CHAPTER
NINE
I AM FOILED IN MY IGNOBLE PLAN TO DITCH MARA AT THE AIRPORT BY GENE Silverman’s determination to catch up to Leo Balthasar. First he cuts the line at immigration, infuriating a French couple behind us who reel off a list of anti-American epithets at Gene’s uncomprehending back. Mara smiles at the woman and tries to ask her where she purchased her Longchamps bag, but when the woman stares at her icily, Mara sidles closer to me and whispers, “The French, they’re such snobs.”
Although Mara, by all rights, should present her passport with her husband, she sticks to my side so that we end up approaching immigration together—forming an unlikely family unit in the eyes of the Italian government. Then, since Gene is too deep in movie talk with Balthasar to bother with Mara’s luggage, I end up helping her collect five pieces of matching Louis Vuitton bags—including one that we are forced to return to the infuriated Frenchwoman.
By the time we reach the taxi queue, Gene has hopped into a cab with Balthasar and a German hedge fund manager who they’ve learned is also bound for La Civetta.
“Have you thought of investing in film?” I hear Balthasar say in perfect German. I wonder how many languages he knows how to say that phrase in.
“You girls probably want to plot out your shopping anyway,” Gene tosses over his shoulder to us as he gets into the minivan. And then, turning to Leo Balthasar, “I should probably ask you guys for my retainer fee in cameos and small leather goods.” He laughs at his own joke as the car drives off, leaving Mara and me to a tiny Fiat that visibly sinks to the pavement under the weight of Mara’s luggage.
“Will we pass any good shops on the way to the villa?” Mara asks.
“No. La Civetta is in the hills north of the city. We’re just skirting the northern edge of town right now. All the stores are south—along the Arno and the Via della Vigna Nuova, and, of course, the Ponte Vecchio has dozens of jewelry shops.” I peer out the window in the direction of the river, but all I can see, past the brown and gold suitcases crammed into the backseat with us, are flashes of ochre walls and the metal shutters that cover the doors and windows of closed tabaccherie and cafes. It’s early Sunday morning. The Florentines are still in bed or in church. Whatever life’s occurring is going on behind thick stone walls and shuttered windows. A wave of sadness passes over me—a feeling of being shut out that I try to dismiss as jet lag or the melancholy that Boswell described upon viewing “the celebrated Forum…now all in ruins.” My sadness, though, is not for ancient history, but for my own past, the life I might have had here.
Only when the car starts climbing do I realize we’re on the street that leads to the villa. The road is narrow and curving, flanked by high stone walls that give no hint of the palatial villas that lie behind them. A fringe of olive branches, a spill of bougainvillea down an iron gate, or an enameled plaque inscribed with some whimsical name are the only clues that princes and dukes kept their summer homes here and, later, British peers and rich Americans, and now, colleges and universities. We pass the University of Paris’s villa and I recognize the French cou-ple from the airport standing before the gate shouting their names into an intercom box. La Civetta is just around the next curve of the road—which means that we’ll be bumping into our new French friends at the bus stop for the rest of the summer.
Our driver swerves into a shallow half-circle depression, screeching to a halt inches from a pair of closed wrought-iron gates. I can see over the hood of our taxi the black face of an owl with hollow eyes staring at us as if we were intruders—part of the decorative pattern in the old metalwork.
“Is this it?” Mara asks. “You’d think Mr. Balthasar would have left the gates open for us.” She doesn’t mention that her husband was in the same car with him and might have been expected to think of his own wife’s convenience first.
“Cyril Graham is fanatical about security,” I tell her. “The gates are fixed to close automatically after each entrance. I’ll have to get out and ring the bell.”
I climb over a toiletry case and what looks like a hat box (who in the world still travels with a hat box?) and step out of the car. The intercom is the same antiquated metal box I remember from twenty years ago—a metal grate with a brass lever you turn to the right. I shout my name into it as though I were shouting down a well instead of speaking into a piece of late-twentieth-century electronic equipment.
The school took us all once to the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, and Bruno told me that there was a tradition that if you shouted your name into the cave and then listened very carefully, you would hear your destiny. I realized later that many of Bruno’s “traditions” were his own fancies, but I didn’t know that then. I threw my name into the dank sulfurous gloom as confidently as any tourist tossing lire into the Trevi fountain and then listened to the echoes dying in the still, flat air, waiting for an answering vibration from beneath the earth—from the gates of hell, as the ancient Cimbrians who once populated that part of Italy believed. Instead I felt Bruno’s touch along the back of my neck and the coolness of his breath in my ear as he suggested how we might spend the rest of the afternoon. It seemed at the time all of the future I needed to know.
Now I don’t bother to listen at the metal grate for any answering call. It’s a one-way intercom (cheaper, Cyril Graham once told me); its only response is the slow opening of the iron gates. Mara beckons from the cab for me to get back in, but I lean in and hand her a twenty-euro note for my half of the fare.
“I’ll walk,” I tell her, closing the door before she can object. For a moment I feel the same childish glee I had back at Cumae when Bruno and I managed to slip away from the scheduled field trip and spend the rest of the afternoon at the Hotel Sibylla, and all because now I can approach the villa at my own pace with only my memories for company.
I step between two marble pillars that are surmounted by marble owls whose taloned claws grip three balls—icons that link the original owners of the villa (the Barbagianni family, whose name means “barn owl”) with the symbol of the Medici family. These owls always frightened me. Their talons are long and sharp, their wings flexed for flight. As I pass underneath them it’s hard not to imagine that they will follow me on silent wings, ready to sink their claws into the back of my neck. Even the sound the gates make as they close resembles the high-pitched screech of an owl.
To my right is the path that leads to the plain gray-stone building that once housed the Convent of Santa Catalina but now serves as a dorm for the students. Everyone just calls it the little villa. The main villa is lemon colored and lies at the end of a long avenue, or viale, of tall cypresses. It’s a popular view featured in all the college’s advertising brochures and on the Web site for the study abroad program. Maybe that’s why I find myself curiously numb as I start down the viale, as if I am approaching a picture instead of the real thing, a painted façade that seems to slip in and out between its frame of gray-green cypresses like a woman hiding coquettishly behind a curtain.
“Like a high-priced whore,” Cyril Graham once described the villa to our class, delighting, as always, in shocking you naïve young Americans. “She’s bled me dry keeping her up over the years. That’s what La Civetta means. A whore.”
“Isn’t it Italian for ‘screech owl’?” one of the students asked. “That’s what the brochure says. That it was named that because the Barbagianni name meant ‘owl’ and that’s why there are all the statues of owls and that goddess who’s always got an owl on her head.”
“I believe you mean Minerva,” Cyril drawled, looking down at the boy as if he were himself an owl and the boy a tasty field mouse, “and yes, civetta means ‘screech owl,’ but it also means, in the vernacular, a coquette—a tease. Yes, I know, that’s not what it says in the brochure. Not everything worth knowing is to be found in books, children; you must also listen to gossip—what the Romans called fama—a winged beast with a thousand eyes. And fama tells us that Lorenzo Barbagianni named La Civetta for his mist
ress, Ginevra de Laura, whom he had the gall to install here when his wife died. Of course, when Barbagianni died, his son and his guardians were able to throw her out. Some say she cursed the villa when she left. You’ll see. La Civetta will imprint herself on your heart and mind, and years from now you’ll be haunted by the time you spent here. You’ll remember it as the most beautiful season of your life—”
Cyril paused, gesturing with his long, mobile fingers toward the garden. We were on the loggia; on fine days he always taught his Aesthetics of Place class on the loggia. We all looked out over the clipped yew hedges and rosebushes toward the view of Florence, the Duomo framed between two marble urns. We all thought we knew what he was going to say next. Wasn’t everybody always telling us that these were the best years of our lives? Even the brochure for La Civetta claimed that the place would stamp an indelible impression on the minds of the students who studied here. But Cyril Graham had ended on a more melancholy note. “And you’ll forever regret its passing.”
In the twenty years since I’d left La Civetta, I have counted myself as reasonably happy. I’ve had success in my chosen career and even found time between writing for academic journals to pen a sonnet or two. I’ve dated men I liked, and just when I thought I might not marry before it was too late to have children, I met Mark. If we marry next year after I get tenure, there might be time yet to have a child. And even if there isn’t, my students have, to a large degree, made up for that lack. I haven’t, up until now, had any reason to think that Cyril Graham was right. And he was wrong about so much—for instance, I found out from Bruno later that la civetta may mean “a gossip” or “tease,” but never “a whore,” and even those meanings only attached to the word in the nineteenth century, too late to have had anything to do with the naming of this fifteenth-century villa—which at any rate already possessed the name before Ginevra de Laura came to live here in 1582.
So why, then, does my current life suddenly pale in the light of this strong Mediterranean sun? Is it because the colors here are so much more vibrant than anything back in New York? Too vibrant. I have a sudden urge to turn around, walk back down the viale to the Via Bolognese, and take a cab back to the airport. I’m afraid that if I go any farther I’ll have to admit that Cyril was right. The best season of my life has passed.
But then the door to the villa opens and a woman is framed in the arched doorway. I recognize her immediately as Claudia Brunelli. If I turn now, she’ll know I wasn’t able to face her—or face La Civetta. I pass through the second set of gates—these flanked by statues of Minerva and Venus—and finally the façade of the villa comes completely into view. The placid ochre building regards me with equanimity behind the cracks in the stucco and the peeling paint on the wooden shutters. I could cry, I’m so happy to see its familiar worn face.
Claudia Brunelli comes forward and I see that she has weathered the twenty years that have passed much better than the villa has. She’s only slightly curvier than I remember, and her skin—that lovely olive complexion that ages so well—looks more like that of a girl of nineteen than that of a woman in her late forties. She’s wearing a cream-colored linen skirt and a sleeveless yellow silk blouse, with a blue and gold silk scarf tied around her waist—an outfit that looks so effortlessly chic, I’m instantly conscious of my wrinkled slacks and T-shirt that went saggy somewhere over the North Atlantic.
“Cara Rosa,” she croons, brushing her cheek against mine, “Che piacere. How good to see you again after all these years. Orlando told me he met you in New York. Bruno and I were hoping you would come. We both wanted to talk to you about that poor unhappy boy who died.”
“Orlando would know more about what happened than I would,” I say coolly, thinking that poor unhappy Robin might still be alive if not for Orlando. “He was on the balcony; I was inside when it happened.”
“Yes, yes, it was such a horrible shock for poor Orlando. Who knew the boy was so unstable? Although I have to say I thought he was a bit…come se dice?…mutevole?”
“Flighty,” I say, instantly regretting the translation I’ve chosen. “Changeable. Yes, Robin seemed to change his colors with his surroundings. To become what people wanted him to be—”
“Exactly. Yes, I knew you would understand. Poor Orlando, he was charmed by the boy. He thought he and Robin were going to become writers for the movies, and then the boy went back to America and forgot all about his promises to Orlando. But I mustn’t burden you with a mother’s worries when you must be so tired from your flight. Look at me, keeping you standing in the doorway. And me, the hospitality coordinator! Can you believe it? You must have been very surprised when you heard.”
I remember Robin saying that in Claudia’s case the title was a misnomer. “Well, yes…” I begin, searching my jet-lag-addled brain for a polite response. “I remembered that you weren’t exactly happy here at La Civetta, so I was surprised that you and Bruno had moved back from Rome.”
Claudia doesn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, she fingers the gold saint’s medal (Saint Catherine, the same one I remember her wearing twenty years ago) at her throat and studies me as if waiting to see if the effort of pronouncing Bruno’s name will have any effect on me, some tremor or aftershock that she’ll be able to detect. I hold myself perfectly still and finally she shrugs, a movement that dimples her bare shoulders in a way she must know is attractive, and says, “I couldn’t stand to see Bruno moping around the apartment in Rome any longer. He loves this place. So when his mother died I figured I might as well take it in hand and make it livable. You’ll see I’ve made many changes since you were here, not that I haven’t had to fight tooth and nail with the old man for every last euro spent on repairs.” She holds up the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and rubs them together, giving me a nice view of her thick gold wedding band. “You’d think the plumbing was sculpted by Donatello to hear him talk. But really he just wants to spend as little as he can get away with until your university takes over and…oh, how do you say it? Foots the bill. He’s in there with that American filmmaker and your college president—such a handsome man, your President Abrams!—trying to see who he can get to pay for repairs to the roof of the limonaia.”
I follow the tilt of Claudia’s chin through the doorway, where the polished marble floor and Venetian glass mirrors gleam dimly in the cool light of the vestibule.
“They’re in the sala grande,” she says, reading the look of reluctance on my face perhaps too well. “But the doors are shut. If you like I can whisk you up the stairs to your room. I’ve already had your luggage sent up.”
“Yes,” I say, “I think I’d like to wash up a bit before seeing Cyril. He was always so finicky about dress.”
“He ought to be as finicky about the company he keeps,” Claudia comments as she leads me over the stone lintel and through the thick arch of the doorway. The walls of La Civetta are two feet thick and made of stone under the orange stucco, an effect that always made me think of a seashell and which keeps the house insulated from the heat. As soon as the cool air hits my skin I realize how warm I’d been outside and how sweaty I am. I steal a look at myself in one of the giant Venetian glass mirrors that line the vestibule and wish I hadn’t. The little bit of makeup I’d reapplied before landing has melted in the heat and my hair looks like I’ve just gotten out of bed. More Medusa hair than Botticelli hair, I think, glad that I’ll have a chance to brush it before seeing Mark.
“Vieni. Let’s get you upstairs,” Claudia whispers, giving me a little push toward the rotunda.
Although I’m grateful to avoid meeting Cyril Graham right now, the way Claudia hustles me past the closed sala doors—beyond which I can hear the murmur of male voices—to the foot of the curving stairwell, makes me feel as though I were a concubine being smuggled upstairs to the master’s bedroom. She even slips out of her high-heeled pumps as she steps onto the stairs and motions for me to take off my own shoes. Although I’m wearing crepe-soled loafers, I comply. The marble
feels deliciously cool on my bare feet. If the walls of La Civetta are a seashell, then the rotunda with its curving staircase is the inner chamber of a nautilus. I look down to see whether the inlaid pattern I remember is still there. It is. Set into the white Carrara are mosaic petals fashioned of Eretria red and Rosetta pink marble. As I follow the cascade of petals up the winding stairs I remember Daisy Wallace telling me that her father believed he had seen blood spots appear on the tiled floor of the rotunda, and I look down and see the pattern of rose petals swirling around the antique Roman impluvium at its center. Before the rotunda was enclosed, the large basin collected rainwater from the open oculus, but now the skylight has been glassed over and the impluvium is dry, and whatever pattern the petals once formed has been lost under the eighteenth-century walls around the circumference of the rotunda. I can imagine, though, that when the rainwater splashed over the basin and wet the floor, the pattern of red and pink might have looked like splashes of blood.
At the top of the stairs Claudia turns left and takes me down a long hallway toward the northeast corner of the villa. “We house the students in the little villa near Via Bolognese,” she tells me as she takes out a heavy ring of keys from her skirt pocket, “and most of the professors as well. I sent that other American woman over there, although she kept insisting that you’d want to be near her. If you really do—?”
“Oh, no,” I say a little too quickly. “That’s all right.”
“Bene. President Abrams is on this floor—in the west wing—but I took the liberty of putting you in your old room.” She opens the last door in the hallway. “For memory’s sake,” she adds, because clearly no one would have chosen this room for its size or decoration.
I remember thinking that I had been installed in a convent the first time I saw it: the cold terra-cotta tile floor, the bare white walls adorned only by a lunette-shaped painting of the Virgin Mary above the narrow bed, and for a desk, an old oak table below the only window. And yet, I think as Claudia crosses to the window and unlatches the heavy wooden shutters, I had come to love this room. Claudia steps aside and I rest my arms on the wide stone windowsill and lean forward. The view is exactly as I remember it—not the more celebrated view on the southwest side of the house looking over the gardens toward Florence, this view encompasses a corner of the limonaia, its yellow stucco walls and redtiled roof surmounted by the bust of a woman who is looking away from the house and toward the Arno River valley. How many days had I looked up from my studies to see her profile, to follow her gaze out into the valley toward the blue hills of the Valdarno, until I came to feel that we were both waiting for something—or someone—to appear on the crest of the hill to come and deliver us from the penitential silence of this convent room?