He sighed over another long silence. “Well,” he said, and she heard the doubtfulness in his voice, “if you really want to try it, Renata—”
“I want,” she said. “And to Giu’an I am always the Zia Renata. And,” she added sharply, “also he will not know I can speak English.”
Randall tried to smile, as if to give agreement, or thanks, or encouragement. Instead he turned his head quickly, overcome by another stabbing memory. He saw the lovely, laughing face framed in ruching, across a restaurant table, and heard the rippling voice saying, “Better I teach you Italian.” For what a reason then, he thought; and for what a reason now! She sat with her head bent humbly over her sewing.
Domenico beached the boat on the narrow strand of pebbles and lifted John out and put him down to run up to the house while they unloaded the boat. A short flight of crooked steps led up to the small loggia which enclosed the entrance to the “English” part of the house. Renata stood in the open doorway, smiling. John clambered quickly up the steps and threw his arms round her. “Ciao!” he cried. “Ciao, Zia!” She kissed him and swung him up in her arms and put him down again. He ran inside and round the rooms which he knew well already, for they had been here much of the past week during the daytime, putting the house in order.
Domenico shouldered the heavy valise and ran lightly up the steps with it and Randall followed with the basket. The house smelled clean and fresh and the rooms were pleasantly warm. There was a small red terra-cotta stove in each room, as Domenico had said, and a better stove in the kitchen than the primitive firebox at Zia Paola’s. There had been a good deal of head-wagging over the amount of firewood that Randall would have to buy if he meant to use all the stoves, but everybody agreed that fire for an hour or two a day would keep the place more than warm enough.
John came and seized Randall’s hand and dragged him to the kitchen. “Look!” he cried. He pointed to the things ready on the table which Renata would soon begin to cook. “Risotto!” His eyes danced. This was a treat, a luxury, according to the Gandolfis, whose invariable polenta even at a few meals had become wearisome to the child. John continued his tour of inspection, pulling Randall along. The place looked welcoming and comfortable. Nobody knew the status of the Englishman’s furniture and possessions, no one had come to claim them and Zio Pepe had simply kept them locked up here. Now, aired and cleaned, they looked very cosy. In addition to the pleasant kitchen there was the large room which had been the painter’s studio, with a high window cut into the north wall; and upstairs there were two bedrooms with good beds and more sheets and blankets than most people would know what to do with. “They come from such a cold country,” Domenico had said when they were carrying the bedding outside to air. “They can never believe it is not the same everywhere.”
“It’s much colder where I come from,” said Randall, “and I haven’t noticed any balmy southern nights around here yet. It’s only warm here so long as the sun is out.”
Domenico laughed. “Winter is winter,” he said. But he tipped his chin at the lovely green hillsides that Randall so much admired. “Is it like that all winter in America?”
This morning Randall thanked him for all his help and the use of the boat, which Domenico borrowed whenever he needed it, and with a good deal of embarrassment on both sides, payment was offered and accepted. This was the sort of thing that made the situation awkward. But, thought Randall, in such ways at least I can be as matter-of-fact as they are. His resolution stopped short, however, at Renata herself. He had not found a suitable way to broach the subject of payment to her and something told him he had better not try, at any rate not yet.
He waved at Domenico as he pulled away in the boat, and went into the house to unpack and put away his clothes and John’s. Upstairs in the larger bedroom there was an ample wardrobe and a chest of drawers, a wash-stand, a small bed for John, and the wide one in which the Englishman had slept, which would be Randall’s. When he had put all their things away he stepped out onto the narrow balcony, with its waist-high iron railing, upon which the long window opened. This seemed a luxury, an elegance out of proportion to what he had understood of the Englishman’s small means; but it was commonplace on any house about here, as he had seen. He loved it. The balcony seemed to hang directly above the water, though actually the house stood some yards from the shore, tucked into the steep hillside at the bend of the cove. The white haze of this morning was burning off, the sun was glistening through and a light breeze from the north was blowing off the thin layer of cloud. It swept the sky a brilliant blue. The water reflected it. Oh, he thought, the blessing of this water; the sense it makes of quiet and space in the mind. Morning is a lovely thing here, each morning is a newly-washed face. In the town there had been noise, the ordinary comfortable noise of people beginning their day. Here he heard not a sound, except a boy singing out of tune far off up the road behind him. That was good; silly; human. And he was so grateful for this view. The other branch of the lake was more imposing, grandly spectacular; the view from the height of San Bernardo was panoramic like a great relief map. This was intimate, gentle, cosy. Even the stern peaks of the Grigna had an humble quality, they did not seem to have been put there to overawe humanity like the vaster ranges sweeping up to soar into the Swiss Alps. This was very, very good, he thought, sighing with a bottomless sense of relief.
He turned and went inside. He heard Renata and John talking and moving about downstairs. He decided to look into the second bedroom to make sure, he told himself, that Renata would be comfortable. He stood on the threshold and examined the room; small, plain, whitewalled, scrupulously neat, the room of a person of few possessions and no habit for comforts. But, he thought … and stood there lost in time. People change; he knew how people change. But those had always been his people, his mother, Seymour. Himself? That he did not know. But she, Renata? Was there a way to reach back through all those turns of the wheel of time to bring forward a place and a moment; a late morning; a laughing, teasing, careless woman; scented steam, fading roses, gimcrack furniture strewn with laces and feathers and ruffles? He heard again the crystal peals of laughter, saw the brown hair damp and curly, heard the patter of running slippered feet. She always ran in those days. She never runs now. She walks: remote, sedate, resigned. To what? She said she chose it. What else could she do? His thoughts swerved from the unknown, he could understand only that for which he had a measure. He groped for it. Life will change me, like you, like tutti. When is time, is time. His jaw dropped, he stared at the bare white room, the blank walls, the crude furniture upon which she had put no mark of the butterfly whose rooms he had seen in the past.
Moved by an irresistible impulse he stepped softly to the low chest and drew open the top drawer a little. Inside were a few articles of clean, plain white underclothing, neatly arranged. He shut the drawer quickly. Memory could serve him as much and as far as he would let it. But his memory was a plateau, high and sweeping, which ran to the edge of a fatal precipice and stopped there dead.
He backed out of the room and went to the stairs, just as he heard the sound that he had thought relegated forever to that far plateau, the ripple of her quick, delighted laughter. He paused and listened, swallowing a lump in his throat. He had not heard this once since coming here. He tried not to think it remarkable, he ignored the beating of his quickened pulse which seemed to augment the sound in his ears. Slowly he descended the steep stairs, which wound down a corner of the studio room and ended opposite the door into the kitchen. He stood looking in. Renata and John were playing a game of tag round and round the kitchen table. John had snitched one of the fancy horn-shaped rolls that had come for the special occasion in the basket from Bellagio, and eaten part of it while Renata’s back was turned. She had pretended to be cross, and had given chase. John kept a jump ahead of her and they were circling the table, trying to double back and outwit one another. John was excited as much by surprise as by the game, he had not known her in this mood; and Randall ha
d not seen in years the sparkling face, the mischievous eyes which he had supposed forever beyond recall. He turned sharply, drawing a breath and struggling to ignore the tingling of his own eyes which he had no idea of allowing to betray him. Renata stopped the game by catching John and giving him a mock spank on the seat of his breeches. She said, wagging her forefinger, “Eat your bread if you want to, you little pig, but you will spoil your appetite!”
She had set the table with the crude, gaily colored Italian pottery left by the Englishman; in the centre stood a bowl of delicate greenish-white flowers, interspersed with clusters of red berries in spiked glossy foliage, which Randall had seen children carrying round the countryside. They gathered them on the hillsides all winter, and Renata said that the little daughter of her cousin Ambrogio had brought these this morning.
“What do they call them?” he asked, as she brought the food to the table and started to serve it.
“The white ones are bucaneve,” she said, “and the red ones we call pungitopo.” She ladled the steaming yellow risotto onto the plates.
“What a funny name. Did you understand that, John?” he asked in English. “Sting-a-mouse. Isn’t that a funny name for a plant?”
Renata’s face was inscrutable as she sat down and they began to eat.
“The risotto is good!” said John, with his mouth full. Randall raised his eyebrows, and Renata leaned towards John and said softly, “Swallow your food before you speak, Giu’an.”
“It is good,” said Randall. He thought it as well that his Italian was still so limited, else he might have blurted, “I had no idea you could cook,” making the sort of impression they wished not to make on John. By the time Randall had attained any fluency, John with a child’s short memory and quick adaptability would be well over the possibility of asking questions that they did not wish to have to answer. Meanwhile Randall had to think slowly as he spoke, translating from the English in his mind; his conversation was accordingly commonplace.
“I would not like to eat polenta every day,” he said.
“No,” said Renata. “Neither do I. When you have lived in Milano or other cities, you grow spoiled and want variety. I prefer risotto, by far—but rice is expensive and the polenta costs us nothing.”
Randall had never been at the Gandolfis’ in the evening and he asked what they usually ate for supper.
“A minestra-a soup. Made of anything there is, vegetables and such. With beans, usually. And we throw in a handful of something farinaceous to make it filling.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head. “Bread, of course. Always bread.”
“And for breakfast?”
“Whatever was left of the minestra from supper.”
“No coffee?”
“Coffee! Every day? Never, except on the greatest occasions.”
“But,” he said. Once again he was caught in the toils of memory. Once again he heard the voice which, speaking its ludicrous English, had seemed lighter, higher, effervescent compared with the calm, cool tone in which she spoke her own language now. Countless references to coffee; slavish dependence on coffee; first we drink the coffee … a part of her like ruffles and perfume and laughter.
He looked up from his empty plate and said, “We will have coffee every morning for breakfast, Renata.” He would willingly have used the thought and the deliberate order he had given to overreach the stony uncommunicativeness of her expression. She rose to clear the table, keeping her eyes on what she was doing.
“As you like,” she said.
Only in the evenings after John was asleep was there any occasion to talk with her, and it was then that he saw her reserve close down like the shutter on a window. All day long she was busy with the house and with John. At meals they spoke Italian, with Renata at Randall’s request correcting and teaching him. The rest of the time she and the boy chattered in dialect or in Italian. Randall was not much with them. He had become interested in the Englishman’s garden and discovered that Zio Pepe had always had as much to do with it as the painter. Randall thought dimly of the few miserable bulbs he had once planted in the gritty yard in New York, and of the lawn and the stiff geometrical flower-beds which had preceded it very long ago, when he was a little boy like John. Even then things had not seemed really to grow there, only to be on display until they were overcome by city grime, when something fresh would take their place. He had not realized that he really loved flowers and was capable of gardening. Here it seemed to him that one need only stick a root or a seed in the ground, for some lush green thing to burgeon or sprawl or climb like magic. Zio Pepe soon relieved him of that delusion. Gardening here was work, and the old man was ready enough to show him how to do it.
When Randall had spent the morning out of doors, pruning shrubs, cutting back roses, tying vines, or spading beds and turning in manure, he came in hungry for dinner and ready afterwards for a nap. The air exhilarated him in the sunny hours of the morning, but Renata and Zio Pepe both told him, wagging their heads, that this was tranquil air, soporific air, and that life moved here accordingly. It was true; nobody hurried, nobody travelled, nobody planned. One just went along, keeping regular hours, sleeping more than Randall had ever heard of sleeping, going to bed early and getting up early, digging oneself by easy degrees into the ancient mood and tempo of the place. Only in the brief evening hour or two between supper and bedtime did he hold to the old habit of sitting down to read. He would put a few sticks of wood into the stove in the studio room, and sit down in an armchair beside the round table where there was a student lamp with a green shade, which gave good light. There was a smaller oil lamp in each of the other rooms, as well as candlesticks; the Englishman had, as they said, known how to make himself comfortable. Randall read the Corriere which a boy brought every day from the post-office at the nearby village, along with the bread and the milk. When he had finished he was more than sleepy enough to go to bed.
The first few evenings he sat alone in the studio, appearing more absorbed in the newspaper than he was, for he was wondering what Renata was doing and whether she would not presently come in and sit for a while, which would be natural, would it not? He heard her finish the work in the kitchen, and sat waiting for the light to be extinguished there, and Renata to appear. She did not; as soon as the kitchen was dark she went quietly upstairs, pausing only to say “Buona notte, Randalo.” He answered and she disappeared. After several evenings he said, as she paused on the stairway, “Why don’t you come and sit here for awhile, Renata? It is very comfortable.”
She hesitated. For a moment her stern and remote look made him feel rebuked. But why should he not have said this? Why should she expect him to treat her like a servant now when her attitude all day long, in spite of her reserve, was nothing of the sort? To keep such a distance in the presence of John would have been preposterous, and confusing to the child. Randall looked up at her and said, “Please don’t mind what I said. After all—” he smiled wryly. Any kind of silent appeal was better than the clumsiness of words. He saw her eyelids droop slowly and widen again, a tremor cross her face. It would be better, he thought, with a sharp, painful grasp of what she felt, if I did not look at her. This is not reproof that she is showing. She is afraid, abashed, unsure. We have mountains to climb, higher than any peaks to be seen from here, and depths to plumb, deeper than the fathoms of that lake, before we can meet again where we can feel at ease. He dropped his eyes and said quietly, “I understand, you know. I would like you to sit here with me awhile if you are willing.”
“I will bring my work,” she said, and presently came with one of the gaudy silk handkerchiefs. She took a chair on the other side of the table and began to hem the silk square. He read desultorily; from time to time his eyes followed her fingers. His memory once again had stepped in and seized the initiative. He could not see her do anything now which she had also done in times gone by, without rousing to these stabs. He had often seen her sew; he remembered the white ruchings on Em
ma Maynard’s petticoats, the dimity dresses that she had made for the hot summer in New York. He sat now and listened to the echo of the past, clear against the quiet crackle of the fire. Sew the fazzoletti, she had said, sew the fazzoletti like my aunts. Two lire the week. Maybe thirty-five cents?
He put aside his newspaper and leaned over and looked at her, rejecting any notion of trying to keep from his eyes the emotions brimming in them, the burden of memory against the sight of her poor clothes and the drudge’s work in her hands. He spoke to her and she raised her head and looked at him, and he knew from her face that his blue eyes had moved her as he had suddenly and forcefully intended that they should.
“That work you are doing,” he said quietly in English. “I remember, Renata. I remember all sorts of things, everything.” She was silent; he saw her draw a deep breath. “So do you,” he said, gathering courage. “Please don’t do that any more. I assure you, it is unnecessary.”
She paused in her sewing and was plainly thinking what to say. Then she said it, in English almost whispered.
“Is not better keep the work I am sure of,” she asked, “when is not sure anything else?”
For a moment he could not speak. Then he said, “I know. I wish—I wish I had the answer to anything. I know I am hard to understand. I’m feeling my way, Renata, you do realize that. Some things I just cannot decide yet, and some I don’t know anything about. But this I do know.” He put out his hand with a surge of daring and laid it on her forearm. It was the first time he had touched her, he realized, since coming to this country. He felt her arm stiffen and then slowly relax. At that he patted it gently and took his hand away and said, “You can be sure of one thing. It will not be necessary for you to do that kind of work any more.” He bent his head, overcome by the thought of his actions in New York, by the thought of Seymour saying, ‘There wasn’t any other way to treat her …’ He shivered inwardly. He said, “No matter what I do, you won’t be—” he was lost for words. He waited awhile and said, pointing to her work, “Dependent on that. Never.”
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