The Scent Of Rosa's Oil (26 page)

An hour later, Isabel’s hair was untangled and, neatly combed, looked like a summer cloud. Gently, Madam C gathered it at the base of Isabel’s head in a round chignon. With her new hairdo and dressed in one of Madam C’s light chamber vests, Isabel, everyone agreed, looked ten years younger. “I don’t know about this,” Isabel mumbled, looking at herself in Madam C’s mirror. “I think I’d like to have my black vest back.”

Margherita coughed. “I have bad news,” she said. “We washed it at the fountain with our clothes, using the soap we always use for our wash, and it lost most of its color. Right now, it looks more like a stained rag than anything anyone would want to wear.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken it off,” Isabel moaned.

“Must be a magic thing,” Stella whispered.

“We’ll get you a black vest, Isabel,” Maddalena reassured her. “I promise.”

To console her, Stella took Isabel to her room, where she showed her all her amulets and talked about her witchcraft, which she had learned as a child from her mother, a woman from Africa almost two meters tall. “What about you, Isabel?” she asked. “Where did you learn your witchcraft?”

“Perfumes are not witchcraft,” Isabel explained calmly. “They’re an art. Do you know the difference between witchcraft and art?”

Stella shook her head.

“Witchcraft is made up of rituals that come from popular beliefs. Lots of people can perform the same rituals. Art,” she said, placing a hand on her chest, “comes from your heart. No one can imitate it or take it from you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Stella argued with a friendly smile. “But,” she added, “I know for sure that no one will ever be able to imitate
you
, my dear.”

Because of the proximity of Rosa’s room to the kitchen, Isabel ended up spending time with Antonia during the afternoon. Despite her initial mistrust, Antonia grew fond of Isabel in a very short time, helped by the fact that Isabel volunteered to share with her the recipes of her soups, which Antonia gradually included in the Luna menu, gaining the approval of all the Luna people. Isabel never told Antonia, or anyone else for that matter, about the white powder she had twice sprinkled on Rosa’s soup and, in a few instances, on her own. It was opium. She had bought a handful of it years earlier from the Spanish sailors who brought her the eucalyptus leaves, and used it following Azul’s teachings about the prodigious healing qualities of poppy seeds and their by-products when used sparingly and on the right occasions. In gratitude for the shared recipes, Antonia cooked for Isabel her best vegetarian dishes:
farinata, torta pasqualina
, and
torta di bietole
. Overall, Isabel blended into the Luna’s life gracefully.

“With Isabel in the kitchen, it’s like having Rosa here all over again,” commented Margherita.

“The difference is,” Madam C said, “we don’t need to watch for her to stay out of the parlor.”

“She knows better.” Stella giggled.

“Do you think that Isabel understands completely what’s going on here?” Maddalena asked. “She seems so out of this world.”

“Isabel,” Madam C said in a grave tone, “knows a lot more about life than you and I can ever imagine.”

“But she hasn’t left her distillery in sixty years,” Margherita said doubtfully.

Madam C nodded and smiled. “That’s the beauty of it, my dear.”

The only accident involving Isabel and the Luna clients happened on a stormy night, while the parlor was packed and the clients particularly loud. Isabel stepped into the parlor from the kitchen around midnight, shoeless and in a dark gown. She looked right and left at the girls and the clients; then, with no hesitation, crossed the room under everyone’s stunned eyes. From across the counter, she tugged at Madam C’s sleeve twice. “The wind may have broken a window back there,” she said, then walked away before Madam C could recover from the surprise. All the men in the room gaped at Isabel as she passed by. “Good Lord,” one of them grimaced.

“Is she a ghost?” said another.

Stella took Isabel’s arm. “Don’t be bothered by what they say,” she told her as she pushed her back in the kitchen. “I know what ghosts look like. Nothing like you, dear. Keep this door closed now, and go to sleep.”

In the parlor, the men wouldn’t stop talking. “What was that, Madam C?” a sailor asked, rubbing a hand on Margherita’s hips. “Someone you save for a special treat?”

Madam C gave him one of her icy glares. “She’s my mother,” she said. “Don’t you dare make fun of her,
capito
?”

There was an exception to Isabel’s idyllic relationship with the Luna people: Cesare Cortimiglia. “I don’t like him,” Isabel told Antonia one day. “He smokes like a chimney and never looks you in the eyes.”

Cesare Cortimiglia never looked Isabel in the eyes because he was afraid of her. He had heard the shopkeepers talking about her many times during his days of sitting on Piazza Banchi, and despite his attempt to convince himself that there were no such things as witches, he was never capable of overcoming his fear. He had arrived at the Luna a few days ahead of Isabel, in the company of Madam C, carrying one suitcase and, with his long beard and red-rimmed eyes, looking like a creature from another world. “Girls,” Madam C had said after summoning everyone in the parlor, “I believe you all know my friend Cesare. He’ll live at the Luna, in my quarters, as of today.” She turned around and smiled at the still disoriented former mayor. “Please make him feel at home.”

He climbed the stairs with weary steps. As he put down his suitcase in Madam C’s bedroom, he looked at the bed with melancholy eyes. “So many memories…” he whispered, then smiled as he saw himself lying naked on those sheets, surrounded by a flock of young girls, celebrating his farewell to the brothels. He blinked as he noticed, on the nightstand, his beloved briar pipe. All caught up in the fever of his love for Rosa, and later in his dementia with the poetry and the handkerchief, he had forgotten all about it, until Madam C had mentioned it in his living room earlier that week. Ever since the mishap on Rosa’s birthday, he hadn’t had a single smoke. He took the pipe gingerly, as if it were a jewel. “Here,” Madam C said, handing him a box of extra-long matches. “I took good care of your pipe, because I knew you’d be coming someday to reclaim it. There’s Cuban tobacco in it, ready to be smoked.” He took the matches and with a flick of his wrist struck one of them and dipped the flame in the bowl of the pipe. As he began to puff, a look of contentment filled his face. Madam C, who hadn’t allowed anyone to smoke in her rooms since the end of the mayor’s farewell marathon, watched him and said nothing at all. His only chore later that day was to cut his chest-long, matted beard and shave.

“Now I can recognize you,” Madam C said as they both looked in a mirror at his hairless face. “You haven’t changed much on the outside.”

He thought a moment. “I had a battle going on inside. I don’t know myself anymore.”

“We’ll figure you out, mayor,” Madam C said, taking his hand in hers. “What else have we left to do?”

He asked, “May I call you Clotilde?”

“Why?” she said, surprised.

“I like it better than Madam C.”

“You told me you liked Madam C. I remember your exact words. You said, ‘I like it. It’s exotic. I’m already turned on.’”

“I lied,” he said. “May I call you Clotilde?”

Madam C took a step back. “What else did you lie about?”

“May I?”

She pursed her lips then, spoke in a serious voice. “Only in private. Don’t you ever call me that in front of the girls.”

Cesare nodded and took a seat by Madam C’s fireplace.

She stood in front of him. “Tell me, Cesare, are you happy to be here? Or are you here only because I dragged you out of your house?”

He waited a while. “I’m not sure that I know how to define happiness,” he said gravely, staring at the
graniglia
floor. “I know I feel like I woke up from a bad dream, and I have this certainty I can’t explain that the bad dream will not return.” He looked her in the eyes. “And when I look at you, I’m at peace. Is this happiness?”

Madam C lowered herself into a chair next to him. “I guess so, Cesare. I guess so.”

As life at the Luna settled into new routines with new people, Rosa and Renato took care of the distillery and the flower room, both badly in need of sprucing up after Isabel had occupied them uninterruptedly for sixty-one years. The idea was to make the space usable as a store and sell it before Isabel’s departure for Costa Rica. First, Rosa and Renato boxed all the oil bottles and brought them to the Luna, together with Isabel’s old rocking chair. Then they scrubbed the floors, washed the walls, threw away the old mattresses and the worn-out sheets, cleaned and disinfected the stove, and left the windows and the glass door open day and night to get rid of the stubborn odors. They enlisted the help of Santina, who scrubbed the place once more with a mixture of water, alcohol, and Marseille soap. Finally, following Isabel’s advice, they lit five bergamot candles and vaporized pine oil. The neighbors watched the cleaning operations vigilantly, taking due notice of Isabel’s absence as well as of the absence of the steam. Their conclusion was unanimous and was passed on from house to house in whispers and loud shouts: “The witch is dead.” Infuriated by the gossip and exasperated by the curious looks, Rosa hung a sign on the booth wall:
Isabel is not a witch
, the sign said,
and she’s not dead either.
The neighbors shrugged. “She’s dead,” they went on saying, “with prostitutes at her bedside.”

One week after the cleaning process had been completed, a merchant offered to buy the booth for little more than half its market value. “It’s my last offer,” he told Giacomo, who was handling the sale on Isabel’s behalf. “No one in his right mind would pay a higher price for a space known to have hosted a stinking sorceress for more than half a century. Take it or leave it.” After a group consultation in the Luna parlor, the unanimous decision was to accept the offer and sell. Isabel drew a cross at the bottom of the papers with a shaky hand and let out a long, heavy-hearted sigh.

“Well,” Madam C said with a rare relaxed smile, “now that we took care of business and Isabel is a rich woman, there’s only one thing left to do before she, Renato, and Rosa leave us.” She paused a moment and looked at the eight people—Maddalena, Margherita, Stella, Rosa, Renato, Giacomo, Isabel, and Cesare—standing around her. “Party.”

There was an awkward silence. “You can’t be serious,” Margherita said, squinting her eyes.

Maddalena gazed at the people in the room. “I don’t know about you,” she said with a long face, “but I’ve had enough of partying at the Luna.”

“Oh, come on,” Madam C urged. “Would someone please be happy around here? Let’s not call it a party. Let’s call it a…family dinner.” She waited for a response. “What do you say?”

The party/family dinner was set for the upcoming Wednesday, a day everyone had agreed on because it was three days before the ship departure and would work well with Stella’s fear of Fridays. “And there will be no
libeccio
blowing,” Margherita said, “so hopefully nothing will go wrong this time.”

On that Wednesday, the only outsiders at the party were Giacomo, who had returned to work and to leading the longshoremen’s political battles; Renato, still struggling with his lack of memory but better able to come to terms with it, mostly thanks to Rosa; Marco, in brand-new, clean clothes; and Roberto Passalacqua, paler and shyer than ever. Everyone else at the gathering lived or, in Rosa’s case, had lived at the Luna. When Rosa arrived that day and stepped into the parlor, she saw Cesare Cortimiglia for the first time since the day he had left Piazza Banchi. He was standing by the counter, talking to Maddalena. She looked at him from a distance, unable to identify that deeply wrinkled, red-eyed old man with the man who had taken off his clothes and fallen asleep in her bed on the night of her sixteenth birthday. As for Cesare, he gave Rosa a quick glance, then turned away from her and poured Madam C a glass of Barbera. Isabel, in a brand-new black vest purchased for her by the Luna girls, was seated on her rocking chair in the middle of the room.

“See?” Rosa told her. “You can go to parties after all.”

“I guess,” Isabel said. She paused a moment. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“What?” Madam C asked.

“Going again on a ship across the ocean.”

“I can’t believe I walked into your booth a year ago,” Rosa said. “I was so afraid.”

“Attention, everybody,” Margherita shouted. “I’d like to read a poem for Renato and Rosa.”

“Oh no,” Cesare moaned, cupping his hands over his ears.

“I thought you had come to like poetry,” Madam C said, amused.

“Only because I was miserable and alone,” he replied. “Now that I have you,” he added, taking her hand, “the hell with poetry and poets.”

Despite Cesare’s protest, Margherita read one of Petrarca’s most famous poems:

At the end, as everyone applauded, there were knocks on the door. “I have a surprise,” Madam C said. She let in a small man with a limp and a young boy who was carrying two heavy bags. “This man,” she said, “is a photographer, and I asked him to come here to take pictures of us.”