Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1963

  Ermenegildo crowed at 4:39 a.m., well before the sun rose at ten past six. I had no pennies or anvils to toss out the window, let alone a sniper’s rifle, which is what I really needed. I considered sacrificing a small painting on the wall, but resisted, knowing that it wasn’t mine to fling at the bird. Had it belonged to me, the dark, little picture of a marketplace— frame and all—would have ended up around the rooster’s neck like a lace ruff collar. I tried to get back to sleep, but after an hour of listening to Ermenegildo exercising his considerable voice, I threw in the towel and repaired to the bathroom down the hall. By half past six I’d made my way downstairs, fully intending to rummage through the larder in search of milk and bread for breakfast. But that wasn’t necessary. Berenice was already on the job.

  “Buongiorno, signorina,” she said. I returned the greeting. “Why are you up so early?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because you refused to chop off Ermenegildo’s head.”

  “You Americans like eggs for breakfast, don’t you? Sit down and I’ll fix you some that povero Ermenegildo never had the chance to fertilize. We don’t let him near the hens.”

  She offered up a lascivious grin, and I wished she’d hadn’t. I didn’t need to think about my tormentor’s sex life, his frustrations, or his off-limits harem.

  “I believe Teresa, the Spanish lady, is staying in a room near yours,” I said to change the subject. “Tell me about her.”

  “What do you want to me say? She’s quiet, reads her Bible. She’s clean.”

  “She’s devoted to Mariangela.”

  “Certo. Why shouldn’t she be? That girl is a love.”

  “Does Mariangela take after her mother?” I asked.

  Berenice cracked two eggs with one hand and dropped them into a hot skillet on the stove. She frowned. “La piccina is a love, but, poverina,she’s not a beauty. Not like her mother. Maybe she’s an ugly duckling—un brutto anatroccolo—and will turn out to be a swan.”

  “Was the signore very fond of Silvana?”

  Berenice stirred the eggs in the pan, perhaps mulling over my question. Then she sniffed and said he’d loved her as a brother loves a younger sister.

  A voice came from the kitchen door. “What are you talking about?” It was the ugly duckling herself.

  Berenice burned her hand on the skillet. I did my best to maintain calm. “We were talking about how beautiful your mother was,” I said. “And how much your uncle loved her.”

  After a colazione of eggs, bread, and caffellatte, Mariangela and I took advantage of the warming sun—the rain had stopped well before the rooster had crowed, not thrice but thirty, forty, fifty times?—and embarked on a stroll through the garden. We took a different route that morning, eschewing the pergola and its long alleyway, opting for a path that took us east through a wooded area of olive trees. The temperature was pleasantly cool at that hour, more so given the rain of the day before, but I sensed the sun would mount its revenge later that day. The girl was carrying one of those navy blue BOAC flight bags with a shoulder strap.

  “What have you got there?” I asked.

  “I brought some fruit and water,” she said, sitting down cross-legged in an open dry spot. She produced a bottle of San Benedetto acqua gassata as if pulling a rabbit from a hat, then pouted. “Oh, drat. I forgot the bottle opener.”

  In college, I’d learned a few tricks for removing crown tops from bottles. Those usually were filled with beer, but water would work just as well.

  “Here, give me the bottle and your bag,” I said, taking a seat next to her on the ground.

  She handed them over. I slid the end of one of the straps to the far edge of the metal fastener that connected it to the bag, then I positioned the bottle cap against the rectangle.

  “See, this metal doohickey here? If you hold it tightly against the heel of your thumb and push . . .”

  The cap popped off into the grass before I could finish explaining.

  “Brava, Ellie,” said Mariangela.

  “Actually, almost any edge will do. As long as you catch it under the crimps, you should be able to pry it off with a swift tap.”

  “You’re so clever.”

  “Yes, I had a first-rate education.”

  We each peeled and ate a tangerine, washed down with mineral water from a couple of dented metal cups Mariangela had squirreled away in her bag.

  “It’s all so strange,” she said. “Losing my father, I mean. I can’t quite convince myself it’s real.”

  “It will take time. People react in different ways to death.”

  “I feel so wretched. I haven’t even wept once. Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Of course not. You’re simply trying to understand. There’s no training for this. You’re doing just fine. You know, I reacted much the way you describe when my mother died. Somehow I couldn’t cry any tears.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Ellie. Were you not close to her?”

  “Quite the opposite. I loved her and cherished her and respected her. She was the sweetest person in the world.”

  “Then why didn’t you cry?”

  I kept the answer to myself. Tried to answer it to myself before sharing with Mariangela. Though I’d long felt my stoic acceptance of my mother’s passing was due to how devastated I’d been by my brother’s death just months before, I was no longer sure that was the case. I still couldn’t offer a reason. We’d shared a healthy bond as mother and daughter, with none of the heartache and rancor and reproach that characterized my relationship with my father. His death had scarred me more than hers, and Elijah’s had torn out my heart. Why, then, had I not wept at her funeral? Why had I thrown up a wall of impassive calm when I lost her? I didn’t know. I simply didn’t know.

  “I did it to punish my father,” I said. “We had . . . a stormy relationship. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Perhaps I did know after all.

  I immediately regretted having burdened a child with my sad story. I apologized to her, but she told me not to fret.

  “Goodness, Ellie. You lost everyone. I’m so sorry. You’ve no reason to apologize to me.”

  We reflected on that for a while as we sipped our water. It was time to change the subject.

  “What else do you have in there, Mary Poppins?” I asked, referring to her bag.

  “This,” she said, producing two records, both 45s with bright labels reading “PA RLOPHONE” in all capital letters. “This one is ‘She Loves You.’ It’s the Beatles’ best song ever. And this one is ‘Please Please Me,’ which is really fabulous. Better than any other song besides ‘She Loves You.’ And there’s ‘Ask Me Why’ on the B-side. That’s the third greatest song ever, but not like ‘Please Please Me.’ Remember I told you we were going to listen to the songs?”

  “Do you have a record player in that bag as well?”

  “Of course not. But I asked Berenice this morning, and she said there’s one in the house somewhere. We’ll listen when we go back.”

  “So nothing else in the bag?”

  “Just my camera kit and this,” she said, pulling out a framed black-and-white photograph. I recognized it immediately. It was a copy of the one I’d seen in Max Locanda’s study. The one from the café. Mariangela pointed to the woman. “There. That’s my mum. And, of course, that’s my father.” She indicated the tall man sitting two seats away.

  “Who’s this?” I asked, referring to the bald man on Bondinelli’s right. “My grandfather. I don’t remember him. He died when I was small.” We’d arrived at the last man in the photo. “And who is this?”

  “I don’t know, but, here, Father wrote the names on the back of the frame.”

  She flipped the picture and, sure enough, beside the sticker identifying the framing house, there were three names written in black scrawl with a fourth scratched out: “R. Locanda, S. Locanda, P. Sasso.”

  “That’s strange,” I said. “He’s only identified thre
e people here.”

  “He must have removed his own name,” said Mariangela. “He was a very modest man.”

  “Still, he’s written the other names, including his father-in-law’s and his own wife’s.”

  “But they weren’t married yet, don’t you see? The date is there. April twenty-first, 1944. So it makes sense that he noted down the names.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Something seemed off about the explanation, but then again I couldn’t stand to see a crossword puzzle clue go unsolved. I bought her idea that he might not have included his own name, but why would he have scratched it out? And more than anything, I was disappointed that the names on the back of the frame did not include Marco, Silvana’s one-time love.

  “So you don’t know this P. Sasso?” I asked. “Your parents never spoke of him?”

  As an answer, she offered one of those precious, awkward, adolescent shrugs along with a rubbery face of lips and eyes stretching the boundaries of their natural resting positions.

  “Would you mind if I borrowed this photo? Just for a day or two. I’d like to study it a bit more.”

  “I can’t imagine why, but be my guest.”

  We made our way back to the house a couple of hours later, still well before the noonday meal was to be served. Lucio, Franco, and a subdued Tato were milling about on the terrazza, smoking cigarettes and talking about anything except what had happened the night before. Mariangela and I had little time for chitchat. We were on a quest to find a record player or a gramophone or a hi-fi. I hadn’t seen anything remotely resembling any of those in the house, but Mariangela wasn’t one to give up so easily. Having badgered Berenice for information, she finally discovered her uncle’s BSR portable record player atop a dusty, forsaken piano in a sitting room beyond the dining hall. It was one of those machines that looked like a miniature suitcase orphaned in the baggage room at a train station. We lugged it up to Mariangela’s room on the second floor and placed it on the dressing table near her bed. Despite an aging needle and a fraying power cord, the BSR sparked to life when we plugged it into the wall. We pulled up a couple of chairs, and Mariangela slipped a record onto the turntable.

  “Now just listen, Ellie. How I envy you, hearing this for the first time.”

  A spirited harmonica opened the song. Unusual, I thought, for pop music, but not unpleasant. A nice beat, then the energetic harmonies of two or three voices followed. The Beatles had a different sound, I had to admit. Sweet and melodious, but with more of an edge than your average hit parade offering. I appreciated the bridge, one of my favorite parts of song structure—along with the intro, verses, refrain, and coda. I suppose one could point out that those are all the parts of a popular song, and I wouldn’t disagree.

  In the case of Mariangela’s “Please Please Me,” the totality was, on first listen, a catchy little tune sung by voices with some character and personality. Not bad, though I wasn’t yet ready to swoon.

  Mariangela played the song three more times before suggesting we listen to the flip side, a song called, “Tell Me Why.”

  “This one is good, but not as good as ‘PPM.’”

  I gathered PPM was her shorthand for “Please Please Me.”

  This song began with a muscular intro of drums and guitar, then dived right into the refrain. Again, good harmonies from the singers and a roughness to the lead’s voice. The melody, like the first song’s, was memorable and pleasing, even if I didn’t quite understand the words. “Tell me why you cried and why you lied to me.” I struggled to determine who was the villain and who was the aggrieved. But then, maybe that made it a better song after all. Not the tired old theme of “you are mine” or “be true to me” or anything by Pat Boone.

  “What are you thinking, Ellie?” asked Mariangela. “Don’t you like the song?”

  “Of course I do. In fact, I was just thinking how much better it is than the music I normally hear on the radio.”

  The beamed at me and said now was the moment. “I’ve saved this for last. I’m going to play ‘She Loves You,’ and you’re going to flip.” She placed the new record on top of the other one and cued it up.

  Despite the repetitive “yeah, yeah, yeah” that made the song instantly memorable, this was clearly the number with the most potential for success. As in the other tracks, there were harmonies. They were having fun with this song.

  “That’s Paul there,” she said, pointing to the spinning record as it played.

  I couldn’t really distinguish any single voice standing out, but Mari-angela seemed sure. The arrangement, vocals, and overall performance all seemed more professional and polished, at least to my mind.

  “Che chiasso infernale è questo?” came a voice from the door as the song played for the fourth time. It was Max Locanda.

  Mariangela plucked the needle off the record, loosing silence in the room.

  “She was playing her favorite song for me,” I said. “And it’s not an infernal racket. It’s the Beatles.”

  “The Beetles? Gli scarabei? What is this ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ nonsense?”

  I fired a silent glare of reproach at him. His niece had just lost her father. She was an orphan. I’m not sure how a fierce scowl managed to communicate that specific message to him, but I believe it did. His expression softened somewhat.

  Now that the music had stopped, he stepped into the room and asked if that was his record player. The girl stared at the floor, too frightened to say anything at all. I thought the best strategy was to leverage my newfound friendliness—if it could be called that—with Max and plead ignorance at the same time.

  “We don’t know whose it is. Berenice found it. And since it was collecting dust on a piano, we didn’t think it would be missed. Surely you won’t deny us a little amusement.”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “But I wish you were amused by more pleasant noise.”

  “What if we turn down the volume?” I asked.

  He could find no argument with that and reluctantly agreed.

  Then he noticed Mariangela’s BOAC bag, which she’d tossed on the bed earlier. The photograph from the café was peeking out. Max nodded at it and asked if that, too, was his?

  “No,” I said. “It’s from her father’s office at the university.”

  He picked it up and examined the faces. “This was forty-three or forty-four. Piazza della Repubblica. My father used to frequent that café.”

  I joined him to study the photograph as if for the first time, even though we’d already discussed it in detail in his study the day Mari-angela arrived. I glanced at her. She was still seated at the dressing table next to the record player. If Max knew she was there, he made no attempt to acknowledge her. She watched us silently. I fancied she was searching for a secret, perhaps how I managed to talk to her uncle without trembling.

  “My father was looking particularly nasty that day,” said Max. He reconsidered his statement. “Every day, really.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t know who this is?” I asked, pointing to the fourth man.

  “Non lo so. I never laid eyes on him.”

  I took the frame from him, stared at the picture for a brief moment, then turned it over to reveal the names on the verso.

  “Look here,” I said. “There’s your father’s name, your sister’s, and this other name. P. Sasso. Do you suppose that’s his name?”

  Max squinted to see, his brow knitted into a tight frown. “Alberto didn’t write his own name, so I suppose that man is P. Sasso.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to identify himself in the photograph. Or he changed his mind and scratched it out here.” I pointed to the offending blotch on the back of the frame. “It could be anything. The name of the café or some other note. Perhaps he’d misspelled something and decided to cover it.”

  My answers didn’t satisfy him. The frown remained fast in place as he looked up at me.

  “You must be right. But what does it matter? This man must have been a friend of o
ne of them. Maybe he knew my father or Alberto.”

  I didn’t want to add his sister’s name to the list, and clearly neither did he. Not in front of Mariangela. He took the photo back from me for one last look. Then he placed it on the bed and said lunch would be served in a half-hour.

  “Go ahead and listen to your music,” he said to the girl. “But not too loud, ti prego.”

  Before heading down to lunch, I gathered up the photo Mariangela had said I could borrow and took it to my room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After lunch, whose main course featured spaghetti—or something resembling spaghetti but thicker—served with a delicious meat ragout of cinghiale, most everyone retired for a siesta or a stroll in the garden. Only Franco refused to budge from his spot in the salone,where he was engaging me with questions about my youth in New York. Had I ever met a real mafioso? Did all Americans chew gum? And other such nonsense. At length, once he’d smoked a couple of cigarettes and succumbed to the magic of Berenice’s heavy meal, he yawned and said perhaps he’d take a nap after all.

  Once he’d climbed the stairs, I waited a full minute before grabbing my purse and darting out the door. The gray Vespa stood against the wall where Franco had parked it three days before. He’d ridden it like a cowboy from Santa Maria Novella to Fiesole, the fetching Veronica seated behind him, holding on for dear life, like some kind of itchy ingénue in a bad movie. I didn’t care about any of that. I only wanted to get the thing moving and drive it down to Florence without anyone catching on.

  Fearing discovery, I wheeled the scooter behind the house and down the path I’d walked that morning with Mariangela. I’d noted how isolated the way had been and, figuring it would eventually reach Via Boccaccio, I thought I could escape Bel Soggiorno without the policeman at the head of the drive any the wiser.

  I walked the Vespa at least two hundred yards into the olive grove to the south of the house. Confident no one would hear me there, I climbed aboard, inserted the key as Franco had explained, and switched the fuel tap to the on position. Then, having pulled the choke, I lifted myself up onto the kick-start pedal and gave it every ounce of my weight as I pushed down against its resistance. To my surprise, the thing roared to life on the first try. And after one or two stalls as I learned to handle the clutch,