“A splendid aspect,” he said to me, “the swimming pool. Wonderful that you’re getting the opportunity to use it. Notice the patio stones. That was Alba’s idea. La signora, I mean, ha-ha. The stones are actually for grinding polenta. They’re the tools of a peasant’s existence, a peasant’s meager fare, bland mush you cook in a copper pot. A few years ago she and I were rambling around the hills above Argegno and she saw a stack of them next to a quarry and asked this fellow if she could buy an entire lot, to make a patio. It’s very original, and quite funny in a way, a patio of stones that give the swimming pool its elegance, place it so beautifully in its wild setting, and yet their rough-hewn softness is from thousands of hours of peasants toiling away. In any case, enjoy.”
“Thank God,” Sandro said, watching him make his way up the path toward the house.
I assumed he and Sandro’s mother were lovers, but sensed this would be a taboo subject with Sandro, who rolled his eyes at Chesil Jones and didn’t say anything more than that he was a blowhard.
When he had disappeared up the path, Sandro pulled me toward him. He wanted to fool around there, in the pool house, but I was nervous about it.
“What about the groundskeeper?” I said. He had been skimming the last few leaves from the pool’s surface when we arrived. Perhaps he was still lurking around.
“Oh, he’s really going to object,” Sandro said. “Maybe he’s watching us right now. Let’s give him a show.”
“No.”
“Well, then we’ll have to be discreet,” he said softly, staring at me, his fingers grazing the back of my knee.
“I’ll just help you out,” he whispered, and pulled me down onto his lap, working the zipper of my jeans, fitting his hand into my underwear. “And no one will know. I promise. Not even your groundskeeper.”
Sandro was generous that way, seemed not to tally what he offered against what he got in return. I had chalked this up to his age, as if maturity meant that pleasing others gave back to him in certain ways. But there was power in this, for him, to watch my face with such scrutiny, to observe the effects of his own touch, as I sat over him on that couch, the two of us silent, me trying to hasten things, because I could not shake the feeling that the groundskeeper was somewhere nearby, watching as Sandro had joked he was.
We spent the whole first part of the day there, reading on the couches in the swimming pool pavilion, Sandro’s arm resting lightly around me, stroking my hair absentmindedly. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but wind brushing through the trees and Sandro turning his page.
I could get used to this place, I told myself. If I could just suffer a bit more time with these rude, rich people. Soon they’d all be gone. “We can’t just show up and not see my mother,” Sandro had said when we planned the trip. “I’ve got to give her a week.” After the family meeting at the Valera factory in just a few days, his mother would return to Milan, and Chesil Jones would go with her. Sandro and I would have the villa all to ourselves, and then I’d go to Monza.
Probably they would just roll out the Spirit of Italy and have me pose in front of it, the team manager said when I spoke to him on the phone. Giddle had reminded me to ask how much I’d be paid. That way, she said, whatever you do or don’t do with it, you’re still making something: money.
I was in the pool, floating on my back, letting my legs sink into the water, when I heard bare feet on the patio stones. The polenta stones. I opened my eyes to the wavering trees, thinking that whoever it was, I would just go on floating and sinking, sinking and floating. A gust of wind sprinkled a few leaves into the water. I smelled cigarette smoke.
“Sanndroo!” a huskily familiar voice said.
It seemed a voice out of a dream, but it was real. Talia Valera, walking toward the pavilion.
“You people swim in March? How ridiculous.”
Sandro had not mentioned she was coming. I made my way to the edge of the pool and got out.
“How is it?” she asked me.
“Warm,” I said.
“Hey, maybe I’ll swim, too. Sandro?”
A moment later she had stripped off her clothes and was naked and walking toward the water. As she took heavy steps toward the edge of the pool, extra flesh on her bottom and the backs of her legs went into a kind of systemwide jiggle.
She dove in, moved across the bottom of the pool silently.
Sandro laughed and stubbed out her cigarette, which she’d left perched on the edge of a table.
She lay on her back, taking large lungfuls of breath in the same way I liked to do, to rise, float, and then slowly sink, then rise and float.
A servant brought lunch down to the pool pavilion, and we ate listening to Talia talk about the various men, and women as well, who had recently become obsessed with her, so much so that she’d had to leave New York. “I was getting bored there anyway,” she said. And then she had gone back to London but her old boyfriend had made a habit of standing below the windows of her flat and crying, and the scene there was boring to her, too, so she’d decided to do her mother a favor and attend the Valera Company meeting on her mother’s behalf. Her mother had gone to India and according to Talia was not coming back.
“Have you ever been to India?” she asked me, aiming her chin up in a slightly arch manner. I realized she was looking at herself in the mirror that hung down across from us in the pavilion.
I shook my head.
“Then you can’t understand,” she said, meeting her own gaze, drawing a lock of her hair down along the side of her face, inspecting her reflection with pleasure and satisfaction. “There’s a lot about the world, about humanity, you just can’t see. No, you absolutely must go to India. Immerse yourself in its colors and smells, in the cycle of life and death . . . you don’t know anything about life, Talia. How can you, if you’ve never been to India?” She changed her tone. “My mother thinks wearing silk saris and burning incense will keep her from killing herself.”
I thought of Gloria, when she’d returned from India the winter before, with an air that wasn’t too far from Talia’s parody of her mother. Gloria had gone to Calcutta and came back announcing to everyone that artists needed to start using more bamboo. She was trying to convince Stanley to work in bamboo. “You work in bamboo,” he’d said, when Sandro and I went there for dinner, to hear about her trip. “But I dance,” Gloria said. “My body is my material.” “Then shut up about bamboo,” Stanley said.
* * *
It came as no surprise that Talia and Sandro’s mother got along famously. Not in a mother-daughter way. More like two warriors taking a bit of time off together from rampaging the enemy. Talia had the right confidence and ease for Sandro’s mother; I could see that. She walked around the villa picking up little treasures and commenting on them, asking the right questions about various tapestries and busts, to the pleasure of her aunt. They were of the same pedigree, which removed the need for snobbery. They sat together, disarmed, and drank large amounts of wine and vodka and made each other laugh. They even made fun of Roberto, Talia walking stiffly across the lawn in her flip-flops as if with a stick up her ass, talking in a German accent, which was a little unfair, given that Roberto was totally and completely Italian, and yet the German accent had a comic logic that I wished I could openly appreciate, but they spoke in low tones and did not address me, and it would have been inappropriate to laugh along with them.
There were more interminable dinners for which we had to “dress,” or rather I did, as we moved slowly through the four long days until their departure. Sandro, as always, wore his one nice jacket, but over his standard uniform of faded black T-shirt, Carhartt pants, and scuffed steel-toed boots. Talia wore various elaborate kimonos and gowns of Sandro’s mother’s, and came to dinner barefoot, and was much complimented by her aunt for looking ravishing in this or that ancient and brightly colored garment, which she would inevitably take off halfway through dinner, revealing that underneath she wore a leotard and jeans, which was what I wished I had
on myself, but I wore the things that Sandro had bought for me in Milan, unable to let go of the idea that I could please his mother by following her rules. I understood, as I followed her rules, that this was only causing her to despise me, but she intimidated me, so I smiled nervously and cleaved to politeness as if it were a lifesaver. It wasn’t.
The first night after Talia arrived, I dreamed that Sandro’s mother was friendly and open, a woman who spoke to me in the same soft tone she’d used when she said “there you are” to the Count of Bolzano. In my dream I was the you and she said it to me. There you are. Her nose was not black. She was not drunk or confused, as she sometimes seemed at the villa. I don’t know what language she spoke in my dream, but whatever it was, it was crystal clear, a language that she and I both understood perfectly. We smiled in complicity over something, some ciphered knowledge. “You know he really loves you,” she said, and then she conveyed a question to me silently, What are you going to do about it? It left a strong residue, that dream, and when I saw her the next morning, her stern gaze was a shock. Don’t think for a second I’m the woman in your dream, it said. There’s no softness for you.
“We are so seldom all together,” signora Valera said one evening. “We should take a photograph,” and she went off to fetch a camera. I offered to take it, to avoid the awkwardness of moving out of the frame. When the photos came back from the developing lab in Bellagio, signora Valera was unhappy. She said she looked old and tired.
“No,” I said. “You look beautiful.”
“I know what beauty is,” she snapped. “I used to be quite good-looking. You wouldn’t understand what it is to have that and then lose it. Every trip to the mirror is a nightmare.”
Talia burst out laughing. It wasn’t clear to me if she was laughing at me or at her aunt.
This inability to interpret was not only unpleasant, it also seemed to perpetuate itself. The less I understood, the less capable I was of understanding the next time someone made a comment that seemed possibly like an insult and someone else laughed. And the signora persisted in forgetting I understood Italian and would turn and say something to Talia, quick, vague, and idiomatic, that I didn’t catch. Talia would look at me. “Zia, she understands.” Sandro’s mother would reply in Italian how inconvenient it was, that usually guests could be discussed openly. I was constantly on alert when Sandro’s mother spoke to anyone but me, and when she spoke to me, even more so. You could say I was growing paranoid, but there were reasons for it.
There were place cards every night, even if there were just the five of us—Talia, Sandro, his mother, the old novelist, and myself. “It’s important to rotate and intermix the guests,” signora Valera said. “If I could, I would have dinners where only some of you were invited, but since you’re all staying here, it’s a bit awkward. But honestly, that’s how I would prefer to do it.” I was never placed next to Sandro. “You are a couple! I mean, how dull, how inane, to sit together!” she said when Sandro protested. “What is there to discuss?” I was always to sit with so-and-so, if not the old novelist, some crumbling viscount or count who would apparently like me. “He’ll be charmed by you.” As if to say, he goes in for that kind of thing (that most of us don’t go in for). She always seemed to seat Sandro next to Talia, free and easy Talia, who reached across the table, joked openly about the stale bread, the bad wine in a box, asked the cook to make her an egg when she didn’t like what was being served, a regional dish called pizzoccheri, heavy and rich with cheese and butter. And she did look good in signora Valera’s gowns, of red or purple silk, with her dark hair, which was now a bit longer, wisps of it almost reaching her chin. I imagined that her decision to cut it short, as it had been when I’d met her, was made under circumstances not unlike the decision to punch herself for Ronnie’s entertainment. A lark, a dare. A why the fuck not. If she had been nicer to me I would have wanted to know Talia Valera. It was always that way with women I found threatening, that there was some unfulfilled longing to be friends. I didn’t know quite why she threatened me. She was full of life and verve and a refreshing bluntness, and yet I wanted her contained instead of celebrated for these qualities I secretly admired.
Her third night at the villa, she appeared at the dinner table wearing what looked like the brown fedora I had given to Ronnie on that secret night long ago. Sandro’s mother smiled at the sight of the hat, and the pleasure in her expression was like the softness of her tone for the Count of Bolzano, it’s you, the way she reserved warmth for certain people in certain moments. The way I had dreamed of her.
“That hat,” she said to Talia, “looks absolutely fabulous on you.”
Talia took it off to show her aunt that it was a Borsalino. My Borsalino. So Ronnie and Talia were sleeping together. The girl on the layaway plan flashed into my thoughts. Her hopeful, young face.
How stupid I’d been to give it to Ronnie, even if I had stolen it to begin with. It was a naive generosity, to establish some connection. He had given it to Talia. See how little you meant? It was possible she’d simply found it in his apartment and claimed it, the way she claimed her aunt’s ornate gowns. Or that Ronnie had forgotten who had given him the hat to begin with. None of those scenarios consoled me much.
“Are we wearing hats tonight?” Chesil Jones asked. “Because there’s one I’ve frankly had my eye on.”
He got up from the table and reappeared in a curious black fur fez with gold and black tassels that flopped down over one eye.
Signora Valera looked at him sternly.
“Take it off,” she said.
The old novelist smiled and began swinging his arms as if to a brass band, humming some kind of official song that the hat seemed to suggest or summon, the tassels that hung over his face bobbing up and down as he jerked his arms.
“Please remove it.”
A servant came with pork chops on a huge silver platter. At the sight of the chops, the old novelist shot up his right arm in salute, exhaling a gin-scented wind.
“You’ll have to leave this table. I mean it.”
“Oh, lighten up, Alba. Why can’t a man have a little fun? I’m not trying to fill his boots. I can promise you that. In any case, they are, ahem, too small for me, way too small. And from the look of his closet, he wasn’t much a wearer of boots. What I have seen are mostly pigskin moccasins by Ferragamo and Hermès, and dainty kerchiefs with the good old ‘T. P.’ embroidered in the Venetian style—”
“Stop,” she said. “Stop it right now. Let the dead rest.”
He looked at her in an almost tender way but did not remove the hat. He took a deep breath. I could feel it, the gearing up for a lecture. Stanley was so right about old men. Sandro and I joked about it. “What are you going to do,” Sandro asked me, “when I get to that stage when I won’t shut up?” “I’ll buy you a reel-to-reel tape recorder like Stanley’s,” I replied.
“All of these silly categories,” the old novelist said, tsking and moving his head slowly back and forth as if in disapproval, the tassels drooped over one side of his big, ruddy face. “The way people whine, oh, I can’t like him, he’s a Fascist. Or, he’s a Communist. A Trotskyist. A pederast. A this. A that. I couldn’t care less if you’re a that. If you wear the official hat of the that.”
He walked over to the sideboard and lifted the small, trapezoidal shade from the lamp there. He traded it for his fez and said, “Look, now I’m a Maoist.” When none of us laughed he took it off and put the fez back on.
“I care if a person is attentive,” he said, reclaiming his seat. “If they seem to have a brain. If there is a genuine quality to their manner—it’s the only way to judge someone.”
“And if my husband were here,” signora Valera said, “he would judge you an idiot. But I will tolerate your nonsense because you’re American and you had a crooked spine, could not fight in the war, and have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The spine is not the only part of mine that’s crooked,” Chesil whispered to me
, grinning in a salacious way. “But she never complains about that.”
He asked the signora if she’d prefer that he’d had a straight spine and might have, who knows, even appeared over Lake Como with the American troops. Could she imagine? Him over Como, under a billowing parachute. “Like an angel,” he said. “I could have been your angel, Alba. But since I wasn’t fit for combat, I was merely a journalist in Naples when the Americans arrived in 1943, and that’s how they came. Softly, on great, white wings. The Italians, what can I say? They were starving, eating boiled cotton, sleeping under rubble. Stepping over their own purple relatives. We didn’t have it much better, just meager rations of fried Spam—”
“What’s that?” Talia asked.
“The innocence of a question. Spam, my child, is . . . ah . . . it’s pig marmalade. It and creamed corn and corpses—these were wartime delicacies. But I should say that we in the press corps did drink wine made from grapes of the Sordo vineyards, and not this bargain-basement rotgut your aunt stocks. But where was I . . . oh, yes, with my crooked spine, stuck merely observing your liberators, these magnificent American soldiers, beautiful blacks who urinated on the king’s throne in the Palazzo Reale. While the Italian mothers called out, ‘Hey, Joe, hey, Joe,’ and attempted to bargain their children on special Allied Forces discount. Conqueror’s credit. Also called rape, but what do I know?”
The Flamethrowers: A Novel Page 26