Bluebeard (38 page)

“Whenever I see a man wearing a medal,” said Marilee, “I want to cry and hug him, and say, ‘Oh, you poor baby—all the terrible things you’ve
been
through, just so the woman and the children could be safe at home.’”

She said she used to want to go up to Mussolini, who had so many medals that they covered both sides of his tunic right down to his belt, and say to him, “After all you’ve been through, how can there be anything
left
of you?”

And then she brought up the unfortunate expression I had used when talking to her on the telephone: “Did you say that in the war you were “combing pussy out of your hair’?”

I said I was sorry I’d said it, and I was.

“I never heard that expression before,” she said. “I had to guess what it meant.”

“Just forget I said it,” I said.

“You want to know what my guess was? I guessed that wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away,” she said. “How close was I?”

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” I said.

“What’s the matter, Rabo?” she said.

“You hit the nail on the head,” I said.

“Wasn’t very hard to guess,” she said. “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

“They can pretend pretty hard sometimes,” I said.

“They know that the ones who pretend the hardest,”
she said, “get their pictures in the paper and medals afterwards.”

“Do you have an artificial leg?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Lucrezia, the woman who let you in, lost a leg along with her eye. I thought maybe you’d lost one, too.”

“No such luck,” I said.

“Well—” she said, “early one morning she crossed a meadow, carrying two precious eggs to a neighbor who had given birth to a baby the night before. She stepped on a mine. We don’t know what army was responsible. We do know the sex. Only a male would design and bury a device that ingenious. Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won.”

And then she added: “Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren’t they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.”

I said with utmost fatigue, “O.K., Marilee—you’ve certainly made your point. I have never felt worse in my life. I only wish the Arno were deep enough to drown myself in. Can I please return to my hotel?”

“No,” she said. “I think I’ve reduced you to the
level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to have you stay for the tea I promised you. Who knows? We might even become friends again.”

     
M
ARILEE LED ME
to a small and cozy library which used to house, she said, her late husband’s great collection of male homosexual pornography. I asked her what had become of the books, and she said she had sold them for a great deal of money, which she had divided among her servants—all women who had been badly hurt one way or another by war.

We settled into overstuffed chairs, facing each other across a coffee table. She beamed at me fondly and then said this: “Well, well, well, my young protégé—how goes it? Long time no see. Marriage on the rocks, you say?”

“I’m sorry I said that,” I said. “I’m sorry I said anything. I feel like something the cat drug in.”

We were served tea and little cakes at that point by a woman who had two steel clamps where her hands should have been. Marilee said something to her in Italian, and she laughed.

“What did you say to her?” I asked.

“I said your marriage was on the rocks,” she said.

The woman with the clamps said something to her in Italian, and I requested a translation.

“She said you should marry a man next time,” said Marilee.

“Her husband plunged her hands into boiling water,” she said, “in order to make her tell him who her lovers had been while he was away at war. They were Germans and then Americans, by the way, and gangrene set in.”

Over the fireplace of Marilee’s cozy library was the Dan Gregory-style painting I mentioned earlier, a gift to her from the people of Florence: showing her late husband, Count Bruno, refusing a blindfold while facing a firing squad. She said that it hadn’t happened exactly that way, but that nothing ever did. So I asked her how it happened that she became the Contessa Portomaggiore, with the beautiful palazzo and rich farms to the north and so on.

When she and Gregory and Fred Jones arrived in Italy, she said, before the United States got into the war, and against Italy and Germany and Japan, they were received as great celebrities. They represented a propaganda victory for Mussolini: “‘America’s greatest living artist and one of its greatest aviators and the incomparably beautiful and gifted American actress, Marilee Kemp,’ he called us,” said Marilee. “He said the three of us had come to take part in the spiritual and physical and
economic miracle in Italy, which would become the model for the world for thousands of years to come.”

The propaganda value of the three of them was so great that she was accorded in the press and at social events the respect a real and famous actress deserved. “So suddenly I wasn’t a dim-witted floozy anymore,” she said. “I was a jewel in the crown of the new Roman emperor. Dan and Fred, I must say, found this confusing. They had no choice in public but to treat me more respectfully, and I had fun with that. This country is absolutely crazy about blondes, of course, so that, whenever we had to make an entrance, I came first—and they came along behind me, as part of my entourage.

“And it was somehow very easy for me to learn Italian,” she said. “I was soon better at it than Dan, who’d taken lessons in it back in New York. Fred, of course, never learned Italian at all.”

Fred and Dan became heroes in Italy after they died fighting more or less for the Italian cause. Marilee’s celebrity survived them—as a very beautiful and charming reminder of their supreme sacrifice, and of the admiration many Americans had, supposedly, for Mussolini.

She was still certainly beautiful, by the way, at the time of our reunion, even without makeup and in widow’s weeds. She should have been an old lady after all she had been through, but she was only forty-three. She had a third of a century still to go!

And, as I say, she would become Europe’s largest
Sony distributor, among other things. There was life in the old girl yet!

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

After Dan Gregory’s death, her regular escort in Rome was Mussolini’s Oxford-educated and unmarried Minister of Culture, the handsome Bruno, Count Portomaggiore. He explained to Marilee at once that they could have no physical relationship, since he was interested sexually only in men and boys. Such a preference, if acted upon, was a capital offense at the time, but Count Bruno felt perfectly safe, no matter how outrageously he might behave. He was confident that Mussolini would protect him, since he was the only member of the old aristocracy who had accepted a high position in his government, and who virtually wallowed in admiration at the upstart dictator’s booted feet.

“He was a perfect ass,” said Marilee. She said that people laughed at his cowardice and vanity and effeminacy.

“He was also,” she added, “the perfect head of British Intelligence in Italy.”