Over the next two years she became a confirmed, if highly critical, Italian, mired in the present and in the material. Each morning she had espresso for breakfast at the café, along with a hard roll and quantities of butter. Sarani did not allow the usual Italian long lunch, so they had French baguettes with ham and cheese and a carafe of red wine. The biggest meal was dinner, pasta to start, a steak or piece of veal, and then perhaps a little gelato, only enough to satisfy her craving. She developed a small circle of friends—one writer, another, a young woman who worked in her mother’s tailoring establishment, the owner of a T-shirt shop, and a man with a guided tour business of the Roman ruins in the area. They met every Thursday night for dinner, and the two who had spouses refused to include them, since they all liked to drink and swap scandalous stories. Jenna adopted a jogging course through the hills and over onto the beach, so her weight never became quite the problem she expected. In fact, she grew much leaner, and she became a student of Italian style. She dressed with significantly more flair, always wearing silver bangles on her arm, and even while price was no longer an object, she stuck to dark skirts, slim pants, fitted tops that showed off her breasts and shoulders.
Finally Jenna’s hair began to make sense to her, and she no longer stared unbelieving into the mirror. She liked this young woman who looked back at her; she had a different personality altogether. Her life resembled a masquerade party at which she was the only guest. Other people thought it all real, while she could feel the thrill of being hidden. In some respects, anything she wanted to do was fine, since she was no longer her real self. Perhaps the best, most promising aspect of her life was that she learned to laugh, a lot. Watching Italian women day after day, she saw that they had a quality of joy that came from within. It was aggressive, relentless charm, and she decided to imitate them. They smiled all the time and laughed at the silliest things. It seemed like a system to live by, to pretend to be some way, and then she would become that way. To a certain extent, she did.
Inevitably romance entered her life, first in the form of a young professor of mathematics in Turin who came often to visit his aging parents. He spoke beautiful English because he had taught for some years at UCLA, quite the brilliant young man, and she enjoyed him very much, enjoyed the unfettered sex too, but he was occasionally unfaithful, and she did not like that. He talked endlessly about Mama, which bored her, then infuriated her. She could see the fat grandmas always presiding over their broods of grandchildren, especially at the beach. Older women would sit in a round heap of clothes, parceling out bread and sweets to the humming little bodies plopping toward them, until at last corralling them for an even bigger lunch. When did the eating stop? The grown sons would hover there, and she grew to detest the infantilizing process going on all around her.
If there was one thing she became expert on, it was the juvenile Italian male, led first and foremost by the boys at the atelier, who schemed endlessly over their pranks. One day they strung a tarp across the door to the studio, and because they knew Sarani walked always with his head straight toward the ceiling as if thinking higher thoughts, never really looking where he was going. He ran straight into the thing and almost fell down. No angel himself, Sarani lied to his wife and his mistress and was always trolling for women on the side, to whom he lied as well. None of this ever fazed him and when caught out in one of these lies, he began to lie some more, often in front of Jenna. Then he would wink at her in complicity and light up another cigarette.
Jenna’s more important affair began with a lawyer in town, Stefano, who also had a Mama, but he kept her in check somehow. In his late forties, he was really too old for her, at least that’s how she thought of him, but he had the fatal Italian charm, seemed faithful, and told her every piece of gossip worth knowing in the town. At some point marriage became an issue, but Jenna couldn’t even contemplate such a move. Though she spoke good Italian and lived an entirely Italian life, still in her penthouse apartment in the hills looking down at the Mediterranean, she hungered for all things American, not the least of which was a hamburger. Her one extravagant habit became many a weekend jaunt to Venice to eat at Harry’s Bar, specifically to consume their hamburgers and drink their martinis. She loved that meal, the perfect juicy burger with cheese and lettuce and tomato and the straight up icy cold vodka. Weird how it satisfied her, as if a bit of her life in New York existed right here in her adopted country. She took Stefano with her often on these jaunts, and he seemed amazingly content to be kept in such style at the Gritti Palace, continuous meals at Harry’s. Another manifestation of Mama, she knew, and one that would no doubt worsen the longer they stayed together.
The four years she’d been absent from her native country had passed by quickly. Though her life in Italy had a routine, a smoothness, without many worries, only small ones, still, the larger ones loomed. She very much perceived herself as a person in hiding. Even though she visited Matthieu once every few months, and he continued to do work for the count, nothing further was said regarding art theft, no investigators from either France or the US appeared, undoubtedly consumed with bigger international worries. In the dark as to Inti’s doings, Jenna was nevertheless grateful that more serious issues must now occupy him.
In the later days of December, just before Christmas of 2003, Jenna and Sarani sat before a late nineteenth-century oil painting by a minor painter, Giametto, but the beauty of the piece enthralled them both. A young woman sat at a small table, her head bent down as if in sorrow. On the table rested a teacup and a bowl of flowers, red and yellow. The girl’s hand brushed her cheek, and the other clutched at an astonishing blue robe, deep, dark blue with tiny flecks of golden paint. Therein lay the problem, the texture of the robe. Small bumps, like grains of sand, popped up all over the blue paint, a texture not evident in any other part of the work and obviously not intentional.
“I just saw a paper on this. It’s the lead soaps, a reaction of the paint to fatty acids in the oil binder,” Sarani said.
“Not altogether unattractive though.” Jenna and her “maestro” talked often about the chemistry of oil painting, and by now she had mastered a number of aspects of the subject, but this new intersection between art and science posed a problem for both of them.
“Shall we try to change what’s happening? There are many things that happen to a work over time, and the cracks and bruises and movement of the paint, they constitute the life of the piece. What we call ‘inherent vice.’” He smiled over at her. “A facelift is nice, but should we do it?”
“I need one of those.”
“You’re young, you’re beautiful,” and at this he placed his hand lightly on her back and rubbed it slowly in small circles. Out of the cool darkness of the studio, Sarani’s wife advanced upon them. “Oh, Sylvia,” he started and jumped up. “Ciao, Bella, mi amore.” He rushed to kiss her, but the tall, elegant, black-haired woman had already frowned at her husband and glared at Jenna.
Jenna stood up, feeling helpless and ridiculous in a situation made, of course, much worse since the man beside her engaged in chronic philandering, how much known to the wife she had no idea. But she tried to smile several times at the irate older woman, getting nothing but a cold stare in return. Sarani gathered up his coat and moved as if to guide his wife away, but Jenna stepped in front of him. She took the angry woman by the arm and led her onto the patio outside. “Please, Signora Sarani.”
“What do you want?” The woman looked down at her watch and then shook her wrist at her. “I am late.”
“Please, what you saw, there was nothing to it. We were only looking at the painting. I’m just a student here, and he was trying to make me feel better about my work. I need you to know this. There is nothing else going on.” Jenna spoke in excellent Italian.
The still flustered older woman softened, and a smile broke across her face. “Oh, thank you, my dear. I worry, you know, I worry.”
“Yes, we all worry.” Signora Sarani bent down and kissed her first on the left, then on the right cheek, and this was what the Maestro saw as he walked outside to find them. He wondered if his assistant, his best student so far, had actually told his wife something of his doings, but when he saw the smiles all around, he thought no, neither one would betray him, not ever. It was the first article of faith in his own private canon without which all restoration would stop, including the personal.