Irritated by having given in, Puricelli appropriated Orimbelli’s Zeiss binoculars and sat on the terrace, his elbows resting on the railing. He focused on us with great attention, and not for nothing, because after a few minutes, he put down the binoculars and got to his feet, yelling and waving for us to come back. I got out the oars and immediately returned to the dock. Puricelli had come down to the little pier to wait for us, and he sent his daughters up to the house before rounding on me and asking why I’d made a lewd gesture; there could be no doubt about it, he’d seen it thanks to the binoculars.
I patiently explained that, offshore as we were, and without the slightest breath of air, I’d relied on an old method for testing whether the wind was blowing, and from which direction, a method that involved putting your index finger in your mouth, wetting it all over, and lifting it up. If it feels cold on one side, it means the wind is wafting from that direction. I told him that Orimbelli had copied the gesture on his own account, and the girls were curious, wanting to try feeling the wind for themselves a few times, like old boatswains.
Confounded, he looked as if he wanted to slap me.
“Try it yourself,” I said to convince him.
He remained somewhat dubious. Then, determined, he put his finger in his mouth, took it out and raised it in the air. Orimbelli blew on his cousin’s finger and asked him, “Do you feel the cold?”
“I feel it, I feel it,” Puricelli responded through his teeth. “But what need was there for you to put your finger in the mouth of my Cristina?”
Orimbelli, who’d actually put his finger in the mouth of the elder sister, justified himself. “I was showing her how, just showing her how.”
We returned to the terrace, where we found the two girls teaching their mother, Matilde and Signora Cleofe how to feel the wind on their fingers. Seeing the five women, one with her finger in her mouth and another with her finger in the air, Puricelli was overcome by a frightful rage. To put a stop to their game, he announced that he’d scheduled their departure for early the next morning.
V
AS SOON AS THE GRAND COUSINS HAD GONE, Orimbelli wanted to put out in the Tinca, despite the dead calm on the lake. To his annoyance, we could still see the villa after two hours. But the inverna, rising early, gathered us up before noon and carried us all the way to Ascona in one long run, almost always aft.
Orimbelli was anxious to get in touch with Germaine again. When she’d said good-bye a few days earlier, she’d let us know that one of her lovely friends would be arriving soon. I was less keen.
From a distance, I spied the Lady’s two masts standing tall against the dark foliage of the plants around the Castello. I went over to drop anchor in the small dock there. It was where Signor Kauffmann normally anchored. A Swiss German, he had the most beautiful boat you could see anywhere on Lake Maggiore, at Ascona. It so happened that our paths had crossed several times on the lake, and we’d exchanged the captain’s greeting—a touch of the beret and a brief glance. I knew his base was Ascona, but I’d never found him at anchor there. He was always out sailing around the lake, and he often sheltered behind the long, tree-lined tongue of land that separated the basin of Ascona from that of Locarno. I never ventured there for fear of losing the winds.
I decided to visit him so I could get a close-up of his boat. It had to be a sort of Stradivarius, to judge by the way it behaved downwind. The jib and flying-jib, the mainsail and mizzen were fearlessly raised, secured by heaven knows how many quintals of lead in the keel and a draft that prevented the Lady from entering small ports and kept her offshore, swift and silent as The Flying Dutchman.
Orimbelli was completely ignorant about boats and barely glanced at the Lady, so I advised him to go off to town on foot, and said I’d join him after I docked the Tinca.
A true yachtsman, Signor Kauffmann showed me the Lady’s every detail. It was stunning. I saw some amazing electric capstans as well as gauges for wind and depth near the binnacle. Inside there were four couchettes with linen sheets, an electric kitchen and a bathroom with a shower.
In the central room, Kauffmann offered me an aperitivo, taking a bottle from a well-stocked bar.
Then, like a gentleman, he asked to come aboard the Tinca. He was good enough to find it pleasingly shaped, with well-proportioned sails considering its size. I was so touched I could have hugged him.
I went off happy, especially since he’d given me a small anchor with knotted arms that was too small for his boat. He couldn’t use it, but it was heaven-sent for the Tinca, since it had been furnished with a clumsy old fisherman’s anchor that was too heavy for it.
I slipped along the shore, grazing the plants that hung out over the water, and headed for port. Orimbelli had to be at one of the lakefront cafes, stretched out on one of those comfortable chairs foreigners lie on to take the sun at Ascona. I inspected the rows of tables, one after another, but didn’t see him, so I sat outside in a cafe and waited for him to go by. All at once I heard his voice behind me. He was in a bar with a stranger, perhaps a Swiss German who spoke Italian. Their words filtered through to me from the open window I was sitting under.
“Did you say aconite?” Orimbelli was asking.
“Aconite,” the other answered loudly, as if speaking to a deaf person. “Aconitus napellus. Ja! Is plant with huge roots. You take the drug from it. Extremely poisonous. Ja. Very poisonous! One milligram is enough to kill you.”
“Die? How?” Orimbelli asked quietly.
“Central nervous system collapse,” the German explained. “Muscular convulsions, cardiovascular paralysis. Then death!”
“And it’s used as a drug?”
“Ja. Definitely,” said the German, his voice louder and louder. “For trigeminal.”
“For trigeminal neuralgia!” Orimbelli exclaimed. “Did you say for the trigeminal?”
“Ja, trigeminal, trigeminal, tres gemìni,” the other confirmed. “But only a tenth of a milligram!”
I called the waiter over so I could pay, and asked who those two talking in the cafe might be.
“One is a very famous professor at the University of Basel: Professor Kraus—he has a villa here in Ascona—and the other is an Italian who’s buttonholed him.”
I went to sit at a cafe a little farther along. Half an hour later I saw Orimbelli walk by.
“I’ve been exploring the center of the village, and I visited the Collegio Papio just as you suggested,” he said as he sat down beside me. “Beautiful! I also visited the house of the painter Serodine, and the house where Carlo Borromeo slept four hundred years ago.”
It was time to go to Charlotte’s place. It was possible that she’d already seen the Tinca approaching the coast of Ascona a couple of hours ago from her apartment window.
Germaine’s friend Hedwig had just arrived from Zurich. She was a single blonde in her thirties, tall and good-looking. The manager of a big shop on the Bahnhofstrasse, she was supremely elegant and set on marrying an Italian. She wanted him dark (but not from the south) and bilingual, with a degree. Or so Charlotte told us.
Hedwig came to Ticino three or four times a year to look around, but she never seemed to be able to find the right man.
Orimbelli boldly declared himself a bachelor. But he made the wrong moves from the start, no doubt paralyzed by Hedwig’s exacting requirements. He began joking about the term “bilingual” and then gave Hedwig the once-over with the sort of greed women find terribly ill-mannered.
“She’s amazingly pizzuta.” He used a term he’d learned in Naples to refer to Hedwig’s lush curves, which were actually rather surprising for someone so tall and thin. She was reminiscent of the female models in vogue during the Liberty period at the end of the nineteenth century.
Yet despite unpromising beginnings, the rapport between the two took a turn for the better that same day, and they went out together to shop for provisions for a three- or fourday cruise.
“Luckily she’s rejected me as a husband,” Orimbe
lli told me. “But it seems she’s not opposed to me as a friend.”
All the same, he had to sleep in the boat that night. Despite the drinking and dancing during the course of the afternoon and evening, both in the apartment and out on the terrace, the situation never lent itself to their getting it together the way it had with Germaine.
When I arrived at the port in the morning with the two women and our provisions, I found he’d got everything in order inside the boat. He was already hoisting the sails like a real sailor.
I took the helm. “What didn’t happen last night will certainly happen during the voyage.”
But it wasn’t to be. Neither at the Castelli di Cannero nor at Baveno, where we stayed at the Hotel Suisse, could Orimbelli claim victory. Hedwig got as far as taking off her clothes on the boat, but she lay down at the prow protected by the bridge-house, insisting that “the men,” as she called us, stay at the other end until the show was over.
“It’s pointless,” Orimbelli said. “There’s nothing I can do. She’s old, backward-looking, and she’s Protestant—what’s more, she’s practicing. Maybe she’s a lesbian, too.”
At Meina we found only two double rooms, and he began to harbor some hope. He offered champagne and did miracles with his schoolboy French, and it suddenly seemed he’d succeeded in disappearing into one of the two rooms with Hedwig. But when I went to Charlotte’s room with her, I found Hedwig there reading the Zürcher Zeitung while she waited for her friend. I had to retire to the other room, where Orimbelli was lying on one of the beds, fully clothed and extremely angry. I convinced him to get undressed and give up on the venture.
“When it’s not happening, best not to insist,” I said to him. “You’ll see what catches we’ll make over the next few days: a haul of women, such as shad and bass.”
So as not to prolong his humiliation, I gave up on reaching Arona as I’d planned, and in a single day we sailed up the lake again to Ascona. I slept in the boat with him after we said good-bye to steely Hedwig and to Charlotte. She was expecting her husband to come back from England any day now.
VI
“WHY DON’T WE LEAVE SWITZERLAND instead of hanging around here for nothing? Let’s go and try our luck in our part of the lake. We’ll be like St. Francis—when he discovered that the people where he was weren’t ripe for conversion, he went back to Italy to harvest the people there, and not waste time and effort.”
Orimbelli had a weakness for literary quotations, and another one for war stories; they always featured his old commander, Aimone Cat.
I also felt we’d do better to turn back to the Italian harvest, particularly since I’d been promising the two girls from Laveno a little cruise for some time.
The port of Laveno is in the middle of the city between the Ferrovie Nord train station and the town hall. It’s in plain view of everyone, so exposed that the two girls didn’t want to board the boat in such an open place. I had to wait an entire day before I could get them on board under cover of night. They arrived with their bags at just before midnight. Meanwhile Orimbelli, seated in a cafe near the port, patiently awaited our cargo. They were so frightened, so wary of being seen that I had to cast off and set out in the middle of the night. The montive wind had already fallen and in order to get us out of the gulf Orimbelli had to take to the oars, which were very heavy.
Once on the lake, we found the wind from a storm that had been rumbling for some time behind the Mottarone and was threatening to break out any moment. We’d agreed to cross the lake in order to shelter on the opposite shore when the thunderstorm suddenly broke. Torrents of water began falling, accompanied by squalls and flashes of lightning. Halfway across the lake, with the girls crouching below deck and shivering like leaves, Orimbelli let fear get the better of him, as if by contagion.
“What will we do if the boat capsizes?” he asked me.
“It doesn’t capsize,” I returned. “The Tinca is made for gales. The important thing is not to fall in the water. Keep your balance and steer cautiously.”
One after another, bolts of lightening fell around the Tinca, which was floundering and rearing up like a horse now and again. The boat seemed static, almost chained to the bottom of the lake, and then it would run and fling itself toward the Piedmont shore, dipping now to the right, now to the left, depending on the blasts of wind and the waves that struck it.
Orimbelli stayed seated on deck, clinging mutely to the mast. By this stage he was incapable of manning the jib or carrying out any other maneuver. In the flashes of lightning I saw his face, white as the sail flapping around ominously and making almost more racket than the storm.
“One more kilometer,” I said, “and we’ll find a haven by the coast, where it’s smooth as glass.”
From below deck came the muffled cries of the girls. With every plunge, they feared the end had come, and began calling out for Mamma.
The fact was that an exceptionally strong current—the sort stirred up by a tempest—was drawing us toward the center of the lake. There, at the eye of the storm, there’s no refuge whatever from the winds and, taking advantage of that limitless space, they let loose and raged to their heart’s content.
I leaned toward Cannero to compensate for the leeward drift, seeking to bring us under the shelter of the mountains, but taking care not to turn the stern completely toward the storm for fear of heeling over.
The squalls were coming completely unexpectedly, because the dark kept you from seeing the cloudy water that accompanies them and gives some forewarning. But the boat held steady, heeding the rudder and the play of sails, and gradually gained ground toward the shelter of the coast.
All at once—as if by miracle—the wind fell and the lake grew calm. The sails slackened and the Tinca veered gently toward the shore. We’d passed the torrent at the center of the lake and entered the strip of coast protected by the Ghiffa promontory.
With everything in me, I bore up into the wind so as not to crash into the shore, and the boat fell in line, calm as a tired horse.
Orimbelli revived. He groped around to unravel the cords he’d become tangled up in in the dark, and idly gave me a hand with the jib. He called out loudly to the girls, “Nothing to be afraid of! Come on up! The storm is over.”
I beckoned for him to come closer. “Look over to the left,” I said.
Only fifty meters away, the facade of Villa Cleofe could be seen through the last flashes of lightning, now distant. It stood out white against the dark backdrop of the trees.
“Shall we dock there?” I asked, bearing toward land.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” He begged me not to, his hands joined as if in prayer.
At that moment the light went on in the bishop’s bedroom, and a shadow passed behind the window.
“My wife,” Orimbelli said quietly. “She’s heard the storm and is going around closing the shutters.” And in fact, the light went out and a short time later came on again in another room.
“There’s nothing for us to do but dock in the port at Oggebbio,” I said. “If we keep going or turn back toward Intra, we’ll end up in the middle of the wind again. We can’t feel it here, but it’s waiting for us less than a mile offshore, and who knows where it’ll fling us.”
“As long as you agree to lift anchor at dawn,” he replied. “If Cavallini notices that we have women on board, we’re done for. Cavallini sees all and tells all.”
It was probably three in the morning and a little before the first light of dawn. But the clouds weltering over the Lombard shore obscured the sky, which meant that it would still be dark for at least another couple of hours.
Once we entered the port, the girls finally lay down to sleep in the couchettes. The two of us couldn’t stretch out in the cockpit—it was still full of water—or unfurl the sails, so we walked back and forth along the lake under the lamplight, one eye on the boat and another on the windows at the Vittoria to see whether Cavallini would appear.
Above us the sky was cle
aring, but dawn was slow to arrive. It would be another two hours or more before the lake became visible through the mist. At the moment, the water was moved only by the sort of restlessness that follows a storm.
We climbed into the boat and without waking the girls, loosened the ropes and left harbor, pushing against the walls with our hands, so still was the air.
With a turn of the wheel and the aid of an oar, we disappeared behind the gardens of a villa within half an hour. Almost imperceptibly, the boat began to glide along the thread of a current along the coastline. We passed by Rèsega di Barbè, then the Villa d’Azeglio. The Cannero Castles could be seen standing out against the shore as if suspended in air, and the lake was so colorless it was hard to tell it from the sky.
“Let’s go put up inside there,” I said. “We’ll have to rest today after the night we’ve spent.”
We came ashore at the Gardanina in front of the castles, and from the women in the osteria I got the keys for the main one. The sun had meanwhile made a hole in the clouds, and a bit of air was beginning to circulate. One of the two girls, Wilma, put her head through the hatch. Behind her appeared the other, Milena.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“In paradise,” Orimbelli replied.
They’d never been to the castles, and when we turned and they saw these abandoned fortifications emerging against the light from the glossy black water, they thought they’d crossed, while sleeping, not a lake but Lethe and Euonoë.
The Bishop's Bedroom Page 4