Cambridge (4 page)

That day of my second encounter with Saint George, Frederika was off with her Italian boyfriend, Fulvio. Despite the glasses and the lumpy footwear, she’d proved exotic enough to appeal to the neighboring villa’s eldest son, who was studying or doing an imitation of studying architecture at the University of Florence. Fulvio was in his early twenties, spoke rather good English with a German accent (Austrian mother), and had a green Vespa on which he abducted Frederika on Thursday and Sunday afternoons.

My mother did not approve. She had better things in mind for Frederika.

“It’s all right for a fling,” she said. “But you don’t love him.”

Frederika had to admit that she did not.

“Thank god,” my mother said. “Be careful.”

In Italy in 1956 they must have had to resort to the oldest form of contraception. I imagine the cedar-studded, bee-humming acreage that stretched out behind the house fertilized by Fulvio
on those evenings he turned up after dinner (which were all evenings except Thursday and Sunday), his Vespa whining with anticipation as he blasted through the massive iron gate that hadn’t been open or closed (it was stuck in a halfway position) since the nineteenth century, judging by the extent of the vines that grew all over it.

I could see them from my window, strolling down the path to the jungle, hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel. This comparison comes to mind because later, in Cambridge, Frederika made a gingerbread house for my mother’s birthday, cutting the windows and doors out of the dough before cooking it, plastering the walls together with caramelized sugar, painting tiles on the roof with red-tinted icing. It was a representation of our villa in Florence, an out-of-season, Swedish-Italian hybrid marvel. “We make them for Christmas,” she said, “but I thought it would be nice in springtime too.”

By then Frederika was in love for real. This time my mother approved, because she’d set up the match. My mother had more fun with Frederika the substitute daughter than she ever had with me or my sister. Behavior that we called “meddling” or “interfering” seemed to Frederika a passionate engagement with her happiness—which it was, in all its instances.

The thing looked unlikely from the outset: a short, bug-eyed Indian conductor just hatched from the Paris Conservatory, name of Vishwa Dal. My mother was right, though. She often was right, which added to the irritation of her meddling. Vishwa and Frederika were a perfect pair. Their love story unfolded and then folded up again in Cambridge, as I watched and took mental notes and learned nothing, naturally, because the heart is unteachable.

While Fulvio and Frederika thrashed around in the undergrowth, I lay in my four-poster bed and thought about Saint
George. My notion of sexual intercourse was a gymnastic exercise in reproduction, not something you’d dream of and yearn for. So when I thought about Saint George, I thought about hugging him. First standing in front of him, looking at him and wanting to hug him, then hugging him, then his hugging me back. I could and did think of these three tableaux over and over: standing and wanting to hug; hugging; being hugged. I varied it by imagining it first with Saint George in his niche on the wall of Orsanmichele, then with Saint George on his plinth in the Bargello. Once I’d fallen in love with Saint George, I stopped making my nighttime flights to Cambridge. In fact, adulterous, I didn’t want to go back to Cambridge because I didn’t want to leave my beloved.

There were other things I didn’t want to leave. I’d become entranced with the piebald, harlequin Duomo, which we could see from our terrace above town. The crazy-colored marble blocks made it look like a vertical chessboard for a game played on black, pink, and white squares by Italian giants. Nearly every morning I sat on our hot flagstones with my box of Crayons brought from home, now missing some critical colors like red and sky blue, and drew a picture of Brunelleschi’s dome. I produced dozens of these drawings. My mother thought they were wonderful and kept them all. For years she had one taped to the refrigerator door in Cambridge. When one faded or got mayonnaise on it, she’d replace it with a new one from her store.

I loved the Duomo because it looked as if the Florentines had had fun building it. When we went to Siena, the whole city looked that way—the sloped, scalloped piazza like a tipped-up pizza shell, the black-and-white prison-striped columns in the churches. I thought Italy’s elaborate architectural eruptions had been created to amuse and astonish children, and me in particular. But I was wrong about that, like millions before and after
me. Italy didn’t love me back any more than Cambridge or a statue of Saint George did.

Though she disapproved of Fulvio, my mother had become friends with his mother, Annemarie. Annemarie also disapproved of Fulvio. “He wastes his life,” she said in her growly, smoky voice. Annemarie and my mother spent many afternoons under a parasol on our terrace smoking together. “No talent,” she would continue. “No talent at all, at all. It is a rebellion.”

“Against?” my mother prompted.

“The Businessman.”

The Businessman was what Annemarie called her husband, Alessandro. Whatever business he was in, he made a lot of money at it. Their villa had new plumbing, new marble, a sleek, visionary, stainless-steel kitchen, exposed timbers in the ceilings of the large rooms empty except for groupings of antique armchairs reupholstered in Florentine flame-stitch silk (my mother told me it was called a Bargello pattern) commissioned by Annemarie at the old fabricator in town that still produced cloth in the Renaissance manner on ancient looms. Twenty or thirty years later, this was how houses looked in fancy architectural magazines. In the mid-fifties, it was home decor from Mars. The design talent in that family belonged to Annemarie.

My mother also had a good eye. One of her and Annemarie’s favorite pastimes was to stroll together through our dark, overstuffed villa pretending they had all the Businessman’s money available to fix it up.

Standing in the dining room, Annemarie waved her hand.

“Out! Out!” she said, banishing the extra chairs and china cabinets and hat racks and footstools that had invited themselves for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Nothing,” she decreed, nudging with her bare foot a yellow-and-blue Majolica umbrella receptacle big enough to hold a dead dog.

“Nothing would be kind of difficult,” my mother said. “Not even a table?”

“A daybed,” said Annemarie. “A daybed and an
armadio—
that long, low one in the Child’s room.” She always called me the Child.

“And where do we eat?” asked my mother.

“Buffet-style,” said Annemarie.

“Standing up? Come on, Annemarie. That’s cocktail-style. There’s got to be a dining room.”

“Eat in the kitchen. Eat on the terrace.”

Because Annemarie was not Italian, she wasn’t very interested in food.

“This room would be perfect for napping,” she continued. “It’s cool and those long windows. Very nice, opening out to the terrace. Lovely. Painted red. Dark red—everything!”

“Like a bordello,” said my mother.

“Exactly!” said Annemarie.

They both burst out laughing.

Annemarie fascinated me. I didn’t know that she was an example of a type, not all that rare. She seemed as unprecedented and marvelous as if she’d stepped out of a painting. Not
La Primavera
, certainly; she wasn’t a beauty. Something later, blowsier, a Caravaggio or a Titian. She was perfectly turned out for every occasion, even the mundane occasion of smoking on the terrace with my mother. One day: black Capri pants, sleeveless white cotton shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons; flat sandals kicked off under the chair (Annemarie liked to be barefoot); auburn hair swept up in a mishmash that teetered between knot and ponytail, impaled with a tortoiseshell skewer; a diamond ring, a ruby ring, a bloodstone signet ring, three gold bangles, and an English Oval smoldering in her left hand. Next day: magenta linen sheath dress, kneelength; hair au naturel (this meant all
over the place, tumbling, wavy); aforementioned rings plus amber necklace; and black high heels in which it was impossible to walk the quarter-mile dirt road between her villa and ours. And yet, she did. She was the sort of woman who could walk three miles in high heels.

She was depilated and waxed and creamed and buffed to a glistening smooth finish like our terrazzo floor after the farmer’s wife had scrubbed it with vinegar and water and then skated it dry with lamb’s-wool slippers.

My mother was more beautiful, but her arsenal of presentation was limited, first by money, second by inclination. She wasn’t willing to spend time on what Annemarie called “the constant vigilance.” My mother was younger by about five years—crucial years in a woman’s life, the ones that separate the thirties from the forties. And unlike Annemarie, who tended toward plumpness, my mother was a skinny person. That summer in Italy, these factors were in her favor. The differences, though, showed up several decades later when I saw Annemarie again. My mother had aged and Annemarie had stayed quite the same, preserved—nearly pickled—by European beauty secrets. Who knows what they were? Bee-pollen injections, high-colonic mineral-water irrigations, once-a-week fasts (she was doing that when we met her). Possibly she bathed in milk and drank crushed pearls like Cleopatra.

My mother thought Fulvio wasn’t good enough for Frederika; Annemarie thought the opposite. She knew her son was a bit of a wastrel, but she didn’t understand Frederika’s “qualities,” as my mother referred to them. I was the Child; Frederika was the Girl. As in, “The Girl isn’t very good at keeping the baby quiet, is she?”

“Babies cry,” my mother said. “She’s had a fever.”

“You must have the doctor,” said Annemarie.

“It’s nothing,” said my mother.

“It could be malaria,” said Annemarie, a robust hypochondriac. She sent the doctor over the next day.

His first question: “Does she coo?”

This flummoxed my mother. “You mean, is she happy?”

“Coo, coo.” He demonstrated, coughing a little
rat-tat-tat
a baby might make. Phonetic English.

“Ah,” said my mother. “No, no. Just a runny nose and a little fever.”

“And what do you feed her?”

“Pureed carrots, things like that.”

The doctor threw up his hands. “No pasta? Of course she is sick. She must eat pasta.”

“She’s not even a year old,” my mother protested.

“In soup,” he explained.

“That’s damned unlikely,” my mother said to herself as he drove off in his ramshackle Fiat. “Am I supposed to masticate the pasta like a bird mother?”

“What does
masticate
mean?” I asked.

“Chew,” my mother told me. “Bird mothers chew things and then spit them into the baby’s mouth.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Don’t worry—I’m not going to.”

“Icky,” I said. I couldn’t get over how disgusting that was.

Even though it was disgusting, I suppose because it was disgusting, I didn’t stop thinking about it until the inevitable happened, which was imagining myself chewing something, chocolate gelato maybe, and then spitting it into Saint George’s mouth. Gelato wasn’t a good choice, since it didn’t really need chewing and would dribble out. So then I had to think about it all over again from the beginning, chewing something that needed chewing, salami and bread, say, and spitting
—poof, poof
—and by doing this, waking my love from his stone or bronze trance. Soon it was a second chapter in my pattern of Saint George thoughts. First wanting to hug, hugging, and being hugged back; then, while in an embrace, chewing, spitting, and waking him.

I had no idea what I would do with him were he to awaken, and in my stylized round of thought, everything stopped at the moment he opened his eyes, enlivened by chewed salami.

The evenings a-chatter with katydids and locusts as we ate on the terrace while the abrupt sunset blacked out the already-shadowy garden; the lovely arc of the day, bisected by the nap we’d finally learned to take after lunch so as to attack art and architecture with renewed zest in the afternoon, when the museum guards slumped in postprandial torpor on their tiny folding canvas stools; “our” vegetable stand, “our”
gelateria
, “our”
ristorante
on the Lungarno for a festive Saturday night out: We had Italy in the palm of our hand. We were practically Italian!

Many, many years later, the last year of the century, I spent a winter with Annemarie and the Businessman, who was no sort of businessman at all, rather, a cultured, tailored professor of philosophy from a wealthy family in Trieste. Some friends of theirs invited us to a New Year’s Eve house party in Siena in their deconsecrated monastery-chapel, transformed into a villa with no heat. The Businessman and I got up early on New Year’s Day and, half frozen, decided to walk around town in order to get the circulation going.

It was quiet and chilly. The tippy narrow streets were empty and dark, because northern Italy, in an awkward time zone, is artificially dark in winter. When we reached the piazza, old men in long blue cashmere coats were watching their grandchildren play ball on the half-shell. Streams of people were coming out from church while the bell rang and rang and rang.

“It looks as if it were five hundred years ago,” I said.

“It does look the same,” said Alessandro.

“Do you think you can know how it felt to live here in 1499? Because you’re Italian, I mean,” I asked him. “I know that I can’t know,” I said. “I just pretend I know.”

Alessandro looked around and shrugged. “It’s not possible,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s just not possible. We’re not the same as they were.”

I looked at the gray tilted stones and the houses leaning in toward the center like an audience waiting for a climax. “Then all this is as mysterious to you as it is to me?” I asked him.

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

It was time to go home. Frederika would join us later. She had to return, first, to her family in Sweden.

Annemarie gave us presents. For my mother, a cake plate from Ginori shaped like a tray and made of heavy, creamy porcelain painted with fabulous—as in nonexistent—birds and insects. For my father, a silver-and-boar-tusk shoehorn as long as his forearm. For me, a tiny blue enameled box in the potbellied form of a pirate’s chest, “for your treasures, Child,” she said.