The Conversion (3 page)

Pléiade books are printed by the great French publisher, Gallimard, leather-bound volumes decorated with gold leaf, onion-thin pages that I consider to be the most beautiful mass-produced books in the world. The volumes are dedicated to the “stars” of world literature, showcasing in the splendor of high production values a renowned author’s greatest works. Owning a library full of Pléiade editions is something that I’ve always dreamed of, despite the fact that my French still lags substantially behind my Italian. Michel had quite the collection.

I tentatively approach the sacred volumes. I crack a few, setting off flares of dust and a delicious crunching of leather spines and parchment: a sort of literary chiropractic. Here are some of my favorite authors: Musil, Voltaire, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rousseau, Sartre, Proust, and even Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis. The Pléiade is proof, I tell myself, that when the author dies, his words continue a life of their own. I used to dream of literary life after death for myself until I learned that it was possible that one’s work could be completely ignored; then I began to say to myself, “What does it matter, anyway?”

But of course things mattered greatly when it came to the literary legacy of somebody like Edward. I remember how, shortly after the police came and took his body away, I went to the folder that contained the last sequence of poems he’d been working on, many of which I had typed for him. With shaking hands, I rifled through the printed pages, as precious as sheets of gold, reading about the watery reflection of Venice seen from the window of his room in the Palazzo Barbaro.

Among the Pléiade in the bookshelf I notice a very broad, very old book on European judicial theory. And then it suddenly occurs to me: I have a court date in Paris.

In a panic, I throw my clothes on, scrub my teeth, and rush out into an enormous dining room with a gray-and-white marble floor. Staring at me are two huge portraits done in oil: a man in nineteenth-century military regalia with a diagonal sash across his chest, and a woman decked out in a ball gown ruffling with tulle. At the end of the room are a suite of six pairs of French doors, and just beyond them I spot Marina sitting outside on a loggia half as long as a football field. Showing a lot of leg in a short floral skirt, she is holding a glass of white wine and chatting with another
woman, more or less the same age, dressed in tennis whites. I rush toward them barefoot, and Marina no sooner says, “Oh my God, look. The ghost has arisen?” than my abrupt arrival triggers the pack of her six dogs lying at her feet. A single bark trips off a yapping chorus and soon I am surrounded by howling, hackled mongrels of various sizes.
“Basta,”
says Marina in a low throaty voice.
“Zitti! Tutti.”
The dogs continue barking compulsively and she then begins to question them like children, asking them whatever do they want and what they are on about.

“What day is today?” I ask.

“The twenty-fourth of August.”

“I knew it!” I cry. “I was supposed to be in Paris yesterday. I’ve missed the inquest!” The dogs, startled by my tone of voice, begin a reprise of barking backed with a lot less conviction, and this time Marina doesn’t even bother to silence them.

“All taken care of. Wait a moment. First, meet my sister-in-law. Daniela.”

“I’m sorry. How do you do?” I say in English.

“Well, and waiting for my afternoon
partita
,” the woman answers coquettishly.

Marina now tells Daniela in Italian that she needs to speak to me privately and suggests they begin their card game a bit later on. Daniela gives a shrug of disappointment and pushes her rhomboid-shaped sunglasses down over her eyes like a race-car driver. Showing off her English, she says, “Glad to have met you finally,” before loping across the loggia.

Once we are alone, Marina informs me that she’d consulted a physician who’d told her that my sleeping for most of the day was a symptom of shock over Ed’s sudden death and advised her that I shouldn’t travel back to Paris. “And so I had to get a Parisian friend of mine involved—a lawyer who went to court on your behalf and told them that you were not well.” She went on to say the Parisian medical examiner had come to the conclusion that Ed’s heart attack had occurred a few hours after the men broke into our room. No prosecutable link could be found between his death and their intrusion.

“So they’re not going to investigate?” I ask.

“Well, of course they will still try to find these men. They must. Otherwise other people could be killed. But now you’ve already given the police a statement, correct?”

I tell her I had.

“So you’ve done your part. And you’re free.” Marina flips her hand in a whimsical manner and smiles at me. “You can return to America, although you’re certainly welcome to stay here at the villa until you’re feeling better.”

I collapse in the cane chair opposite her, keenly feeling the loss of Ed, remembing how, after I had called down to the front desk, a doctor not much older than me arrived at our room barefoot and in silk pajamas. Obviously a hotel guest who had been summoned from his room, the physician had taken one glance at Ed, felt his pulse, and murmured, “He’s gone.” Then he turned to me and asked how
I
was.

“What difference does that make?” I recall snapping at him.

“Your friend is obviously dead,” he replied with typical French evenhandedness. “There’s unfortunately nothing more I can do for him. But you, you’re still alive.”

Marina, meanwhile, has been looking at me with great concern. “Do you realize that you’ve been sleeping almost continuously for days on end?”

The words no sooner leave her mouth than the urge to crawl back into bed seizes me. I nod and tell her I can’t help it.

“Understood. But you must try to not sleep so much now,” she scolds gently. “Go for walks, take a trip into the city. Walking there takes only a half hour. Make yourself do things. And as I said, stay here for as long as you like.”

“You’ve been very kind to me.”

“Who wouldn’t be kind? Perhaps I have some reason to be kind,” she says mildly with a smile.

“Oh?”

“We’ll discuss it on our stroll.”

It occurs to me that Marina seems far too sophisticated to entertain the idea of perhaps having an affair with a younger man clearly wired toward members of his own sex, not to mention the fact that I am dealing with the emotional fallout over Ed’s death. But neither does she seem
particularly
maternal. Besides, hadn’t she just introduced me to her sister-in-law? “I had no idea you were married,” I say in English.

She laughs and responds, “We didn’t discuss it,” gazing at me with disarming directness. “You sound disappointed. As though you were hoping to court me.”

“‘Court you’ is a very antiquated phrase.”

Marina ignores my comment and returns to Italian. “Anyway, I am married, but not to her brother.”

“You divorced him?”

“Not exactly. We were already separated when he—her brother—died very unfortunately. In an automobile accident.”

I murmur that this must’ve been very tough and she solemnly nods her head in agreement. “Yes, it was. Terribly. And now I am married for the third time,” she admits quietly.

I stare at her, fascinated. “So then where’s your husband?”

It’s her turn to look surprised. “What do you mean, where is my husband? He’s here at the villa.”

Feeling awkward, I say, “Why haven’t I met him?”

“Well, you’ve been asleep.”

“But shouldn’t I?”

“I suppose you should. But actually he’s a recluse. He stays in his room mostly. My Carla brings him all his meals. Have you noticed all those books in your room?” she asks. “In fact, the room used to belong to Stefano. But when I began renting the villa out for weddings, he moved to the part of the house that would be the farthest away from all the public activity. He mostly just stays put, reads and writes his articles. At night sometimes, if you stand in the middle of the
salone
, you can hear the pitter-patter of his old typewriter, the one he’s always used, dating back to his days as the chief cultural critic with the
Corriere
.

“Anyway,” she goes on, “you have two phone calls. One is from that very aggressive Annie Calhoun.”

“Did you actually meet her in Paris?” I ask.

“We introduced ourselves at the hotel.”

“She’s Ed’s literary executrix,” I explain.

“I figured as much. She called—it was a few days ago—and was asking about a certain manuscript of your late friend.”

I groan and then inquire about the other call.

A puzzled yet somehow amused look shades Marina’s face. “A Madame Michel Soyer.”

I involuntarily pitch forward in my chair, my head reeling.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

I explain that she’s married to Michel, my ex whom I haven’t seen in over a year. Why on earth would she be contacting
me?
“How could she have found me
here?
”

“With ease, my friend, with such incredible ease, you have no idea. As one would guess, the death of the decorated American poet has been
reported. And you, as his companion, are mentioned, obviously.” She begins counting with her fingers “It was in
Le Monde
, here in
La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Il Gazzettino
, and even in our local paper,
Il Tirreno,
where they reprinted … I guess it was the last poem that he ever published.”

“‘Venice Sinking by Degrees’?” I ask.

“Yes, the very one. It’s really quite graceful, even in translation. It gives a very unusual glimpse of a city that has been written to death. I must say, the images of decay are remarkable. Down to the descriptions of the algae in the water and the barnacles on the boatslips.”

The poem had actually been written about a trip that we took, Ed and I, when we stayed in the Palazzo Albrizzi, a private residence owned by a Venetian nobleman. Besides the barnacles and the algae, Ed melodiously describes the enormous hanging glass lanterns in the palazzo’s entryway. The poem seems to be about the dying of energy and ardor but it’s actually—he admitted as much—about the fact that I’d been unable to return his aroused affections in such a romantic setting.

“Anyway,” Marina goes on, “this woman who called you here surely saw the articles and rang up the hotel. And probably made the concierge think she knew you well enough to get information.”

Another wave of fatigue, the urge to recoil from Ed’s dying and these people trying to contact me who clearly want something. I suppose my eyelids begin fluttering because Marina barks at me, “Don’t fall asleep again! I’ll make you a coffee. For God’s sake, you need to do things. Get your mind off of this. I know, go make your phone calls. The names and numbers are written down in the kitchen. Then get on some proper shoes and we’ll go for our walk.”

One of the dogs understands the word
passeggiata
, and the frenzied barking begins again. Marina silences them, amused.

She gets up and leaves the loggia, whose stone balustrades are so old they seem to be crumbling or dissolving. To the left of me, over a walled Tuscan city just a few kilometers away, rise the blue peaks of the Apuan Alps.

Reluctant to get into a conversation with Ed’s overly zealous executrix, I linger on the loggia. I gaze up thirty-five feet at high arches, frescoed with
trompe l’oeil
to look more architecturally ornate and gilded, and then toward the far wall. Here are beautifully executed though slightly pockmarked frescoes of a pastoral scene: sheep and their shepherds, a
snaking river, the unmistakable gold-and-olive-colored Tuscan hills, tall cypress spires.

There is a blue slip of paper next to the kitchen telephone with Marina’s scrawl:

Suddenly fearing bad news about Michel, I decide to call Madame Soyer first.

To my great disappointment I get an answering machine with a
bilingual
message in French and English. I hang up, and as I am standing there contemplating my next move, Marina’s housekeeper, Carla, comes into the kitchen. A stout woman of late middle age with dark copper hair and a practically lineless face, Carla has been kind enough to bring me a few meals in my room: carbonara that she claims is made from the eggs produced by her chickens; pasta complemented by the villa’s fresh tomatoes and mint; plates of prosciutto; wedges of Tuscan pecorino with clusters of Sicilian grapes.

Carla speaks a blurred, truncated Tuscan dialect that is a challenge for me to understand. However, a few days ago I overheard her telling a workman, “No, no, you can’t go in there now. He’s sleeping. Sleeps all the time. Like a crazy.” An insult perhaps, but somehow this struck me as uproariously funny and I started to laugh, so much so that Carla opened the door and said, “What, what is it? What is so amusing,
so
suddenly?”

“I’m not a crazy,” I said, still chuckling.

“God in heaven forgive me,” she’d replied. And then commanded me to go and stroll the garden. “Would be the cure of you,” she’d said gruffly. At the time I didn’t listen to her.

Now she greets me brusquely and, putting her stout muscle behind it, begins wiping down a lazy Susan built in the middle of a round highly varnished wooden kitchen table. To me a lazy Susan is a very
middle-American
convenience, and I wonder what such a suburban contraption is doing in a fifteenth-century Tuscan villa. On the counter a slab of prosciutto nestles in a delicatessen meat slicer. Eyeing it, Carla asks if I’d like some. When I politely decline she mutters something unintelligible to herself and
begins to mop the terrazzo floor. She merely pretends to be disgruntled and disagreeable; I will soon learn she is completely devoted to Marina, and even more devoted to Marina’s mysteriously reclusive husband.

Annie Calhoun, the literary executrix, picks up after the first ring and actually hesitates before agreeing to have the charges reversed to her. She claims to have gone to the New York University–subsidized apartment where Ed had sent all of his belongings, has successfully found all the writing files in his computer, sorted through his papers, which are all relatively well organized, but has not yet located the manuscript of “the memoir,” which she’d unsuccessfully searched for among all the papers he’d had with him in the Parisian hotel.