Less understands at last what is happening: he is in the wrong car.
SR. ESS—he anagrams in his mind what he took, in his lingering hypnosis and pride, for signor and a childlike misspelling of Less. Sriramathan Ess? Srovinka Esskatarinavitch? SRESS—Società di la Repubblica Europea per la Sexualité Studentesca? Almost anything makes sense to Less at this altitude. But it is obvious: having cleared the problems of travel, he let his guard slip, waved at the first sign resembling his name, and was whisked away to an unknown location. He knows life’s commedia dell’arte and how he has been cast. He sighs in his seat. Staring out at a shrine to an auto accident, placed at a particularly rough curve in the road. He feels the Madonna’s plastic eyes meet his for an instant.
And now the signs for a particular town become more frequent, and a particular hotel: something called Mondolce Golf Resort. Less stiffens in fear. His narrating mind whittles the possibilities down: he had taken the car of a Dr. Ludwig Ess, some vacationing Austrian doctor who is off to a golf resort in Piemonte with his wife. He: brown skulled, with white hair in puffs over his ears, little steel glasses, red shorts and suspenders. Frau Ess: short, blond hair with a streak of pink, rough linen tunics and chili pepper leggings. Walking sticks packed in their luggage for jaunts to the village. She has signed up for courses in Italian cooking, while he dreams of nine holes and nine Morettis. And now they stand in some hotel lobby in Turin, shouting with the proprietor while a bellboy waits, holding the elevator. Why did Less come a day early? There will be no one from the prize foundation to straighten out the misunderstanding; the poor Ess voices will echo emptily up to the lobby chandelier. BENVENUTO, a sign reads as they pull into a drive, A MONDOLCE GOLF RESORT. A glass box on a hill, a pool, golf holes all around. “Ecco,” the driver announces as they pull to the front; the last sunlight flashes on the pool. Two beautiful young women emerge from the entryway’s hall of mirrors, hands clasped. Less readies himself for full mortification.
But life has pardoned him at the scaffold steps:
“Welcome,” says the tall one in the sea-horse-print dress, “to Italy and to your hotel! Mr. Less, we are greet you from the prize committee…”
The other finalists do not arrive until late the following day, so Less has almost twenty-four hours in the golf resort by himself. Like a curious child, he tries the pool, then the sauna, the cold plunge, the steam room, the cold plunge again, until he is as scarlet as a fever victim. Unable to decipher the menu at the restaurant (where he dines alone in a shimmering greenhouse), for three meals he orders something he recalls from a novel: steak tartare of the local Fassona. For three meals he orders the same Nebbiolo. He sits in the glass sunlit room like the last human on earth, with a wine cellar to last him a lifetime. There is an amphora of petunia-like flowers on his private deck, worried day and night by little bees. On closer inspection, Less sees that instead of stingers, they have long noses to probe the purple flowers with. Not bees: pygmy hummingbird moths. The discovery delights him to his core. Less’s pleasures are tinted only slightly the following afternoon, when a mixed group of teenagers appears at the edge of the pool and stares as he does his laps. He returns to his room, all Swedish whitened wood, with a steel fireplace hanging on the wall. “There is wood in the room,” the sea horse lady said. “You know how to light a fire, yes?” Less nods; he used to go camping with his father. He stacks the wood in a little Cub Scout tepee, and stuffs the underspace with Corriere della Sera, and lights the thing. Time for his rubber bands.
Less has, for years, traveled with a set of rubber bands that he thinks of as his portable gym. The set is multicolored, with interchangeable handles, and he always imagines, when he coils them into his luggage, how toned and fit he will be when he returns. The ambitious routine begins in earnest the first night, with dozens of special techniques recommended in the manual (lost long ago in Los Angeles but remembered in parts), Less wrapping the bands around the legs of beds, columns, rafters, and performing what the manual called “lumberjacks,” “trophies,” and “action heroes.” He ends his workout lacquered in sweat, feeling he has beat back another day from time’s assault. Fifty is further than ever. The second night, he advises himself to let his muscles repair. The third, he remembers the set and begins the routine with half a heart; the thin walls of the room might tremble with a neighbor’s television, or the dead bathroom light might depress him, or the thought of an unfinished article. Less promises himself a better workout in two days. In return for this promise: a dollhouse whiskey from the room’s dollhouse bar. And then the set is forgotten, abandoned on the hotel’s side table: a slain dragon.