Little Fortress

by Laisha Rosnau

  “You can keep them, Miche, or try at any rate. And Roffredo, you’re next in line for the titles if you want them. It’s at the point now that if – when – I leave, there is a possibility I’ll essentially be putting myself into exile. For a time, at least.”

  The duke’s mother clutched her neck, her eyes wide. “No, Leone. No, that’s not right. Of course you can never be in exile from your home.” She looked from family member to family member, nodding as if to confirm this. They avoided looking directly at her.

  Finally, Marguerite asked, “Where will you go?”

  “America, though I’m not yet entirely certain where, specifically.”

  “Not yet entirely certain, are you, old boy?” mocked Michelangelo. “You’ve been turned out of parliament, taken up with your mistress, quite publicly, with no regard to your wife or the church, given away – pardon me, leased – ancestral Caetani lands for a pittance, and now you’re going to emigrate as some kind of political statement, but to where you’re not so certain. And leave the rest of us with the mess you’ll leave behind. Good work. More than ten centuries of Caetani legacies felled in a few foolhardy swoops.”

  “I’ve felled nothing. The land leased to the villagers at a fair price is a pittance compared to the generations their families have worked it. Why would we, Caetanis, want to hold onto a wealth that is tainted by centuries of corruption by church, government –”

  “Leone, Leone,” his mother said in almost a whisper from the head of the table. “Enough, darling. We know that your intentions are good. We know, too, that our family is more cut out for libraries, concert halls and mountaintops than government, perhaps.”

  “You shortchange us, Mother,” said Michelangelo. “Just because Leone is giving up on our country doesn’t mean the rest of us will.”

  “I said nothing about giving up.” Leone’s voice was quiet and steady.

  * * *

  On our drive back to Villa Miraggio, each of us was silent. I assumed that Ofelia would retire with the duke, but when we got into the villa she said, “Miss Jüül will accompany me to my quarters.” She looked at neither of us, held her cheek to the duke and he leaned to kiss it. He turned a tense, downward smile toward me, paused as though he was going to say something and then nodded as he left the room.

  When we reached her room, I closed the door and Ofelia twisted as she struggled to get out of her dress. “I’ll help.” I undid each clasp carefully, watched my own hands tremor slightly as I did.

  She stepped out of her clothes and perched on the bed, unfastened her stockings. I bent to pick up the dress. “Just leave it there.” Ofelia’s voice was curt, tired.

  I let the dress drop, stood beside it. She threw each stocking, and they arced and fluttered before they crumpled on top of the dress. “Did you know?” I asked.

  “That he was thinking of leaving Italy, yes. That he was going to make his grand announcement tonight, no.” She collapsed back on the bed, arms held straight out from her sides. “He’s been talking up his so-called New World for weeks. I’ve told him the phrase is already dated.”

  “You’ll go with him, you and Sveva?”

  Ofelia made a sputtering noise and sat up. “Miss Jüül, of course I’ll go with him! We’re family. What did you think we might do?”

  “I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to assume.”

  “Why wouldn’t you? And I hope you’re assuming that you will be coming as well? Because you are. I am not going alone.”

  “Of course not, you’ll have the duke, and Sveva.”

  “Sveva’s a child – and the duke is sometimes as impetuous as one. You’re coming with me, Miss Jüül. I can’t go without you.” Ofelia folded at the waist, head in her hands, and began to cry. I stood where I was for a moment, then took two steps to her side, put my hand on her hair, rubbed her back as she sobbed.

  Would I go? I couldn’t imagine what I might do if I stayed behind. Hermann had answered none of my letters. I could return to Denmark, a childless spinster, and find work as I always had, but what employers would be better than the Caetanis? Ofelia was desperate to remain in Rome, but it was her home, not mine. I could go anywhere. I wouldn’t expect a new beginning, not again. Instead, I would remain with people who treated me well, who held me in their confidence.

  Fifty-Five

  We left in March 1921, travelling first to London before we sailed from Liverpool on the Empress of Britain to Canada. I thought I was accustomed to sea travel by then, but Ofelia, Sveva and I were all sick for the entire journey, though Ofelia had the worst of it. Because we’d not brought a governess with us, it was I who spent much of the day with Sveva. The duke delighted in her but spent much of that trip writing, both correspondence and his academic work, as though in doing so he could both avoid and script the unknown we were sailing into. Ofelia was taking medication for seasickness and slept through the days, barely eating, so that she could attend the dinner and dance each evening. She would wake slowly, ask for some bread, then go through the routine of getting ready calmly, even stoically, as if it was something she had to bear, which I suppose it was. By the time she was ready for the evening, something would shift in Ofelia, as if she’d lit a little flame within herself. Her eyes would gleam, her skin shine with a soft, steady light.

  One evening she said, “I know it’s expected of me, this ritual – dressing, putting on jewels, presenting myself on the arm of a duke. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it.” She lowered her voice to a lilt, “You know I adore the clothes,” then continued, “I just know how little it has to do with me. I feel like I can hide in plain sight.”

  “Do you feel like the duke expects it of you?”

  “In some ways, no. I know that in some ways he loves me for what I’m not – I’m not nobility, I don’t care much about titles or big society parties. I just want to be with my family. To have a few comforts” – here she stopped and laughed at herself – “Well, a few luxuries, let’s be honest! But in some way, of course, Leone expects it. It’s all he’s ever known, this world.”

  “I suppose soon enough we’ll all know a different world.”

  “Yes, I suppose we will.”

  * * *

  I got Sveva into her party dresses each evening for dinner and held her hand after the meal as we stood to watch her parents dance. Then I took her back to the cabin, tucked her in. “Isn’t this an adventure?” we said to each other, over and over. I knew that Sveva’s father had said it to her often, as though to instill that this was what it was – not exile, escape or avoidance, but adventure. “Isn’t it?”

  Sometimes after dinner, the duke would play cards in the men’s lounge. On those nights, Ofelia would come to me. She would be sickly and exhausted, so I would help her undress and get ready for bed, as I had her daughter. “Lie beside me, Miss Jüül,” she said one night. “Just for a moment. I have a hard time falling asleep alone.” And so I did, lay in my evening dress on top of the bedclothes, Ofelia pinned under blankets beside me. We lay without speaking for some time, me listening to her breath, hoping it would deepen and lengthen to indicate sleep so that I could go. Instead, Ofelia whispered, “You’ve left home before.”

  “Yes.” Over and over I’d left home – my childhood home, my home country, the home that I thought I had with H, so sweet and so small that we held it between us.

  “How do you –” she paused. “How do you do it?” I waited for Ofelia to go on, but she didn’t.

  “Just like this. You pack your things, you board a train or a boat and you go.”

  “Was there a reason for your leaving?” Isn’t there always a reason for leaving? I didn’t answer and Ofelia kept talking. “I feel like none of our reasons for leaving Italy were my own – or Leone’s, really. He pretends that setting off for Canada is some grand adventure, a sport, but really, we had no choice but to leave, it was just a matter of where we would go.
Was there a reason you had to leave?”

  She still knew so little of me, and this I didn’t regret. As much as Ofelia felt increasingly like a friend, I was a paid companion, an employee. I wouldn’t let myself be known as I had before. “There are always reasons for choosing to leave any given place, but no, there was nothing forcing me to leave my family farm, or Denmark. There were opportunities. I felt like it was time to go.”

  Ofelia turned toward me in the bed, and I knew she was looking at me though I couldn’t see her eyes – the darkness in the berth was so thick I could barely trace her outline against the bed. “Do you think you’ll ever go back?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You know that your home is with us, Miss Jüül.” Ofelia touched her hand to my cheek. “With me. We’ll make the most of Canada while we’re there, won’t we? Until we can go back home again.” I could hear how her voice faltered, how close she was to sleep.

  When she touched me, it was meant as a small gesture, something comforting. While Ofelia was accustomed to being with the duke several nights a week, I wasn’t afforded that measure of intimacy. Only she or Sveva touched me in any way that wasn’t accidental. Each time they did, a current was set off under my skin with even the briefest touch. We are meant to be held, I thought as I got up from Ofelia’s bed. She was asleep. I made my way from her berth to my own, lay awake, imagined an ocean of water rocking against the boat but was unable to sleep, so I got up and went out to the deck.

  It was a different world than before the war; I was a different woman. This is what I told myself as I watched the bulk and glow of icebergs in black water set against dark sky strewn with stars. They told me all I needed to know of the world. And what was that? We are moving within the gears of some impartial machine, the darkness of our unknowing illuminated by something that lumbers by in the night. Their faint glow rises from under the surface while we are drawn to specks of light in the sky. The distance of stars makes no difference to us. From below, they appear so close together.

  Fifty-Six

  Canada, 1972

  Between the duke’s death and Ofelia’s, we had secluded ourselves in the house on Pleasant Valley Road for twenty-five years. During that time, we each thought of how different our lives could have been. Even those thoughts were fallacy – ones that had sustained us, but delusions nonetheless. We made little fortresses of our former selves, our memories, as we fed ourselves pieces of our sister lives, as sweet and frothy as whipped cream or as bitter as pills broken in two, depending on the day, the moment. And then that moment became the next, and who is to say that what we thought, just then, hadn’t split off and become something of its own? I knew now that thoughts became little more than daydreams unless we acted on them, took our chances with the outcomes, as I’d done over and over as a girl and young woman. If I couldn’t be that person again, I would try to ensure that Sveva would be.

  When Sveva began her schooling at the University of Victoria in 1970, what a pair we made. A fifty-two-year-old freshman and her eighty-five-year-old companion, we confused people. Sveva was often mistaken for a professor, and no one was sure who I was or what I was doing there. Around campus, students lolled and fidgeted, wrapped arms and even legs around each other, snapped gum and strummed on guitars, ukuleles. While most were well groomed, there were students who were more unkempt than the Roma we used to see in Europe. Ripped and threadbare clothing, uncombed and uncut hair, women without a trace of makeup, sometimes without a trace of supporting undergarments, either. Long-haired young men, loose vests floating over naked, skinny chests, smelling as though they gave as little thought to hygiene as they did to common social order. When we saw students barefoot, I thought of Dirk and Anna Soeberg, their tea shop and the salons they’d held in Zealand. This was more than the reckless fray of youth, Sveva told me, it was some sort of social movement – but the smell that came off some of those students! So pungent – feral, we would joke together. Ofelia would have been appalled. She found the sight of ordinary Canadians frightful enough.

  We lived near the ocean. Sometimes, terrific storms crashed in from the Pacific and Sveva would drive us in her clattering car to watch swells hit the breakwater, arcs of spray fanning out and then falling like crumbling walls. During storms, the road was a mass of cars sitting and watching the show. “It restores my faith in humanity. There is some awe left!” Sveva said as she dashed out of the car. She wasn’t even at the water’s edge before she was completely soaked. She came running back, laughing as she opened the door. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out through the pouring rain, pretended not to see anything beyond the enormity of it all coming in, hitting the breakwater, and I’d felt then as though nothing had really changed, that it was all repetition, washing up against us again and again. But so much had changed, hadn’t it?

  * * *

  In Sveva’s final year of studies in 1972, Joan Heriot visited us for Easter. When we had emerged back into society, such as it was in Vernon, a few different social groups in the valley tried to lay claim to us. We knew that for all our oddities and unique needs, we – specifically, Sveva – were a kind of badge of honour to bear as friends. It was the Catholic Women’s League that first took us in, but we had so little in common with those ladies, their faith straightforward and clear, their lives prescribed. I wished mine had been as simple, as clearly mapped, yet felt relieved it hadn’t been.

  We were introduced to members of the Naturalist Club, a group of eccentrics with a perhaps unnatural proclivity for birds. Slightly fanatical, but harmless hobbyists, really. There were several single people in the group, our contemporaries, spinsters and old bachelors. One of these was Joan Heriot, recently retired from her position as a zoology professor in Brighton, England.

  “Imagine, MJ.” Sveva had taken to calling me by my initials. “She was a fully tenured professor, even though UBC thought it might damage her womanhood to take such an advanced degree in science. She left Canada so she could get her doctorate, taught university and travelled all over the world as a scientist and now! Now, she has deigned to be my friend.”

  “Hardly deigned. You have as much to offer, Sveva.”

  She swatted at me lightly, then squeezed my shoulder. “You’re too good to me, MJ. You always have been.” If only she knew how good I was or was not.

  Joan arrived on Good Friday, a taxicab dropping her off in front of the house. I was tidying the front room when I saw her get out and carry her airman bag to the stairs. But she didn’t come up; I looked out the window to see her sitting on the bottom of the steep concrete steps, legs stretched out in front of her. At a glance, they appeared bare, though I thought she must have been wearing nude-coloured stockings. She was not one of the young larks with whom Sveva took classes. I went to the kitchen to wash and dry my hands. As I came out of the house, I saw that Joan’s legs were in fact bare. When she heard me, she pushed herself up straight from her lounged position, then stood. “Oh, Miss Jüül!” she said and leaned into my face to kiss me on each cheek. She sat back down and I stood against the rail while Joan lounged. “How is our Sveva?” she asked, eyes closed, face to the sun.

  “She’s certainly enjoying her studies. I worry about how much pressure she puts on herself, though. It’s a lot for her.”

  “Of course it is.” Joan’s voice was quiet, gentle. “I suppose she feels like she’s making up for lost time. She’ll do well. She’s a strong woman.”

  “She is.”

  Joan opened her eyes and looked at me. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “No, no, it’s not that.” I looked down the street, the boughs of trees arched over its length. “I just wish now that I’d done some things differently.”

  She watched me as though I might say more. “We all do.”

  “I kept things from her, Joan. From everyone.” There was something more I wanted to say, though I wasn’t sure how, when Sveva pu
lled up, parked the car at an angle over the two lines of paving stones that made the driveway.

  Joan propped up on her elbows, laughing, as Sveva opened her door. “Have the good islanders not taken away your licence yet?”

  “They have not.”

  “I could hear you – I could practically feel you – grinding the gears for blocks, Sveva! That poor car.”

  “Poor car? The car is fine. Poor me having to try to maintain some momentum on these island roads – have you driven them? No thought to ease of travel. They wind round every twisted old oak tree that the road builders could find, I’m afraid.”

  Joan pushed herself up and leaned to kiss Sveva, who was a step down so she was the same height as Joan. I saw the colour grow along Sveva’s neck before she held out her arms. “This is how we do it on campus.” She pulled Joan toward her for a hug. “So many hugs – even doled out to old biddies like ourselves!”

  The sun was bright and we squinted at each other. “It’s glorious,” Joan said. “You realize that the valley is in that awful time of year when all the snow has melted, revealing a season’s worth of dirt that the sanding trucks left behind. The branches are still bare. Everything is dirt and muck and the prickly beginning of things.”

  “That sounds good,” Sveva said. “The prickly beginning of things – like a poem.”

  * * *

  Sveva and Joan did an admirable job with our Easter brunch. “We’ve decided enough with this Julia Child French cooking nonsense, we’ve gone with classic North American!” announced Sveva and waved her arm over the small table. There was a glossy ham studded with cloves and ringed with pineapple, a spiral of deviled eggs and a trembling dome of lemon Jell-O patterned with bright pink cherries, mandarin crescents and what appeared to be tiny marshmallows. I laughed at the sight of it, unlike anything I would have made.