The Last Promise

  Eliana grinned. Anna talked to her as if she were single rather than a married woman. Even more peculiar was that Eliana was Anna’s cognata, her sister-in-law. Anna sat back in the chair, her eyes closed, the sun in her face. “He was bello, no?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Trust me. He was bello.”

  Eliana let Anna’s remark dissipate with the breeze that swept over them. Then she said, “I think Alessio’s coming down with something.”

  “In the summer?”

  “Penso di sì.” I think so.

  “Where’s Manuela? Isn’t she supposed to be watching Alessio today?”

  “She’s still sick. She’s had the influenza.”

  “She probably gave it to Alessio.”

  “I hope he doesn’t have it.” She looked over at her son. He still hadn’t climbed into the water, which in itself she found peculiar. She looked back at Anna. “Are you still leaving for the sea Friday?”

  “Yes. Are you still decided not to join me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I am. It means I’ll be alone with my boring cousin Claudia.” She sighed. “Can I do anything for you before I go? I could shop for groceries for you.”

  “No, grazie. I have enough food for the week. When Manuela comes I will go shopping. Besides I need to get out of the house. I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  “Sì, you need to get out more. I will watch Alessio this afternoon and you can go out. Go into Florence and buy yourself something pretty. I will give you the money from your paintings.”

  “No, Anna. You keep the money for your vacation. Besides, you have much to do before you leave. You have a new tenant coming.”

  Anna sighed. “Vero, vero.” True. Anna would be gone on holiday for three weeks and she still hadn’t finished packing. Now she also needed to see the apartment cleaned and purchase new linens for the bed.

  “I will hang the paintings after Alessio naps,” Eliana said. “Just leave the door unlocked.”

  “Grazie. When does il cretino return?”

  “You shouldn’t call him that. I don’t know. He said tomorrow, but I doubt it.”

  Anna shook her head. “Che cretino.”

  The women seldom spoke of Maurizio. His neglect of his family and his numerous infidelities were too unpleasant a subject. Even though he was her brother, Maurizio was an embarrassment to Anna, and the two of them had argued on more occasions than Eliana could number. Now they spoke only as necessitated by the family business. Though Anna managed the villa, as the oldest son Maurizio ultimately controlled the estate.

  Anna sided with Eliana not just because they were best friends, but because she understood, in part, what Eliana was going through. Anna’s own husband had left her for a young Swiss woman she discovered he had been having an affair with for more than seven years. Eliana had been her support during the time of their divorce.

  Anna sighed. “Devo andare.” I must go. “I’ve still much to do.” She pushed herself up from the chair.

  “Anna, do not leave for the sea without saying goodbye.”

  “You know I don’t say goodbye.” She smiled.

  “We’ll take coffee tomorrow morning.”

  “Ciao, Anna.”

  Anna leaned over and kissed Eliana’s cheeks. “Ciao, bella.” Then she waved to Alessio.

  “Ciao, bello.”

  “Ciao, zia,” he replied.

  She walked to the end of the pool, stopped and picked a handful of sage leaves, then disappeared into the villa.

  Eliana lay back and sifted through the mail. Mostly bills. One of the letters was postmarked USA. She immediately recognized the careful handwriting of her mother. She opened the letter.

  Dear Ellen,

  It’s been a hot and dry summer. They’re talking about drought again. Seems they always are. Maybe they shouldn’t build cities in deserts. Thank you for the pictures you sent of Alessio. I have them up on the refrigerator. He’s getting so big. I showed them to Marge next door. Did I tell you her son has asthma too? Anyway, she mentioned what a handsome boy he is. He’ll be a real heartbreaker, that’s for sure. Handsome like his father. We just made it through another 24th of July Rodeo. Mark Jennings’ boy, Jed, got thrown from a horse. He’s okay, but he’ll be in a cast for a while. Doctor says he broke his collarbone. They have the roundup for the little ones where they let loose the greased pig, then a bunch of chickens. (I don’t know where they found the chickens this year, they looked pretty diseased to me.) Anyway I couldn’t help but think of Alessio and wish he were out there with the others. I miss you both. Have you decided on whether or not you will be coming home for Christmas this year? Of course I understand if you can’t come. Write soon. Someday I’ll get Bert to show me how to send an e-mail. They have those computers you can use down at the library. I know it costs a lot less and it’s faster, but it just seems so impersonal. I like the feel of paper and ink. There’s something honest about it. I know, I’m just old-fashioned. I hope you are well, sweetheart. I pray for you every night and morning.

  Love, Mom

  Eliana set the letter down. It was like a broadcast from an alien planet. She missed her mother. Her mother hadn’t seen Alessio since he was five years old, and Eliana knew it hurt her more than she would ever let on. Even though she often spoke to Alessio of his Grandma in America she wondered how much he actually remembered of her. The thought made her sad. These were years neither of them could reclaim.

  Her mother had offered to fly to Italy, but Eliana wouldn’t let her. Her mother’s first airplane ride was at the age of fifty-seven, and even though it was a short flight of only an hour, it had terrified her so much that the flight attendants gave her a sedative. It took her nearly a week to calm down, and she took a bus back home. There was no way she could make a four-hour flight to New York followed by a ten-hour flight to Italy, at night, over the ocean.

  Eliana looked over at Alessio still kicking his feet in the water without getting in. She walked over and sat down on the tile next to him, her slender, bare legs perpendicular to the edge of the pool. The sun refracted off the water in long, weblike streaks.

  “Are you going to get in, little man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I could push you in,” she teased.

  Alessio turned to her with a grin. “I’ll push you in.”

  She smiled. “I better not then.” She rubbed his head. “Hey, guess what? I got a letter from Grandma.”

  “Oh.”

  “She says she misses you. They just had the big Pioneer Days rodeo. Everyone in town was there. She said that she wished you were there too.”

  Alessio kicked at a leaf that floated near him on the water’s surface.

  “You know, the rodeo was always my favorite time of the year. Right up there with Christmas. We’d all dress up in our jeans and boots and cowboy hats. Some of the guys had belt buckles this big.” She brought her hands together at her waist to form an oval only slightly exaggerated to the size of a football. “We’d play games and eat. We’d have barbecue beef sandwiches and apple pie and drink root beer until we were sick. Then after the sun would go down we’d all go to the arena for the rodeo. Maybe in a few years we’ll be able to go back for the summer and do that. Does that sound like fun?”

  Alessio nodded halfheartedly. His feet moved slowly in the water, barely turning a wake. After a moment he looked up at his mother. “Mom, what’s a rodeo?”

  CHAPTER 6

  “There are places our spirits feel at ease, no matter how austere, just as there are places we cannot call home, no matter how opulent. I have made a home in a country villa named Rendola.”

  —Ross Story’s diary

  The next morning Ross led a Catholic choir group from Boston through the Uffizi. The group had just come up from Rome the night before and was still excited from their trip to the Vatican and their audience wi
th the pope.

  After the tour, Ross reported to Francesca, then walked back across the Ponte Vecchio to his hotel. He had already checked out of his room, and his backpack, which had only grown slightly in weight since his arrival in Florence, and a small cardboard box waited on the floor next to the front counter.

  He sat down on the steps of the hotel to read a copy of the paper while he waited for Luigi. When he arrived, they stowed Ross’s things on the backseat of Luigi’s car and drove off to Rendola.

  On their way they stopped at the co-op in Bagno a Ripoli for groceries. Ross purchased six liters of bottled water and four plastic sacks full of food: two large rounds of hard-crusted Tuscan bread, a half kilo of prosciutto cotto, parmesan cheese, coffee, sugar, bread, spaghetti, crackers, penne, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, eggs, salt, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, six frozen margherita pizzas and two one-liter cartons of milk. At Luigi’s suggestion he purchased three plug-in mosquito repellents. “You’ll need them in the country,” Luigi warned. “It is not America. They don’t have screens on the windows.”

  They completed one more errand on the way, stopping briefly at the bus stop at the end of the long drive into the villa. Ross hopped out and checked the schedule, scribbling it into a small notepad.

  Rendola’s outer yard was vacant when they arrived. They crossed the courtyard and Luigi rang Anna’s doorbell. She greeted them from an upper window.

  “Buona sera, signori.”

  A moment later she emerged from her apartment carrying a large plastic envelope tucked under one arm and a bottle of red wine clutched in the other.

  She led them to the apartment, unlocked the door and they went inside. They sat around the kitchen table while Anna spread the contracts out in front of them. After she had explained in meticulous detail the troubles of her morning, they signed the lease papers. Then she opened the wine, poured their glasses full and they consummated the deal with a toast.

  Anna handed Ross a set of keys then walked him and Luigi around the apartment, explaining how things worked and what to do if and when the power went out, which Ross could expect a couple times a month. She showed him how to check the radiator and bleed it of excess air when it wasn’t working properly and how to restart the water heater. She gave him a rubrica: a phone book filled with the numbers of local restaurants and shops. They went outside, and Luigi recorded the gas levels on a meter built into the courtyard wall.

  On their way driving up to the villa, Ross had noticed an older couple filling water bottles at a brass spigot at the end of the property. He asked Anna about it.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “It is good springwater. We all fill our bottles there. There is a sign that says ‘Non Potabile,’ but do not believe it. Half of Chianti would be dead if it were true. Someone put it there a couple years ago to keep outsiders away. It is better than the bottled water in stores. And it’s free.”

  Ross thanked her and she left them. Then Luigi left as well, leaving Ross to settle into his new place. He hung his clothes, put his toiletries in the bathroom and then walked around the apartment. There were four new paintings that hadn’t been there when he first came—two landscapes, one of the Chianti hills, the other of a field of sunflowers. There was one still life—a wooden platter with grapes and cheese—and one framed portrait of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of Italy. Ross had noticed the new artwork the moment he stepped foot in the apartment. Unlike the cheap reproductions passed off as art in most rentals, this art pleased him. For one they were originals. More important than that, they were good.

  He examined the paintings in greater detail. He especially liked the painting of sunflowers. He heard a noise in the courtyard and pulled back the kitchen curtain. The boy he had seen by the pool was kicking a soccer ball against the inner wall. He looked around for the boy’s mother, but the child was alone.

  He went into his bedroom, stretched out across the bed and read.

  Later that afternoon Anna came by with a housewarming gift: a bag of biscotti, a large bottle of olive oil and some spinach torte, hot from her oven. Though she had always wanted to learn English, for which she occasionally solicited Eliana’s help, it was in the same spirit in which she wanted to lose weight, and neither had happened. Ross sensed that she was nervous to be alone with him. She spoke halting, monosyllabic English and was as relieved as she was surprised when Ross replied in Italian.

  “But you speak Italian!” she exclaimed.

  “Poco,” he said, gesturing with his thumb and forefinger slightly apart.

  “You speak better Italian than my last husband,” she said, then added beneath her breath, “Cretino.”

  As she went to leave, she said, “I will be leaving tomorrow on vacanza. I am going to the sea. If you have an emergency, Eliana will know where to reach me.”

  “Eliana?”

  She pointed to the green door on the opposite side of the courtyard. “She lives in the next apartment. She was the woman sitting by the pool yesterday. She was with her boy. Do you remember?”

  “Sì.”

  The villa had a satellite dish and Ross found CNN. He watched for a while, then surfed the channels until he found a soccer game. The Fiorentina were playing Juventus, their rival, and he watched the match until ten then went to bed early. He had an early tour in the morning, and as he had not yet mastered the bus system, he would have to leave at sunup.

  He set his alarm clock for five-thirty, then undressed to his briefs. He opened the outer window and lay down on top of the bed.

  The sounds of the country seeped into the room like the cool night air. The noises he had grown accustomed to, the horns and brakes of the city, were replaced by the alien warbling of frogs and the shrill songs of the crickets and cicadas.

  For more than three years, he had wanted to be any place other than where he was. But mostly he had wanted to be here, in his own place—here, where he felt like a man. The realization that he had arrived filled him with joy.

  His thoughts returned to the woman by the pool. Eliana, Anna had called her. Though he had only seen her for a few minutes, he could still see her clearly in his mind. He could see those eyes. Could she have really been that beautiful? He doubted it. It was more likely that his loneliness had painted her in the exaggerated strokes of a dream. Then again maybe she was a dream, along with every other good thing that had come to him this last week. If so, he welcomed her and hoped she stayed awhile.

  As he began to drift off, there came from the open window a new sound. He opened his eyes and strained to hear. He wondered what animal could make such a noise. A wild boar, perhaps. Or was it a bird? He couldn’t quite place it. It almost sounded like a woman crying.

  CHAPTER 7

  “La vita è breve e l’arte è lunga.” Art is long. Life is short.

  —Italian Proverb

  “Great art is a hymn that does not dissipate in the immediacy of time and space. I believe that there are greater sermons in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than in all the texts preached below it—that the brush of Michelangelo was far more articulate than the smooth tongues of the religious orators of his day, and, without a doubt, truer and far more lasting.”

  —Ross Story’s diary

  Ross woke in the same bed he had gone to sleep in, his alarm chirping a few feet from his head. Dream or not, I’m still here, he thought and smiled. He left his apartment before dawn, walking a quarter mile to the SITA bus stop.

  He arrived in downtown Florence with more than an hour to spare, so he got off the bus at Piazza Beccaria, where he stopped at a pasticceria for a cappuccino and pastry before catching a compact inner-city bus. In spite of the early hour, the bus was already crowded. He moved to the back and grabbed a ceiling strap.

  At the next stop a couple boarded who reminded Ross of a Duane Hanson piece he had once seen on display at an art gallery in Minnesota: Tourists. They might as well wear a sign, Ross thought, looking at the camera hanging from the man’s neck. A bent tourist g
uidebook stuck out of the back pocket of his shorts. The woman wore a sleeveless shirt and pink-lens sunglasses, and a large bag hung over her arm.

  The doors shut behind them and the couple hovered near the bus’s stamp machine. When they spoke, Ross recognized the accent immediately. They were from Minnesota or Fargo, close to where Ross once called home.

  “Judy, will ya just put the darn ticket in the machine?”

  “What for?”

  “It’s what the man in the tobacco shop said to do. It stamps it or something.”

  “Which machine? There’s two of them.”

  “How would I know?”

  “What if I put it in the wrong one?”

  “Try them both.”

  Ross didn’t speak, but he pointed to the orange box mounted to the wall.

  “Did you see that?” the woman said. “That man just pointed to the orange one. Grazee, signora.”

  “You just called him missus.”

  “I can’t ever remember which one it is. He’s a good-looking Italian man. Grazee, signori,” she said, speaking loudly, with a large, deliberate stretch of her lips. “Th-ank y-ou.”

  She looked so comical Ross tightened his mouth so as not to laugh. “Prego, signora.”

  “That means you’re welcome,” her husband said.

  Just then a young man slid past Ross. Ross had noticed him as he boarded the bus and watched him as he moved closer to the couple, who were all but oblivious to what was happening around them. At a corner all the passengers leaned with the bus and the young man brushed against the tourists, easily lifting the man’s wallet from his back pocket. Ross was waiting for it and caught the thief’s wrist, lifting it with the black leather wallet he held. “Ha trovato qualcosa?” Find something?

  Fear flashed across the thief’s face. The woman screamed. “Martin, that man has your wallet!”

  The tourist spun around. “Hey!”