Part 14 (1/2)

”The real West, in other words,” Luigi said. ”Ranchers. Drifters. Divorcees. A poetic dignity there.”

”You've been to Reno?”

”No, no,” he said, as if I had misunderstood. ”I saw The Misfits. And I have a wonderful book of photographs by Bob Avery. Do you know it?”

The Count of Bolzano turned to Luigi and told him that I was into car racing. That I was going to be doing something with Didi Bombonato. Hearing the Count of Bolzano speak of the publicity tour to Luigi, it sounded like a silly novelty, something kitsch.

”Ah, there you are.” It was Sandro's mother, coming toward us in the dim light.

Her voice was friendlier, softer than I expected, from the interactions I'd had with her so far. I realized she was looking at the Count of Bolzano. The ”you” was he, the softness for him. She had been at a beauty salon in Bellagio in the afternoon, and I could see that her hair was sprung a bit too tightly. She wore a long, brocaded tunic like something purchased from a Turkish bazaar, with espadrilles whose constricting ties crisscrossed up her ankles, as if the ribbons were meant to compensate for the swollen and blotchy appearance of her old legs. She seated herself, touching the curls that clung to her scalp like Mongolian lamb's wool. It was obvious she had been beautiful when she was young, with eyes that were the splendid gold-green of muscat grapes. She was in her seventies now, her complexion like wet flour, clammy and pale, with the exception of her nose, which had a curiously dark cast to it, a shadow of black under the thin tarp of skin, as if her nose had trapped the toxins from a lifetime of rich food and heavy wines. Her French bulldog, Gorgonzola, scampered after her and plopped itself at her feet, licking its tummy, its body in the shape of an egg cup, and whimpering the way little dogs did, with needs that could not be met simply, with food and company, which was all that larger dogs seemed to need. Actually this was Gorgonzola II, the Count of Bolzano said as I addressed the dog. Gorgonzola I, the Count of Bolzano told me, was buried near the swimming pavilion, in the family plot.

Sandro had shown me his father's headstone. T. P. VALERA, ARDITO, FUTURISTA, PADRE, MARITO. He'd died in 1958, just after work was begun on his dream project, the Autostrada del Sole. He'd been through two wars, had been a member of the Fascist Party, and had risen from the ashes of that disastrous era to become a huge postwar success. Ardent or not, he was buried next to Gorgonzola the First, who, I saw the next morning when we were down at the swimming pool, had a pink marble headstone that was as grand and ornate as T. P. Valera's.

There was a toast all around the fireplace with what the Count of Bolzano commented was a very good Trentino wine, which solicited from signora Valera a lament about how it had been difficult recently to locate Trentino wine, and about all that was wrong with the situations in which one found oneself, where people didn't know about it or about the best Nebbiolos, such as Barbaresco and Barolo. I understood most of what she said, but she spoke quickly and her words were punctuated by the echoed pock-pocking from the battle that was taking place under the huge sycamore tree down the lawn, where Sandro and the old American novelist were slamming a Ping-Pong ball back and forth. The old novelist had arrived that morning. ”Chesil Jones,” he'd said, and extended his hand to me, ”but you can call me Chevalier.” Sandro's mother had held a pretend bugle to her lips and then they both laughed. Was I really to call him Chevalier? I was getting used to proceeding without answers, unsure if I was the b.u.t.t of jokes.

I could hear the old chevalier grunting and heaving as he leaped to whack the little ball. Sandro was going to defeat him at Ping-Pong, and Chesil Jones had decided to make Sandro's win as difficult as he could. I'm better at Ping-Pong than Sandro. At least I've beaten him at it. And yet I was left to discuss Trentino wine, which I knew nothing about, while Sandro played my game.

”She looks lovely,” signora Valera said, and looked me up and down.

”Yes, she does,” Luigi said, glancing at me. Not in a salacious way, more as if he was taking inventory of what I had on, in the same way she had. These people cared about clothing and appearance. I understood this was a cliche of the Milanesi, but it also was true. In Milan, it had bordered to me on comedy, women riding bicycles through a downpour in platform heels and tight skirts, holding huge black umbrellas. Florence had been similar, except that the women in Milan seemed more like women in New York-hard and professional, exuding capability. Also, in Florence they dressed well but all women dressed alike, in minor variations on the same theme, and I'd had the feeling they owned only one or two outfits and wore them every day. While we were in Milan, strolling the Corso Buenos Aires, Sandro had stopped in front of a shopwindow and pointed to a dress of pinkish-beige velvet. He said it would look good with my hair, and began carefully brus.h.i.+ng my hair away from my neck and looking at me and at the dress. ”Why don't you try it,” he said. It was a very expensive-looking boutique, Luisa Spagnoli. I had wondered if he was momentarily confused about women, about what they want or think they want. I said it was beautiful but seemed formal for a stay in the country, a place he had told me so much about, the meadows and muddy streams and hiking. He said his mother liked everyone to ”dress” for dinner. It was an old-fas.h.i.+oned rule, he admitted, but perhaps I could just try it on. In New York Sandro would never submit to a social rule of how anyone should dress. But we were not in New York anymore. We went in. A salesgirl fetched the correct size. The fine silk velvet fell in a lovely way, as only very expensive cloth, cut correctly, does. And it did look good, the rose-beige making my dirty-blond hair more honey in shade, closer to that of the dress. Now I was in it, sleeves to the elbow and little velvet-covered b.u.t.tons that fastened there.

”You look lovely as well,” I said to Sandro's mother, unsure if I were meant to respond to the compliment, since she had referred to me in the third person.

”Me?” she asked in a surprised tone. ”I am hardly dressed up. This is what I normally wear. You've made an occasion of it, I can see that.”

”The dress was a gift from Sandro.”

She turned to the Count of Bolzano. ”But of course it was a gift from Sandro,” she said to him. ”A last-minute refurbishment before he brought her here.” She had forgotten, once again, that I understood Italian, although she only seemed to forget, and to say something cruel, when Sandro was not around.

My eyes had begun to tear from the cruelty of her remark. The man who maintained the grounds was putting more wood on our fire. I focused on him, on his hands, the wood, the flames, and the strange phrase chiseled into the flagstone above the hearth: FAC UT ARDEAT. ”Made to burn,” the old novelist later told me. The wood popped as it caught fire. I gazed into the flames and told myself not to say anything, not to be angry. The groundskeeper silently arranged the logs with an iron poker and then he turned and looked at me. I looked away but could feel his stare. In the two days we had been at the villa I'd caught him staring at Sandro and me several times, not in a friendly way. There was something about his gaze, an intensity, that made me nervous. The entire staff of the villa seemed to harbor a kind of collective hostility toward us. At first I thought it was due to their resentment of Sandro's mother. But the reason was actually the opposite. We were not deserving of the same treatment as the lady of the villa, to whom they were deeply loyal. We were in some sense freeloaders, especially me, an unpedigreed American they were meant to serve as if I were a Valera, when they knew that I was nothing of the kind.

The cook set out a cutting board loaded with various cheeses, tall, soft wedges that listed this way and that. Did you use the cheese knife to spread what you cut onto your cracker, or were you meant to deposit a dollop onto one of the little plates, and use some other knife to spread? I hadn't eaten all day, because Sandro and I had gone on a long hike and we had forgotten to bring the picnic lunch the cook had prepared for us, but I was afraid the cook would reprimand me if I went about serving myself the wrong way. With the encouragement of the Count of Bolzano, I helped myself to the cheese. I used the common knife to spread it on the crackers. I thought of something Ronnie had said, that rich people didn't follow the letter of the law. Only strivers did that, Ronnie said. Doggedly following rules emphasized that one did not belong, according to Ronnie. It sounded right. Although there was some way of following them, while not submitting to them, but it required a mysterious touch, and you had to be from that cla.s.s to possess the special touch. Like me in that Luisa Spagnoli dress. Even it was beautiful, and such a flattering cut: by wearing it I was submitting. ”You've made an occasion of it.” While Roberto and Luigi and the Count of Bolzano were not dogged in their finery, but natural. And what did the dress have to do with me? Nothing, while the clothes of these men had everything to do with them.

Signora Valera asked if our room was suitable for me.

”Yes, certainly,” I said. She had already asked me this question two or three times.

”You're in the company of Ettore Valera,” she said, ”Sandro's grandfather.”

I said yes, and that Sandro had explained this to me.

”It was commissioned,” she went on as if I had not spoken, ”by King Fuad of Egypt, in appreciation of Ettore's work on the Suez Ca.n.a.l. King Fuad whispered,” she said, suddenly whispering hoa.r.s.ely herself, ”because he had a hole in his neck. From a bullet. My husband remembered that very clearly, from when he was a boy. The way the king whispered.”

They had once gone back to Egypt together, she and Sandro's father, T. P. Valera, but all signora Valera could recollect of it now, she said, was the overwhelming stench of urine in the tombs and temples at Luxor. They were there to visit her husband's mother, Ettore's wife, who was living back in Alexandria, having fled Italy in protest when the king was dethroned at the end of the war. ”She was a monarchist,” signora Valera said, ”and now I can't say that her view seems unreasonable, though yelling, 'Save the king,' from the window of a Rolls-Royce probably wouldn't go over well now, either. What a mess things were. Actually my husband made a lot of money, but you couldn't buy much. We were eating cold polenta while my mother-in-law lay stretched out in her African compound, Negroes around her holding torches. That's another thing my husband loved to tell about Egypt, the way electric lamps were for those who could not afford a full staff. If you could afford it, you had Negroes with torches, not lamps, not electricity.”

After Egypt, there was talk of other relatives, an uncle of T. P. Valera's who had kept a bear as a pet, which one afternoon mauled him viciously, leading to this uncle's morphine addiction and eventual death. Another relative of some kind who slipped on wet tile and fell into a sulfur bath in Lourdes, the bath having been accidentally heated to boiling. Someone else who was killed in Capri, when picnickers dropped a canned ham from a high cliff to the beach below, rather than carrying the thing down a switchback trail. A cousin who went to sub-Saharan Africa and was bitten by a tsetse fly and got elephantiasis in his b.u.t.tocks. He'd had to purchase special-order trousers with a gigantic seat, Sandro's mother said, and he slept with a platform extension at the side of the bed, to support his a.s.s.

She narrated all of this with no hint of irony, but she must have known it was funny. I smiled at her.

She looked at me coldly. ”You're amused only because you're American,” she said, ”where people die of old age, or in car accidents.” She turned to the Count of Bolzano. ”They don't have histories there. They barely know what history is!”

Again I stared at the fire, as if to hypnotize myself and melt her words to nothing. Fac ut ardeat. I could hear the little Ping-Pong ball being knocked and slapped back and forth in the near dark down the lawn. The edges of the lake below us glittered. The moon, white and full, was rising over the olive grove beyond the patio, twisted little trees s.p.a.ced apart in such a way that they looked like dancers on a dark stage, each holding its pose, waiting for the music to commence.

When Sandro had suggested a hike that morning, I'd jumped at the idea of leaving the villa for the day. I was feeling stifled inside its walls, ancient and clammy and six feet thick. For keeping out intruders when it was built, in the seventeenth century. Some kind of lord had lived there and the pleasures of it-those s.h.a.ggy, towering pines, their branches sweeping the dense carpet of gra.s.s, their huge pistachio-colored pinecones, and the acacia, which were covered with blooms, little white bells bobbling against the windows where Sandro and I slept, green leaves pressing the gla.s.s like decoupage-all this beauty led me back to a sense of cruelty, to the people kept out, and those kept in, in the kitchen, the was.h.i.+ng shed, the servants' little stone cottages. As a guest, you weren't allowed to do anything for yourself. Our first morning, we waited for the maid to bring us coffee on a silver tray, with a basket of chewy, coa.r.s.e bread I a.s.sumed was baked somewhere on the property, probably in an elaborate outdoor oven and by a method peasants had developed over hundreds of years. The breakfast room was sunny and beautiful, but I could not relax the way Sandro did, casually flipping through his Corriere della Sera as though it were normal to wait in your own house for a servant in uniform not just to bring your coffee but also to pour it. Sandro seemed unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge how different this place was. Servants pour the coffee and you act like that's normal, I thought at him, but all he did was rustle his pages, his posture asking or instructing that I not acknowledge the change, or his comfort and familiarity with this alien place, where it was typical to hear no people but to understand that they were everywhere, watching you eat, waiting for the moment you might put down your cup, in order to appear suddenly and refill it. There was always someone nearby, the strange groundskeeper, or a maid or cook or some other household employee quietly moving about. There was one servant, a woman who wore a huge wig of grayish-lavender curls that seemed like a practical joke, whose only purpose that I could detect was to cut flowers from the garden, make little arrangements and place them here and there, and then to scurry around managing these arrangements, clearing away dispensed petals and replacing drooping flowers. She and the others moved through rooms with no hesitation, whether they were occupied or not. They didn't knock, or announce themselves, but instead, in their noiseless corduroy servants' slippers, they acted invisible, meant to dust or replace dead blooms as if they themselves were of no consequence to the privacy of others. I asked Sandro about this, after the woman in the lavender wig came into the bathroom while I was bathing. She had begun stocking a cabinet with soaps and toilet tissue and never once looked at me. ”They're used to people,” he said. ”They're domestics. It's not a big deal.” Later I realized they weren't a big deal to Sandro because he didn't register their presence as judgment. Only I did, which, as his mother might have pointed out, was a problem of cla.s.s, of being from the wrong one, too low for a servant to feel I was an appropriate object of their attentions, for their flower arrangements and ironed sheets, and that was my problem, not hers or her servants', and she was probably right. It was my problem. The groundskeeper was the one who unnerved me most. He said nothing as he went about his business, up on a ladder, pruning the wisteria that wrapped up and around the cypress trees, or fumigating a wasps' nest. He watched us and glowered, while the others didn't look at us at all. He would stare at me, a certain wryness in his face that I couldn't decipher. I might have stared back had he not been handsome. He was, if in a plain and obvious way, and it was that-his looks-that unnerved me, made me look away whenever we crossed paths.

This morning, our second one in the villa, Sandro had slept late and I'd gone to breakfast alone. Signora Valera was there at the table, but it was too late to turn back. We drank our espresso in silence, or what I hoped would remain so, until she asked if I was going to marry her son. Because, she said, she had not been informed of a wedding.

”We're not getting married, no.”

”So what are your plans?” she asked. ”I mean, for when you are no longer together. If he has not asked you to marry him, it's temporary. A temporary arrangement.”

”I don't have any plans,” I said.

There is a certain type of older woman who pretends to be doddering and meek when in fact old age has made her strong and vicious, but signora Valera was not that type. She did not pretend to be meek.

On our hike, Sandro and I lay in a sun-dappled patch of wild chamomile, resting and gazing up at the sky framed in branches. We ended up entwined, his jeans unb.u.t.toned, mine down around my knees. A kind of urgency was what he liked, and making love in a field, in various sorts of public places, was something Sandro was into. It made the act that much more thrilling and directed. But it had been my idea this time, my cue. The villa was so oppressive, and his mother made me feel so minimized that I had not really wanted to make love to Sandro inside its walls. When I had returned from her breakfast a.s.sault, Sandro had grabbed me and I'd said no and pushed him away, his mother's voice in my head, as if submitting to him were submitting to her idea of my disposable status. Here, I felt a bit more free and probably I thought s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her son in a clearing in the woods was a way to defend myself, my autonomy, from her judgments. I looked from the sky, the breath of blue that opened above the crosshatch of chestnut trees, to Sandro, in whose face I detected an apology.

He picked crushed little chamomile flowers out of my hair as we continued our hike, and pointed out a matted place among the underbrush where a wolf had slept. We stopped and looked together at the indentation that was the wolf's bed. There was something tender in seeing where a wild animal slept, the choices it made to seek softness, and I felt a twinge of envy for that wolf, its self-preservation, its solitude. We came out of the woods on a rise above the limonaia that had been planted when Sandro was born. He laughed and said it was an absurdity for the region and that each tree had to be individually wrapped in burlap for the winter season. He put his arms around me as we gazed from our rise over the tops of the lemon trees below us, which had taken root when Sandro had, experienced the same amount of lived time. This is also me, I felt him say, you have to understand that it's also me. I leaned back, into him. I love this also-you. Even if his mother intimidated me and meant to, and even if their house, if you could call such a place, thirty rooms, a house, was not the least bit inviting. There in the woods, his cashmere scarf wrapped around my neck for extra warmth, I felt like everything was going to be okay. I was with Sandro. It didn't matter if his mother, when we were introduced, had smiled in a strained way as if I were a disappointment. Or that she had laughed when Sandro told her I spoke Italian, and insisted on speaking to me in English or what she thought was English but was a strange hybrid language that sounded more like German. No matter. In a week his mother would return to Milan and we'd have the villa to ourselves. Soon after, I'd go to Monza. Sandro had said he wanted to come, and for once, he would be tagging along with me, and not the reverse. In the meantime he would be the bridge between me and this odd place, and maybe at some point we could laugh about it together.

Laugh about his mother? How foolish I must have been.

By the time we were returning along the road, in view of the high, stone wall of the villa, flowerless vines spilling over it like concertina wire, I felt relaxed and happy in a way I had not since we'd arrived. Sandro had suggested we use the garden gates and not the main entrance, and we had pa.s.sed the groundskeeper's little stone cottage and strolled among the olive trees holding hands, Sandro as my protector from this world of rooms and servants and customs, fortifying me against it as he guided me into it.

It was very cold in the dining room, almost colder than it had been outside. Later I came to recognize the particular cheapness of the very rich. Sandro's mother was not concerned with saving money. Rather, she seemed to enjoy creating conditions that were slightly less than hospitable, even a little hostile, with rooms that were fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. And despite all the talk of the diminis.h.i.+ng elite of people who knew (or knew to know) about the right Nebbiolos, wine in a box was mostly what we drank. We would see the same bread at dinner that we'd pa.s.sed over at breakfast, stale and hard then, in the morning, and by dinnertime tooth-breaking. I thought of Ronnie's discourse on bread. Ronnie was amused that you could find only whole-grain breads now in New York's gourmet markets. Not that Ronnie shopped in gourmet markets, but one had opened in SoHo and he perused the aisles to fuel his running commentaries. He said it was an irony that people had decided collectively that whole grains were more desirable than white bread, which, for centuries, had been the bread of the gentry. ”Everything's like this,” he said. Refinement followed a certain course and reverse course. In this case, the literal refining of flour, until super-refined white bread, light and fluffy like only kings and queens had once been able to obtain, was widely available, and so rich people had to go back to eating the crude whole-grain breads they used to leave only for peasants. Now no educated person would be caught dead eating white bread. Not even a middle-cla.s.s person. Sandro was always amused by these rants of Ronnie's, but here at the villa every custom was normal to him. He ate the stale brown bread and said nothing about it.

Eventually a servant came and started a fire in the dining room hearth and the room warmed up, but a haze of suffocating smoke hung over the table, a mesh of white tangles that thickened as dinner dragged on, making it difficult to breathe. On the ceiling above us was a fresco of Lake Como. In the lake, a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes. The fabric of their robes hung down below them like tendrils as these religious clerics treaded water. They were jellyfish popes, not unlike the lonely transvest.i.te's popes floating on clouds, pure and pristine goodness. Or perhaps these men were the mirror image of that: they didn't seem like they could help anyone, occupied as they were with trying not to drown. As a servant came around to refill our gla.s.ses, the old novelist Chesil Jones, who was seated at my left, leaned toward me and said he used to be a drinker but had given up booze. His breath reeked of alcohol. He and I were behind an enormous branched candlestick that blocked my view of Sandro. I asked the old novelist about his books. He narrowed his eyes at me as if I had insulted him. ”You'd like to discuss the most recent, wouldn't you? The Sole of a Wh.o.r.e was what I originally called it-not her spirit but the bottom of her shoe. And what do they come up with? Mrs. Dollface, for G.o.dsakes. If you want to revisit the idiotic responses Mrs. Dollface has gotten, we can do that.”

I said I was simply curious about what sorts of things he wrote.

”Oh. Why of course, yes,” he said, suddenly solicitous, realizing that I was not a hostile critic. ”There is a small library. I can have them brought to your room. The ones you should start with, in any case.”

Beyond the huge candelabra, the subject of tragic or tragicomic death continued, not that of a relative in Egypt but of an Italian industrialist or the heir of one, who instead of ama.s.sing more riches had spent his family's money publis.h.i.+ng pro-Soviet literature and supporting underground groups that wanted to overthrow the government. The man's name was Feltrinelli-like the chain of well-known bookstores. I remembered them from my time in Florence, but had no idea that Feltrinelli had been electrocuted, as the Count of Bolzano explained it, trying to sabotage Milan's power supply. He was found dead under a pylon. It had happened five years earlier. I got the feeling these people had discussed it plenty but because of its mysterious circ.u.mstances weren't ready to give up the subject. It wasn't clear if his death had been an accident, a suicide, or if he'd been murdered. Roberto said it didn't matter how it happened, that Feltrinelli's death had been a resounding defeat for the Communists and a victory for anyone who felt it was a mistake for party boys to hemorrhage money to radical causes.

”He was a semir.e.t.a.r.d, even if he published Pasternak,” Chesil Jones said. ”Semir.e.t.a.r.ded. He got his negative and positive leads mixed up.”

Sandro said that was nonsense and that Feltrinelli wasn't stupid. What happened had been a terrible tragedy.

”Have it how you want,” Roberto said. ”I find him to have been a clown. You find him to have been tragic. Either way he's dead, and that in itself is neither tragic nor clownish, it simply is. He asked for trouble and found it. What was he doing, for G.o.dsakes, on a pylon?”

”He didn't know negative from positive,” the old novelist said, and put his hands together as if holding two leads, then shook like he was being electrocuted.

”So it's of no consequence,” Sandro said to Roberto, ”whether he died by accident or was murdered.”

Roberto shrugged. ”He was a problem. To business. To Italy. To the entire Ministry of the Interior. Not to mention the CIA. A lot of people wanted him dead. And then he managed to die on his own. Anyhow, who grieved over the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli?”

”Roberto, eight thousand people were at his funeral,” Sandro said. ”It was in the New York Post. And his death helped nothing. If he was killed, whoever killed him can count themselves responsible, at least in part, for the violence since.”