outer space

The view from the San Marino hotel was an enchanted kingdom. The first night there we opened the windows wide to the world. Then for four days the air turned thick with heat and mist and the hills were erased. In the white room there were two brass beds, the tubing no thicker than soft pretzels and filigreed in Beardsley lines. We pulled the beds together and touched each other lazily, listening to the sounds of Polish tourists on the narrow mountain streets four stories below. One Italian cable channel carried non-stop porn, ads for phone sex lines (even in Firenze this was so, Duomo of milkwhite breasts). In one video two gay men swam like dolphins in streams of lacy foam, lazy arcs of buttocks and languid arms, tonguing white thighs in a jet of aquamarine spume. On the last day we arrived at the maestro’s summer home, a low stone villa daubed in the same mustard and taupe hues of the surrounding paesaggio. Despite its old world solidity the villa seemed somehow reminiscent of southwest adobe or Sonora ranches. His study was the detached chapel, a single stone room up a steep flight of stone stairs under the inverted V of a simple roof, an ancient rough hewn lintel disclosing itself through the paste of stucco above the doors. Inside there was an incised Etruscan column in one corner, and next to it an IBM PC– its amber screen etched with a demure c> prompt. A polished darkwood recorder lay across an open Bach score on a music stand; a black bookshelf sized CD and tape player occupied one end of a large country table, centuries old, which served as a simple desk. In the garden below a woman in a short gauze peach colored dress moved languidly through the crowd, long tanned legs and pretty sandals, lacy bikini panties perfectly visible through the diaphanous skirt. She had arrived on the arm of a bronze tanned, golden haired heart surgeon, himself something of a media star. Signora Eco moved among the guests in the garden also, she too blond but slower and more beautiful than the ragazza, a Teutonic dignity, Hera’s hair, wise eyes, a ready laugh. She disappeared to help the cook put the feast out upon the ancient long table. Twilight settled. The first sounds of the music stirred in the village below. It was the communist festival. There would be wine and tarantella the maestro said. Perhaps everyone would drive down the mountain after dinner. As night fell he mounted the chapel steps and put a recording of Tangos on the CD player. Their melancholy filled the dark garden and filtered into the valleys below. The lion-maned French philosopher and hero of the revolution carried a full plate of food. Everyone spoke in half-whispers. The Americans sat in a row on the bench overlooking the fading light. “When does the curtain come up?” the maestro chuckled, “Ah you Americans, you think everything is the cinema!” His tone did not suggest disapproval. Swallows moved through the lapsing light in the valleys. It was time to go. When we sought her out to bid goodbye, we found the Signora in the kitchen turning the crank of the ice cream maker. “Won't you stay for gelato?” she said in careful English. We drove all night back to Milano through stifling heat. The dark lots of the coffee-bars along the Autostrada were filled with gypsies, bandits, sleeping tourists, and hippies with guitars. It was the time of the change. The air smelled of petrol, fried food and hashish. I would go back there if time allowed.