Later, as I was on the third page of my letter and the last third of my bottle of wine, lights went on in the villa. Dim lights, to be sure, scarcely enough to read by. And then, dissolving in the night as a cube of sugar does upon the tongue, with irresistible sweetness, there came ethereal music. I recognized it at once. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor. A night bird tweeted a soft triplet from the garden. I smiled as I took up my pen. The bird was in the right key.
All around me German music harmonized the still Italian air, charming the birds right out of the trees on a mild summer night in Tuscany.
* * *
I was up early in the morning, and the air was so fragrant and fresh that it seemed perfectly natural to open the door of the limonaia and pull a chair out to the wooden table on the covered terrace. There I sat with my book and my cup of tea, waiting to be found by my hostess. The fact that I had not done this before, though the weather had been felicitous for several days, could be explained by my shyness about my inadequate Italian and my unwillingness to reencounter either the inhospitable cousin or the earnest servant. My chair was so positioned that Signora Doyle couldn’t fail to see me should she descend the staircase to her car. I was cravenly eager to speak English.
I had read only a few pages when I heard the door open and then the sharp machine-gun rat-a-tat of a woman in high heels. In the next moment, Signora Doyle—it must be her, I thought—appeared on the drive, looking directly at me. I had been expecting the American academic style, practical shoes and long tunic over longer skirt, curling gray hair haphazardly cut, casual, comfortable, and neat. This professor was as stylish as a runway model, tall and slender, nor did she look anywhere near her age. Her hair was black, sleek, cut at an angle so that it swept down across her cheekbones to graze her clavicles. Her skin was like burnished gold, the gift of the gods to their darling Italians, and her sharp eyes under thick, straight brows were nearly black. Her features were more arresting than pleasing, her nose too sharp, her lips too thin for her to be called a beauty. She wore a gray silk blouse under a short canary-yellow linen jacket, a black pencil skirt, and most wonderful and painful-looking high-heeled sandals with a network of golden straps from ankle to toes. As she approached the limonaia, she appeared harried and completely collected at the same time. “Good morning,” she called out to me, and I replied, “Good morning, Signora Doyle.”
“So you are here, comfortably having your tea. I hope you’ve settled in with no problems.”
“Everything is perfect,” I said. “I’ve been having a wonderful time.”
“And working hard, I’m sure. Ruggiero told me you are working on an important project.”
I blessed my colleague, who knew, I felt sure, nothing about my work. “I’ve made some notes,” I said. “But mostly I’m afraid I’ve been researching Tuscan cuisine.”
“No, I’m sure you are up to something exciting,” she said. It was the first volley of the constant play of contradiction she would offer me; I came to understand this as part of a rhetorical style, not uncommon in Italian conversation.
“Well,” I said.
“I am just going to the bar for my cornetto and caffè. Will you come with me? It is very near.”
I closed my book and took up my cup. “I’d love to do that,” I said. “Let me grab my purse.”
English, I thought. Beautiful English. And now I would find the right bar and be in company with the padrona of Villa Chiara. I put my cup in the sink and lifted my purse from the hook, then stepped outside, pulling the door behind me. Signora Doyle had gone to her car and stood bending into the open door, clearing something from the passenger seat. I came up behind her and she turned, smiling. “You must call me Beatrice,” she said, pronouncing it in the Italian way, Bay-ah-trree-chay, and thereby summoning the ghost of Dante, who lingers still in these hills and groves.
In the car Beatrice drove very fast and talked at high volume about America, treating me as an equal on that subject as we were both employed at small colleges. At her college, she explained, the students were very good, but the administration was nothing but buffoons who thought only of cutting their budgets, and when they tried to think of where to cut they could think only of Italian. This was true at my own college; foreign-language departments, and for some reason always Italian first, were endangered. “Why,” she exclaimed, “would anyone in their narrow little world ever need to speak Italian!”
“I need to learn Italian,” I said. “And fast.”
Beatrice parked in the half-empty lot of an Italian version of a strip mall: a collection of colorful storefronts, a hair salon, a pizza restaurant, an alimentari with ambrosial fruits and vegetables piled on an outdoor display rack. The bar, with the name Ciferri in blue script on white tile above the door, occupied the end of the row. Inside we found the usual industrial espresso machine, the electric juicer, baskets of oranges and grapefruit, the glass case of sandwiches and pastries, including two neat stacks of cornetti, the Italian version of the croissant, and the long marble counter behind which a young man who could have been a movie star rattled his cups and tended his machines. He hailed Signora Doyle as she opened the door, and two men in suits knocking back their little cups of espresso at the counter turned to appraise us. The barista repeated his greeting, inquiring, I understood, after the signora’s mother.
Ah yes, I thought. The ancient mother. I had never spoken to her. When I returned from my adventures the house was usually dark, and I assumed the old woman went to bed when the sun set, as old people do in the country. It was my turn to order and I requested my espresso macchiato, my cornetto semplice. Beatrice said, “You speak perfectly well.”
“I can do food,” I said.
As we devoured our breakfast, the barista put a cornetto in a bag and set it and a scrap of paper on the bar. “For my mother,” Signora Doyle said to me. I made a feeble attempt to take up the check. “Please,” she said, pushing my hand away. “I invited you. Don’t insult me.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Prego,” she replied.
Back in the car she spoke of American politics. “It is a country with no past,” she explained. “So all Americans think about is the future. They have never been invaded by foreigners, and so they imagine only spaceships and aliens can harm them. This Reagan and his ‘star wars.’ He’s impossible. He’s not even a good actor.”
There was much to agree with in this spasm of generalizations, but I didn’t bother. I said, “It must have been brutal here during the war.”
“Brutal,” she repeated. “Yes. It was chaos. A living nightmare. No one was safe, no one could be trusted. The planes drilled down farmers with machine guns. They bombed schools full of children.”