Villa Coco

A cardboard package, its contents undisclosed, must be carried north to Ferrara, where the Baronessa² goes to meet the last of the House of Este. She sends the young American¹ and her shy cousin Giacomo,⁵ a married editor from Milan whose grandfather's portrait hangs by the narrator's¹ bed, onward to see Comacchio and the mosaics of Ravenna.

The Mitsubishi dies in the eel town of Comacchio; stranded overnight in a stranger's pink house and loosened by wine, the two abandon the narrator's¹ celibacy vow when he deliberately tosses his hat onto the bed. Giacomo,⁵ wed to a woman for inheritance, asks only that it never become a habit and that his cousin² never learn. The young man¹ agrees, calling himself as discreet as an eel.

Autumn arrives and small things vanish: a drawing, a painting, the Baronessa's² pearls. The whole household plus neighbors is conscripted into the olive harvest, each pretending to be family for the tax inspector; the narrator¹ becomes cousin Giorgio from Todi.

Giacomo⁵ returns to rake olives and share his bathroom, and their affair resumes. At a grape-crushing dinner, Estelle⁴ pours her dangerous homemade wine and confesses that she and the Baronessa² once unknowingly shared a lover, the Milan dealer Visconti, which bound them as friends.

She also reveals the Baronessa's² truest great love was a wooden sailing boat named Caprice, kept for twenty years and then sold. The narrator¹ keeps hunting for a man in the story; Giacomo⁵ suggests the man he seeks is himself.

Oscar³ returns early, summoned because the young couple had neglected their lonely host. He brings real Genoese pesto and a string of confessions: at fifty a heart aneurysm made him renounce meat, love, and pleasure to become, he says, a harmless cheerful old man.

Touring the village church at Cascia, he shows them Masaccio's panel, the first painting ever built on true perspective, and over fish stew he warns the narrator¹ not to be lazy in love, to seize the life he actually wants rather than the one that merely arrives. That same season the American¹ finally cracks Italian, translating the crossroads crone's obscene curse at passersby, and the Baronessa,² weeping with laughter, accepts him fully into her strange court.

Winter seals the villa behind new panes of glass. In the village cafe the narrator¹ meets his own mirror image, an American who has served a ninety-eight-year-old contessa for fifteen years, never got his promised weekend in Paris, and survives by quietly stealing her heirlooms; he warns that the Baronessa² will invent one last trip and the boy will never escape.

Meanwhile her vertigo worsens, and the doctor cautions that a woman her age in a house of staircases must expect a fall. Half dreaming, she confesses her greatest treasure: a marble toe she pried off the ancient Tetrarchs of Venice during a long-ago visit to Istanbul, witnessed only by Oscar,³ slipped into her purse and kept ever since.

Giacomo⁵ presses for a weekend in Florence; the Baronessa² refuses to lend the car, feigning vertigo, and a furious argument erupts before the narrator¹ borrows Estelle's⁴ three-wheeled Ape and drives himself.

After Fra Angelico's frescoes and a street puppet show, he meets Giacomo's wife Laurine¹¹ stepping off the train visibly pregnant beside her own girlfriend, Carlotta. A hotel farce of intruding aunts forces the couples to swap rooms for the night.

By morning Giacomo⁵ lays out his plan: a pink family building on a street named for Lincoln, three connected apartments, a baby and the married couple below, Laurine¹¹ and Carlotta on the middle floor, and the two of them together on the top floor among lemon trees. The young American,¹ stunned, promises only to think.

A phone call from Gazelle,⁸ shouting that someone has fallen and gone to the hospital, sends the narrator¹ racing back from Florence, certain the Baronessa² has finally tumbled. Instead he finds her alive in bed, listening on speakerphone to Oscar,³ who has collapsed in Genoa and is cheerfully describing his oxygen helmet.

The truth surfaces: Oscar³ is not merely weak of heart but dying of leukemia, and the Baronessa,² his maid, and the doctor have conspired to keep it from him so he can preserve his humor and enjoy one final adventure. Enraged at the deception, the narrator¹ demands they tell him the truth; the Baronessa² erupts that Oscar³ cannot die because they had such plans, betraying a grief she has locked away.

A storm delays the rescue to Genoa, and during a power outage the maid calls: Oscar³ is gone. The Baronessa,² blaming his final indulgence in gin, admits through her fury that she loved him. To channel grief she plots a caper at his planned memorial luncheon: steal his ashes and bring him home, telling everyone they are bound for Turin.

At the gathering, where the aristocracy mingle, her old enemy Furman⁷ unmasks her, claiming she began as a thief, bought her very title, and turned a stolen diamond into the boat and the boat into the villa, while Oscar³ was no painter but her art dealer. The young American¹ quietly pockets the urn, and the two of them slip away before anyone notices.

On the long drive back, the Baronessa² apologizes for her sharpness, then offers the wisdom of a lifetime spent with married men: take the bed, the dinners, the adventures, but decide honestly whether such love is enough, and if it is not, let the man go. As the road climbs the ridges, the setting sun appears, sinks, and rises again three separate times, delighting her into calling it an actor taking bows.

The young man,¹ weighing the glamorous Milan offer against the truth of what he wants, recognizes that it is not enough. Soon after, he ends things with Giacomo,⁵ choosing the frightening unknown over a comfortable life already arranged for him on the top floor of a pink house.

They travel to Venice by train, ostensibly for a single night, and lodge in Pippa's⁶ apartment. The Baronessa² fits her stolen toe back into the base of the Tetrarchs beside San Marco, keeps a private rendezvous at the Florian cafe, and sends the narrator¹ off to wander, buy Oscar's³ promised red velvet slippers, and choose his pastry.

Then Pippa⁶ gleefully spills the whole design: the Baronessa² sold Villa Coco and all its contents to her despised rival Furman,⁷ but handed him meticulous forgeries painted by Estelle,⁴ sold the genuine originals through Oscar³ to fund buying back her beloved boat Caprice, and used the naive American's¹ notarized catalog to make the swap look legitimate. She did it all for Oscar,³ one last trick on an old foe.

Confronted, the Baronessa² admits she hired him precisely because an honest, ignorant American¹ would never detect the forgeries and would certify the inventory in good faith.

News drifts in that the marten finally died gorging on the fish oil atop his old mattress, that Gazelle⁸ will join his now-successful son, and that Nimali⁹ and Vinsanda¹⁰ embezzled their way to a riverside house and kept the dog Cesare. At dawn on the Riva degli Schiavoni the Caprice glides in under purple sails, the narrator's¹ duffel already aboard by design.

With the carabinieri lumbering toward the illegal mooring, Estelle⁴ waving, and the Baronessa's² vertigo vanishing the instant she boards, the young man¹ chooses the voyage, casting off toward Croatia and whatever fate waits beyond.