Uncle Isaac stopped in front of a villa whose porch was lined with imitation Greek caryatids supporting an upper terrace covered with ivy and jasmine. He rang at the gate. A maid eventually opened the main door and, on seeing him, immediately came rushing out to open the front gate. “Your Excellency,” she exclaimed, “what an honor.”
Uncle Isaac pushed me awkwardly inside the villa grounds and reminded me to walk properly. “We'll only stay a moment,” he said. From inside I could hear the strains of loud operatic music.
“Isaac,” came a shrill man's voice. “Isaac. Our dear, dear
Isaac. Come in, come in,” said the man, extending both hands, with which he shook my uncle's right hand.
When we entered the house, we noticed that all the windows had been covered with thick cobalt-blue paper.
“We haven't started doing this,” said my uncle, indicating the covered shutters. “I suppose we should.”
“Absolutely must,” said the elderly gentleman, who wore a maroon ascot and a beige cardigan. “The police came yesterday and were so terribly rude that, naturally, the first thing we did this morning was to have all the windows covered as well.” His wife was just coming out of the library.
“Isaac, but you're really unforgivable,” she shouted in the marble hall. “Staying away from us so very longâreally,
tesoro
.”
Uncle Isaac kissed her.
“Ali!” she hollered at the top of her lungs.
“Tea!”
“So tell me,
caro
,” said the man wearing the ascot.
“I don't know what to make of it yet,” answered my uncle. Perhaps he was being evasive or, as he would say, diplomatic: say less than you think and mean more than you know.
“
E finita
â” said the gentleman, “that's what you should make of it.
La commedia è finita
,” he crooned with blithe consternation as he lifted up an arm with the operatic flourish of someone looking for the slightest pretext to break into song.
“But
siamo seri,
let's be serious,” said his wife.
“Siamo in due,”
rejoined her husband, breaking into song yet again, whereupon his most devoted and compatible wife, heeding her husband's musical inducements, joined him in singing
“O soave fanciulla,”
in which my uncle joined as well, adding his warbly basso.
“Aaahh,” sighed the man after the trio had sung and laughed their way into a fit of coughing. “We've lived far too long,
caro
, and have too many wonderful memories to let a bunch
of turbaned hooligans frighten us now.” He reflected for a moment. “Hooligans, schmooligans,” he added. “I've built this house out of nothing”âhe pointed to the marble floor, the marble paneling along the marble staircase, where a creamy afternoon glow graced a pair of marble statues standing inside a sculptured wooden doorâ“and I'm not about to leave it to them. This here, my friend, is where I plan to die many, many years from now, like old King David in the arms of his sprightly, young, desirable Bathsheba,” he said, holding his wife by her waist and rubbing his hip suggestively against hers.
“Ugo!” protested his wife with mock reproof.
“Ugo!”
he mimicked with the rakish petulance of an Old World
charmeur
. “
M'hai stregato,
you've bewitched me,” he whispered, his mouth rubbing her neck. Then, holding his wife in both arms, he turned to my uncle and winked at him, wearing a crafty, naughty-boy smirk that seemed to allege an air of impish complicity between fellow womanizers. This was Egypt's most powerful stockbroker, the man whom the country's European and Egyptian elites trusted with their dreams of fortune.
“Ugo, tell me, what is happening?” asked my uncle.
“What is happening?” repeated Signor Ugo with a sprightly look darting from his eyes. “What is happening is that whatever the British and the French take from Nasser they'll have to give back. The Russians won't allow them to keep anything, not the canal, not Port Said, not anything. And the irony is that the British already know it, as do the French, though they'll continue fighting awhile to save face.”
“But it's the end, then,” muttered Uncle Isaac.
“Isaac. I've heardâ” then he stopped and stared in my direction.
“Talk. He doesn't understand.”
“My friends,” he started, meaning his high-powered clients in the Egyptian government, “my friends tell me that Nasser won't forgive this attack. There will be serious reprisals against French and British nationals once all this is over. Nationalizations. Expulsions. This includes Jews.”
“Jews?”
“In retaliation for the Israeli attack.”
“But we're not Israelisâ” Uncle Isaac began to protest.
“Tell that to President Nasser!”
“But then we're done for. No wonder they've closed the banks. If they don't take everything I've got and throw me out of Egypt for being French, then they'll do it because I'm Jewish.”
“
Questa o quella
â” added Signor Ugo, alluding to the aria but tactful enough not to sing it.
My uncle said that this was worse than anything he had ever imagined. It was worse than waiting for the Germans to march into Alexandria.
“Ugo, just in case anything happens to me, remember this name. Monsieur Kraus. Geneva. Vili knows.”
Signor Ugo took out a white pack of cigarettes and began scribbling something on the back of it.
“Are you mad, Ugo!” exclaimed my uncle. “Don't write anything. Just remember it.”
Signor Ugo gave a quiet, significant nod, put away his pen, and, meaning to stop further dark thoughts from clouding his perennially cheerful disposition, put on a lively face, seemingly for the child who was present, and reminded us that tea would be served in the living room. “
Che sciagura,
what a disaster,” he said, revealing a strangely melodious accent when speaking Italian.
Ugo da Montefeltro was born Hugo Blumberg in Czernowitz. Like many gifted Rumanians of his generation, he had
emigrated to Turkey in pursuit of petty business ventures, none of which got him anywhere except to Palestine, where he arrived as a correspondent for a Yiddish publication in the Ukraine that folded before he had even written his first article. His next stop was Egypt. The charming young man had a gift for languages and song, and soon enough became a stockbroker for Egypt's French and Italian communities. In a matter of four years, he had become a very wealthy man. Always wary of dangers facing Jews, Signor Ugo and his wife changed their surname in the wake of a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Cairo. They had intended to change Blumberg, which in German meant mountain of flowers, to its Italian equivalent, Montefiore, and would have lived quite happily with that name, had a good friend not reminded them that nothing was more Jewish than the House of Montefiore. Ugo shrugged off the borrowed name and soon after picked a French equivalent, to which, this time, he decided to add the ennobling
particule.
He became Hugo de Montfleury.
But that project did not last long, either, for someone else told him of two French playwrightsâa father and sonâcalled Montfleury but whose real names were Antoine and Zacharie Jacob. From this it was inferred that the Montfleurys, the target of Cyrano de Bergerac's most pernicious satires, probably were “like us.” Blumberg hastily cast off Monsieur de Montfleury and took a name that sounded quite like it, and which had, as he would always say with an amused quiver on his lips, a certain charm and a long lineage to go with it. He became Ugo da Montefeltro, “domiciled,” as his illegally purchased Italian passport showed, not in Leghornâwhere most Levantine Jews alleged their ancestral homeâbut in Montalcino, whose wines he fancied.
To tease him, some of his friends called him Ugolino da Montefeltro, which pleased the Rumanian fop no end, because
the name conferred a doubled aristocratic provenance, with brooding reminders from Danteâhence Uncle Isaac's nickname for him: Dantés de MonteCristo.
In later years, few were the European boys in Alexandria whose path did not cross Signor Ugo's. In his impoverished old age, he earned a living as a private tutor of history, literature, and mathematics, while his wife, Paulette, worked as a seamstress to emerging Egyptian families. On Sundays both could still be seen at the Sporting Club, walking arm in arm along the main alley or on the polo fields, he always in the same ascot and tweed jacket, and she wearing loud, colorful designs that she cut and sewed herself, after patterns copied from
Burda,
with the flashy cloth then fashionable in Egypt. My father noticed that the smile was gone from her face, and her husband crooned a bit less when he had us over for dinner, rubbing his hands in excitement before opening an old bottle of Bordeaux that he had cleverly smuggled under the very nose of the Bureau of Nationalization.
“Not the last, but among the last. When these are gone, we'll goâright,
cara
?”
“Always so gloomy,” she would say. “Open the wine and let's enjoy it.
Libiamâet après nous le déluge
,” she would say, invoking the words of Verdi and Marie-Antoinette, as we all sat in their small pension bedroom-dining room on Rue Djabarti, a far cry now from the opulence of their house in Bulkley. Never one to fail to pick up his cue from Verdi, Signor Ugo would sing one aria and then another and yet another from
La Traviata,
ending with a male rendition of
Addio del passato.
On these occasions, my mother, who had no idea what he was singing, would sit with a glass of wine in her hand, half-bored, half-smothering a giggle at the fustian old gentleman who hid his sagging dewlap under all manner of scarves and who she knew would be weeping any moment now. And indeed, having
reached the end of his aria, he would burst into a boyish sob, which never failed to steal the most tender and compassionate
“Tesoro!”
from his wife, who, more than ever now, was forced to liven the atmosphere by holding out her glass to offer a toast: “To the most beautiful soul in the world.”
It occurred to very few that the Signora da Montefeltro had lost her smile not only because she was wretched with grief inside, but because she was ashamed to let people see the deteriorated state of her front teeth, which she could no longer afford to fix. When, on rare occasions, she would run into her old dentist with friends at the club and everyone sat at the same table, he would confront her and ask, “Let me take a look at this.” She would resist, alleging decorum and propriety, calling him an unregenerate rake for asking a woman her age to show him her mouth in public. But, after much resistance, she would finally consent to a peek at her gums. “Just as I imagined. Come tomorrow, understand?”
By being so unusually brusque and peremptory with the exâgrande dame, he was hoping to spare her the embarrassment of hearing that she would never be charged for her visits. “One day, Doctor, one day. But tomorrow I play bridge.”
Tomorrow
I
play bridge was a famous Montefeltro half-lie intended less to deceive than to display a failed attempt to deceiveâa passe-partout phrase everyone quoted when they wanted you to know they were probably lying.
“Tomorrow we're playing bridge,” Signor Ugo said out loud as soon as he saw Ali walk in with tea and hot chocolate. It was his way of misleading the servant into thinking we had been talking about cards.
“I play for Paulette's sake. Personally, I hate bridge,” Montefeltro went on, quite pleased at the deftness with which he had changed subjects on hearing the kitchen door open. “Especially when it's gray, as it's been these days. And on gray,
autumnal days, what better than to drink hot tea and listen to Brahms.” This was a hint to his wife to play something on the piano.
“Not now, Ugo. Put on a record instead.”
Signor Ugo disappeared into the living room, whistling debonairly. Moments later, with a sound that reminded me of a persistent gardener raking dead leaves, came the piercing strain of an old, scratchy 78 recording of the horn trio.
“Here are some little chocolates,” he said, producing a very large box of mini Toblers that were individually wrapped and neatly arranged in a dizzying mosaic of multicolored bars.
“Which will you have?” asked Uncle Isaac.
I took one with a hazelnut on the wrapper, slowly unwrapped it, placed it in my mouth, and, to my dismay, found that, before savoring or thinking about the chocolate or even dropping its crinkled wrapper into the large ashtray that stood next to boxâI had already swallowed it. Trying to hide my desire for another as best I could, I pointed out to Signora da Montefeltro that these were really exquisite chocolates. “You must have another, then,” she insisted, and when I had finished that one, “and another yet.” I chewed that one as fast as I could, hoping she would offer me another. But my uncle intervened after the third, saying I had had three and that was plenty. “Oh, well, if you say so,” said Signora da Montefeltro. “But I want him to take some home with him.”