On the way out, they passed the little gift shop. He bought her a postcard of Constable’s painting. “Here,” he said, “to remember.”
They parked in a field, the cathedral in the distance. He spread the rug on the grass. She sat, bundled in her coat, a thick scarf around her neck. “Look what I have,” he said. He withdrew a hamper from the boot. Inside, a cold chicken. A loaf of bread. A tin of foie gras. A bottle of Saint-Émilion. Two glasses. “Here, try this,” he said, smearing a wedge of foie gras on a hunk of bread. “Best in the world, eh?”
“Mmmm, delicious,” she answered.
He opened the wine.
Later, they drove home in the rain. That night he did come upstairs with her. The next day was Sunday. They both slept in. When they awoke, they made love again. Later, he went to the store and brought back eggs, bread, and cheese, and they had a picnic in bed. Miles Davis and Roxy Music on the stereo. She didn’t put her clothes back on until she left the next morning.
He took her places. They drove through Cornwall to Arthur’s castle. The Brenner Pass. The Ardennes. The cold coastline of Normandy past the unending forest of white crosses. They stayed in a hotel in Caen, and Cesca could barely suppress a giggle as he registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Dickwood, her hands in her pockets. His French was better than hers. They could hardly wait to get upstairs.
Before dinner they wandered the streets, admired William the Conqueror’s castle. In the restaurant they ordered tripes à la mode and goose en daube. In between courses, they drank calvados, which was, as he explained, the local custom. They finished the meal with Pont-L’Évêque and a ripe Camembert, washed down with even more calvados. He admired the way she could eat, heartily like a young girl or an athlete in training yet never gaining an ounce.
Some weekends they didn’t drive at all. Instead one time they flew from Heathrow to Verbier, another to Lech. He was a good skier. But so was she, maybe even a little better. Other weekends they did nothing. Went to a movie, dined at London restaurants. She met his friends. Slept in on gray London mornings and while having tea in bed listened without guilt to the peal of church bells.
Some of the trips were less successful. In early spring on a drive through Holland, the Alfa broke down in Scheveningen, and they had to wait three days in a nearly empty, hideous modern hotel that was operating with a skeleton staff because it was off-season. The stretch of beach was deserted, the chairs stacked. Freddie was constantly on the phone with his mechanic back in London. They spent a lot of time drinking Bols in the bar and watching the roil of the North Sea through the windows. The manager, a plump blonde, kept apologizing and telling them to come during the summer. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” she said.
“Never trust a country that doesn’t make its own wine,” Freddie said on their second day. “England excepted, of course.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“I wouldn’t mind being stuck in France, but this is bloody awful.”
Finally on Tuesday the spare part arrived. Freddie wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. He disassembled the engine, lying its parts in an orderly fashion on a clean sheet in the hotel car park. “The Dutch also don’t make cars,” he said. “It’s like that old line from the Orson Welles film about the Swiss and cuckoo clocks. What have the Dutch done? Edam and tulips. Dreadful country.”
By Wednesday evening they were back in London. For the rest of the spring Freddie refused to drive anywhere near the Low Countries. “If we wanted wet weather and foul food, we could just stay in England,” he said.
Spring melted into summer. Cesca had decided not to return to Amagansett. She would visit Aurelio in July, and then she and Freddie had a big trip planned in August. They were going to drive from Paris through Dijon, Mâcon, and Lyon to Geneva and across the alluvial plains of the Po Valley past Milan to Venice. He told her it would take several weeks. His annual holiday. There are many chefs along the way who would be gravely disappointed if we did not stop by, he said.
Kitty flew to visit her for two weeks before the Venice trip. She had been in Barcelona first, visiting Aurelio. Cesca insisted that she stay in her flat as she was spending most of her nights at Freddie’s, on Lowndes Square.
“I like him very much,” said Kitty. “Go easy on him.”
She and her daughter were having lunch on Beauchamp Place. The previous evening she had met Freddie for the first time. He took them to a restaurant on the Royal Hospital Road, and insisted she order the pig’s trotters with chicken mousseline, sweetbreads, and morels. It was fabulous. “English food is getting better every year,” he said, “even if it isn’t English food at all.” At the end of the meal the proprietor, who was French, sat with them and had a brandy. He tore up the bill. Freddie had been one of his early investors.
Kitty had many friends in London. A Persian woman who was married to a Cambridge don and was the London editor for a well-known American literary journal. Several art dealers. The director of the Royal Ballet. The second wife of a duke. The head of a large advertising firm who had once been her lover. A Rothschild. Even a member of the Royal Family whom she had met in Mustique. She invited Cesca and Freddie to several events. A gallery opening at the Serpentine. A dinner party at Spencer House.
At the end of her visit, Kitty asked her daughter if she knew the old wives’ tale about Venice. No, Cesca answered. Kitty laughed. “It’s probably nothing. But they say if you go to Venice with someone you aren’t married to you’ll never marry them.”
Then it was July. Cesca had never been happier. The trip to Barcelona was like a homecoming. Aurelio, although too thin to her eye, looked wonderful. He was still the handsomest man she’d ever seen. Handsomer than Freddie even. As usual, he was dressed in old clothes that hung off his tall frame. His pants were spattered with paint, and he wore a Basque sweater and a thin cotton scarf around his neck. Espadrilles. He had been waiting at the airport. He ran to her when he saw her and picked her up in his arms with a whoop. He had hired a gypsy band to serenade her as she entered the arrivals hall.
They chatted in Catalan all the way to his apartment. When the cab stopped, people on the street greeted Aurelio. He lived on the top two floors of a house along the narrow corridor of the Barrio Chino, the city’s red-light district. Laundry hung drying between the buildings, blocking out the sun to the street below. There were several women standing around outside his building smoking. “This is where I live,” he said, grabbing her suitcase. “Come on up.”
“Are those?” she asked on the stairs.
“Yes, prostitutes. This street is for the regular ones. A few blocks down you find the transvestites. Sometimes they model for me.”
It was a simple apartment, neat as a Carthusian’s cell. The lower level consisted of a combination bedroom, kitchen, and living room. There was a bed in the corner, with a blue blanket stretched across it. An old sofa. A stove and a small refrigerator. There was no phone or television. In the center was a small square bathtub that doubled as a sink. The toilet was on the landing. By the bed were a few well-thumbed books in Catalan. Unamuno. Saint Augustine. Vasari’s Lives. Several photographs. A notebook. She looked inside the cupboards. They were nearly empty. Boxes of pasta. Tins of sardines. Tea. Salt.
“No wonder you look so skinny,” she said.
“You sound just like Mare.” He laughed. “Don’t worry about me. Come. Let me show you my work.”
He led her up a circular metal stair to the top floor of the building. It was a wide-open room bathed in natural light. There were canvases stacked everywhere. It was obvious at once that he had made a breakthrough.
She was both proud and envious. Her own work would never come to this level, she knew, even if she had been working as hard on it as she should have. The final months at school had been a blur. She found herself going to class less and less. One or two of her teachers had tried to talk to her, encourage her to be more focused, but she wasn’t interested in the limitations being forced on her. It becam
e increasingly obvious to her that the whole notion of art school was artificial and absurd. How could one grade creativity? The only purpose was to provide young artists an environment to work for several years and a way for the instructors to earn a living. Art school was an oven, a proving ground. Nothing more. At the end you simply emerged. It distressed her. Aurelio was the one who knew how to do it.
He had many friends. They sat at a café on the Ramblas. Several people came up to them and stayed for a drink. “This is my beautiful sister,” he would introduce her. “Ella ha vingut aquí a trencar cors.” She has come over here to break hearts. Everyone laughed.
The first night she took him to dinner. “They serve the best paella in town,” he said. All through dinner, he talked excitedly about his work while she sat and listened. He had always been like that. She marveled at how easily they slipped into their old roles. “I know many people here,” he said, “but I only feel truly comfortable around my family. I am so happy you came.”
Later, after they had consumed several bottles of wine, they returned to his flat. “I am very drunk,” he said. They both laughed hysterically when he nearly tripped over the sofa.
“Sorry there’s so little privacy,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs while you change.”
“No, it’s all right,” she said. Normally she slept naked.
“Suit yourself.”
She watched him as he removed his shirt and trousers. She could see his ribs, the boniness of his hips, the flatness of his belly, the long whiteness of his fingers with paint under the nails. He brushed his teeth in the sink.
“Mind if I take a bath?” she asked.
“Of course not. There are towels in the cupboard.”
She ran the water. It came out hot and in bursts.
“The plumbing’s not much here. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” She slipped out of her clothes and walked past him.
“You sure you don’t want me to go upstairs?”
“No,” she said, settling into the tub. “Can you light me a cigarette? My hands are wet.”
She sat there in the small square tub, her knees almost touching her breasts. There was no room to get her head wet. She would have to be a contortionist. “How do you wash your hair?” she asked.
“With this.” He handed her a small bowl.
She put out her cigarette and dipped the bowl in the water, raising it and pouring the water over her head several times until it was wet. She then lathered her hair and rinsed it again with the soapy water.
“Not exactly the Ritz, is it?” he said.
“It’s all right. Can you hand me a towel?”
She stood up, her body glistening, specks of soapsuds clinging to her stomach and thighs. She toweled off standing up. He looked away.
Stepping out of the tub, she left a trail of wet footprints on the wooden floor and wrapped herself in the towel. “Thanks,” she said. “I really needed that.”
“Of course.”
He watched her as she brushed her hair, still wearing the towel.
“Good night,” she said, walking over to kiss him on the top of his head. Before getting into bed, she removed the towel, letting it drop to the floor, and then slipped under the covers.
For a long time, she lay there listening to his breathing, staring into the darkness. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Maybe more.
“Are you asleep?” she asked.
“No.”
“Neither am I.”
“Go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
“It’s not working.”
“Try counting sheep.”
“That never works.”
“Go to sleep,” he insisted.
He lay there for several minutes and heard her moving about. “What are you doing?”
“Getting dressed.”
“Why?”
“I’m going out.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“No,” she said, standing in the doorway. “Don’t wait up.”
In the morning, he was up before her. He hadn’t heard her come in when she returned shortly before dawn. When she came upstairs to his studio, he was working.
“Morning,” she said. She was wearing one of his shirts.
“More like afternoon.”
She shrugged.
“Have fun?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I met some people. We went to a club.”
“Ah.”
“You disapprove?”
“Of course not.”
“Good,” she said. “Then let’s go out and get some breakfast. I’m starving.”
He took her to one of his favorite cafés, where they had truites de patates and sausage and large bowls of cafe amb llet. “What should we do today?” she asked.
It had been years since she had visited Barcelona. She remembered the palm trees. The elegance of the city. Its lights burning from the interiors of shops and restaurants. The colonnades. The mild weather. She was surprised by how many tourists there were. He took her all over on his motorcycle. “I feel very daring,” she said. “Like Marlon Brando.”
“I have a favor,” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“I want to paint you.”
“Again? Aren’t you tired of painting me? You’ve been doing it since we were kids.”
“Not at all. You are one of my favorite subjects, but this time will be different.”
“In what way?”
“This time I want to paint you nude. You gave me the idea last night.”
She giggled. “How risqué.”
“No, I think it would be a great painting.”
They started the next day. Aurelio had already built the canvas and prepared the surface. It was to be a large painting. He had her reclining like Manet’s Olympia, her left hand covering her pubis. “You are a nocturnal creature so I will paint it as though it is nighttime,” he told her.
“How appropriate,” she smiled.
A few nights later, they were at a party where Cesca met Felip. He was a tennis player with muscles like rope, piercing blue eyes. From the moment he entered the room, she couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
“Who’s that?” she asked Aurelio.
He told her. Felip had just returned from Roland Garros, where he had lost in the semifinal round.
“Introduce me.”
“I don’t know him that well but all right.”
The reaction was chemical, almost explosive. Everyone in the room could feel it. In a few moments, they left the party together. Cesca didn’t return to Aurelio’s apartment for three days.
“I was getting worried about you,” he said when she walked through the door. “Where’s Felip?”
“He had to train. He has another tournament coming up. His coach was furious. I just came back to get my things. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all. Will I see you again?”
She threw her head back and laughed her rich, hoarse laugh. “Silly. Of course you will. Felip has to train every day, so you’ll see plenty of me. In fact, let’s have lunch now. I’m famished.”
“Then can we work on the portrait again? It’s nearly finished. I was afraid you were never coming back and that it would stay that way forever.”
That became their routine for the remainder of her stay in Barcelona. She would spend the night with Felip and the day with Aurelio in Barrio Chino. On the last night they all had dinner together. Uncharacteristically, Aurelio ordered champagne.
“I’m going to miss my two handsome boys,” she said, her hands on both their shoulders.
“We will miss you too,” said Aurelio.
“What about Felip? Will you miss me?”
Felip laughed. “I will miss you. My coach will be happy to know you have left. He says I have been playing like an old man ever since I met you.”
She went home with Felip that night, and then, in the morning, Aur
elio took her to the airport in a taxi.
“Thank you for everything,” she said, kissing him. “When will you be back in the States?”
“I am planning to come for Christmas. I promised Mare.”
“Good. Then I will too. By the way, I love the painting you did of me. I hope you don’t think this sounds incredibly vain, but I think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done.”
He smiled. “I think so too.”
He watched as she walked through passport control, aware that his were not the only masculine eyes following her. Several other passengers, airline employees, porters, security personnel followed her movement. It was almost impossible not to. Every one of them imagining for a second what it would be like to possess her. She turned and waved at him, flashing a brilliant smile. He waved back, the smile identical.
“Adéu, Lio!” she cried.
“Adéu, Cesca!”
“See you at Christmas! I love you!”
“I love you too!”
He took a bus back to the city. On returning to his studio, he stared at the portrait of his sister. He had decided to title it: Cesca en la llum de la lluna. Cesca in the moonlight. She was right. It was the best thing he had ever done.
12
THE MOTORBOAT SCUDDED SOUTH ACROSS THE CLOUDED waters of the great lagoon past wooden pylons driven into the soft mud. In the distance rose the domes and towers of the glittering city. To the left, the island of Murano, famous for its glass. Most people arrive in Venice through the back door, like a secret lover. The glories of Santa Maria della Salute, San Giorgio, the Piazza San Marco lie unseen on the far side. Drawing closer, the boat slowed and entered a maze, down one narrow canal, then another, under arched footbridges, past ancient walls green with algae, crumbling brick walls, black shutters, obscure Palladian churches stained with soot, their Latin inscriptions now all but indecipherable. Glimpses into private enclosures of ancient epicurean luxury. Tall cypress trees. Caffès where white-jacketed waiters carried drinks on trays. Boutiques staffed by pretty girls.
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