“If you wait for my dance lesson to finish before you go for your walk, I’ll come with you,” Pandora muttered sleepily.
“You? Why do you want to go and visit a glass artist?” Marie asked in surprise. “Are you considering a career change?”
“Nonsense. I just want to see how she lives. Ask her a few questions. How she came to own the land. How much it cost, that sort of thing. Lukas tells me that after phylloxera killed off most of the vineyards hereabouts a lot of land was sold off for cheap. Who knows? Perhaps I can afford a little cabin here myself. I’m not going back to New York, that’s for sure.”
“You would stay here? Don’t you think you’d miss the hustle and bustle of the city?”
Pandora stretched her right leg up into the air, admired it for a moment, and then crossed it gracefully over the left. “I won’t miss anybody or anything. Quite the opposite. I’ve never been able to concentrate so completely on dance as I have here. I seem to feel the air vibrating around me. You have to dance to the music in your heart . . .” she sang again.
“Lukas and I knew this would happen,” Susanna said triumphantly. The next moment, though, she frowned fiercely. “Pandora, darling—you’re not lying right, again! How often do I have to show you how to sunbathe? This is how you have to do it, watch!” She lay down flat on her back with her arms and legs stretched wide, her back slightly arched, her face to the sun.
“I’ll lie however I like,” Pandora grumbled. “If I lay the way you told me to, I’d feel like I was on a rack.”
Marie, who was lying on her belly, giggled. “I don’t find it all that pleasant either, to tell the truth. You feel so defenseless . . .”
“That’s right, isn’t it?” Pandora said emphatically. “And I always worry that a bug will crawl in between my legs. Or even get into my bottom.” She laughed merrily.
“The way you lot chatter away, it’s worse than having to listen to the magpies cawing on the balcony,” Sherlain grumbled.
The others looked over at her. Unlike the others, Sherlain had assumed the prescribed Monte Verità sunbathing position. Her hair lay spread out over the green moss like a ring of flame, making her look more than ever like a Celtic goddess.
The four women sunbathed in silence for a while, and Pandora even began to snore. Marie smiled to herself. She had never known her friend to be so relaxed.
In New York Sherlain and Pandora had been birds of paradise, praised and adored for their eccentricities—while here they were just two people among a whole crowd of self-appointed creative geniuses. Life on Monte Verità seemed to be doing both of them good. When she was honest with herself, Marie found the constant quest for wisdom rather silly. And it was almost shocking the way they thundered against alcohol here. Franz Hartmann stridently preached the message that wine and beer were only for the weak-willed, and many of the residents lapped it up, so to speak. Sherlain hadn’t drunk a drop since she had arrived at Monte Verità, but Pandora wasn’t quite so self-denying. The same held true with regard to meat. The hard-liners here talked of meat as carrion and held that it polluted both body and spirit. Marie rather liked the meals of sliced apple, grated carrot, and kohlrabi, but Franco refused to try being a vegetarian even for a short while.
“The whole of Ascona enjoys la dolce vita and I’m supposed to eat rabbit food?” he had said right at the start. He had since gone down to the village for at least one meal a day. Now and then Marie and Pandora joined him, but Marie always felt guilty after indulging in prosciutto and other meats. Besides, Italian food was bad for the figure. She had never been as plump as she was now.
Franco however had the time of his life strutting through the narrow streets of Ascona with Marie on his right arm and Pandora on his left. Whenever they sat down in a tavern, he insisted on picking up Pandora’s check as well, which was beginning to get on Marie’s nerves since the dancer didn’t show the least sign of gratitude—quite the opposite in fact.
“How can you make so much money in the red wine trade when it sells for so cheap all over the world? Who knows what business you’re really in?” she had teased him just the other evening, at which point Marie gave her a hard nudge in the ribs. Franco had once told her in no uncertain terms that aristocrats thought it very coarse to discuss business affairs, and that was the last time she had asked where all his money came from. All she had meant was that she didn’t like the thought that he always paid for everything, but he had put on such dreadful airs that she had changed the subject . . . And maybe it wasn’t so bad to let him spoil her.