The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  It was odd to think of Sandro as someone with a home to go to, with a mama and a papa, and an older brother who ran the cartoleria, and a widowed sister who worked in an office in Sulmona and had three children, two still at home. And who was I?

  I suddenly realized that I hadn’t given a thought to my own role. “Who am I?” I asked. “Friend? Assistant? Mistress? Girlfriend? What did you tell your parents?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve explained everything.”

  “But what did you explain?”

  “Please don’t worry.” But I thought I detected a note of uncertainty in his voice.

  “Will we sleep in the same room?”

  “No, but I’ll come to you in the night, like Cupid coming to Psyche.”

  The entire family was waiting for us in the kitchen, where a huge leg of lamb was cooking on a grill in the large fireplace. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, on both cheeks, and I felt an instant rapport with Marissa, Sandro’s sister, and her handsome children, a boy and a girl in their early teens. Sandro’s father was a little remote, but he had reached a time in his life when he didn’t worry too much about things. If he hadn’t made his peace with them at least he had surrendered gracefully. He was placid, calm, peaceful; not senile, but he had no agenda beyond his birds and his tame fox and his two dogs—two short-haired pointers. I was reminded of the old problem of getting a fox and a duck and a sack of grain across the river in a boat that’s not big enough to take more than one item at a time. His hair was perfectly white and his face was covered with white fuzz, as if his whiskers had lost their mettle, their stiffness. There was just a touch of pink in his cheeks, and his eyes were watery. He wore light-colored trousers and two flannel shirts, which didn’t match. The cuffs of both shirts were unbuttoned and flopped around his wrists.

  Sandro’s mother, on the other hand—la nonna—was a handsome woman with gleaming silver hair pulled back tight on her head and fastened in a bun. But witchlike, too, in a dressing gown of raw silk. She was just as dark as her husband was light. Her skin was wrinkled, but the wrinkles were fine. She struck me as tough and sharp, the one I’d have to watch out for, if I had to watch out for anyone. She’d been a French teacher and for some reason insisted on speaking to me in French, which I couldn’t understand very well. I answered her in Italian.

  The news of the flood in Florence neither upset nor interested Sandro’s father. He was glad that Alessandro was well and happy and safe, that was enough. But la nonna wanted to hear everything—how the water had come rushing through the streets at sixty kilometers an hour, and how the people were eating, where they got their drinking water, etc. She asked about everything but was careful not to ask about me.

  The house was an old olive-oil factory that had been converted into four large apartments—one for Sandro’s parents, one for his widowed sister and her children, one for his brother, and another that was rented out to the family that owned the new olive-oil fattoria. The conversion was so skillful, with four separate entrances on two different levels, that I wouldn’t have been aware of it if Sandro hadn’t pointed it out. There was a large courtyard with a stone table where the family ate al fresco in good weather. Behind us the Apennines rose really steeply; below us in the valley we could see Sulmona.

  Dinner, prepared by Sandro’s sister, was superb: a risotto made with locally grown saffron followed by a leg of lamb seasoned with garlic and basted with honey, which we ate with potatoes, also cooked on the grill. I sat next to la nonna, who had begun to address me in Italian and who seemed to know a great deal about me. I gathered that Sandro had described me as an important curator from the United States. I felt more comfortable when she turned to Italy. How did I like Italy? How did I like the Abruzzi? I told her that I had learned a great deal about the Abruzzi in the Liceo Morgagni, and that I’d always wanted to visit the Abruzzi, but when she asked what I’d learned, my mind suddenly went blank. I couldn’t remember a thing. Everyone waited. Someone asked for the salt. Marissa poured more vino rosso for me, though my glass was still half full. Sandro picked up a loose thread from the previous conversation and began to pull on it, and suddenly it all came back to me, just as if I were standing in front of my former classmates at the liceo: the borders, the principal rivers, lakes, and mountains, the average temperatures (in Celsius), the principal cities, the population density, the principal railroads, typical products, the timber harvest, the flocks of sheep and tonnellate of fish . . . I went from beginning to end without stopping, astounding everyone, especially myself.

  After dinner Sandro and his father disappeared while Marissa and la nonna did the dishes. I was not allowed to help. There was a piano in the living room. For some reason I’m always surprised to see a piano in Italy. I was especially surprised to find one in the Abruzzi, since I had in my head the notion that I’d come to a wild place inhabited only by shepherds and, along the coast, fishermen—certainly not by members of the middle class. It was a small grand with music set out on it, but the arrangement of the music was so precise that it looked to me like a display of culture rather than the sort of jumble that generally results from regular practice sessions. As I paged through an edition of Chopin mazurkas, looking for something I could play, I was struck by some interesting comments that had been written in the margins with a fine pen in black ink. The ink was faded but still clearly legible. The comments, which were in English, were astonishingly romantic.

  When I asked la nonna about them she said she’d written them herself; she’d copied them from a book that had belonged to her piano teacher, but so long ago that she’d forgotten what they meant. She asked me to translate them for her, which I did. She sat on the bench next to me and turned the pages, listening closely with her eyes closed:

  Still on the village green, & boys & girls romping

  in the dance. We hear a drone bass & the chatter

  of the gossips, the bustle of a rural festival.

  The harmonization is rich, the rhythmic life vital.

  Bold, chivalric, with the swish of the warrior’s

  sabre. The peasant has vanished while his master goes

  through the paces of a courtlier dance.

  Its scale is exotic, its rhythm convincing, its tune a

  little saddened by life, but courage never fails.

  Bleak & joyless, modulating into a sort of desperate

  gaiety . . .

  That night we were shown to separate bedrooms. La nonna was very clear about showing me mine. I had no idea where Sandro was to sleep, but I expected that he knew where I was. It was a comfortable room given some character by beautiful French doors that opened onto a balcony. The doors were closed, of course, and I couldn’t see out through the curtains, so I didn’t know if I was facing the mountain or the valley. I thought of Ruth and Yolanda on the train from Luxembourg and wondered if their adventures had turned out as well as mine.

  The room was cold, but there was a heavy piumino, or eiderdown. I undressed completely, popped under the piumino and, excited by the prospect of a forbidden tryst, was soon warm as toast. I was toasty and sexy, positively steaming by the time I finally heard Sandro’s gentle tap-tap-tap. I pulled open the door as I was, without a stitch, but it wasn’t Sandro, it was la nonna, in a heavy wool robe.

  She looked me up and down: “You should have a nightgown,” she said. “It’s too cold to sleep nuda come un verme.” Nude as a worm. I’d never heard the expression before. “I’ll bring you one of mine. But get back in bed.”

  I climbed back in bed and pulled up the covers. “Its nice and warm under the covers,” I said. “This is a beautiful piumino.” I ran my hand over the eiderdown.

  “I want to speak to you,” she said.

  “The morning might be better.”

  “No, now is a good time. In the morning, who knows? Some things it’s better to talk about at night.”

&nbs
p; “Si.” Just an acknowledgment.

  “My son has had bad luck with women,” she said, pushing the piumino back to make a place for her to sit on the edge of the bed. “Right from the very beginning. There was an American actress who took him to Rome and then left him on the street. The poor boy was only twelve years old. And Signora Colonna! O Dio.” Signora Colonna—Isabella—was Sandro’s wife. “And so many others too. He’s too kind. He has a large heart. They take advantage of his good nature.”

  I had nothing to say to this.

  “When he didn’t come home for Christmas for the first time in his life—even when he was living with Signora Colonna he always came home for Christmas—I knew there was another woman. And I asked him on the telephone: ‘Who is she?’ ‘This is different, Mamma,’ he told me. ‘This is different.’ ‘You be careful,’ I said. ‘Pay attention. Don’t lose yourself in the mountains.’”

  I was pretty astonished at this view of Sandro as the victim of designing women. And at being cast in the role of a designing woman myself. But she was his mother, after all. Maybe all mothers feel this way about the women their sons get involved with.

  “You have a book,” she said, in the same tone of voice. “May I see it?”

  “A book?”

  “Yes. A book of poems. With engravings. You always keep it with you.”

  She turned on the light by the bed.

  I didn’t know what to do. Should I lie directly? Simply say there was no book? But obviously Sandro had told her about it, so she knew there was a book. It was in my book bag on a chair. (It was true, I always kept it with me.)

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Where is it?”

  I pointed to the chair. She got the book, came back to the bed. She held it out at arm’s length under the light, then put it down on the edge of the bed and took a pair of reading glasses from a pocket in her robe.

  “You did this yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very beautiful.” She ran her fingertips over the red morocco cover.

  I tried to make myself small as she turned the pages in silence. She kept turning, a few pages at a time, till she came to the Aretino. She looked at the pictures one by one.

  “You do these things with my son?”

  “Not all of them.”

  “But this?” She held up one of the drawings for me to see. I nodded.

  “And this?” I nodded again.

  “And this?” She had arrived at a drawing in which the bodies of the lovers form a gondola or perhaps a bird in flight—it was hard to tell. I shook my head. (We’d tried, but I think it was physically impossible.)

  She sighed. “My son says this is worth a lot of money.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know how much?”

  Now I was on safe ground, for this was something I’d been over and over in my own mind. “You can’t really tell with something like this. It’s unique. You don’t know how many people want it or how much they’re willing to pay. There’s nothing comparable.”

  “I wanted to see it for myself,” she said, putting her hand on my face. She sighed again. “Maybe my son’s luck is changing,” she said.

  That was the end of the discussion. Ten minutes later there was another tap on the door, which I answered as I had before—nuda come un verme. I was still expecting Sandro, but it was la nonna again, with a flannel nightgown for me.

  When I woke in the morning I heard voices out in the courtyard. I threw open the French doors to see what was going on. The ground was covered with new snow. Sandro and his brother Franco were tramping up and down and stomping the snow off their boots. They were dressed in hunting clothes and carrying large rifles, bigger than Papa’s thirty-ought-six. The dogs were turning in circles and whining.

  “Where are you going?” I shouted.

  “We’re going after a cinghiale,” Sandro shouted back. Wild boar. “We’re waiting for our cousins.”

  It was so cold that steam was coming out of their mouths.

  I’d seen the boars hanging in the polleria in the Piazza San Pier Maggiore, but I’d never really thought about where they came from. Now I knew; they came from the Abruzzi.

  “I want to come, too,” I shouted, but they just laughed, and by the time I got downstairs, they had gone.

  It was a Saturday morning. Marissa, who’d taken the morning off, gave me a pair of boots and we walked together to the oliveoil fattoria, about half a mile down the steep road Sandro and I had driven up the night before. Two men were standing in a pit right in the oil, which came up almost to the top of their waders. Actually the oil itself was floating on the surface of about three feet of water. The men skimmed it off with large shallow spoons as big as shovels. Marissa filled a tin from a barrel of oil that had been pressed the day before. Back in the kitchen la nonna, Marissa, and I toasted chunks of bread in the fireplace, rubbed them with garlic, and poured the fresh oil over them. It was a wonderful breakfast. Fresh unprocessed virgin olive oil is to regular olive oil what Chateau Lafite is to Gallo.

  “This is delicious,” I exclaimed. “Do you do this often?”

  La nonna laughed. “About once every twenty years,” she said. “But Sandro said you’d like it.”

  Marissa blushed at the deception.

  But it really was wonderful, and sitting there before the fire with those two women I really let myself go for the first time. I mean I let the fantasies I’d been holding in check run loose. All my expectations about life seemed to be coming to a head: love, marriage, maybe even a family of my own. All the things that I’d put aside, that I’d tried to put out of my mind, seemed to be within my grasp.

  When Sandro came back from the boar hunt I was sitting at the piano stumbling through a Chopin mazurka with too many flats in it for me to handle comfortably, but I was taken by the comment in la nonna’s fine hand:

  A gem, a beautiful exquisitely colored poem.

  Figuration tropical. When major is reached & those

  32nds assail us we realize the seductive charm of

  Chopin. Last 2 bars ineffable sighs.

  13

  Impotentia coeundi

  From Montemuro they drive on snow-covered mountain roads to Popoli and then follow the autostrada across the Apennines to Rome, where Dottor Postiglione is to be interrogated by the Sacra Romana Rota Tribunalis regarding the annulment of his marriage to Isabella Colonna. They take a room in an old hotel in an old piazza, the Piazza Campo dei Fiori, a room with a bare tiled floor and a matrmoniale—a double bed—also old, and noisy, and so soft that it is impossible for the dottore to mount her in the ordinary way without straining his back. So Margot mounts him instead, and the weight of her pushes his rump so far down into the bed that he is sitting almost straight up. Tête-à-tête they talk the love talk they love to talk, love, talk to love, then lie listening: buzz of Vespas, shifting of gears, opening and closing of heavy doors, steady plash of fountain, deep masculine laughter, dreamy voices of women who’ve been drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, rumble of wheels on the paving stones, voices of porters who arrive at three o’clock to assemble the stalls: fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, flowers, clothes, material, shoes, leather goods, vendors in full cry—it’s morning.

  Although he has hardly slept a wink, the dottore rises refreshed, shaves, disguises himself in an inoffensive old suit that has lost its shape—no point in antagonizing the old priests at the Rota by looking too sharp—kisses his sleeping comrade-in-arms on the head, just behind her ear, buys a small sack of Clementines at a stall near the spot where Giordano Bruno was burned alive, peels one as he walks across the piazza on his way to the Cancelleria, a massive Renaissance—early Renaissance—palazzo that houses the nine-hundred-year-old Roman Rota, an ordinary tribunal of the Holy See, a sort of appeals court that hears matrimonial cases that ha
ve been referred to it by lower courts of the first and second instance. As he walks he wipes his fingers on a fresh handkerchief. At a bar opposite the main entrance of the palazzo, with its narrow bays and double order of pilasters—Florentine, he thinks, in everything but its size—he arranges the Clementines on the table and drinks an espresso with his lawyer, who has been waiting for him, looking over a copy of L’Osservatore, the Vatican newspaper. The lawyer has a professional interest, for he is not an ordinary attorney but a consistorial advocate, a specialist in canon law who is licensed to represent those who have fallen into the hands of the Sacra Rota, the Sacred Wheel.

  The lawyer, who is the same age as Dottor Postiglione, removes his sunglasses and puts them in a leather case. He fingers the lapel of the dottore’s suit. He turns up his palms. “Not too bad,” he says, “but you look too pleased with yourself.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  The lawyer, Gianozzo, smiles and touches the back of the dottore’s hand. Like Dottor Postiglione, he is from the Abruzzi. They share a taste for mountain dancing and lamb roasted with eggs and cheese.

  “Your wife tells me that you are traveling with a young friend.”

  Dottor Postiglione inclines his head to one side, and draws a thumb across his freshly shaven cheek.