Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  It was easier to decline. And watch. And listen.

  The other children laughed, so Magdalena laughed along with them. Sun baked the cobbles and warmed her face. A gentle breeze swooped down into the courtyard and slithered back over the roof; she could hear it faintly whistling in and out of the loggia in front. Up above, hanging from the terrace that Nurse Cioni called the verone, clean clothes rippled like flags as they dried under the Tuscan sun.

  It was because of Magdalena’s memory problems that they all had their names stitched onto their shirts. Nurse Pratesi had sewn them herself, starting the very afternoon the idea had come to her—months ago, after Mass. Even at your age, Magdalena, you read better than any child here. If you can’t remember your friends’ names, you can simply read them. Magdalena had asked Nurse Pratesi to sew her name on her shirt as well. She said she wanted to fit in with the others. But the truth was that Magdalena, on some mornings, couldn’t remember her own name, much less the dozens of others.

  Even at age five, she was aware enough to know that being “the girl whose memories simply would not stick,” as Nurse Pratesi was known to put it, would not help her prospects of being adopted—nor would it help in finding an eventual husband. The lack of a dowry was one of the reasons girls were more likely to be abandoned than boys in the first place. And adoptions were not common at any rate, although one girl had been adopted the week before by a wealthy leather merchant. The nurses were happy for her, but at the same time sad to let her go.

  “The merchant seemed nice enough,” Nurse Pratesi had told Magdalena as they swept out dust from the loggia’s arches.

  “What merchant?”

  “The one who came yesterday. To take Lucia?” Nurse Pratesi was never able to mask her concern over Magdalena’s memory issues. The nurses dealt with disabled children on a regular basis—some with deformities, others born deaf or blind or dumb, and there was even an isolation ward for the infants with syphilis. But never had they come across a child who appeared normal in every way but simply could not seem to remember.

  On the good days when she recollected small bits of her experience, Magdalena liked all the nurses, but Nurse Pratesi was her favorite, and in secret she called her Mamma Pratesi. They were careful not to let the other nurses hear of this, especially Nurse Cioni, who’d grown colder toward Magdalena over the years and who made a habit of looking cockeyed at the wall clock over the foundling wheel every time she passed it. Ticktock goes the clock. Apparently it had been broken until the night of her arrival. The night of the great storm.

  Even now, Nurse Cioni looked down with suspicion from the verone, pretending to rearrange the drying clothes, but instead doing a rather poor job of spying. Magdalena knew adult words like spying but could not remember what she’d eaten for lunch hours ago. She did know she’d had a cup of red wine, though; the dry, fruity taste still lingered on her tongue.

  “Why aren’t you playing?”

  Magdalena turned to find Nurse Pratesi standing behind her. “Mamma.”

  “Shh. Not when others are around, Magdalena.”

  The little girl nodded skyward toward Nurse Cioni. “She doesn’t like me.”

  “She likes you plenty, Magdalena. She just has a heavy daily burden and waning patience.”

  “I consume most of it, I assume.”

  “Most of what?”

  “Her patience.”

  Nurse Pratesi laughed. “You speak well above your years, my little one. But I won’t lie to you—yes, you try her patience.” And then she added, “Because of your memory.”

  “What memory?”

  They shared a laugh—it was a common joke between them—and together watched the other kids run through patches of shade and sunlight.

  “What’s bothering you, Magdalena?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not true.”

  “Correct. It’s not true. But you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  Magdalena started to but stopped, clamping her lips together as if refusing a spoonful of medicine. She couldn’t tell her that she did remember some things, such as the moment Nurse Cioni’s mood first changed—the day the clock above the wheel started working again. The day of Magdalena’s arrival. Though she had only been recently born at the time, somehow Magdalena had memories of that night. Being placed gently on the blanket inside that foundling wheel. The brush of lips to her forehead. The noise of the storm and the soft sound of a mother’s voice she would never hear again. The smell of rain and wool and wood, the groan the wheel made as it turned inward toward the belly of the hospital. Sometimes still she would startle awake at night to these sounds and sensations.

  Magdalena looked up to the verone. Nurse Cioni had disappeared. Dinner would come soon. Bread smells wafted from the kitchen, and her stomach growled.

  “Why is Nurse Cioni afraid of that clock above the wheel?”

  Nurse Pratesi pursed her lips, exhaled. “I don’t think she’s afraid. Just leery.”

  “So why does it stay up there?”

  A pause. “So that we will always remember the day you arrived here.”

  “Why should that matter more than any other?”

  Nurse Pratesi didn’t answer, just gazed down at the little girl. How could she explain to a five-year-old the uncanny effect she had on people by simply being. Even the children felt it, offering little Magdalena a kind of deference instead of teasing her about her memory. Many an adult voice had been silenced by the sight of those olive eyes and bright orange hair. And the painters—they simply could not resist her.

  Florence had long been known as an artist’s city—crammed with those who created beauty and those who patronized it. And from its founding in the early fifteenth century, the Ospedale degli Innocenti had benefited from that connection. Over the years, statues, paintings, and frescos had been commissioned for and donated to both the hospital and church—works by the likes of Giambologna, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio—and artists often visited the hospital seeking inspiration from the architecture itself. Brunelleschi’s design for the complex had been pioneering—harmonious and humanistic and balanced from portico to piazza. But many who visited left inspired instead by the girl with the orange hair and the olive-green eyes.

  Over the past few years, Nurse Pratesi had accepted numerous requests from those who wanted to paint Magdalena. But recently she had begun to refuse them, especially the ones from that crotchety painter named Lippi, who had returned the day after the girl’s first sitting to pose an even more unusual request. He had wanted the girl to stand next to his easel while he painted something else entirely—a Tuscan olive grove to be exact—claiming he’d never felt more creative and open-minded than he’d felt around the girl. The man’s upturned nose and dark, beady eyes—not to mention the scratchy tenor of his voice—had given Nurse Pratesi the shivers. She’d physically turned him by the shoulders and nudged him on his way.

  “I remember the day the clock started again,” Magdalena said abruptly, surprising herself that she’d let out the words.

  Nurse Pratesi chuckled, patted her on the shoulder, and then, after realizing Magdalena was serious, knelt down beside her. “What did you say, dear?”

  “I remember the day the clock went ticktock.” Magdalena forced herself to look at the only mother she knew. “I remember I was kissed on the forehead. I remember being inside the wheel, the sound it made as it turned. I remember seeing your face.”

  “Magdalena, infants can’t remember such things.”

  “Why not?”

  Nurse Pratesi scratched the hair beneath her cap. “What else do you remember?”

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Most of my memories don’t belong to me.”

  Nurse Pratesi bit her lower lip, turned it pale, and before she could ask the question churning in her eyes—To whom do they belong?—Magdalena started across the courtyard, dodging the playing children. Nurse
Pratesi followed, walking so closely behind that her shadow swallowed them both. She stayed on Magdalena’s heels through the open door in the building, down a hallway, then out through the big front door and across the loggia to the piazza, where the little girl stopped, facing the front of the building.

  Magdalena pointed up toward the spandrels, the small spaces between the loggia’s arches, specifically toward the concave roundels set within. Each framed a mounted terra-cotta bas-relief of a baby. The ten original bambini had been added to the building’s façade in 1487 and had quickly become beloved symbols of innocence, inspiring replicas on buildings all over Florence. The white glaze over the terra-cotta gave them a milky, lifelike appearance, from the details of the hair to the lines on the hands—and toes of the only one not swaddled. More bambini had been added in 1847, but of those original ten, seven were fully wrapped, two had the swaddles loosened, sagging below the waist, and one emerged completely from the clothes—a sequence generally assumed to represent liberation.

  Nurse Pratesi followed Magdalena’s pointed finger. “What is it? Magdalena, you’re frightening me.”

  “The artist.”

  “Yes. Della Robbia. Andrea della Robbia.”

  “His father made the sculpture in the Innocenti church.”

  “Yes. Luca. Luca della Robbia. The Madonna and Child.”

  The nurses, wet nurses, and female foundlings often prayed before that glazed terra-cotta sculpture. Magdalena had probably done so just this morning. “I remember these bambini. I remember him making them.”

  “Who?”

  “The son. Andrea. I have one of his memories. I think, because it seems old.”

  “Magdalena, that’s impossible. That was nearly four hundred years ago. And you can’t have other people’s memories.” But Magdalena remembered it all the same. “You’re frightening me. Is that what you meant earlier? When you said that most of your memories don’t belong to you?”

  Magdalena lowered her arm, walked with her chin upraised, curious eyes still on the spandrels between the arches and columns. “Nurse Pratesi, who is Mozart?”

  “Who is . . . ? Magdalena?”

  “Mozart. Wolfgang Mozart.” She stumbled a little on the German syllables. “Who is he?”

  The nurse touched her brow as if confused or dizzy or both. Her voice trembled. “A composer. A famous composer. Why?”

  “I think I have some of his memories too. Just bits and pieces. Of when he wrote one of his operas.”

  “Don Giovanni? The Magic Flute? The Marriage of Figaro?”

  “What was the first one you said?”

  “Don Giovanni?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  Nurse Pratesi buckled at the waist and then steadied herself with hands on her knees, eyes to the cobbles.

  “Mamma Pratesi? Are you not well?”

  She sucked in a deep breath, shook her head. Some of the other children had stopped their game and followed from the courtyard. She held them at bay with an outstretched hand. “Have you mentioned this to any of the others? The other children?”

  The girl shook her head in a way that said she knew not to, that she probably shouldn’t, because they wouldn’t understand. “I already know I’m different, Mamma Pratesi.”

  “Different in only the best of ways, Magdalena.” The nurse gently gripped the little girl’s shoulders. “What other memories do you have?”

  “Too many to count. Sometimes I remember him painting.”

  “Him? Who is him?”

  “He was on his back, way high up to this giant ceiling. Sixteen chapels!”

  “Michelangelo.” Nurse Pratesi dropped to her knees, closed her eyes.

  Magdalena put a hand on her shoulder, leaned closer to hear what Nurse Pratesi whispered.

  “Sistine, Magdalena. Not Sixteen.”

  Seven

  Vitto startled awake in a sheetless bed that smelled old with mildew and damp. The screaming sound of the Nazi warplane faded as he sat up. A tiny lizard clung to the mortar in the stone wall across the room. An arched wooden window hung crooked from a rusted hinge, open to sunlight and birdsong and a chilly breeze.

  Where am I? You know where you are. Room 268. The door painted peach.

  After his father had greeted them all on the piazza yesterday, somehow like the man of old, kissing each of them on both cheeks, even John—baci, baci, baci—Vitto had felt weak in the knees, nauseated by the barbiturates still swimming through his system. John had hurried to help him, but Vitto had waved him away. I’m fine, just tired. And then, like a sick dog, he’d slunk away while the others conversed, falling asleep in this second-floor room to the sounds of his father chiseling deep into the night.

  As a young teenager, his parents had let him move about the hotel, sleeping in whatever vacant rooms he wanted. This one had been a favorite—mostly because, as a young boy, he’d been allowed to watch the creation of its colorful ceiling fresco, a replica of Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin, painted under the dome of the Romanesque Cathedral of Parma in the 1520s. The artist, a Venetian copyist named Julia Francesca, had started the room 268 version in the summer of 1925 and completed it in the fall of ’26. Though the room had no dome, she had managed to give it a dome-like appearance using foreshortening, tricks of light, and illusions of depth.

  Even today, years after its painting, the fresco pulsed with life as he stared up at it. Apostles at the painting’s edge shielded their eyes from divine light, while others showed excitement, their clothing tousled by the force pulling the Virgin upward, through concentric rings of sky-blue clouds full of angels and saints, into the bright glow of heaven at the vortex of the “dome.”

  A pigeon landed on the windowsill, then flew away, flapping wings giving way to a beautiful violin thrum. Paganini. Caprice No. 24. Valerie? Vitto sat up in bed, swung his feet to the stone floor, rubbed his eyes, and slid into the oxfords he didn’t recall parking so neatly next to the bed. Something Valerie would do, neat and orderly. Bits of him remembered her slipping them off when the room was dark, giving him sips of wine, wishing him good night, closing the door, her footfalls fading along the second-floor gallery. She must have also come up with the musty throw that lay rumpled next to him.

  She’s scared of me. She couldn’t wait to flee from the room.

  He smoothed his wrinkled clothes with his hands and approached the window. It creaked when he opened it wider. Fresh air from the sea mixed with the pleasant aroma of baked bread, and for a moment he felt youthful again, unburdened by the war and that mysterious concept called age, the exact number now muddied by his thirteen months overseas. A twenty-three-year-old boy when he’d left. A grizzled twenty-four-year-old man upon his return. And somewhere in between he’d lost his way.

  The fresh-bread smell caught him again. Was someone in the kitchen? He stepped outside to the gallery. Across the hotel, beyond the terra-cotta roof of the south wing, the olive grove loomed high on the hillside, the terraces buried under weeds and brambles, one jagged slope now instead of what he used to pretend were steps in the earth for the giants and Cyclopes from his mother’s stories. He leaned on the railing. His father carved below on the piazza. On the far side of the fountain, Valerie stood with her violin tucked under her neck, delicately touching bow to string while William kicked a worn soccer ball around a wrought-iron bench.

  When Valerie was a child she’d drawn crowds on this very piazza. They’d called her a prodigy. And now her music soared sweetly again, a little rusty in technique, but shimmering and warm. Had she returned home to retrieve her dusty violin while he’d slept?

  Vitto gripped the railing and closed his eyes. If this was a dream, he didn’t want to wake from it. If it was death, he’d found the right place. But ever since he returned from Europe, his mind had engaged in a tug-of-war between fiction and reality, truth and trust, and the army doc had cautioned him to approach each day as he would his steps—one at a time.

  He held the cool metal rai
l as he descended the spiral staircase, shoes clunking off each step in a weird rhythmic cadence to his father’s mallet blows. An artist from New York had traveled by train in the spring of ’05 to install the spiral stairwells, one for each corner of the piazza. An elevator hidden in the west wing had taken care of luggage and other mundane business.

  Robert looked up from his work, his white shirt unbuttoned to midchest—dust caught in the curled white hairs—sleeves rolled to the elbows, a dotting of white scruff on his cheeks. “Buon giorno, Vitto.” After no response he returned to the statue, eyeing Vitto in between mallet blows. “You’re staring. Why?”

  “Do you smell bread?” Vitto asked, unsure which father would answer back, the mindful one or the one who’d forgotten how to tie his shoes. “Is this even real?”

  “Of course it’s real.”

  “I had some weird dreams inside that hospital.”

  “You died in the war, Vitto. What you see is Elysium,” Robert said. Vitto stared. “Or is it Hades?” Still no reaction. “I’m only kidding.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Your friend John fancies himself a chef. He asked if he could clean up the ovens and test them. Must have gotten them working.”

  “We have no electricity.”

  “Who says? You try the lamp in your room? Figured not. You’re in 268, right? That artist—Julia, was it? Not as stunning as my Magdalena, but definitely a face to be painted.” Vitto should know; she’d allowed him to paint her before her return to Venice, before his father had suddenly and without explanation demanded he paint replicas instead of originals. It had been one of his earliest works, oil on canvas, her sitting in a chair with her back to a blue ocean and a scattering of bright-green Italian cypress trees in the background. His father had looked at the painting with a confused grunt, whispering to Magdalena later that Vitto should stick to copying the masters.

  “But why, Robert?” Vitto had overheard that night.

  “So I can see it, Maggie!”

  It had been the only time Vitto ever heard his father raise his voice to his mother. But what struck Vitto now was the casual way Robert had just mentioned Magdalena.