In Maremma (12 page)

“His character is bad?”

“He gets too angry. He wouldn't attend my husband's funeral. He wouldn't attend our father's funeral. I'm sorry, but I cannot forgive him.”

The reporter made a few more efforts to persuade her, but the sister was adamant.

Back in the studio, the old man looks at the floor. “She's proud,” he murmurs. “She's too proud.”

“And what if I were to tell you;” the host says, “that your sister was here, in the studio, today?”

The old man lifts his head.

“Yes, she is here,” the host says. “Afterwards she had second thoughts. Let's bring her out: Letizia.”

Now, like a long-lost aunt on an episode of
This Is Your Life
, in comes Letizia, beaming while the audience applauds. The old man stands; he embraces her. Tears stream down his twisted face. “She's so beautiful,” he says to the host. “So beautiful.”

“How could I not forgive him?” the sister says. “He's my brother.”

“But you must promise to control your temper, and not be so proud,” cautions the host.

“He's bad in character, but his heart is good,” the sister says.

“I promise,” says the old man.

“Good,” the sister says. “Good. And tonight we'll have supper together.”

Well, in Italy, this is the best news of all. The audience is in a euphoria of applause, it approves so wholeheartedly. Forgiveness—too often cheaply offered and accepted, passed back and forth like a single bunch of flowers that commerce has left listless—is stern, uncompromising, real as flowers (indeed, in its outer aspects, not unlike vendetta itself).

It's winter, but there's an intimation of spring in the air, like the scent of perfume lingering in a dead woman's boudoir. Thus spring must have felt to the sufferers in the
Inferno
: a memory of sun that was almost a sunbeam, bleeding through layers of blackness to those who would never know the real sun again because they were not forgiven.

20

P
IERO, WHO GAVE us the potato roaster, was a gentleman in his early seventies, with a corrosive yet humane humor. Like Aschenbach in
Death in Venice,
he rouged his cheeks. This was not because he was trying to attract the young, but because his health was failing and he did not want anyone to know just how unwell he was. (It seems apt that by profession he was a restorer of antique clocks.) In the years just prior to his death, Piero, who had enjoyed a lengthy career as a Don Juan, served as the nominal cock to a brood of elderly hens. We met them for the first time at a dinner that Piero gave on May 17, 1998: Aina, who, with her sweeping kaftans, heavily painted eyebrows, and gravity-defying hair, resembled more than anyone Agnes Moorehead as Endora on
Bewitched;
Sandra, who had been close to Wanda and Vladimir Horowitz, and expressed great perplexity when she learned that Wanda had left her money to “blind dogs” (presumably she meant seeing-eye dogs); Giovanna, who had survived “one of those US Air crashes” and spoke obsessively of the hip replacement she had had to have as a consequence; Gloria, who was fat, and whom Aina pointedly served smaller portions than she did her other guests at dinner parties; and Venetia, an Englishwoman who had met an Italian man
named Pasquale in India, married him regardless of the fact that she could not speak Italian and he could not speak English, and settled in Maremma. Piero had infinite patience for these women, and they adored him—particularly after his second wife died.

Though Aina professed to be above gossip, she gave us an ear full of it about Piero before asseverating, “Of course, I don't believe a word of it.” This is what she said:

All the women in Piero's circle seemed thrilled to the marrow by the very suggestion that he might have murdered his wife in a fit of jealous passion, even if they insisted publicly that he could not possibly have been capable of such an act. And yet, Aina hinted, he had
appeared to feel remorse as well as grief after Beatrice died, so one could not help but wonder if, after all . . .

“He gave me her clothes,” she added. “You know Beatrice had a tiny figure. They certainly wouldn't have been of any use to Gloria.”

Aina was a piece of work—sometimes delightful and sometimes extremely trying, but always fascinating. Her father, Paolo Emilio Pavolini, was a philologist; hence her Finnish name. Her half-brother was the powerful Fascist Alessandro Pavolini, whose corpse was hung upside down along with Mussolini's, Claretta Petacci's, and others' in 1945. (Alessandro Pavolini also initiated the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.) As a child, Aina had been introduced to Umberto Giordano, the celebrated composer of the operas
Andrea Chénier
and
Fedora
, who prophesied a career as a femme fatale for her.

Aina had lived all over the world—in England, in Sierra Leone, and for many years in Hanover, New Hampshire, as a Dartmouth English professor's wife. She was perfectly brilliant in her own right. At the time we had the most to do with her, she was translating into English (from the French) Amadou Hampaté Bâ's novel
The Fortunes of Wangrin.
One of her regular visitors was the late English literary critic Frank Kermode. (It was after taking him to the airport in Rome early one morning that she told us she had seen a tapir on a rarely travelled stretch of road. She probably had. We ourselves once saw a turquoise snake in Maremma.)

We seemed to attend more of Aina's dinner parties and luncheons than anyone else's. It is remarkable, in
retrospect, that she could maintain such a hectic social schedule living, as she did, in the middle of nowhere. MM's date books record dinner on Saturday, June 6, 1998 (7:30); dinner on Monday, September 21, 1998 (Rosh Hashanah, 8:15); drinks on Sunday, October 4, 1998 (6:00); dinner on Saturday, November 14, 1998 (7:00); dinner on Saturday, December 5, 1998 (8:00); lunch on Tuesday, December 8, 1998 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception) (1:00); lunch on Wednesday, March 10) 1999 (12:30); dinner on Thursday, May 27, 1999 (7:30); dinner on Thursday, July 29, 1999 (7:30); drinks on Monday, September 6, 1999 (6:00); dinner on Sunday, September 26, 1999 (7:45). At very few of these were we the only guests. We in turn took her to dinner at Il Mulino (Friday, July 31, 1998, at 8:00) and to lunch at Bacco e Cerere in Saturnia (December 26, 1998, at 12:00), where the owner's son flirted with her. We also invited her to pick apricots from our trees and had her over for drinks when MM's mother was visiting (Tuesday, August 11 1998, at 6:00).

Usually at her dinners and luncheons, Aina served her “famous Parsi eggs” or a mousse made with tinned halibut. (The latter dish put us in mind of the Monty Python movie in which all the guests at a dinner party die from eating salmon mousse made with tinned rather than fresh salmon.) She'd invite us to arrive an hour before her other guests so that we could speak with her only in English, talk about books, reflect on how we found ourselves where we were—and, sometimes, move something incredibly heavy up or down the perilous stairs of her house for her. Among the other things we had in common with Aina just then were financial straits (hers worse than ours). We had spent most of our money restoring a place, whereas she was trying to raise money in order to restore a place: a
dipendenza
(outbuilding) that she wanted to be able to rent as a vacation house.

 

The Dining Room, Podere Fiume
(Photo by Simon McBride)

The dinner parties were disconcerting. There would always seem to be one person who could not speak the language of the table. If there were eight guests, seven could speak Italian and English, but one only French. All her guests having arrived, Aina would disappear for long tracts of time to put the “finishing touches” to the dinner. Since the dining room and living room were downstairs, and the kitchen upstairs, there was much social awkwardness. Her dining room chairs were the most uncomfortable in Christendom, conceived, it seemed, to induce flatulence.

At some point we had a falling out with Aina. It may have had to do with the fact that when at last we invited her to dinner on King's Day (January 6, 1999, at
7:30), when DL's father and stepmother were visiting, she arrived wearing a gorgeous black dress and exquisite—really magnificent—pearls. She had a gash on her head—she had fallen, she said—inexpertly bandaged.

According to a Tuscan tradition, on King's Day a witch called La Befana brings coal to the children. In fact the coal is trompe l'oeil, hard lumps of blackened sugar. In her black dress and bandages, Aina was La Befana that year, bringing not coal but a bag of her household trash that she asked if we'd be good enough to take to the
poubelle
when we went in to Semproniano the next day. Since she was so pressed for money, she said, she had to ration the gas in her old Range Rover.

21

O
NE AFTERNOON IN May—DL had just woken from a nap, and was getting a glass of water—Tolo, who was outside, started barking with uncharacteristic persistence and agitation. DL walked into the garden and found Tolo poised in front of the grate that covered the main gas pipe. A noise like that of steam escaping made DL wonder whether perhaps the pipe was leaking or had burst, yet there was no smell. Instead an enormous snake sat behind the grate (if “sit” is the right verb for what a snake does when it is not in transit), hissing with all its might.

“Oh my God,” he muttered, in that eerily calm, toneless voice that terror elicits, which brought MM to the window The snake might have been a
frustone
—a large but harmless species that eats mice and things of that sort—or it might have been a viper (although in Tuscany vipers tend to be small and slow, which this snake clearly was not).

We put Tolo inside and called Ilvo: having lived in Maremma for more than seventy years, he knew which snakes to give a wide berth. “Aha,” he said. “
Non è un frustone. È un aspide.”
An asp. Heretofore we had understood that the only snake in Maremma besides those mentioned above was the enormous viper that fed by wrapping
its body around the back leg of a cow and drinking her milk, leaving her calf to starve. In John Cheever's story “Clementina,” the Italian
donna
of an American family tells the children in her charge a folktale: