The Last Promise (2 page)

I woke at four this morning, even before the hunters, and lay in bed for nearly an hour. Then I dressed and went out to walk. My wife is used to me crawling out of bed at all hours of night like an obstetrician. It’s an appropriate metaphor, I think. Stories, like babies, don’t often wait for decent hours to be born. I’ve been thinking all night about a story that has come to me.

Some stories are crafted as if by blueprint, built line by line and brick by brick. There are stories born of angst, wrung painfully from an author’s mind onto pages that, in the end, are more of bandage than paper. Then there are those stories that seek the writer, drifting through time and space like thistle seed, until they find fertile ground on which to land and take root. This is one such story. It found me during my second week in Italy.

 

I met her at the poolside of an Italian country club called Ugolino, about nine kilometers southwest of Florence. She looked thirtyish, slender, attractive. She was wearing a peach-colored bikini, luminous against her bronze skin, with a sheer, pastel wraparound skirt. Her hair was nearly black with a few strands of honey-colored highlights, though where it fell back over her shoulders the sun revealed a natural brown-gold tint. What I noticed first was her eyes. They were exotic and teardrop shaped.

She was reclined in a lounge chair reading a paperback
romanzo
and doing her best to ignore the stream of Italian men who paraded in front of her to ogle and drop lines that could be understood even without knowing the language.

It was a sweltering hot day.
Solleone,
the Florentines call it—
lion sun
. The pool area was mobbed with children playing noisily in the water while the adults stretched out on the white plastic lounge chairs that surrounded the tiled perimeter of the pool.

I’m told that it takes three confirmed miracles to merit sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. I believe that finding a parking space in downtown Florence or a lounge chair by a pool in summer should both qualify. Heaven smiled on me that day. As I entered the pool area, a man was gathering his things, leaving the only vacancy. It happened to be a chaise next to her.

After draping my towel across the length of the chair and covering my body with 30+ sunscreen, I took my laptop from my bag and turned it on. The image on the screen was too vague from the sun’s glare, so I closed it back up and went for my standby: a mechanical pencil and a wire-bound notepad I had purchased the day before at a supermarket in Florence. On the notepad’s cover was a photograph of a lemon wearing round-lensed granny glasses. The picture was titled
John Lemon
. I wondered if the Italians understood the pun.

I lifted my pencil to the page, not because I had words, but because a blank page beckoned. Perhaps I inherited this trait from my father.
A new board begs a nail,
he once told me. My father is a carpenter.

But there was too much noise and motion around me to write. After ten minutes I put the notebook away, took out a book and began to read. Suddenly a thin, bald Italian man stopped in front of me. He had skin as brown as leather and was wearing what looked like the bottom half of a woman’s bikini.

I looked up at him.
“Scusa,”
I said in my two-week-old Italian.
“No capito.”

He pointed at my feet. In truth I had no idea what he wanted. I wore only white-soled tennis shoes. The worst infraction I could conceive being guilty of was a fashion faux pas. I looked at him blankly.

Suddenly the woman next to me said in perfect English, “He’s telling you that shoes are not allowed in the pool area.”

I glanced over at the woman, whom I had assumed was Italian, then back at the man.
“Mi dispiace,”
I said, as I removed my shoes.

“Grazie, signorina,”
he said to the woman and walked away.

I sat back in my chair. “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing.” After a moment she asked, “Where in the States are you from?”

I wondered that I was so obvious an American. “Salt Lake City.”

A smile broke across her face. “Really? I’m from Vernal.”

“Vernal, Utah?”

Vernal is a small town in the eastern desert of Utah: a stop on the way to someplace else. Even in Utah I had never met anyone from Vernal.

“I thought you were Italian.”

“So do the Italians. I lived here for six years. After that much time you start looking like a local.” She laid her book in her lap and leaned over, extending her hand. “I’m Eliana.”

I likewise introduced myself. Just then a man, shirtless, maybe in his late fifties with a belly hanging over his swimsuit and a cigar clamped between his front teeth, stopped in front of her chair.
“Buon giorno, zuccherino.”

She flicked her hand at him as if to brush him away.
“Vai, vai, vai.”

He walked away smiling. Eliana turned back, shaking her head, though more amused than annoyed. “He called me his
little sugar
. I hope my husband gets here soon. The Italian men regard a lone woman the same way they would a bill on the sidewalk.”

I smiled at her metaphor. It was true.

She took a drink of bottled water then settled back in her chair. She asked, “How did you find this place? You’re a long way from the usual tourist haunts.”

“My real estate agent told me about it. I’m not really a tourist. I moved here with my family two weeks ago. We have a cottage, about eight kilometers from here in San Donato in Collina.”

“It’s beautiful in San Donato. Do you have any children?”

“Five.”

“Five. That’s a lot of children. Especially for Italy.”

“Women always congratulate us. They say
complimenti
. The men just ask
‘perché?’
”
Why?

Her mouth twisted with a smile of understanding. “Yes, they would. How are you all adapting to your new life?”

“Good. Mostly. It’s not all gardenias and Bella Tuscany.”

“Every sweetness has its bitter. The romance usually ends for Americans after they get pickpocketed or run over by a scooter.”

“We’ve had our moments. When we landed in Venice our Italian guide never showed up. We took one of those unmarked taxis and ended up paying seventy dollars for what should have been a three-minute cab ride. Then, after we got to Florence, the car dealership wouldn’t give us the car we paid for. They said we needed some number from a
permesso di
something. They gave me an address in downtown Florence where I could get it.”

She nodded. “It’s the address of the
questura
—the police headquarters. You need a
permesso di soggiorno
. But it’s not that easy to get.”

“What is it?”

“Basically it’s permission to live in Florence.”

“I thought that’s what our visa was for.”

“No, it’s something else. With Italian bureaucracy it’s always something else.”

“How long does it take to get a
permesso di
. . . ?”

“Sog-gior-no,”
she said slowly, breaking the word into syllables for my benefit. “It takes a while. Unless you know someone high up in government, or the priest of one of the bureaucrats, it could take as long as a year. How long do you plan to stay in Italy?”

I groaned. “About a year. The car dealership won’t release our car until we have one. We’re still renting a car.”

“Don’t worry. There’s always a back door. Go to the
questura
and apply, then take the receipt from your application to the dealership. If you ask nicely, they’ll likely give you the car anyway.”

“You think that will work?”

She tilted her head to one side. “Probably. Italy’s too bureaucratic and the Italians know it, so they find ways around things. If they didn’t, nothing would ever get done.”

“Thanks.”

“I should warn you. Don’t insist that they do it for you. Entitlement is an American mind-set. Here it’s a cardinal sin. They’ll fight you just over principle and you’ll lose. But if you ask nicely, as a favor, most Italians will walk over broken glass for you.”

“Thanks again.”

“Did you come here for work?”

“Indirectly. I’m an author, so I can work anywhere. But I was hoping to find inspiration.”

Her face lit. “Really? I’m a voracious reader. What kind of books do you write?”

I looked at the cover of the book spread in her lap. “Probably what you’re reading.”

“
Romanzi rosa?
Love stories?”

I nodded.

“Are you famous?”

“Have you heard of me?”

She thought for a moment. “No.”

“If you have to tell someone you’re famous—you’re not.”

She laughed at this. “But you are published? You’re not just one of those guys who calls himself a writer to meet women?”

At this I laughed. I too had met such men. “No, I’m published. And happily married.”

“How are your books doing?”

“Not bad.”

“Have you ever written a best-seller?”

“A few.”

“I’m sorry, I should know you. I’ve just been reading Italian authors for the last decade.” She leaned over to get her bag. “Do you mind if I get your autograph?”

“Why would you want the autograph of someone you’ve never heard of?”

“Because I’ll regret it later if I don’t. And I want to tell my friends that I met a bestselling author.” She pulled a pen from her bag and handed it to me with the paperback she had been reading. “Just sign in the book, if that’s all right.”

“Certo.”
I opened the book and scribbled my name across its fore page, then handed it back to her. “So how is this book?”

“I’ve read better. But once I start a book I can’t stop until I finish it. It’s a compulsion.”

“Do you have a favorite love story?”

She thought for a moment; then a smile slowly spread across her face. “Mine.”

“Yours?”

“I’ve yet to read a love story that compares with mine.”

“Really. Tell me about it.”

She did. This is Eliana’s story.

—Italian Proverb

E
liana released the clasp on the cedar shutters, then unlatched one side of the wood-framed window and pushed it open, welcoming a rush of fresh air into her second-story painting studio. In the window’s thick glass she saw her own pale reflection. Her umber hair, still unwashed, was pulled back and bound with elastic. Her usually beautiful eyes were puffy from another hard night.
There are more beautiful things to see in Tuscany at six in the morning,
she thought.

From between the two large cypress trees that flanked the window, she could see the neatly lined trellises of the Chianti vineyards, faded in the distance by a morning mist.
Sembra una cartolina,
she thought.
Just like a postcard
. She had thought the same thing when she arrived in Tuscany almost six years earlier, only then her thoughts had been in English. In spite of her hardships, the country had not lost its beauty to her. She was grateful for this. It was one of the joys life had not stolen from her.

As difficult as the previous night had been, she was ready to start again. She had learned to live this way, discarding the past each night and starting each day anew—picking joy where she could find it—like hunting for mushrooms in the Chianti forests. Sometimes her own endurance astonished her.

The fifteenth-century villa where she lived was twostoried and horseshoe shaped, enclosed with a front wall, forming a sizable courtyard. Her family’s apartment was the largest in the villa and took the entire east wing. While she was a new bride still living in America, her groom, Maurizio, had told her that their apartment in Italy was part of the
new
section of the restored villa. It was only after she arrived in Italy, three years later, that she realized that “new” is relative in an old country: the “new wing” was only two hundred and seventy years old.

The villa’s center apartment was smaller than Eliana’s by half and was occupied by her sister-in-law Anna, who had lived in the villa since her husband left her five years previous.

The western wing of the villa was used for storage and there was also a small apartment there that was rented out. An arched, wrought iron gate in the center of that wing led to the villa’s garden.

The other buildings on the property were nearly a quarter mile away, surrounded by vineyards: a small, stucco home where Luca, the winery manager, and his wife lived, next to the three-story ochre cantina where the grapes were processed into wine, aged, bottled and shipped.

Eliana’s painting studio was rectangular in shape, with white stucco walls that slanted slightly in toward the center of the house. It had a high, vaulted ceiling supported by heavy, wooden trusses that had been hewn by an ax. The room was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and the only room in the villa where one could see both the inner courtyard and the world outside the villa, depending on which side of the room one stood in. The space was larger than Eliana needed and she had only moved into one half of the room, piling the other half with blank canvases and unframed paintings.