After showering, Marie made herself a tea, which she drank from a big bowl on the terrace, then she went to have a look in the toolshed. She dug through a pile of junk in search of a few tools, moved aside a wheelbarrow, and returned to the garden with a pick, a rake, and a pair of clippers sticking out of her pant’s back pocket like a comb. She began working in the garden, she clipped the creepers and bramble, whose scraps she raked into neat piles. She wore her father’s old straw hat, a pair of jeans, a white shirt, and rather kitschy flip-flops, with a plastic daisy in bloom in between her two big toes. Pulling up weeds, tearing out some fuller’s teasel, she cleaned up around where her father’s tomatoes had been with her bare hands. Standing on her toes, she rerouted long branches of honeysuckle, careful not to break its vines, which she transferred from the wall to a trellised espalier. Then she watered the garden, pensive, slowly moving around the enclosure while dragging behind her a rolled yellow hose, which slithered along like an obedient snake.
Below the house the horse’s paddock had been untouched since the previous summer. Marie crossed the old fence and went down formerly cultivated plots of land, now overgrown, their surfaces bumpy, rocky, uneven, where grass had shot up in irregular tufts around the ruins of small stone walls. She walked three hundred feet or so before stopping in front of the sea and gazing down at its expanse, blue, still, slack, its surface slightly ruffled at times by an imperceptible heaving. The sky met the sea at the horizon, and their two blues fused there, the deep blue of the sea and the paler, slightly hazy blue of the sky. All was calm around her, the silence of nature, the occasional chirping of birds, the flight of a butterfly, the tall grass of the property bent gently by a languid breeze.
Marie spent the summer alone at La Rivercina. Occasionally, in the early evening, returning from the beach, she’d wash her hair in the small garden, standing against the gate in her bathing suit, her bare feet in the soil or planted on a blue duckboard, her hair lathered with a soapy white foam whose vanilla scent seemed to hang in the air around her, and she ran her hands through her hair under the hose’s spray of warm water. She’d bend down to turn off the water and roll her hair up in a big white towel, after having let it drip at length, her head hanging upside down above the ground. She’d return to the house, her flip-flops slipping off her feet, barely attached, sliding on the ground and scraping against the terrace’s large, irregular flagstones. She’d lower the straps of her bathing suit one at a time, slide it down her hips and leave it carelessly on the kitchen floor, proceeding up the stairs naked, turbaned in white, her flip-flops clacking, daisies between her toes, her naked body pearled with beads of water glistening in the sun and trickling off her at each step.
Before leaving La Rivercina the previous year, Marie had boarded her father’s horses at the equestrian club of La Guardia. When her father was still alive, Peppino, the manager of the club, would see to the horses’ health, coming by La Rivercina at least once a month to check on them, inspect their coats, examine their teeth. Old Maurizio was happy to make sure the horses had water, and Marie’s father would give them a treat sometimes by bringing them an extra share of hay or a bucket of oats. He’d cross the paddock’s fence and walk up to the horses with his bucket, addressing them cheerfully from a distance (ciao, ragazzi, he’d say to them, and he’d pet their necks affectionately with the flat of his hand, and they’d snort and shake, sending swarms of flies away in the dust of the paddock).
Marie had taken a liking to Nocciola, the mare with beautiful eyes that she’d ridden for the first time the previous year, the day of her father’s funeral, when she’d escorted his hearse on horseback through the streets of Elba all the way to the cemetery. This year she’d gone to see Nocciola at the equestrian club at the beginning of July, and she’d wanted to ride her. She rode her at a slow pace, gently going around the riding stable, under the passive surveillance of Peppino’s daughter, a glum adolescent straddling the fence, a telefonino at her ear, speaking with a lilt that she punctuated at times with a brief salvo of eloquent gestures made with an upturned hand. The equestrian club comprised a scattered set of stone cottages spread around a sort of clearing, at one end of which lay a dusty track with a single building for the lounge and reception, a shed for the saddles and various harnesses, as well as simple stables with sheet metal roofs and wooden frames, reinforced with planks, where the horses spent the night. From outside the stalls, the dark manes of the horses could be seen waving in the air, while their legs were still under the stable doors, as though their upper and lower halves belonged to different animals. The riding stable felt at once closed and opened, surrounded as it was by white barriers and at the same time leading directly into the coastal scrub. On horseback, one’s view stretched far into the surrounding countryside, past the wild olive trees, all the way to the hill’s barren crest, where wind and successive fires had consumed most of its vegetation. It wasn’t long before Marie needed no help riding Nocciola, she saddled the mare herself when she arrived at the club, leading her by the bridle, mounting the saddle, and riding around the paddock at a slow pace, then, firmly kicking the horse’s sides, riding at a trot, and, after a week, at a gallop.
One morning, at the end of August, Marie, casting aside the old clothes she wore for riding or gardening, did herself up, she’d put on makeup in front of the mirror. Before leaving her room, she carefully applied her lipstick, which she softened by pressing her lips to the soft center of a toilet paper roll, leaving the silent vestige of a red kiss on the roll as she placed it back down on the marble counter. Marie left the property in her father’s old open-bed truck, and she drove serenely through the winding roads of Elba, the sea below her, blue, still, with warm air blowing through the truck’s open windows. Next to her, on the seat, sat a bouquet of wild flowers she’d arranged the night before in the kitchen, with a sense of refinement she demonstrated time and again when dealing with colors and fabrics, never forcing novelty or originality, just a small gesture, simple, confident, natural, bringing together, in a vase, the obvious and the impossible, three sprigs of fennel culled on the side of the road, two branches of a young eucalyptus taken from a tree in the garden, and a few clippings of bougainvillea with royal purple flowers she’d stolen from the terrace of a seaside residence.