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"Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree." -- W.B.Yeats
Una Nobildonna
For Joel FletcherGreat rooms with chestnut beams, carved pietra serena, Antique brocade and damask, faded, rubbed, Have been the stages for her rituals. At five the majordomo closes the shutters And lights the lamps; the curtains drawn, he stirs The embers in the polished grate to flame. A Kentish grandmother's wheeled altar bears The shining pot, the holy grails, the cake, The scones, the thin, thin tasteless sandwiches. Firelight suffuses the eggshell porcelain, Glows through her spotted, manicured old hand.La MarchesaMother was Neapolitan. Once at Bagni di Lucca -- I was about five -- she went to bed in evening dress with all her jewels on. At three that morning came a rumbling shock and she rushed down the stairs with me in my nightdress, half asleep in her arms. The other guests asked, 'How did you know?' And she replied, 'I knew.' She thought all Neapolitans had second-sight. She had fair hair and deep-blue eyes, was avid for life -- had a cavaliere servente when she was seventy. I thought her, I'll admit, a bit outrée. I have always had common sense. It has sufficed. * * *Herringbone brick walks through patterned beds South wall with espaliered mandarins Family group by Sustermans Pale, threadbare tapestries Lovely, mended, frothy negligées, tea gowns Old white Ginori procelain blazoned with gold* * *Il MaggiordomoThis is a well-run house, no matter the Marchesa is alone now sixty years. When she goes -- and I pray nightly she goes first -- then I'll go, too. But until then I polish silver, answer bells. The books, all bound in fine morocco with the family's crest in gold, are oiled once a year. It takes a week. With only four of us in service now I have unbent somewhat. I clean my lady's shoes. Luncheon is still five courses with two wines when we have guests. I wear white gloves. Pina puts on a lacy apron and gray silk and helps me in the dining room. We haven't any footmen nowadays. No one is invited here for dinner any more. The poor Marchesa comes down all alone in garnet velvet, wearing the diamonds, and sits at the head of that endless board, as if her friends were there, and eats her soup. She sits so straight! I stand just to her right. Sometimes she talks with me. * * * A lullaby Children's voices singing a round-game The dancing master and a waltz A string quartet playing the wedding march Trumpets and drums: their bright and rattling blare A lullaby Children's voices singing a round-game The organ at the funeral Mass In the garden of the Torrigiani a nightingale The endless intricacies of wordless airs * * *La CuginaI think she married Ermenegildo for the name -- not for love or money or the ancient family name but that grand, booming fanfare she called him by, when everyone else -- his mother, too -- just called him Gildo. We're almost of an age -- I and that vecchia strega , and I suppose we're friends. What else could you call two creatures tottering above their tombs who've known each other longer than most lifetimes? As cousins we were together often enough as girls. Even then, when the rest of us wanted to be Mary Pickford, she seemed always to emphasize her differences: that blend of the Norman from the South and the English nonna. Maybe she hankered to be Queen Mary! -- those clothes and hats from no particular century, the manners from some royal court in operetta land! I know her grandeur certainly took the King aback. The poor old girl. She's tried so hard to mlake us think she's intellectual and made of finer stuff than we, that she was destined -- no, condemned -- to dwell apart in her Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. All fiddle-faddle. I think, if truth be told, she's always been ashamed of her long, thin, bony nose and a perfectly flat behind. I think she's a zitella born. She probably would happily have spent her life somewhere as an archivist. But shame! -- gossiping about an old woman who's no worse or sillier than most of us and one of the few alive who can remember me when I was young. I lunch with her next week. In that house, I have to say, one eats superbly well. I wonder if she's spent a lifetime modifying facts, so Gildo's starred as a tragic lover lost and she's forever Giulietta in the tomb. But what could she ever do with the poor, fat, dull little boy? What was his name? -- something archaic and long, you may be sure. * * * Calling cards, polite notes Thoughtful, appropriate gifts Punctual appearance at the proper Mass Housekeeping noted to that last speck of dust Flowers arranged and food as beautifuly prepared As for the supper at a ball of seventy years ago * * * Il Professore Americano The facade's in every history of architecture Important stylistically, transitional between early and later Renaissance. Note the ground floor: rusticated stone. First floor: stone more finely dressed, Ionic pilasters, more graceful window treatments. Second floor: smooth stone, Corinthian details. And then the cornice: really marvelous. Too bad it was never finished all the way around. The family that built it's lived here ever since. Some tourist rang the bell a while back -- thinking it was a public museum I guess -- and got the back of the hand from an ancient butler. The last of the direct line was killed a hell of a long time ago. The old Marchesa, so I hear, is still hanging on. La Marchesa Consider this gallery: Bronzino's Lucrezia Panciatichi: perfect beauty Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck: perfect piety Mazzolino's Slaughter of the Innocents: perils of the lethal crowd François I, Clouet: a man dressed in his best and on his way La Cameriera She's older than the century and I'm not much younger. Came to her before she'd met the Marchese. Used to wait up, half-asleep. She wasn't easy, even then. I watched her not allow herself to weep the day after the wedding; was there for the birth, there for the double death. All these years, and I'm still here. I brush her hair a hundred strokes, morning and night, make sure there's an orchid in her room, line up the shoes and iron the linen sheets when she gets up from her nap. I keep the jewel box. Her heart is like a jewel in a box -- far too gaudy a jewel for such a lady. She's always needed me. I never wed. There's no woman alive but me could do things as she wants them done. There's not another house in Tuscany that's run as this one's run. We keep old ways. * * * Noi fiorentini siamo chiusi Superbiated, proud of a cherished flaw Beyond the porte barbarians clad in pelts But overheard remarks concern denaro, gli americani * * * La Marchesa The seicento is my period. I like the lesser masters of the baroque -- Italians, not the grand, German Bach -- their simpler curves, and convolutions more easily resolved. Though I have lived a long, long life in grim old Florence -- the Palazzo Vecchio is an antique hypodermic needle -- Bernini might have laid out my mind, designed those high and angel-thronged, rose-clouded reaches where I have made my home. I am thought eccentric, but nothing is anachronistic which serves someone. I heap the complicated on top of the difficult in all external things. That is my style. Etiquette, immutable ceremonious ways, have distanced me, precisely as I wished. It is the simplest strategem I found, a well-clipped maze, of which I've had the plan for quite some time. No one has understood -- my mother or my father, the man I married, or the child I bore, who all too soon I saw would turn out a simple country gentleman. Like Sleeping Beauty I lay at the heart of a castle girded by a thorny hedge. The difference: while all the others slept my eyes were open. I saw it all and chose not to participate. I have had my music and my books: Vivaldi, Albinoni, Pico, Tasso, John Donne..., the Mannerists -- their not-quite-appropriate elegance. My manner has opened vistas and has given me at the same time near-perfect privacy -- my giardino segreto: my bower, my hermitage -- my lair! I admire disdain, have scorned most of the world; and those I've spurned have paid me back with curiosity. I am -- or was -- a curiosity, I suppose, to the few who tried for closer scrutiny. Acquaintances see me as a rigid woman armored by a way of life against life's thrusts. No one has ever guessed -- and it amuses me -- I fly through private heavens, free now as I have almost always been, thank God, my goal, since I first thought of goals, to be completely civilized. If my designs have forced some "natural" streams through straitened conduits, I do not care: I have lived by an aesthetic, and I know constriction makes for beauty and for strength. This may divert you: when I go to the Uffizi once a year I make it a point to see the group of the Laocoön, an object lesson in entanglements. Refusal to intervene saves one. The serpent is always there, rearing out of the sea; but I have wielded fastidiousness like a flaming sword, so well, so long, that now if I cared to look i imagine I might note, beyond a wrinkled waste of water, merely a setting sun.* * *The bells of Santo Spirito announce the Angelus. Swallows are circling in the deepening sky. Lights flicker from Fiesole to San Miniato. Great domes and towers rise in air the gold of florins. Monte Morello watches over us. Between stone walls the green Arno flows toward our sea.© Carl Selph, 1993 First published in Bellowing ArkAll text on this page is copyrighted by Carl Selph and appears here by permission. All rights reserved. It may not be archived beyond one personal electronic copy for offline reading; such a copy must include the entire text of the present notice and the author's name. It may not be printed, posted on a web-site, distributed publicly or privately, used or quoted in whole or in part, or published in any manner or form whatsoever without the author's explicit permission. E-mail Wordreign to contact Carl Selph and your request will be promptly forwarded.
Carl Selph Poetry Index Original Writing Page Images from Myst © 1993 Cyan, Inc. and Riven © 1997 Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved. Myst® and Riven® are registered trademarks of Cyan, Inc. Used by permission.