by Lily Tuck
Quand il la lâcha, gémissante et salie de larmes sous son bandeau, elle glissa à terre: ce fut pour sentir des genoux contre son visage, et que sa bouche ne serait pas épargnée.
(When he let her go, sobbing and befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to feel someone’s knees against her face, and she realized that her mouth was not to be spared.)
“Pass me the cheese, please,” Rudy tells Liliane as he spreads butter on his bread, his appetite unaffected by the amorous exploits of the night before.
Then, Rudy goes back to reading the newspaper.
Several months earlier, a Reuters correspondent present at the historic signing of the Treaty of Rome (by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) that established the European Economic Community better known as the Common Market, also reported seeing, one trafficless early Sunday morning, a shepherd driving his flock of several hundred sheep down the Via del Corso—the main street that bisects the city of Rome.
In the afternoons, Liliane goes to an equestrian center called Circolo San Giorgio, on the Via Cassia, located across the Tiber, over the dangerously narrow Ponte Milvio, the oldest bridge in Rome. She rides a young gray nervous thoroughbred mare called Magali. Colonel d’Inzeo, the riding master, stands in the middle of the vast outdoor ring and shouts instructions—instructions in Italian that Liliane does not always understand. From time to time, one of Colonel d’Inzeo’s two sons comes to the Circolo San Giorgio to ride. Piero or Raimondo—Liliane never knows which since they look alike in their immaculate military uniforms, both lean and determined. In the ring, the jumps are quickly raised to Grand Prix standards—the highest level of show jumping—to 1.6 meters high and to 2.0 meters wide. Warming up, Piero or Raimondo slowly canters around the ring, then, when all is ready, he collects his horse and gallops toward the three jumps—jumps known as oxers that consist of two rails set far apart. In the first jump the front rail is lower than the back rail—it is the easiest. In the second jump, the back rail is lower than the front rail—it is the most hazardous, because it can cause an optical illusion. In the third jump—the most difficult—the rails are parallel, all of which Piero or Raimondo takes impossibly, effortlessly, almost soundlessly. He does this several times. Afterward, he pats his horse’s neck and trots over to his father. They speak briefly, then Raimondo or Piero waves a hand to the other riders in the ring—a salute, a blessing—and leaves. Heroes of the Italian equestrian sport, the brothers are military officers—Piero a colonel in the Italian Army, Raimondo a major in the Carabinieri. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Raimondo wins the show-jumping gold medal on a bay called Posillipo and Piero wins the silver on a big white horse called the Rock.
Did Piero notice how she handled her fidgety horse? Did Raimondo think her an excellent rider—a rider who, one day, might win a gold medal at the Olympics?
Rudy’s film, Villa Borghese (released in English as It Happened in the Park) written by Sergio Amidei and directed by Vittorio De Sica with a distinguished cast that includes De Sica, Gérard Philipe, Micheline Presle, Eduardo De Filippo, and Anna Maria Ferrero, and which consists of six vignettes that take place during a single day—beginning in the morning with a nanny and her charges and ending late at night with a prostitute—in historic Villa Borghese Park, was well received and Rudy is pleased and still more generous.
He buys Francine a pair of diamond earrings and Liliane a gold charm bracelet. The charms are beautifully carved and depict five Roman fountains: Fontana delle Api, Fontana del Nettuno, Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, Fontana delle Tartarughe, and Fontana del Tritone. The bracelet is heavy and the charms knock against things and Liliane rarely wears it. (A few years later, she will sell the bracelet, keeping one of the charms as a souvenir—the Fontana del Tritone.)
On a visit to Capri with Rudy and Francine, Liliane imagines another life for herself as, walking down the narrow streets filled with the sweet smell of orange trees and jasmine, she catches sight of romantic-looking villas through closed iron gates or over stucco walls topped with bright bougainvillea and bits of broken glass. A life of well-born luxury and elegance like the one she glimpses on the island, led by handsome, well-dressed Italian men and women, who own fast cars and yachts, have titles and aristocratic names—Ruspoli, Torlonia, Pignatelli—and with whom Rudy is slightly acquainted.
“Ciao, ciao, Rudy, how are you?” Putting his hand familiarly on Rudy’s shoulder, Giovanni Pignatelli stops at their table while they are having a drink before dinner on the piazzetta. “Permesso?”—May I? he also says and, without waiting for a reply, he pulls up a chair and signals to the waiter.
He smiles at Francine, but Francine does not smile back.
He and Rudy exchange news, gossip, a bit of business. Before he leaves, he nods toward Liliane.
“Your daughter has grown a lot since last summer. A real young lady. Carina”—cute, he also says, smiling at her.
After Giovanni Pignatelli has left, Francine leans over and whispers to Liliane, “He just wants to get inside your pants.”
Liliane blushes. She has been watching a young waiter as, confidently, he maneuvers around the crowded tables with a tray full of glasses, bottles, and ice. She has noticed him on earlier occasions as well, and, on one afternoon when she was walking back to the hotel, their paths had crossed.
“Ciao,” he said, smiling at her.
“Ciao,” Liliane answered.
A lot of the customers seem to know him by name. “Marcello!” they call out to him. “Marcello.”
“Si, si, subito, signor”—Yes, yes, right away, sir, Marcello replies good-naturedly, not paying attention to their demands or hurrying to fill their orders.
When Rudy gets ready to pay the bill, he motions to Marcello, who comes over right away. As Marcello makes change, he looks directly at Liliane and softly begins to sing a song popular that summer:
Tu sei per me la più bella del mondo
You are for me the most beautiful in the world
Again, Liliane blushes.
“Italian men are born singers and liars,” Rudy says as he leaves Marcello a tip. “It’s in their blood. Come, let’s go eat. I’m hungry.”
At Gemma’s, a restaurant popular among the affluent crowd, Dado Ruspoli, the 9th Prince of Cerveteri, the 9th Marquis of Riano, and the 14th Count of Vignanello and an eccentric playboy who walks around Capri with a parrot on his shoulder and whose opium habit is the subject of much gossip, sits at the next table. Turning in his seat, he asks Liliane if she recommends the spaghetti dish she is eating.
“Bellina”—pretty, turning back around, he declares to the others at his table about Liliane.
“Careful,” Rudy warns her. “Don’t go near him.”
“Dado is taking lessons from Orson Welles,” Francine tells them. “Apparently they are good friends. Lessons in hypnotism.”
“Hypnotism?” Rudy repeats, frowning and shaking his head.
“According to the story I heard, they were sitting together in a café,” Francine continues, ignoring Rudy, “and Orson Welles, to show off his occult powers, asked Dado what he would like to see happen next, and Dado said that he would like to see the beautiful girl at the next table spill her drink, a Bloody Mary, down the front of her dress and guess what? Right then and there, the girl spilt her Bloody Mary all over the front of her dress.”
After dinner, in a nightclub across from the Quisisana Hotel, Rudy and Francine get up to dance. No sooner are they on the dance floor leaving Liliane to sit alone at the table than a young man comes up and asks her to dance.
Liliane is tempted to say no but she says yes.
“Paolo,” the young man says, introducing himself as he holds out his arms to her.
“Liliana,” Liliane answers—yet another version of her name.
Cha cha, cha cha cha.
Mar
cello, she thinks.
But Liliane is of two minds. A part of her wants nothing to do with elegant society or with romance. She wants to lead a boy’s independent and adventurous life—the kind of carefree life led by the hero in Elsa Morante’s coming-of-age novel, Arturo’s Island.
Nonostante la nostra agiatezza, noi vivevamo come selvaggi. Un paio di mesi dopo la mia nascita, mio padre era partito dall’isola per un’assenza di quasi mezz’anno: lasciandomi nelle braccia del nostro primo garzone. . . . Fu il medesimo garzone che m’insegnò a parlare, a leggere e a scrivere. . . . Mio padre non si curò mai di farmi frequentare le scuole: io vivevo sempre in vacanza. . . .
(Although we were fairly well off, we lived like savages. When I was two months old my father left the island . . . he left me in the care of our first boy servant. . . . It was he who taught me to talk, and to read and write. . . . My father never bothered to send me to school; I was always on holiday. . . .)
Liliane does not want to live like a savage but the freedom of Arturo’s life appeals to her. The novel is set on Procida, a smaller, darker, less frequented island than Capri or Ischia in the Bay of Naples, and home to a national prison. There, Arturo’s existence is unfettered, full of make-believe, and solitary—a dog, who doubles as a kind of nursemaid, is his only companion—except for when his unreliable, handsome father, whom Arturo worships, makes his occasional visits.
Quanto al fornirmi di scarpe, o di vestiti, mio padre se ne ricordava assai di rado. Nell’estate, io non portavo altro indumento che un paio di calzoni. . . . Solo raramente aggiungevo ai calzoni una maglietta di cotone, troppo corta, tutta strappata e slentata.
(Clothes and shoes and things, my father didn’t often remember. In summer I wore nothing but a pair of trousers. . . . Just occasionally I wore a cotton shirt too, but it was too short, and hung around me in tatters.)
Nor does Liliane want to dress in tatters but, as yet, she does not know how to think about clothes. Her body is strange to her—she once was pudgy and slightly overweight and now, all of a sudden and effortlessly, she has lost her “baby fat” and is thin—skinny, nearly.
Rudy, however, cares what she wears. “Don’t you have anything else to put on besides those slacks?”
“Honey, tomorrow, I’ll take you to a shop where you can buy lots of nice things,” Francine says quickly, placing a hand on Liliane’s arm. “And I’ll bargain them down,” she adds, laughing.
“It’s about time—how old are you?” Not letting Liliane answer, Rudy continues, “Time for you to start dressing like . . .” He hesitates before he says, “like a lady,” and reaches for his cigarettes.
In the shop, the following morning, Francine persuades Liliane to put away her one-piece bathing suit and buy a bikini.
“What have you got to hide?” Francine tells Liliane. “You have a perfectly nice body,” she adds.
But the revered, handsome father’s mysterious and unpredictable ways in Arturo’s Island are made clear at the end of the novel and come as a bitter surprise and disillusion to Arturo, his son. The reason, too, Arturo decides to leave the island of Procida, which signals the end of his idyllic innocent childhood. The father is revealed to be homosexual—or, in the language of the novel, a parodia (a parody)—and in love with one of the criminals incarcerated in the island’s prison.
“Can we go?” Liliane asks her father.
“Go where?” Rudy says.
“To Procida. We can hire a boat. Go for the day.”
“Leave Capri?” Rudy asks, frowning. “Why?”
Instead, Liliane hikes up to the top of the cliff known as Tiberio—a steep, hot, forty-minute climb—where Tiberius, the Roman emperor, spent the last ten years of his life in self-imposed exile. From there, she wants to catch a glimpse of Procida—a black volcanic rock in the sea. One day, she promises herself she will go. Standing on the promontory looking out toward the island, Liliane fantasizes a life there for herself. Married to a fisherman—a fisherman who looks like Marcello—she will live in a pastel-colored, stucco house with an arched balcony that overlooks the sea; the garden will be filled with lemon trees and bougainvillea; she will cook and clean and eventually, too, she will write a novel—a novel much like Arturo’s Island, only she will call it Liliane’s Island—and despite the fame and fortune the book will bring her, she will continue to shun the corrupt and materialistic outside world, never forsaking the simple life and pleasures of the island of Procida.
A dark cloud momentarily blots out the sun, darkening the sea, and Liliane turns back. Feeling anxious and alone all of a sudden, she hurries past the remains of Tiberius’s villa, a pile of roofless, brick rooms, huge arched chambers that might have served as cisterns and storerooms, the imperial bath, loggias, a walkway lined with columns set at the edge of a sheer escarpment encircling a vertical three-hundred-meter drop down to the sea known as the Salto di Tiberio (the Tiberian Leap), where the emperor was said to have thrown people he disliked to their deaths. Tiberius, too, was well-known for his perverse sexual excesses—the one most alluded to was how he trained young boys known as “nipping minnows” to swim alongside of him, biting at his private parts.
On Capri, Rudy, Francine, and Liliane spend most of their days sunbathing and swimming at Gracie Fields’s elegant bathing establishment, La Canzone del Mare (The Song of the Sea), on Marina Piccola. The name La Canzone del Mare, according to the British comedienne, was inspired by the passage in the Odyssey where Ulysses, sailing past an island—an island that could well have been Capri—begs his sailors to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he won’t be tempted by the song of the Sirens intended to lure sailors ashore and to their deaths.
A strong swimmer—thanks to lessons learned at Camp Bueno—Liliane swims freestyle. The Tyrrhenian Sea is warm and she swims as far out as she dares, to where the water turns from an aquamarine to green then, quite abruptly, to a colder navy blue.
“I’m starving,” Liliane says, as she sits down at the table, joining Rudy and Francine for lunch.
“You’re still wet, but the new bathing suit looks good on you,” Rudy says, giving her one of his rare compliments.
Liliane spends the month of August on another island. An island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, with Irène and Gaby, and Irène cannot help but notice how Liliane is changed.
“You’ve lost weight, you look wonderful,” she tells her. “And did you have a good time with your father?
“What did you do?” Irène also asks.
“Nothing much. I went riding every day and we went to Capri,” Liliane answers.
“How is Rudy?” Irène says, then hesitating, she asks, “Does he have—someone in his life? A woman, I mean.”
Liliane shakes her head. How can she explain to Irène about Francine? “He’s busy making movies,” she says instead.
Unconvinced, Irène nods.
For several generations, Gaby’s family has been spending every summer on this island in Maine. Gaby’s grandfather built the house—a large, shingled, three-story gabled house euphemistically referred to as a cottage—situated on a point, a few hundred feet from the water. Jutting out from the shore, below the house, is a granite pier with a float, and several boats—a twenty-foot Herreshoff sailboat, a Boston whaler, and a wooden dinghy. The sailboat, named the Edwina, is Gaby’s pride and joy and, several times a week, Gaby rows out in the dinghy to bail out the boat, clean the teak, and polish the brass fittings.
“Nathanael Greene Herreshoff was one of the greatest naval architects,” Gaby likes to remind Liliane. “Not only did he revolutionize yacht design but he himself sailed five winning America’s Cup yachts. . . .” Gaby pauses to recollect their names. “The Vigilant, the Defender, the Columbia, the Reliance, and the Resolute,” he recites before continuing. “Herreshoff also invented the streamlined bulb and fin keels, the crosscut sail, the modern turnbuckle, the modern winch, sail tracks on masts—
”
Either Liliane has stopped listening or she tries to interrupt, “Gaby, I know. You’ve already told me.”
Gaby is an excellent and competitive sailor; silver trophies, won for races by both him and members of his family, line the mantel in the living room of the house.
Liliane, however, avoids sailing with him. As a captain, Gaby is a despot; he curses and shouts at her. During one race, when Liliane was at the tiller while Gaby was putting up the spinnaker, she accidentally jibed and Gaby nearly fell overboard; worse, they came in last.
Irène does not sail with Gaby either. She prefers playing tennis and golf, sports at which she excels.
The other large cottages that dot the coastline on either side of Gaby’s house are owned by families not dissimilar from Gaby’s—old-moneyed, Protestant, Ivy Leaguers, members of the same private clubs. Many of the cottages are owned by his relatives: sisters, brothers, cousins, cousins by marriage, and those families, likewise, spend their summers on the island each year.
“I haven’t missed a single summer—or maybe just one or two because of the war,” Gaby says proudly. “I know every last person on the island. Most of them are related to me,” he adds.
“The locals, too,” Gaby says. “I know them all by name.”
The locals on the island live inland in houses that are much smaller. Mostly they work as caretakers, gardeners, cooks, boatmen, and caddies for the summer people. Since the island population is small and, in winter, often cut off from the mainland, many of the local families have intermarried with unfortunate results. Malcolm is one. A caddy, he once unzipped his pants in front of Irène’s foursome and peed on the green of the fifth hole.
The island is accessible from the mainland only by ferryboat. It is beautiful with its rocky shore, pine trees, and fields going down to the sea. It is also exclusive, with few stores, no movie theaters, no restaurants or hotels—in other words, no tourist attractions or accommodations. During the day, most of the summer activities occur at the club—tennis, golf, sailing—while at night, they occur in people’s homes, where there is a never-ending series of cocktail and dinner parties and where people flirt, have affairs, drink too much, run their cars off the road or their boats aground. None of these peccadilloes are taken very seriously, only anecdotally, stories to recall and tell the following summer.
