This is an account of three people who died. Quite recently, one after the other, in the space of six months. A reclusive old noblewoman, a painter of murals, and a philandering handyman. Ombretta, Francescon, and Remo. They weren’t important, as the wide world defines “importance,” though the muralist did have something of a reputation among the fabulous and the rich. No, they were people whose orbit was small, residents of a provincial place, the town in the north of Italy where I live. Though all three had met, they weren’t friends; they were too different in age, social position, and degree of sinfulness. At the same time, as I can see only now, they were alike in their possession of a purity of spirit that shone—through ordinary or foolish or desperate actions—with a steady sidereal gleam.
I was connected to all three through the family I married into: an insular, blue-blooded Ligurian clan ensconced hierarchically in a set of old terraced villas, stacked one above the other, like the layers of a cake, on a hillside overlooking the Malaspina castle. In my private drama—my ongoing adventure with my husband and his family—Ombretta, Francescon, and Remo were bit players to whom I gave little thought until they vanished from the scene.
But lately I’ve been waking up every night, as I lie beside my husband in the iron canopy bed that Remo forged for us as a wedding present. What wakes me is the feeling of being in company—gently included in a quartet as watchful and discreet as the bedpost evangelists in the nursery prayer. And inevitably the same three names are present to me. As if they had come to remind me that there is something I need to do: perhaps simply to tell what I know of their discarded lives.
I
The oldest, and the first to leave, was my mother-in-law, Ombretta. A dozen years ago, I met her at a Sunday lunch presided over by the eldest of her sons, an occasion on which my husband-to-be, the youngest, presented me to his tribe. I was a dazzled foreigner, the American fiancée, and this was one of those gilded October scenes with which Italy tempts the sojourner: a garden filled with handsome inbred men and women drinking wine with a tang of oak; children in lace collars and muddy boots playing in the shade of a grand Juvarran façade, smudged with age. As mulberry leaves drifted down like flakes of rust onto the laden table, I gazed out over the panorama of the Magdalene hills, the castle, the distant smokestacks and tenements of the city below, the river plain spreading toward the Alps.
Nonna Ombretta, as they called her, was at the head of the table, a white-haired figure in pearls and a sweater whose color matched her large aquamarine eyes. Her face, with its shaggy black brows, crooked beak of a nose, and tributaries of wrinkles, suggested a battered bust of Tiberius. Yet this overpowering visage, clearly made for tyranny, displayed instead a gentle reticence, a beatific air of restraint that was clearly a choice, even a private indulgence. Her three charming and arrogant sons interpreted it as devotion to them, the familiar domestic martyrdom of a Catholic matriarch, but I felt from the start that it was something stranger, less easy to define. When we were introduced and I first heard her ragged, sweet thread of a voice, with its lilting Venetian accent, I felt a curious jolt of awareness, as one might feel on hearing a bell chime once in the distance.
Ombretta means “little shadow,” and I soon saw how well the name suited. Unlike the time-honored image of a mother-in-law, she was never intrusive; she was simply present, a quotidian mystery flickering along the edges of our lives. At first, like all second wives, I wanted to possess my husband entirely, to erase his past, and I kept expecting his mother to be a problem. I studied her, trying to understand how she could be dangerous for me, and was baffled. Problems there were, of course, with my husband, a jaunty egoist with the robust self-absorption of his long-dead father, a dissolute provincial magnate famous for having gambled away the family match factory at the casino in St. Vincent. And many power games confronted me: resentful stepchildren, territorial sisters-in-law, and all the pressures and depredations of a large Italian clan. But Nonna Ombretta kept apart from all this, and I took a big step toward belonging to the family when I first realized that, although its members venerated this mild matriarch, they’d have admired her far more had she been a despot.
Ombretta hardly ever left her house. With my husband, I visited her on weekends, walking up the stony road from our house, the bottommost of the villas, to the cottage where she lived, on her second son’s property: three dark, beam-ceilinged rooms, set between the chapel and a crumbling brick alcove, where someone had propped a wooden sculling shell from the sixties. Half rotted and filled with dead vines, the boat lent an oddly nautical air to Ombretta’s end of the garden, where she grew tightly whorled antique roses and huge bushes of lavender. Inside, the fragrance of the flowers mingled with the odor of wood smoke and mildew. We sat in the gloom of giant chests and bookshelves from her girlhood house in Venice, while she served us coffee and dates stuffed with marzipan.
My husband, bored, would work the conversation around to how brilliant he had been as a schoolboy, sometimes even trying to provoke her and me by referring to his early sexual escapades, references that we both blandly ignored. I’d take refuge in trips to the bathroom, passing by Ombretta’s conventual single bed and the prie-dieu beside it. I’d sit contemplating her yellowed plastic shower cap, and bottles of home-distilled lavender water, and wondering why, despite the tedium, I always felt refreshed after these visits.
On her coffee table stood an odd piece of antique silver, a lily with seven petals that detached to become miniature silver dishes, a puzzle that children and grandchildren could pull apart to amuse themselves, but only Ombretta could put back together. It sat there in the dim room, like a small, shining secret.
Time passed, and our son and daughter were born and were received by Ombretta with the same absent-minded warmth with which she treated all her grandchildren. I never found myself intimate with her, but a curious admiration had begun to flow between us. She started to ask about the books I wrote, about my trips to literary events in America, and she vouchsafed me glimpses of her youth in Venice. She told me how, daringly for a well-bred girl, she had sailed her own small boat, a shallop, up and down the canals, and how tourists had embarrassed her by snapping photographs, so that her nameless face graced photo albums around the world. How she and her family had sat in evening dress in the Piazza San Marco, uneasy amid rows of Fascist dignitaries, as a legendary pianist gave an outdoor concert. How during the war, when she was married but living with her parents, she had ridden down the Grand Canal under a full moon, in the family gondola, to give birth to her eldest son at the hospital in the Rialto.
These fragments were all I knew of her, and sometimes I would glance at her wedding picture, where she stood, heavy-jawed and clear-eyed in a cascade of lace, beside a husband whose rakish conceit was already outlined below his brilliantined hair. I got the sense that there was some brutality there, some sexual affliction that she had endured with the fathomless patience of her generation.
For her ninetieth birthday, the entire family gathered in the highest villa to feast on agnolotti with truffles and a Monte Bianco pudding the size of a washtub, glittering with gems of crystallized fruit. Her sons announced that they had planned a luxurious trip to Venice for her, but later I found out that she’d refused it.
Soon after that, she was gone. A bad influenza; a tumor; failing kidneys. We came back from a short vacation and found her dehydrated and confused, and then began a long sunny spring of dying. The usual story: clinics, specialists, nurses, brief rallies, false hopes. Her three sons, businessmen used to bullying their environment into submission, railed at her and at fate, urged, prayed, commanded, cajoled her to stay alive. With their own hands, they cooked for her, puréed fish flown in fresh from the Adriatic, and poked spoonfuls between her reluctant lips, poured her glasses of red wine “to build blood.” It would have been interesting to chart the strangled, desperate affection in the rapport of these three sons with their dying mother, but I was busy with my own feelings.
You see, I had fallen in love with Ombretta. Did she know? I didn’t, myself, until the last three weeks of her life, when I was drawn to her side again and again, bringing flowers, little treats, as if in a shy courtship. It was like a childhood crush, where one finds excuses to bicycle past the house of the loved one, to use his name in conversation. For a brief while, I loved her against my own inclination—hopelessly, the way you do when someone is remote or already taken.
In the afternoons, I’d walk up the hill to find her propped in a sunny corner of the garden, awake, but ignoring her cultured lady companion, who, on orders from the three sons, would be reading aloud her favorite poems from Quasimodo or glum Leopardi: “Così tra questa immensità s’annega il pensier mio; e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.” Skeletal, almost transparent, Ombretta would bare her wolfish teeth in a polite salute and murmur my name, her blue eyes now muddy and vague, hidden behind huge, rather vulgar sunglasses, her once tough skin as papery as onion peel, her hair no longer a strict white helmet but blowing in milkweed wisps over a maculate bare skull. In the light April wind, I’d drink tea and watch her force down a few sugary sips. I’d question her companion in the usual worried undertone, and chat with Ombretta in a manner that I could not cleanse of false brightness.
On those afternoons, I was affectionate in a way that, before, I had never dared to be: holding her gnarled, discolored hand, careful not to disturb her arms, which were purple with I.V. bruises; sneaking a caress at arrival and departure, as a crafty suitor does with a distracted maiden. I could see that her heart was elsewhere. Even to me, it was shocking how, step by deliberate step, she was moving away from daylight, complicit in her own seduction by death. It was clear that she was lingering with us out of sheer politeness.
In her last week, she became clairvoyant, predicting with serene indifference the arrival of unexpected visitors, and even what color they would be wearing. Once, she remarked to me that, as a girl, she’d loved to waltz but that her husband had disliked dancing. She said this with a faint, scornful smile, as if soon she’d be waltzing as much as she liked.
On the last full day of her life, I carried her a rose from my own garden, and she awoke from her stupor long enough to hold it to her face and murmur, “I know this scent—cuisse de nymphe.” The nurse told me that it was the only thing she’d said all day. Later, when I was leaving, she spoke again, her eyes still closed: “Please excuse my rudeness in not rising to say goodbye.”
She died before dawn the next day, and that evening we came to her house for the recitation of the Rosary. There I observed a discreet storm brewing over the silver lily, which one daughter-in-law had already appropriated, and another, in a furious whisper, maintained was hers. I forgot the dark comedy of all this when I saw the old woman laid out on her bed, and found that someone had tucked between her hands my cuisse de nymphe rose, wilted but still fragrant.
These trifles weren’t mentioned, of course, in the grand Napoleonic church, scene of the family’s weddings and funerals—a church where kings had prayed, and which was one of the many rumored hiding places of the Holy Grail. For Ombretta, who was without friends, it was filled with her sons’ friends and clients, and distant relations. The bishop—a famous anti-drug crusader, clearly bored with this mild soul—stood between marble pillars and spoke of a virtuous Catholic woman who had lived out her years, a figure who could have been one of an identical series in a shooting gallery. Her sons, anguished, mourned their mother as a lost part of themselves and as a centerpiece of that great architectural structure their family, but no one seemed to think the world a duller place for her absence.
Nor did anyone allude to the curious distance that Ombretta had kept between herself and the rest of the world, a seclusion that was never selfish or hostile but seemed to confer an odd sort of grace on her surroundings. And certainly no one invoked the image, the little shadow, of a young girl flying down the canals of Venice under the sail of her own small boat. An irreverent granddaughter—a teen-age troublemaker, inappropriately dressed in trousers that revealed the top of her plump backside—had tucked a bunch of lavender into her shoulder bag, and through the congregation the fresh scent flowed out like water.
II
The last flowers Ombretta saw were likely the ones that Francescon, long ago, had painted on the beams of her ceiling. I recall a dim arabesque trail of wisteria in an Art Nouveau style, in keeping with the cottage, which was a nineteenth-century addition to the big villa. A beautiful and unrepeatable design, since Francescon’s restless obsession was the creation of a new Arcadia, paradise inside a room.
Whenever I heard his loud, nasal voice on the phone, my heart sank. And yet I could look up at my own ceiling and adore him. There in a rococo wilderness of interlaced garlands and hovering putti I’d see his lighthearted practical genius, and I’d forgive him everything: his interminable phone calls, scheduled on an astral calendar to arrive at the worst moments; his lunatic right-wing rants, in which he cursed socialists and vaunted his own pure Piedmontese Celtic blood; the quivering glee that animated his six-foot-tall, white-haired figure at the sight of any pretty woman, and inspired his long-fingered, powerful hands to squeeze waists and wander over bottoms.
Francescon decorated walls and ceilings in our family’s houses, and in churches, villas, and castles all over the province. His designs, sketched on sheaves of crumbling onionskin, came from his father, and generations of grandfathers reaching back to the eighteenth century. His was a clan of itinerant painters, famous in northern Italy and southeastern France for their trompe-l’oeil, their chinoiserie, their Baroque whirligigs, their seraphim with sensual faces. Footloose, they had set up temporary workshops in the households of the hermetic Piedmontese nobility, the frivolous members of the Savoy court, and the ambitious early industrialists. In these settings, they’d picked up the social ease of all artists and master craftsmen in fine establishments, and, being tall, handsome blond men, left behind a few bastards.
When I met Francescon, he was already in his seventies, with bright, guileless gray eyes and a drinker’s nose, unmarried because of his impossible character. I don’t recall being introduced to him; one day, he simply appeared at the top of a ladder in the middle of my sheeted dining room, chattering and smoking as he daubed from a square cardboard palette, sprinkling cigarette ash and infinitesimal drops of paint through the air. It was as if he had always been there, and I immediately felt an encumbering sense of fondness for him.
We made up designs together, bickering, like kids planning a party. I’d ask for faces, for pomegranates, for cockleshells. And he’d rustle through greasy, tattered folders of drawings, shouting suggestions that were really ultimatums, refusing to combine elements from different centuries. Then for weeks he’d invade our house with his huge, disruptive passion for his work, crowding everything else into corners. My husband complained about how much he charged, how he gobbled agnolotti at the lunch we were obliged to provide for him and drank whole bottles of Barbera. I couldn’t write when he was in the house. He talked constantly, or sang Bruno Lauzi songs in a deafening tenor, and if he had a new idea he’d invade my study to tell me about it. Once, hollering about sprays of olive leaves, he even burst into the bathroom where I was reading the newspaper on the toilet. When he finished a room, I’d vow never to hire him again. But six months later he’d be back.
He spent a lot of time under my roof, yet I knew little about him. I knew that he drove a battered red Fiat Uno, and lived—like a great chef who eats nothing but boiled eggs—in a nondescript modern apartment in a village in Montferrat. I knew that his exuberant lechery had devolved into a penchant for roadside prostitutes; that he had a disapproving sister, and nephews with no interest in his craft; that although he’d had various apprentices, there was no heir interested in devoting a life to such irregular work, to the endless minutiae of mixing colors, the long hours of painting that had frozen his hands into yellowish claws, which later required a series of painful operations.
I knew that he hadn’t a trace of personal vanity but was shamelessly proud of his work, of which he spoke in a doting tone as if discussing an adored young daughter: “È un amore. That wall, I have to say, it’s a love.” And often he called me from houses, castles, churches, where he was finishing projects, shouting, “You have to come and see this ceiling, this façade—it’s sweetness itself!”
One afternoon, he drove me and a friend into the hinterlands of Vercelli to visit two villas. One was dark and nineteenth century, with a vulgar pine kitchen and an evil atmosphere; he had lined the upper walls with a black-and-white Liberty frieze that seemed to comment on the sombreness of the house, to expand it into a sinister nobility. The other place, a huge country pile built by a long-dead Savoy courtier near a decayed resort town, was one of the loveliest I have ever seen—each room with coffered ceilings decorated by Francescon with dense eighteenth-century millefleur designs, dusted faintly with gilt. The effect was that of an Arabian Nights palace, transported to the back hills of Piedmont.
There was, in our town, a little group of women who, like me, felt an exasperated affection for Francescon. My beautiful red-haired friend was one of them. She had an old villa, a former monastery, for which he had invented a roseate shade of stucco that looked as if it had always been there. That was the thing about Francescon: nothing superfluous or vulgar ever came from his brush, and every house he touched seemed to exhale its true spirit. When an art house published a book on Francescon’s work, his admirers were pleased, but I’m afraid we mostly thought of it as a vanity project. My red-haired friend and I went to the presentation in the brick town hall of his village, and as Francescon stood beside the mayor, giving one of his rambling, faintly profane monologues, we nudged each other like proud mothers at a kindergarten fête.
That summer, he left Italy for the first time to visit America, and my friend escorted him around the East Coast. She described how he let out a whoop and clapped his hands like a child when he first saw the Chrysler Building; how he gave a talk to a roomful of old gentlemen at a club in Boston, waving his hands around and speaking an Italian that was half Piedmontese dialect while the baffled patricians nodded politely. How at her summer house she discovered him, awake with jet lag at 3 A.M., cheerfully painting her kitchen walls with a delicate Victorian border.
Time passed, and I got busier, and Francescon’s phone calls became less welcome than ever. I was forever telling him that I was on my way out, promising to visit the houses he was painting, to schedule the great project we had discussed: a library ceiling in the naïve Piedmontese chinoiserie style. A new note in his voice hinted to me that he wasn’t well, but I told myself that it was just the usual problem with his hands.
Finally, the summer after Ombretta died, I heard that Francescon had been very sick: something to do with his pancreas—no one used the word “cancer.” I was alarmed into inviting him to my house as a guest, something I’d never done before. I also invited a few people who knew him, including my red-haired friend, and served polenta and stew, a menu, I reasoned, that would allow Francescon to be at his ease. He shocked us all with his emaciated appearance, suddenly seeming much taller, his sweater tucked into his belt, his gray eyes blazing in a gaunt face that had acquired an extraordinary nobility. He looked, I thought, like an old prince masquerading as a homeless man.
I was dismayed by how he—a former Rabelaisian drinker and polisher of lunch plates—could manage only two glasses of wine and a few spoonfuls of polenta. Yet he seemed deliriously happy with his party. He roared with laughter, lapsing into dialect as he raced off into one after another of his crazy anecdotes, which culminated in an encounter with a flying saucer in the wilds of Montferrat. It surprised me how good a time we had: everyone stayed late, and it was hard to get Francescon to leave at the end. Standing in my dark garden, enduring his bearish, wine-scented hug, I felt something on my cheek and realized that he was crying. “Sai che ti voglio bene, che voglio bene a tutti voi! ” he said. He loved me, he loved us all—a declaration I’d often indulgently accepted, while dodging his wandering hands.
After I saw him off, I was seized by a sudden apprehension. He’d insisted that his doctor had issued him a clean bill of health, but his departure that night left me with an irrevocable chill that I had come to recognize as that of finality. As I watched his tail-lights vanish down the hill, I thought of him driving home along the ugly provincial highway, past the draggled rural prostitutes he knew so well, stepping over the threshold of his tiny apartment, where no one waited for him, while I would sleep wreathed in the roses he’d lavished on my bedroom. And I felt shamed by the paucity of the celebration I had offered him, that night and always, by the meanness of not having, just once, spoken to him from the heart.
The next—and last—time I saw Francescon was a few weeks later. He was as yellow as beeswax, intubated, weighted with morphine, and breathing with deep mechanical yelps, as he lay on a bed in a country hospital near Lanzo, full of hideous turquoise tile. Through the windows, against a clear autumn sky, I could see the Aosta mountains, arid and brown. No one was with him when my red-haired friend and I entered the hospital room. Around the next bed, a large family was gathered, chattering loudly as they took turns spooning broth into the mouth of an old man with amputated legs. They stared unsmiling at us as we bent over Francescon and spoke his name.
“I think he knows we’re here,” my friend whispered, and, for an instant, his gray eyes flashed open: startling, almost silver windows in his jaundiced face. A slight smile crossed his lips. Then the eyes closed. His legs moved the sheet, revealing a catheter and an embarrassing smooth stretch of lower belly, and after we covered him he didn’t respond again. Under the scrutiny of the clan at the next bed, we each gave him a kiss on the cheek, feeling awkward. In effect, what were we to Francescon? Not family; not sweethearts. And as we walked away down the ugly tile hallways I wondered whether he’d really recognized us, or whether the haze of morphine had transformed our faces into the idealized feminine features of the dryads, the seraphim, the stoop-shouldered chinoiserie beauties he had painted again and again.
His funeral was held in his village, in a seventeenth-century church built for a poor rural congregation: a brick edifice enriched with no marble or gilt. It was clear that neither Francescon nor his ancestors had been at work here. My friend and I were the only people present from the dead man’s circle of well-heeled clients. Around us was a modest crowd of thirty or forty, with the dark winter clothes and the weather-beaten faces of hill and mountain people. No tears were shed during the impersonal service, in which a plump, waxen-faced priest prayed for the soul of our dear friend and neighbor and did not once mention his art.
It occurred to me that the crowd and the church were like the crumbling shells of chestnuts you find in the woods. If you scrape the dirt away, you find, like a jewel, the fiery brown nut glistening within. The cheap varnished coffin that held Francescon’s long body was the color of fresh chestnuts, and, when his sour-faced brother-in-law and five other men picked up the coffin and carried it down the street to the cemetery at the edge of town, I felt as if they were burying something precious in the mud.
A year later, I was in Rome visiting the atelier of a legendary fashion designer and aesthete. On his desk I saw a copy of Francescon’s book. When I told the designer that I had known the painter and had his work throughout my house, he raised a seignorial eyebrow and said that I was a lucky person, because the book was a treasure and Francescon a great maestro. And in my heart I felt a familiar tug of shame.
Nowadays, there is a resonant absence in the afternoons, with no one to annoy me with phone calls. In the painted rooms around me, I can count the designs: the pomegranates; the scallop shells and putti; my bedroom garden, real enough to fool the occasional errant bee; the four winds puffing overhead in our entranceway, the curling Baroque borders on all our slanted country doors. One of the doors is unfinished, with the design still traced out in pencil, marking the moment when my husband got sick of Francescon’s endless presence and suspended the work.
Occasionally, driving down a country road, I look at the old villas behind their garden walls and think of all the works in progress that Francescon begged me to come and see. In one house, he told me, he had created a net of roses carried by birds hurling themselves up toward a Watteau sky, billowing with foliage and clouds. Now, like the gates of paradise, those doors are closed to me.
III
The day Nonna Ombretta died, I saw Remo, weeping furiously, walk out of her garden and onto the dusty road, rutted by the tractors and pickup trucks he drove daily to the woodshed and outbuildings. His shoulders were shaking in the cheap suit jacket he had put on to join the family kneeling at prayer in her sitting room. When I ran up to him and put a comforting hand on his arm, I smelled his alcoholic breath and felt the abandoned force of his grief, mingled with the electrical charge of the physical attraction he exerted on every woman he met.
In his long years of working for my Italian family, Remo was described variously as a domestico, an uomo tuttofare, and a factotum. He was a superior hired hand of protean talents, whose energy and ingenuity were the soul of the three villas.
I first encountered Remo shortly after my wedding. At a summer dinner party, in the high-ceilinged rooms of my brother-in-law’s house, open to the stuffy Malaspina night, women in provincial evening finery began shrieking and covering their hair as a tiny, blundering baby bat wobbled desperately through the lamplight, finally coming to rest at the top of a voluminous curtain.
“Kill it! Hit it with a broom!” the bloodthirsty female guests shrilled, directing their cries to Remo, who until then had been parking cars, tending a gargantuan buffet of grilled meats, and getting drunk with the waiters hired for the evening. I saw a small, slight man with shaggy dark hair dart into the room, carrying a push broom and a ladder under one arm with no discernible strain. As he opened the ladder near the curtain where the bat clung, I grabbed his rolled-up sleeve and said to him in a low voice, “Please don’t kill it!”
He looked at me—he was no taller than I was—and I realized what a curious face he had, with a pointed chin and slanted high cheekbones like a cat, and something of a cat’s complacency in the set of his jaw. It was impossible to guess how old he was, since although his face was pockmarked and seamed by the weather, his narrow black eyes were filled with an impudent glee that gave him the look of a feral boy: an Italian Mowgli, perhaps.
As our eyes met, he lowered his gaze respectfully, like an old-fashioned servant. At the same time, I felt him considering me in my low-cut evening dress, and experienced the sudden shock of the magnetism that women, old and young, giggled over whenever Remo’s name came up. I noticed that his wrists and the chest visible above his modestly buttoned collar were covered with a mat of fine black hair.
“Don’t worry, Signora!” he said, and his voice was not deep or compelling, as I might have imagined, but light and raspy, like that of an adolescent.
In the midst of the hubbub, he laid aside the broom and in a flash was up the ladder and down again, motioning to me to follow him outside to the terrace, where he opened his clasped hands. Cupped there was a walnut-size wrinkled sphere the color of licorice, from which a small, tender, demonic black face looked blankly at us.
I drew a breath, as Remo tossed the bat lightly into the air like a ball of tissue paper that suddenly sprouted wings and faded into the hot darkness. “Ecco!” he said softly, and ever after I felt as if we shared a secret.
Remo resided in a two-room annex to Ombretta’s cottage. He had a mysterious bond with the old lady, and served her in every way—driving, running errands, tending her roses and lavender—with slavish devotion. For her part, she treated him with chiding tenderness, like a fourth child, another rascal of a son. Beyond this, his tuttofare days at the three villas encompassed every kind of task: plastering, carpentry, pruning orchards, sweeping chimneys, repairing machinery, cleaning out deadwood in the acres of forest attached to the family land. A skilled blacksmith, he forged tall wrought-iron canopy beds for each of the three brothers and their wives. And in the old brick outdoor bread oven he cooked the best pizzas that anyone had ever tasted, a mainstay of family communions and birthdays.
Children adored him, and he had an almost telepathic connection with animals. He fed and nursed a ragged collection of stray cats and dogs, fallen nestlings, and even a spindly fox cub. His animals wandered and fought among the dismantled motors in his tiny courtyard and earned curses from his wife.
Yes, Remo had a wife: beaten-down, prematurely toothless, with the bitter, suspicious look in her eyes peculiar to the wives of philanderers, a silent black-haired woman who could have been his sister, and was probably a cousin from the tiny village in the back hills of Cuneo, where he was born. Though his family had been rooted in the Italian-French borderland for generations, Remo bore no resemblance to the classic blond or red-haired Celt who claims—like Francescon, and his right-wing regionalist friends—to be the authentic face of the terroir. Remo looked more like a dweller of the inland fastnesses of Basilicata: one of the dark original people who grow out of the very stones of the Italian peninsula, and have a curious cognizance of the natural world.
“Remo is sort of the great god Pan, isn’t he?” my bookworm daughter remarked once, after he had driven his battered Datsun truck to our house, and nonchalantly risen into the frail top branches of a huge persimmon tree to rescue our cat, trapped there for three days of an autumn gale. The cat, soaked and weak, had fled from a fireman on a ladder but lay serenely purring on Remo’s shoulder, as he climbed down with one hand.
Some people, especially priests and cuckolded husbands and jealous women, thought of Remo as the devil, or at least a minor demon. At the same time, he was like a manservant out of opera buffa, with his fixed idea of the social hierarchy, his fierce loyalty to our family, his strange unholy innocence, his endless ingenuity, his well-publicized foibles: drunk every night, seducer of every pretty cleaning girl and barmaid he came across, and even, as the gossip had it, of some Lady Chatterleys with big houses on the hill. I could well believe this, since I myself felt embarrassingly attracted by his slight, wiry body; by his polite compliments that were never disrespectful but let me know that, at any time of my choosing, things between us could take a fresh turn. When his wife finally divorced him, she cited infidelities with ten or twelve other women, including the senator’s wife down the road. Remo’s life outside his work was a patchwork of scandals, fights with rivals, drunken sprees, and constant complaints from my husband and his brothers, yet no one considered firing him; it would have been like cutting off your right hand.
Years passed, and one Christmas I noticed that Remo’s hair was dusted with ashen gray, that the skin on his cheeks was like fissured clay, that he smelled of alcohol even in the mornings, that a shattering cough seized him each time he lit a cigarette, and that his legs in his worn jeans were bent and fleshless like those of an old rodeo rider.
But he still hauled logs with tractors, climbed into treetops to trim the highest branches, and drank all night with the Gypsy mechanics at the Bianchi garage. He now lived with a Romanian woman who worked as a barmaid in town, a hard-drinking, fleshy beauty with a witch’s green eyes and a razor tongue that grew sharper as he continued his philandering. And he had a protégé, a towheaded Albanian kid, to whom he taught everything from smithing to making pizzas, and of whom he said, with a grin, “He’ll carry on when I’m gone.”
Remo was only fifty then, and it didn’t appear as though he had his mind set on being gone, yet after Ombretta’s funeral—at which he’d helped out with stoic practicality—something in him seemed broken. He began to lose control, to vanish into alcoholic binges, to damage cars and motorbikes, and fall off ladders.
Summer came, and my husband, children, and I departed for America, leaving our house in Remo’s hands. He had instructions to paint the dozens of peeling shutters. When we came home in September, we found the shutters half painted, the wine cellar depleted, and a novel situation: Remo in love. The object of his adoration was a very young Ecuadoran woman who worked as a housekeeper nearby, and whom I’d hired to do some extra cleaning. Plump and brown-skinned, with surprised-looking pencilled eyebrows and a nose stud, the girl wandered through our house with a dazed expression that I recognized as the residue of passionate lovemaking. This seemed different from Remo’s other affairs: he declared to anyone who would listen that she was the woman of his dreams, and even came to thank me, with odd formality, for having introduced the two of them.
The great problem now was his former paramour, the violent-tempered Romanian, who’d moved out but was threatening to cut her rival’s throat. As if following a telenovela, we inhabitants of the three villas traded daily reports on the fierce tug-of-war for Remo’s affections. I myself received hysterical phone calls from both women, and I helplessly suggested what no one could do: be patient; be reasonable; reflect.
Things did seem calmer for a time. Then, early one October morning—when Francescon was in the hospital and Ombretta was five months dead—the phone rang and my brother-in-law announced, in a shaking voice, that Remo had hanged himself in the woodshed.
The carabinieri, and everyone else, had explanations. Some said that it was the madness of love or an alcoholic raptus; some that any autopsy would show what Remo had been hiding—that he was a dying man, his lungs as invaded by cancer as his heart had been by his last romantic folly. No autopsy was performed, though: the forces of law and order cared little about the fate of a drunken uomo tuttofare.
What we knew about his last night was that he had started out drinking with his Albanian protégé in the seedy birreria he frequented on Corso Mantova, and that as usual they had finished up in the woodshed, sharing a bottle of grappa, sitting on crates near the mountains of firewood they’d cut and stacked for the villas. They talked about Remo’s love problem, and the Albanian kid said later that Remo was in dire spirits: convinced that his sweetheart, in the face of death threats and harassment, was beginning to cool toward him.
Later, he trudged up the hill to his house and wrote a letter to his girl, a letter that never reached her, since the carabinieri promptly impounded it as evidence, and launched it into their labyrinthine bureaucracy. Just before dawn, Remo must have made his way down the hill to the woodshed again.
Poor, hasty, paltry funeral, held in the San Giuseppe parish church, a concrete sixties building the color of a grimy biscuit. The priest, who had always detested Remo, accepted a large donation to the youth football fund as incentive to ignore his suicide and to say a few perfunctory words over the coffin that our family paid for and decorated with autumn flowers from the three villas. In the front pew, toothless and avid, sat Remo’s ex-wife, who had already descended on his house with a pack of relatives from Cuneo and cleared out anything of value. The vindictive Romanian was conspicuously absent. The rest of the mourners were a sparse mixture of our family and Remo’s drinking friends: housepainters, a local plumber and electrician, the Gypsy mechanics, the Albanian kid, his pimply face raw with grief.
And there was the Ecuadoran girl. She’d come with me, wearing a cheap black veil, and sat sobbing like a child, muttering in Spanish, as people stared. I patted her chubby arm, and imagined their enchanted affair, which must have made her feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. Remo had told her things she had never heard from any man. He’d given her champagne—ours—and bought her a ring that looked like gold.
As the priest droned on, I thought how little his words had to do with the pagan Remo, who had lived and made love and died as he pleased. His small body should have been buried in the forest, left to the brisk work of the scavengers he knew so well. I recalled the last conversation we’d had, which was not about roof repair or pruning fruit trees, or even about his romantic drama. It was about a young wild boar that Remo had accidentally hit on a backwoods road with his truck. He told me that it was crying with pain in a way that sounded like a human child. So he picked it up, as only he would have done, and quieted it in his arms until it died.
And then? “Then I took it home and gutted it. Young like that, they make good eating.”
This eerie tenderness and brutal practicality were, I thought, at the heart of Remo’s character. It was not hard to imagine his last moments, to picture the final gulp of grappa, the expert, if intoxicated, knotting of the noose, the nimble step atop the crate where he had sat earlier, drinking with his friend. Then the pause, the pre-dawn chill of the wooded hillside, the damp, clay-scented air, the awareness of the nearby forest and the glistening eyes of hundreds of beasts going dispassionately about their nocturnal rounds; then the step forward, perhaps muttering the name of the girl; the swift grip of the rope; the sudden wing of true blackness sweeping over the dark.
These are the three who are not present anymore. All of them sent out of the world with words unworthy of them, eulogies that revealed only a deep ignorance of who they really were. Of their status as celebrities in—what galaxy? Mine, certainly. I’m sure, at least, that I am the only one who noticed their peculiar constellation, though I have yet to discern the pattern they form.
The gods of antiquity tossed saints and sinners, lovers and chimeras up into the heavens, making sure that there was a thumping good yarn behind each stellar formation. Just so, I’m certain that a kind of logic connects these three characters, and I begin to suspect that I am more implicated in it than I thought. Perhaps I was not just a witness but one of them, a fourth outsider at our villas: I, the foreign writer; Ombretta, the Venetian recluse; Francescon, the master painter; Remo, the wild spirit. Perhaps we were a story, and didn’t know it.
I’m still searching for the thread, aided by a few clues in my own house. An iron bed, and the melancholy voice of an Ecuadoran girl who calls me occasionally, asking for news of a letter; the fat-cheeked face of a putto, peering out of a garland of dog roses; and a few ribbon-bound sachets of lavender, crumbling into aromatic dust. ♦
