“The Princess in the Tower” is the second of our Rapunzel retellings, each very different from the other. Here, Elizabeth A. Lynn takes the humorous high road, while Gregory Frost, in “The Root of the Matter,” traveled a darker path. The following version of the fairy tale of a girl locked in a remote tower is a clever and unusual one, and thoroughly delightful.
Travelers rarely go to I______. Few outside the O_____ Valley even know of its existence. Among those who do it is a closely guarded secret.
To get to I______ one must travel on the steamer up the coast to a location just north of Venice. At a certain lagoon (the name of which I will not divulge), one disembarks, hires a car (commonly an ancient Ford pickup, more recently a Bronco or a Jeep) and driver, and continues northeast. Barely passable roads traverse hideous tracts of marshland populated largely by mosquitoes, gnats, and other biting insects. After V_____, the land wrinkles into scabrous rocky hillsides. The scenery, for those who care about such things, consists mostly of goats and scraggly trees. At C_____, one’s driver becomes a negotiator, haggling with the folk who live along the tributaries of the river, who would rather rob you than work. (Experienced travelers usually arm themselves with extra pairs of boots and a box filled with bone-handled hunting knives, especially those from Finland, which are much prized here.) However, once through the pass at O_____ such inconveniences vanish. The harsh chill of the mountains seems to fall away, replaced by warmth and softness and the delicious smells of salsicce and bacon and prosciutto, of onions sautéing in oils, of garlic sauce without compare, faintly undercut by the pungent, rich, salty scent of sausage factories. Here one may dismiss one’s guide and move confidently across the valley to I_____.
Once (so our story goes) in I_____ there lived a beautiful and wealthy widow named Favorita Z_____. She was a woman of substance, as they say, possessed of land, a large villa, and a fine herd of pigs. Her husband, whose name is not germane to this story, had survived the war (and indeed had prospered through it) but then, unfairly, had died young, leaving his widow grieving but with a home, an excellent stud boar, a well-endowed wine cellar, and his legacy, their only issue, a daughter.
She was christened Margheritina, after the pasta, which, everyone knows, looks like funghini only larger. This is common practice in I_____; children are named Pericatello or Millefiora or Anellina. Even the priest has no objection though I was told of one priest who refused to baptize a child Ditalino, saying it was sacrilegious.
Favorita, herself the youngest of six girls, had feared she was barren, and doted on the child, and was determined that Margheritina would grow up to be worthy of her heritage and to make a great marriage. As an infant Margheritina was distinguished by the rich buttery color of her hair (but then, her great-grandmother Mafalda’s hair had been so blond as to be nearly white) and by the fact that she was, compared to other babes of I_____, oddly thin. At the time, no one thought much of it, though Favorita observed that she would turn from the breast quite early, well before one would think she had been sated.
As Margheritina grew older, those about her remarked with some concern that she did not seem to eat very much. She would push away from the plate while others were only into their second portions and upon being questioned she would merely say, “I’m full.” She also had a strange aversion to sweets. The cook would prepare a creamy zabaglione, a sweet peach ice cream, a fresh fig tart, or even a chocolate soufflé with the finest bittersweet chocolate stirred into the unbleached flour, only to have the child say, “that’s too sweet for me.” Her mother cajoled her, her aunts frowned, her cousins teased, but Margheritina remained adamant. At seven, which is when the girl-children of I_____ begin to blossom toward the rosy lushness that informs their adult beauty, she was skinny and pale, “Thin as a dinner plate,” as they say in the valley.
“Favorita, something’s not normal about that girl,” Regina, her mother’s oldest sister, said bluntly.
But Favorita would not hear it, insisting the child was simply developing late, and that she would soon be as buxom and beauteous as all the woman of her family were, for not one, she pointed out, was under one hundred kilos (or, if you prefer American measure, two hundred twenty pounds), and hadn’t their mother told them stories of their great-grandmother Mafalda, who was nearly twenty-four before she reached her full girth? And she ordered Teresa, the cook, to feed Margheritina six times a day, small portions, and only the most delicate dishes, capellini, foratini fini, semi di mela, perline microscopici, prepared with the freshest of vegetables or fish, sauced with cheese or cream or butter, and spiced to make the angels weep.
But it all made no difference: the girl continued to pick at her food. Her nickname in the village school was Carrotshanks, not because of her coloring but because of her leanness. At twelve, the age the girls of I_____ begin to develop that heft and softness of flesh, that billowy, cushiony bulk which their men so prize, Margheritina was narrow hipped and flat breasted, bony as a Tuscan cat.
One blithe April day, midway through Margheritina’s thirteenth year, her uncle, the widow’s brother-in-law Luciano, came to the villa, sent by Regina to discuss their niece’s troubling condition. Luciano had not wanted to come. He disliked exertion, and interference (he felt) into so private a matter would only make his sister-in-law annoyed with him. Moreover, he did not believe the situation could be that bad.
But Regina had insisted. “Go. You have not seen the girl since Christmas,” she said. “When you do you will understand.”
So Luciano climbed into his Ford pickup and drove to his sister-in-law’s villa. As fate would have it, he arrived just as Margheritina, seated on the terrace under the awning, was finishing the second of her six daily meals. The cook had prepared a tasty plate of vermicelli all’alba: sliced truffles, butter and cheese over a mound of thin pasta.
Seeing her uncle, Margheritina rose politely to greet him. Luciano barely managed to suppress his shudder. She had a pleasant enough face (all the women of her family were fine-featured) and excellent height, and her eyes, which were dark blue, and her hair, which was golden and lustrous and fell nearly to her knees, were really quite lovely. But she was thin as a skeleton; one could see her wristbones through her skin! (He himself had never seen his wife’s wristbones. She was plump and luscious as a Piacenzian squab.)
He was quite shocked. Nevertheless, he spoke kindly to the girl, inquiring about her health and appetite.
“Thank you, Uncle, I am very well,” she said, pushing the half-filled plate away. “Would you like some pasta? I’m sure there is plenty.”
Normally, Luciano would not have refused such an offer. But he was so upset by his niece’s appearance that he had lost his appetite, a rare occurrence indeed.
“No, thank you, my dear child,” he said. “I came to speak with your mother.” And he entered the house, where he encountered his sister-in-law, dressed as was proper, in black, drowsing on the sofa.
“Luciano, what a surprise,” the widow said, blinking. “How lovely to see you. What brings you to my home? Would you like bread, cheese, some wine?” Then, becoming sensitive to Luciano’s agitation, the widow woke more fully, and struggled to her feet. “There is nothing wrong, is there? Is all well with Regina and the children?”
“Regina and the children are fine,” Luciano said. “But there is indeed something wrong. My God, Favorita, you must take that girl to the doctor. She is most assuredly not normal. My daughter Anella, at ten, is twice her size. This condition could be serious.”
It took some argument before Favorita could be persuaded to follow her brother-in-law’s advice. But at last, convinced and unhappy, she enlisted the aid of another brother-in-law, Vittorio, who owned a Ford sedan. In it she brought her daughter to be examined by the village doctor.
Doctor V_____ had heard about the child, mostly from his wife Angela, whose sister Lumachina was married to Mario the Trout (so called because his favorite meal, beyond question, was that soup called ochi di trota, trout’s-eye soup). Gravely he accepted the gift which Favorita brought him (a bottle of Barbera and three pounds of sausage) and gravely he examined the girl, without demanding that she do more than remove her stiff, high-necked cotton shift, while her mother watched tensely. His gentle questions elicited from the girl information that she felt perfectly well, that she rarely ate one portion at any meal, and that yes, she had begun her menses.
After the examination he told Margheritina to go outside, where she was instantly encircled by a small crowd of delighted urchins, who speculated aloud about the fatal, wasting disease she had obviously contracted.
“She is small for her age, I know,” the widow said defensively, “but she will grow. Her great-grandmother Mafalda was twenty-four before she reached her full girth.”
Doctor V_____ shook his head. “No,” he said, with sad conviction, “she will not. I know the signs. Favorita, you must be brave.”
The widow gasped. “Is she dying, then?”
“We are all dying,” Doctor V_____ said in his most profound tones.
The widow snorted. “You sound like a priest, Bruno V_____. Tell me what is wrong with my daughter.”
“It is a very rare condition, mostly seen in cities, and most common among the daughters of the rich,” said Doctor V_____. Really he had no idea what was wrong with the girl. He was perfectly at ease sewing up the gashes the men suffered when some fool came hungover to the sausage factory, or setting the occasional broken bone, but the ills of women he left to the midwives and the specialists at the hospital in O_____. But a dim memory of something he had once heard, that the daughters of rich Americans sometimes starved themselves in order to be thought beautiful, came to his mind. “It is called anorexia nervosa, and there is no cure.”
“Is it contagious?” the widow asked.
“No. But”—Doctor V_____ lowered his voice portentously—“it affects the brain.”
This was truly awful. Favorita actually trembled, which the doctor found most attractive. He went on to explain that women afflicted with this disease often fell into melancholy and did inexplicable, destructive things. “It would be safer for her to be at home, of course.”
“Why, where else would she be?” said the widow, who did not approve of this modern idea of women working in factories or as teachers, to say nothing of those poor women whose husbands allowed them to work as government clerks. They spent all day in public places and could be seen by anybody! “Except for school, and church.”
“No school,” said the doctor. “How old is she? Thirteen? They” (he meant those despised representatives of authority, the social workers) “won’t care if she drops out now.”
So Favorita informed the school that her daughter was ill and would have to leave. The school received this news with disinterest; the teachers were tired of chiding the other children for their malice toward the skinny, ugly one who was, indeed, quite bright—she could read and write, and had spirit and some imagination. “It’s a pity,” said Cettina, who had taught Margheritina from her fifth to her tenth year. “She would have made a good wife for some ambitious man.” But she knew very well that would never happen.
Margheritina herself, though her mother did not ask how she felt, was not sorry to leave the schoolyard. Though she was not, by nature, either mean or melancholic, the torments and taunts of the other children had begun to rub on her nerves. She observed their appetites (and those of her relatives) with awe and the increasing majesty of the other girls in the village with wonder tinged with envy. At home she prayed to the Virgin to forgive her. She knew envy was a sin, but still, comparing her own meager arms and legs to Peppina or Tortellina’s robust limbs, and her scrawny chest with its two bumps to Ninetta’s, she felt that the Virgin would understand. After all, hadn’t She sometimes wished wistfully for a more normal household, a lusty husband instead of a dried-up old man, and a son who chose to stay at home, instead of preaching in the markets and disturbing the proper order of things.
So she went home. There she stayed, mostly alone, though her mother was there, and old Teresa who cleaned and cooked. The aunts visited, of course, and with them the cousins, under strict orders to refrain from teasing, which made them walk about Margheritina softly and speak in hushed tones, as if visiting some national monument. There were a few books in the house besides the New Testament, for her father had had some pretensions to scholarship and once had a letter published in a newspaper in Padua. So she read them: Cipolla’s History, Pieri’s Venetian Tales, and an illustrated book of fairy stories, translated from the German. There were also cookbooks. Margheritina read them, too, not for the recipes, but in the hope that one of them might contain some simple explanation of her puzzling malady. She took long walks across her mother’s acreage, and held whimsical conversations with the pigs.
In July she celebrated her fourteenth birthday. Her uncle Luciano, feeling obscurely guilty over his part in her isolation, brought her a gift, a radio. It was ivory white, with a dial and two knobs, and said Emerson Radio and Phone Corp., U.S.A. on the face. With it, Margheritina could pick up three stations, all relayed through the transmitter tower in O_____. One of them played the most wonderful music, not at all like the syrupy sweet stuff her mother loved; it was cheerful and bouncy and made her want to spin, alone in her room, spin about in crazy, dizzying circles.
Her aunt Regina, out of the same feelings, presented her with an old Singer sewing machine. Margheritina, after a few false stats, discovered that she could sew. She mended all Favorita’s clothes. She made new curtains for the kitchen. She made herself a pair of blousy trousers (we would call them harem pants) out of dark green velvet. Favorita would not let her wear them.
One morning, she appeared at breakfast in a green floor-length satin gown, clearly resewn to fit her.
Favorita, looking up from her panettone, was astonished. “What are you doing in that? It’s ridiculous. Where did you find it?”
“In the chest in the attic,” Margheritina said. “I think it’s beautiful. Do you know whose it was?”
“Your great-grandmother wore it,” Favorita said. “Take it off. It’s not suitable. You look like you belong in a bordello!”
Margheritina smiled. There was a bottle of Sangiovese on the table. She poured herself a larger than usual glass. “To bordellos!” she said.
She is mad, Favorita thought.
In alarm and despair, Favorita forbade the girl to leave the house. Margheritina ignored her. If they want me to be mad, she thought, I will be mad. Being mad was easily more interesting than being sane and sober. She turned the radio on at all hours. Her favorite station played songs by a new English group; they were raucous, rhythmic, with growled lyrics which were doubtless obscene. She turned the volume as high as it would go and danced about the house in her green gown, singing the words to “She Loves You” in fractured English. She drank: Barbera, Albana, Lambrusco, whatever lay in the cellars, and when the amber bottles were empty and dry she inserted into them bits of paper on which she had written, in her round schoolgirl’s script, I am the princess in the tower. Then she would walk across the fields and hide the bottles. Sometimes, when tipsy, she would throw them from the terrace, to watch them tumble end over end and fall to the rocks. She imagined the bottles breaking, freeing her scraps of paper to fly with the wind.
“What should I do?” Favorita asked of Regina. The telephone had come to I_____ that spring, and the two women spoke frequently. “She will hurt herself, I’m sure.”
“Lock her in,” counseled Regina.
So in September, when the harvest moon blazed dangerously down upon the house, Favorita locked the doors. She kept the keys to them all on a string around her neck. Naturally, since the telephone was a party line, the entire village knew within twenty-four hours that poor Margheritina had gone quite mad, and was wandering about the house stark naked, singing obscene songs. The only thing that seemed to quiet her was wine. How sad for Favorita, the titillated villagers told each other as through the autumn and long winter they absorbed bits and pieces let fall by Luciano, by old Teresa, and by Favorita as she spoke with her sisters, with Margheritina’s teachers, with Doctor V_____, and once with a neurological specialist in Venice. The good doctor would have been pleased to help, but the static and Favorita’s distress made the call mostly unintelligible. He concluded that his caller was deranged and that the unhappy daughter was probably compensating for her mother’s pathology as best she could.
Into this situation arrived the young man from T_____.
His name was Federico Dominico Tommaso L_____. Under the circumstances I believe it would be best to refer to him as Fred. At the time of this story, he was nineteen. Why he came to I_____ is a matter for conjecture. Hints have been dropped of a quarrel with a domineering father, or a romantic interlude gone astray. As the eldest son of a prominent landowner, Fred was destined for inheritance, authority, possibly the town mayorality. It made him twitch. He had some vague notion of going south, to Venice or Ravenna or even Bologna when he left home. It may have been that I_____ was simply on the way. I prefer to think (and Fred has never disputed this) that in the warm spring night, the wind from the south blew across the valley, carrying to his nostrils the scents of garlic and pepper and anise, of red wine, of buttery pasta, and principally, marvelously, of sausage. Enchanted, unconscious of this powerful stimulus, innards rumbling gently, he followed his taste buds to I_____.
He had spent two nights in the chill damp of the foothills, and it was therefore understandable that at his first sight of the valley and the town therein he thought that perhaps he had died in the night and gone to, if not Heaven, then one of its anterooms. I_____ lay sleeping under a honey-colored sky. Smoke from the rendery steamed upward like a prayer. Pigs moved across the hillsides, snuffling and chewing, and the smell of frying bacon on the griddle rose from three hundred smoke-blackened chimneys. Just a short walk from him, a large house loomed on the hillside. Someone in it was sautéing onions. Wishing he had a mirror, and conscious that he had not shaved for three days, Fred ran his hands through his thick dark hair. Then, brushing dirt off of his clothes and with his knapsack on his back (it contained cheese, and bread, and a clean shirt) Fred took the path toward the villa.
As he neared the terrace, someone thrust a window open, and a rock-and-roll beat challenged the serenity of the dawn. A woman’s voice sang along with John, George, and Paul as they crooned “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Astounded, Fred stopped. The singer stepped out onto the terrace. She wore a long green gown. It looked like something out of the previous century. Fred, transfixed, watched her twirl in graceful circles. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. The scrawny American models who graced the covers of his sisters’ magazines had never appealed to Fred, and Margheritina was not, by his standards, scrawny; she weighed sixty-eight kilos, one hundred fifty pounds. Her long, golden hair swung like a skein of silk. He thought her eyes were blue. She was Venus under the morning star, Juno in her majesty, a goddess.
Margeheritina looked down and saw a handsome, if unshaven, young man with dark curly hair staring at her with a look of absolute adoration. She stood still.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
Fred cleared his throat. He did not think he could talk. “Falling in love with you, I think,” he answered.
It was the right, possibly the only thing, to say. Margheritina had never seen a movie, or read a romance novel. But she was fifteen and a half, and her sense of drama was instinctive and acute.
“Who are you?”
He told her.
“Where are you from?”
He told her that, too. She had never heard of it; the teachers at the school had not been strong on local geography. He asked her name, and did not smile when she told him.
They had both forgotten the radio. The music stopped, and a man’s voice came on, cajoling his listeners to buy meat from such and such a butcher and to vote for the Christian Democrats. Margheritina turned it off. Into the sudden silence a woman’s voice called.
“My mother,” Margheritina said. “I have to go.” She thought quickly. As it so happened, all the sisters, except Gemella, who was pregnant, were going to the market that morning: Vittorio would be coming by after breakfast to take Favorita away in the big, dusty Ford. “Wait. Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” said Fred.
“I’ll be back. Stay out of sight!” And she went in. Fred looked about for some hidey-hole from which he could watch the house, and found a niche between two boulders. He settled into it, spine against his knapsack, and closed his eyes. He saw her face, her hair, the glow of her bare flesh, the white line of her breasts against the green fabric of her dress …
When she reappeared an eternity later, she was wearing ordinary clothes and carrying a plate. Her long fall of hair was prosaically confined in two long, thick braids. She knelt. “Can you get up here?”
He had no doubt that he could. A brisk scramble brought him to the terrace. Crouched in a corner, he devoured a huge breakfast of eggplant, sausage, bacon, a frittata, breadsticks, all washed down with red wine. As he ate, Margheritina sat near, watching him gravely, wondering what it would be like to cook for him, and if he was really who he said he was, and what he would look like without a shirt on. His shoulders were attractively broad, and his arms muscular and shapely, with dark curly hair along them. He might even have hair on his chest.
The noise of the Ford made them both start. “That’s Vittorio,” Margheritina said. “Get down and hide. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come up again.” Fred descended to his boulders. Margheritina went inside. After the black car appeared and then drove away again, Margheritina returned to the terrace, Fred reascended, and the two entered into conversation. Fred confided that he was going to Venice (or Ravenna, or Bologna) to seek his fortune. Margheritina explained that her cruel mother had locked her away forever because she was so ugly. I need not further describe what ensued, save to mention that the green harem pants and the clean shirt in Fred’s knapsack were both exceedingly useful. Four hours later, Favorita went into her daughter’s bedroom to find an incoherent farewell note pinned to the pillow, signed, Your loving daughter. Coiled about it lay two long, lustrous, butter-colored braids.
Favorita screamed and raged, and managed to use the telephone to confuse the entire town. Luciano, summoned from the sausage factory, received the impression that Margheritina had been kidnapped by a band of ruffians from the river, the ones everyone knew would rob rather than work. A stout group of men from the factory drove to the river, where they made much noise hunting along its eastern bank and shouting threats to the indifferent herons. Much later, Alberto N_____ remembered the dark youth with the knapsack and his blond, delicately featured companion, who had passed his wheat field, singing one of those indecent songs to which his fourteen-year-old son listened all the time. But by then it was too late. Fred hired a car in O_____ and by the next day he and his beloved were sixty kilometers away.
They were married two weeks later, in R_____, by a sympathetic mayor, a staunch Communist, to whom they lied about Margheritina’s age, something he very well knew but, as he pointed out to his wife, someone had to marry them, or the baby when it came would be illegitimate, and that would be a great pity.
From R_____ they took the train to B_____, where Fred found work mending stoves. Margheritina stayed home, and within the first four months of their marriage Fred gained twenty pounds.
One afternoon he offered a taste of Margheritina’s sausage to a chef at a restaurant whose stove he had just repaired.
After two bites, the chef’s eyes widened. “This is your wife’s cooking?”
Fred nodded proudly. “Good, isn’t it?”
“I have never tasted better.”
Fred blinked. Then, not being a fool, he said, “Perhaps some arrangement could be made …”
The restaurant sits in the same place, on a little alley off the Piazza, six blocks from the new movie theater. Outside, it looks the same as it did twenty-five years ago, with blue tile around the shuttered windows and pink geraniums in planters facing the cobbled street. Inside it is larger; Fred bought out the laundry next door fifteen years ago, and the two grime-encrusted stoves are long gone, replaced by huge, white German ones with big, natural gas ovens. Margheritina presides over the kitchen, assisted by Paolo and Giorgio, her two younger sons, and Anellina, her cousin Anella’s daughter. She will not go back to I_____, but she calls her mother monthly, and sends photographs of the family. Favorita proudly displays them to all her friends. Margheritina has gained weight over the years, and though she never developed the taste for sweets which a woman of substance should have, she looks very much like her great-grandmother Mafalda. To Fred, of course, she is a goddess. Fred is stouter than he used to be, and he doesn’t see as well as he once did (the doctor says he has cataracts), so Giovanni, the eldest son, manages the restaurant and keeps the books. If you go to R_____, you can find it by smell. There is only one other place in the world that gives forth quite that odor of oil and garlic and onions, of salsicce and prosciutto and bacon, of anise and pepper and cream and buttery pasta, and rough red wine, and it is far away, and even harder to find.