the very least, I couldn’t help but feel that she had betrayed him. How one who promises their heart and soul to one person, can promise it again so easily to another is beyond me. Dr. Harrington did the honor of giving her away at the small but extravagant ceremony. It was very disturbing to me that they married in the same garden that she went out to every night to pick a rose for Van Zant’s grave.
Upon marrying Alessandro, Madam seemed to be on top of the world, but he seemed to have a small problem remembering he was married also. I remember during the parties, how women would clamor around him, and Madam would always end up stomping off upstairs in a jealous rage, spending the night pouting in her bedroom, where hence, the next day we would watch as the entire house would fill with white and yellow roses. It happened like clockwork. Alessandro was not so discreet about his affairs, he would receive phone calls at all hours of the night, and more than once I’d watched as Marta washed an array of pink and red lipstick smudges off his collars and neckties. But Madam cared for him so much that after a while, she pretended not to notice. People see what they choose to see, and when we love someone, it’s even worse. We become blinded to their every flaw. Once when she had confronted him about his promiscuity, he looked her dead in the eye and said, “Abigail, Italian men make only the best lovers, not husbands.”
They began to fight, fiercely and often, always ending in the same way, the house looking and smelling like the inside of a floral shoppe, then all the flowers would die, and the fighting would resume. I would hear her crying to him, “But I love you so much, Alessandro, why do you do this to me?” More than once, he would snap back, “Do to you?!? You are insane! Look what I have to put up with from you!” Apparently, he did love her, but for some reason he just wasn’t able to resist the charms of other women.
In the early morning hours of June 3, 1982, we all awoke to a piercing scream. We all ran, still in our night clothes, to find Marta in one of the bathrooms, shaking and crying as she stood over Alessandro’s body, he was lying in a puddle of blood, his wrists had been slashed. His eyes were wide open and glossed over, and his face was so pale that you could almost see through his skin. No explanation, no suicide letter. Nothing. We had no idea as to the reason why he had chosen to end his life. Alessandro was entombed in the mausoleum, in a beautiful casket covered with painted angels and Italian artwork, right beside Richard Van Zant. Once again, I was asked to select an epitaph for the crypt. I selected a verse I felt was fitting, since I forever heard Madam go on and on about his gorgeous eyes, “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses of the world,” Edna St. Vincent Millay.
His funeral was quite large, a lot of his family from Caserta attended the service, which was held at the same church where Van Zant’s funeral had taken place. After the initial shock of Alessandro’s death had passed, Madam became very withdrawn and melancholy. When not crying, she would sit at the piano for hours, gently caressing the shadows of fingerprints left by the man she had loved so much. Although she had lost a husband before, she seemed the most devastated over him, she was completely heartbroken. She vowed, once again, never to re-marry.
Now, every night, instead of taking one rose to the mausoleum, she took three, one for Van Zant, and two for Alessandro. Even in death, he was higher on the pedestal than anyone else. Once or more it swam through my mind that maybe she had something to do with his death, but deep down I knew that couldn’t be possible, she had too much of a loving heart to ever do a horrible thing like that. She always wore black now, as if to show the world that she was in a constant state of mourning for her deceased loves. She hired an artist to paint pictures of Alessandro, dozens and dozens of them, “Be sure to emphasize his beautiful eyes,” Madam instructed the artist. When he had finished, images of Alessandro stared out at us from nearly every place in the house. His “beautiful eyes” followed us wherever we went.
Ten years passed and 1992 crashed upon our lives before we knew what hit us. Madam was not thirty-eight years old. I felt like I had watched her grow up, as well as the two maids, who were just as young when I started. By this time, all of her friends had stopped visiting her altogether, the only one who ever came to see her was Dr. Harrington. Our obligation to have dinner with Madam was now almost mandatory. But none of us minded, we all had grown quite comfortable chatting with her, even Marta would say a few words now and then. She was lonely, and we were her family now. Sometimes, she would drink too much wine, and ramble on for hours about the same silly things (But perhaps they weren’t so silly to her) “Didn’t Alessandro have the most striking blue eyes you had ever seen?” she would say, “And his hands, didn’t he have the most beautiful hands you’ve ever seen on a man??? so soft and strong at the same time.” I am sorry, but a man’s hands all look the same to me, maybe because I am one, I don’t know. “And Richard’s laugh… didn’t he have the most amazing laugh???”
I thought maybe she was going mad. She talked more about Alessandro than she did Richard, it was still so obvious that she loved him the most.
Twenty-one years since I had inherited my beloved library, and still, there were so many wonderful books left to read, twenty-one years and with all the hours and hours of reading I had done, it didn’t even make a dent in what was left to enjoy. I settled down in my comfy, worn chair to read Moby Dick, a book I had read at least fifty times when I was a child.
“Upon waking the next morning about daylight, I found Queenqueg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of little particolored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan Labyrinth of a ffigure,” I was so tired, that by this point the words began to blur on the paper before me.
At almost midnight, I closed my book and went off to bed. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. Awakened me out of a sound sleep, I looked at the clock beside my bed, 1:43am. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. I jumped up and rushed to the door, thinking there must be a fire or some other dire emergnecy. “Did I wake you, Malachi?” Madam asked. “Oh, no, Madam, not at all.” Why must we always lie and tell others we weren’t sleeping, as we wipe the drool from our mouth and the fuzziness from our eyes, like it were an unforgivable sin? “I know it’s very late, but is it alright if I ask a favor of you?” “Yes, certainly Madam.” I want to visit with Alessandro and Richard, but I don’t want to go out there alone, not at this hour. I must have stared at her for five straight minutes. I honestly thought she was going to ask me to bring her a glass of water or perhaps make her a sandwich, never did I dream she wanted me to escort her down to visit with two corpses.
We slowly walked inside the cool, silent night. The moon and stars looked like a giant canopy of blue velvet hovering over the vineyard. Soon, the sickening-sweet smell of the wisteria blew up our noses. Madam gently pushed open the doors of the mausoleum. There was hardly any light, except for the moon shining through the small windows, and the candelabras we each carried. I held on tightly to her thin arm as she led me though an unbelievable maze. I was always frightened by mausoleums and wall crypts as a child, and that was exactly how I felt now, like a terrified child, clutching my mummy’s arm, shutting my eyes often and wanting to scream. To me, it’s a completely different story when you visit the grave of someone who is buried, six feet of earth and dirt separate you from the deceased. But in a mausoleum, the dead lie just inches away from touch, only a thin piece of marble between you and them.
We finally reached them. I sat down on one of the cement benches, while Madam kissed each one of the cold slabs of marble, each one covered with the imprint of a million lipstick kisses. Her finger traced the letters of their names over and over again. “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world, Alessandro,” she whispered, leaning her head against the crypt. I silently went over in my head the next lines of the poem, “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave, gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am resigned.”
The air inside the crypt was so freezing that smoke came out of her mouth when she spoke. She sat down next to me and placed her hand inside my own. “I miss them so much, Malachi.” I patted her back. “I know, Madam, I know.” She gently started to lean towards me, as if waiting for me to respond with a kiss. But I turned away and looked down. She then rested her head on my shoulder. After a while, it became sort of routine, usually after dinner, I escorted her down to leave roses at the crypts or sometimes late at night, when she felt the need to “visit them.” I became so used to being inside that mausoleum, that even late at night, it didn’t bother me anymore. It even became beautiful to me, much too beautiful a place to put two hateful men like those two.
One night when we were all having dinner together as usual, she was once again talking about them, actually admitting they each had a “tempered” streak. A nice way to put it, I thought. “Madam, may I ask you a question?” I inquired. “Why
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