A Funeral in Fiesole

by Rosanne Dingli

  He opened both palms and waggled long fingers. ‘It was a mere hypothetical. I asked what might happen if we didn’t all accept the will. What if one of us didn’t think it was equitable … and I didn’t specify who ... it could be any of us.’

  Suzanna bridled. ‘And here I was thinking you were about to upset the applecart!’ Her own wide mouth smiled at her twin, but her eyes blazed, even in the half-darkness. ‘You were always one to make trouble when there was none.’

  ‘What!’ Brod burst into sarcastic laughter. ‘What?’

  I quickly stood and started to say something. ‘And I think …’

  ‘You think you can pour Fiesole olive oil over troubled waters, Nige. I think we’d all better have a jolly good shouting match and get it over with.’ Harriet sat back, obviously fed up.

  Paola’s eyes travelled from one pair of eyes to another in turn, bemused and mute. She seemed to have no doubt about anything at all. Her visit to Matilde had done something to soothe her, in her aloneness. ‘Let’s all go down to some bistro …’

  ‘The nice osteria …’

  ‘Oh, please, not where all the tourists gather, Brod.’

  I put a hand up. ‘Let’s not fight about this too.’

  Harriet stood. ‘If we want to avoid the tourists and have a nice meal at a long table … are Lori and Tad coming? … in which case we should go to the place whose name I can never remember. The one with all the bikes hanging from the ceiling.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Okay – lead the way!’

  ‘Can we walk?’

  ‘Is it far away?’

  ‘Won’t Paola be tired after her drive?’

  It was clear we all wanted to clear the air. The mound of chopped vegetables could always be blanched and frozen.

  My older sister regarded me boldly and without guile. When everyone had left the terrace, she hung back.

  I stood with my back to the cobalt sky, where a threatening bank of cloud had gathered, feeling a chill breeze blowing past me from over Florence. The trees had all turned black. It was until then a beautiful clear night, but would grow quite cold later. ‘What is it, Paola?’

  ‘I’m very happy with how Mama apportioned the bequests. Aren’t you, Nigel? We … we all sat there, that afternoon, listening to the notary, hardly exchanging glances, all hoping it wouldn’t cause too much complicated calculation, division, signatures, powers of attorney, acting as joint vendors, buying each other out of things …’ She took a deep breath and took up one of the chairs to take inside. ‘I was afraid Italian bureaucracy and the funny succession laws they have here would make it all impossible to decipher and execute. He read it so it all sounded simple. Or is it too good to be true? Aren’t you happy with how Mama devised it all, Nigel?’

  I picked up two chairs from their backs and started toward the sitting room door. ‘Of course I am. I’m delighted.’

  ‘I could see it in your face.’

  Could she really? I tilted my head in question. Ah – my sister Paola. She had a habit of examining people silently, and it could be quite unnerving. ‘I thought Mama was very clever. I think it’s all perfect.’

  ‘And do you know what I think? I think Brod is stirring.’

  I had to agree. ‘What he said last. A hypothetical, he said.’

  ‘Could it be he’s not happy, Nigel?’

  I stopped to think on the threshold of the glass door to the terrace. Yellow light from the sitting room spilled out in a long rectangle onto the terrace floor. A curtain moved in the breeze. From somewhere in the valley, the sounds of a brass band were clearly audible. We listened together. American fanfare music; Sousa, as far as I could guess, in Tuscany.

  I had to say something. ‘Brod can be strange, and he can fluff up all our feathers. He could have no reason to be unhappy with his portion.’

  Paola shook her head. ‘No, no – I mean unhappy for some other reason. Something to do with his new relationship.’

  ‘But …’ I thought it over for a second. ‘They seem quite all right. Grant is a very nice chap. The only thing Brod should do is shave off his silly moustache.’

  She shifted in the light from the sitting room, lifted the chair through, and walked along to the kitchen. She set down the chair, and faced me. ‘You can have two perfectly nice people, in a relationship with some very prickly problems. No one’s going to come out with their private stuff at a reunion like this. Things do surface, though, don’t they, despite all efforts to present a face. Behaviour and words … they betray everyone’s feelings and moods. Besides – we’re all here because Mama died.’ She looked at her feet. ‘It’s difficult to introduce more … more personal matters.’

  So she knew something about Grant and Brod. I wasn’t about to ask. ‘More personal … like you and John.’

  Her eyes were clear when her face rose to mine. She pushed at a lock of hair, which the breeze had blown into her face, with a steady hand. ‘I’m getting used to it. I’ll be fine. I’m going to be all right, Nigel. But no – you’re right. I’m not about to bring it up as a big discussion for all and sundry to tear apart and analyse.’

  ‘No.’ I agreed with her. ‘No one likes to have their marriage dissected at a dining room table, after the main course, before dessert.’

  She laughed. It was good to hear her laugh in such an unusually hearty way. Something happened at Matilde’s, and it had lightened her heart.

  Suzanna

  Needless stirring and teasing

  I knew what Brod was stewing about. Of course I knew. A twin’s thoughts are never entirely secret. He was brooding about his relationship with Mama. Was her love for him faithfully and unerringly equal to hers for me? What a dilemma to have, when one is half of something! Although I suspected siblings all had a craving for special regard from a parent, the preoccupation was worse for twins!

  We had only one parent for the portion of our childhood we could remember. For the part that most probably truly mattered. We all, except Paola, had very fragile memories of Papa, and they were memories created out of narrative and family folklore, rather than authentic recollections. We were all second-hand witnesses to what he did and who he was. All dead parents were saints. Mama was turning into one right now, under all our noses.

  Paola of course had what she termed the curse of a long memory. She might have remembered some of Papa’s faults and errors. Or may have realized sainthood was not something one could confer on our mother. Was there such a thing as a parent who entirely lacked flaws and weaknesses? I for one remembered Mama singling out my older sister when it came to selecting clothes for the winter. She spent much more time with her than with me. Or with the boys.

  I was infuriated by Brod’s teasing and stirring out on the terrace, and Paola was not there to rein him in with a clearly rational observation based on some real memory, or some logical calculation. She appeared late, unusually relaxed, and unwilling to enter an argument started without her. She missed her calling – Paola should have gone into the law. What a formidable unflappable judge she would have made!

  What a transparent thing for Brod to do! Stirring us all up about the bequest. Transparent at least to me. I thought he was quite happy with it all, and that he would sign the dichiarazione di successione without a murmur. It appeared, however, that Nigel, who had most at stake apparently, and who desperately needed us all to sign, was ruffled and upset. Nigel was the most likely to sign without much hesitation, and my guess was Paola had no reason not to.

  I was rather elated with my portion of the estate. For two reasons; the most important one being I would not have to surrender, sell, or buy out any one of my siblings. I was singled out quite amazingly cleverly by Mama. Oh, Mama! Clever, without being scheming. Intelligent and fair, but infinitely understanding of me in particular. Perhaps I would have to live it down with the others.

  How dreadful being the female half of a pair of twins might have been with a chauvinistic parent,
or one driven by popular beliefs, and prejudices, and social preferences! At least Mama saw the hazards late in life, even though I had to fight for attention too often when I was young.

  My second reason was of course the boat. I had planned, schemed and worked all my life with an aim in mind. Papa taught us all to work towards aims. Or so Mama used to tell us, all the summer long. Mine was to sail the Med. Persuading Lewis took a long time, but I guessed he would relent because all he wanted was for us to be comfortable together. Comfort for Lewis was not a simple thing. It had to be physical and mental. He was a complex man. I realized he seemed to everyone to be a dogsbody, a yes-man, an auxiliary, a side-kick to my activities and ventures, but he has been no small help. He is a collaborator of very fine quality, who can strategize and implement plans, working flexibility into financial policies and logistical procedures without which I would have floundered a long time ago. No one can buy and sell franchises on their own. Lewis is like the scullery of this house, the old scullery which holds up the entire building, it and its formidable buttresses.

  He made me realize, very early in our relationship, the likelihood was I would not make a great parent. We debated what it would mean to have a family, and I had to agree I wanted my plans and dreams to materialize much more than I wanted to be a mother. He was happy with the decision.

  ‘I’m a private person who would not cope well with sticky interruptions, sleepless nights, and four-hourly feeds, Suzanna. You are pretty much the same,’ he said. It was only years later I realized he was clearing the way for a future he could handle. ‘The fact we are discussing this at all is a good indicator, darling – and it’s why I brought it up.’

  It was years before I realized what he meant. He was also right about his feelings about the will.

  I could have laughed out loud in surprise when we all sat so solemnly in Mama’s sitting room with the notary. Did they all see me raise a hand to cover an involuntary smile? Mama set me free of my siblings. She insulated me, made me feel special, in the same way as she would single me out as a child, very early on a Saturday morning, when she’d tap a knuckle on my door, put her head into the room, and hiss, ‘Suzanna … I made us pancakes!’ No one else heard. We’d sit in the big warm kitchen and stuff ourselves with blackberry pancakes, oozing with dark juice.

  ‘Eat them while they’re warm … here’s more sugar.’

  She sensed how being a younger sister, how being a twin, how being a young woman, was not the easiest thing. She gave me strength and distinction.

  ‘You’ll go far, my darling,’ she would say, tapping her garden-stressed fingers on the red table top. ‘Very much your own little person. You are a determined young thing.’

  And we’d talk about school, about friends, about my agony over the right haircut and the visibility of steel braces on my awful teeth! She made time feel like a stretchable or shrinkable commodity. I learned so much from Mama’s concept of time and how to get it to work for me.

  ‘Do you know what Papa used to say, Suzanna?’ She asked me this one Saturday morning when the sun sizzled early outside and she felt it would be a dreadfully humid day. I was all ears, all replete after eating half a dozen pancakes and drinking a bowl of warm milk to which she had added a splash of coffee from the intractable filter machine. ‘Papa said everything was either time or money. Now you, of all people, would understand the … the concept.’

  And I kept the concept in mind my entire career. Everything in business, indeed, was time or money! But Mama gave me a gardening example, which stayed in my head, more than Papa’s behest ever could. ‘You can plant a sapling and wait for five years for a good crop of fruit … which is time. Or you can buy an advanced, more expensive, tree and have fruit the same year. That’s money.’

  So I always measured cost against waiting, in business. And found someone like Lewis who always estimated what he called my acumen above his own. Only a generous and very clever man without an inflated ego could do what Lewis did. I’ve been so lucky!

  Brod

  A sweet grannie

  I insisted on Grant driving with me to Matilde’s, all the way to Prato. We followed Paola’s directions and got there rather quickly, despite the gridlock traffic we encountered as we entered town. There was the tall orange building she mentioned, and yes, a mushroom-coloured apartment block, where Matilde and her niece lived.

  ‘O, guarda, guarda!’’ She was so delighted to see me, clapping her hands like a child and beaming, beaming – she took both my hands in hers, as she would when I was little, but she was gratefully too short now to sweep my hair backwards off my forehead.

  She shook Grant’s hand and tried her English on him, which seemed hilarious to her too, so we all stood in her narrow hallway and hooted with laughter. It was good.

  Grant gave me a little shake of his head, followed by a quick nod and wink, which meant I didn’t have to constantly translate back and forth. He was happy to sit there and watch me converse with Matilde, who told me all about how Donato spent his last year, and how he had carved a massive owl out of a tree stump, slowly chiselling and whittling over the twelve months he was poorly; unwilling to sit and do nothing.

  ‘He did not wait to die, he worked right to the end, filling the room with sawdust and shavings, and laughing when I tried to sweep and dust. Come, I’ll show you!’ She led up a passage to a small spotless bedroom, where a beautiful fruitwood owl stood on a chest. ‘M’ha lasciato un gufo!’ She laughed, but there was a slight tremor in her voice and she impatiently brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘He left me an owl, an owl, a preying bird that flies at night, and I cannot find a reason why. I think for once he wanted to do something without reason.’

  ‘Did he …?’

  ‘Never, never. Everything he did had a reason, like when he planted those new pine trees in a row, to please your mother. Goodness knows how tall they must be now. Close to the house. Close. Sheltering. The owl? No reason.’

  I think she did see some sort of reason, and I was quite touched to see her emotion. She sat us in her small kitchen and gave us some sweet yellowish wine and her famous almond biscuits.

  Grant held up his glass. ‘Mm – what is this? It’s delicious.’

  ‘Trebbiano grapes,’ she said. ‘Explain to your friend, Broderick. This is Tuscan vin santo, and look – the colour is gold.’ She held up her small stemmed glass and light from the kitchen window lit it up, amber.

  She explained about her relatives, who had a vineyard somewhere in the hills on the other side of Florence. Her niece Anna bowed her head, poured us all a little more wine, and peeped at something baking in the wall oven.

  ‘More biscuits, more cantuccini. I often send a little basket of them to the nuns at the monastero di San Clemente. There are still nuns there, you know. They live in clausura … how do you …?’

  ‘Cloistered – isolated from the world, am I right?’

  She agreed. ‘They rely on the community to keep food on their table, you know. They are Dominicans. It is a very old monastery. Very old, medieval,’ she went on, in her Florentine dialect, which was clear and easy to follow. ‘There are still a few nuns there, shut away from the world. They hardly speak to each other. A life of prayer and contemplation.’ She smiled and cocked an eye at me. ‘I suppose there need to be some nice pious people to make up for the rest of us, wicked as we are.’ She chuckled.

  ‘Wicked?’

  ‘Eh?’

  I could see her hearing came and went. Her face was tired. ‘We can’t stay long, Matilde.’

  She had turned her good ear to me and tilted her head. ‘But not before we speak a bit about your dear mother – what a wonderful woman she was, eh? And how clever in the garden. Ah, la signora Nina!’

  ‘She outlived Papa …’

  ‘… by quite a few years, yes. So she made sure you four children knew him, by talking about him and what he did. All those rooms he renovated at the villa!’

  ‘Mm – the villa needs a lot of repa
irs now.’

  ‘My advice?’ Her shrewd eyes opened wide, as wide as the deep wrinkles and papery eyelids allowed. ‘You should keep it. One of you. Some of you. All of you? There should be a signore or signora Larkin at the villa forever! Keep it, have a couple of men like Pierino, who is Anna’s brother here, do some work. He is a good handyman. It’s all you need. Slowly, slowly – it’s how you should do it. Isn’t it so, Anna?’

  Her niece made a motion of assent. She sat in a corner of the room, away from the table, with her arms folded comfortably over her rounded stomach, chewing a biscuit. ‘Pierino is very good. He will be more than happy to work at the villa.’

  Grant had no notion of what the conversation was about. He sipped his wine and glanced at me, at Matilde, and on to Anna, and back to me. We would have to go soon, or he would be bored rigid.

  ‘We’ll go soon, Grant.’

  ‘No – this visit is important. Isn’t it? Don’t worry about me. It’s not like it happens every weekend, Brod.’ He waved an emphatic hand and I could see he wished he had such people to visit, in Italy, or anywhere.

  ‘Now listen, before you go, I must tell you a secret only you will hear. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, Matilde.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘There was something your mother wanted you to have, Brod-er-ick.’

  It was so funny, so reminiscent of my childhood, to have her call me by my full name. I remembered her scolding me for running over a tiled floor she had mopped. Brod-er-ick! I reminded her of how she would shake the mop at me.

  ‘Ha ha! You were such a naughty boy. You used to steal things from your big sister’s room, and I occasionally used to take books and comics from under your bed, and put them back in the box under hers! Ha ha!’

  We all laughed again, Grant not knowing what amused us so heartily, his eyes gazing from one face to another, and enjoying it anyway.