The Lady Is Delicate

My first glimpse of the Villa dei Quattro Venti came at the end of a five-hour, nonstop jeep ride from Naples, and in my by then extremis about getting to the bathroom, I was in no condition to take in details. We had hurtled violently up the coast road through mangled and prostrate villages, bearing on their few standing facades the unhealed pock-marks of mankind’s most loathsome malady. It was June of 1946, the first spring after the war. Behind me lay months of tedious preparations, getting myself and my young daughter, Marta, outfitted—physically and mentally—for life on a different continent. (And don’t think the mental hazard is minor in the case of a six-year-old to whom Father is a pleasant myth, the neighborhood gang is far more important than mere parents, and the block you grew up on is the center of the universe.) Behind me lay a trip across America with six trunks and ten pieces of hand luggage undertaken at the moment when porters as well as railway trainmen were on strike so that we progressed from station to station with about as much assurance of reaching our destination on time as Lewis and Clark had of getting over the Rockies by snowfall. Behind me lay ten days at sea aboard the barely converted troop transport, the Marine Carp, with as odd an assortment of characters as you would find outside of a zoo, including the psychopathic lady whose husband was taking her back to visit relatives in the Old Country in hopes of effecting a cure. To add to my general confusion, my landlubber’s head still carried the imprint of waves. And now came a kaleidoscope of dusty ruins where bougainvillea flung its improbable cerise banners across broken pink walls; of geraniums red and Mediterranean blue; of scrawny, squawking chickens flapping out of our way and scrawny, shave-topped children trying to impede it. We had been impelled to such haste by the well-documented belief that to pause momentarily on an Italian highway in those days was to invite being hijacked and relieved of one’s hard-come-by possessions. They were the days when bridges under construction were carted bodily away at night. When a jeep driver leaning against the rear of his jeep to enjoy a cigarette might suddenly find himself sprawled in the road, his prop having been driven away from in front of him. Yes, there was ample reason for not loitering along the way, but it was an experience which gave me a permanent antipathy to jeeps and a somewhat confused first impression of the house that was to be our home, for better or for worse, during the next two years. If you had grown up, as I did, in the far and middle West and you were suddenly informed that you were to live in a villa in the country on the outskirts of Rome, you would probably have as little basis as I had for visualizing said villa. If you were told it had impressive hedgerows, a large garden, and a swimming pool, you would probably imagine something Hollywoodian. At least you would patch together some concepts of the country places of local cattle barons, or of chewing gum magnates outside Chicago. It had to be something pretty fancy, by any previously existing standards. Rolling lawns, I pictured, formal gardens… But rushing madly up that coastal road in the early summer drought, in the wind-swept rear end of a jeep and peering out into the barren countryside as it flew by, I found nothing to contribute to my vision of the villa. I could only hope that Rome was greener, more watered, less desolate. Marta, beside me, gazed steadily into the wind with a sort of entranced expression. Behind us an army truck thundered in our wake bearing our possessions. As we ticked off village after village I began to think Italy was probably all like this—just broken walls, glaring piazzas, miserable people, and a general tone of dust and despair. Was there no end to this war-blazed road? Frank kept encouraging me by saying we were almost there now, if that can be termed encouragement when each hopefully approached village in turn receded behind us and the road stretched on ahead relentlessly. I gave up hope entirely at Albano. It had looked so promising as we approached that I had been sure it was the Eternal—but eternally deferred—city which was our objective. Only another twenty miles! I went into such a decline of morale, what with five hours on the rack of a jeep with neither food nor comfort station, that I stopped looking at the scenery until somebody said we were turning into our driveway. Our driveway! It was a broken down arch of brick with barbed wire fences stretching, or rather reclining, to either side of it. We bumped up a dusty road through denuded fields toward an indistinguishable huddle of buildings graced by a few tormented fruit trees. Was that the place Frank had written me about in such glowing terms? I gave him a sidelong glance, just checking whether anything had happened to his head during the years of his absence. His profile was noncommittal. Still, I didn’t much care at the moment what sort of place we were coming to, just so it had a bathroom, or at least a path out back. We paused at a gate under an archway, then entered an enclosed yard. “Show the Signora to the gabinetto,” Frank said to the little daughter of the custodians the moment she opened the front door. There was a slight preliminary formality. The custodian’s wife, a squat, youngish woman with a pleasantly ugly face, had to be greeted. My rudimentary Italian had to be called into its first hesitant use for the exchange of obsequies, and we were off. I followed the short white frock, the short black curls and the sturdy brown legs up the staircase, around two landings and across an unbelievable expanse of somberly gleaming red tile floor. “Ecco, Signora,” said the little girl at last with a suggestion of a curtsey as she opened the door for me. I thanked the child and entered the blue-blond vastness of the bathroom. My faculties returned, and my observations began there. Well, I have seen bathrooms and bathrooms, large ones and small ones, but this was the first I had seen that would dwarf the living room of a tract home. Its gabinetto was cozily recessed at the end of an enormous blond wardrobe which occupied one long wall. A nine-foot window lighted up the gleaming white and blue tiles. There was a pear-shaped porcelain object in one angle which I was to learn is a standard fixture in European bathrooms. At the moment I did not even know what it was called, so I did what all greenhorns do, I tried its various spigots. But what was that foot pedal thing underneath? I stepped on it to find out, and was rewarded by a stream of water shooting up into my gaping face. And there was the bath department, the tub installed on a dais with an elaborate instrument panel above it for regulating temperatures, angles, and pressures. That dangling cord over the tub? I reached to try it, but remembering my experience with the bidet, I drew back my hand. I didn’t want any unexpected stream of water hitting me from above. But it was, on closer inspection, obviously a bell-pull and for a moment I was lost in delightful speculation as to just what must be expected of the Signora in her bath—or, unnerving thought, did the Signore use it too? Did the maid come trotting in to wash his back? I began to think it was no place for a simple girl from Chicago and points west. In this timorous frame of mind I emerged from the bathroom and found myself in the—what is this, the living room on the second floor? I had passed through it, of course, en route to the bathroom, but I had not really seen it in my preoccupation with more elemental things. Now I saw it for the first time and I had to sit down quickly in the nearest chair to take in the details. It was truly a lovely room. There was an expansive stillness and a palette blending of colors that merged into an inexpressible emotion. Something remembered, something desired, something completed.