Lola was a thief; otherwise she might never have used her wings at all. However, the sort of articles she was fond of stealing—shiny things, grapes and fountain pens, cigarettes—were situated usually in elevated areas; so, to reach a tabletop, she occasionally took a (quite literally) flying jump. Once she stole a set of false teeth. The teeth belonged to a guest, a difficult and elderly friend, a lady.
She said she thought it not the least funny and burst into tears. Alas, we did not know where Lola hid her loot (according to Graziella, all ravens are robbers and invariably keep a secret storage den for stolen treasure). The only sensible course was to try to trick Lola into revealing where she had taken the teeth. She admired gold: a gold ring I sometimes wore constantly excited her greedy gaze. We (Graziella and I) therefore baited our trap with the ring: left it on the luncheon table, where Lola was cleaning up crumbs, and hid behind a door.
The instant she imagined herself unobserved, she snatched the ring and rushed out of the dining room and along a hall to the “library”—a small, gloomy room stuffed with cheap paperback editions of the classics, the property of a former tenant. She leaped from floor to chair to bookshelf; then, as though it were a cleft in a mountainside leading to an Ali Baba’s cavern, she squeezed between two books and disappeared behind them: evaporated, rather like Alice through the looking glass.
The Complete Jane Austen concealed her cache, which, when we found it, consisted, in addition to the purloined dentures, of the long-lost keys to my car (I’d not blamed Lola: I thought I’d lost them myself), a mass of paper money—thousands of lire torn into tiny scraps, as though intended for some future nest, old letters, my best cuff links, rubber bands, yards of string, the first page of a short story I’d stopped writing because I couldn’t find the first page, an American penny, a dry rose, a crystal button—
Early that summer Graziella announced her engagement to a young man named Luchino, a slim-waisted waiter with oily, curly hair and a film-star profile. He spoke a little English, a little German; he wore green suede shoes and drove his own Vespa. Graziella had reason to think him a formidable catch; still, I was not happy about it. I felt she was too plain and healthy, simply too nice, for a sharp fellow like Luchino (who had a reputation as a semiprofessional gigolo catering to solitary tourists: Swedish spinsters, German widows and widowers), though, to be fair, such activities were far from uncommon among the village youth.
But Graziella’s joy was difficult to resist. She pinned photographs of Luchino all over the kitchen, above the stove, above the sink, inside the icebox door and even on the trunk of a tree that grew outside the kitchen window. Romance, of course, interfered with her care of me: now, in the Sicilian fashion, she had her fiancé’s socks to mend, laundry to do (and such a lot of it!), not to mention the hours she spent preparing a trousseau, embroidering underwear, fitting a wedding veil. Often at lunch I was handed a plate of ice-hard spaghetti, then given cold fried eggs for supper. Or perhaps nothing at all; she was forever hurrying off to meet her lover in the piazza for a twilight promenade. Yet in retrospect I do not begrudge her that happiness: it was but the prelude to the bitterest bad luck.
One August night her father (much beloved despite his drunkenness) was offered (by an American tourist) a tall glass of straight gin, told to drink it at one go, did so and underwent a stroke that left him paralyzed. And the very next day even starker misfortune struck; Luchino, streaking along a country road aboard his Vespa, rounded a corner, ran into and instantly killed a three-year-old girl. I drove Luchino and Graziella to the child’s funeral; afterward, on the way home, Luchino was dry-eyed but Graziella moaned and wept as though her heart had been halved: I assumed she was grieving for the dead baby. No, it was for herself, the dark prospect before her: Luchino faced possible imprisonment and certainly a huge indemnity payment—there would be no marriage now, not for years (if ever).
The poor girl was prostrated. A doctor confined her to bed. One day I went to see how she was getting on. I took Lola with me, meaning to cheer the invalid. Instead, the sight of the bird horrified her; she screamed. She said Lola was a witch, she said Lola had the malocchio, the evil eye, and that the double tragedy, her father’s stroke and Luchino’s accident, was Lola’s work, a punishment inflicted for having caught her and clipped her wings. She said, Yes, yes, it’s true: every child knows ravens are the embodiment of black and wicked spirits. And, “I will never come to your house again.”
Nor did she. Nor did any other servant girl. For out of Graziella’s accusations, a myth grew that mine was a house of the evil eye: that not merely Lola, but I myself, possessed a potent malocchio. Nothing worse can be said of one in Sicily. Moreover, it is a charge against which there is no defense. In the beginning I joked about it, though it was not in the least a humorous adventure. Persons meeting me in the street crossed themselves; or, as soon as I had passed, arranged one hand in the shape of a bull’s head with horns—a dark-magic gesture meant to dispel the power of my malevolent, spell-casting, tortoise-shell-rimmed eye.
I woke one night around midnight and decided (snap!) to clear out. Leave before dawn. Rather a decision, for I’d lived there two years, and did not altogether relish being suddenly homeless. Homeless with two large dogs and an uncaged, peculiar bird. Nevertheless, I stuffed the car: it looked like a rolling cornucopia: shoes and books and fishing gear spilling out the windows; with a few rough shoves I contrived to fit the dogs inside. But there was no room left for Lola. She had to sit on my shoulder, which was not ideal, for she was a nervous passenger, and any abrupt twist or turn made her either squawk or relieve herself.
Across the Straits of Messina, across Calabria, on to Naples and Rome. It is a journey pleasant to look back upon: sometimes, when balanced on the edge of sleep, I see pictures of it slide past. A picnic in the Calabrian mountains: a hard blue sky, a herd of goats below, the thin sweet pipings of the goatherder on a bamboo whistle—and Lola gobbling bread crumbs soaked in red wine.
Or Cape Palinuro, a remote, forest-fringed Calabrian beach where we all were sunning ourselves under a still-warm October sun when a wild pig charged out of the woods and raced toward us, as though to attack. I was the only one intimidated: I ran into the sea. The dogs stood their ground and Lola stood with them, flapped about, shouting encouragements in her rusty voice; together, in concert, they chased the pig back into the forest. The evening of the same day we traveled as far as the ruins at Paestum: a brilliant evening, the sky like another sea, the half-moon like an anchored ship rocking in a surf of stars, and all around us the moon-brightened marble, the broken temples of a distant time. We slept on the beach that borders the ruins; or they did—Lola and the dogs: I was tormented by mosquitoes and thoughts of mortality.
We settled for the winter in Rome, first at a hotel (the management of which expelled us after five days, and it was not even a first-class establishment), then in an apartment at 33 Via Margutta, a narrow street often painted by bad painters and renowned for the number of cats who dwell there, unowned cats sheltering in the overgrown patios and existing on the charity of half-mad elderly women, crones who every day tour the cat jungles with sacks of scrap food.
Our apartment was a penthouse: to reach it one climbed six flights of steep dark stairs. We had three rooms and a balcony. It was because of the balcony that I rented it; after the vastness of the view from the Sicilian terrace, the balcony offered, in contrast, a miniature scene tranquil and perfect as firelight: several Roman rooftops, faded orange, faded ocher, and a few across-the-way windows (behind which episodes of family life could be observed).
Lola loved the balcony. She was scarcely ever off it. She liked to sit perched on the edge of the stone balustrade and study the traffic on the cobbled street below: the old ladies feeding the Margutta cats; a street musician who came each afternoon and played bagpipes, until, feeling thoroughly blackmailed, one tossed him a coin; a handsome knife-grinder advertising his services with a song sung in the most bull-like of baritones (housewives hurried!).
When the sun was out Lola always took her bath on the balcony balustrade. Her tub was a silver soup dish; after a moment of sprightly immersion in the shallow water, she would spring up and out, and as though casting off a crystal cloak, shake herself, swell her feathers; later, for long, bliss-saturated hours, she drowsed in the sun, her head tilted back, her beak ajar, her eyes shut. To watch her was a soothing experience.
Signor Fioli seemed to think so. He sat at his window, which was exactly opposite the balcony, and played
