Nicolà laughs. “As you must know, we represent everything. And I will find you a fondo. What is it for?”
Susan explains her new scheme and Nicolà is fascinated. “And Susan, the ‘staging’ you mention. That’s not done here and it should be. Often these venerable properties are pretty dour. I tell the owners to buy new lampshades and linens and to spruce up the kitchen, paint walls that haven’t been touched in thirty years. They don’t want to get rid of their grandmother’s madia or buy a high-end stove. They don’t realize that buyers have changed. The rustic charm doesn’t charm as it used to. Especially the bone-hard living room furniture. We must talk about this. And the gardens of magnificent places can look weedy and bedraggled as you drive in with Russian bajillionaires, or Americans, excuse me, who expect to buy what’s taken centuries to make, but require a sanitized vision of what that is. The clients now are not like previous waves, when they wanted adventures in restoration. Now people want everything perfect when they deposit their suitcases all filled with electronic devices and spa cosmetics. I had a woman weep when she saw a villa’s huge array of aluminum cookware—a hundred pots of all sizes. She said it gives the Alzheimer’s. Flowers—bloom on demand. Pizza oven, yes, though they almost never use it. No power outage! Instant Internet. And yet they long for the mellow ambiance that drew them here in the first place. I can’t imagine who buys those big corporate makeovers of castles and huge farm complexes, those soulless pseudo-Tuscany re-creations. Some decorator swoops down from London and wrenches everything into Scandinavian Gustavian gray. Those places are deadly dull. We—Brian and I—are after the authentic experience. But without anything dreary.” She’s talking a mile a minute. Ranting.
“I get that. Not easy. Walk the line,” Susan responds. “Truth be told, we’re maybe a bit like those picky renters ourselves. We aren’t too thrilled when the iron pipes send up a rank, dank smell from the bowels of the earth. And what do Italians have against insulation around doorways? But you are right, it’s disappointing to be in a denuded place. There’s that perfect point between tradition and the present. By the way, what’s a madia?”
“Every house had one—a chestnut bin where bread rose. Usually drawers under the bin part and what do you say, cupboard. The awkward thing is, because you must raise the top to use it, you can’t put anything on top when it’s not in use.”
“Oh, that’s what it is! We have one in the kitchen. It’s beautiful but in the way. Julia stores bowls in it. I’ll have to tell her she should be kneading bread. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I’ve seen one left open and used as a bar at a restaurant. Clever.”
Susan likes Nicolà. She could talk all morning. “Listen, will you and Brian come to our house for dinner? I know this seems quick, but I’d love for you to meet my friends and I promise a great dinner—not that I will cook!”
* * *
—
The three women have decided that all winter they will invite friends on Friday nights. Julia will use those dinners as primary research for her Learning Italian. They’ve agreed that by Thursday, the guest list must be set so that everyone can do their bit. Susan, the flowers and table, Julia the food, Camille the shopping and sous-chef duties.
Susan describes Julia’s writing/cooking project to Nicolà, and Camille’s blooming interest in making art after putting it off for decades. “She’s revving up. It’s like she’s orbiting the moon looking for the right place to land.” Susan puts on her coat and holds out her hand to Nicolà. “I was nervous to come in with my awful Italian.” She pulls out of her pocket the piece of paper where she’d written Vorrei affittare un fondo. I would like to rent a fondo.
Nicolà laughs and takes the scrap of paper from her. “When you are fluent, I’ll frame this for you.”
Susan heads toward the cobbled Roman road for home. She walked into town with a list of past participles in hand, as Kit suggested. All the way back she practices.
Winter. Colin and I rise to a white sea of frothy fog in the valley below us. It’s thrilling to throw open the shutters and lean out into the aria fresca. All morning, the sea rises, finally enveloping the house, and then the vapors burn off in the midday sun. I shake three scorpions out of my boots stored in the barn. Our wool socks smell of the sheep they came from. Colin tightens the shutter fittings so northern winds won’t fling them about in the night.
“You must have a mind of winter,” poet Wallace Stevens said. I do: I am planning major accomplishments over the closed-in months. Not that winter ever gets Minnesota-serious here. But stone houses hold a chill. We’re pretty snug with radiators that lightly clang four musical notes when they start up, and with a scaldaletto, a fuzzy kind of mattress pad that all Italians I know use from November until April. It’s electric. With warm down above and the plushy thing below, you feel like a humid, snoring bear in a cave.
First—I’m having a party. The holidays are coming and before my new neighbors scatter with their visiting families, it’s time I introduced them to my best Italian friends and some of the foreigners. And I want to celebrate. I have wild holly on the land, and mistletoe in the crotches of almond trees. My house will be filled with roses.
I can flat lay down a feast though I’m not inspired in the pastry/cake department. From a woman in town I can order a brilliant hazelnut roulade. I love winter food—short ribs, my mother’s potatoes dauphinois, pork with red cabbage and chestnuts, mushrooms over polenta—all odes to winter.
* * *
—
When I was growing up in Coral Gables, Minnie, our housekeeper, used to tell me that fate happens in threes; whether bad or good or bad, she believed our Lord sends things in bundles of three.
I’m going for three good.
One: After the visit to Dr. Caprini (meaning goats, how wild), I felt exultant. Who could ever expect a mystical experience while lying on an examining table? When I was gelled and connected to the sonar (stomach still concave), and the aqueous image of that tiny splotch of gray and black smaller than a bay shrimp (head apparent) appeared, I almost crushed Colin’s hand. I wanted to shout! And then I wanted to cry and did. Dr. Caprini seemed excited, too, and didn’t make me feel worried at all about being as they term it an “elderly primigravida,” meaning someone over thirty-five pregnant for the first time. She was, instead, marveling that I am pregnant, given my age (eighty-five percent of women are sterile by forty-four) and the inclination of my uterus. “This is one determined little creature,” was her opinion. She has capable cool hands, iron-gray hair pulled into a tight bun, and a wedge of a chin. No little whippersnapper is going to pull anything on her watch. I liked her. She said, “You’ll be fine. You have a young body. You are not having twins and for that I’m grateful. One is enough.” I laughed. I got chills. “The sex isn’t visible quite yet,” she said, squinting at the blurry squiggle.
“That’s fine—we’re not sure we want to know anyway.” More tests later, books to read, a vitamin to take, a diet high in protein and vegetables—it’s all easy for now. My breasts are like Eden rosebuds about to bloom, pressing to open, explosive. (Spindly roses along the side of the house in Coral Gables. I’m missing my mother every day.)
Two: Colin’s team won an award for innovative design and a commendation for excellence in adaptation to site. The work was a university student center in Manchester. Next, we learned that Colin’s London firm will expand early in the next year. They’re opening offices in Dubai and Miami. Dubai because it’s Dubai, Miami because three major commissions came through—a museum, a municipal complex, and a destination pier with shops and restaurants. He found out on the last trip that he has a choice of staying in London, with more flex time to be working on Italian designs, or the chance to spend part time in the Miami office, if he wants, on a project-based schedule. This means life here becomes easier; the brutal London commute can lessen. And Florida—if there had been a job available after my mother died
, I’d probably be there yet. The place I always crave is far inside the idea most people have of Florida. You have to dig for my Florida, but it’s there, a primitive landscape of hot sand and rioting foliage and alligators with comical wide jaws and trees dripping with moss, and coasts as you imagine them. Should Little Miss X draw her first breath there? Or should Young Master X draw his in Florence, the air of the Medicis, intrigue of the renaissance, the opposite of primitive? Colin sees all this as excitement and possibility, not as stress, so I am seeing it that way, too, only occasionally seizing up with uncertainty and, well, stress. (No Italian word exists for stress—it’s imported from English: lo stress.)
We are looking at remodeling my small stone barn. If Colin outfits it with a large-scale printer and other equipment he needs, he can work more from here. Right now, he has his drawing boards set up in a spare room. An architect in town lets him print at his office. Not the best.
There’s little light in the stone barn, only that coming in from the arched door built wide enough for a cart, but he can embed a skylight on the back side that doesn’t show, if we can obtain permission. The cart door can be all glass, as there’s a side door. To stand beside the entrance, an astrolabe. I will surprise him, if I can get Susan to find another one. When I looked up the function of the astrolabe, I came across a reference to Heloise and Abelard, those philosophical star-crossed lovers who were passionately romantic in the early eleven hundreds. Teacher/pupil affairs rarely come to good ends. Heloise’s furious uncle had Abelard castrated for his dalliance with his niece but not before a son was conceived. He was called Astralabe. I think they felt that their love was as dimensional as the heavens and bambino Astralabe symbolized their astronomical love. But when I talk this out to Colin, he only says, “Hmm. We should name ours Sonogram?”
“Well, what about Abelard. That is a nice name.”
“You’re kidding. Richard is a nice name. James. Placido. Alessandro. But Abelard? He’d be Abe or Lard.” He pushes me back on the bed, kissing my neck, blowing in my ear, tickling me until I’m kicking my legs in the air. “But I am partial to Balthazar.”
Three: We’re getting married. Gesù! I’m unaccountably thrilled. As is Colin. We did not care before that we were arrested in boyfriend-girlfriend mode. Now, every night at dinner we talk about when and where and how. We’re listening to music in the kitchen, dancing between checking on the green beans and the chicken twirling on the rotisserie in the oven. I toss out the idea of marrying in Coral Gables, in the same chapel where my parents married and I took first communion. (I was intensely religious for about six months.) I suggest our garden this spring with the jasmine dangling over the pergola and the profligate Lady Banksia rose arching over the door. But really, do I want to bulge in an ephemeral wedding dress? It should be sooner. He imagines Greece. Just us on an island. On New Year’s Day? Since neither of us has been married before, the documentation required for foreigners is less baroque.
Actually, there are more than three fates right now. In my own realm, lines are coming to me as I fall asleep, as I wake up, and I’m remembering them whole.
By day, I’m writing poems that surprise me. I’m allowing in fragments of emotions, bits of esoteric knowledge I pick up in my reading, and a looser form, the lines broken more casually. When each poem is done, I turn back to my three women’s adventures or to my Margaret project, which took a jolting turn when we were examining the barn and I came upon her suitcase she left during her back-and-forth travels to the U.S. after she sold her Casa Gelsomino.
I dread opening the barn, since two barbagianni live there. Last time I went out to store the summer fans, I opened the door and the two owls, tall as one-year-old children, stared down from a beam and flapped their wings—a three-foot wingspan at least. Their eyes drilled into me. They croaked otherworldly sounds and I spooked, dropped the fans, and ran, waving my arms and screaming.
Today they are not in residence. We have an archive of luggage stored on the back shelves, from backpacks to duffels, an array of roll-ons and giant folding monsters I hope never to travel with again. Hers is stacked with those. “Can you hoist it into the house?” I ask Colin. “I’ll go through it later.”
We find a friend’s battered calfskin bag filled with dried-up tubes of oil paints, stiff brushes, rags, his painting slippers, and on a rolled canvas a quite decent still life of blue plums in a pewter bowl. (The rime of light on the fruit worked its way into a poem.)
“Oh, here’s Jeremy!” Colin says. “He’s got work at the Tate now. Wonder if he wants this back.” Jeremy lingered too long one summer.
“You could ask. I think he abandoned it. Such juicy-looking plums—we could hang them in here as a memorial to all the nights he kept us up talking about sight lines and Emil Nolde’s work, and the grad student he was poking.”
* * *
—
Colin hires a man with a truck to haul off Jeremy’s ruined art supplies plus tons of accumulated nonsense that piles up so slowly that you don’t realize what a nasty burden you have—mildewed suitcases, split hoses, a table with a broken leg, paint cans, plant fertilizers turned to cement, junk, junk. Emptied, the barn suddenly looked spacious enough to imagine white plaster walls, cleaned-up stone floors smoothed for a couple of centuries by hooves, and a long worktable with some cool industrial lighting over it.
After lunch, I open Margaret’s suitcase. She’s tucked sachets of potpourri in the side pockets. The heap of clothes gives off a scent of ferny woods, mildew, and spice, maybe curry. The suitcase must have been stored for five years. I don’t find the stack of paper immediately, a thick pile of pages tied up with a thin yellow ribbon stuffed inside a handbag. The title reads Incendiary Remarks, with Margaret Merrill handwritten beneath. I thumb through the pages of single-spaced type, some scarred with cross-outs and amendments in the purple ink she favored in her Mont Blanc pen. “Colin,” I shout down the stairs, “I can’t believe this—Margaret has left a manuscript!” I empty the suitcase out on the bed: a jacquard silk bathrobe that looks like a man’s, three sweaters, those orange suede boots I always admired, a bottle of Dior perfume gone sour, cotton nightgown, black skirt, then at the bottom a box holding a string of pearls and the Murano glass beads I once gave her but never saw her wear. Now I think she found them tacky.
Colin bounds in, riffles through the pile of clothes, and picks up a blue sweater shot through with grosgrain ribbons. “That’s pretty. We’re finding treasure today. Would you wear that? Or that dress I brought in the house before, the one that looks like it emerged whole from the Grand Bazaar?”
“So flashy. Oh, maybe I will. But, look. This is definitely a manuscript. I don’t recognize it as anything in print. It has to be an unpublished book that has moldered in our barn for years. Can you realize what this means? A lost Margaret Merrill?”
“Well, yes, to you. I doubt if the world will tilt on its axis.” We push back the clothes, sit down on the bed, and start reading. A novel? The epigraph says: I prefer a drop of blood to a glass of ink. (George Seferis.)
“Rings true. Margaret despised theory.” We turn to the first page, which begins: Rain fell in great gray slats across the valley. I was newly home, still relishing home, my cantilevered stone steps to the dining room that to my satisfaction always give guests a moment of vertigo, the mustard velvet chairs around the fireplace, windows that open to the view of a gigantic tower in the adjacent palazzo. “Hmm, that’s Casa Gelsomino. Is this autobiographical?” I flip forward and read randomly. “Has she written a memoir?”
“I’ll leave it to you. I want to get some work done.” Colin picks up the blue sweater again and smells it. “You remember, she always had a scent. Not fresh like you, sheets drying in the sun. More like incense that priests flick around a coffin, sort of smoky and forbidden. Or worse, like she just walked out of a hashish den where someone was murdered.” He laughed.
“She did have a n
oir quality.”
* * *
—
Margaret. Maud and Freya were easy to investigate and easy to bring to life on paper. I loved Margaret well and then later not as much. When I read my San Rocco poems in a Washington bookstore—I was thrilled to be invited—she happened to be in town. I’d known her several years by then, my witty, so-worldly friend, well known across a spectrum of writing. My early years—when I wondered if I would surpass A Glass of Morning Rain, my first book that got me the position at Boulder. I was the case-study “struggling” writer, dealing with rejections and dismissals, trying to get another book published, hell, trying to get poems published. Then I did. Things broke open for me when I sent out my work based on Italy. (Maybe I’d just learned to write after seasons of solitude at my desk.) (How I miss that concentration I could achieve then.) One sequence was an abecedarius, based on the letters of the Italian alphabet; another was inspired by Italian words I liked. I tried to fit each word—cipresso, mirtillo, girasole, luna, chiacchierone, sera, cielo—into landscape or event. I think there were thirty in that series. Most popular, if I can even use that word in regard to poetry, were the prose poems about daily life in San Rocco. I worked to make them authentic, wishing I could glue onto the pages the yellow broom blooming on the hillsides, the worn-out ropes of the dwarf who carries wood on his back to the pizza ovens, the walking sticks Leo carves, the navy-blue print housedress aprons older women wear at home—all the tactile sensations that constantly pour on me in this wondrous place. That work was my first book, A Glass of Morning Rain. Okay, pun on my name, sorry.
The Washington reading went well. You can tell when an audience is with you. I began to enjoy the experience and I felt braced by Margaret in the back. Team Kit, I thought. During the Q&A after I finished, someone waved a hand and asked, “What is the reaction of local people to your book? Do they like the poems?” I didn’t know that anyone local would ever read them and was just forming that answer when out of nowhere, Margaret, looking like a thirties movie star in a white linen suit, stood up and said, “No! They won’t. They’ll think foreigners should mind their own business. They’ll invent ways they’re condescended to, and besides they don’t like contemporary forms. To them, poems need to rhyme.” She sat down.
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