Flirting in Italian (14 page)

I took the time to look up online that songwriter Luca mentioned. It took me ages just to work out how to spell the name Jovanotti, and it took forever to find the lyrics:

“Ci sono trenta modi per salvare il mondo, ma uno solo perche il mondo salvi me—che io voglia star con te, e tu voglia star con me.”

And then it took me even longer to translate it. Those online search translations are pretty rubbish when it comes to sentences. I had to work my way through it, painstakingly. But it was worth it.

“There are thirty ways to save the world,” Jovanotti says, “but only one way for the world to save me—if I want to be with you, and you want to be with me.”

I can’t help it. I came to Italy trying to find out about a painting and its connection to myself, but instead, all I can think about is Luca.

The castle walls loom above us, stark and gray. Set on a grassy mound, which raises them even higher, they’re just as intimidating as they were built to be; forbidding, almost sheer sheets of stone, so tall we need to tilt our heads back to see the crenellations between which the archers would kneel to fire down arrows on the besiegers. Or pour boiling oil on their heads, or push them off their ladders so they crashed to the stony ground below and broke their backs.

It’s a sunny day, but the graveled area where Catia parked the jeep is in what’s probably perpetual shade, surrounded by a thick rank of tightly massed cypresses, their dark foliage cutting off all direct light. The castle towers dominate the landscape, forcing us to look at it; we’ve been chattering
away on the drive in high excitement, but as soon as we step down from the jeep, we fall silent, standing there in the shadow of the castle, staring up at its walls. Feeling very small and fragile and mortal by comparison with its solidity and endurance.

“ ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ ” Kelly murmurs, and Catia, hearing her, taps the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other in approval, a clap performed by an Italian too elegantly restrained to actually make much noise.

“
Molto bene
, Kelly,” she comments. “A Dante quotation! You have been doing your homework from our class yesterday, I can see.”

Unsurprisingly, Catia is turning out to be a strict teacher. The afternoons spent by the pool are now supposed to be used for homework time after morning classes; we’ve done Dante and Petrarch, the famous Italian poets, started Italian art history—lots of icons at the moment that all look exactly the same to me, but are painted on gold backgrounds, which Paige oohs and aahs over—and are studying Italian verb conjugations. Though we don’t have formal tests, Catia will fire out questions in classes, fully expecting us to be able to answer from reading through the bound printouts she’s handed to us the day before. I’m doing all right, Paige is frankly struggling, but Kendra and Kelly are the stars of the group. A competition is developing between them that isn’t always friendly.

I see Kendra dart Kelly a resentful glance, and Paige blurts out rather sullenly:

“Jeez, Kelly, you are
such
a brainiac.”

I’m sure that isn’t meant as a compliment; Paige accompanied the comment with a roll of her eyes at Kendra. But Kelly, who has none of Paige’s advantages, who’ll have to make her way in life entirely on her own brainpower, not Mummy and Daddy’s money and social status, takes it as one, and beams with pleasure.

“Can you tell us where that quotation comes from?” Catia asks. Kendra opens her mouth to answer, but Kelly gets in first:

“The
Inferno
. When all the doomed souls are going into hell,” she says quickly. “It’s written above the gates.”

“Eccellente!”
Catia comments, and her approval provokes Kendra to raise her immaculate eyebrows and drawl:

“Kelly, better not tell Luca next time we see him what you said about his ancestral home, eh?”

Kelly flushes red with embarrassment.

“I—I didn’t mean—” she stammers, but Kendra’s already turning to exchange a smile with Paige, having scored a point off her academic rival.

Why do we have to do all this sniping and bitchery?
Kelly and Kendra are both really clever—one of them doesn’t have to win over the other to prove that.

Sometimes I think hanging out with boys would be an awful lot simpler. And then I remember how much they like to make fart jokes, and I change my mind again.

“We will certainly not say that to the principessa,” Catia says firmly, “who is waiting to show us around the castello. Come, we go in this way.”

She leads us along the wide gravel drive, to a high arched gateway whose ancient wrought-iron gates are pushed wide
open; it doesn’t look as if they’ve been closed in decades. The Castello di Vesperi isn’t expecting an attack any time soon. Still, the gates are wicked-looking things with spikes on top, presumably in case anyone tries to scale them and climb in that way, and as we walk inside, into the stone courtyard, I notice that all the girls instinctively glance back over our shoulders, as if we’re checking that we know where the exit is. The walls are just as imposing from this perspective, casting deep shade over this side of the courtyard. It reminds me, unavoidably, that they’re this high, this looming, not just to keep invaders out, but to keep prisoners in.

Inside the fortifications, a car is parked, a battered old white Fiat Panda, square as a children’s toy, along with a sleek Mazda. I can’t help noticing that Luca’s car isn’t there, and this is surely where the family leaves their cars; I was secretly hoping we’d bump into him on this visit. I’ve made a huge effort with my hair, my makeup, and my clothes. A mixture of disappointment and relief floods through me at the realization that I’m unlikely to see him today. Relief, because Luca stirs up all sorts of incredibly confusing feelings in me, and I have more than enough to cope with—meeting his mother, trying to find out as much as I can about the castello’s history and any clues that might lead to the unknown girl in the portrait who looks like me—without the powerful distraction of my attraction to Luca being thrown into the mix.

It’s definitely for the best
, I tell myself firmly, and I try very hard to believe it.

A long strip of pavement rises to one side, curving around in a wide semicircle, leading to a cluster of buildings
at the center. Catia starts up the path, and we all follow. I can hardly believe I’m here, at the castello. It’s so weird that this is Luca’s home but maybe also connected to me.…

“It’s like the Yellow Brick Road,” Paige mutters irrepressibly. “Look out for the monkeys!”

The castello is a ridiculously imposing building. The jeep had to climb a steep, winding road to reach it; it stands on its own hill, Catia said, on the historic border between Florence and Siena, and was a battleground for centuries as the two cities waged perpetual war with each other. I can sense all the years of history here, am imagining battles fought, arrows flying, blood seeping into the stones beneath our feet. I may be letting my Gothic ideas run away with me, based on my love for historical novels, but as I look at Kendra and Kelly, I’m sure their thoughts are running on similar lines. They look grave and solemn as we round the wide sweep of pavement and finish at an enormous pair of double doors made of thick oak, so heavily embossed and decorated with ironwork bosses and shields that I can’t imagine how much they must weigh. Or indeed, how many men it’s going to take to heave one open to let us in.

Catia pushes a brass button recessed into the wall, and a high, eerie electric bell reverberates beyond, sounding as if it’s bouncing off acres of stone corridors inside. We wait for a minute or so, and then the four of us girls jump out of our skins as an awful creaking noise starts up from the doors, and a smaller one, cut into the larger left-hand door, swings open. It’s cunningly concealed, so we didn’t notice it was there, which is a shock in itself; and the woman who stands there, small, with a heavily lined face, wearing
a black dress and shoes that look like orthopedic clogs, is equally scary-looking; she’s positively glowering at us. We cower back. I’m paralyzed with fear that this tiny, evil-faced apparition is Luca’s mother.

“Buon giorno, Maria!”
says Catia, the only one of us who isn’t intimidated by the grimacing dwarf. She rattles off something quickly in Italian, to which Maria shrugs, raising both shoulders and then letting them fall so heavily I can almost hear her bones creak. She turns away, leaving the door open, and Catia gestures for us to go inside.

“I just told her she needs to oil the hinges,” Catia says firmly. “It is ridiculous, that noise. It will give everyone terrible headaches.”

Catia runs a very tight ship; everything at Villa Barbiano is oiled and dusted and polished within an inch of its life, her cook and maid bustling around in a perpetual flurry of activity. Here at the Castello di Vesperi, the atmosphere is a lot more laissez-faire. Maria—who must be the housekeeper or maid; there’s no way Catia would greet the owner of the castello by lecturing her about oiling her hinges—is definitely not as keen as Catia on proper house maintenance. We’re walking down a high corridor, what’s probably a priceless carpet beneath our feet, but there’s definitely a stale, old smell in the air; the brass up-lighters meant to illuminate each picture hanging on the paneled walls aren’t gleaming as they should be, and the heavy gilt frames themselves are equally dull.

“Well, I guess we found the monkey,” Kendra says dryly to me, and I can’t hold back an answering huff of recognition. With her lined and creased face, her dark, beady eyes
and gruff demeanor, Maria does look very like a monkey. A mean, evil monkey who’d rip the food out of your mouth, scurry up a tree, and perch on a branch to eat it, throwing the bits it didn’t want at you with a nasty laugh.

We emerge into a majestic hall, with a wide central mahogany staircase straight out of a period film, or one of my favorite historical novels. It’s illuminated by stained-glass windows that throw diamonds of blue and red and green light over the wooden floors, and I can see dust mites gleaming golden, turning over in the shafts of sunlight that pierce the gloom. A gigantic chandelier hangs from the center of the ceiling. It must be four feet around, and it’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen: like an explosion in a glass factory, curlicues of white- and pink- and gold-edged glass, fluted and twisted and curling around each other, enormous and vulgar. It doesn’t go with the rest of its surroundings at all.

“Oh, I
loooove
the chandelier!” Paige gushes predictably. Kendra, who’s come to a halt next to me, rolls her eyes.

“You
would
,” she says as we stare up at it. “It looks like something from a mall in Dallas. Or a Disney cartoon.”

“So?” Paige is unabashed. “I love Disney cartoons!”

Directly below the chandelier is a circular table, big enough to seat eight people around its circumference. Curious to see more, I walk closer and gasp when I realize the top, set on a carved wooden base, is a slab of shiny, streaky dark green stone that looks as if it’s been cut from one huge rock, though that can’t be possible. Set into it is an elaborate design that looks like a family crest, in black and dark red and mother-of-pearl, all pieces of stone cut to fit and
slotted in so smoothly that when I run my fingers over the surface, I can barely feel the joins.

“Ah, Donatella!
Eccoci!
” Catia says, and I look up to see the figure of a woman on the landing above, or really a balcony that runs the length of the stone wall, split in the center by the wide staircase. It must be a nuisance to have to walk along the balcony to get down the stairs, but it does allow you to make an amazing entrance as your guests stand below, looking up at you as you descend the stairs like a queen.

Or at least, in this case, a princess.

“This is the Principessa di Vesperi,” Catia says as the slender woman makes her way down the stairs toward us. The light is behind her, so I don’t see her face at first, just her slim figure in a Chanel jacket over a silk T-shirt with a double string of pearls at her neck, narrow blue jeans, and Ferragamo pumps, those quilted navy ones with bows on the toes that so many posh women wear. Her black hair is too big for her head, blown into a rigid bob by an old-fashioned stylist. Led by Catia, we shuffle around the gigantic green table to meet the principessa, finding ourselves lining up to say our names and shake her hand as if we really were being greeted by the queen: Paige actually does a tiny bob, like a modified curtsy, when she takes the principessa’s outstretched hand. I look down at my own fingers and realize with horror that the tips are gray with dust from the table; I wipe them swiftly on the side of my leg before holding out my hand, but she’s seen the gesture and shakes her head.

“I’m sorry, the table is not clean,” she says to me, and I feel my face go red as I mumble some apology for having
inadvertently pointed it out. “It is beautiful, though, yes? It is my own family
stemma
.”

She shakes her head, looking cross with herself that she doesn’t know the word in English.

“Coat of arms,” Catia interpolates, and the principessa nods gratefully.

“This table came with me when I came ’ere to live, many years ago. I begged my father to let me bring it,” she says. “I always love it, even when I am a little girl. It is malachite, the green stone.”

“The carving’s amazing,” I say, because she’s looking at me expectantly.

“If you like,” she says, “there is a
museo
in Florence that shows many examples of this kind of work. Maybe Catia can take you. It is called
Museo dell’ Opificio delle Pietre Dure.
They ’ave many
mosaici
. I go often, I find it very interesting.”

Her Italian accent is much heavier than Catia’s, and the name of the museum is so complicated that, mouthing it to myself, I get hopelessly stuck. Also, she looks very like Luca, and that’s weirdly hypnotizing. I recognize his high cheekbones, his pale skin, the black of his hair, his blue eyes, and his slim build, though Luca is lean, tensile muscle while the principessa seems surprisingly fragile. Her hand in mine was thin, all bones under her heavy gold rings, and the skin of her face is drawn too tightly over the high cheekbones, as if they might actually slice through it.

She’s frowning now as she looks at me. I feel myself blushing again, not sure what I’ve done; then she says something in Italian to Maria, who clops forward in her cloglike shoes. To my horror, Maria grabs my shoulders with hands like
claws and swivels me around so my face is illuminated by one of the shafts of white light that pierce through the clear panes in the stained-glass windows.

The principessa shakes her head as if in shock. Maria, squinting closely at me, her ancient skin creased so deeply it’s cracked like leather, mumbles a stream of Italian that sounds like a string of curses. Both of them seem transfixed by the sight of my face. I hear the name Monica repeated as they look briefly at each other, then back at me. Maria’s fingers are sunk into my shoulders, gripping me so hard it’s as if she’s digging right down to the bone. She’s much stronger than she looks; I don’t dare to move because I know she’ll just clutch me harder with those claws.