That evening she missed all the greetings. Most of the guests were well into their main course before she sat down. Signor Alfieri bent at her table to translate that night’s menu and then lowered his voice to say, “Where were you?”
Betsy was taken aback. “I’m sorry if I held things up in the kitchen. Please apologize for me to the signora.”
“Where were you all this day? You were not in your room or to the lake.”
She found herself meekly reporting her trip to Tremezzo.
“Today was not good for me,” he said more audibly. “My liver was sick. I spend all this day in bed.”
Betsy offered polite sorrow for his troubles though she supposed his incapacitation had been feigned to give him a day free for pursuit. When he left her table, she saw the signora staring at her from the kitchen doorway. Betsy beamed at her but the woman went temporarily blind.
As she was eating her dessert, the familiar, sweet smell of Signor Alfieri’s cologne sidled up to the table a moment before him. Betsy laid her spoon down and waited. “Tonight you dial nine, yes?” and then he was gone.
That night Betsy pushed the writing desk against her door before settling into bed.
Restively she observed the stage business of Signor Alfieri’s suit coat. The plague of heat had stretched as far north as Lake Como, and there what wasn’t felt as heat was doubly suffered as humidity. None of the men staying at the Albergo Giannino wore jackets. The most proper among them carried theirs, limply, over one arm. On the evening of Betsy’s arrival, Signor Alfieri had directed traffic in the dining room in his shirtsleeves. Now a pattern established itself. The signore attended to his duties in a comfortable short-sleeved shirt, but he would repair to a small room behind the reception desk when Betsy appeared. He would emerge with his suit coat buttoned over an incipient paunch, silk tie and matching breast-pocket handkerchief in place. Betsy was aware of the timing of Signor Alfieri’s toilette though no one else seemed to notice, with the exception of the hollow-eyed signora.
He strutted and preened like a male bird, flashing his colors, while the signora remained on the nest, silent and glowering. Signora Alfieri wore the drab, dull coloring that camouflages the female; one could barely discern her shape behind the lusterless wood of the reception desk. She did not appear womanly and rounded but thick and congealed, like some perishable clotted from neglect.
Betsy began to sense Signor Alfieri’s hovering even when she did not see him.
Sitting on the hotel terrace with its white wrought-iron tables and chairs, Betsy discovered that everyone seemed to have more English than her poor sampler of Italian. When, after a day or two, she was seen to neither behave badly nor be swept along by the Grand Tour, some of the guests made room for her in their circle of family and friends formed during annual visits to the hotel. For her part, she was more than content to spend the evenings mangling the language with new friends.
On these evenings, convened around a bottle of wine on the narrow border between the Albergo Giannino and the rain which connected Lake Como to the sky, the mother of a high school philosophy teacher would retire early, leaving her son free to wait on Betsy, but while he paid her respectful compliments, she paid attention to the shifting shadows. Then somewhere at the corner of her eye, Betsy’s glance would snag on Signor Alfieri. She would be laughing and the laugh would die, asphyxiate in her throat. The signore would stand at a distance, too proud to presume to mix with his guests. If he saw that Betsy had spotted him, he put on his bustling, officious manner befitting the proprietor of a prosperous hotel. Betsy could not avoid feeling flattered.
She had trouble sleeping. She found herself listening for something. When footsteps came down the corridor, she held her breath until the sounds were long past her door.
It was preposterous, she told herself. She did not find Signor Alfieri physically attractive. If he had ever possessed it, he had outgrown the gracefulness necessary to this role. And then there was the way he treated his wife.
Betsy was sure women fell into one of two categories for the easily categorized Signor Alfieri: either unwieldy obligations or inconsequential pleasures. She couldn’t think of a single thing she liked about him.
The next morning Signor Alfieri stopped at her table. She waited for him to ask how she had slept.
“How many more days you rest with us?”
“I don’t know.” Her fingers fluttered beneath the heavy damask napkin on her lap, as if they were curious, quite apart from her, to touch his shaven cheek.
“You call for night service this night?”
“What am I to ask for?” She tried to make her voice sound arch.
“Ask nothing. It is only necessary that you call.”
“And if the signora answers?” Betsy had meant to make her inflection deep with disdain but she was listening so intently for his words that she forgot.
“She does not answer.” He looked around the dining room to find their exchange had pass unremarked. “Si,” he sighed. “This night,” he said as he moved off.
Despite her resolve, Betsy spent the whole of that day vibrating between predictable repugnance and unforeseen anticipation. It was his willfulness perhaps, his determination to have her. She was no longer either annoyed or flattered by his attentions: she was impressed by his decisiveness.
During dinner, she kept her eyes fastened to her plate, allowing them to stray only as far as the small pink blot on the tablecloth in the shape of Illinois where she had spilled some wine the evening before. Betsy took particular care not to smile at the signora when she came out of the kitchen to survey the dining room.
Following dinner, she walked up and down the pier, not altering her schedule in any way. Afterwards she joined a young Venetian couple on the hotel terrace for a tumbler of bright blue anisette mixed with water. At eleven o’clock she slid her key from the rack beside the desk behind which Signor Alfieri sat stiffly in his coat and tie. Her fingers nearly grazed his shoulder while his eyes fixed on her breasts.
In her room she executed her nightly routine, all her cleansing rituals. This time she didn’t push the desk against the door.
Pulsing to the steady lap of lake against shore, Betsy lay there, alternating between replaying the speeches of Signor Alfieri and those of her ex-husband until three o’clock, wondering just how many women Greg had pursued while they were married, and how many of those had at last given in to him. Was he as dogged in his chase as the signore? Did he have to go after five to get one? Or had he been successful with them all? Did they pretty much fall into his arms, one after another? A domino effect? And what was the hotelkeeper’s success rate? Surely Signor Alfieri enacted the same dance with other female guests traveling alone.
As she passed through the lobby on her way to breakfast, Signor Alfieri called her over to the desk. He was not wearing his suit coat. The signora was beside him, the two of them filling the space behind the desk like wooden pegs.
Signor Alfieri officiated. “You leave the hotel this morning, si?”
“Scusi?” Betsy was bewildered.
“You say you leave this day, so I give your room to another one person.”
“But I never said—” Tears pricking her eyes, Betsy started to protest but found she could not claim innocence of any kind.
The signora spoke in English. “It is mistake,” she said and patted Betsy’s arm. She turned to her husband and began to argue. Betsy understood that Signora Alfieri was suggesting they give her the vacant double room for the price of a single. But the signore was adamant: that was no way to run a hotel.
The signora herself—the task was too menial for Signor Alfieri—insisted on helping Betsy shift her belongings to the end of the pier, where the boat would remove her from the Albergo Giannino. Slumping at the water’s edge, Betsy waited to be carried away.
La Donata É Mobile
10.<
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By the time she had turned fifteen, Donata was already taking orders and turning down offers.
She had been waiting tables at the restaurant of her family’s hotel, the Albergo Giannino, every summer since she’d entered upper secondary school. During the off-season, her married cousin Allegra could manage the dining room on her own with occasional assistance from Donata’s father, but during the tourist season two young, energetic servers were indispensable during both the breakfast and the dinner shifts. Guests were left to fend for themselves at lunchtime.
Donata’s mother oversaw the workings of the kitchen and supervised the culinary efforts of Donata’s older sister, Glorianna, who would be replacing their mother as head chef when the swelling in the signora’s legs finally made standing over the stove too difficult. Like their mother, Glori was an excellent cook. Unlike their mother, she worked just as hard at having a good time. She called it “letting off steam,” a phrase she’d picked up from one of their guests. “When you cook pasta, you are always creating steam,” she grinned. “I need to let it off before I wilt. Or explode.” Donata worried about her big sister, that Glorianna would come to No Good, which she pictured as a small desolate island where Glori would mistakenly disembark and be forever marooned.
Donata also worried about their mother. Mamma, with her arthritis and swollen feet replete with bunions and hammertoes and fallen arches, struggled through her days. And with a husband like Signor Alfieri, nights were an ordeal as well. Once Donata asked her mother if her father had always chased other women and the signora had only shrugged wearily in reply. If he hadn’t, she couldn’t remember that far back.
One of Donata’s worries was that Glori took after their libertine father. Another of her worries was that she herself took after their mother.
Now in the steamy summer of 1981, at age twenty-two and with her degree completed and with Allegra expecting her first child, Donata’s parents let her know they were expecting her to take her cousin’s place serving in the hotel’s restaurant year-round. She had other ideas. Travel being the chief one. She wanted to check out the places the tourists were escaping from.
But because her parents were counting on securing her service for the foreseeable future—ideally at least until after she wed and was expecting her first child (fortunately for them, there were no likely prospects in sight)—she had some newfound leverage in her dealings with them. Otherwise, she would never have been able to persuade her father to put out the American woman he had been prowling after all week. Well, perhaps persuade was not precisely the correct word. Donata had threatened to quit the dining room, not at the end of the tourist season as he’d feared, but that very day, before the dinner seating.
Donata had studied her father in his pursuit of the American woman. He was relentless. A pomaded, scented wave of water wearing away the edges of an iceberg, eroding the American’s considerable disdain until a chunk of her rectitude was ready to split off. Donata had witnessed it many times before. His clumsy, clownish wooing. He wasn’t afraid to make a fool of himself. She thought it was this—as much as his persistence—that sometimes made him successful.
He was a sportsman, ever on his game, focused on the goal. Unfortunately for his wife and daughters, the unwilling spectators of his sport, his goal was always that small delta between some woman’s legs. Despite his past conquests, Donata was each time surprised when he scored. It made her think less of her own sex. Women were so easily won. They craved attention and admiration, even from her buffoon of a father. She recalled with disgust what her sister had discerned about Cernobbio’s middle-aged postmistress: “She is a whore for compliments.”
Donata had delivered an ultimatum to her father that morning as the thermometer rose toward a record-breaking high. “Send the American away on the ferry or I will be the one leaving on it.”
So he had sent the American female packing, quite literally. He wasn’t sure he had been getting anywhere with her anyway. Another battle of the sexes lost. But that was a minor skirmish compared to the open warfare his daughter had declared. Signor Alfieri felt very much wronged, but he also felt he was not in any position to dictate terms, grooming Donata as he was. The job of managing the hotel was meant for her, era fatto per lei. Glorianna knew her way around the kitchen but was otherwise impractical. Her hands were deft but her head empty. She would have been more at home in a family of obsessive Scopa players or television addicts. Bookkeeping, managing the cash flow, keeping track of reservations, controlling the purchasing processes—these were beyond her. The only part of running the hotel that he worried Donata couldn’t handle was customer service.
Donata knew too well that her parents did not want to bring strangers into the hotel and restaurant business. They trusted only family, and with that as their guiding principle, business had prospered. Except for the positions of limited scope—those of the housekeeping staff and the gardener—hiring from outside the family was not even considered. To do so meant that cash would be pocketed, wine would be pilfered, silverware would go missing, and secrets would be stolen. Not just the signora’s recipes for capriolo alla valdostana and her celebrated linguini with fried lemon sauce but also the signore’s practiced methods of seduction. On so many levels her father did not want outsiders knowing the family business.
Perhaps in this one instance Donata had felt sorry for the American (she always felt infuriated on behalf of her mother). At any rate, she knew she couldn’t keep demanding that her father oust every woman who aroused him. Hotel owners could not be in the business of turning away half their female guests. Luckily, not too many lone female travelers found their way to Cernobbio, let alone to the Giannino.
Despite dreaming of becoming a tourist herself, Donata found people in transit tiresome. They took so much for granted, expected so much to be granted to them. Away from home, among strangers—without baggage, so to speak—they could transform themselves into anything they wanted, anyone they wished to be for their two-week Lake Como vacation. Apparently, they spent the other fifty weeks of the year aspiring to be privileged assholes. “Assssa-hole,” the waitress would hiss in sibilant English under her breath no matter the native tongue, age, or gender of the offending party. She had studied English in school but her working vocabulary came chiefly from listening to tourists and watching the occasional film.
Her disenchantment with the hotel guests, who made up most of the population of the restaurant, was becoming increasingly manifest. A few days before, during the dinner service, she had put the entire dining room on edge. No one heard what the Londoner had said to her, but several caught her reply in English. “You know how they say we Italians always talka with our handsa? Well, they are correcta,” she delivered with an exaggerated accent before slapping him smartly across the face.
No one in the dining room needed to be bilingual to get the message.
Her victim smiled thinly for the benefit of their rapt audience, “And now you have illustrated the origin of the expression about the Englishman’s stiff upper lip.”
Signor Alfieri bustled over to the red-cheeked guest with an unopened bottle of Montalcino red. “All Sangiovese grape,” he confided, as though hastening to fulfill the Londoner’s straightforward request that had discombobulated his capricious daughter. “Per favore, our gift to you,” he spoke softly as he sliced the foil from the lip of the bottle and withdrew the cork in two deft motions. He mentioned the oppressive heat and how it seemed to agitate everyone, even the bees on the promenade, but his goal wasn’t to defend or excuse his daughter, only to return the room to its accustomed hum, the clatter of silver and china, the fizzy intersection of voices, the sighs of satisfaction.
That night, after the dining room had emptied, Donata took a seat at one of the tables on the terrazza looking out on the lake. This was an act of defiance, the first in the civil war she’d declared against her father. It was forbidden to the family to sit at the
tables, indoors or out, at their hotel. “It is not professional,” Signor Alfieri decreed periodically when he thought his family/staff’s standards might be weakening. “Not the custom at fine establishments.”
“Because we are their inferiors?” Donata had inquired at the peak of her mutinous secondary-school years with a sneer that would yet ripen over time. “Because we are here to serve them?”
“Per niente.” He tried to illustrate. “Sometimes a guest insists I join him for a drink. I accept and raise my glass in acknowledgment, but I never lower myself to his table.”
“Because we are superior to them?” This notion more closely conformed to Donata’s sense of the world.
Her father shook his head. “Because it is not done. It is like . . . like finding one of the Sisters of the Order of the Visitation smoking a cigarette. Not just improper—impossible.”
On the night she slapped the Englishman, when the dining room was finally closed and she had changed from her starched white shirt to a shimmery lime-green one, she took the only open table on the terrazza, brazenly, in the manner of a woman who was above convention. When her father headed in her direction—his agitation evident only to his daughter, the familiar sight of his arms straight down at his sides while he vexed both thumbs against his index fingers as though he were appraising invisible fabric—she was saved by two of her vacationing countrymen who asked if they might join her. “We wish to thank you for protecting our national honor,” grinned the younger and more handsome of the two.
Signor Alfieri’s mouth pursed and his forehead collapsed onto his eyebrows in furrows, but he started to back away from the table.
“Signore,” the younger said, “we would like to buy the young lady a drink.”
“I’ll have a glass of the Valtellina,” she said dismissively to her father, as if she didn’t recognize him from her seated position.
“Signorina, may we tempt you to try a wine of the Piedmont also from the Nebbiolo grape?” the storybook-handsome prince earnestly proposed. “Unless you would prefer something iced in this heat.”
The Opposite of Chance Page 11
