Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  John steered the Ford down through a valley and then up a hill. Tall Italian cypress trees lined both sides of the serpentine road leading to the hotel, the fields waving with golden winter grass. In the spring and summer, they would be dotted with wildflowers—sunflowers and orange California poppies mixed with the red corn poppies Robert had imported from Italy. When Vitto was a child, the red ones had been limited to a single field near the hotel, but by now they had spread and mixed with the native flowers. Dollops of gold and scarlet now dotted the hotel grounds and beyond—sneaking beside walkways, randomly sprouting between the grapevines and olive trees, playing peekaboo through the cracks of the hotel’s limestone façade, springing up along the foundations of Robert’s Leopoldini—square, stone, mortarless imitations of Tuscany’s old countryside farmhouses. One of these housed the olive mill, and the other was used for drying grapes and making wine.

  The angled, slate roof of each structure was topped off by a central turret-like home for the property’s pigeons and doves. He and Valerie used to feed the birds fresh bread from the hotel cucina as the shadows of so many flapping wings flashed monstrous across the lawn, the movement alone conjuring smells of rich olive oil and recently harvested grapes drying in bundles inside the stone houses, each facing the other as if in competition, with the harmonious combination of both always winning out.

  “You do know where the pigeon dishes for pranzo come from, Vitto?” Val had said one day as they both peered skyward toward the birds.

  Until then, he hadn’t known. He’d never been as astute as Valerie.

  John’s voice now broke his silent reverie. “Did it really happen?”

  “Did what happen?”

  “The guests’ memory,” he said. “Did it leave when they arrived and return when they departed?”

  Valerie took a breath to respond but Vitto spoke first. “Of course not. It was just another fun addition to the hotel’s lore. Keep following the road.” As they climbed the curved road, now potholed in places, sunlight showed glimpses of Renaissance-inspired statues spaced randomly across the grounds and between the trees, their bases covered by weeds and vines, the heads and shoulders and splayed arms pocked by bird dung. No more employees left to clean them off.

  John was crying again. Vitto didn’t ask why. Valerie patted John’s shoulder and the tears came harder, so John clenched his jaw to keep things from getting messy. “Barrel of sunshine or a barrel of stones. Right, Gandy?”

  A question of himself to himself, Vitto assumed, John’s motto, his crutch to fall upon now that it was clear both he and John had been released—or escaped, in Vitto’s case—from the hospital too early.

  The road opened. The hotel loomed like a castle in front of a sunlit backdrop. The land dipped and rose in carved undulations, a pedestal of its own, the building a work of art soaring above the cliffs and water below. The scent of ocean breeze and wildflowers entered the car along with ghostly remnants of the region’s finest olive oil.

  In front of the hotel was an oval loop where guests had unloaded luggage and valets had parked their cars. The grass in the middle was overgrown by weeds but still highlighted by another of Robert’s statues, this one named simply Psyche and Cupid. Robert had modeled it after Antonio Canova’s masterpiece, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

  John slammed his foot on the brake, eyeing the statue. Vitto braced himself against the dashboard to keep from hitting the glass. In the backseat Valerie grabbed on to William. But the boy thought the abrupt stop funny and was even more amused by the way John left the driver’s door open and walked trance-like inside the weedy loop toward the two nude figures dominating the statue, Psyche’s backside in partial view as she lay in Cupid’s arms, awakening from the kiss that freed her from the deep sleep Venus had cast upon her.

  John stopped a few paces away, then slowly began to walk around the statue, taking it in from every angle, just as Vitto—for many reasons—had as a young boy, the foremost stemming from what Magdalena had told him one afternoon when she’d caught him staring at the front of the statue, specifically at Psyche’s nude form and her bare legs lazily crossed at the ankles. He’d started to run when he saw her watching, but she’d lovingly grabbed his wrist to keep him put. “No reason to be ashamed of beauty, Vitto. Look closely. Cupid has your eyes, does he not?”

  But how was that possible? How could Robert have carved the likeness of Vitto’s eyes when Vitto had yet to be born? Some said he had his father’s eyes, so perhaps Robert had simply carved his own. Regardless, he’d taken it as truth, and later in the day he’d imagined that Psyche’s eyes resembled Valerie’s. Years later, in front of this very statue, he’d asked for her hand in marriage, to which she’d responded, “Of course, Vittorio, I’ve known we would since the day we met.”

  Now they could hardly stand to look at each other.

  She and William were now out of the car. William pointed. “Naked butts.” Valerie chuckled and pushed gently to lower his arm, her ears tuned in now, as were Vitto’s, to the sound of chisel against stone echoing across the piazza.

  Robert was here somewhere, alive and apparently safe.

  * * *

  “Love endures against all odds,” his mother whispers in his ear, explaining the story behind the hotel’s welcoming statue. What he pulls from it is that Psyche, the youngest of three daughters, had beauty that was unparalleled, and the attention the mortal princess received made the goddess Venus—“Aphrodite, as the Greeks would tell it, Vitto”—rage with jealousy. So the goddess urged her son Cupid—“Eros to the Greeks”—to use one of his arrows to make her fall in love with the ugliest creature on earth. But when Cupid witnessed the beauty firsthand, he accidentally shot himself with his own arrow and fell in love with her instead.

  “To make a long story short, Vitto, there were trials and tribulations, breaks in trust, and Venus eventually put a spell on Psyche, a long-lasting sleep that took a kiss from Cupid to finally awaken her. She was made immortal by Zeus, at which point Venus eventually accepted her as Cupid’s wife.”

  Magdalena kisses him on the head, then on both cheeks the way Robert does with all the guests, her perfume smelling of lavender, her breath of cool mint. “Why do I tell you this story, you ask?” He didn’t ask, but she’s correctly inferred it. “Love endures, yes. But even more importantly, Vitto, the grace of a mother-in-law is not so easily earned. And to whoever that challenge falls upon when the time comes, please warn her to be ready.” She gently grips his shoulder, leans in toward his ear, and nods toward Psyche. “And yes, I agree, she has her eyes.”

  * * *

  Vitto shook that memory away, and the cold chill along with it. It wasn’t so much from what she’d said as from when she’d said it. He hadn’t even met Valerie at that point; she and her parents hadn’t arrived until that afternoon. And in all the years they’d known each other, Vitto had never been able to figure out if Valerie had earned her future mother-in-law’s grace. If she hadn’t, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. But Magdalena had always been protective of Vitto to a fault.

  Cupid’s massive wings cast ominous shadows across the grass. Vitto turned away from the statue and his mother’s voice and faced the Tuscany Hotel in all its grandeur, now six years uninhabited, yet still somehow gleaming with life. Despite the sun-scorched old vineyards down the hill to the left—now gnarled scabs of the lively vines that had once borne grapes so purple they looked blue in the right sunlight and greens ones as plump as small apples—the hotel’s wide façade still held the welcoming Italian villa aura that had brought so many to its doors in its heyday. Shaped in a perfect square, two-storied except for the turrets standing higher at the four corners, the sturdy exterior concealed a massive travertine piazza and courtyard—the heart of the hotel’s charm—where artists and musicians had done their work and all the guests had congregated day and night.

  The clinking of stonework grew louder.

  Vitto followed it, then froze on the bricked walkway, st
aring into the shaded darkness of the portico with its three Roman arches that acted as doorways, where air flowed freely and guests never entered and departed unchanged. The terra-cotta roof tiles showed stains from recent rains, where water would have cascaded the overhang and curtained the second-floor windows, which were shaped as smaller Roman arches—once decorated with flowers of every color but now only pockets of dull shadow staring from rough wedges of limestone shipped in from Tuscany itself. Green vines slithered from mortar cracks. Window ledges had begun to crumble, sprinkling rusty dust on the overgrown hedges below. A few of the stones would have to be replaced.

  From afar, the hotel glowed orange in the morning, more yellow and cream-colored at dusk, sometimes red at the exact moment of sunrise. But up close, as Robert had asked Vitto to observe as a boy—so close his nose touched the craggy surface and he sneezed out stone dust—each block had a fingerprint of its own, a unique palette of swirls and specks and fibrous tendrils of red and orange and yellow and creams. On that morning he had stepped away convinced that the walls were somehow alive and dripping.

  That was back when Robert was the teacher and he the pupil, back before Vitto’s yet-unknown talents with the brush had become a threat to the father. Back before jealousy had turned to rivalry and rivalry to a divide that had yet to be bridged.

  I think he wanted me to go off and die in the war, Val.

  But that thought was surely nonsensical, so he kept it in.

  Valerie clutched Vitto’s arm, urged him onward toward the first of three arches Robert claimed represented earth, wind, and fire. John hurried from the statue to catch up, his footfalls heavy beneath the arched ceiling as they passed through brief shade to the vast open belly of the hotel’s piazza, where the first-floor rooms opened from canopied entryways and the second-story rooms to an open-air gallery that overlooked the piazza. The door to each room had been painted a different color. After years of disuse, the doors still held the vibrancy intended to make each room unique.

  The rooms contained in the eastern wing of the enclosed square—the one comprising the hotel façade, all showed shades of blue, from pale sky to serene periwinkle to inky navy. To their left, on the south wing, the doors were scarlet, crimson, brick—all the various shades of red. To the right, the doors on the north wing shone with shades of yellow and gold. And directly ahead, across the piazza was the west wing, with a walkway behind the crenellations that overlooked the cliffs and ocean. Instead of rooms, this section of the hotel featured a bar and kitchen and bakery and a dining area—where the Saturday markets were held—all under canopied protection.

  John turned in a circle to take it all in, as did William, who had let go of his mother’s hand as soon as they’d entered the piazza.

  “The doors,” John said, turning in awe and wiping his wet cheeks. “Like a color wheel.”

  William pointed across the piazza, to the shadows of the far right corner. “Paw Paw.”

  He started toward him, but Valerie held him back. “Wait, dear. Let him work.”

  Robert was clearly safe, unharmed, and perhaps more sound of mind than he’d been in months. It was clear he’d gained some burst of inspiration upon entering the hotel, and Vitto, too, was reluctant to disturb it. He’d learned long ago to not interrupt when Robert was in the middle of one of his manic phases, which was what he appeared to be in now, wielding that mallet and pointed chisel like the magician Vitto had always assumed he was.

  “Vitto, look.” Valerie pointed to the middle of the piazza, toward the massive, cross-shaped fountain. Tiny square tiles in blues and yellows lined the fountain bed and walls, creating a radiant mosaic sun around which the hotel activities had always rotated. Each end of the fountain cross blended into a mosaic walkway that reached out toward the rooms on each wing, cutting the piazza into four equal sections and continuing around the circumference to enclose it all. Tiled in various shades of blue, the walkways represented river water, a constant flow of life to every room.

  Vitto slowly approached the fountain and the ten-foot statue that dominated it: his father’s masterpiece, The Rape of Mnemosyne. Museums across the globe coveted it, as they did all of Robert’s pieces, but none more than this. They had offered money enough to resurrect the hotel, but Robert had always refused. The sculptures were already in a museum. The hotel was his museum. Artists from around the world had come to stay and to create, willingly leaving their fingerprints behind in the form of paintings and mosaics, reliefs and friezes, ceiling frescoes and wall murals, religious art and stories about the ancients, each room a new experience.

  There had never been any rational explanation for the variety of artwork that adorned the hotel. Religious art seamlessly mingled with secular, ancients, Greek, and Roman with Renaissance and Impressionist and Expressionist. A medieval Madonna and child side by side with a replica of Michelangelo’s drunken Bacchus, a German-style triptych of Christ on the cross within arm’s reach of a classical frieze depicting the battle of the centaurs. Angels and archangels lined up with gods and Titans, goddesses next to saints, the apostles and Apollo with the nine Muses. The Creation of Adam, Cain Killing Abel, gods of dusk and dawn, day and night—each had a place, and each was irreplaceable. Which was why Robert—according to his unreliable books—had used every last bit of his money to pay for a security officer to stroll the grounds in his absence.

  Where is the guard now?

  The fountain statue had been carved in the style of Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women and Bernini’s The Rape of Persephone—the word rape used in the ancient sense of kidnapping or abduction—but with Robert’s unique vision. Vitto stopped feet from the mosaic fountain bed, surprised to see a few inches of water sparkling yellow and blue above the tiles. The muscular nude figure of Cronus, the king of the Titans and god of time, wrestled the beautiful Mnemosyne, both forms spiraling upward as the goddess of memory reached for the sky in an intensely passionate struggle for freedom. The goddess Lethe cowered below, one arm clinging to the right leg of Cronus as if unable to watch, as if wishing to take back what she had possibly set in motion or to stop the abduction in the final throes.

  Time and memory and forgetfulness all frozen in struggle.

  At the base of the statue, spilling from the open mouths of four gargoylelike winged chimeras—each facing one side of the hotel and guarded by carvings of archangels in bas-relief—water fell softly, as if from a half-turned faucet, splashing into the cross-shaped pool below and rippling in a way that gave the tiles movement, life.

  Vitto lowered his hand into the fountain, dipped his fingers until water lapped his knuckles, cold and fresh and completely unexplainable—the fountain had been bone-dry for years. He removed his hand as if burned, wiped it on his pants, turned to watch his father chisel away at that tall block of stone in the corner of the piazza.

  Valerie pointed to a ceramic goblet on the travertine next to the fountain, lying sideways and wet, recently used. “He drank from it, Vitto. Vitto?”

  He was slowly approaching his father in the corner of the piazza. He drank from the fountain. But why?

  Ten paces from his father, Vitto stopped, noting the dozens of sketches strewn about the stone at the base of his father’s next statue. Charcoal studies to use as models, as blueprints. An outline of some figure had been painted on the tall block. Around the base lay a jumble of tools and supplies—plumb lines and mallets, brushes and rags, a bucket of water, and an open bottle of one of the hotel’s house wines—Palazzo Tuscano, this one a merlot from 1930—apparently brought up from the cellar.

  Robert’s concentration was intense as he hammered with a pointed chisel, chipping and cleaving the initial chunks and slivers of marble away. In the weeks and months to come he would switch to the toothed chisels for detail and then, to refine, the smooth chisels and files and rasps. In his mouth was a curved pipe that smoldered as he eyed the next hammer blow.

  A genius. Clink—the mallet struck chisel. A madman while at work.
Clink. A gladiator. Clink. In this place a god, not the man who confused a razor for a toothbrush. Clink. Marble dropped to the travertine and splintered. He focused on the chisel. Clink! Dust showered down on his shoulders, on the fresh stubble of his face, his long, white hair tossed by the ocean breeze that blew in through the portico.

  And then he stopped. Looked around the marble slab, noticing he had an audience of four. The pipe dance-clicked across his teeth. He exhaled; buttery Cavendish caught the breeze, floated with hints of cherry and vanilla.

  The memory of those smells alone made Vitto’s knees tremble. He swallowed heavily, throat thick with nerves, feeling hungry and suddenly light-headed.

  Does he still not know who I am?

  “Father?”

  Robert smiled, broad and strong, the same smile that had once greeted the likes of Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Joan Crawford unfazed; the presence that Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton had spoken of for weeks after their departures. He dropped the mallet to the stones. The chisel fell from his slack grip, rattled sharp against the travertine.

  “Vittorio,” he said, eyes clear and focused. “My son. You’ve come home. Buon giorno!”

  Six

  1871

  Florence, Italy

  Magdalena watched her fellow orphans move about the Cortile degli Uomini, the inner courtyard of the Ospedale degli Innocenti.

  She’d passed on their invitation to play, choosing to observe rather than to feign amusement. The game—whatever it’s called—involved a wolf and a fruit and far too many questions. It seemed fun, and she would have joined in if only she could remember the rules, which they explained to her daily, only to have her forget them midgame and then stand in a stupor while they continued on.