The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  I took the small bronze fillet from the stove, laid it on the cooling pad until it stopped hissing, put my thumb on top of the handle, steadied it with my left hand, brought my right shoulder up so I could use the weight of my body as a press (better control this way than trying to do everything with your arms), ran the fillet up the long vertical line closest to the spine of the book. It didn’t feel right, so I went over the line a second time, being careful not to twist the fillet and double the impression. But the gold didn’t stick.

  “You left the fillet on the cooling pad too long,” Signor Cecchi observed.

  I tried to conceal my disappointment by a businesslike demeanor as I scraped off the old gold and cut strips of new, but I was moving too fast and Signor Cecchi had to slow me down. “Piano, piano,” he said. “This isn’t a race. This isn’t a job to be done in haste and fury, in fretta efuria. Do the rest and come back to this line when you’re done. You have to add more glair anyway.”

  Once again I took the fillet from the stove and touched it to the heating pad. This time I kept an eye on Signor Cecchi, and though he didn’t give me a visible signal, I could tell from a slight twitch in his face when the bronze reached exactly the right temperature.

  I tried a second line, getting some body weight into it. It felt good. It was an athletic feeling, like knowing you’ve swum the hundred-meter freestyle in less than seventy seconds even before the times are posted, or knowing you’ve bowled a strike before the ball is even halfway down the alley, or that your backhand drive is going to hit three inches inside the baseline. I had no further problems with the straight lines or with the ornaments at the corners.

  The Santa Trinità curves, however, remained. My instinct told me to start with the long flat part of the curve and then add the smaller arcs, but Signor Cecchi pointed out that it would be easier to match fillet lines to gouge lines than vice versa, which seems obvious once you think of it. I still had to articulate the two smaller arcs at each end of each curve so that the arcs met exactly, forming a single line.

  The trick in using a gouge is to “sight” it from the inside of the curve and then apply the pressure quickly and evenly so that neither end of the stamp cuts into the leather. I was getting a feel for the tools now, and I had a certain momentum going, too, carrying me along like a boat on a river. All I had to do was steer.

  I won’t say that I did a perfect job, and I won’t claim that I sonetti lussuriosi put me in a class with Thomas Berthelet or Roger Payne, or with the great modern binders like Douglas Cockerell and Roger de Coverley, but I will say that those curves were enormously satisfying. It was as if Michelangelo had created ex nihilo a curve as satisfying as some of the curves of the human body. It was gratifying to know that I had added to the small store of these curves.

  Only one thing went wrong. I’d begun to sweat profusely, and as I was about to join the long, flat arc of the last curve to the sharper arc at the end, a drop of sweat fell from my forehead and landed on the hot fillet. The fillet hissed; I jumped, as if I’d been stung by a bee, and overshot the mark slightly. Instead of meeting end to end, the two arcs intersected. I don’t suppose the overlap was more than three or four millimeters, but as far as I was concerned it was enough to spoil the curve.

  Have you ever had the impulse, when you’re working on something, to destroy it completely if you make even the tiniest little mistake? You hit a wrong note that no one would notice, but instead of going on, you start banging on the keyboard? You write an a instead of an e in copying out a poem and instead whiting it out and going on you crisscross the paper with great big Xs? Signor Cecchi must have realized what was going on in my mind, because he reached over and took my hand in his.

  “Niente” he said. “It’s nothing. No one will notice a thing. When you come back tomorrow you won’t notice it yourself.”

  They say that chess players lose as much as ten pounds during a match, even though they aren’t exercising physically, because they concentrate so hard. That’s the way I felt—as if I’d lost ten pounds. I was drained. I was too tired to redo the first line I’d attempted.

  “Domani,” I said. “Let’s finish up tomorrow.”

  I wiped off the excess gold with a rag dampened with a bit of coconut oil. The tooling was perfect except for the first line, which could easily be retooled, and the one mistake, which stood out like a proverbial sore thumb or, as the Italians say, a sore nose.

  But Signor Cecchi was right. The next morning I didn’t even notice it, and it wasn’t till I was showing the finished book to Sandro a couple of days later that I realized what had happened: not only had Signor Cecchi picked out the gold where the lines had intersected instead of joining, he’d dampened the leather, picked up the impression with the point of a pin and retooled the join. He’d left his mark, too, in his own way, and I was very grateful.

  12

  Gli Abruzzi

  In the third week in January we went to visit Sandro’s family in Montemuro, in the Abruzzi. It was a cold, crisp day and the car, an old Fiat station wagon that Sandro had borrowed from a friend, was leaking air. The heater didn’t work properly, but we generated our own heat. Sandro’s face was as fresh and shining as if he’d been driving an Alfa Romeo. He was dressed for the occasion in old clothes, like a very rich man who doesn’t have to dress fashionably.

  The more I got to know this man, the more I loved him. I loved him for himself, and for his bald head and for his uncircumcised uccello (his little bird that sang so sweetly in the night); I loved him for his attentiveness; I loved him because he seemed so at home in this world and because at the same time he was so hopelessly unworldly; I loved him because he never opened unpleasant mail and because he’d invested half his money in a fast-food restaurant and the other half in a scheme to export low-calorie wine to the United States; I loved to see him crossing the piazza, I loved to find him waiting for me in the station when my train came back from Prato; I loved to come home and find him waiting for me in his old silk robe; and I loved him for the things I learned about him from others, which seemed great and heroic: on the night of the flood, for example, he opened up his apartment to all the people living on the lower floors who had no place to go, and he waded to the Uffizi to help rescue the paintings in the restoration rooms in the basement and the self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor, which was in danger of collapsing into the Arno.

  And I loved him for being so good at his work, for being a true craftsman. He was a man who cared about things, who cherished them, who spent his life preserving them.

  “When was the first time you fell in love?” I asked him, thinking out loud.

  He laughed and adjusted his sunglasses.

  “You mean really in love?”

  “Really, really in love.”

  “November 1928.”

  No hesitation!

  “What day of the week?”

  “It must have been a Wednesday, because the truck from Sulmona had come—”

  “What time?”

  “Oh, I’d say about three o’clock, because Papà’d just gone across the street to have coffee with Zio Franco and Signor Spettini at the bar.”

  “Who was she, a shepherdess coming down out of the mountains?” (I’d seen plenty of pictures of Abruzzi girls in fancy peasant costumes.)

  “Not at all, though believe it or not I knew lots of shepherdesses, and some of them were very pretty, and I’d fallen in love with some of them, too. But not really in love.”

  We were on the outskirts of Florence, just passing the Certosa.

  “Someone from the village?”

  “No.”

  “I give up.”

  “Her name was Sybil Connelly, and she was an American.”

  “Sybil Connelly?”

  “The film star.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Before your time, I’m afraid.
She starred in the first sound film made in Italy. It was an American company, I think.”

  “You saw her in a film?”

  “In the flesh, cara mia, in the flesh”—he touched my leg with his fingertip—”like this. It was November, getting cold, we’d just had the first snow. I was minding the store when a red car drove by. You have to realize that there were about as many cars in Montemuro as there were flush toilets, about half a dozen, and most of those—the cars, not the toilets—had been put away for the winter. And none of them were red, believe me. No one had ever seen a car like this one. A Hispano-Suiza. For the most part all we saw was the truck that brought supplies from Sulmona. And motorcycles. There were some paved highways outside Rome—I know because my brother had been called up to work on them—but in the Abruzzi, no. So when this car drove by, I was all eyes and ears. I ran out of the store to look, but all I saw was a cloud of dust. Ten minutes later it came back. A woman got out, and she was even more remarkable than the car. She was cream colored. We didn’t have women like that around. She must have lost her way or gotten off the highway. She looked like a movie actress, and of course she was. But there was no movie theater in the village, so nobody recognized her.

  “She stopped the car, got out, looked into the bar, changed her mind, and came into the store. Her skirt was so long that it caught in the door when it closed behind her. She didn’t speak Italian, but I’d won the English prize in the fifth grade and spoke a little.

  “American,” she said.

  “My first impulse was to run across the street to get Papà or Signor Spettini, who owned the bar and who had been to New York. Actually he’d never gotten past Ellis Island, but it was an experience that had served him well, and he was sometimes known as the man who’d been to New York. He didn’t speak any English, though, and the woman was so beautiful I was mesmerized. I wanted to have her all to myself.

  “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, not that I’d had wide experience. The farthest I’d ever been from home was Sulmona, but I’d arrived at the age when boys start to notice these things. Not only was she blonde and cream colored, she had red fingernails that matched her red lips. But was sweating, little droplets of crystal-clear liquid. She was in distress. Only I could save her.

  “She looked around as if she didn’t notice me and was waiting for someone more substantial. But finally she spoke, a mish­mash of sounds, nothing at all like the English I’d heard in school from Signor Dieci. She spoke louder and louder and faster and faster, and finally she pointed between her legs and made a shishing sound. She needed to use the toilet.

  “It just so happened that we had a toilet, at the back of the store, of which Papà was justifiably proud. It attracted customers.

  “I showed her the little room, a toilet only, and waited outside the door. I wanted to stay close to her. She made noises, just like a real person, not at all what I expected from a cream-colored angel. She seemed surprised, when she opened the door, to find me standing right there.

  “Mamma appeared at this point, up from her siesta. The two of us stood there, staring at the radiant American. Mamma, who’d always seemed beautiful to me, looked old and shriveled.

  “I could speak enough English to communicate, though the americana didn’t make it easy. She couldn’t seem to speak slowly, and I was shy.

  “She was lost, she said. She needed someone to drive with her back to Rome. If I understood her correctly she had come to Italy to make a film, but the director had treated her badly and she had taken a car from the studio and driven as far as she could.

  “By this time the men in the bar had noticed the car and come over to the store. None of them could speak English, and they were all as shy as I was in the presence of this woman. They might as well have been struck dumb, but they were indignant at her story of mistreatment, ready to go to Rome to avenge her.

  “It wasn’t so easy to get down out of the mountains in those days. There was no major highway to Rome, and you couldn’t drive on the roads around Montemuro in the winter or in the spring. So you had to admire her daring and courage, though I suppose now that it was just foolishness. Whatever it was, she had driven to the end of the paved roads and then just kept on driving.

  “I was the only one there who knew any English, so I was elected to accompany her back to Sulmona. At Sulmona she could pick up the highway and drive back to Rome with no problem. I didn’t have a choice and didn’t want any. I knew the way to Sulmona because my mother’s sister lived there and we went to visit once a year.

  “By the time we’d sorted things out and filled the car up with petrol from the storage tank behind the bakery, it was too late to start out. It was getting dark, and though the car had electric headlights, it was too dangerous. I explained, with considerable difficulty, that she would have to spend the night.

  “That afternoon we sold our entire stock of pens and pencils and paper and envelopes to the people who kept coming into the store to see her. She was resting on the sofa, but Papà would open the door to let customers have a peek.

  “At supper she asked a lot of questions and I translated. We were too shy to ask her much, so we stuck to questions about the film, which was called The Villa of Mystery and was unlike anything we’d ever heard of, since the nearest movie theater was in Sulmona, ten kilometers away.

  “But what I remember wasn’t her conversation, it was her tremendous erotic presence, which was so overwhelming that no one would have dared even to touch her. Even Mamma was affected. Everyone wants a little romance.

  “She didn’t seem particularly grateful for our hospitality, but then, we weren’t asking for gratitude. It was enough that she’d condescended to visit us. She was a princess among peasants and assumed that the best we had to offer was no more than her due.

  “We set out early the next morning, furnished with two loaves of bread, a tremendous chunk of local cheese, and little salamis made from wild boar meat.

  “We reached Sulmona without any problem. I was supposed to go to my aunt’s house and then take the bus back to Montemuro. But she—Sybil Connelly—asked me if I would go to Rome with her. She said she was afraid to go by herself and that she’d have someone drive me back all the way home.

  “I was in love with her and she knew it. She stopped the car in front of the cathedral, where she was supposed to let me off, and looked at me with eyes as blue as ultramarine. I was as nervous as if we were eloping or embarking on an affair. I didn’t know much about women. I now recognize her as a type: she was modeling herself on Greta Garbo, but I didn’t know that then. I was torn between fear and desire—fear of the unknown and desire for the unknown. Didn’t know anything about Roma either. I’d heard it mentioned, and I’d heard about Mussolini, and my older brother, Franco, had gone off to build roads, and I could probably count on a whipping when I got home, but I told her I’d go with her wherever she wanted to go.

  “‘Tell your mamma I was afraid,’ she said. ‘Tell her I needed a man with me.’ She put her hand on my leg, above my knee, and dug her fingers into my flesh. Her hand felt like a cattle prod or like a bunch of nettles. Like this.” Sandro used any excuse to put his hand on my leg.

  “Rome was further away in those days. She drove faster and faster as we got closer to Rome and the roads improved, and she talked all the time. About her life. About love. How wonderful it was. And how terrible, too. And every once in a while she’d reach over and tousle my hair or put her hand on my leg again.

  “It was midafternoon when we got to what must have been the outskirts of Rome, but she had no notion where the studio was and it was almost dark by the time we found it. It was north of what later became Mussolini’s Cinecitta. At the gate an Italian portinaio picked up a phone, and pretty soon there was a crowd, everybody swarming over the car, over la bionda. It was pandemonium, which, I understand now, is exactly what she wanted. I waited by the car, and w
hen she disappeared through the gate, I knew I was in trouble. I tried to explain to the portinaio, who told me to get lost. I waited around, demanding to see her, but it was no good. The portinaio threatened to call the police if I didn’t make myself scarce.

  “It took two days to get home. I spent the night in the station in Rome, and I had just enough money to get as far as Avezzano. When I got on the train I went straight into the gabinetto and locked the door and didn’t get out till the train got to Sulmona, which I recognized by the station sign. I spent the night with my aunt, who put me on the bus in the morning.

  “Had I done the right thing or not? Opinion was divided. Most of the men thought yes, and most of the women thought no. But Mamma sided with the men and took my part. Everyone, of course, was angry at la bionda, but when the film came to Sulmona everyone wanted to see it, and I was a hero, just as if I’d been in the film myself.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “I saw all her films, though there weren’t too many. She never became a big star.”

  “Do you think you did the right thing?”

  “I’ve never been sorry.”

  “She was very beautiful?”

  “Oh, yes. But her voice was no good. I think that’s why she didn’t do too well in talking films.”

  “But what do you mean when you say you were in love with her? Really in love?”

  “That kind of love is very powerful, but it’s a fantasy. You’re in love with yourself, actually, an image of yourself (or the opposite of yourself) that you project onto someone else. The psychologists know all about that sort of thing nowadays; you can read about it in all the magazines. It’s not so mysterious as it used to be. Biological versus psychological. The same thing in the end.”

  “But she was very beautiful?”

  “Very beautiful.”

  What did I know about the Abruzzi? Everything and nothing. Everything: because of the stuff I’d memorized in school—detailed information about each province—for the interrogazioni in geography, a subject the Italians take more seriously than we do. I couldn’t call up this information at will, but if I got started I could reel it off as easily as sliding down a hill on a sled. Nothing: because I’d never imagined mountains, real mountains, snow-capped peaks, like Switzerland. And I’d never driven past the cathedral in Sulmona where a twelve-year-old boy had told an American actress that he’d go with her wherever she wanted to go, and I’d never looked in the window of the little cartoleria in Montemuro where that same little boy had been minding the store when the actress appeared out of nowhere, needing to use the toilet. The window was full of pens and pencils, paper and envelopes, mechanical drawing sets and T-squares, just as it had been on that day. Sandro tried the door, but it was locked. We got back in the Fiat and drove on.