She’d addressed a young man whose smashed gray fedora had been tilted askew, framing in a nimbus of ash felt a richly colored chiseled perfection. True, his nose was slightly snub for so refined a harmony, his lips fuller if possible than the woman’s, his eyes more deeply set, the shallow triangle of teeth open to view excessively white against his tanned skin. Even within the shade of his hat brim, his eyes flickered darkly as he unconsciously lifted a hand in gesture to me, as though encompassing the vista, reminding me of one of those burghers of old Flanders painted as an afterthought at the extremities of a vast triptych, some merchant who sponsored the artist, and was thus allowed to eternally present his city—minuscule in the background of some stupendously dramatic, infinitesimally detailed Deposition from the Cross.
The slightly over-elegant gestures of the two as well as the evidence of napery, china, and glassware suggested a meal consummated, and dawdling, as though neither wished to make a decision to move. At first I thought them siblings because of their strong resemblance in beauty, then lovers from their languorous and wordless communication. Until I noticed the third member of their party.
No wonder I had missed this figure, so ensconced was it in the shell of a high, hooded, wicker-work chair. At first, all I could discern of a personage was cloth, as though linens and pillows had been enthusiastically plumped and allowed to softly deflate.
In that moment of trying to make out the figure inside the hooded chair (for I’d convinced myself that it was a person), a very small peasant woman came into view on the piazza. She was quite round and wide-faced, with ebony hair pulled back into a doubly braided bun, mounted upon the back of her head like a spare tire upon the side fender of a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Even more amazing was her costume, one almost parodistic in color and cut, it made her so much the tour guide’s contadina. She’d stepped out of a double door from which she must have seen me stagger into the piazza and addressed me.
“’Giorno, Signor. Voi rifrescarlei!”
Her plump hand swept toward the tables, offering me a seat. Her words of welcome drew forth slow turns from the Etruscan couple.
When I didn’t immediately answer her offer to refresh myself, she added brightly, “Noi siamo molto gentile,” attempting I guess to reassure me. Instead, she confused me further. Who of us I wondered, were very civilized? She and I? Or the other three?
I took a seat at the only other already-set table, sharing the umbrella a bit, and the taverna owner—for that was who I supposed the plump woman to be—nodded in approval and after asking if I was hungry, and not waiting for a response, obliged me with an oral menu: pasta and risotto of the day, coffee, gelati di noce, and delice.
Thinking I would rest here a minute before venturing down into the contentious little town again and attempt to locate the others, I ordered coffee—with milk, so I wouldn’t receive the standard bitter, dark double sip of espresso.
“Niente di mangiar?” she asked appalled, as if I’d asked to drink blood.
I wasn’t hungry. Couldn’t eat a thing. Then, fatigue taking over, my little bit of Italian by now spent, I added in English, “Just something to drink.”
The woman with the exquisite profile moved an inch to look at me better.
“She asks what food you will take,” her companion said, turning in his chair just enough that I knew I was being addressed. He concluded by favoring me with the slightest hint of smile: it devastated me.
“Is it required?” I fumbled back at him.
The peasant woman waited, her apron edge twisting in her fingers.
“Not required,” he allowed, and I couldn’t for the life of me place his accent, which didn’t match any I’d heard so far in this country. “Yet,” he went on, and seemed at a loss.
“Yet preferred?” I tried.
He bowed almost imperceptibly in my direction, then smiled more fully. The pearly gates opened, irradiating the piazza, dazzling me.
“If I must eat…then…anything!” I said, casting my gustatory destiny to the winds that played with the stranger’s lapels. To the woman waiting, I said, “Anything sweet. Anything but chocolate,” I tacked on, as an afterthought.
A soft sputter of what I assumed to be a dialect of Italian between the man and the peasant woman conveyed the information. The contadina curtseyed in our general direction and flounced off, like a dismissed comprimario.
“May I ask,” his ravishing companion suddenly spoke up, “why not chocolate? Have we not heard it scientifically proven that chocolate is the food of love?”
Her accent was identical to his, and perfectly inscrutable, her voice as dusky in contralto as his had been burnished in baritone.
Under differing circumstances I might have disputed her statement, but I was weary and unwilling to extend myself. “I’m allergic to chocolate.”
In truth, I liked chocolate as much as the next person, but the Italians’ use of it so far in my trip had sated my limited palate for the stuff. I’d not eaten a chocolate I was comfortable with since I’d crossed the Grand Corniche into the country.
“Allergic? Exactly how allergic?” I heard twitter from the depth of the hooded wicker chair in a thin, high voice with a pure American accent, startling in its directness.
“I get fevers,” I fibbed.
“Hives too?” she asked primly.
“Not for years, no.”
“Red streaks on your arms? Rashes on your abdomen? Blotches on your bottom?”
“Sometimes.”
“High fevers?” she probed.
“Low but insistent.”
“A dry mouth?”
“It’s been so long since I…”
She ignored the attempt at qualification. “You see, Ercole. All the symptoms,” and she seemed to subside back into the pillows of the wicker-work in what I was forced to assume was hypoallergenic musing. In the enfolding silence—striking by the absence of birdsong—I thought of the rising pitch of her interrogation, and the name by which she had called him. Something classical, no? Hercules? Yes. And the young woman then would be whom? Dejaneira? Diana? Aphrodite?
I must have muttered the last name aloud, in Italian.
“No, no!” the young woman laughed.
Ercole now motioned to me, clearly asking me to join them.
“American?” the still nameless lovely young woman said rather than asked when I took the fourth seat at their table. She swanned a long, tanned wrist at me, and I took her hand, unsure whether to kiss it. The air around us smelled of almonds—almonds, spun sugar, something vaguely metallic. I took the soft hand and she looked at me from within the striated illumination of her sun hat.
This close, her eyes were rounder, hazel, green, golden: no, the same cream color of those long bars of ciocolata Jesu sold on the Via Urbana in Rome.
“The Grandmama believes it is a sign of old nobility to be allergic to chocolate,” she now said, amused. “Having blue-blood. We—Ercole and myself—we eat liters of it.” She laughed, sharing the secret with him and I would have given her the keys to my house to hear that laugh again.
So charmed by her, and by the fact of the heap of white skin, white hair, and bones I could make out among the purple material of the wicker chair, that I missed their names in the long liquidity of Ercole’s “Pardon me to introduce ourselves, etc.” I did regain presence of mind just long enough to register that he called the old woman Principessa Someone or other.
Our waitress returned carrying a tray of milky looking drinks in tall mauve coolers, each glass set within a chased silver holder sculpted in relief, so that frolicking Nereids barely fended off the advance of amorous Tritons, all of them about to be swallowed by wide-mouthed, rather jovial-looking sea serpents. They looked old and valuable. Where was my coffee?
I turned to ask if one of these was it, and was interrupted by Ercole, smooth as glass, saying, “Better than the coffee you ordered, signor. A dessert and drink in one.”
I sipped at it with a Bronzino-thin merman o
f a spoon. “Amaretto?”
“Amaretto, yes,” a touch of eagerness in his voice, “something else too.”
“Brandy? Eau de vie de Poire, perhaps?” I hadn’t a clue.
“It is quite special,” the young woman said, pointing to the Principessa’s nearly non-existent lap where I now made out a mauve glass flask, the same tint as the coolers, and like them encased in a chased silver carrier with nautical allegories.
“Absinthe?” I tried, half-joking.
They laughed and shook their heads no, and I laughed, a bit bleakly, I admit, wondering if I were being slipped a mickey, or if Ercole had mentioned among that long list of surnames I’d scarcely listened to, the name Borgia.
“This is your first time here?” the young woman asked, changing the subject. “You are here on vacation as a tourist? Or to study?”
“A little of both.”
“You pardon my curiosity?”
She might have asked me the number of my bank account, and although it was so depleted now it would hardly matter, I still would have gladly given it.
“And you adore the country?” she enthused softly.
Well…” I began, and stopped.
Manners decreed that I ought to say yes, certainly, I adored their country. But the truth was a bit more complex. Not that it wasn’t altogether lovely to look at, so many beautiful places and things to see. But I was more or less alone in Italy—and that seemed to make all the difference, didn’t it? Unable to see Italy with Sarah, I was somewhat lost, even forlorn.
I ought to note here immediately that we’d had no falling out and that Sarah had abandoned me suddenly, without warning, two weeks before, outside of Monaco. She’d simply asked me to stop the Renault and she’d stepped out, grabbed her two pieces of luggage out of the backseat where she’d placed them that morning at our pensione in Nice, and she’d walked into the little train station and onto the steps of a waiting train taking her back to Paris. All without a word or a hint of explanation.
I’d still not gotten over her doing it, nor even worse, her utter calm in doing it. How she’d met the train precisely on time, how she’d known precisely where I had to stop for her to catch it. (Had she planned in the pensione the night before, as I’d written out postcards, as I’d slept? She must have!) How she left me without a hint of complaint, or kiss, or word of good-bye. I’d thought our trip together, our being together, heaven. How could she have thought differently? What could I have done to so alienate her? To not even deserve an explanation?
Once Sarah and the train were gone in the other direction, I sat in the rented car until the train barrier was lifted from the road in front of me. The cars behind me honked for me to move on and so I did. I drove to Florence, just as we’d planned, Sarah and I, in our carefully-mapped-out itinerary made months ago on the front lawn of her father’s bayfront summer house.
I’d then continued to travel through Italy, following that itinerary. Not as though Sarah were still with me, naturally, but as though I couldn’t admit that she was gone. I suppose in some way I expected to be stopped at another crossroads or train trestle and have Sarah as suddenly step out of a car with her two pieces of luggage and hop right into the Renault again, to continue our journey, without a hint of explanation. That would be unlike her, of course. But what she’d already done was so utterly unlike her, what difference would that make? And should that occur, I’d never ask for an explanation either.
I kept to our plan. I stayed at our decided-upon pensiones, I walked the foreplanned narrow alleys of Florence, purchased silver stuffs and tooled leather book jackets on the Ponte Vecchio exactly as we said we would, and I mailed them home from the American Express office near the Spanish Steps, a week later, to announce my arrival in Rome. No letter, not a hint of a note to our parents about what had happened.
Once, only once in those weeks did the full realization of Sarah’s deed impinge upon me fully—sickeningly. I was sipping Pernod and water and picking at some local variation of Nesselrode pie in an outdoor café on the Via Veneto. It was sunset, and all Rome appeared bathed in the final hot flush of twilight. Up the via, the Borghese Gardens had already flamed up and dimmed into moody shadows. But a small street perfectly perpendicular to where I sat was an eye-hurting red-orange, as though that half of the city was engulfed in fire.
The café was sparsely peopled, as most Romans were returned to work or home after their midafternoon siestas. But a lovely young Scandinavian woman swerved off the via into the café and sat opposite me. She spoke in what I took to be Norwegian.
When I tried to tell her I didn’t understand a word, she reached into a colorful woven carryall and pulled out a dozen or so frothy looking cookies, each wrapped in tissue paper. She unwrapped each sweet, popped it into her mouth, and offered me a few too, which I enjoyed. When we’d eaten them all, she lined up the parti-colored tissues on the edge of the table, crushed each in such a way it stood up, struck a match, and set fire to its upper tip. First one, then all the other papers lifted up off the table as they burned, flaming as they fluttered, rising a foot or more perfectly vertical in the air, and evaporating into lilac-colored smoke; not a jot of ash descended. Then she stood up and without a word walked off.
I was so delighted by the little performance, and the mystery of the papers rising as they burned, that I turned to my left and said, “Wasn’t that strange and wonderful and exactly what you would have wanted to happen at dusk on the Via Veneto?”…And Sarah wasn’t there.
Of course not. She hadn’t been there in some time.
I remember seeing a documentary film about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, some years before. At one point, an accuser suddenly stops testifying. Holding on to the edge of the podium, the witness looks around the courtroom, then slides off, crumpling onto the floor, as men rush to his side. Explaining the incident to the camera later on in the film, the man—who’d suffered everything short of death in one of the Nazi camps—explained, “I realized all of a sudden that Eichmann was just a man. Only a man. But if one man could do that, well, then any man could. I could too. You too.”
Something on the order of his sudden realization leading to an instant and overpowering emotion happened to me at that café table. William James called it a “vastation,” a lovely turn-of-the-century word, don’t you think? I stood up to leave the table and I realized not only that Sarah was not with me, hadn’t been with me, and would probably never again be with me, but that I was alone: in Rome, in the world, in the universe, and I would probably always be alone. I reacted as that Polish Jew at the trial had, as William James said that he and his father before him had done: I fainted back into my chair.
Amazingly, I didn’t hurt myself, and I came to soon after, thanks to the ministrations of the waiters.
That night, I didn’t follow the itinerary Sarah and I had planned for our third night in the city—the Coliseum by moonlight (we’d even checked to be certain it would be a full moon) followed by dancing in one of the ancient Roman baths converted into a discotheque. Instead I remained in the room of my pensione and I pondered. I slept poorly. The morning following that, I checked out, obtained a road map, and left Rome for the hills, deliberately headed north and east, when our plan had meant for us to go south, to Naples and Capri.
From then on I would follow no itinerary. I would wander. I’d drive around at large, waste time, try to discover what I had done so wrong that Sarah had walked away from me without a word. Failing that, I would be miserable.
I’d left Rome two days before and I still remained haunted by questions. Earlier this morning, I’d awakened in a hotel in Lucca, walked out onto the terrace where a half dozen other Americans happened to be breakfasting, and I’d allowed myself to be talked into being part of their group on their visit to this particular town—Spiegato, was it? No, that meant mirror, didn’t it?
Whatever its name, the town was completely off the beaten track for tourists and contained, they assured me, but a single att
raction, an underground chapel dating from early Christian times. The Americans weren’t a church group, so I never discovered why exactly they’d hit on this specific village and its single feature. But so they had. I’d followed their van for a few kilometers, then lost them. Once arrived, I’d circumnavigated the lower part of the little place in fruitless search of the tour group, their ecru van, the ruins, or anything at all interesting. One time, I’d thought I’d seen two from the group strolling high up a road too narrow for the Renault to traverse, so I’d parked and followed them on foot, and eventually arrived here.
“No?” the beautiful woman questioned me. “You don’t at all adore our country. Not even a little?”
“Right now I do,” I allowed. “Here. Now.”
“Ah!” Relief flooded her face, sending her from a momentary anxiety, leaning forward across the table toward me, back into her chair back smiling.
“He likes the place fine. He has a dilemma.”
The accent of the sentences was American. Rather specifically New England American. And the voice had issued from the depths of the hooded chair.
“Grandmama hears great sadness in your voice,” the young woman said. I wondered if the old Principessa was blind, but didn’t dare look closely at her to check.
“Hesitations,” Ercole added. “A tragedy, perhaps!” He said it not to me, but to the air.
“No. No tragedy,” the prim old voice declared with utter certainty.
If this was the family’s idea of social chatter, I found it peculiar indeed. Even more peculiar when the old woman spoke again:
“She’s gone back to Paris. To the man who seduced her.”
I sputtered into my drink.
“You didn’t know?” she went on. “It happened in an elevator. One of those large, over-elaborate pneumatic lifts. But he’ll soon throw her over, of course. Her name begins with an S. Sandra. Susan…”
Contemporary Gay Romances Page 4