The Inventory at Fontana Bella

In the early autumn of her 102nd year, the Principessa Lisabetta von Hohenzalt-Casalinghi was no longer able to tell light from dark, thunder from a footfall nor the texture of wool from satin. Yet she still got about with amazing agility. She danced to imaginary schottisches, polkas and waltzes with imaginary partners. She gave commands to household domestics in a voice whose volume would shame a drill sergeant. Having once been drawn through Oriental streets in rickshas, she had naturally learned to yell "Chop-chop!" and she now exercised that command to make haste at the end of each order she shouted, and these orders were given all but continually while she was awake and sometimes she would even shout "Chop-chop!" in her sleep.

Early in October, close to midnight, the principessa sat bolt upright in her bed, breaking out of sleep as a sailfish from water.

"Sebastiano!" she cried, at the same instant of the cry pressing a hard fist to her groin.

Sebastiano was the name of her fifth and last husband, who had now been dead for 50 years, and she had clutched her groin because in her dream she had felt the ecstasy of his penetration, a thing that had remained in her recollection more obsessively even than her command to make haste.

Immediately after the outcry "Sebastiano," she slammed her fist down again, not on her nostalgic groin but upon the electric buttons that were on her bedside table; all eight of them were slammed down by her fist, hard and repeatedly and with continuous cries of "Chop-chop!"

It was her resident physician who first responded, thinking that she had finally been stricken by a cardiac seizure.

"Cristo, no, this creature is immortal!" he shouted involuntarily as he entered Lisabetta's huge bedchamber and observed her standing naked by the bed in a state of existence that seemed to be nuclear powered, her blind eyes blazing with preternatural light.

In a number of minutes others assembled and were equally astounded by this phenomenon of vitality in so ancient a being.

"Preparations at once, chop-chop. Fastest boat, motoscafo with the Rolls engine for lake crossing to Fontana Bella! Party including as follows. Senta! Secretaries, business and personal, upstairs and downstairs maids, especially Mariella, who remembers Fontana Bella as well as I do. Lawyer, of course, not the old one gone blind but the young one with the long beard who speaks high German, the curator of my museum and, of course, my bookkeeper, because the purpose of this trip is to finally hold, to conduct, an inventory of treasures at Fontana Bella, assessment of treasures remaining there, priceless art objects and ancestral paintings, all, all valuables kept there, so get to it, chop-chop, teeth in, clothes on, off to Fontana Bella."

The crossing was not so tedious as most of the party had anticipated. The lawyer was soon engaged in the defloration of a very young chambermaid, first with his fingers and then with his tongue and, climactically, with his organ of gender, and the chambermaid's moans and cries were finally heard and mistaken by the principessa for a noisy sea gull flying over the boat and she ordered it shot down at once. This provoked considerable merriment among the passengers; and then the curator of the principessa's private gallery, brought along to assess the canvases at Fontana Bella, began to tell a story about a rather well-known and gifted Roman painter who had been recently transferred to an insane asylum in Zurich.

"Dear Florio," said the curator, "he could only set to work under very peculiar conditions. He had to have a barely pubescent youth in his studio. No, no, not as a model, no, not that, just as a sort of excitant to his creative juices, you see, but what's so amusing about it is that this nubile youth, picked up on the Spanish Steps by Florio's secretary, always had to be discovered naked in an alcove of the studio, a curtained alcove, with a peacock's feather inserted in his rectum, oh, no, not all the way in, just in far enough to hold it in place, and the alcove was kept curtained until Florio was seated at his easel. And then the curtain of the alcove would be drawn open by the secretary and he and Florio would utter ecstatic cries at the sight of the boy with the peacock's gorgeous tail feather up his bum, and Florio then would cry out, 'Ah, che bella sorpresa, uno pavone in case mia!' "

(Which meant, "What a lovely surprise, a peacock in my house!")

"Then the boy would be paid nicely and dismissed from the house and Florio would start to paint like the madman he was."

At this story, there was general laughter loud enough to be heard by Lisabetta.

"Silenzio," she shouted and began to strike about her with her parasol. She managed to hit only the head of her poodle and when it barked at her in protest, she said: "You flatter me, sir, but we must wait upon another occasion!"

Then she fell asleep.

When the principessa awoke, she was in bed at Fontana Bella and it was again midnight.

She sprang up and shouted into a closet door, "Mariella, dress me, I want on woolens this morning, this is the north shore of Lago Maggiore, not the south, and there's no more disgusting affliction than a summer cold in the head. Subito, get them all up, the inventory is going to commence at once!"

Then she stood in the center of the bedroom, lifting legs to step into imaginary woolens and extending arms for the fur jacket that she thought was being put on her. She was quite impatient as the imaginary maid. Mariella, who had been dead for 20 years or more, did not seem to be following instructions with sufficient rapidity.

"Mariella," she shouted, "teeth in, teeth in! Chop-chop!"

She opened her mouth for the dentures to be inserted.

"Hah, ring a bell, now andiamo!"

She then started across the great chamber, knocking over a couple of chairs, which she mistook for assistant maids who were slow to get out of her way, and by an act of providence, she walked straight to the door upon the hall.

The upper floor of Fontana Bella was still remarkably clear in her head, since it was the floor on which she had lain with her great love, Sebastiano. She found the top of the grand staircase as if she had full possession of her sight and she descended it without a false step, at one point crying out, "Hands off me, I can't stand to be touched by anyone but a lover!"

The lower floor of Fontana Bella was more distinct in her mind than any part of her residence on the southern shore of Lago Maggiore, and yet it was not as certain as she assumed it to be, and at the foot of the stairs she made a wrong turn, which brought her outdoors upon an enormous balustraded terrace that faced the gloomy lake that starless midnight.

"Tutti qui? All present for inventory? Chop-chop!"

Old ladies have a way, you know, of acquiring prejudice of race and class and gender, so it wasn't surprising that Lisabetta had turned somewhat against members of the Hebrew race, mostly through a paranoid senility.

"If there's a Jew at the inventory," she shouted, "I want him to keep a shut mouth. Not a word out of him during the inventory. I know they're an ancient race, but not all ancient races are necessarily noble!"

This is struck her as a witty observation and she gave forth a great peal of laughter, to which some storks at a far end of the terrace responded with squawks and wing flapping, which Lisabetta interpreted as a flight of Jews from her presence.

"Gone, good! Proceed with the inventory, chop-chop! Oh, Christ, oh, wait, I have to relieve my bowels, put two screens about me and bring me a pot! Chop-chop!"

She lowered herself to a squatting position until the windy disturbance in her bowels had subsided, and then she stood up and remarked, "These things do happen, you know. It's a natural occurrence when there's so much agitation.

"Doctor, doctor? Please examine my stool, each morning's stool ought to be examined, it's the key to existence. Now, then, that's over, on with the inventory!"

Lisabetta felt herself surrounded by the party that had accompanied her from the southern shore; that is, all but the possible Jews she'd ordered away.

"Ready? Ready? Va bene!"

She began to conduct the inventory now and it continued for seven hours. Her memory of her possessions at Fontana Bella was quite remarkable, as remarkable as her endurance.

It was an hour before daybreak when her truant party of attendants returned from the nearby casino, but the principessa was still on the terrace, pacing up and down it, naked in the gray moonlight. From a distance they heard her shouting. "Gold plate, service for eight! In the vault, yes, get the keys! Has the Jew made off with the keys? What, what? Don't shout, I cannot put up with this rushing about and shouting, hands off, I've told you and told you that I abhor the touch of anyone but a lover! You, you there, come here and explain something to me!"

She seemed to be pointing at the Neapolitan lawyer who was the first to approach her on the terrace, the rest standing back in attitudes of indifference and fatigue.

(concluded on page 172)Fontana Bella(continued from page 78)

The lawyer was lively as ever. He went up close to the principessa and shouted directly into her relatively good ear, "Che volete, cara?"

The old lady wheeled about to strike at him and the motion made her dizzy. She became disoriented, but she was swift as ever as she rushed to the end of the terrace above which the storks were nesting, their patience exhausted by the disturbance beneath them. A great white female stork, alarmed for the safety of her young ones, flapped down from the roof onto Lisabetta to engage her in combat. It dived repeatedly at her head and her breast and abdomen, inflicting wounds with its beak and blows with its wings till the old lady toppled over and fell onto the terrace pavement. Her naked and withered arms made frantic attempts to embrace the matron stork. At last she caught hold of its beak and would not let go. She divided her limbs and finally, she forced the stork's beak to penetrate her vagina. It stabbed and stabbed at her uterus, and still she kept calling out "Sebastiano" in a loud voice and "Amore" in a soft voice.

The lawyer caught hold of the stork's legs and tore it away from the lady. He held the bird up and announced, "The stork is dead, suffocated inside her, and still she's calling it lover!"

It was not voluntarily, nor even wittingly, that the principessa returned across the lake the following day. The Neapolitan lawyer invented a story to entice the lady away from Fontana Bella: He told her that the owner of the nearby casino had arranged that evening a great gala in honor of her return to the province.

"All the walls of the gaming room are covered with talisman roses," the lawyer told her, "and your name is spelled out in camellias above the grand entrance."

When finally this invention had gotten through her left eardrum, it did not surprise Lisabetta at all.

"Ah, well, I'll make an appearance, I suppose it is a case of noblesse oblige."

The party got her seated among cushions in the stern of the motoscafo, informing her it was a Mercedes limousine, and so the return voyage began.

The lake surface that day was smooth as glass and the sky was radiant.

"Perhaps a few turns of the wheel and some rolls of the dice, then home, chop-chop, to continue the inventory. So many valuables are still not accounted for, and then, of course, you know— Mariella, cologne!"

A chambermaid passed a handkerchief to her. After a few sniffs of it, she resumed her talk, which seemed now to have gone into the babblings of delirium.

"If the moon were not clouded over, even if some stars were out, you would see behind Fontana Bella a bare hill with a bare tree on it. It ceased to leaf and to blossom when my last lover died."

That preface to her narrative was accurate in regard to the presence of the bare tree on the bare hill behind the villa.

"Sebastiano died as his name saint died," she continued. "He was chained to a tree and his incomparable young body was transfixed by five arrows. I had five brothers, you know, one for each arrow that pierced him. They're dead now, I trust. No complaints, no demands from them lately. A family and a lover should never meet when a huge fortune's involved and questions of its division are involved, too, since there is no limit at all to the fantasies of hatred when great wealth is involved. First they tried to get His Holiness to annul my marriage to Sebastiano. Got nowhere with that and so resorted to arrows and, well, that was that. For them, emigration. For me, a period in a convent. Oh, I tell you I have been a few places and I have done a few things and while I was in that convent, I learned there are uses for candles besides the illumination of chapel altar and supper table, but it was faute de mieux, as the frogs put it, don't they?"

She fell into silent musing for a few moments: then, after a slight, bitter laugh, she spoke again:

"All good doctors," she said, "have telephone numbers that contain no more than one or two digits and the rest is all zeros, you know."

"Yes, and all good morticians," observed the lawyer, "have telephone numbers consisting of nothing but zero, zero, ad infinitum."

The curator of the museum was asked if he recalled any more amusing anecdotes about that Roman painter now confined to the asylum in Zurich.

"Well, yes, now, the last time I visited poor Florio, he seemed to have recovered completely. He kept assuring me that his aberrations were all gone under the excellent treatment at the retreat and he begged me to get his relatives in Rome to have him released, and I, being convinced that he really was quite well, embraced him and started for the gate, and I had almost reached it when I was struck on the back of the head by a large piece of concrete paving that almost gave me a concussion, but I managed to turn about and there was Florio behind me. And he had quite obviously thrown the missile. 'Don't forget now,' he shouted, 'I'm the sanest man in the world!' "

The passengers were laughing at this tale when Lisabetta leaned abruptly forward from her mound of pillows.

"Ah!"

With this exclamation, she struck a fist to her groin as if unbearably pained there, but on the reptilian face of the principessa was a look of ecstasy that outshone the glassy lake surface on that brightest of autumn mornings.

The Neapolitan lawyer, seated nearest her in the boat, seized her wrist and then, discovering no pulse, turned to the party and said, "A miracle has happened, the lady is dead."

This announcement caused one or two of the passengers to cross themselves, perhaps while reflecting upon the difficulty of seeking new employment, but, understandably, most of the others in the boat were moved to much less solemn expressions of feeling.