“I know another toast you might like,” she added.
“What is it?”
“A noi, e alla faccia di tutti quelli che ci vogliono male,” she said. “To us, and in the face of all those who wish us ill.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“It’s a very Tuscan sentiment,” she said. “Now tell me what else you’d like to know about the Italians.”
“I’d like to know the story of this house,” I said.
“That’s a very long story,” she said.
“And I’d like to hear the story about your uncle,” I added.
“My uncle?” She looked mystified.
“The one who was shot in the driveway,” I said. “During the war.”
She took up her spoon and swallowed a mouthful of soup, looking at me closely. “You’re a good listener,” she said.
“You said he was mad.”
“They made him mad,” she said. “Poor fellow. His name was Sandro.” She paused, took up her wineglass, and sipped thoughtfully. I did the same, unwilling to interrupt what I took to be a mental reassessment of a memory soiled and faded by age and neglect.
“Not so long ago, we were a large family,” she explained. “My nonno, my grandfather, Giacomo Salviati, an avaricious man who wanted always to be modern, had five children and they all lived in a grand palazzo in Firenze. There were three girls and two boys. He had other properties and factories and this villa and the vineyards and olive groves, which have been in the family since the seventeenth century. My two aunts never married, and at some point they moved to this house. My poor uncle Sandro went mad before I was born and was committed to an asylum for many years. I saw him only near the end of his life, when my mother brought him home.”
“She brought him here,” I said.
“Yes. She left one night and drove to Milano, and when she came back he was with her. She was afraid the Germans would raid the asylum, but they never did.”
“And your other uncle?”
“That was Marco. He was a fascist, a real Blackshirt. He adored Mussolini until the end, and even then he didn’t blame the Duce, he blamed the communists and the king. My mother was never certain Sandro was shot by Germans; it could have been partisans, looking for Marco.”
“But you think it was Germans.”
“No one knows. It didn’t matter. He was dead. He could have been killed in crossfire. There was a lot of that.”
“So what happened to Marco?”
“Oh, Marco came through just fine. He married a wealthy Lucchese.”
“And he was no longer a fascist?”
“He took off the black shirt,” Beatrice agreed. “He was a lawyer. He and his wife, her name was Grazia, had two children, a boy and a girl, my cousins Luca and Mimma, who live”—she lifted her chin to the far end of the villa—“in the other half of this house.”
“Is Marco still alive?”
“No. He became a bitter old man. My mother despised him. One day he had a stroke walking down the street in Firenze; he and his family were living in Nonno Giacomo’s palazzo then. It turned out he’d made some very bad business decisions and the palazzo had to be sold. By that time, all that was left of the family was my mother, my two maiden aunts, who died in the sixties just a few months apart, and the cousins, Luca and Mimma. In the seventies there was a big division of the Salviati property. There are a few apartments in Firenze—my mother and the cousins each have one and the others are rented. There’s land here and there; we had a factory near Bergamo that lost money until it closed a few years ago. The biggest part is this estate. Two-thirds of the land went to my cousins, one-third to my mother, but it was agreed that we would divide the villa, half to Luca and Mimma and the other to my mother, and ultimately to me.
“So it wasn’t always two houses,” I said.
“It still isn’t,” she said. “The connecting doors were simply closed. We don’t open them. And of course Luca had to put a kitchen in over there. It’s much nicer than the one here.”
“Are you on good terms with them?”
“I get along with them well enough. My mother can’t bear Mimma. She says she talks like a baby and has no sense. They’re an odd couple, brother and sister—neither ever married. He’s a psychiatrist and she’s a lunatic, so they’re perfect for each other.”
I laughed, then gave my attention to the soup for a few moments, considering the complex relationships she had just described. “What was Sandro like when you saw him?”
Beatrice considered this question, casting back to an event that had taken her by surprise. “He was strange,” she said. “Very confused, and he had difficulty walking and eating. But my mother maintains he was never mad. He wanted to marry a poor girl, and my grandfather wouldn’t allow it. So he was put away.”
“And Marco became the heir.”
Beatrice nodded, pushing out her lower lip and opening her hand in a gesture that said, This is obvious.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a story.”
“Do you like it?” she said. “I give it to you.”
* * *
Do you like it? I give it to you. Total strangers, acquaintances, close friends, even relatives have all offered me stories before—there’s something about talking to a writer that makes people so uncomfortable they babble stories in self-defense. They seem to imagine that novelists go about sniffing drains and peeking behind curtains in search of clues, that they are constantly in need of characters or plots and their whole interest in other people is impersonal and professional, like those doctors who go to parties in hopes of being presented with interesting symptoms. Americans in particular are swift to point out that they have in their mental safekeeping the material of a great novel which they don’t have time to write. Have I got a story for you!
It’s an occupational hazard, and I don’t mind it. The stories seldom engage me, as they are either plot-heavy or concerned with characters who don’t interest me, such as people who climb mountains or women who triumph over adversity and become successful in some male-dominated field like architecture or physics.
But Beatrice’s story, narrated so simply in straightforward responses to direct questions, intrigued me. That night, back in the limonaia, I sketched out a genealogy of the family, assigning names to her grandmother, to her father, to the two characters Beatrice had described only as “the maiden aunts,” and to her uncle Marco’s wife, a rich woman from Lucca.