Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  “Vitto, come to bed.”

  She didn’t have to ask him twice. He joined Valerie under the covers, and they shared thoughts on Juba and William’s experiment during the day, both agreeing it could work if monitored correctly. They’d have to get paperwork drawn up, though, to avoid future lawsuits. If the water really was doing what Robert said it would, they needed written proof that the guests were well aware of what they were doing. Maybe that would help keep that reporter’s nose out of their daily business.

  The goal, they both agreed, was to give each guest the minimum amount of medicine possible to get them through the day. Juba apparently agreed, because they’d noticed him taking notes on the doses for each guest so they could track the results. It was already clear that several who’d taken the smaller dose in the morning had begun to lose some of their mental facilities by sundown, and many more became confused after last call. Keeping records would let them adjust the dosages accordingly and try to reach a balance between mental and physical decline.

  “And then you fill in the gaps,” said Valerie. “With your paintings.”

  Vitto nodded, thinking about Cowboy Cane and what had happened after dinner that night.

  Cowboy Cane had not been enthused with the new lower dosage, pleading instead for his right to live his life how he pleased, to the utmost and, in his exact words, until he “keeled over and bellied up in the sun.” He had finally agreed to participate in the experiment and took the smaller amount. But he was one of the ones who began to lose his train of thought and grow agitated as darkness fell.

  As soon as Vitto noticed Cowboy Cane getting aggravated and confused, he’d called him over to his easel and had him sit for a portrait. And to the basic picture of Cowboy in the chair, Vitto had added some items the man had used in the past months—a tennis racquet leaning against the chair’s arm, a basket of bocce balls on his lap, and a glass of wine in Cowboy’s right hand to remind him of the nightly last call. He got the piazza and fountain in the background, with a few of the colorful doors and some of Cowboy’s friends mingling. When he finished, he showed the painting to Cowboy, and the old man smiled. Vitto helped him carry that memory painting back with him to his room and set it up on the dresser while the old man crawled into bed. He was already snoring when Vitto turned off the lights. Come morning, hopefully, the wet canvas would be dry and the next dose of water would give him a restart. In the meantime, the painting had indeed helped.

  “But I can’t fill in the gaps all alone, Val,” he said. “There’s a reason you’re here too.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Your music. You’ve noticed how your violin affects the guests. Tonight even, when a few of them started getting confused, your music calmed them down quick. And John’s food, his smile, they need that too. Food often conjures good memories.”

  They lay silent for a minute, staring up at the waves of the ceiling fresco, and he could tell they’d come to the same thought simultaneously as their heads rolled toward one another on their pillows.

  He said it out loud: “But Val, what if that fountain water starts to run out? What if at some point the water becomes just . . . water?”

  “Then with your paintings and my music and John’s food, at least we’ll have somewhere to start.”

  Twenty-Seven

  “Hey, wake up,” someone said in a hushed whisper. “Vittorio.”

  Vitto opened his eyes, figured he’d been dreaming his father’s voice, only to find him hovering bedside, wearing a canvas jacket and a soft hat. Vitto tried to sit up, hit his head on the headboard. Valerie remained asleep.

  “What are you doing?” Vitto whispered. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Follow me.” Robert sipped from his ceramic chalice as he stepped out the door.

  Vitto slipped his shoes on and followed his father outside into the crisp night, where Robert waited next to a door that looked purple under the moon glow but Vitto knew to be closer to blue in the daylight. Robert stared at the door, sadly almost, as if trying to make it something other than gray. His face was dotted with fresh stubble, his skin looser around the neck and arms, where previously muscle had pushed it taut.

  “You were right earlier.” He sipped water from the chalice, which held far more than the doses Juba had given out the previous morning. “There was a time when I could see color.” Robert moved slowly out toward the piazza and Vitto followed, listening. “I was born color-blind, but with a curse.”

  “What curse?”

  Robert shuffled toward the fountain and grunted as he sat on the edge. He patted the tiles beside him, inviting Vitto to join him. The shadow of Cronus stretched across the travertine at their feet. “My curse was that I knew what color was. I had a deep understanding of it, like I’d not only seen it before, but had been able to touch it. To be it, Vitto, if that makes sense.”

  To Vitto it did.

  “I would have dreams at night.” Robert smiled, reminiscing. “Vivid dreams in color, of oil paintings and frescoes and mosaics. Dreams of the Renaissance, Vittorio. At night when I closed my eyes, I’d walk the streets with Michelangelo and Leonardo. Raphael and Botticelli. Titian and Masaccio. And not just artists, but places. I’d walk the streets of Milan and Florence. I’d see the beautiful Tuscan countryside, with green cypress trees and red poppies blowing in the fields. I was there, Vittorio. It was all somehow . . . inside of me.”

  “And then you would wake up.”

  “And then I would wake up,” he said, his stark blue eyes now distant. “And see only black and white and shades of gray. It was like God was teasing me, showing me nightly what I couldn’t have, couldn’t be. But still, I was consumed with the art. Italian art. The Italian Renaissance. I read books. I saw pictures. I had my father take me to museums.” He laughed, a quick burst. “All black and white and gray. I thought that maybe if I searched long and far enough, I’d find that painting I could see fully, and my color would be returned.”

  “Returned? But you were born without the ability.”

  “Seemingly, but then why did my mind see it at night? Somehow I knew those weren’t dreams, Vitto. Those were memories.”

  “Of the Renaissance? That’s not possible.”

  Robert held out his chalice of water. “Is this possible?”

  “But . . . how could you have memories of a time when you could not have possibly lived?”

  “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. I think part of me did live out the Renaissance, Vittorio.”

  Vitto couldn’t help laughing, but he stopped when he saw how serious his father’s face was, how stoic and unmoving and statuesque he sat.

  Robert took another sip and stared across the piazza toward the bar, the clock ticking on the wall behind it. “I was convinced of this even as a young boy. I know it’s nonsensical, but that’s how I made myself believe. Not only did I study the Renaissance, but also the ancients, the gods, until eventually I began to pretend I was one of them. A god who’d accidentally fallen from the sky, flawed now, his power stripped somehow.

  “I tried painting, you know. My parents bought me brushes and paints, but it was hard to get excited about putting shades of gray on canvas. My father, before he struck oil, he owned a quarry. One day—I was eight or nine, I believe—I went with him to work, and I took my paints along. I was determined that that would be the day I’d squeeze the paint tubes and color would emerge. So I sat there and painted while Father and his men pulled stone and rock from the earth. But nothing changed. It was still just . . . nothing.

  “I got upset and turned my little table over, scattering the paints. My father watched, as did his men, as I stormed across the quarry and picked up a small hammer. I went to the stone wall and chipped away at it, violently slamming that hammer into the stone with no purpose other than to let out my frustrations. At first Father tried to stop me, but then he just let me go, let me attack that wall wildly.”

  Robert sat silent for a moment.

&n
bsp; “And?” Vitto prodded.

  “Well, finally I backed away from what I’d done to the wall. And as I stepped back to look, I saw a face in the stone. Roughly carved, since I had only a hammer, but a clear face nevertheless. The workers were amazed, if not a bit frightened. But my dad was intrigued, and I—for the first time in my life I felt like I had connected to who I really was. Who I was meant to be. The next day Dad located a sculptor’s hammer and chisel for me and then took me back to the quarry. He set aside a big chunk of granite for me, and I went to work. I created, Vittorio. Chiseled into a medium that I could see as it was—those stones of white and gray.”

  “So you were a sculptor after that.”

  Robert nodded. “I worked at my craft, studied, developed my skill. And for years I assumed that was what I was meant to be—not only a sculptor, Vitto, but a god. A god fallen, just as you titled that painting, and trying to create something so brilliant that the heavens would call me back up. To be immortal.”

  “So that is why you’ve always been so consumed with your work? Dad, you’re trying to create something that cannot be created. Trying to get somewhere that doesn’t exist.”

  Robert took a heavy gulp of water. “I know that now. I don’t have long, Vittorio.”

  “Then stop accelerating the process.” Vitto took the chalice from his father’s hands and poured what remained into the fountain. “Now tell me, when did you first see color?”

  “Orange was the first color I had ever seen.” Robert smiled. “It was your mother’s hair. Brilliant and bold, vivid like the color I’d see in my dreams. My memories.”

  “But how did you see it? This makes no sense.”

  “Because you’re too grounded by things you can hold and feel, Vittorio. You always have been.”

  “I’m grounded by reality.”

  “What reality?”

  Vitto started to respond but didn’t, suddenly couldn’t, as his own reality swarmed him with memories of color, his ability at such a young age to take pictures in his mind and paint them perfectly, life and art recreated in pigment. His ability to remember numbers and lists and names and statistics. His inability to escape the war memories because they’d been so vividly engraved. What reality?

  Robert patted Vitto’s leg. “My entire childhood, and into my teenage years, I’d always felt something missing. Something beyond my inability to see color and that sense that I was part of something bigger and higher. I had friends growing up, but while they wanted to hunt and fish and throw rocks into the river, all I wanted to do was carve. To create. When they got to the age where girls stole their attention, I waved them on. I’d seen enough girls about town and in the schoolhouse to be aware of their beauty and attraction, but even as many sought my attention, none of them could lure me from my work. For there was only one girl for me, Vittorio. I began to see her in my dreams. In my—”

  Don’t say it.

  “In my memories.” He said it anyway. “The orange hair and those olive-green eyes. The most beautiful woman on earth. I didn’t know her yet, but somehow I knew her. I attempted to carve the way I saw her in my mind but found it impossible.

  “By the time I was sixteen, with too many statues under my belt to count, I was ready to set out on my own. Fortunately, my father understood and granted me this freedom. As my memories of my dream girl intensified, I set out to Europe. To Italy. Started in the south. Sicily. Up the coast to Pompeii and Naples. To Rome. Siena. Then to Florence, where I stayed for months—carving, soaking up the sun and atmosphere, walking streets and passing buildings I felt sure I’d visited before.

  “And then one day I heard some men talking, some artists chinning about a beautiful woman they’d seen on the streets. A woman with long, flame-colored hair, so beautiful and striking she was forced to hide it beneath a hood. Artists, when they saw her, felt the urge to paint her. A real muse, the whispers said. Pienza, they said. The daughter of an artist named Francesco Lippi, they said. So I gathered my tools and luggage, and off I went to Pienza.”

  “And there you first met her?”

  “Found her, Vittorio. Found is the word used for things that have been lost. Separated and then reunited. I’ve no other way to explain it.”

  “Seamless as an eggshell,” Vitto said. “I once heard a guest refer to you and Mamma that way.”

  “That’s not inaccurate.” He pondered it. “I saw her on the piazza one day, following behind that man Lippi. A strand of her hair had fallen loose beneath the hood, and I saw it. I saw the color, Vittorio. A flash of orange in a world of gray, and then it was gone. We made eye contact, stared for a few seconds—an eternity. She’d seen me before, she’d later tell me, but had forgotten.

  “You, see, Vittorio, we were both born with something missing. I was stripped of my ability to see color, and she was stripped of her memory. Well, she had memories, but they were not her own. Somehow she could recall things from before she was born—little flashes of memory about the greats—from Raphael to Shakespeare to Mozart. Music. Art. The written word. Memories somehow from the past, from history. But she couldn’t remember her own life from day to day, from hour to hour even.”

  “The journal?”

  “Yes. It was her salvation, the only way she could piece together a life for herself. She’d write details to remind herself and read it the next morning, and that’s how she was able to sneak out to meet me. Vittorio, do you know how difficult it is to be in love with someone who doesn’t remember you from meeting to meeting, who every day when she first sets eyes upon you, it’s as if she’s seeing you for the first time?”

  It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, so Vitto didn’t. His father had never told him of how he and Magdalena had met. Robert had rarely told any stories of his past—and Vitto didn’t want the flow to stop. But he sensed where this was going—his mother had been able to remember things at some point, just as Robert at one time could see color. Magdalena had been cursed at birth with some kind of memory loss, and Robert had been her magical water, just as she had somehow been the key to him seeing color.

  “We fell in love as if we’d invented it,” said Robert. “And she was my muse. Not just my muse, but the muse—like all nine of the Greek Muses molded into one. We had to be together. So we plotted to escape Lippi. Your mother was basically a captive in his house, and he abused her. Thought he could get away with what he did because he knew she wouldn’t remember the next day. But she wrote it all in her journal—a secret journal Lippi didn’t know about—and she showed me. I threatened to kill him, but she begged me not to. She managed to escape, and we fled.”

  “But the reporter, he spoke of the house being burned down. And the man Lippi dying?”

  “Another night, Vittorio. I can’t explain what I never fully understood myself. What I didn’t witness.” Robert’s eyes grew wet. “And your mother, she . . . she never spoke of it, although I fear it haunted her until her final days—at least once she was able to remember.”

  “How does Juba enter into this?”

  “Because of whatever happened inside that house, it seemed the entire town was after us. Lippi had thugs in his employ, unscrupulous men, and they were especially determined to find us. I’d devised a plan of escape but found my route to the Arno blocked, so we hurried back into the city, and there he was. Juba. Like he’d been watching out for us and waiting. He had an alternative plan of escape for us already mapped out—first by carriage and then by river to Rome and on to the western coast, where we boated out to the open sea.”

  Robert paused, eyes glistening. “I’ll never forget that voyage. The sun dappled over the water. Endless water. The three of us floating on the waves. I was watching her, your mother, and in the shimmer I saw her hair—the beautiful flame of her hair. A few strands at first, like I’d seen on the piazza, and then all of it came into my view as if painted by an unseen brush. And she looked at me without seeking her journal, Vittorio. She called me by name, remembering me. Juba was there,
just relaxed against the side of the boat with his arms stretched out on either side, smiling as he watched us.”

  “And from then on you were able to see color?”

  “Not right away,” he said. “At first it was just her hair, then part of her dress. And then, after we came here, to the spot where we would build the hotel, I saw the green of her eyes. Soon colors began to pop from flowers, from grass, from clothing. Sunsets and sunrises. Ocean waves. Works of art. And as my ability to see color settled and became reliable, so did Maggie’s memory, until eventually she no longer needed her diary to remember simple daily things. Oh Vitto, those were heady days. We built this place together, the three of us, out of a single vision. I’d stolen her from Tuscany, so I wanted nothing more than to bring Tuscany back to her. And we always had a sense that somehow we might be able to recreate the Renaissance—or at least bring a taste of it to this little plot of land.”

  Vitto had so many questions. How did they come to arrive in California—in this specific part of California? Does Dad know more about the fountain and the water than he’s letting on? But the story was still so far from his reality that he didn’t know where to start, and he wanted his father to keep talking.

  “The walls came up, and rooms soon filled. Word got out that this was a good place to create, and people came in droves—artists, musicians, actors, and scientists. And as for me and my work—Vitto, it was my golden age. Every month I was turning out new pieces—beautiful pieces—that I refused to sell because I wanted them around me. I always said that the hotel was my museum.

  “And now that there wasn’t a color I couldn’t see, I was determined to fill the hotel with it. I painted the doors one by one, each one slightly different than the next, until I one day stood next to the fountain, turned full circle, and realized I’d created the entire color wheel. That’s when we started referring to the rooms by the color of the doors instead of the room numbers. Later, we’d also name the rooms after the artwork inside them—the copies of Renaissance masterpieces that I hired people to do—until you came along to do them.