Palladian Days

by Sally Gable

  Buzzati becomes my second-favorite Italian author after I read his short story “L'assalto al grande convoglio” (“Attack on the Great Convoy”). The protagonist, Gaspare Planetta, an old bandit newly released from jail, dreams of his past conquests while enduring the decline of his health and vigor. With a young protege he plans one final glorious assault on a convoy carrying gold. Plan-etta's strategizing brings me back to my father in the late years of his life, dreaming of one last, great stock-market bonanza to recoup all the tuition bills of his daughters; his grandest play netted five thousand dollars. Or one last big win at the racetrack, where he once won a thousand dollars on the daily double by betting on the numbers 3 and 8, the last two digits of my zip code as a college student. The story and its attendant clouds of memories open gates of sadness and regret.

  Many of Buzzati's characters, such as Giuseppe Corte in “Sette piani” (“Seven Floors”), become permanent residents in my memory. Corte moves into a retirement home, where he and the other most able patrons live on the seventh floor. For various reasons other than personal choice, he is moved to lower and lower floors until at last he resides on the ground floor: a brilliant and chilling parable of old age. My own father, I muse, now in strong health but with wandering mind at age ninety-two, has already descended to the fourth floor, or perhaps the third.

  As I accustom myself to the rhythm of these evenings alone and consider my options of reading or writing, or simply listening and pondering, I begin to sense a bright lightness of heart when I hear those last clicks of the lock as Giacomo departs. A melody forms in my mind, and before I can place the CD in the player I'm dancing around the kitchen to the scherzo in Dvorak's Seventh Symphony. My first week's sniffles of loneliness transform to a sense of blissful luxury. Never have I had such large, malleable blocks of free time. Always there have been others to cook for, wash for, plan for, carpool for, select music for, meet or consult with. Suddenly I'm alone, and I find that solitude has its own satisfactions.

  34

  Love and Marriage

  Our son Carl and his girlfriend Lisa fly through the west sitting room on the second floor. Lisa's caramel-colored hair sails behind her like a wedding veil. Carl is our middle child, the artist among us, who drew a recognizable mouse with whiskers when he was two years old. Lisa is the most sensible and focused twenty-year-old I know; in two months she will enter her final year in college, having survived on scholarships, student loans, and two simultaneous part-time jobs. Now she's applying to law school.

  This is Lisa's first trip out of the United States, her second airplane flight. She and young Carl arrived yesterday, one day before Carl, Ashley, and I flew into Marco Polo Airport ourselves. They have spent their first morning in Venice.

  Their excitement has nothing to do with travel, with Villa Cornaro, or with Venice: it's obvious that this is about love.

  “I proposed! I proposed! And Lisa said yes!” Carl looks blissfully amazed as the two of them brake before us. Lisa's broad grin lights the large room.

  “Well, it's just in time!” says Ashley, who is standing with us. “If you hadn't proposed soon, Mom would have proposed for you!”

  Now, I'm sure I would never have done that, but it is just as well that I wasn't tested. Lisa is a great catch, a wonderful complement to our son's artistic nature and time-absent view of the world.

  Young Carl, we learn, had secreted a modest diamond ring in his luggage on yesterday's flight from Atlanta. This morning he transferred it to his sock before taking Lisa in for her first view of Venice. They began the day, appropriately, with a vaporetto ride down the Grand Canal—as close to a gondola ride as their budget would allow. At Piazza di San Marco he invited her to sit outdoors at Caffe Florian for a cappuccino so they could admire the busy piazza and the shimmering surfaces of the Basilica and the Doge's Palace.

  Lisa refused to participate. “We can't afford this place! You told me the prices are ridiculous. Plus they charge extra when the orchestra is playing—which it is. Let's go somewhere else.”

  But young Carl has been in Italy enough to understand the life/ opera equation. Maybe he learned it from Giacomo.

  “Lisa, sit down,” he insisted. “This is important!” He refused to lose the drama of the moment, even at the risk of an argument.

  Lisa says she was completely surprised by the proposal. She and Carl had, separately, been thinking of marriage but had never really discussed it. Some of her surprise registers in the photo of the two of them that he took to record the moment by placing his camera, set for delayed exposure, on an adjacent table at Florian's.

  Carl and I are delighted at the news. The wedding, we are told, will be in Atlanta next year, so each can complete college first. A prosecco toast is in order.

  Italian weddings produce the same result as the ones in America, but the road to the altar can differ markedly. The first Italian wedding I attend is Alessandra Battiston's. She marries Amedeo DeGrandis in an alliance of two prominent businesses, the Battis-tons’ supermercato and the DeGrandis hardware and gift store. Alessandra and Amedeo have known each other all their lives; perhaps they planned from birth to marry. Certainly their parents were content to see them become fidanzati and now to marry.

  Fidanzato translates literally as “engaged,” but the word encompasses a range of relationships, from little more than going steady all the way to a fixed intention to marry, with wedding date set. In Piombino Dese, I conclude, it is the rule rather than the exception to be fidanzati for six to ten years before being married—which may help explain why Italy has one of the world's lowest birthrates. One new friend recently told us that she was first fidanzata for twelve years; that relationship ended, and she remained alone for four years. Now she has been fidanzata for another twelve years. Had I guessed her age on the basis of appearance, I would have said she was no older than thirty-five.

  The state oi fidanzamento seems to comprise three levels. After an initial period of close involvement and experience together comes a second, more expensive level. This is when the couple begin to pool resources toward the purchase of a condo or house, buy furniture and accoutrements for the home, perhaps go in on a new car together—and, of course, save up money for the wedding reception. Parents help financially in all these enterprises, depending on their own circumstances. Finally, at the third level, a wedding date is set. The prospective bride and groom reserve the church, find a restaurant or another venue for the reception, book a band, prepare their new apartment. The bride visits dozens of bridal shops in the area—they crowd the roadside like the roses on the highway into Udine—and selects a gown for a sum that is beyond my imagination. Silvana once told me how much she paid for her wedding dress thirty years ago; my eyebrows shot so high they nearly left my face. I remember wandering into Crawford Hollidge in Boston six months before my own wedding and buying a lovely silk gown on the superreduced rack for fifty dollars. A good cleaning, a few tucks here and there, and it looked fine. I've never looked at it since my wedding, except when I pulled it out to wear at our twenty-fifth anniversary party. Silvana, on the other hand, often visits the special closet where her wedding dress is hung— just to remember the day, recall her joy, repeat her vows. I like that idea of specialness and am overjoyed when Lisa asks me to join her in selecting a wedding dress at a proper bridal shop. Note to diary: Do I have room in Atlanta to build a special closet?

  The progress oi fidanzamento can be accelerated to just one or two years, says a friend in Treviso, who claims that modest economic circumstances dictate a longer fidanzamento to ensure financial stability in the union. Her own engagement lasted just one year. (Her marriage lasted ten.) Whatever the reason, all five of the weddings I've attended in Piombino Dese have followed lengthy engagements.

  Italian wedding ceremonies seem almost as long as the engagements. Even the shortest I attend lasts a full hour. I remember our friend Ray coming up to Carl after Lisa and young Carl's wedding in Atlanta, saying, “Well, Carl, that laste
d twenty-three minutes, exactly one minute longer than the average wedding!”

  The Italian service includes a Mass and Communion, so it is bound to have a certain length. The longest I attend lasts two hours—my only experience with a “rock” wedding. Guitars substitute for the organ. The young people's choir sings numerous love songs, all in twangy nasal voices that prompt me to suspend mentally all of my training as a choir director.

  The fun begins at the reception, where the sociable Venetan character blossoms. All one hundred to two hundred guests are seated at formal tables for eight or ten. A menu beside each place indicates that several antipasti will be served, followed by three or four primi piatti, two or three secondi piatti, then formaggio, frutta, and dolci. Each course is served by a dozen waiters who, while you're eating the tagliatelle con funghi or the risotto agli asparagi, are refilling your wineglass.

  Toward the conclusion of the meal, toasts and jokes begin. The toasts are rarely serious and the jokes are often risque. When all the food has been served at Alessandra and Amedeo's wedding, guests begin calling out “Bacio! Bacio!” first to the bride and groom, then to their family and friends. Afterward, the chant becomes wider-ranging until every couple in the room—Carl and I included—has stood for a public kiss. The only one from whom a kiss is not demanded is Don Aldo.

  At Wilma and Paolo's reception, someone unveils a gigantic hand-painted poster featuring a towering Wilma with Paolo engulfed in her full bosom. At another reception, a brief limbo contest is held by several of the couple's young friends under the bride's skirts. The most memorable prank comes as a large cardboard box is presented to Alessandra Battiston at the conclusion of her reception. She opens the box with difficulty because it is so heavily taped. Inside are three loaves of baked bread—one long, skinny loaf of French bread and two round Puglia-style loaves—all conjoined in an oversize replica of male genitals.

  35

  King Kong

  “Owning a villa is like having King Kong for a pet,” Carl says at breakfast one morning.

  I look up from my La Repubblica, the newspaper whose inscrutable headlines puzzle me each morning. Note to diary: In America we read the headlines in order to know what is in the story; here it is the opposite.

  “King Kong?”

  “Like King Kong,” he says again. “You better learn to live with him like he is, because you aren't going to change him.”

  We spend a lot of time learning to enjoy Villa Cornaro as it is. For instance, we learn the eccentricities of the alarm system through trial and error, discovering almost weekly some novel way to set it off accidentally. We turn it on while some obscure window is open, or we walk into a room with a motion alarm, or we forget that the whole system must be recycled after a false alarm before it can be used again.

  The halcone, we learn, are the lungs of the villa. We open them wide in the morning to inhale the cool fresh air, then close those on the east and south sides precisely as the sun rises above the trees and the day begins to heat up. In the afternoon the eastern ones can be reopened, but those on the west must be closed.

  Most pesky, the bell at the north gate, on Via Roma, rings only in the kitchen. If visitors arrive when we are not in the kitchen, they can ring the bell all day and we will never know. After their frustration has reached a high level, they may think to cross the street to Caffe Palladio and ask one of the Miolos to telephone us. The telephone also is in the kitchen, but there is an extension upstairs, outside our bedroom. If we are not in either the kitchen or the bedroom, a Miolo must leave the bar—sometimes unattended—to enter the villa with the Miolos’ set of keys and ring us up on the intercom. Or hunt for us on the south portico or in the park. Even that solution won't work on Mondays, of course; the caffe is closed on Mondays.

  After a long and ultimately fruitless wait in the kitchen for a repairman one Monday, Carl decides that we have been too accepting of the status quo.

  We telephone Giancarlo, our electrician-mushroom aficionado, to come by for a conference. (Actually, I telephone Giancarlo; Carl is still telecom-phobic in Italian.)

  “Is there some way to connect the bell at the gate into the intercom system,” Carl asks, “so that when someone presses the bell it will ring at each intercom instrument?”

  “Certo,” Giancarlo responds, with a hint that the matter is elementary. In fact, he says, we will even be able to converse via intercom with the visitor at the gate.

  Carl has a second idea.

  “Can you fix the system so a ring by a visitor at the gate will sound different from an intercom ring made from within the villa?” Giancarlo pauses at this, either because of the technical challenge or because of the challenge of Carl's Italian, which I have trouble following myself. The different sound can be achieved, Giancarlo assures us after some reflection.

  Carl and I drink a special prosecco toast in the evening, elated at the prospect of removing one of our greatest annoyances with such minimal effort.

  Our elation abates the next morning when Giancarlo arrives not with his usual two supernumeraries but with three of them. One struggles under the weight of an immense spool of insulated wire. The brigade scatters through the villa. Soon they are all busily disconnecting intercom apparatus in every room.

  “Having four people will let them make quick work of it,” Carl says bravely but without conviction.

  By midmorning all the intercom wall plates are removed and dusty gray insulated wires are spilling from the boxes behind them. Giancarlo is outside working at the gate; his assistants are strewing lengths of wire through the rooms upstairs. Carl's look has changed to mild concern.

  “I should have asked for a preventive)/’ he laments. “I think he is rewiring the whole system.”

  By the second day the floors of the villa are tangled in enough wire to light the Pentagon. We hunt for Giancarlo to discuss what is going on, but he is not to be found. His crew, however, continues in a flurry of activity, shouting and pulling wires in no discernible pattern.

  “Giancarlo must be off at his travel agent,” Carl speculates. “Planning the vacation he is going to take with the profit from this job.”

  The third day dawns and Giancarlo returns. We don't ask for an explanation, just an estimated time of completion.

  “Today,” Giancarlo assures us. “We will finish this afternoon.”

  By five o'clock all the wire is gone, either into the walls or back on Giancarlo's panel truck. With his assistants arrayed behind him like backup singers behind Elvis, Giancarlo demonstrates the system. Everything works perfectly. The sound from the front gate is distinctly different from the sound of intercom calls within the villa, and we can hear them both in any room.

  The bill arrives a few weeks later. It's about four times what we originally expected, but only half what we had come to fear. Several months later I phone Giancarlo about fixing a broken light switch. His daughter tells me that her parents are away, vacationing in Rio.

  • • •

  Carl has just ordered the largest water heater in all of Piombino Dese.

  He and I and the villa's longtime plumber, Mario, are sitting on the south portico discussing a new problem. The current oil-fired water heater is old and periodically protests its age by belching clouds of black smoke. I was grocery shopping earlier in the afternoon and raced home when I glimpsed billowy gray clouds wafting from our cantina windows.

  The villa is on fire! I thought as I tore along Via Roma. Silvana stopped me at the cancello (gate).

  “Don't be concerned. It's just the water heater,” she assured me in her calm voice.

  Carl called Mario and now we are deciding—over a glass of prosecco—on a solution. There is a consensus that we should switch from fuel oil to a gas water heater, which will require bringing a gas line into the villa. The only question is the size of the heater. Carl insists on a monster that will allow us and six guests all to have baths during the hour preceding dinner.

  At this moment Giacomo walks
around the corner of the villa and shouts up to us. “Signori, do you see that black bag hanging from the low branch over the bridge?”

  We peer at the distant branch. It is almost touching the bridge, bowed down by some mysterious weight.

  “ Api,” says Giacomo. “Tante api. Many bees.” We hop up and follow Giacomo to see the marvel at close range.

  We deduce that a queen bee, along with twenty-five thousand close friends, has fled her hive and set up housekeeping at our bridge. The bees seethe about in a massive black ball clinging to the limb.

  “What should we do, Giacomo?”

  “Ah, conosco una persona ehe…” Giacomo knows exactly whom to call to come and remove them.

  Giacomo's friend arrives the following evening, wearing a natty cap and nonchalantly carrying a shoebox-shaped wooden box on his shoulder. The bees are still there. He pulls the bee-laden limb to the ground and clips it off, leaving the ball of bees humming on the grass. He sets his box beside them and opens a small door in its side. He lights a smoky torch and, with a bellows, gently blows smoke at the ball of bees. Gradually, so slowly their movement is almost imperceptible, the mass of bees begins to shift and flow into the small opening of the box. When all the bees have passed from sight, he snaps the door shut and departs. It seems magical.

  The following spring he brings us a jar of delectable amber honey in appreciation for the hive of bees.

  Two years later we arrive at the villa in early May to find another errant swarm has set up housekeeping in our stairwell, off the southwest brick staircase. The bees have built a beautifully intricate honeycomb between the interior glass window and the balcone beyond. We marvel at thousands of bees constructing a vast apartment complex, but we realize they must go, for the health of the villa.