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“Your things have already been brought here.” She interrupts me. “Clothes are in the closet and your notes are on the desk.” I blink with my mouth open for several seconds before I'm able to say something. The expression on Luigia's face doesn't say much, but it's also not her traditional look of displeasure.
“Why? Was it because I got into trouble yesterday?” I don't want to believe in something like that, but no other possibility occurs to me. “Signora, I...”
“What happened yesterday wasn't your fault.” She interrupts me with the statement that cannot be challenged. I feel like I’m taking my first full breath since she came to pick me up in the kitchen. Her opinion was really very important. “Nothing that happened yesterday,bambina, was your fault,” she repeats, and I blink more times, feeling my eyes burn.
“Then why?”
“I follow orders,bambina. Just that.” Silence settles between us as if the housekeeper was giving me time to process the information. I'm going to need a lot more than a few minutes to do this. “And today was your last day as a housekeeper.” She speaks again, however.
My eyes go from blinking and watery to wide.
“Am I going to change roles?” I ask, even though I know the answer to that question.
“No,bambina. From now on you are confined to this wing.”
“But what about my classes? Rafaella? But what about...” There are so many questions coming at once that the realization that, suddenly, I had things to lose, shuts me up. I don't know what stuns me more, the actual loss or the understanding.
“I'm sorry, Gabriella,” Luigia says, and I think this is the first time I've heard her apologize about anything to anyone.
“For what,SignoraLuigia?” A sad smile appears on her lips. Another first time and no answer to my question.
“Don's room is at the end of the hall.” Her tone is one of caution, and I understand the warning implicit in it: under no circumstances should I go there. I nod slowly, having no idea what to do, what this sudden change could mean. “Good night,bambina.”
“Good night, Luigia,” I say goodbye, and the woman leaves the room, but doesn't even touch the door.
The housekeeper leaves the passage wide open in a perfect metaphor for what is about to happen to the black box I had buried deep in my chest. Because it wasn't under the ground that I kept it isolated, it was under the infinity of daily tasks, the banal subjects, the chaos of the kitchen and the Italian classes. But alone, being the only one who needs to deal with the emptiness in my own head, I don't know how long it will take for everything I ignored and hid to simply explode, from the inside out.
***
The wing isn't really that different from the others, I realize, after opening the fifth door. I left the room before I could start thinking.
The room is even bigger than the one I stayed in before. The bed is bigger, the patterned carpet is plush, the chandelier on the ceiling looks like a giant jellyfish, and if I thought the previous view was breathtaking, this one is impossible to describe.
From above, the vines, already full of the movements of the harvest, are even more beautiful than from eye level and, to my surprise, when I entered the bathroom, I found the same saint that was in the other. The same comforting look and the same outstretched arms greeted me from the window.
But after all my daily rituals, after covering the floor and getting ready for bed, I rolled from one side of the soft carpet to the other and couldn't fall asleep. The inconvenient questions began to arise, and I decided that risking bumping into Vittorio, since I would be deliberately strolling through his house, was a much less problematic scenario than the chaos inside my own head.
Wearing light fabric pants and a T-shirt, I enter yet another fine, classically decorated living room. The Provençal furniture has carved wood and gilded picture frames. The wallpaper is ivory and full of arabesques, and the sofas and armchairs are dark, mostly leather. I brush my fingers over the surfaces, feeling on my skin what each one feels like.
“Like what you see?” the deep voice asks in Italian, scaring me enough to make me scream and put my hand on my chest. I turn around with wide eyes and find Vittorio, standing in the doorway of the room.
Meters and meters of distance between us don't stop my breath from hanging in the air when my eyes fall on him. The man, silent as a panther, stares at me with his expressionless face, as always.
“I like it,” I reply finally when I find my own voice again.
“I see you're already giving yourself a tour?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“A second thing, you mean.” I roll my eyes at the pun I never had the patience for. In one of his rare displays of emotion, Vittorio raises an eyebrow.
“Can I?”
“Now it's a third.” He adds, seeming to take pleasure in irritating me. I narrow my eyes.
“Why am I here?” Vittorio smiles, apparently amused by my question, or perhaps it's my audacity in asking. It is likely the second. “You said I could ask.”
“I’ve never said that. I also didn't say I would respond.”
