Mary Lou scrunched up her nose. “I’ve tried, but I’m useless. You don’t, right?”
“No.”
“I hear your husband is quite good.”
“Paul’s grandmother on his father’s side was Sicilian. She lived with them when he was growing up.”
“That’s a nice cheat,” said Mary Lou, and I agreed that it was.
The commodore lived in a neighborhood called Moneta, on the eastern side of the island. “If you stay on this road,” Mary Lou said as she hung a left onto a smaller side road, “you’ll get to a little bridge that will take you to Caprera.”
“And what’s that again?”
“Another island. A little bigger than La Maddalena. Most of it’s a nature reserve.”
“Like with hiking trails?”
“I guess?” she said as she rooted around in her purse for something. “I don’t really go in for that sort of thing.”
Bythat sort of thing, I think Mary Lou meant the outdoors.
She had found what she was looking for. A pack of Virginia Slims. “Do you smoke?” she asked, offering me one.
I was a social smoker, never one to buy a pack myself but always happy to bum a cigarette off someone at a party. It was tempting to do so now, but Paul hated it when I smoked, and I felt certain he’d have feelings about me lighting up in front of the CO’s wife. I shook my head and said, “No, thanks.”
Mary Lou took her hands off the wheel long enough to light her cigarette, then used the cigarette to gesture in the direction of Caprera. “Garibaldi’s house is out there.”
I knew nothing about Giuseppe Garibaldi except that the Sardinian revolutionary’s portrait hung in more than half the shops and restaurants I’d been to. He gets the credit for Risorgimento, or unifying Italy, in the mid-1800s, which sounds like it was a pretty bloody undertaking. But the reason the Maddalenini loved him was that, after he’d helped install Victor Emmanuel II as king of Italy, he retired to Caprera, where he established a small farm and lived out the remainder of his days. It would be years before I read his biography, but in only a week on the island, I had already come to understand that “the Hero,” as he was referred to by the Maddalenini, was their pride and joy.
“You can tour the house,” said Mary Lou, “but I’d save it for when you have out-of-town company. You don’t want to do it more than once.”
I made a mental note.
“There are some pretty beaches out there, too. And a Club Med.”
I looked over at her, confused. “I thought the Club Med was on the other side of Santo Stefano?”
Mary Lou blew a thin stream of smoke out the window. “There are two.”
“Wow.”
“I know. Seems like overkill. Though it does mean we get some pretty good celebrity sightings.”
“Anyone I’d know?”
She took an exceptionally long drag on her cigarette, which gave me the impression that she was intentionally holding out on me. “How about Robert Redford?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” she said with a wan smile.
“Oh my God, I lovedThe Way We Were. He was so handsome in it.”
“Well, from what I hear, he’s every bit as handsome in person.”
We had arrived at a fork in the road, and Mary Lou veered onto a dirt path—barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. As we bumped over the rutted road under a canopy of pine trees, we passed a number of villas, mostly hidden from view thanks to an outcropping of concrete walls and bougainvillea. I couldn’t see the water, but I smelled the salt in the air and knew that I was likely looking at the backsides of a bunch of waterfront homes.
“This is gorgeous,” I said as we passed a particularly lavish spread.
