Through the Looking Glass

AS THEY TURNED NORTH off the familiar winding road past Montepulciano and Pienza, a tractor pulled onto the highway just ahead, slowing Gianni’s Land Rover to a crawl. This was almost a mirror image of a similar moment with Luke on the road from Tarquinia. Gianni slipped quietly along, almost nudging the tractor’s rear, until the farmer pulled aside. The Land Rover sailed past, and on through the looking glass, Clare thought: the countryside was transformed as well, everything that had been green and new was now tawny and bristling, the fields dotted with fat jelly-rolls of hay, cloud shadows carving deep purple canyons into the stubby gold.

The road wound past small villages and ruined castles and bosky groves, then further fields — such variation and repetition, like some lovely musical arrangement. She decided to let her concerns about meeting Gianni’s family drop behind. She would take Gianni’s word that the beautiful mother — and the stepfather stolen from a previous long-established marriage — would be at the sea.

They wound down into a farther valley, where tender shoots of rice were poking up and the morning light was steamy, then patchwork fields replaced the paddies and red-tiled roofs dotted the hills. “What amazes me about this country is that there is so much country,” she said, aware that she’d been silent for too long.

“From my ancestral tower,” he said, “I will present you with a most beautiful panorama.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of any tower.”

“Oh we have very good defences at La Celta.”

She asked what exactly they defended. He turned another of those fond, unsettling looks on her. “Mainly we are involved in bringing back what has been lost. You will see.”

Then he slammed on the brakes. “Aiii, I have allowed myself to be distracted.”

A leather portfolio slid against the back of her seat. Another of those fine, cared-for possessions of his, she thought as she reached back to secure its location; like his shoes, the aged leather of the case was polished to a buttery lustre, revealing an innate sense of the worth of well-worn things. All very well, if there was someone around to do the buffing up. All very well, if you could suddenly spring on someone else the fact of an ancestral tower.

He reversed, pulled in through a gate where stone pillars held urns of geraniums, started up a drive between a double row of cypresses, took a hairpin turn, and then another and another. When the drive levelled she saw, through a leafy screen on the downhill side, a jumble of buildings with a battlemented tower. He turned off the cypress-lined drive onto one that twisted downward. Some minutes later, they drove through an archway into a flagged courtyard with a well at its centre and a stone animal rearing on a plinth, its features so worn away it could be a rodent of some sort.

Our ancestral mouse?

He parked in a farther courtyard. Two big whitish dogs burst from metal-studded doors. Gianni sprang out to embrace them, introduce them. “This is Rudolfo, and here we have Charles, because we thought he had an English temperament.” The dog stuck his nose in Clare’s crotch, then looked up with mild eyes of the same deep amber as his master’s.

His own apartment, Gianni said, was at the top of that tower. He was vague about what lay behind the many doors as they climbed up, fifty-two steps, light filtering through occasional arrow slits.

When they stepped into a darkened hallway at the top, Clare had an impression of terracotta floors, ceiling beams as thick as barrels. A pinkish glow filtered from a room where there must have been an open shutter; she caught a glimpse of a rosy quilt, a doll.

He led her up one more set of stairs to a landing, then through studded doors into a space almost completely dark. With a conjurer’s flourish, he went around opening the shutters on low square windows with stone sills as wide as sidewalks. She barely had time to form an impression — thick rugs, a fireplace, a trestle table with perhaps a kitchen alcove behind — before he steered her through arched doors onto a narrow balcony hovering over a vertical drop. Far below, a slim river wound silvery through patterned fields. A train that looked like a toy was pulling into a tiny tile-roofed train station at the river’s edge. Beyond were many layers of hills, each one paler than the last, then beyond those were the deep blue mountain ridges.

“Wow.”

“When I return here, I think always ‘wow’ as well.”

She asked what those towers were, clustered in the near distance. That was Siena, he said. In the evening, when the sunset caught it, she would see that the whole town gave off a rosy glow from the light it had absorbed all day in its stones.

“You never told me your ancestral acres lorded it over Siena.”

“So you like it, then? My kingdom?” He looked almost apprehensive. “Now here is something we must perform.” He swooped her up like a bride. “I regret I did not carry you up the stairs. But now I formally welcome you, Clare Livingston, to my kingdom where all is yours to command!”

SHE PULLED AWAY SO that she was standing again, stung by how foolish she was, after everything he’d explained about his marriage. There were rules to this sort of thing, lines she had to walk. She must be careful not to step over.

“So tell me, what’s the story of this place?” she said quickly, to cover the awkwardness of not letting him carry her over the threshold. “How come it’s called La Celta?”

He would come up with something foolish, she knew, to ease them over that awkwardness, which of course he had caught.

She was right. His eyes flashed mischief. He asked if she knew the famous medieval English soldier of fortune, Sir John Hawkwood. There had been many other such companies of mercenary soldiers, he said, who had come here to spread much terror, “but the most dreaded was our Celt, who came with a band that played terrible instruments and all wore skirts, and occupied our castle before moving on to Verona. There he took the family name of the Montecchi, just to blend in. You have surely heard of the feud between the clans of the Montecchi and the Capuleti, and the tragedy your Shakespeare later stole?”

“You’re absurd!”

“You do not believe? Very well, I will show you to your quarters,” — much fake Scottish rolling of the r’s — “and then prevail upon you to take a spot of lunch.”

But that would mean a trek back down to his car, while in one of those apartments bordering the courtyard, she’d decided for certain now, the Senior DiGiustinis lurked and spied.

“I’m not at all hungry, actually.”

“In Italy we always must eat our midday meal, or we will not have the verve afterwards for making love.”

“It’s un-Canadian, though. We think it’s like swimming. You could sink.”

“Very well. As you are my guest, we must do everything in the manner your countrymen would approve.”

So when she woke up much later, in a bed almost the size of Nova Scotia, she was starved.

SHE HEARD HIM TALKING in the other room. She recognized the already familiar rhythms of a phone conversation with his Mammà. A few times even on the drive here there’d been a small twitter hardly louder than a bat squeak from his pocket, and he’d pulled out the phone and checked the number. She’d come to recognize the mother-conversation tone: humorous, indulgent. These chats were never short.

Clare stretched out in the vast bed, which Gianni claimed had once been the playing field of a Spanish prince. The bed had remained in the tower bedroom since the days when Charles the Fifth had occupied Siena; as he explained this, Gianni had climbed three steps on the far side of the footboard and stood on a little carvedwood ledge there, saying that this was where the Spanish prince had delivered bedtime sermons to his spouse.

“And I suppose Juliet slept here with her Scottish lad as well?” she’d laughed, from the acreage of silk-covered feathers below.

“You do not believe in my Scottish heritage? Permit me to show you, then, my Highland fling.” He’d pulled off the white silk shorts, popped the final button on his shirt, done a swan dive that landed him beside her on the cloud-like layers.

Now, in the last light filtering through closed shutters, Clare saw that the bedroom held much more dark carved wood. She couldn’t help wondering what scenes those brooding chests and cupboards had witnessed. At the far end of the room, a set of steps led to a trap door in the ceiling. Gianni had said they would go up onto the parapet later to see the stars; he said that here, in his kingdom, there were different constellations altogether.

She found a bathroom through a set of studded doors, a vast marble sarcophagus with polished brass taps that gave out lots of hot water. He found her there and brought a long red flannel robe and wrapped her up. “You smell so good.”

“You too. What have you been up to out there? You smell of bacon.”

“I have been starting a little spaghetti carbonara; I hope this will be fine. I do not have a lot of supplies.”

The kitchen table held a basket with tomatoes and a clutch of basil, and a round of Tuscan bread. Someone called Manfredo had brought the tomatoes from a vegetable garden out beyond the battlemented walls.

“Does Manfredo bring your fireplace wood up all those fifty-two steps as well?”

“Sometimes, sì.” A vague twist of the hands, as if refusing to limit the possibilities — sometimes carried by Manfredo, and sometimes by himself, and perhaps sometimes by flocks of doves?

The window looked down into the dark courtyard where a wrought-iron lamp threw a faint gleam on the cobbles. She wondered which of the shuttered sets of windows might hold the senior DiGiustini.

She asked what had happened to his Land Rover. He said that Manfredo had taken it to wash, then to the stable.

Of course, she thought.

As they ate, he told her how the place had fallen almost to ruin when his stepfather, Tomasso, bought it.

“You mean these are not actually your ancestral acres?”

He laughed, spreading his hands, letting that particular ancestry escape. “But I am the one who is bringing everything back into shape.” He was very proud of what he had accomplished; for example, to have all the apartments around the castello brought into modern comfort for his workers.

“Your workers live in the buildings around the courtyard?”

“Yes, many of them,” he said. “Around here is generally much life, though this evening I think you have put an enchantment on.” He said that next day he would show her all that he had done to reclaim the heritage of the place. “For imagine! Tomasso even wanted to turn the castello into apartments for Americans to rent! What does he care, when he can still have his fine private life up at the villa.”

“At the villa?”

“Yes, yes, you will see.” He waved his hands, in that vague airy way, in the direction of the hill behind.