Roberto took us coursing up the coast road from Trieste. I knew that road well. It rode high on the cliffs above the Adriatic. Earlier in the day I’d driven it to make my sales call to the managing director of La San Marco, earning enough in one visit to term my affairs for the entire trip a success. I came away with my commission, about $5,000, and a mysterious invitation to spend the evening with them.
The mystery was to be the Countess.
In honor of the event the company had bestowed Roberto with a new black Mercedes station wagon, the La San Marco winged lion logo decaled on each front door. Without those winged lions it would have been a hearse.
Roberto’s a La San Marco espresso machine salesman and I was his assignment.
Roberto Cacciola, pleasantly homely with deep set eyes and a hook nose. Women probably liked him. He wasn’t shy of grinning like a satyr. He drove the Merc with dash and pride. In his hands it was moving like a small yacht.
The station wagon carried the three hulking espresso machines that rode in the back. They’re lever style, ersatz since they actually ran on electricity. They were earnest mimes of the Arte Nuova styled La San Marco espresso machines of the 1920s. Popular in fascist bars.
This dressing up looked good, if self-consciously cheesy. Italians have a knack for getting away with such antics as well as with their pricing, $12,000 per machine.
Each has a fake boiler protruding on top. There’s even more above this, a large and elaborate fake-bronze molding of the winged lion. Lions rode atop like abandoned Hapsburg doodads.
Roberto and I sat up front. The grumpy technician complained behind me, ignored. He’s sulking, like a little kid said Roberto, adding with a hint of contempt that anyway he didn’t speak English.
“He‘s pissed off because he’s missing the match on the tele,“ Explained Roberto.
He gave the self contained laugh that in Italian means “this is very very funny.”
I surmised that we were going to a party of some importance, somewhere out in the bush. We like the espresso machines are dressed up. Roberto is there beside me in a tux. My orders had been simply to wear a suit.
I knew the reason for my invitation. The wily managing director expected me to write up the event for Tea & Coffee.
No choice for me but to wear the same business suit as every day on a business trip, a rumpled Cartier that I’d hang each night in the hotel bathroom, hot water left on, door closed. The suit going limp in the steam. Cheap salesman’s trick. Going with my cheap and sordid hotel room.
For identity I’ve got on the Lucchese cowboy boots that cost me more than the suit. I wore the boots, mid calf, for luck in my selling, also for taking the courage of Kansas.
I think the Italians I’ve met weren’t too impressed with the suit, but they loved the boots. When you met an Italian man first thing he’d do was look at your crotch, sizing up the competition, and then your shoes, sizing up your quality. No joke, Italians really do like shoes. And for them the cloth and tailoring of a fine suit were Shroud-of-Turin stuff.
Roberto was young, maybe 25. This allowed him some playfulness with me. With the tux he’s got on orange socks and wore a small lapel pin. I scrutinize the pin but find it inscrutable. I tease him, are you a Rotarian?
“Not at all,” he said face playing poker, “it’s a pig.” I don’t inquire further.
“Mr. Bell,” Roberto gave me a sidewise to get my attention. “You know how my name is spelled, I see it on all the sales offers you are always sending in. Then why do you call me ‘Cacasolo?’ In Italian that’s “Lonely Shit.”
So we rode along while the sunset behind us became an exploding star in the rear view mirror. We’re passing the fantasy in stone of the Miramare castle the sky melting behind it into the Adriatic.
Good enough romance for making casual passerbys horny. Gave me a sense of something silly and joyous. As it goes by I imagine a cry, a siren calling to Ulysses? No, it’s that mad Carlota calling out to ‘Max!’
This strange place. It’s made me strange too.
All of this land was Hapsburg domain, for several centuries. It’s only been nominally Italian for less than one. The gentry landowners who were Austrians lost the legal use of their titles in 1919, the Italians in 1948. Never mind, they are still in place whenever possible.
This land is a stage production of the old Austro- Hungarian Empire where at its fullest Vienna ruled over 250,000 sq. miles of Europe covering Austria, Hungary, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, part of Poland and Ukraine with 55 million citizens from 11 ethnic groups, 14 official languages.
We’ve come to the bitter end of the Trieste Corridor. The funereal Mercedes plowed at last into ‘real’ Italy as the world went dark.
Communism no longer squeezed in here belligerently from where Yugoslavia once was. Close as walking distance. Communism too has become an antique. Its enemies those even truer antiques, the Austrian and Italian nobility, have survived even if stranded on the beach like tanks.
My destination came near, 40 miles west and somewhat north of Trieste, this to the thoroughly slaughtered town of Aquileia. During the Roman empire Aquileia grew to be a great city of more than 100,000. That until Attila the Hun leveled it down to bare earth. It survives hardly a village.
The Aquileia area was a landscape of such phantasms, powerful medieval Catholicism, shades of a lingering feudalism. In our heads it’s potent thanks to Hollywood. A living sentiment, a faux nostalgia for the Church in drag, for the Austrian Hungarian empire in scenes of waltzing girls with bare shoulders swirling about the lithe forms of effete young officers. All that. Beloved far and wide. Retch.
We’ve arrived at the villa, not huge, a gentleman’s country house. Neo-classy and clad in its 18th century quietude. It’s lit like a baseball field. We parked among the other Mercedes, the BMWs and Audis plus a Porsche or two. Even more than suits and shoes, Italians adore the purr and run of a car built for elite fascisti.
La San Marco bought the right to serve espresso to this event via its espresso machines crowned by those odd winged lions. I’m awed at life dropping me here standing in my Kansas boots from the Harry Shepler store on Kellog Avenue in Wichita.
I’ve been delivered to this event and I’m feeling like a debutante in the wrong dress at The Hofburg Palace. Or like I’m naked in shit up to my neck. It’s a ceremonial presentation of the season’s Aquileian wine to the Contessa Margherita Paola Grafin von Cassis-Faraone.
She’s to be presented with the wine from 30 vintners, their reds, whites and roses: Friuli Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, Malvasia Istria, Refosco (an ancient wine beloved by the Empress Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus). A mob of a few-hundred people sacked the villa, trailing smears of the hors d’oeuvres on the old oak floorboards along with pools of spilled wine.
Roberto and the technician have the La San Marco espresso machines up and running. That’s good because since wine tasting was the point a few visitors were already showing an ataxic gate.
It’s a battle between sobriety and the potential for a Dionysian revel.
The ballroom scene’s more than strange, it was antique, antiquated, superannuated, antediluvian. Most of all, it was obsolete.
Somehow I’ve been put into the line of peasants waiting to be received. I’d not intended this. When they told me to wear a suit they’d never mentioned bringing along Emily Post.
The rent-a-chamber quartet played Haydn to the ballroom, pulsating and crowded. Men seethed inconspicuously in the deadly serious business of buying and selling.
I’d wagered this first ever countess of mine would be standing in nice shoes. She does. They’re ruby red too. Maybe the scene would go ‘pop’ like a bubble if she clicked them three times?
She’s at the center of this grand room and looks well accustomed to being so. She’s a beguiling personality. I tried imagining her farting and couldn’t.
First glance and my appraisal goes lyric, secretly we’re all schmucks for nobility. She’s in her early 60s. Steel rod runs down her back bestowing that ineffable posture of aristocracy.
Countess possessed Mona Lisa allure. She doled out half smiles like Amadei chocolates to one and all and everything —what nicely capped teeth. Does a countess run for her office?
Her skin was most curious of all, even at a distance it’s powdery snow and strictly forbidden.
She’s got this event by the balls, exerting maximum charm, moderately haloed too. Something like Our lady of Guadeloupe in cobalt perylene red organza.
Beetles sang:
“Here come old flat-top, she come groovin’
slowly
She got ju-ju eyeball, she one holy roller
She got hair down to her knee
Got to be a joker, she just do what she please.”
The men in front one by one have been bowing their heads to kiss her hand. Lots of bald spots paraded forward. The women curtsied. Oh lord, I’ve never kissed a hand in my life. I’d rather curtsy.
My turn. Before I can make a move stricken in dumb-fuck stasis the Countess thrusts her hand out in handshake mode. In perfect English and giving me her bonbon smile she said, ”You are the American. I’ve been expecting you. I have American cousins in New York.”
When the greeting line trickled out, the countess came to find me, “I’m going to hide in the kitchen, follow me if you wish, we can talk. I need a cigarette and a whisky.”
And we did just that for those few hours in the hard working realism of the sweaty kitchen, getting a bit wasted. It steamed too, a better kind of steam. At least my suit might look better.
We hid there among the pots and pans from an evening she probably found hard work. Beefy local women gossiped indifferent to us, rolling out the gnocchi di prugne.
Later I researched her. Margherita von Cassis Faraone came from an Ottoman-Syrian family, Christian Syrians and hence her exotic eyes. Her great great grandfather amassed a legendary fortune in Egypt. ‘Faraone,’ was literally for Pharaoh.
One forefather translated there for Napoleon, maybe while his troops shot the nose off the Sphinx.
The family fled from Egypt to Trieste to escape upheaval. They built the largest villa in the city, also Trieste’s monumental opera house. They became widely known not only for wealth and philanthropy but also as noted collectors of curiosities, ancient relics, loot of inestimable value. Upon Egypt they’d been another plague of locusts.
Here in Aquileia they gave another villa to become the Imperial Archeological Museum of the ancient Aquileia. A Habsburg Emperor made the family noble perhaps because he owed them so much money.
Countess Margherita’s title came to her at birth. To this by marriage she’d added Count Manfred II Mautner von Markhof, one of the prominent business men and politicians in post-war Austria. With whom she had four children. After Manfred II passed she married Count Hans Ulrich von Goess-Enzenberg.
Thus she managed to marry into two booze-mogul families, one for beer and the other for wine. Acquiring more bizarre names as she went along.
She was one of three sisters, all beauties, each marrying upwards into high-strata princely families. She was either aunt or grandmother to royalty in Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, Kings and queens became kith without crowns but sitting pretty on company boards.
This kind of European nobility is exclusive, inclusive, born nigh to the point of hemophilia and prognathic jaws. They had their own museum of life, living in dioramas among stuffed dodos. Admission restricted.
So much so that they don’t know, don’t accept, don’t care that they are all past tense.
Margherita, she said to call her Gita, I did, feeling the warmth of noblesse oblige. The countess knew all about music, current affairs, history, art, literature, cooking, wine of course, perhaps beer and, obviously, men. In all Gita was the most cultured lady I’d met, the most seductive old woman by far.
Charming as she was, as the evening ended after a few hours spent in camaraderie, our conspiracy of two, she did not invite me back for cheese and crackers.
Merely shook my hand, looking me straight, gave me her half smile enigmatic as Nefertiti, and ended my passing through in a sea-wave hush of organza.
When Roberto came to fetch me he posted me an evil leer.
One day since then it came that as I checked on a detail for an article I was writing the headline of an on-line newspaper for the Trieste region made me pause.
Omicidio Contessa von Cassis Faraone
That was tantamount to ‘Santa Dead’ on the front page of the New York Times. My wonderful countess, perhaps the last one ever, had been murdered in one of the family castles in Austria. Gita had gone up there from her villa in Italy for a family meeting. There to argue about a dumbwaiter.
The dumbwaiter had been installed in the old castle a few years earlier. According to the regional Austrian government it did not meet the criteria for a historic monument.
Considerable cost would be involved in bringing the dumbwaiter up to standard. The adult sons of count von Goess, both counts themselves, were strongly opposed to picking up the check.
Their father and Gita, however, thought it best to quietly accede. The argument over the money for the dumbwaiter became heated.
At one point the younger son stormed out in a rage, probably an expensive one in rare Italian shoes, racing over frigid travertine to fetch a rifle from his bedroom. Then he murdered the others at point blank, father-brother-stepmother.
Obituary gave the countess’s age as 86! I counted. Yes, she might have been 71 that evening in the villa. Guess she’d had some good help making time stand still.
The funeral of Countess Margherita von Cassis Faraone was held in the immense rococo church of San Biagio in Terzo d’Aquileia. A few hundred came to pack it tight. They gave her a state funeral production. Also an occasion for nobility to crawl out of hiding throughout a large part of Mitteleuropa, from Geneva to Sarajevo or wherever Habsburgs and such might find discount flights.
Her funeral was a major fashion event of that January. Haut couture in black with hats competing for expense.
From the video I’ve seen of it everyone came looking photogenic and tragic.
No higher mass was possible, droned off by a monsignor from Trieste and a monsignor from Vienna, an ac/dc burial in Italian and German.
An orchestra came from Vienna, a choir from Trieste, entertainment was one of Shubert’s funeral masses. It must have made the rococo gilt tremble.
More believable were the photos I saw of the mob of villagers who truly mourned her as they walked behind her coffin to the cemetery.
I wondered if they were thanking her for presiding there for a life time in a style to make them proud. In tolerance and kindness too.
Did Roberto, that lonely shit, provend the espresso there too? Attending at the funeral along with the La San Marco black Mercedes station wagon? Those three espresso machines? The winged-lion boiler ornaments?
I did see one photo among those taken at her funeral of the La San Marco logo. Made me wonder if the company had underwritten the entire event.