Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  The four of us had managed to squeeze in, violating all manner of societal norms that discouraged the rubbing of oneself against others. Bernie and I were thrust together, as it were. The discomfort wasn’t merely the alternately slippery then sticky properties of shared perspiration on my bare shoulders and arms—though that was a dampness I’d rather not experience again this side of a drive-in passion pit—nor was it the poking elbows, which tickled or bruised depending on the pressure and location of the contact. More than anything else, I was tortured by the stifling heat inside the car. I stuck my head farther out the window, resigned to accept that my hair would be as tame and silky as a Brillo pad by the time we arrived in Fiesole.

  When we weren’t complaining about the hot air, we were rehashing the tragedy of Professor Bondinelli’s drowning. Lucio said he’d known him for three years, having studied under him at the university. From the backseat, Bernie asked Giuliana if she’d been Bondinelli’s student as well.

  Unable to turn around due to the suitcase on her lap, she shook her head and said she was working with another professor. She’d taken some classes with Bondinelli.

  “How well did you know him?” I asked.

  “Not well. He was reserved. Always proper but not friendly.”

  “What about his youth? Do you know anything about what he did during the war?”

  I couldn’t gauge her reaction from the back of her head. She said no, she knew nothing about his past. I’d already heard Giuliana’s incomplete version of Bondinelli’s war record, even if she was denying any knowledge of it now. But I wanted to get Lucio’s take on it. He seemed to have known him better than the rest of us.

  “I think he lived in Tirrena,” he said. “But I’m not sure. Somewhere on the coast.”

  “I’m always interested in what people his age did during the war. Someone told me he was with the partisans.”

  “Maybe. I heard he was arrested by the fascists. And he was wounded in Spain. That’s where he lost his eye.”

  “The poor man. He lost an eye in Spain?”

  “Yes. He wore a glass one.”

  “Did he fight on the Republican side?”

  “Hardly,” said Giuliana, who then remembered herself and clammed up.

  “Anything else you can tell me about his past?”

  Lucio fell quiet for a short moment, steering around a green Piaggio Ape that was chugging along too slowly for his taste. Overtaking the threewheeler on the viale proved more challenging than he might have thought. The Cinquecento whined as Lucio punched his foot down on the accelerator, practically pushing it through the floor to the street below. Somehow it all reminded me of the chariot race in Ben-Hur, only without any of the speed or horsepower. I feared the car would give out before we could get around the Ape, but the little engine eventually delivered the goods and we passed it. With the epic duel behind us, Lucio returned to the subject at hand. He said Bondinelli had never talked about his past. In fact, his only concession to nostalgia was a photograph in his office at the university.

  “An old picture of him with his late wife and two other men. Somewhere in a café.”

  “Any idea who they were?”

  “Difficult to say.”

  “Could it have been taken during the war? Was there a date on it?”

  “Not that I saw. Maybe on the back. He never talked about the war, though. Not to me anyway. To tell the truth, he was rather secretive about his past.”

  “Anything else special about the photograph?” I asked.

  “Niente. Just some people sitting at a table in a café. It might have been springtime. And they were looking up at the camera, like someone had just called their names. Like those strolling photographers take of tourists then sell the prints to them.”

  It was touch and go for a while, but the Topolino puffed its way through Piazza della Libertà and up the winding via before finally breaching at the crest at Piazza San Domenico. Lucio stuffed his tiny Cinquecento into an impossibly small parking space between a car and a couple of motorini. He pulled the brake and told us we needed to wait for the motor to cool before continuing any farther. There was an alimentari at the corner, and so, sweating buckets, Bernie, Giuliana, and I squeezed out of the car. We staggered into the small shop, trying to recover our land legs, and bought some Chinotto and Limonata. We guzzled them down as Lucio tried to make sense of the hand-drawn map and scribbled directions he’d received from Franco. Once he’d deemed the rocket engine ready to percolate again, we piled back inside the rolling oven and headed west on Via Boccaccio.

  A few hundred meters farther on, the road narrowed and high stone walls sprang up on both sides, immuring the properties beyond. Inside the tiny car, I felt mildly claustrophobic, especially since I could see little besides the mortared stones rushing past the window. I wondered how Lucio would manage if another car came at us from the other direction. Or even a bicycle. But it wasn’t another vehicle that suddenly appeared on the road before us but a pedestrian. Coming out of a tight turn, we bore down on a young man walking in the same direction we were taking.e carried a suitcase in his left hand as he hugged the stone wall to give us as wide a berth as possible. And still, Lucio, who was gesticulating as he made a point about which grew faster, the hair on one’s head or in one’s beard, grazed him with the right front fender as we overtook him. Had it not been for the added weight of the four passengers and our luggage on top, the Man vs. Topolino might have ended in a draw. As things turned out, the fellow on foot bounced off the stone wall like a pinball and tumbled into the middle of the road. The old leather valise he’d been carrying somehow got run over by our car, and, adding insult to injury, scattered its contents into the road. I shrieked.

  “Fermati, Lucio. Stop!” called Bernie. “You hit that guy!”

  Lucio shifted down to first, pulled over to the shoulder, and cut the engine. We all craned our necks to see the man we’d knocked down and were relieved to see him spring to his feet uninjured. Lucio leaned out the window and treated the fellow to the foulest Italian oaths and insults I’d ever heard. It was an education for me.

  “Disgraziato, cornuto, figlio di putt . . .!”

  I lost track after that, catching only the occasional word. But I did manage to sputter to Lucio that the man he was berating—the one who’d nearly greased the underside of his car—was none other than Tato Lombardi.

  “Really?” he asked. “That was Tato?”

  He popped open the door and scurried back to the scene of the collision to brush the dust off the man he’d so vulgarly excoriated a moment earlier. We all climbed out to help gather up Tato’s clothes, most of which bore telltale tire marks from Lucio’s car. Then, like a rescued shipwrecked sailor, he boarded our already overloaded lifeboat. It took some organizing and a couple of different combinations before we managed it, what with everyone offering opinions on how to fit him and his bag into the car. Finally it was decided Giuliana would sit on his lap in the front passenger seat, while Bernie and I would inherit the suitcase she’d been holding on hers.

  Underway again, we asked Tato what had happened. Why hadn’t he met us in the piazza?

  “I got to Santa Maria Novella late,” he said. “I thought we were meeting at the station, not the church. Anyway, I saw the car and Franco’s Vespa driving away and tried to chase you down. But my valise popped open and spilled all my clothes in the street. Then a taxi ran over my things.”

  Perhaps the skid marks weren’t ours after all.

  Lucio chuckled. “Two times in one day. Bravo, Tato. Let’s go for the tripletta.”

  Though it wasn’t nice, we all erupted into laughter. Tato didn’t seem to take it personally. And we didn’t mention that not one of us had even noticed that he’d missed the nine a.m. appointment in the piazza.

  “Anyway, I repacked my things and took the number seven bus up to San Domenico,” he explained. “I was walking the rest of the way when you passed by and rescued me.”

  “Rescued?”
scoffed Giuliana on his lap. “Ran over you is more like it.”

  Lucio shook his head, half in amusement, half in woe, and told him he needed to be more mindful of appointments, schedules, and passing cars. “You should watch where you’re going. You could’ve hurt yourself.”

  We turned off Via Boccaccio, through an open gate and past a sign announcing “Villa Bel Soggiorno.” The long private drive meandered up a gentle hill, guarded by two rows of mature cypress trees that waved like giant green feathers in the warm breeze. Lucio’s Topolino crunched over the pebbled road, kicking up dust and, with each bump, treated us to a jolt to the coccyx that ran up the spine all the way to the base of the skull. I didn’t mind too much, though, as I was enchanted by the view of the olive groves and fig trees on either side of the drive. And, sure that it somehow cheapened my opinion of myself, I had to admit that the beautiful property and its stunning vistas made me more curious about the man who lived there. I thought of Vicky, his . . . lover? Was that what we’d settled on to describe her relationship? I found myself wondering for a brief moment what Max Locanda looked like. Was he handsome? Or was money his best feature? What a shame it would be, I mused as we bounced through another hole in the road, if he turned out to be less attractive than Marcello Mastroianni.

  “Pretty nice,” said Bernie, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Not bad.”

  “Bourgeois excess,” pronounced Giuliana from Tato’s lap.

  “More like aristocratic excess,” said Lucio.

  “Same thing. I don’t know why I came along. This place represents everything I despise.”

  “Calmati, Giulià,” said Lucio. “Take some time off from the revolution and let’s enjoy a couple of days in a beautiful place.”

  Bernie and I exchanged glances. I knew universities could be political hotbeds, but this was awkward. Giuliana may well have had a point. Why had she come if she was going to hate every moment?

  “I’m going to do some reading this weekend,” said Bernie, trying to ease the tension. Despite or, in fact, because of the pall hanging over the impending three-day weekend, I was glad he’d decided to accept the lastminute invitation.

  “Bravo, Bernie,” said Lucio. “And I’m going to sing and play the guitar. And eat and enjoy the wine. What about you, Tato? Maybe you can get your clothes pressed. With an iron this time.”

  “You’re so mean,” said Giuliana.

  Bernie stifled a chuckle. I failed to swallow my grin. Lucky Tato couldn’t see me. He came to life, though, assuring Giuliana it was okay. Lucio was only joking. Then he voiced his support of her argument on class struggle and Locanda’s house.

  “This place should belong to the people who work the land,” he said.

  “Usually the dummy sits on the ventriloquist’s lap, not the other way around,” I whispered to Bernie.

  The house loomed ahead, shimmering in the hazy, late summer heat like a mirage. I only caught fleeting glimpses from the backseat. Lucio’s fat head, the neck of the guitar projecting over his left shoulder, and poor Giuliana, contorted on Tato’s lap, blocked my line of sight. Still, when the bumps cooperated, a large dusty-yellow building lurched into view, flanked by smaller structures on each side.

  The Topolino squeaked to a stop on the right side of the house, where Lucio parked it against the wall of one of the side buildings, the one I could now see was a small chapel. He cut the engine, and the Fiat hiccoughed twice before giving up the ghost. The silence loosed by the little car gave way to a thrumming chorus of cicadas that buzzed all about us. Franco’s gray Vespa was already there, sitting in the shade of a towering Italian stone pine.

  Surrounded by long rows of boxwood shrubs, the main house stood three stories tall. I counted twelve lemon trees in great terra cotta pots, which, presumably, could be moved inside the adjacent limonaia—the other side building—in colder weather. Flowers spilled from boxes outside the second- and third-floor windows, open wide to catch the breeze in their gossamer curtains.

  Lucio popped open his door, and Giuliana followed suit, liberating the rest of us from the torture of the hot Topolino.

  “This place is a dream,” I said to Bernie once we’d both breathed in two or three lungfuls of fresh air. “I might have to break my promise to you and seduce the old fellow who owns it.”

  “Too bad he’s in Switzerland this weekend. But if you knew what I found out yesterday about Locanda, there’d be no might in your promisebreaking.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Franco heard Locanda’s place in Lugano makes this one look like a garden shed. He described it as an eighteenth century palazzo.”

  “I thought Franco didn’t know Locanda.”

  Bernie shrugged.

  “So tell me about this Lugano palazzo,” I said. “I want to know how much of my virtue I’d have to sacrifice to win him away from Vicky.”

  “Vicky might only be the first battle you’d have to fight. Locanda’s married to a much older woman, it seems. She was the widow of a count or something.”

  “There goes my villa in the countryside.”

  “And your palazzo in Switzerland. Turns out Locanda’s wife is loaded. He says she stashed her money in Switzerland during the war. Not sure how she held onto this place, but I heard she won’t come back to Italy without her title.”

  “What title?”

  “Contessa or Marchesa, I don’t know. After the war, the new Italian Constitution prohibited most titles of nobility. Apparently she took offense and refuses to return.”

  “And that leaves Max free to cavort with young gold diggers like Vicky Hodges,” I said.

  “You didn’t sound opposed to landing a sugar daddy a moment ago.”

  I wanted to answer with a witty retort, but nothing clever came to mind. Instead I bent over to pet a brown-striped tabby who’d wandered out of the shade beneath the boxwood to investigate the new arrivals. He welcomed the attention, curling around my legs for a couple of turns and squawking an off-key meow—as melodious as a crow—then took a seat a short distance away to watch us unload the car.

  A side door of the house burst open, and a sunburned, white-haired man in a dark apron emerged like a racehorse from the starting gate. He hustled toward our car calling out a welcome. The cat hightailed it away and disappeared into the shrubs.

  “Benvenuti, ragazzi!” called the man in a rough voice. “Ma quanto siete in ritardo.” (You’re so late.)

  The porter, Achille, as we later learned his name was, proceeded to wrestle the bags off the rack on top of the car and—God knows how— clutched them all under his arms. He trudged back to the house. I called to him to let me help, but he ignored me and hauled everything inside. Lucio took careful charge of his guitar case, and the five of us followed the porter inside.

  We entered the house via a darkened vestibule of sorts, and the temperature dropped ten degrees as soon as we crossed the threshold. A sternlooking woman in her fifties shuffled into view, wiping her hands on her apron. She regarded us with something akin to horror.

  “No, no, no, no!” she wailed, then explained in an accent I found difficult to comprehend that we had entered the house through the wrong door. Guests were to come in the through the main entrance. Lucio disarmed her instantly with his smile and an explanation that we were not too fancy to come in the side entrance. He charmed Berenice, as her husband, Achille, called her, with his lovable smile and a kiss of her hand. She, in turn, blushed and patted her cropped hair and smoothed her apron as if primping for a suitor. Lucio had won an admirer.

  As demure as a new bride, Berenice withdrew, barking over her shoulder as she went that she was going to prepare uno spuntino (snack) for us.

  Lucio hoisted his guitar over his shoulder and paused to regard us with impatience. “What?” he asked as if his actions hadn’t been obvious. “First rule for a houseguest: be nice to the cook.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  While Achille prepared our rooms, we sat outside on the stone terrace
behind the house, enjoying panini with salumi, cheese, and tomatoes on Tuscan bread. Berenice also provided a liter of white and a liter of red wine for our consumption. The five of us emptied the carafes without breaking stride. We were getting the feeling this might turn out to be a pleasant weekend after all. Even Giuliana loosened up, somehow buoyed to learn that the wine had been made on the property and was the same stuff the lavoratori drank.

  “Come on, Giulià,” said Lucio with a laugh. “We say contadini, not lavoratori for farmworkers.”

  “Contadini carries a pejorative meaning,” she said. “It’s demeaning. These people are part of the working class.”

  For my benefit, Bernie explained that contadini technically translated as “peasants” in English, but it was commonly used in Italian to mean farmers and country folk.

  “The wine is quite good,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation back to less contentious topics. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind some more.”

  No one seconded my motion. Nevertheless, a contented mood settled over us as the food and wine worked their magic. Tato and Giuliana nodded off in their chairs, and Bernie read from some book written in German. Lucio strummed his guitar without actually playing a real song. He seemed to be toying with chords and some fingering. It was the very picture of bucolic, but I still wanted another drink.

  A little before four o’clock, we were shown to our quarters on the second and third floors of the house. I landed in an airy room with two single beds, a large armoire against the wall, two bedside tables and lamps, and a small writing desk. The glazed terra cotta floor tiles were the color of kidney beans, and the walls were flat white, peeling in places. But I didn’t mind, especially when I saw the ceiling fan and the tall double casement window, thrown open to reveal a small balcony overlooking the terrazza and giardino where we’d been lounging behind the house. I nearly squealed with delight, but knew the idyllic setting brought with it the prospect of mosquitoes. Like a Boy Scout, however, I was prepared. I’d packed the Super Faust aerosol in my bag.nce I’d settled in, I showed off my room to Bernie. He was bunking on the top floor.