The Flamethrowers (31 page)

There was a toast all around the fireplace with what the Count of Bolzano commented was a very good Trentino wine, which solicited from signora Valera a lament about how it had been difficult recently to locate Trentino wine, and about all that was wrong with the situations in which one found oneself, where people didn’t know about it or about the best Nebbiolos, such as Barbaresco and Barolo. I understood most of what she said, but she spoke quickly and her words were punctuated by the echoed pock-pocking from the battle that was taking place under the huge sycamore tree down the lawn, where Sandro and the old American novelist were slamming a Ping-Pong ball back and forth. The old novelist had arrived that morning. “Chesil Jones,” he’d said, and extended his hand to me, “but you can call me Chevalier.” Sandro’s mother had held a pretend bugle to her lips and then they both laughed. Was I really to call him Chevalier? I was getting used to proceeding without answers, unsure if I was the butt of jokes.

I could hear the old chevalier grunting and heaving as he leaped to whack the little ball. Sandro was going to defeat him at Ping-Pong, and Chesil Jones had decided to make Sandro’s win as difficult as he could. I’m better at Ping-Pong than Sandro. At least I’ve beaten him at it. And yet I was left to discuss Trentino wine, which I knew nothing about, while Sandro played my game.

“She looks lovely,” signora Valera said, and looked me up and down.

“Yes, she does,” Luigi said, glancing at me. Not in a salacious way, more as if he was taking inventory of what I had on, in the same way she had. These people cared about clothing and appearance. I understood this was a cliché of the Milanesi, but it also was true. In Milan, it had bordered to me on comedy, women riding bicycles
through a downpour in platform heels and tight skirts, holding huge black umbrellas. Florence had been similar, except that the women in Milan seemed more like women in New York—hard and professional, exuding capability. Also, in Florence they dressed well but all women dressed alike, in minor variations on the same theme, and I’d had the feeling they owned only one or two outfits and wore them every day. While we were in Milan, strolling the Corso Buenos Aires, Sandro had stopped in front of a shopwindow and pointed to a dress of pinkish-beige velvet. He said it would look good with my hair, and began carefully brushing my hair away from my neck and looking at me and at the dress. “Why don’t you try it,” he said. It was a very expensive-looking boutique, Luisa Spagnoli. I had wondered if he was momentarily confused about women, about what they want or think they want. I said it was beautiful but seemed formal for a stay in the country, a place he had told me so much about, the meadows and muddy streams and hiking. He said his mother liked everyone to “dress” for dinner. It was an old-fashioned rule, he admitted, but perhaps I could just try it on. In New York Sandro would never submit to a social rule of how anyone should dress. But we were not in New York anymore. We went in. A salesgirl fetched the correct size. The fine silk velvet fell in a lovely way, as only very expensive cloth, cut correctly, does. And it did look good, the rose-beige making my dirty-blond hair more honey in shade, closer to that of the dress. Now I was in it, sleeves to the elbow and little velvet-covered buttons that fastened there.

“You look lovely as well,” I said to Sandro’s mother, unsure if I were meant to respond to the compliment, since she had referred to me in the third person.

“Me?” she asked in a surprised tone. “I am hardly dressed up. This is what I normally wear. You’ve made an occasion of it, I can see that.”

“The dress was a gift from Sandro.”

She turned to the Count of Bolzano. “But of course it was a gift from Sandro,” she said to him. “A last-minute refurbishment before he brought her here.” She had forgotten, once again, that I understood
Italian, although she only seemed to forget, and to say something cruel, when Sandro was not around.

My eyes had begun to tear from the cruelty of her remark. The man who maintained the grounds was putting more wood on our fire. I focused on him, on his hands, the wood, the flames, and the strange phrase chiseled into the flagstone above the hearth:
FAC UT ARDEAT
. “Made to burn,” the old novelist later told me. The wood popped as it caught fire. I gazed into the flames and told myself not to say anything, not to be angry. The groundskeeper silently arranged the logs with an iron poker and then he turned and looked at me. I looked away but could feel his stare. In the two days we had been at the villa I’d caught him staring at Sandro and me several times, not in a friendly way. There was something about his gaze, an intensity, that made me nervous. The entire staff of the villa seemed to harbor a kind of collective hostility toward us. At first I thought it was due to their resentment of Sandro’s mother. But the reason was actually the opposite. We were not deserving of the same treatment as the lady of the villa, to whom they were deeply loyal. We were in some sense freeloaders, especially me, an unpedigreed American they were meant to serve as if I were a Valera, when they knew that I was nothing of the kind.

The cook set out a cutting board loaded with various cheeses, tall, soft wedges that listed this way and that. Did you use the cheese knife to spread what you cut onto your cracker, or were you meant to deposit a dollop onto one of the little plates, and use some other knife to spread? I hadn’t eaten all day, because Sandro and I had gone on a long hike and we had forgotten to bring the picnic lunch the cook had prepared for us, but I was afraid the cook would reprimand me if I went about serving myself the wrong way. With the encouragement of the Count of Bolzano, I helped myself to the cheese. I used the common knife to spread it on the crackers. I thought of something Ronnie had said, that rich people didn’t follow the letter of the law. Only strivers did that, Ronnie said. Doggedly following rules emphasized that one did not belong, according to Ronnie. It sounded right. Although there was
some
way of following them, while not submitting to them, but
it required a mysterious touch, and you had to be from that class to possess the special touch. Like me in that Luisa Spagnoli dress. Even it was beautiful, and such a flattering cut: by wearing it I was submitting. “You’ve made an occasion of it.” While Roberto and Luigi and the Count of Bolzano were not dogged in their finery, but natural. And what did the dress have to do with me? Nothing, while the clothes of these men had everything to do with them.

Signora Valera asked if our room was suitable for me.

“Yes, certainly,” I said. She had already asked me this question two or three times.

“You’re in the company of Ettore Valera,” she said, “Sandro’s grandfather.”

I said yes, and that Sandro had explained this to me.

“It was commissioned,” she went on as if I had not spoken, “by King Fuad of Egypt, in appreciation of Ettore’s work on the Suez Canal.
King Fuad whispered,
” she said, suddenly whispering hoarsely herself, “because he had a hole in his neck. From a bullet. My husband remembered that very clearly, from when he was a boy. The way the king whispered.”

They had once gone back to Egypt together, she and Sandro’s father, T. P. Valera, but all signora Valera could recollect of it now, she said, was the overwhelming stench of urine in the tombs and temples at Luxor. They were there to visit her husband’s mother, Ettore’s wife, who was living back in Alexandria, having fled Italy in protest when the king was dethroned at the end of the war. “She was a monarchist,” signora Valera said, “and now I can’t say that her view seems unreasonable, though yelling, ‘Save the king,’ from the window of a Rolls-Royce probably wouldn’t go over well now, either. What a mess things were. Actually my husband made a lot of money, but you couldn’t
buy
much. We were eating cold polenta while my mother-in-law lay stretched out in her African compound, Negroes around her holding torches. That’s another thing my husband loved to tell about Egypt, the way electric lamps were for those who could not afford a full staff. If you could afford it, you had Negroes with torches, not lamps, not electricity.”

After Egypt, there was talk of other relatives, an uncle of T. P.
Valera’s who had kept a bear as a pet, which one afternoon mauled him viciously, leading to this uncle’s morphine addiction and eventual death. Another relative of some kind who slipped on wet tile and fell into a sulfur bath in Lourdes, the bath having been accidentally heated to boiling. Someone else who was killed in Capri, when picnickers dropped a canned ham from a high cliff to the beach below, rather than carrying the thing down a switchback trail. A cousin who went to sub-Saharan Africa and was bitten by a tsetse fly and got elephantiasis in his buttocks. He’d had to purchase special-order trousers with a gigantic seat, Sandro’s mother said, and he slept with a platform extension at the side of the bed, to support his ass.

She narrated all of this with no hint of irony, but she must have known it was funny. I smiled at her.

She looked at me coldly. “You’re amused only because you’re American,” she said, “where people die of old age, or in car accidents.” She turned to the Count of Bolzano. “They don’t
have
histories there. They barely know what history is!”

Again I stared at the fire, as if to hypnotize myself and melt her words to nothing.
Fac ut ardeat.
I could hear the little Ping-Pong ball being knocked and slapped back and forth in the near dark down the lawn. The edges of the lake below us glittered. The moon, white and full, was rising over the olive grove beyond the patio, twisted little trees spaced apart in such a way that they looked like dancers on a dark stage, each holding its pose, waiting for the music to commence.

*  *  *

When Sandro had suggested a hike that morning, I’d jumped at the idea of leaving the villa for the day. I was feeling stifled inside its walls, ancient and clammy and six feet thick. For keeping out intruders when it was built, in the seventeenth century. Some kind of lord had lived there and the pleasures of it—those shaggy, towering pines, their branches sweeping the dense carpet of grass, their huge pistachio-colored pinecones, and the acacia, which were covered with blooms, little white bells bobbling against the windows where Sandro and I
slept, green leaves pressing the glass like decoupage—all this beauty led me back to a sense of cruelty, to the people kept out, and those kept in, in the kitchen, the washing shed, the servants’ little stone cottages. As a guest, you weren’t allowed to do anything for yourself. Our first morning, we waited for the maid to bring us coffee on a silver tray, with a basket of chewy, coarse bread I assumed was baked somewhere on the property, probably in an elaborate outdoor oven and by a method peasants had developed over hundreds of years. The breakfast room was sunny and beautiful, but I could not relax the way Sandro did, casually flipping through his
Corriere della Sera
as though it were normal to wait in your own house for a servant in uniform not just to bring your coffee but also to pour it. Sandro seemed unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge how different this place was. Servants pour the coffee and you act like that’s normal, I thought at him, but all he did was rustle his pages, his posture asking or instructing that I not acknowledge the change, or his comfort and familiarity with this alien place, where it was typical to hear no people but to understand that they were everywhere, watching you eat, waiting for the moment you might put down your cup, in order to appear suddenly and refill it. There was always someone nearby, the strange groundskeeper, or a maid or cook or some other household employee quietly moving about. There was one servant, a woman who wore a huge wig of grayish-lavender curls that seemed like a practical joke, whose only purpose that I could detect was to cut flowers from the garden, make little arrangements and place them here and there, and then to scurry around managing these arrangements, clearing away dispensed petals and replacing drooping flowers. She and the others moved through rooms with no hesitation, whether they were occupied or not. They didn’t knock, or announce themselves, but instead, in their noiseless corduroy servants’ slippers, they acted invisible, meant to dust or replace dead blooms as if they themselves were of no consequence to the privacy of others. I asked Sandro about this, after the woman in the lavender wig came into the bathroom while I was bathing. She had begun stocking a cabinet with soaps and toilet tissue and never once looked at me. “They’re used to people,” he said.
“They’re domestics. It’s not a big deal.” Later I realized they weren’t a big deal to Sandro because he didn’t register their presence as judgment. Only I did, which, as his mother might have pointed out, was a problem of class, of being from the wrong one, too low for a servant to feel I was an appropriate object of their attentions, for their flower arrangements and ironed sheets, and that was my problem, not hers or her servants’, and she was probably right. It was my problem. The groundskeeper was the one who unnerved me most. He said nothing as he went about his business, up on a ladder, pruning the wisteria that wrapped up and around the cypress trees, or fumigating a wasps’ nest. He watched us and glowered, while the others didn’t look at us at all. He would stare at me, a certain wryness in his face that I couldn’t decipher. I might have stared back had he not been handsome. He was, if in a plain and obvious way, and it was that—his looks—that unnerved me, made me look away whenever we crossed paths.

This morning, our second one in the villa, Sandro had slept late and I’d gone to breakfast alone. Signora Valera was there at the table, but it was too late to turn back. We drank our espresso in silence, or what I hoped would remain so, until she asked if I was going to marry her son. Because, she said, she had not been informed of a wedding.

“We’re not getting married, no.”

“So what are your plans?” she asked. “I mean, for when you are no longer together. If he has not asked you to marry him, it’s temporary. A temporary arrangement.”

“I don’t have any plans,” I said.