Read Alice for Free Online Page B

because he was always polite and knew how to behave. Maybe also because she wasn’t in love with him. As far as she knew, Anna wasn’t in love with him either. She had suggested their names to Conrad, and he had agreed. And now he was sick. A fever. He would have unlocked the yellow house and shown it to them. Alice knew he would have enjoyed that very much. She followed Lotte down the stairs, Lotte’s slow, measured steps, not turning to look again at the middle door. The cardinal beetles scurried out of their way and vanished into the cracks between the stones.
    The yellow house had three storeys and six rooms. Alice chose the room under the eaves, the room Conrad used to live in, before he and Lotte converted
la stalla
. The room was square, windows on two sides, a narrow bed, a cupboard, a red carpet with a black pattern woven into it and, in its exact centre, a table. From there Alice could see the peaks of the mountains on the other side of the lake. Anna tookthe room next door. Fig leaves on the coverlet over the wide bed, a door leading to the second balcony and another to a bathroom with a bathtub, shiny fixtures, blue tiles, and two sinks in front of two mirrors. A stairway led down to the first floor, no banister, instead a golden cord along the wall which slid softly through Alice’s hand. The sheets, starched and ironed, were in a chest under the stairway. The Romanian took the smallest room for himself. Its window was shaded by ivy; it had a metal bed with a small table next to it, polished wood, delicate inlaid work. On the ground floor: the kitchen, a dining room, a living room, low sofas in front of the fireplace and on the bookshelf were games for rainy days: Monopoly, Ludo, chess. On the walls hung framed drawings by their children, Lotte and Conrad’s children, three. And drawings by the grandchildren, five. A guest book next to the telephone. In the large pantry behind the kitchen was a refrigerator into which Conrad had put a watermelon the day before. Alice went from room to room pushing open all the shutters, then the doors to the balconies; the curtain rings clattered softly against each other. Sunlight on the table in Conrad’s old room, and fine dust.
    Anna opened her backpack, threw everything on the bed: white skirts, dresses, and blouses with red roses on them. Suntan lotion. Books. Three pairs of sunglasses. From downstairs the Romanian called up to them: Campari! It was really quite unbearable.
    Leaning against the door frame of Anna’s room, her naked feet crossed and her arms across her chest, Alice asked, Do you suppose we’ll still be going for a swim today?
    Well,
naturalmente
, Anna said, what do you think!
    One of the kitchen doors led to the outside, the other into the dining room. Seventeen steps from the kitchen to the dining room, living room, and a white French door to the terrace. The terrace was the seventh room; it had a stone parapet with red cushions on it, three columns, a cypress. Alice sat down on the bench outside the house next to the kitchen door. Lizards on the house wall, their mysterious rustling in the ivy. No breeze now. Nothing. She sat there like that for a while. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, walked past the Romanian without saying a word, and the seventeen steps again to the terrace where Anna was sitting on the stone parapet on the red cushions, leaning against a column, holding a glass in her left hand, her knees drawn up, her head to one side, and her matted hair tied into a child’s pigtail. She smiled at Alice, showing her broken left front tooth. What a relief to see her.
    What a relief to see you, Alice said. You have no idea, you just wouldn’t believe it.
    And what if I do? Anna said.
    That doesn’t change anything, Alice said.
    After the sun had set, they walked along the dirt road, past the goats, through the great forged-iron gate, and down to the restaurant on the lakeshore road. Nuovo Ponte, it