The Golden house in those last months was like a besieged fortress. The besieging forces were invisible but everyone in the house could feel them, the unseen angels or demons of impending doom. And one by one the help began to leave.
The film echoed here is maybe the greatest masterpiece of the great Luis Bu?uel. Its original title, The Outcasts of Providence Street, is not explicitly religious—“providence” is not necessarily divine, it might be no more than a metaphor, as also its colleagues karma, kismet, and fate—so the characters cast out by destiny might be no more than unlucky losers of life’s lottery—but by the time the movie arrived on cinema screens as The Exterminating Angel Bu?uel had clarified its meaning beyond any doubt. When I first saw the film at the IFC Center I was perhaps too young to understand it. There is a large feast in a lavish mansion and while it’s taking place all the household staff find flimsy pretexts and desert their posts and duties and leave the building, leaving only the butler and the guests to face whatever is coming. I understood this simply as surrealist social comedy. That was before I learned that there are people who can sense impending calamity, like cattle predicting earthquakes, and that self-preservation is the explanation for their apparently irrational acts.
There was no feast in the Golden house and the staff did not desert on one single evening. Life does not imitate art as slavishly as that. But gradually, over a period of weeks, and to the increasing consternation of the lady of the house, people began to quit. The handyman Gonzalo left first, simply not showing up for work one Monday and then never being seen again. In a big house there was always something that needed fixing, a blocked toilet, a chandelier with dead lightbulbs, a door or window that needed easing. Vasilisa reacted to Gonzalo’s disappearance with petulant annoyance and a few remarks about the unreliability of Mexicans that were not well received belowstairs. McNally the butler/majordomo was able to handle most of Gonzalo’s odd jobs and knew who to call in for things he couldn’t fix by himself, so the absence did not cause the master or mistress of the house any serious discomfort. But the subsequent departures were more disruptive of the building’s daily routine. Vasilisa had always been rough on maids, often reducing them to tears with her savage critiques of their usually diligent work, and there had been a high turnover of cleaning and bed-making staff during her incumbency, so it was no surprise that the latest young Boston Irish girl should flee saying no, she didn’t want a raise, she just wanted to get away. In the kitchen there was a firing. Cucchi the chef sacked his assistant Gilberto because of an epidemic of petty pilfering. When the good kitchen knives started vanishing Cucchi confronted the young Argentinian who denied everything and flounced out. You can’t quit, Cucchi yelled after him, because I’m firing you first. McNally tried to cover the gaps by calling temporary work agencies and asking his professional colleagues in other grand homes to lend him people if they had some spare capacity and so the household limped along. But the rats kept on leaving the ship.
A part of me had been grudgingly impressed by Vasilisa’s swift and effective damage control in the days following my spilling of secrets in her living room. Nero Golden had been publicly humiliated and he was not a man who took kindly to humiliation. But not only did Vasilisa rescue her marriage, she also convinced Nero to continue to recognize Little Vespa as his son and heir. Those, I said to myself, were some fancy moves. Those were moves that placed her among the all-time pantheon of designing women. She knew how to hold on to her man.
It is not for me to speculate on what may or may not have happened between them behind the bedroom door. I will avoid such salaciousness, tempting as it is to conjure up the spectacle of Vasilisa at work. Desperate times, desperate measures, but in the absence of a sex tape there’s no more to be said. And to be honest it’s unclear that the bedroom was the basis of her defense. Much more plausibly one might say that she exploited Nero’s mental decline. This was an old and increasingly sick man, more and more forgetful, his mind very often a meandering trickle now, offering only short glimpses of its previous, formidable flow. Vasilisa took the duty of nursing him upon herself, dismissing the day-and night-nurses who had been hired previously to relieve her of the difficulty of the work. So, a further exit of household staff, and Vasilisa uncomplainingly performing the duties of primary caregiver. She and she alone was in charge of his medication now. Fuss and Blather were pushed further and further away from the presence of their boss until one day Vasilisa with feral sweetness told them, I am familiar with all his business practices, and am fully able to be his close personal assistant, so, thank you for your service and let us discuss severance pay. The large house began to echo with absences. Vasilisa was playing all her trumps.
The ace of trumps was Little Vespa himself. Not only was my son growing up to be the most charming of fellows as he approached his fourth birthday, he was also in Nero’s milky eyes the sole survivor of a calamity. A man who has lost three sons will not easily give away the fourth, and as Nero’s decline accelerated and his memory flickered and faded and the child sat on his knee and called him Papa it was easy for the old man to forget the details and hold tightly to his only living child as if he were the reincarnation of his dead brothers as well as being himself, as if he were a treasure chest which contained all that his father had lost.
Who was left? The babushka mother who might or might not have been from Central Casting, Siberia. McNally the butler and Cucchi the chef. Cleaning teams from professional housecleaning services that came and went and charged five hundred dollars a visit. No visitors. And Nero, invisible, not seen by any of his neighbors. I began to believe in Vito Tagliabue’s theory. She must have known he didn’t have long. And if she was tampering with his medication then the fewer eyes the better. She must have known this was a short-term state of affairs. What were his doctors saying to her? Was there a terminal condition that was not made public? Or was Vasilisa herself that condition. I see her in my mind’s eye kneeling each day in the living room of the Golden house, the “great room,” as she called it, in front of her copy of Tsarina Alexandra Romanova’s Feodorovskaya icon of the Mother of God, praying. Let it be today. Let it come now.