“One of the penalties of growing old,” she said, making a face. “It’s my right hip and it disturbs my sleep, don’t you know. I must lie on my left side, but sometimes I forget. If you should hear me screeching, it’s only that, my dear. It’s like being on the rack if I land on that poor, crippled hip.”
She patted my arm. “Enjoy your nap, love.”
And then went off.
I had no intention of observing siesta. However, I did want to rid myself of my headache, so I took some aspirin and lay down for, I told myself, only a bit, just until the nagging ache in my head was banished.
But lying down made me dizzy, and I sat up quickly. There was a sudden, violent pain in my head, really violent, and a wave of nausea swept over me. I broke out into beads of perspiration. For a moment the whole room whirled about me and then I got to my feet, clutching at the coverlet of the bed and, making a dash for the bathroom, reeled against the door jamb. I knelt down on the cool tile and leaned over the bowl.
I retched, dryly at first, and then vomited.
It left me spent. I felt like a dishrag. Disconsolately, clutching my clammy forehead, I thought, oh my God, I’ve got the travel bug. On the third day of my vacation! What a kettle of fish.
At the thought of fish I retched again.
When I finally crawled back to the bed I didn’t even get undressed. I kicked off my shoes and lay down. The room swam, I groaned, tears came to my eyes. I felt so sick.
I can’t be sick on a holiday, I told myself, protesting. I don’t have that much time.
And then I dropped off.
• • •
I woke bathed in my own sweat.
I felt weak as a cat, but my headache was gone. I sat up warily, but the nausea was gone too. Yet the thought of food sickened me, and I knew I would eat no dinner that night. Perhaps there was some clear soup in the house. I felt faintly feverish, as if I had a touch of the flu, so I took some more aspirin. They stayed in my stomach only a short time, and then sent me to the bathroom again. Only a thin stream of water dribbled past my lips … bile … I could taste the bitterness of the medicine, the aspirin.
I heard movements outside my closed door and opened it. Lucrezia was arranging fresh flowers, from the garden, in a terra cotta bowl. She was disgustingly cheerful.
“The signorina slept well? So, now you have some cheese, ham, si? Something cold to drink?”
“Nothing to eat,” I said wanly. “But yes, I’d like a cold drink. I’m thirsty. But as for food, uh uh. It seems I picked up a little something. My stomach.”
I put my hand on it. “Empty,” I said. “I threw up. And I thought I was such a hardy sort.”
She was businesslike and helpful. “Ha,” she said. “Sit down, signorina, I bring you something.” She snapped her fingers. “You will be better, fine, like that. Sit, please, I come right back.”
She was as good as her word. She returned with a tray on which was a bottle of Fiucci water, a tall glass, and a small box from which she extracted two large, brownish lozenges. She filled the glass with the bottled Fiucci water, told me to open my mouth, popped the two lozenges into it and then gave me the water.
“Drink … quick … it’s a good girl.”
The tablets had a kind of licorice taste. “What are they?” I asked.
“Entero-vioform. Good for stomach business. In half an hour I give you two more. And now keep sitting, because I bring you some Fernet Branca. Is the best thing. Then you begin to feel better.”
When she brought the bottle of Fernet Branca, she poured about a jiggerful into a small wine glass. It smelled horrid and tasted even worse. She watched me grimace and laughed. “Not nice? Americans no like. Italians? We drink if for aperitive. Is good for digestion.”
For a moment I thought I’d have to escape to the bathroom again, but once the Fernet Branca was down the taste evaporated.
“Thanks, Lucrezia,” I said.
“Prego, is nothing at all. Now you see, signorina, you feel better subito.”
And after a while I did begin to feel better. I told Lucrezia so, but said I wouldn’t want any dinner, and was wondering if there was some kind of thin broth in the house. She said yes, there was, and that I was very wise. “Also,” she warned me, “you don’t drink the tap.” She tapped the bottle of Fiucci. “You drink this. Better for you, until the stomach, the digestion, is well again. Now you have your color back again, signorina.”
She pulled me up. “Now go out and breathe the air. The best thing for you.” She went back to her flowers. “The signora, she gets up soon anyway.”
I went outside, through the french doors, into the warm, glorious sunlight. There was an umbrella table, like that of the Monteverdis, and I sat down under it, sighing. Wondering if there would be more headaches and more nausea. But after a while I started feeling more like myself again, and, stretching out in a lounge chair, closed my eyes.
It was just what the doctor ordered, I thought. This incredible sun, and the faint breeze in the trees. Oh, dear Lucrezia. She had cured me!
I was half asleep, I suppose, because first I thought it was a dream, hearing the voice calling out. In my dream someone was saying something … from far off …
I opened my eyes and heard it again.
“Ecco … signorina …”
“What?” I mumbled, and then was wide awake.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Gianni peering over the wall between the gardens. He smiled dazzlingly and raised a hand. “Hello, are you asleep?”
“I was,” I said. “But someone woke me up.”
“Oh, you mean me,” he said disarmingly.
“What is it, Gianni?”
“Come,” he said. “I paint you.”
“Not in my present condition.”
“What means that?”
I got up and walked across the lawn to him. “It means I have a touch of the wobblies,” I told him. “Traveler’s Trouble. I lost my breakfast and for a while thought I might be dying. But Lucrezia gave me some pills and something ghastly called Fernet Branca and now I feel better.”
“You don’t like Fernet Branca?” he asked, surprised.
“Let’s say I can take my medicine like a man, and that’s as much as I can offer in favor of Fernet Branca.”
“Hum, that’s funny,” he said, frowning. “Here, we like it very much. It’s wonderful for the digestion.”
“Which is why I took it.”
We were both leaning on the top of the brick wall. If the wall hadn’t been between us, our heads wouldn’t have been so close. As it was, his face was so near to mine that I could feel the waft of his breath. “Your eyelashes are too long,” I said, perhaps because of a sudden silence that had fallen on us, perhaps because he was looking intently at my mouth. Perhaps because he had a certain magnetism I found a little overwhelming.
He looked a little astonished and then he laughed. “Shall we measure them, then?” he asked. “Yours and mine?” He put out a finger and swept it across my own lashes.
“Like stars your eyes are,” he said.
“Nonsense.”
“You come let me paint you?”
“No, but if you’re painting I’d be interested to see.”
He pointed to the gate near the adjoining wings of the house. “I meet you there,” he said, with mock solemnity. “You won’t be late?”
“Gianni, you’re an idiot,” I said, laughing, and we faced each other a second later at the aperture of the open gate. “So,” he said. “Right on time.” He pretended to consult his watch. “American girls aren’t so bad after all.”
Laughing, feeling much better, I walked through the gate and across the lawn with him. There was an easel set up near the table where that morning I had had coffee. A partly finished canvas, of the view below, was on the easel, and there was a small, rickety table with brushes in jars, and a paint-smeared palette.
I saw at once that Gianni’s work was excellent, strong yet sensitive.
I looked at it admiringly. This young man had inherited, from his forebears, the great talent of the region. It was in the blood, I told myself, passing on from generation to generation, from century to century.
“Oh, Gianni,” I said, and didn’t think it necessary to say more.
“It’s all right?”
“You must know,” I said. “It’s sublime. Oh, how I envy you.”
“Florentines paint,” he said negligently. “Or they work in metals, like Cellini. I would be a sculpter, sooner than this, but — ”
He raised his shoulders.
“No abilities there,” he said. “Just the brush, and the knife.”
“It’s enough,” I said. “It’s wonderful, what you can do.”
“I can do portraits too,” he said. “I paint you, yes?” He put a hand to his cheekbones. “These are good,” he said, and from his own face transferred his hands to mine. “Fine planes, like marble,” he murmured. “Now, when I see a face like that, if I could take the stone and drive the chisel into it … and sculpt such lovely features …”
He took his hands away.
“But I can not. It’s not the same with brush and oil. The colors fade, the canvas rots. I am only a little painter. They won’t hang me in the Uffizzi.”
“Maybe they will.”
He brightened a bit. “Maybe they will,” he agreed. “My master, Antonioni, says maybe they will.” He laughed infectiously. “You know? When I am dead for a hundred years. One hundred years from now maybe Gianni Monteverdi hangs in the Uffizzi. But, cara, I won’t know!”
He made me sit down in a chair. “I’ll make a sketch of you,” he said. “Quick … fifteen minutes. You want to see how you look? I show you.”
“Gianni, I feel like a rag doll,” I objected.
“Forget. I don’t draw a rag doll. I sketch a good, pure face. And I sign it, give it to you, and some day, who knows, you make money with it.”
He chuckled again. “One hundred years from now.”
His laugh was deep and vital. I thought, Italian men were different from American men. Oh, yes. They were so damned masculine. They looked at a woman in a different way, had strange, exciting voices, were assertive, dominating. They were men, and you were a woman. I sat, posing for Gianni Monteverdi, and I swear I felt beautiful, felt like part of the sunlight, like the dazzling, multi-colored dragonfly that flitted through the air only a few yards in front of me.
Finally he threw down the crayon.
“Okay,” he said. “Come and look. Tell me if you like it.”
I got up and went over to the easel.
“Gianni, it’s a wonderful sketch. But it’s too flattering.”
“Is?” He squinted at me and then looked at the sheet of sketch paper again. He shook his head. “No, darling, not at all. You look better than this.” He picked up a piece of charcoal, signed the sketch with a flourish. Then tore the sheet off the sketch pad. He presented it to me.
“From Gianni,” he said. “With love.”
“I’ll keep it,” I said, “forever.”
“And you think of me when you look at it?”
“Certainly.”
He gazed into my eyes. Put a hand on my hair. “You could say thank you,” he said, huskily.
“Thank you, Gianni.”
“It’s the best you can do? Say a few words?”
And, without knowing how I got there, I was in his arms. His lips were on mine, warm, questing. His hands threaded through my hair. “Caw,” a bird said, in flight, and there was the tinkling knell of a cowbell somewhere. A light breeze shivered the leaves in the trees.
Agitated, I dropped the sheet of drawing paper.
“Oh, goodness, am I de trop?” a light voice asked, and we sprang apart. It was Francesca, in a lovely, lime-green dress, her hair piled high on her shapely head. She had gardener’s shears in her hand, and a big, fan-shaped basket of rattan.
“I didn’t mean to make an interference,” she said. Her pretty face was mischievous.
Gianni looked sheepish. I’m sure I did too. Francesca walked past us, clicking her shears. And then her daughter, little Eleanora, came out of the house. She saw Gianni and then me, and ran over to us, found the sketch Gianni had done of me.
“Ah,” she said softly. “Bellissima. Che bella, bella.”
“Isn’t it nice?” I said, when she handed it back to me. “And now I must go. My hostess won’t know where I am.”
“I’ll come with you,” the little girl said.
“Fine, darling.”
She put her hand in mine. The ubiquitous basket was hooked over her arm. And when we went through the gate to the other side of the house, she looked up at me thoughtfully and then said, “Signorina, would you like to see my secrets?” She tapped the basket.
“You mean it?”
“Um hum.”
“Well, then, I’d love to, of course.”
“Then come, let’s sit down here.” She led me over to the twisted pine where the dog, Paolo, had been buried. She settled herself on the grass, asked me if I was comfortable and then opened her basket. It was shaped like an inverted garden hat, with a snap closing, and she was very businesslike about it, parting the snaps with a small fingernail, and then putting the basket down on the ground.
After which, one by one, she lifted out her treasures. There was a pair of earrings, obviously filched from her mother’s vanity chest, a tiny teddy bear with one glass eye missing and a worn sticker that said JAPAN. There was also a variety of rings, cheap little trinkets made for a child’s small fingers, and some little glass beads in a clear plastic tube.
A tangle of gilt chain necklets, discarded perhaps by her mother, an empty matchbox with a colored picture of San Gimignano on one side and Siena on the other, a tiny address book with a fleur de lys cover. The basket was filled to overflowing. “Oh oh,” Eleanora said suddenly, and I saw a cookie like the one I had been given earlier in the day. She seemed quite embarrassed, but was mistress of the situation. “I thought I had given them all to Mama.”
“It’s all right, I won’t tell,” I said. “Give it to me.”
She handed it over, a trifle flushed, and I put it in my pocket. She was about to reload the basket again when I caught sight of something else.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s dirty, don’t touch it.”
“But what is it?”
“A handkerchief, that’s all.”
I don’t know why I did it, but I suddenly reached over and pulled it out. I thought, at first that it was only soiled, as the child had said, that the brown stain was dust, earth ground into it. But it was only for a moment, and then I knew what the brown discoloration was. It was a particular kind of brown stain.
It was, in fact, blood.
“Why do you keep this?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was hers, that’s all. I liked her. Capisco? She was my friend.”
“Who?”
“The signora.”
And then I saw the raised initials, embroidered in the cambric handkerchief. M. d’A. In one of the corners. Fine linen, crumpled and stained, with hand embroidery.
M. d’A.
Mercedes d’Albiensi.
“Where did you find it?” I asked, careful not to sound alarmed.
“When she fell.”
“Fell?”
“Yes, from the ladder.”
“From the ladder? What was she doing on a ladder?”
“Cutting away the vines.” She pointed, indicating the top story of the house. “I was helping her. She said, ‘Nora, go in the house and get me the big shears.’ You know where they are, signorina? In the shed, in the courtyard. So I went there, and brought back the shears. But she was lying on the ground. I never saw someone like that, signorina. I thought her head was off. It looked like that. I thought — ”
There was a quiet horror in the child’s eyes.
“Then,” she said, “sh
e was dead. Mama said she didn’t know it, that when you are dead you don’t know it, and I was not to grieve.”
My mind was whirling. I had assumed that my aunt had died of a heart attack. One always takes it for granted, with the aged, that it must have been a coronary.
But apparently it had been something quite different.
“Your mother was right,” I said. “You musn’t grieve. Just remember your friend with love and think only of the good times you had. And now I’d like to ask a favor of you.”
“Yes, signorina?”
“It would be very nice if you would let me take the handkerchief. I know she was your friend, but she was my aunt. Would you mind very much?”
There was an inward battle. Finally, sighing, she nodded. “If you wish, signorina,” she said, with some regret.
“Thank you very much. It’s kind of you. And thanks for letting me see your secrets. You have lovely things in that basket. And now I must go and talk to Elizabeth. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
We parted at the gate, she with her basket and I with my drawing by Gianni Monteverdi … and in my pocket a stale cookie and something else.
A bloody handkerchief. I felt as if it were burning a hole there.
Chapter Six
I waited until that evening, when we were having aperitivi in the garden, to speak to Elizabeth Wadley about the accidental death of my aunt. I decided not to tell her what Eleanora had said, but rather to ask outright. In other words, I wanted to take her unawares.
I had slipped easily into calling her by her first name, and I said, abruptly perhaps, but wanting her first reaction, “Elizabeth, how did my aunt die?”
There wasn’t even a second’s hesitation. “Because of a total lack of sense,” she said crisply. “She simply declined to admit to the infirmities of age, and went on acting like a schoolgirl. Well, she was a narcissist, of course, anyone would tell you that. She was Queen of the May for so long that she thought herself indestructible. God wouldn’t dare let any harm come to her! She’d be alive today if she hadn’t been so bloody foolhardy.”
I waited, looking inquiringly at her, and she went on. “Well, I assumed, of course, that you knew,” she said. “She was on the ladder, pruning some parasite vines that were choking the trees round the house. Never mind having Pietro tend to it. Oh no, she had to do it herself. Pride goeth before a fall, my dear. At any rate, she was hacking away at a great rate and the ladder must have slipped. After all, she was nearly eighty. She fell a hundred feet to her death.”
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 70