Enchantments (4 page)

Usci and Ubi were carriage horses too, but my father made us ride them. That is, my sister
and I rode them and their stiff trot jarred our spines. For Clara it was a torture every time, so demonstrably so that she only had to say “That's enough, Papa, I want to get off,” and he was relieved and helped her down. But when I tried to call a halt to the drill, I was promptly rebuffed. “No, you keep going. Make an effort, show some spirit, and you'll do fine. In a few years you'll go to the Olympics, and I'll buy you a horse who'll make Princess Anne die of envy.” And I would go on, my legs aching, by now unable to keep a good post.

One day he and I left Paris on a trip, for the first time just the two of us. We were going to Pau, a town in southwest France where there was a family who bred Anglo-Arabs. Rather than being happy, I was fretful, anxious at the thought of all that unaccustomed intimacy with my father, traveling by ourselves day after day.

In the train I began to write. With my fountain pen and a turquoise ink that I adored I wrote down what I saw from the window—field after field like an enormous patchwork quilt and every so often a group of melancholy cows. After a while my father asked if he could read what I was writing. I handed him the notebook without hesitating, but immediately I was sorry. What if
he thought it was all foolishness? When he finished, he looked at me seriously. He'd never looked at me like that—a long look of surprise as well as respect. He said, “Good. I like the way you write, I like the idea of the quilt.” I was in seventh heaven. But when I started writing again, the muse was silent, and the fields and woods and rivers of drizzly France didn't inspire me any longer.

At Pau we went to the Hôtel de la Poste. Our room was nice, facing the town square where the horse races took place, but it was so small that my massive and portly father couldn't get out of the bathroom if I left my suitcase open.

We went to the races—the couple who bred Anglo-Arabs had innumerable sons who rode in them. The husband was a small, muscular man, a Popeye with a beret, and the wife was a tall stick of a woman, just like Olive Oyl. They addressed each other with the formal
vous,
and I was terribly puzzled that they could have managed to produce so many sons without saying
tu
to each other. Wth my father I ate snails with garlic and frog's legs.

One day near the end of our stay we chose our horses—three three-year-olds (a stallion, Scapin, and two mares, Urhéane and Ukrainienne)
and an Irish Thoroughbred, Ardent Lady. Olive Oyl and her husband gave us a puppy, an Irish setter whom we named Red.

A month or so later, during the summer, the horses (and Red) came from France to Umbria. They were exhausted and nervous. They caracoled out of the truck with a whinnying and stomping that filled me with anguish. The veins stood out on their necks, which were studded with horsefly bites. The men had trouble holding them, and my father told them to let the horses loose in the paddocks, the mares in one, Scapin in the other. They romped around for a quarter hour or more, but when the others settled down, Urhéane was still galloping, with the setter puppy holding on to her tail with his teeth so that he was a red ball flying along twenty centimeters off the ground.

That was how I came to choose her. We grew up together and learned everything together, step by step. Sometimes, for fun, she took the bit in her teeth, carrying me off with her on a rodeo ride the way she did with Red. There was nothing I could do but give her more rein and grip with my legs, sealing in that way the agreement that we were equals, that we would put up with each other's moods without making a fuss.

As far as Urhéane was concerned we were a single thing, and if I had a fear it was that she would count too much on the sure-footedness she had on her own and make a mistake that would bring both of us crashing to the ground.

But I didn't know true fear until later, and that was during the reign of the other mare, the terrible, the gray czarina, Ukrainienne. Even before I got into the saddle my legs would shake. She, who was all quick flesh, could sense my uneasy approach and a current of annoyance would run through her—an annoyance that became intolerable to her once I climbed into the saddle, when I was actually touching her with my plebeian trembling. She couldn't help herself— she had to get me off, soon, right away, now, in whatever way she could. She would rear, time after time after time, with horrifying determination. If I managed to press myself onto her neck, throwing all my weight forward, there she was bucking furiously to make me fly over her head. If I didn't fall right away, she would hurl herself at top speed toward a wall or a railing and then suddenly stop. In a fog I could hear the voice of my father or the riding master telling me to do something, do something—but what? What could I do?

The times when I didn't fall, I still got off in a sea of cold sweat, and in despair. The gray czarina, who a few years later would be—with another rider—the champion of France, was too much for me. But I couldn't bear to admit it. And the day when my mother appeared, shaking with alarm, and yelled loudly and clearly at my father, “Can't you see! You irresponsible maniac, can't you see the child won't ever handle that horse?”—I had my first humiliation.

Clara and I were the first of our friends to have a Barbie doll. One day a girl joined my class, and her hair was even longer and curlier than mine. I began a conversation by asking her, “Does it hurt you too when someone combs the knots out of your hair?” To impress her I said, without waiting for her answer, “Tomorrow I'm getting mine completely shaved off.” She looked so terrified that I liked her immediately.

I found out that she too had a younger sister, and, what was even more exciting, they lived in the same building we'd moved into a few months earlier. I foresaw an endless friendship, total intimacy.

We're in the car. As always my mother has come to pick us up at school. In a rush I tell her
about the new girl who's called Anna and who lives in our building, and I point her out with a trembling finger—there she is walking along the sidewalk with her mother and sister. “Mama, can't we take them with us?” I beg feverishly. My mother looks at me intently, weighing the urgency, the seriousness of my plea, and then throws open the door and jumps out of the car and there she is running—running! How my heart is leaping with each stride she takes, a lioness running down her prey for her famished cubs, and I'm thankful, so thankful that my mother is running toward those distant figures on the sidewalk to ask them to come home with us. From then on my mother takes all of us to school and picks us up every day (Anna and Gabriella's father picks us up only after the Saturday half-day). And from then on we play together every afternoon, Mondays at their house and all the other days (except Saturday and Sunday, which are reserved for our family alone) at our house. There was no special reason I could see for this lopsided arrangement, but it suited me because at their house they weren't allowed to play with Barbie dolls.

One day I dared to ask Anna's mother why not.

“Because Barbie has breasts,” she replied. And that was that. I didn't dare tell all this to my mother, but that evening I regarded her with suspicion, wondering if it was something to be ashamed of that I had a mother who let me play with a doll with breasts.

Sunday mornings my father would drive Clara and me to the drugstore to buy a new dress for our Barbie dolls. The three of us in the car— Papa at the wheel, one of us in front, maybe both of us. On the radio—sometimes French songs with a mournful accordion, sometimes the races at Longchamp. The quays a gray ribbon running past us, solemn buildings with the windows always shut, cold as mirrors. But I feel cheerful, floating as lightly as our birdlike chatter in the little paradise of our car. “I want Barbie's Christmas dress.” “I like Barbie's riding habit.”

“And what about Barbie's boyfriend?” my father says. “Doesn't anyone want Ken?”

“No, not Ken,” I answer decisively. “We don't like men.”

“Not even your old dad?”

“Yes, Papa,” I murmur, lowering my head. “Yes.” But I'm not telling the whole truth. Because even though I'm very fond of him, I would like him better if he were a woman.

There was one Barbie dress that I adored more than all the others: the Barbie queen's gown. Full-length, billowing, immense, in gold brocade. And then a glittering cape trimmed with ermine. Shoes with gold stiletto heels, a diamond crown, an emerald necklace, and a scepter like a torch holder with a circlet at the top and on it the insignia of the royal family—a big Gothic
B,
blue on a field of yellow. There is a reason that I remember it so well.

One time my parents were invited to a ball at the palace at Versailles.

That evening Clara and I are in our pajamas after our bath. We're sitting in our parents’ bedroom on Mama's twin bed. They're getting ready, going in and out of the pink marble bathroom. They're excited, they're talking about this and that, laughing a little. Then Mama takes something out of the closet, some sort of cumbersome bag. She says, “Don't look, children, don't look,” and she awkwardly carries whatever it is into the bathroom and closes the door. And I wait endlessly. At last my mother reappears, my mother in the Barbie queen's gown—perhaps not as billowing but full-length, and yes, in gold brocade, and even the shoes are gold. On her face there's a timid smile, but she's very, very
happy—I can tell. And my father is smiling and there's a sly gleam in his eyes. He says, “Look under the pillow … “And Mama comes over to the bed where we're sitting and slips her hand under the pillow. And in her hand there is a case made of smooth, smooth green leather with a little press button. And Mama's eyes light up the way a clearing in the woods lights up when the moon suddenly appears, and she asks, “But what's this?” And I know that she knows and doesn't know, knows and doesn't know, and it will be like that, wonderfully like that the whole while she's holding the case in her white fingers, about to press the hard little button. And then,
toe!
Inside there's a necklace of teardrop emeralds. My father picks it up and stands behind Mama. As he gently fastens it around her neck, it closes the circle of my dreams.

My mother was born in America, and she used to tell us bedtime stories about when she lived among the Plains Indians with her grandfather, Sitting Bull. When she got to the end of a story, Clara never failed to say, “Mama, I don't believe your grandfather was Sitting Bull.” If Papa was there he'd laugh and say, “What are you talking about? Just look at her big, beautiful Sioux nose.” And he'd pinch it and she'd push his hand away, but she'd be laughing too. And she'd add, “Just remember you had to give ten horses to Grandpa Sitting Bull so you could marry me.”

She came up with story after story with so many details that even though at the beginning we were just pretending to believe so she wouldn't
stop, by the end we found ourselves wondering— what if it's true?

Of course, as we found out the first time she took us to America to meet her family, it wasn't true. To begin with, they were all light-skinned—though there was some hope for an old aunt with a face so wrinkled it looked like cracked shoe leather and an aquiline nose so large it cast a cone of a shadow across her cheek. The only problem was that her name was Rosalinda.

To be sure, Mama's family sometimes spoke odd Italian. With complete assurance they would say they were going to the “supermar-chetta” in the “carro.” But they weren't Indians— no, they were Abruzzesi, the older ones having emigrated to America at the turn of the century. Great-aunt Angelica and Great-uncle Giacomo (now called Jack) had gotten married by proxy when he was already in America and she was still back in the Abruzzo. Jack told us that he and his brother (my mother's father, who died young) had built the roads of New York State. Jack had gone on to build not only the roads but houses in White Plains, the suburb of New York City where they lived. Perhaps that was why all the houses looked so much alike. When I went for a walk, I got lost. Luckily they weren't all the same color.