Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [81]
Lucia never openly complained about Alvise’s long absences in her letters to Paolina, but traces of her disappointment were just below the surface. “It is very important here in Vienna to display family harmony,” she wrote, adding touchingly that “the appearance of it often generates the actual substance: leading the same life, spending a lot of time together—it helps bring two people closer, it helps them join their souls.”15 After all that had passed—the birth of Massimiliano, the death of Plunkett, the shock of Alvise’s return, the move to Vienna—Lucia was willing to make a new start with Alvise. By living together in “family harmony” she hoped they might generate “the actual substance.”
Was Alvise listening to Lucia? In his diary, he had proclaimed rather emphatically to himself that he was moving his “family” to Vienna. So far, he had moved only his wife. During that first year in Austria, he was with her a mere few weeks; and he was always on the go, always restless, clearly reluctant to put roots in his “adopted fatherland.” In the eyes of Lucia, Alvise was still, in many ways, the inscrutable, enigmatic person she had married fifteen years before. So it was not without a certain wistfulness that she set about organising her life in Vienna without him.
Running the households in Vienna and Margarethen, keeping the accounting books in good order and writing her reports to Alvise kept Lucia busy and gave a structure to her daily life. She actually enjoyed working with numbers and discovered she had quite a knack for good management, always looking for ways to run things more efficiently. The memory of her father’s uncertain finances during her youth had remained vivid and, perhaps as a reaction, she was generally parsimonious and very meticulous about keeping track of her personal expenses. She liked to follow a general rule she had picked up from Madame de Genlis, her favourite writer, and which she passed on to Paolina: “Divide your monthly stipend three ways: the first for alms-giving and charity, the second for clothes, the third for treats and entertainment such as coffee, tickets to the theatre, ice creams, toys for the children.”16
When she had time to spare, in between her regular trips out to Margarethen, she ran errands and went shopping for Paolina and her nieces and nephews. She was always wrapping packages of some kind or another to send to Italy—winter boots, clothes, books, toys. She once bought an amusing set of wax ice creams and sherbets for the children. Before sending them off to Paolina, she took the ice creams over to old Doctor Vespa, thinking a practical joke would cheer him up after the mild stroke he had suffered. It did—especially when he discovered she had also brought real vanilla ice cream, which he ate with delight.
In the evenings Lucia often went to one of Baron de Braun’s productions at the opera house. She was usually home for supper shortly after nine o’clock, arriving with her head full of dust raised by the evening traffic of carriages. Before going to bed, Margherita cleaned and combed her hair as they chatted about the day’s events.
As the winter season approached, her social schedule grew busier. “I have an assembly with dancing and supping at the Russian Embassy today,” she wrote to Paolina, showing off a bit. “Tuesday a ball at Court. Wednesday another ball at the Coblentz’s. Thursday I’ll be at Count Zichy’s and then at Prince Esterhazy’s.”17 Lucia discovered how ridiculously difficult it was, in these circumstances, to fix an appointment with Signor Boschetti. “I sent out for him at seven in the morning so that he could fix my hair today but he had apparently left the house at six because he had so many heads to