“But these were to be my going-away gift,” he says, placing the carrying case in Fernando’s arms.
“OK, then. We’ll come to find you early in July.” He and Fernando have settled it.
I hand the keys to our house to the duke. To Palazzo Barlozzo. “Just in case you get to missing the velvet and the brocade,” I say standing on tiptoe, pulling his face down to kiss. What I’m thinking is that he might like to sit in Florì’s chair under the window in the upstairs hall some mornings, to read a little. Refusing to let the duke see his tears, Fernando walks straight ahead toward the house. I’m crying too hard now to care who sees me and so, wrapping my arms as far up onto his chest as I can reach, I hold the duke tight to me. I hold the duke tight for all I’m worth, and he lets me. I look at him. “Ciao, bestione, ciao, great beast. Remember how I love you.”
“Ciao, piccola, ciao, little one.” Lifting his face to the sun and away from mine, he stays that way until I reach the house and go inside.
WE’RE PACKING UP again, making the final check, carrying things out to the car. We’ll leave at dawn. We’ve dined on the last bits and pieces left in the cupboards, a supper made of stones. A lone sausage, a sprouted potato, and three lamb chops we cooked over the fire outdoors. The car duly loaded, we go back to the garden with the last of our wine, not at all ready to go indoors. Fernando pulls me close to him so my back nestles into his chest, and we sit like this on the packed May earth. Twilight is a woman. And she’s a long time in leaving. Like the train of a wedding dress, she drags pink clouds across the darkening, never minding the hard blue night at her heels. Rain falls like a blessing, the mizzling of it polite, not disturbing the fire at all. A new moon sickles, polishing the stars, and I sit holding my face up to the rain, to the light, letting a quiver of wind, like a faithless lover, kiss me on his way to someone else. This is what I’ve wanted to do and how I’ve wanted to be. There is nothing vainglorious in my thoughts. My small life would hardly stretch to fit the needs and desires of many others. Still, I want what I already have. But I know there’s no holding seawater in your hands, no fixing the moon. All of life is nothing more and nothing less than a few short strolls around the park, a sashay or two around the fire.
“What are you thinking?” asks Fernando.
“That life is this marvelous and terrifying mystery.”
“Don’t you ever think about anything big?” He tightens his arms, kisses my hair.
I sit in the warmth of him, his heart beating through me and into mine. And I wonder why it is that, of all the thousands upon thousands of people who pass through one’s life, most leave not a trace. Into abandon and oblivion they are consigned, as though they were never there. And more curious, why do those few, only those few, stay somewhere safe, dying, even, but never entirely so, engraving the heart, deep and smooth? The cut of the eyes, some voluptuous sting, one exquisite phrase, a voice like chocolate just before it melts, a laugh like thin silver spoons chinking across a marble floor. The way the sea crashes into crisp champagne pools behind him as he kisses you. A hand resting on a hip. One mesmeric glance, brown or black, green, topaz. Blueberry.
Without warning the rain turns hard. We run to gather dishes and glasses and the spoils of supper. We make two trips each and slam the stable door against the thrashing water. The electricity has blown, but still we laugh as I light the candles in the wall sconces on either side of the mirror and Fernando lights the ones on the table.
“Siamo salvi, we’re saved,” he says, pouring brandy into a great crystal snifter, offering it to me with both hands. I sip and then he does, just as Aeolus screams, flings wide the stable door, crashing it against the wall, the blow crushing its hinges, the furious draught guttering the candles on the wall, cinnamon wax spilling from their wounds, the flames leaping like Cossacks, dancing. The door won’t shut but partway. As we begin heaving furniture against it, the wind goes soft and the rain spends itself in a dwindling gasp. We say let’s leave the door hanging as it will for a moment, let the strange evening come inside. We’re pattering about the room and, with the tail of my eye, I catch us in the mirror.
Framed between the flames, peaceable now, we are a portrait. But those two, could they truly be us? The candles light up the raindrops that form crowns of tiny amber beads in our damp hair. Ripened, whole we are, and made of velvet, of vintage stuff—worn, still lustrous, faded like blowsy August roses gone to bronze. Fernando doesn’t see the portrait and moves in and out of the picture. I stop him, pull him back a step, holding him around his waist so we can look together at us. “See? Stay still for a moment and look at us.”
He gazes at us, looking hard and then quizzically as though he can’t decide if we’re a memory or a dream. He tells me this and I say I think we’re both a memory and a dream. And that, as well, we’re real. He looks for a long time. He blushes, as though the mirror was a camera. We look until the exhilaration, the flash is past, and we’ve both grown timid, somehow embarrassed. Or is it that we’d glimpsed our secret selves, the best of us distilled in a moment, a fugitive moment, a dissolving moment, seeping, spilling over into the next one, just as time has always moved, never waiting for us to catch up. Barlozzo said it. Time is a blackguard, Chou. And, of course, he’s right. There goes time, running like hell, looking back at us, taunting, as we fumble, trying to save him in a jar. Trying to tuck him forever under the bed, fix him tight inside a red satin box. Trying to string him like pearls. Enough pearls to make a life.
Acknowledgments
Rosalie Siegel
donna nobile
Sharona Guri from Tel-Aviv,
Isabella Cimicchi from Orvieto,
muses, both
Lisa and Erich,
cherished babies
Fernando Filiberto-Maria,
the all, the everything.
The everyone
A Thousand Days in Tuscany Page 24