Hill Towns (41 page)

“I think they stayed together simply because she willed it.

Her will is incredible, a real force of nature. She literally made herself over into the Ada you see now, glamorous, serene, confident, capable of running his life and his work like nobody else ever could. He’s

342 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

the painter he is today because of her. When the impotence started, he also started to get long dry spells when he just couldn’t paint. There was just nothing there. Impotent in every way. She cured the first one by getting Verna Cardigan to sit for him. He fell in love with Verna, got it up in all ways, and had the first really great show of his life. When I met him at the embassy party and he brought me home to Ada, he was in the middle of another drought. I cured that for him, courtesy of Ada. The fertile spell I started outlasted me for years, but he’d been dry for a long time until this summer.

Until you came along. I don’t have to tell you how simple Ada has made it for Sam to paint you; she’s literally taken charge of Joe so you could be alone with Sam. I’ve watched her do it. She knows I have. She’d have done anything to get him back on track, including kiss your husband or fuck him if she needed to. They were getting low on money and Sam wasn’t getting many calls from the art magazines anymore. This new show will probably set them up for life.”

I stared at her.

“I’m not saying he doesn’t really feel something for you,”

Yolie said. “But you need to know that when he’s finished your portrait he’s shot his wad. No more nookie. No more Cat, unless you want to be a house pet. I’ve often wondered if Ada doesn’t miss it. Who knows? Maybe she goes outside.

Maybe she gets all she needs from his subjects’ men. Maybe she doesn’t need anything at all, except to be Mrs. Sam Forrest. Sam thinks that.”

“How do you know this? Did he tell you?” I could barely whisper. My ears rang and my head pounded.

“No. She did. Much later, over sherry at Doney’s, as cool as a cucumber.”

HILL TOWNS / 343

“Why?”

“Who knows?” Yolie said. “I don’t. I don’t know who she is, or what. If she thought telling me would ‘cure’ me of Sam, she was right.”

Rage shook me.

“No, she wasn’t! You’re not anywhere near over him! If you were, you’d never bother to tell me this; you’re jealous; you want me to stop—”

I stopped, breath rasping in my throat, hearing my own words over the babble of the bar as if listening to a stranger.

A mad stranger. I wanted to get up and run from the place, but I did not think my legs would hold me up. He was not like that, he could not be; none of this was true. She had made it up, had asked me to stay over so she could tell me this monstrousness, stop my being with him. I remembered my first impression of her, drunk and belligerent, by the pool in Rome. Across the table she looked like that now. Drunk, anyway. Her face was slack and unfocused. Her lipstick ran up the sides of her mouth.

But there was no malice in her eyes, and no anger. She looked at me for a long space of time with something akin to pity, and then she shrugged.

She turned her head toward the bar and made words with her mouth, without a noise. Slowly she pulled the elasticized neck of the peasant blouse down off her shoulders and bared one large brown breast, and touched it with the tips of her fingers. She smiled. Behind me, the bar exploded in noise: catcalls, smacking of lips, laughter.

The rage nearly choked me. I scrambled to my feet.

“I’m not going to stay here and watch this,” I said furiously.

“I’m not going to listen to any more of this crap!”

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“Where you going, Cat?”

She was still looking at the young man at the bar and smiling. She made a kiss with her mouth.

“Back to the room. Anywhere. This is disgusting.”

She shrugged, broke eye contact with the young man, and fished the room key out of her purse. She handed it to me.

“I think I’ll stay awhile,” she said. “Let yourself in. Go on to sleep. Don’t worry, I’ll be good as gold tomorrow. You’ll see. Put it right out of your head.”

For a moment I did not move.

“Go on. You’ll be safe on the street. I won’t be long. This should only take a few minutes….”

I took the key and turned and walked out of the restaurant.

As I passed the young man, I saw he had started across the room toward her, bearing the erection before him like a battle standard.

At the door, I heard her call, “Cat?” and stopped and looked back. The boy was at the table now, leaning over her. Over his shoulder, she smiled broadly at me.

“You better fuck him fast!”

She laughed. I ran out of the bar and up the steps, turned right, turned right again, and was at the entrance to the Centrale before I drew another deep breath. When I reached the room I did not even turn on the light. I grabbed a half-forgotten vial of the sleeping pills Corinne had sent with me to Italy out of my purse, swallowed two with tap water, shucked off my clothes, and crawled naked into the huge white bed. From the street below the snarl and spit of traffic went on unabated, but I did not hear it. I was asleep practically before my head touched the pillow.

HILL TOWNS / 345

I woke with the start of the early rush hour the next morning and sat up groggily, tasting last night’s wine and the pills.

Yolanda was not there, and the other side of the bed had not been slept in. I found a note, though, stuck on the bathroom mirror with a Band-Aid:

Have decided to stay over awhile. Key to car is on chest
under your purse. Car is in the parking lot in the Piazza del
Carmine; you saw it yesterday. Right out of the hotel, first
left, you’ll see it. Map on back of note. Take the car and drive
on to Siena, and tell everybody I’ll catch up to them, or maybe
I’ll call. Love, Y
.

I sat down heavily on the bathroom floor.

“I can’t drive to Siena by myself,” I whispered aloud. I looked back down at the note. There was a postscript.

Yes, you can
! it read.

I dropped my head down on my drawn-up knees and put my hands over my face. The fear boiled up like a volcano erupting, pure and terrible, stronger than it had ever been on the Mountain or anywhere else. I began to cry and to rock myself.

“Help me, Sam,” I whispered, rocking, rocking, “Help me, Joe.”

Then: “I want my mother!”

The fear rose into my mouth and filled my eyes, ran out to the ends of my fingers. It seemed to explode inside my head, in a huge, white, soundless burst. I felt the reverbera-tions in my chest, in my legs, in my teeth. Then it drained away and icy anger flowed in behind it like an avalanche. I shook with it, briefly, and then it steadied down into a silvery shimmer, a cold, all-sustaining flame.

I got up and dressed and got the Opel from the lot in the Piazza del Carmine and drove to Siena.

Y
OLANDA SENT ME THE OLD WAY. IT TOOK MUCH

LONGER because of the narrow, twisting roads.

Often I had to slow almost to a stop to grope my way around a particularly sharp hairpin switchback, and once I spent nearly an hour behind an ancient jury-rigged truck laden with farm machinery so old it looked like a rust pile. Passing was next to impossible. At first, shimmering with anger and the brassy foretaste of triumph, I raged inwardly at her, adding this impossible route to the litany of her sins that sang in my head. But soon I saw she had literally given me the gift of Tuscany. I would have missed it on the Autostrada, in the hot, howling wash of the huge cars and trucks.

I came to Siena via the Chiantigiana, the eighteenth-century wine route from Florence. I picked it up at the Piazza Ferruci, following Yolie’s scrawled but surprisingly clear directions from the Piazza del Carmine, hands and teeth clenched so hard that the muscles there would ache for days after. I do not think I drew a deep,

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HILL TOWNS / 347

full breath until halfway there. Anger is a superb agent of focus; I was so angry when I got into the car that I saw, as if in a tunnel, only the streets and landmarks she had indicated on her map. The shrieking maelstrom of traffic around me in Oltarno might as well not have existed. I laid the map on the seat beside me and turned where it said to turn, exited where it said to exit, and saw with great and simple surprise that I was indeed in the Piazza Ferruci. It is always a matter of wonderment to me when maps work.

From there I picked up SS222 and bowled smoothly out of Florence following the promised blue signs to Greve and Siena. After Grassina, the countryside opened up and the entire panorama of Tuscany lay before me, hill after dusky blue-green hill, sweeping in rounded waves south to the horizon. I saw them clearly for the first time then, the
cittì di
colli
: the little cities on the hills. They crowned the soft peaks like cubes of pale brown sugar, red-roofed, cypress-guarded.

Their thick towers reached into the sky, already bluer here than in Florence or anywhere else in Italy I had seen. Each town was separate unto itself and its hill; each was the same as the next and yet profoundly not the same. Each was surrounded with a great surf of cultivated land, land in patch-works of green and gold and dusty pink, up to the very walls of the towns. Around these, and around the lone farms and villas that I saw on the nearer crags, the black cypresses stood tall and the elegant umbrella pines leaned close.

“Oh,” I said aloud, into the warm wind that flowed into the Opel’s window, bringing soft dusty earth and a dry sweetness like straw in the sun. “Oh!”

Just past a great baroque villa I saw the sign that said I was entering the Chianti Classico wine region. Just 348 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

past that, the road took a spectacular turn and swept down toward Greve. I saw the first of the great sunflower fields there.

Somehow I had not read or heard about them. I saw with the comforting sense of meeting old friends the low, tumbled vines and the silvery gray groves of the olive trees, and the dense emerald of the cornfields, even the pale gold of the fields of sedge. But nothing had prepared me for the sunflowers. They were incredible, fantastic, impressionists’

fantasies: flaming Van Gogh suns with hearts of pure red-orange fire. Acres of them swept away from the road, miles of them. Lava pouring down the slopes, settling in the tender, womanlike curves of the valleys, bisected by narrow road ribbons of black-green cypress. I stopped the car for the first time since the Piazza del Carmine and laid my head on the steering wheel and wept.

I knew the tears came from several places, several levels inside me. The top level was the pure, drowned shock of beauty, classic Stendhal. I cried with joy for the sunflowers.

But there were other, deeper levels: Joe’s betrayal lay there, and the sly ugliness of the story Yolanda had told me the night before, and the sheer repugnance of her behavior with the young man in the trattoria. Confusion and loss were there too, and the exhaustion of the long days of travel and the bleeding sense of myself leaking away, along with almost everything else that was familiar to me. Deep, abiding anger at Yolanda was there; I knew that would not leave me.

Loneliness for Joe was there, simple and childlike. Loneliness for Sam Forrest, not at all simple, not at all childlike. And above all, triumph was there. Mastery. Exultation that was so fierce I could only weep with it. I was actually doing this thing, making this drive, alone and HILL TOWNS / 349

with competence. In another hour or so I would have done it. At that moment there was virtually nothing in the world I could imagine that I could not do.

I wept because I had never felt such strength before.

I wept because I was no longer afraid and knew I never would be again, not with the great old fear. Not ever again with that.

I wiped my eyes on the heel of my palm and put the Opel into gear and drove on. I passed small cars coming in the opposite direction, saw farmers and herdsmen in the fields, families walking along the road. I waved to all of them, and they all waved back. Handsome; they were handsome people.

I saw many blondes. On that transcendent morning I thought them the most extraordinary people on earth, natural heirs to the enigmatic Etruscans whose playful, beautiful art I so loved. I felt a kind of kinship with them. I thought I understood why they chose to stay here on these old hills, to go into the cities outside Tuscany only with reluctance. Sam had told me that Tuscans suffered almost to a man from
campanilisimo
, intense loyalty to their own bell towers. I had laughed, but it made great good sense to me now. This spasmed old earth was safe. I felt the safety deep in my bones, humming up out of the very earth, pouring into me through the droning tires of the Opel. Other parts of Tuscany and Umbria might be—were, in fact—wild and inhospitable, but here, in the Chianti, there was a thick and indestructible felting of permanence over the bones of the earth. The old towns did not change. They were whole; they were not ag-gregates. They had been born whole, planned whole. Nothing was piecemeal, left to change. Each town had a purpose: to protect, to nurture. Each mile of earth had one: to bear fruit, to sustain. And the sheer beauty of the countryside 350 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

was as much a part of the towns as their brick and mortar.

I remembered reading, before we had come, that an early Tuscan pope had built a palace around a view, the first time in European architecture anyone had thought to do that.

I turned left at Castellina, into the very green heart of the Chianti district, passed through Radda and Gaiole, and swept down upon Siena on SS408. By the time I reached the small road that veered off into the hills just above Siena, where Yolie’s map said the Villa di Falconi should be, I was thrumming like a tuning fork with a kind of crazy rapture.

As the road climbed, I began to sing; I sang “La Marseillaise”

and “We Shall Overcome,” and “Waltzing Matilda.” I finished

“Waltzing Matilda” at the top of my lungs just as I swerved the car in between the stone gateposts of the Villa di Falconi and skidded it to a stop, spurting gravel.