“What to do? What to do?” Helena tapped her chin again, as though entering impersonal integers into an adding machine and waiting for the calculation to appear. She looked from one to the other of the men looming at the foot of the bed. “No matter what, we are leaving the Désirée this morning as planned. It’s time to move on. I guess you two should take our bags downstairs for a start. Then we’ll all go down for la colazione and decide what’s next.”
They went down to breakfast with Paul wondering exactly who was supposed to be making precisely what decision. Ever since he had found himself in bed with Helena, Paul had been wildly confused, but never too rattled to recognize that he had turned out to be the worst kind of snake in the grass, the vile amigo horridus. Turning away from the mirror this morning, he could see cat’s eyes in his reflection. He knew what he had done was as venomous as could be. Remorse and pride struggled within him. Just a few days ago, he would have reckoned that Betsy was out of his league. But the amazing Helena? Out of his universe. And yet.
Paul and Stephen each downed a caffè doppio and Stephen made quick work of a sour-cherry crostata while Helena sipped her caffè latte and picked at her croissant-like cornetto. Paul, having eaten earlier at his own pensione, vibrated with impatience and yet wished he could stop the clock. Make time stand still. He couldn’t go back and undo, but he dreaded going forward. He sat stupefied by the thought: everything changes now.
When Helena had finally finished, Paul scraped back his chair against the marble tiles and stood. Still seated, Helena looked up at him. “Stephen and I have decided to take a pass on Venice, but we don’t want to interfere with your plans.”
His plans? He gaped at Stephen, who shrugged in his direction.
Helena continued, “We’re going on to Madrid. We’ll be just in time to catch the Spanish Grand Prix tomorrow. We know you’re not interested in racing. Or in ever hearing Spanish again for that matter”—she flashed her smile full at him, inviting him to pretend he was in on the joke—“but that doesn’t mean we can’t all share a taxi to the train station.”
Paul stumbled backward, jostling the chair of another diner. As he retrieved the elderly gentleman’s fallen napkin, he had time to wonder when this itinerary had been hatched. Steve and Helena hadn’t had a moment alone together since his arrival at their door.
He felt betrayed. By both of them. And then he had to strangle a laugh. What right did he have to feel outrage? Forget outrage. His body told him that this intense feeling was, actually, relief: he was going home.
Steve, too, felt a relief as cool as Pennsylvania mountain air wash over him: he was not the Dwarf.
No one could guess what Helena felt. Helena least of all.
An Innocent/A Broad
9.
Betsy removed herself from the Desirée and the clutch of Americans staying there to another pensione but she knew she had not gone far enough. She had to get out of Florence.
There was the heat, of course, which filled not only the air but everyone’s conversation. She showered twice each day—mornings before the breakfast of hard rolls, apricot preserves, and caffé latte, and evenings before she foraged for a trattoria with a menu turistico. In this way she was able to dine with some dignity, some poise—what was the Italian for sangfroid?—but by the time the bowl of floating fruit arrived at her table she was reduced, like those around her, to fanning herself with one hand, trying to move the hot, heavy air that breathed down her neck like an ardent dragon.
She blamed the heat, but it was heat of a different sort that troubled her. In all her vague plans, the itineraries of daydreams, she had seen herself regretfully leaving Florence—how much better the Italian name, Firenze, captured the climate and the overwhelming closeness of the city—for Rome and Naples. Now the prospect of going south, where it was yet warmer and the men were purported to be warmer still, made her feel faint.
She had not expected, at the age of thirty-two, to have her footsteps dogged by strangers, to be barked and worried at like unprotected game. Chestnut hair, dark wide-set eyes, trim figure, Betsy knew she was reasonably attractive, not unreasonably so. The face she saw in the mirror had never stopped traffic before. She was certain the attention she was receiving was a by-product of culture and climate and something indigenous in this species of male rather than inspired by anything in her. She found this exaggerated interest peculiarly impersonal.
In Florence she had introduced herself as Elisabetta, hoping the sheer formality of her name would serve as a mantle of protection, her way of taking the veil, but nothing could shield her from total strangers. After she was spun round on the street by a passerby who planted a kiss upon her protesting mouth, she decided to about-face for Ireland, where the weather would require wearing a cumbersome sweater and where the men would be properly repressed. On her way north she would visit the Italian lake country.
Even the words sounded cool and crisp and clean. She fled by rail to Milan, where she connected with the unabashedly third-rate second-class train to the city of Como. The Lago di Como was the only one of the lakes she recognized by name. From Como she rode a steamer (slightly cheaper and significantly more romantic than the bus) to one of the little towns on the water’s edge, where she took a room in a well-kept, gracious middle-class hotel, the Albergo Giannino.
Nestled into the waterfront of the small town of Cernobbio, the Giannino offered the best accommodations of her trip thus far: a small but not cramped bedroom with an intoxicatingly modern private bath: sink, shower, bidet, toilet, shimmering stainless steel and salmon-colored tile everywhere. She had not minded walking down the hall or paying an additional fee for the use of a shower, but she had come to dread the water closets as she had dreaded having to use the outhouse when visiting her grandmother as a young child. The WCs were exactly that—indoor outhouses: windowless, airless, without even the aperture of a crescent moon hewn into the door; barren except for a commode which invariably did not flush properly. So the Giannino offered both charm and luxury for surprisingly less than she was accustomed to pay for neither.
She took full-pension accommodations, knowing after her first meal that nowhere else could she eat so cheaply and so well. She had learned variety and motion were not, for her, the essential ingredients of travel. Instead, they were distractions. Betsy was soothed by her increasing store of familiarities: set hours for dining, the same young waitress to serve her, the small carefully laid table with her room number discreetly displayed, her own napkin folded and tucked after each meal into an oversized paper envelope bearing both her name and that of the Albergo Giannino. For the first time since she had landed at the airport in Paris, Betsy relaxed.
Her host and hostess at the Giannino were a pair of perfectly matched opposites—he at once both officious and friendly, anxious to impress, and she sullen, with eyes half closed so she might be excused from returning a smile. Signor Alfieri spoke hotelkeepers’ English, as well as a smattering of French and German. He was proud of his hotel and his accomplishments. The signora, also receptionist and chief cook, chose not to understand a word spoken by her few alien guests. Quickly Betsy learned to avoid complications and confusions by dealing only with the signore.
Her first morning at the Giannino, Betsy awoke in time to indulge in a shower before breakfast, which was served hours earlier than in the cities. Halfway through her ablutions, the lights in the bathroom went out. After pressing the various switches in the bedroom and discovering she was completely without electricity, Betsy resolved to withhold this announcement from the signora. With her impoverished Italian, she worked up a formula for explaining to Signor Alfieri both the electrical failure and her own lack of responsibility for it.
Signora Alfieri was ensconced behind the desk, wearing the same shapeless dress and well-formed frown of the evening before. Betsy offered a buon giorno in which she felt every one of her teeth was displayed. When the signora realized she
could not pretend ignorance of her native tongue, she grudgingly reciprocated the greeting. Betsy decided henceforth to ladle pleasantries onto the signora like sauce. Her own smile and salutations would be frequent and unavoidable, the tariff her hostess must pay to keep Betsy’s room occupied. She said nothing about electricity.
During breakfast, the same fare as in Florence with the addition of individually foil-packaged slices of cold, dry toast, Signor Alfieri stopped by the table three or four times to make sure she was satisfied with his hotel. “And did you sleep well in this night?” he asked with a degree of seriousness that made Betsy lend greater than usual enthusiasm to her reply. “Very well, grazie. I can’t remember when I’ve slept better.”
Signor Alfieri shook his head dismally so she could only suppose some error in his translation. He was gone before she thought to tell him about the electrical failure in her room.
Later, as she mounted the stairs, Signor Alfieri called her to the desk. He had replaced the signora, who was presumably off somewhere rechiseling the hard edges of her expression. “Signora, the lights in your room, they do not work?”
“Pardon? Oh”—Betsy felt herself flush as though discovered in a compromising position—“that’s quite correct,” she said stiffly. “I’m sorry—I forgot to tell you. I can’t imagine why they went off. I’m sure it was nothing I did,” she heard herself apologizing.
“You will go now to your room, please, and call to me if the lights do not work more?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Dial four, please.” His voice was stern and his manner distant, showing no trace of the congeniality of the dining room.
“Sorry?”
“Two is for the outside line. Nine is the number for night service. You dial four, please. It is here, then I come.”
“I see. I’ll go right up and try the lights now.”
“Yes. Then you call me.”
Betsy hurried to do as instructed. When she phoned, Signor Alfieri didn’t give her a chance to speak. “Si. I come now, signora.”
She left the door to her room open and stood folding her washing of the night before. She expected Signor Alfieri to enter armed with tools and expostulations. While mentally preparing for the onslaught, she found herself unceremoniously spun round. Signor Alfieri pressed his hips to hers and more gently placed his mouth on her lips. Betsy pushed off from him with the heels of both palms. Signor Alfieri’s eyes darted back to the passage visible through the open door. His face was illuminated by the light pouring out from the sleek silver fixture in the renovated bathroom.
“Signore! You work very quickly,” she said.
He moved toward her again with another furtive glance over his shoulder, but she kept both arms rigidly extended. “How long you rest here?” he panted.
“I don’t know.” She was torn between laughter and dismay. “It is a very nice hotel.”
“It is my hotel,” he wooed. “I own this hotel.”
“I would be sorry to have to go,” she warned.
“We talk later,” he said, eyes fixed on the corridor behind him.
After she had shut and locked the door, Betsy snorted. She had just been congratulating herself on having discovered such a cozy refuge. She resisted the urge to run after the signore and tell him she had already met his younger, more handsome cousin on a street corner in Florence.
Standing at her window looking out upon the lake, instead of giving in to outrage, Betsy decided to be amused. Signor Alfieri had so overacted his part in this tired, clichéd drama. She chose to think of him as a stock character.
Later that day, with a great rush of agitation, Betsy saw it was she who hadn’t been following the cues properly. She suddenly understood that Signor Alfieri had shut off the electricity to her room himself. That was how he knew to ask her about the failure even before she had reported it, and also how it came to be instantly repaired. She wondered if his maneuver was intended to be as obvious as it now appeared, and if her phoning down to the desk was taken for complicity, an invitation.
Betsy became angry at last. She had forgiven him when he was merely an opportunist, seizing the advantage against Ladies Luck and Elisabetta. Now that she saw him as master of his fate, she railed inwardly against him.
The following morning Signor Alfieri again stopped at Betsy’s table to inquire how she had passed the night. Frostily she assured him she had again rested well. When she was passing through the lobby, he summoned her to the reception desk.
“Si, signore?”
He brought a printed card from behind the desk. On it were listed three single digits and a brief explanation for each in four languages.
“You see, to dial two for the outside line. Four is in the day. You remember you dial four for the lights?”
“I remember,” she hastily summoned some hauteur.
“Good. Nine is the number of the night service. This night you dial nine.”
“I don’t understand. You mean to order something? Room service?”
“Si, room service.”
Betsy had seen the small tables at intervals in the corridors where trays laden with crockery were deposited. “Grazie, signore, but you feed your guests too well.”
“Tonight you cannot sleep. You dial nine. I come and you sleep.”
Betsy had discovered in these weeks of traveling alone that the quickest way to avoid unpleasantness was by feigning tight-lipped, wide-eyed innocence. She often pretended not to understand an unsavory suggestion. Certainly she was blind to looks and deaf to innuendo. When pressed, she pleaded ignorance of language, as though a Berlitz course were needed to comprehend the meaning of street-corner lotharios. She wasn’t young enough to have expected such unwanted attentions, or cool enough to dismiss them. She wondered now if her practiced innocence had indeed become second nature.
“I am quite sure I will not need any night service.”
Signor Alfieri, too, was practiced in the art of convenient deafness. He nodded his head, “You dial nine.”
Betsy at last appreciated the signora’s discriminating hostility, but this recognition did not eradicate the injustice to herself—the signora should place all the blame where it belonged—so Betsy continued her campaign of cloying sweetness as retribution for the personal offense. Unfailingly she spoke to the signora whenever possible and the signora was forced to reply. Her coldness, Betsy decided, was perhaps some explanation, though no excuse, for the signore’s behavior.
In the meantime, Signor Alfieri did not give up. Betsy was impressed, almost touched, by his dogged persistence. When she sat out on the pier, with its cultivated appearance of a formal garden, reading a novel or the collection of poems she had brought from Florence, Signor Alfieri was apt to appear at her left shoulder talking out of the right side of his mouth. “You rest here the day. Maybe later I can come to you. The afternoon we are together.” Betsy would only shake her head and laugh, careful neither to encourage nor discourage him, for either of these would mean she took him seriously. Still, to be safe, on those afternoons she reluctantly took herself away from the pier to wander the streets of the village or steam into the throbbing city of Como.
The lake itself surpassed Betsy’s airy anticipations. According to a local brochure, Shelley had written to a contemporary declaring his intent to find a house on Como: “This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus island of Killarney.” Betsy would soon have the chance to make that comparison for herself. Such a funny guide, Chance, to bring her here where she had never meant to come.
In the daylight, after a night’s rain—and it seemed to rain every night yet never before sundown—the green of the hills shimmered. The color was so lush that merely taking in the view seemed an exercise in hedonism. Scattered amid the thickly verdant growth were collections of dwellings, pale buildings hooded by faded orange tiles,
crisp geometric shapes among all the undulating green. In the morning Betsy could sit contentedly, just looking, for hours. But at dusk, when the lake was more beautiful than she could bear, she would walk restlessly up and down the meticulously raked pebble-banked promenade, beneath the manicured trees, her eyes and her feet never still.
At dusk the light over the water softened and lied. Hill beyond hill beyond hill was shrouded in deepening veils of mist, making each seem a false shadow of the one before. In the haze the house lights shone yellow and warm, like fireflies or lanterns or candles in the windows. When dark came, it transformed all parts of the picture, smoothing the ripples on the water, absorbing the repeating hills, and draining the house lights until they were a thin, starry white. After only the second night, Betsy lost all sight of leaving.
On the third day, immediately after breakfast, she slipped out on the boat for the two-hour journey to Tremezzo. She visited the Villa Carlotta with its fecund botanical gardens, its statuary and paintings and period furniture, and returned to the hotel only moments before Signora Alfieri closed the immense wooden doors of the dining room.
Betsy loved the nightly collection of people, all guests of the hotel and almost all Italian—in Florence every third person had been an American. The Giannino was a family haven. In one corner of the dining room were grouped three tables representing three adjoining suites. A handsome couple in their mid-thirties and their two very prettily spoiled daughters occupied the first table. At the next sat the parents of the wife, and at a third sat her mother’s parents. Four generations of women. Betsy feasted upon the flurry of kisses that hailed the beginning of each meal.
The Opposite of Chance Page 10