Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

tiny, contorted heads, which make her think of holocausts and Dantean hells. Game, she thinks, is high in the kind of amino acids that foster gout and aggressive behavior.

“The worst case of flatulence I know of,” Edo says, “was the Countess Pentz, a lady-in-waiting to my mother. She was a charming woman with nice big breasts, but she was short and ugly, and farted continuously. It was funny at receptions to see everyone pretending not to notice. I believe she used to wear a huge pair of padded bloomers that muffled the noise to a rumble like distant thunder.”

They go on to discuss Hitler and meteorism. One of Nestor’s cousins, Giangaleazzo, sends Elizabeth a swift glance of inquiry, perhaps of apology. There is something sweet about that look. Edo sees it and glowers. Elizabeth seizes the opportunity to contribute, mentioning—she realizes it’s a mistake the minute she does—Chaucer. Blank looks from the men, although only Edo is truly uneducated. Edo says: “The middle classes always quote literature. It makes them feel secure.”

Elizabeth has lived in Rome long enough to be able to throw back a cold-blooded barb of a retort, the kind they don’t expect from an American woman. She knows that the young men aren’t even surprised by Edo’s remark, since it seems to be a family tradition to savage one another like a pack of wolf cubs. But she is looking at the row of restaurant knives and cleavers stuck in back of the long, oiled kitchen counter, and she is imagining the birds heaped in the freezer—small, gnarled bodies the color of cypress bark. She decides that she would like not simply to kill Edo but to gut him swiftly and surgically, the way she has watched him so many times draw a grouse.

When they have finished the larks and the young men are eating Kit Kat bars and drinking whiskey, they complete the fraternal atmosphere by launching into a canzone goliarda, a bawdy student song. This one has nearly twenty verses and is about a monk who confesses women on a stormy night and the various obscene penances he has them perform:

Con questa pioggia, questo vento,

Chi è chi bussa a mio convento?

Between verses Edo looks at her without remorse. He’s thinking, She’s tough, she holds up—which is one of his highest compliments. “You look like a wild animal when you get angry,” he tells her, and she hates herself for the way her heart leaps. Just before midnight she lies in bed wondering whether he will come down to her. She will not go to him; she wants him to come to her room so she can treat him badly. She lies there feeling vengeful and willfully passive, imagining herself a Victorian servant girl waiting for the master to descend like Jove; at any minute she expects the doorknob to turn. But he doesn’t come, and she falls asleep with the light on. At breakfast the next morning he greets her with great tenderness and tells her that he sat up till dawn with Nestor, discussing fishing rights on a family property in Spain.

4. H

ALLOWEEN

Bent double, Edo and Elizabeth creep through a stand of spindly larch and bilberry toward the pond where the wild geese are settling for the night. It is after four on a cold, clear afternoon, with the sun already behind the hills and a concentrated essence of leaf meal and wet earth rising headily at their footsteps—an elixir of autumn. Edo moves silently ahead of Elizabeth, never breaking a twig. His white head is drawn down into the collar of his green jacket, and his body is relaxed and intent, the way he has held it stalking game over the last fifty years in Yugoslavia, Tanzania, Persia.

Even before they could see the pond, when they were still in the Land Rover, chivying stolid Hertfordshire cows, and then on foot working open a gate that the tenant farmer had secured sloppily with a clothesline and a piece of iron bedstead—even then the air reverberated with the voices and wingbeats of the geese. The sound created a live force around the two of them, as if invisible spirits were bustling by in the wind. Now, from the corner of the grove, Edo and Elizabeth spy on two or three hundred geese in a crowd as thick and raucous as bathers on a city beach: preening, socializing, some pulling at sedges in the water of the murky little pond, others arriving from the sky in unraveling skeins, calling, wheeling, landing. Sometimes during the great fall and spring migrations, over two thousand at a time stop at Edo’s pond.

He brought them here himself, using his encyclopedic knowledge of waterfowl to create a landscape he knew would attract them. He selected the unprepossessing, scrubby countryside after observation of topography and migratory patterns, and enlarged the weedy pond to fit an exact mental image of the shape and disposition needed to work together in a kind of sorcery to pull the lovely winged transients, pair by pair, out of the sky. After three years, the visiting geese have become a county curiosity. Local crofters have lodged repeated complaints. Edo doesn’t shoot the geese; he watches them. This passion for the nobler game birds is the purest, most durable emotion he has known in his life; it was the same when he used to lie in wait for hours in order to kill them. Now he’s had enough shooting, but the passion remains.

He grips Elizabeth’s arm as he points out a pair of greylags in the garrulous crowd on the water. His hand on her arm is like stone, and Elizabeth, who loves going to watch the geese, nevertheless finds something brittle and old-maidish in the fixity of his interest. Crouching beside him, she experiences an arid sense of hopelessness, of jealousy—she isn’t sure of what. Casting about, she thinks of his ex-lovers who sometimes call or visit—European women near his own age who seem to have absorbed