The Last Promise (9 page)

On their way they stopped at the co-op in Bagno a Ripoli for groceries. Ross purchased six liters of bottled water and four plastic sacks full of food: two large rounds of hard-crusted Tuscan bread, a half kilo of prosciutto
cotto
, parmesan cheese, coffee, sugar, bread, spaghetti, crackers, penne, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, eggs, salt, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, six frozen margherita pizzas and two one-liter cartons of milk. At Luigi’s suggestion he purchased three plug-in mosquito repellents. “You’ll need them in the country,” Luigi warned. “It is not America. They don’t have screens on the windows.”

They completed one more errand on the way, stopping briefly at the bus stop at the end of the long drive into the villa. Ross hopped out and checked the schedule, scribbling it into a small notepad.

Rendola’s outer yard was vacant when they arrived. They crossed the courtyard and Luigi rang Anna’s doorbell. She greeted them from an upper window.

A moment later she emerged from her apartment carrying a large plastic envelope tucked under one arm and a bottle of red wine clutched in the other.

She led them to the apartment, unlocked the door and they went inside. They sat around the kitchen table while Anna spread the contracts out in front of them. After she had explained in meticulous detail the troubles of her morning, they signed the lease papers. Then she opened the wine, poured their glasses full and they consummated the deal with a toast.

Anna handed Ross a set of keys then walked him and Luigi around the apartment, explaining how things worked and what to do if and when the power went out, which Ross could expect a couple times a month. She showed him how to check the radiator and bleed it of excess air when it wasn’t working properly and how to restart the water heater. She gave him a
rubrica
: a phone book filled with the numbers of local restaurants and shops. They went outside, and Luigi recorded the gas levels on a meter built into the courtyard wall.

On their way driving up to the villa, Ross had noticed an older couple filling water bottles at a brass spigot at the end of the property. He asked Anna about it.

“Oh yes,” she said. “It is good springwater. We all fill our bottles there. There is a sign that says
‘Non Potabile,’
but do not believe it. Half of Chianti would be dead if it were true. Someone put it there a couple years ago to keep outsiders away. It is better than the bottled water in stores. And it’s free.”

Ross thanked her and she left them. Then Luigi left as well, leaving Ross to settle into his new place. He hung his clothes, put his toiletries in the bathroom and then walked around the apartment. There were four new paintings that hadn’t been there when he first came—two landscapes, one of the Chianti hills, the other of a field of sunflowers. There was one still life—a wooden platter with grapes and cheese—and one framed portrait of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of Italy. Ross had noticed the new artwork the moment he stepped foot in the apartment. Unlike the cheap reproductions passed off as art in most rentals, this art pleased him. For one they were originals. More important than that, they were good.

He examined the paintings in greater detail. He especially liked the painting of sunflowers. He heard a noise in the courtyard and pulled back the kitchen curtain. The boy he had seen by the pool was kicking a soccer ball against the inner wall. He looked around for the boy’s mother, but the child was alone.

He went into his bedroom, stretched out across the bed and read.

Later that afternoon Anna came by with a housewarming gift: a bag of
biscotti
, a large bottle of olive oil and some spinach torte, hot from her oven. Though she had always wanted to learn English, for which she occasionally solicited Eliana’s help, it was in the same spirit in which she wanted to lose weight, and neither had happened. Ross sensed that she was nervous to be alone with him. She spoke halting, monosyllabic English and was as relieved as she was surprised when Ross replied in Italian.

“But you speak Italian!” she exclaimed.

“Poco,”
he said, gesturing with his thumb and forefinger slightly apart.

“You speak better Italian than my last husband,” she said, then added beneath her breath,
“Cretino.”

As she went to leave, she said, “I will be leaving tomorrow on
vacanza
. I am going to the sea. If you have an emergency, Eliana will know where to reach me.”

“Eliana?”

She pointed to the green door on the opposite side of the courtyard. “She lives in the next apartment. She was the woman sitting by the pool yesterday. She was with her boy. Do you remember?”

 

The villa had a satellite dish and Ross found CNN. He watched for a while, then surfed the channels until he found a soccer game. The Fiorentina were playing Juventus, their rival, and he watched the match until ten then went to bed early. He had an early tour in the morning, and as he had not yet mastered the bus system, he would have to leave at sunup.

He set his alarm clock for five-thirty, then undressed to his briefs. He opened the outer window and lay down on top of the bed.

The sounds of the country seeped into the room like the cool night air. The noises he had grown accustomed to, the horns and brakes of the city, were replaced by the alien warbling of frogs and the shrill songs of the crickets and cicadas.

For more than three years, he had wanted to be any place other than where he was. But mostly he had wanted to be here, in his own place—here, where he felt like a man. The realization that he had arrived filled him with joy.

His thoughts returned to the woman by the pool. Eliana, Anna had called her. Though he had only seen her for a few minutes, he could still see her clearly in his mind. He could see those eyes. Could she have really been that beautiful? He doubted it. It was more likely that his loneliness had painted her in the exaggerated strokes of a dream. Then again maybe she was a dream, along with every other good thing that had come to him this last week. If so, he welcomed her and hoped she stayed awhile.

As he began to drift off, there came from the open window a new sound. He opened his eyes and strained to hear. He wondered what animal could make such a noise. A wild boar, perhaps. Or was it a bird? He couldn’t quite place it. It almost sounded like a woman crying.

—Italian Proverb

—Ross Story’s diary

 

 

R
oss woke in the same bed he had gone to sleep in, his alarm chirping a few feet from his head.
Dream or not, I’m still here,
he thought and smiled. He left his apartment before dawn, walking a quarter mile to the SITA bus stop.

He arrived in downtown Florence with more than an hour to spare, so he got off the bus at
Piazza Beccaria
, where he stopped at a
pasticceria
for a cappuccino and pastry before catching a compact inner-city bus. In spite of the early hour, the bus was already crowded. He moved to the back and grabbed a ceiling strap.

At the next stop a couple boarded who reminded Ross of a Duane Hanson piece he had once seen on display at an art gallery in Minnesota:
Tourists. They might as well wear a sign,
Ross thought, looking at the camera hanging from the man’s neck. A bent tourist guidebook stuck out of the back pocket of his shorts. The woman wore a sleeveless shirt and pink-lens sunglasses, and a large bag hung over her arm.

The doors shut behind them and the couple hovered near the bus’s stamp machine. When they spoke, Ross recognized the accent immediately. They were from Minnesota or Fargo, close to where Ross once called home.

“Judy, will ya just put the darn ticket in the machine?”

“What for?”

“It’s what the man in the tobacco shop said to do. It stamps it or something.”

“Which machine? There’s two of them.”

“How would I know?”

“What if I put it in the wrong one?”

“Try them both.”

Ross didn’t speak, but he pointed to the orange box mounted to the wall.

“Did you see that?” the woman said. “That man just pointed to the orange one. Grazee, signora.”

“You just called him missus.”

“I can’t ever remember which one it is. He’s a good-looking Italian man. Grazee, signori,” she said, speaking loudly, with a large, deliberate stretch of her lips. “Th-ank y-ou.”

She looked so comical Ross tightened his mouth so as not to laugh.
“Prego, signora.”

“That means
you’re welcome
,” her husband said.

Just then a young man slid past Ross. Ross had noticed him as he boarded the bus and watched him as he moved closer to the couple, who were all but oblivious to what was happening around them. At a corner all the passengers leaned with the bus and the young man brushed against the tourists, easily lifting the man’s wallet from his back pocket. Ross was waiting for it and caught the thief’s wrist, lifting it with the black leather wallet he held.
“Ha trovato qualcosa?” Find something?

Fear flashed across the thief’s face. The woman screamed. “Martin, that man has your wallet!”

The tourist spun around. “Hey!”

The pickpocket, his wrist still in Ross’s grasp, dropped the wallet. As the bus slowed for the next stop, the thief yanked his hand from Ross and jumped off the bus, knocking an elderly woman over as he did so. He quickly disappeared down a side street.

The man stooped down and picked up his wallet. “That was close,” he said to Ross. “Thank you.”

“Give him a reward, Martin,” the woman said.

He fished a couple of ten-thousand-lire bills from his wallet and offered them to Ross.

Ross waved them off.
“No, grazie.”

“I insist.”

“Say, insist-a. Just add an ‘a’ to it, sometimes they understand that.”

Ross just waved.
“Veramente, no.”

“I don’t think he wants it,” Martin said to his wife. He turned to Ross. “Well, I sure as heck appreciate it,” he said, shoving the thick wallet into the same back pocket it had just been lifted from. “Grand-ay gra-zee.”

“Prego,”
Ross said again. They stood in silence as the bus jogged along, until a few minutes later, when the woman pointed ahead. “There’s the big dome up ahead. I think the next one’s our stop.”

A moment later the couple stepped from the bus, and turned back before the doors closed. “Grazee, again.”

Ross smiled. “There are a lot of pickpockets in Florence, sir. It’s best to leave a wallet that big in your hotel.”

The couple just stared at him in wonder as the door closed.

At the next stop Ross stepped off the bus and walked a half block to the Uffizi.

Even before he entered the gallery’s courtyard he could feel his mood begin to change.

The Uffizi was more than a gallery to Ross, it was a temple, and standing before its art was a religious experience.

During his darkest hours, when faith deserted him, art had been his closest link to divinity and it still sustained him. He felt his work a calling in the same way some feel a calling to preach the word. That is what he was, he decided—a preacher, expounding the divinity of art. Though more times than not his pearls were cast before swine, before those too jet-lagged and culture-shocked to hear, but sometimes his sermons fell on willing ears, and he saw the light come into their eyes, and sometimes tears, and that was when he was happiest.

 

By nine o’clock Ross had completed his first tour of the day. His second group canceled. Their tour bus had broken down in Siena, and Ross had waited in the courtyard for nearly an hour before Francesca found him and gave him the news. He took coffee at a bar in Piazza della Signoria then went out to the city to purchase a scooter.

His first week in Italy he had decided that riding a scooter on the Italian roads was akin to a death wish, but he had since repented of the thought. A scooter was the only practical way around Florence. After a little while he found one he liked, a Piaggio Vespa, black and yellow like a wasp. He bought a helmet and lock and drove out of the dealership feeling more like a native. He drove to the northeast perimeter of Florence, upward to the hills of San Domenico and Fiesole. He stayed awhile in Fiesole, toured the Etruscan amphitheater and tombs. The town square, Piazza Mino, was as beautiful as he had been told it was, but there were too many tourists, so he drove back down from the hills, across the Arno toward Rendola.

 

Earlier that morning, while Ross commuted to work, Eliana had taken coffee with Anna. The sky was a brilliant blue, and Eliana had opened an upstairs window near the parlor overlooking the courtyard.

Anna spooned her third teaspoon of sugar into her coffee.

“The American moved in yesterday.”

“I saw him.”

“He leaves for work early. He left at six this morning.”

“Are you spying on him?”

“Every chance I get. He’s very
bello
. And he speaks
un buon italiano
.”

“Really?”

“He speaks better Italian than my ex. I told him so.”

“Gorbachev speaks better Italian than your ex. I could never understand his accent.”

“Maybe you should go welcome him to the villa.”

Eliana looked up over her cup at Anna. “By welcome him do you really mean seduce him?”