Read Online That Summer in Sicily by Marlena de Blasi - Free Book Online
Authors: Marlena de Blasi
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find her that makes for madness. Having been her best friend, witness, confidante, advocate since she was ten years old, I will say that, yes, in my fashion, I was in love with her. I might say that I am in love with her still.”
CHAPTER VI
I DON’T RECALL WHETHER IT WAS ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME day that Cosimo told me his story or an evening soon afterward when I’d decided to accept Tosca’s invitation to see the frescoes in the changing light. I know it was a Friday, and that Fernando and I had set the next morning as our departure.
When I enter the dining hall at six she is there sitting by a spent hearth, a book opened on her lap. We greet each other, she resumes her reading, and without further discourse, I begin my tour. I wander about the vast room, head thrown back, marveling at the exalted beauty of the frescoes in the softer light. I stay for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time we say nothing more. I want to ask her about the artists, the epochs of the work. About the allegories themselves. About why there are so many blank spaces in the frescoes. I stay silent, though, sensing she is a reluctant docent. Lost in a last look, my back turned to Tosca, an Italian voice speaking in rather tentative English asks, “Do you drink gin? I have some good Genever gin if you’d like me to fix you a drink. It’s about that time, isn’t it? I mean for you English.”
Perplexed, I stay fixed, my back still turned to Tosca. And to the voice. It can’t be her speaking and yet, as I turn to her and understand that it
is
she, I begin to laugh.
“Why didn’t you tell me you could speak English?”
“Why should I have done that?” she asks in mock smugness. “I also speak French and read in Greek. What’s more I dance and sing, play the pianoforte. I’ve yet to tell you about any of those accomplishments. I neither felt nor do I feel now the need to impress or comfort you with the sound of your own language. We
are
in Sicily, after all. I simply wanted a gin tonic and thought you might, too. That I offered it to you in your own language was fairly involuntary. An impulse.”
She speaks English splendidly. A Sicilian contralto singing the role of a Berkshire matron, I think. “Did you once live in England?”
“No. Never. I’ve never set foot off the island even once in my life.”
She says this with neither pride nor regret and leaves no pause for my response. I find it curious, though, that she answers much more than my question asked. She proceeds. “I studied English and French when I was young and have read the nineteenth-century English writers over and over again for most of my life since. I don’t like them in translation.”
“I see. Actually, I’m not English but American, and I prefer vodka.”
“I have that, too.”
She rises, walks her mannish walk to a far corner of the
salone,
pauses before a narrow armoire, the rough wood of it painted a pale yellow-green like the heart of a celery. She opens its doors to reveal a bar—mirrored, upholstered in midnight-blue velvet—that would rival the lobby bar of any good small hotel in Manhattan or Vienna or Rome. From a small black enamel refrigerator she takes a bottle labeled in red Russian script. With a heavy hand, she pours from it into a cut crystal wineglass. Offers it to me.
“I have no ice,” she says without apology.
“I don’t take ice,” I tell her in an icy tone. Tosca’s refined scorn has something of mockery about it this evening. A stylish disdain that causes mine. She putters about with her gin tonic while I stand behind her. She turns to me, then raises her glass.
“To your health,
signora,
” she says. Once again that counterfeit gentility.
“Alla vostra salute, signora,”
I wish back at her. One less cube in my voice.
We remain standing, looking at each other, appraising each other. I suppress a laugh. At myself, at her. At us standing in the
salone grande
of a glorious villa set among the barren
CHAPTER VI
I DON’T RECALL WHETHER IT WAS ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME day that Cosimo told me his story or an evening soon afterward when I’d decided to accept Tosca’s invitation to see the frescoes in the changing light. I know it was a Friday, and that Fernando and I had set the next morning as our departure.
When I enter the dining hall at six she is there sitting by a spent hearth, a book opened on her lap. We greet each other, she resumes her reading, and without further discourse, I begin my tour. I wander about the vast room, head thrown back, marveling at the exalted beauty of the frescoes in the softer light. I stay for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time we say nothing more. I want to ask her about the artists, the epochs of the work. About the allegories themselves. About why there are so many blank spaces in the frescoes. I stay silent, though, sensing she is a reluctant docent. Lost in a last look, my back turned to Tosca, an Italian voice speaking in rather tentative English asks, “Do you drink gin? I have some good Genever gin if you’d like me to fix you a drink. It’s about that time, isn’t it? I mean for you English.”
Perplexed, I stay fixed, my back still turned to Tosca. And to the voice. It can’t be her speaking and yet, as I turn to her and understand that it
is
she, I begin to laugh.
“Why didn’t you tell me you could speak English?”
“Why should I have done that?” she asks in mock smugness. “I also speak French and read in Greek. What’s more I dance and sing, play the pianoforte. I’ve yet to tell you about any of those accomplishments. I neither felt nor do I feel now the need to impress or comfort you with the sound of your own language. We
are
in Sicily, after all. I simply wanted a gin tonic and thought you might, too. That I offered it to you in your own language was fairly involuntary. An impulse.”
She speaks English splendidly. A Sicilian contralto singing the role of a Berkshire matron, I think. “Did you once live in England?”
“No. Never. I’ve never set foot off the island even once in my life.”
She says this with neither pride nor regret and leaves no pause for my response. I find it curious, though, that she answers much more than my question asked. She proceeds. “I studied English and French when I was young and have read the nineteenth-century English writers over and over again for most of my life since. I don’t like them in translation.”
“I see. Actually, I’m not English but American, and I prefer vodka.”
“I have that, too.”
She rises, walks her mannish walk to a far corner of the
salone,
pauses before a narrow armoire, the rough wood of it painted a pale yellow-green like the heart of a celery. She opens its doors to reveal a bar—mirrored, upholstered in midnight-blue velvet—that would rival the lobby bar of any good small hotel in Manhattan or Vienna or Rome. From a small black enamel refrigerator she takes a bottle labeled in red Russian script. With a heavy hand, she pours from it into a cut crystal wineglass. Offers it to me.
“I have no ice,” she says without apology.
“I don’t take ice,” I tell her in an icy tone. Tosca’s refined scorn has something of mockery about it this evening. A stylish disdain that causes mine. She putters about with her gin tonic while I stand behind her. She turns to me, then raises her glass.
“To your health,
signora,
” she says. Once again that counterfeit gentility.
“Alla vostra salute, signora,”
I wish back at her. One less cube in my voice.
We remain standing, looking at each other, appraising each other. I suppress a laugh. At myself, at her. At us standing in the
salone grande
of a glorious villa set among the barren
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