an elderly woman?an old customer, I guessed?appeared on the other side of the counter. The clerk rushed over to greet her, and I switched rings. Then I called, “Thank you very much. I’ll think it over.”
“Very well,” the clerk said haughtily, and I went out of the store. It was as simple as pie. I walked down to the diamond market in the Forties and sold the ring for eighteen hundred. No questions were asked. Then I went to Thomas Cook and found that the Conte di Salvini was sailing for Genoa at five. This was in August, and there was plenty of space on the eastbound crossing. I took a cabin in first class and was standing at the bar when she sailed. The bar was not officially open, of course, but the bar Jack gave me a Martini in a tumbler to hold me until we got into international waters. The Salvini had an exceptionally percussive whistle, and you may have heard it if you were anywhere near midtown, although who ever is at five o’clock on an August afternoon?
That night I met Mrs. Winwar and her elderly husband at the horse races. He promptly got seasick, and we plunged into the marvelous skulduggery of illicit love. The passed notes, the phony telephone calls, the affected indifference, and what happened when we were behind the closed door of my cabin made my theft of a ring seem guileless. Mr. Winwar recovered in Gibraltar, but this only seemed like a challenge, and we carried on under his nose. We said goodbye in Genoa, where I bought a secondhand Fiat and started down the coast.
I got to Montraldo late one afternoon. I stopped there because I was tired of driving. There was a semi-circular bay, set within high stone cliffs, and one of those beaches that are lined with cafes and bathing houses. There were two hotels, a Grand and a National, and I didn’t care for either one of them, and a waiter in a cafe told me I could rent a room in the villa on the cliff. It could be reached, he said, either by a steep and curving road or by a flight of stone steps?one hundred and twenty-seven, I discovered later?that led from the back garden down into the village. I took my car up the curving road. The cliff was covered with rosemary, and the rosemary was covered with the village laundry, drying in the sun. There were signs on the door in five languages, saying that rooms were for rent. I rang, and a thickset, bellicose servant opened the door. I learned that her name was Assunta. I never saw any relaxation of her bellicosity. In church, when she plunged up the aisle to take Holy Communion, she looked as if she were going to knock the priest down and mess up the acolyte. She said I could have a room if I paid a week’s rent in advance, and I had to pay her before I was allowed to cross the threshold.
The place was a ruin, but the white-washed room she showed me into was in a little tower, and through a broken window the room had a broad view of the sea. The one luxury was a gas ring. There was no toilet, and there was no running water; the water I washed in had to be hauled out of a well in a leaky marmalade can. I was obviously the only guest. That first afternoon, while Assunta was praising the healthfulness of the sea air, I heard a querulous and elegant voice calling to us from the courtyard. I went down the stairs ahead of the servant, and introduced myself to an old woman standing by the well. She was short, frail, and animated, and spoke such a flowery Roman that I wondered if this wasn’t a sort of cultural or social dust thrown into one’s eyes to conceal the fact that her dress was ragged and dirty. “I see you have a gold wristwatch,” she said. “I, too, have a gold wristwatch. We will have this in common.”
The servant turned to her and said, “Go to the devil!”
“But it is a fact. The gentleman and I do both have gold wristwatches,” the old lady said. “It will make us sympathetic.”
“Bore,” the servant said. “Rot in hell.”
“Thank you, thank you, treasure of my house, light of my life,” the old lady said, and made her way toward an open door.
The servant put her hands on her hips and screamed, “Witch! Frog! Pig!”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you infinitely,” the old lady said, and went in at the door.
That night, at the cafe, I asked about the signorina and her servant, and the waiter was fully informed. The signorina, he said, came from a noble Roman family, from which she had been expelled because of a romantic and unsuitable love affair. She had lived as a hermit in Montraldo for fifty years. Assunta had been brought here from Rome to be her donna di servizio, but all she did for the old lady these days was to go into the village and buy her some bread and wine. She had robbed the old woman of all her possessions?she had even taken the bed from her room?and she now kept her a prisoner in the villa. Both the Grand Hotel and the National were luxurious and commodious. Why did I stay in such a place?
I stayed because of the view, because I had paid my rent in advance, and because I was curious about the eccentric old spinster and her cranky servant. They began quarreling early the next morning. Assunta opened up with obscenity and abuse. The signorina countered with elaborate sarcasm. It was a depressing performance. I wondered if the old lady was really a prisoner, and later in the morning, when I saw her alone in the courtyard, I asked her if she would like to drive with me to Tambura, the next village up the coast. She said, in her flowery Roman, that she would be delighted to join me. She wanted to have her watch, her gold watch, repaired. The watch was of great value and beauty and there was only one man she dared entrust it to. He was in Tambura. While we were talking, Assunta joined us.
“Why do you want to go to Tambura?” she asked the old lady.
“I want to have my gold watch repaired,” the old lady said.
“You don’t have a gold watch,” Assunta said.
“That is true,” the old lady said. “I no longer have a gold watch, but I used to have a gold watch. I used to have a gold watch, and I used to have a gold pencil.”
“You can’t go to Tambura to have your watch repaired if you don’t have a watch,” Assunta said.
