with Oscar, I thought. One last trick on that cretino. Why not? Though there is a poetry to the latest I heard from Nimali, which is that they have found the second pozzo at last! You recall, from our first day.” She snickered very wickedly.
“It has overflowed onto Pullman’s new property. ”
I was not to be distracted by her scatological humor. “Nimali and Vinsanda! Ghazel! What happens to them?”
“Gazelle is to join his son, who is a great success. As for Nimali. You think she learned nothing in my household? Embezzling. Embezzling all along! I am told she bought herself and Vinsanto a little house by a river.”
They had also taken Cesare. I was surprised and delighted and relieved. I was reminded of the diviner who had told my baronessa that she was not to die in that house. Villa Coco was a great treasure for her to give up. But by giving it up, she had shaped destiny to her liking.
“You were a strict young man when you arrived,” she said, lowering her chin. “But you will not call Pullman.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are not that young man anymore.”
I regarded her, sitting crookedly in her red suit and camel coat with Pushkin and Gorky asleep around her.
Was this, from her, the highest form of praise?
That I, too, had lost my sense of morals?
But, as I have said, I never really had them.
I thought of Estelle’s portrait of me, so much older than I saw myself.
“I misjudged you,” she said. “That is the truth of it. Estelle was always your advocate, but I would not listen to her, I said we could not tell you under any circumstance. You are too American to trust. She is, by the way, a wonderful painter but terrible at forgery. That was a disappointment. You see how hard it was to lose Oscar. We had to hand over to Pullman a number of my best works. And Oscar meant to sail with us…”
“Yes. You did misjudge me.”
“You must forgive me,” she said. “I will need you tomorrow. We will have to be up very early. The arrangement is Schiavoni at dawn. The harborage is not entirely legal, but I am advised the carabinieri are not early risers, thanks God. I am not as nimble as in my seventies, but with luck, we may elude them! I will need your assistance to board, as Estelle will meet us there with my luggage and Pushkin and Gorky.”
I understood this was to be my final duty as her assistant. Or adjutant or maggiordomo or man Thursday or archivist or whatever I had been to her. I said I would be up early to wake her before our goodbyes. My baronessa turned to me and said:
“Do you think it is a great folly?”
I leaned forward, hands on my knees. “Since you ask, I do.”
She seemed serious. “I’m a foolish old woman, you think.”
“No, no, of course not.”
Her chin lifted. “But still you don’t approve.”
“It’s not something I would do.”
“Live a life at sea?”
I exhaled with frustration. “I mean forge art and lie and sell everything on a whim. And live on a boat! It’s ridiculous!”
“You don’t see the humor?” she asked. So this was the why: simply because it was funny. “Think on it for a moment. Surely a life at sea has an appeal!”
“But to choose this? At your age?”
She was half in shadow now on the sofa, the red wine trembling in her hand, but Pippa’s strange lamp gleamed in her eyes, and I could see how pleased she was.