Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

Annotations from "Villa Coco" by Andrew Sean Greer

I am certain I was no more or less irritating than any other good American son of the century, unweathered by experience and unwise to the world. Whatever attributes one found in me were simply, as in the Pekingese, part of the breed.

I was determined to avoid the clichés Americans expect of Italy—though these turned out, of course, to be the very images that had fed my decision. Stomping grapes for wine, sun-drying tomatoes on a roof, dancing the tarantella; who knows what idiotic fantasies I had picked up? What was certain was that I would not fall for some black-haired, half-shaved stranger leaning on a pitchfork before an olive grove. And so I took my vow, like a monk’s, that for this period, I would enter the cloister of my work, my mind, and tend the garden there. The row of cypresses made me smile; what I needed was not romance and chaos but order.

Apparently, having communicated this sentence, he had wiped his hands of the whole affair. I approached the pozzo. A smell assaulted me, and instantly I understood Italian.

“Princess Margaret is her cousin, and Pippa didn’t know she was once my guest! What a nuisance. Someone called us ahead of time and said to put a bottle of whiskey in front of her, plop!, like that at the table. She drank from it the whole time. And it was lunch. I remember we had linguine alle vongole.” “Buone!” cried Pippa. “Buone!” replied the Baronessa, adding that the clams had come straight from the Adriatic. These cries of “buone!” and “buono!” and so on were a particular affectation of conversation at Villa Coco; later, I was to realize it was an aspect of Italian conversation in general. It meant “delicious,” referring to the food just mentioned, and it did not matter if the talk was of a death in the family, a crisis of the heart, or the Titanic disaster—if one noted that the penultimate dish served to the ill-fated passengers had been foie gras, the very mention of the delicacy would bring cries of “buono!”

“I am certain you are saying something very interesting, young man,” she told me in her clipped accent, “and that we would grow to become friends, but I am afraid I only understand…the King’s English.” She gave me a warm smile and put her hand on mine as she spoke very carefully. “The American dialect…Is. Beyond. Me.” Imagine the effect on an arrogant young American, who has never bothered to learn a single word outside his language, a nightingale who thought he spoke in the sharp, clear language of all birds, only to awaken inside a cage of cockatoos.

The Baronessa chirped brightly: “You know that Oscar was thrown in jail for his art?” He sat up straight. “Lisabetta. I was never in jail.” Estelle seemed to have tensed beside me; I could see her exchanging glances with the old man. I wondered if this was a sensitive topic, but my employer ventured on: “It was in Paris. He had stolen tubes of paint from an art store. Sneaking around in a trench coat with big pockets. Had been doing it for years, but the trick to pinching is to keep a sense of balance. Something missing here, something missing there, nobody minds—” “So you often say,” Oscar mused. “But Oscar got greedy, went too often, and the owner had him arrested.” He opened his hands to me and Estelle, pleading guilty: “I couldn’t afford it. It was one thousand francs.” “And you know what his defense was? ‘I am a great artist and I need this paint.’ " He said, “I did need it.” I asked if his defense worked, and he nodded serenely. I asked what the paint was. “Tyrian purple,” the old man said. “Made from the murex snail. A fugitive pigment. Though I was acquitted, I was advised by the court, in the future, to use”—he paused to shudder—“magenta.” I gasped, and it made him giggle.

every house and lover has a fatal flaw—I hired a rabdomante, a very esteemed one—a diviner. He walked all around the property with his stick, and at last he came beside the house, and down it went! ‘Here is water,’ he announced to us. ‘We should dig here.’ I was very sad to tell him that he had found, on the other side of the wall, our refrigerator.

“One room that is ready is the library,” she offered, and I felt a great relief. Here was a place I was comfortable setting rules. “I will make sure it’s alphabetical—” “Are you mad? Some of these are in Russian! No, I have found another solution. By country of the author’s birth.” “Okay,” I said, swallowing. “That should be easy.” “Not so easy as you say! Where, for instance, is Yugoslavia? Or, for that matter, the Ottoman Empire? Prussia? Austria-Hungary? So many nations I knew as a girl. To simplify things, I refer to the map you see here on the wall.” It was dated 1912.

“You ask about organizing principles. These,” she said, gesturing to the vitrines, “are by affinità.” “What does that mean?” “Their obvious attraction to one another!” she said. “I will show you, and this is something to learn. The Bangladeshi dolls and Afghan blanket together bring to mind the Mughal Empire, and isn’t it amusing to see this Robensky, a terrible antisemite, below a Jewish Greek bridal shawl?”

A child will draw the arm holding the tennis racket twice the size of the other arm, to convey its importance, and a director often puts a character in red so the audience can catch her in a crowd, but life does not provide these clues.

“I think you misunderstand. In America…ahem…you always marry. You marry for health insurance and to protect the children from shame. We do not have these problems here. Here we only marry for inheritance and if the landlady complains. Otherwise we don’t bother. Nobody I know is married except the ones who married an American.”

La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette. I told the Baronessa and she said: “In it are inscribed the wonderful lines: ‘There is a heavy price we have to pay for seeing things as they are. The price is of our youth.’ "

The Baronessa claimed the government would not let private citizens hire workers for the raccolta and that only family members could do the work; if a government inspector came along, she told us, we were all to say we were her cousins. “Giovedì, you are now cugino Giorgio,” she informed me. “You are from Todi.” Vinsanda cast me an expression that I took to mean this was all utter horseshit.

I wondered at the urgency, but my only companion was Ghazel, whose explanation was “PUTTA! MENTO!” Since this meant the chin of a whore, I waited until the Baronessa passed near our grove again for an inspection, and she made it clear it was an appuntamento: an appointment at the olive press in a week. “It was the best we could get. You have to book in advance,” she said, raising a finger gravely. “Like the Ritz.”

“It is a very old horsehair mattress” came a voice from behind me. I turned and the Baronessa was there in a white wool sweater and pants. Her hair had three olive leaves resting in it. “Only a few people know how to redo them. It has to be done,” she said ominously, “from within.” She strode into my room and imitated attacking a mattress with a pitchfork, though she was a poor mime and it came across as someone fishing. “You have to have it in your soul, to fix a horsehair mattress! Of course, we won’t need to fix it again for another hundred years.” She paused for a moment in the hallway, then added with a smile: “I suppose we leave that for the next owner?” It was the first time she implied she might not live forever.

What began as one of the charms of “country living” ended, of course, in monotony, especially for the Italians who had suffered the olive harvest annually. And yet Giacomo refused to complain, as much as his arms grew tired. “We must have the olive oil,” he said to me when we were at lunch and I brought up my sore arms. “And so what else is there to do?” I mentioned that some, in the wide world, purchase their olive oil, and have fine autumn days free to do as they choose. The withering glance he gave me implied he regretted sharing a bed with a barbarian who bought his oil.

It was clear to me now that Giacomo knew himself, and what he wanted, so little that, like a magician’s apprentice, he had simply put everything potent in the pot—his wife, his American, his future child—and waited to see what might be conjured. It had conjured, as they say in Italy, a pasticcio. A kind of baked dish but also: a mess.

I thought of his renouncement of love and of pleasure in all its forms, how the excesses of his youth—sleeping with shepherds in the countryside!—had been locked away, like sharp objects, and how he had made himself into a “very cheerful, very harmless old man.” When none of that would kill him. It is possible he could have slept with shepherds and dined on roast lamb until the day before, and it would all have come to the same thing.

“We are going to steal the urn.” I asked what urn. Did she mean to pinch some valuable artifact of his? “I mean the ashes.” I gulped. “WHAT ashes?” Surely she could not mean— “Oscar’s!” she said. “Where else would he go but here? This was his favorite place in the world.” “But that can’t be—” “Yes, we’ll tell them Torino. It will buy us some time. In case,” she added with verve, “they give chase!” And I understood that the only way she could handle her rage and grief was to create one final caper.

She could hear Giacomo’s voice echoing in my own? I began to check myself, as a hypochondriac does when hearing of a new disease. I told my employer that she found fault with all of my teachers. How was I expected to learn? “Simple,” she said. “As you will learn to steal. From me.”

Florentines have an innate aversion to Pisa. I am told it comes from a medieval siege the Pisans waged against Florence, and it is said this time of privation is why the local bread has no salt. This is of course absurd; that was centuries ago. They have had plenty of time to change the recipe. But the animosity evidently continues and is, in fact, mutual. “A friend of mine was once in a car accident near Pisa,” my employer told me. “The Pisa driver was clearly in the wrong, and the carabinieri agreed and told the man to pay a fine. He pointed to my friend’s Florentine license plate and declared, ‘But this bastard is not even supposed to be here!’ "

did not think another life was possible, he had told me. But it is always possible.

With shaking breath, I knew my old life would soon return to me, with its foolish terrors, and all I could do was remain on the perch of the present as long as it would support me.

“You would go back to old habits,” she told me, tapping one of my slippers with the tip of her cane. “Such as?” “You would start thinking again that literature began with Hemingway and art with Warhol. That the fate of the world depends upon your presidential election. That a proper dinner conversation is to discuss your favorite television shows. Like every American, you would lose—” “Really?” I broke in, irritated. “What would I lose?” She looked at me at last. “Your sense of humor.”

She was in her place in the world. And I began to think, quite suddenly, of my own. For it was as if I had delivered an important message to a remote king, who had read it and sighed his understanding, and now I would be out of the story and on my own to return from this foreign land to my home, which months or years of travel had made to me a distant place, or else continue on my journeys, somehow, in hopes of keeping in my veins this strangeness, this incongruity, which had become my ordinary life.

It seems to me, even now, with the long expanse of years, impossible that she could have arranged the arrival of carabinieri to make the boat’s departure so urgent, but then again, her genius was in making life do her bidding.