Part 16 (1/2)

She gave me a hard look. ”I have a feeling I'm meant to say something here, give an indication that my prodigal son is actually the favorite, and even to suggest I harbor some disdain for the dedicated one and so forth. Nonsense. I greatly prefer Roberto. You'd have to be a fool not to feel partial toward the one who actually takes care of you.”

Sandro was probably having a carefree time down in the village. Why did he leave me here? Someone had to stay with his mother, he explained, but the paratrooper should have been enough.

The signora was in her quarters bathing before dinner when I heard a car pull up the drive. I a.s.sumed it was Sandro and Talia, and I went out to greet them. It was Roberto. He began talking about Rome. ”You've probably never been there,” he said.

”I was there once.”

”But you can't possibly know Rome by seeing it once,” he said, ”as a tourist.” He was right. I could never know the Rome that Roberto knew. Just as the villa itself, even if unpleasant, was an experience of Italy to which I would have had no access as a student in Florence. It seemed to me that if you were poor and went to a foreign place, you met poor people who weren't all that foreign to you, like the bikers and their girlfriends I'd hung around with at the squalid bar near the train station in Florence. And the opposite was probably true, too. For the rich, the world would be a series of elegantly appointed rooms, similar rooms and legible social customs, familiar categories of privilege the world over.

”Anyway, it's too late,” he said. ”Rome is ruined. Dirty and chaotic, and there is the feeling of enemies, a population of people who are against you and for no reason. Hateful people who attack us because we are sane, and for order and work and all the good things that Italians once wanted. All the young people are on drugs,” he said. ”With long, ratty hair and stupefied expressions, like they've figured out how to empty their minds of thought. They have nothing to communicate but the cretinous message anyone can see: I have long hair.”

I wanted to ask Roberto about Didi, but then Sandro and Talia pulled up. They emerged from Sandro's mother's Mercedes with a burst of energy vibrating between them, Talia's hoa.r.s.e voice, a conspirator's laugh. She was tearing off small pieces of a long baguette wrapped in brown paper and throwing each piece underhand to Sandro, who caught them in his mouth. When they reached the kitchen, Sandro grabbed the baguette from her and began throwing pieces for Talia to catch in her mouth, but she couldn't, because he was pelting her with them harder and harder, and it was funny, except that it brought me no relief.

The next morning was the company meeting. I kissed Sandro good-bye in the driveway as signora Valera's Mercedes idled on the gravel, the mustachioed paratrooper behind the wheel, his arm on the sill, bent for access to his mustache, which he stroked in a dreamy way as he waited for their imminent departure, and with his other arm tugged at the rise of his tight jeans, adjusting himself on the leather-upholstered seat.

Didi was still in captivity, but I had put off making plans for what to do until the rest of them were gone. Now the moment had arrived. When Sandro returned, we'd be rid of them. Talia was going back to London. The old novelist, to bathe like Hercules in the Danube. Sandro's mother and Roberto, both back to Milan.

Sandro had wanted me to come with them to the meeting. He explained in whispers that the gates of the factory were being picketed, that it might be a tense situation and I could film it if I wanted to.

Doc.u.ment the problems at his family's company? I had never considered it, given that it was not a subject Sandro was normally willing even to discuss. But now he was encouraging it. Wasn't one of the earliest films, he said, of workers leaving factory gates? This would be angry workers blocking factory gates. ”It's actually a much better subject,” he said, ”than Didi and the Valera team.” But I wasn't ready to give up on that idea, and I couldn't bear the thought of spending the entire day with his mother, Talia, and Roberto, of trying to make something in their midst, so I stayed behind.

They departed, the Mercedes moving slowly down the gravel drive. As its sluggish diesel idle faded to insect chatter, I knew I'd made a mistake, that I should have gone with them. I should have filmed. The point was to have interesting footage. I could have decided later what to do with it.

I wandered through the house, experiencing it for the first time in this empty state. While the servants were all downstairs, I peeked into Sandro's mother's bedroom and looked at the perfumes and lotions and powders on her bureau, the silver vase of enormous pale pink roses the maid in the lavender wig must have put there. I felt a curious bristle at the sight of these things. Was his mother not allowed to have feminine accoutrements simply because she was in her seventies? It wasn't her age. It was that she was cruel, and I didn't a.s.sociate her cruelty with femininity and its rituals. I went into Talia's room, next door, which she'd cleared out of, banging her huge leather suitcase dramatically down the stairs that morning, before Sandro intervened and came to her aid. The bed was unmade, wet towels on the floor. On a chair was my Borsalino. Had she forgotten it? No. She didn't care about it. She was free and easy Talia, and the hat meant nothing. If Ronnie Fontaine had given me something the one night I'd brought him home, if our secret interlude had resulted in a possession, I would have held on to that thing, whatever it was, forever. But Talia wore the hat once, got her compliments, lathered the old novelist into a drunken tirade. That was enough. It probably just took up too much room in her suitcase. I put on the hat, went to the room I shared with Sandro, and lay on the bed next to the stack of Chesil Jones's novels, Summertime, Men in Trouble, Guilty Pleasures, The Runaways. I looked up at the portrait of the grandfather. He was trapped in a never-ending vigil up on the wall. I felt like we had that in common, somehow. The predicament of being trapped.

”They went to the factory,” I said, looking at him.

He stared out from his dark green void, holding my gaze, or his own gaze, and then the maid in the lavender wig came in, flitted a feather duster around, and began collecting dropped flower petals and stuffing them into her ap.r.o.n pockets. I would never feel comfortable with servants around. I felt convicted by their very presence, not among them and not worth their servitude. I took off the hat, put on a sweater, and went out for a walk.

At the gate I saw the groundskeeper, who was leaning into the open engine of an idling car, a little Fiat 500. I looked at the empty place in the garage where the Mercedes was kept and felt a small wave of anxiety. I couldn't have named its source, a pocket of worry that just happened to pa.s.s by, like a flurry of gnats. I walked around the idling Fiat, thinking I'd go down the road and maybe into Bellagio.

The groundskeeper glanced at me. It was not only because he was handsome and possibly contemptuous of us that he made me nervous, but because he was my age. I was self-conscious, in his presence, of being the lover of someone both older and very bourgeois. Every time he was lurking around, I felt a desire for him to understand that I was not with my own people, here at the villa. That I was not one of them. He leaned into the engine compartment. I heard the gentle, rhythmic winding of a socket wrench.

”Why didn't you go?” he asked without looking up. Tools clinked on the gravel. He wiped his hands with a red shop rag, shut the hood, and latched it.

”It's a company meeting,” I said. ”A family thing. I'm not part of the family. I'm just here.”

”You're just here,” he said. ”Yes. This seems clear.”

I turned to walk down the road, feeling like I was performing the role of a girl walking down the road, because I knew he was watching me. The road curved out of his sight, and I was alone, stepping over the broken crockery that formed its surface in lieu of gravel. Crockery instead of gravel. There was nothing wrong with beauty. I thought of Sandro, of making love to him in a field on our hike. Me, smothered by his heavy frame, but floating into the cross-hatching of tree branches. By the time Sandro returned tonight, we would be here alone and everything would be better.

I heard the little Fiat approaching from behind. I moved to the side of the road. The groundskeeper slowed. He said they had forgotten a file of important papers and that he was bringing it to the factory. He'd left the gate open, for me to get back in.

I thanked him.

The reason to stay home, to avoid riding in a car with his mother, had already fallen away. If I went with him, I could film at the factory, the one reason to have gone. I asked if he could take me along.

He nodded and shrugged, as if to say, Sure. What difference does it make?

”You can return with him,” he said.

Him. He meant Sandro.

”You're not coming back?” I asked.

”No.”

I got in and he took me back up the road so I could get my knapsack, camera, and my pa.s.sport, because he said I'd have to have proper identification to get inside the factory.

As I grabbed my things, I was thinking how much I'd fallen into a kind of ditch, how eager I was for contact with anyone outside Sandro's mother's loyal little circle.

When I got back in the car, the groundskeeper looked at me as if he knew what I was thinking, but he could not have.

Gray concrete and puffing smoke from huge vertical towers. Concrete-block buildings under clouds that pressed low and dark, promising rain. Those shades of gray: sky, concrete, and smoke were the first impressions as the groundskeeper motored his little Fiat along the perimeter.

At the factory gates was a large group of men with signs. They swarmed around a car that was attempting to pa.s.s through the gates. I expected some kind of conflict, but they only handed flyers to the men in the car. The groundskeeper unrolled his window and called to one of the picketing men by name. He and the groundskeeper spoke briefly.

”You know them,” I said.

”I worked here.”

I looked at the flyer he'd handed the groundskeeper. The strike was tomorrow.

”Sandro said it was today.”

”Sandro? That's his name?”

That he didn't know the names of the family members came as a surprise. Sandro was Michele Alessandro, properly speaking, and the groundskeeper probably only knew his full name and not what he went by. I realized the Valeras were nothing to him. Of no consequence. He was as free of them as that wolf that slept in matted briars.

”He told you the strike is today? Workers decide when the strike is,” he said.

Factory guards checked the car, the trunk, the groundskeeper's papers, my pa.s.sport, the camera and knapsack, and let us through.

”They won't let you film, you know,” the groundskeeper said.

If I were with Sandro, different rules would apply. I nodded and kept the camera in my knapsack.

Beyond the guard station was a city of tires. Stacks and stacks of them, gleaming like black doughnuts. Shuddering, deafening noises, heavy, bitter air, and repeating rows of textured black O's. The workers had on white coveralls like Didi Bombonato's race techs at the salt flats had worn, ”Valera” in red script over the breast pocket, as they operated forklifts that moved these giant doughnuts around. We kept driving. A train yard, cars filled with carbon black, and men, their faces and their white coveralls grimed in it, unloading the carbon black with shovels, silos towering behind them.

We parked and made our way toward a set of interior offices, the groundskeeper carrying the leather valise that Sandro's mother had forgotten. I had my knapsack but didn't want to disrespect the groundskeeper's word by pulling out the camera. I'd wait until we found Sandro.

”Is that how you know signora Valera,” I asked him, ”from working here?”