I was in the doorway now. My mother’s back, stiff as a marble column, gave me courage. “She didn’t attack him, sir,” I said boldly. “She only sang from La Bohème.”
“You!” He pointed at me, his fleshy, blotched face damp with sweat. “Always reading! What servant girl, what bastardina, needs to read? You should be cleaning this cesspool.” He flung his hand around the room. Sunlight glistened on the china and wood I dusted daily. He yawned. “Get out, both of you. I’m surrounded by imbeciles. The laughingstock of Naples.”
“All Teresa did was sing,” said the countess, who had just arrived. “The maestro called her an angel. Who else has a servant like that? You should rest now, Filippo.”
“Where’s my octopus?”
“I asked her not to get it. Dr. Galuppi said to eat lightly.” We slipped out the door as the countess eased the fuming count back under his sheets.
In the windowless chamber off the kitchen where servants ate, I gripped my stool, which seemed to dip and sway as if at sea. If we were turned out with Count Filippo’s word against us, what noble house or even decent merchant would hire us? Tradesmen’s servants slept in stairways, eating scraps. But Mamma heaved with rage, tearing at her bread, cursing our life. Better a count’s servants than any other fate open to us. Couldn’t she see that?
“Are you crazy, Teresa?” Nannina demanded. “All the great divas of Europe want Maestro Toscanini. Madonna mia, why would he pick you?”
“I don’t know,” said Mamma in a voice suddenly dry and brittle as eggshells. Her wide, dark eyes raked the room. “Does he know we live here?”
I put my arm around her heaving shoulders. “No, Mamma. He doesn’t. He’s probably forgotten all about us. There’s an opera tonight, remember? He’s busy.”
“He heard me say ‘Count Monforte.’ ”
“No, he was already in the opera house by then.”
“The guards will tell him.”
“Maestro Toscanini doesn’t speak to guards,” Nannina snapped.
Paolo called for us. The matter of Toscanini, piled on other troubles, had given the countess another headache. The count’s debts and many dalliances tormented her. He constantly reminded her that his money had restored her family’s crumbling villa, that all she brought to the marriage was a noble title. After each tirade she suffered throbbing pains that only gentle singing eased. Each time my mother’s misdeeds threatened our place, I reminded myself that Countess Elisabetta needed her servant’s voice.
When the headaches came, she took to the sitting room, put a silk cushion over her eyes to block out light, and had the windows opened to the gentle wash of waves. Then Mamma sang softly: arias she heard from street singers, popular songs, French and Spanish airs she mimicked perfectly. I’d unwind Countess Elisabetta’s honey-brown hair, brush it gently, and rub lavender oil into her temples.
These were our golden hours, sweet relief from the cramping pain of work: scrubbing pots and marble floors, polishing silver, cleaning fireplaces, oiling woodwork, blacking shoes, and hanging suspended on ropes to wash crusted salt spray from the high windows. With relief came the pure pleasure of ease in that lovely room. Breezes found it on the warmest day. Damask curtains pulsed gently as if Mamma’s voice moved them. Even waves on the rocks below seemed to follow the rhythm of her song.
I see the room now. Tiny rainbows from a crystal chandelier dance over us. Polished silver glows. Sunlight glints softly on marble busts. Nannina’s flowers bloom in painted vases. The Persian carpet we beat in the courtyard is soft as moss under my feet, richly colored as a summer garden.
“Read to me now, Lucia,” the countess would say as the pain eased. Then I’d open a leather-bound volume of her favorite poet, Giacomo Leopardi. When I stumbled, she’d say, “Read slowly. Think of each word.” I would and she’d smile. These moments are wrapped in my heart forever. Yes, I was a servant and the count called me bastardina, but those afternoons I swam in beauty and the joy of being needed for more than the strength of my arms.
“If we’d had a child like you,” the countess once said when we were alone, “perhaps the count would be different.” What if I had been hers, I wondered. Then hot guilt seized me for abandoning my mother, even in dreams. “Lucia Esposito,” I repeated silently. “That’s who I am. Lucia Esposito, Lucia Esposito, daughter of Teresa Esposito.”
Laudanum lulled the count to sleep and the countess dismissed us when the headache passed. She would review accounts with Paolo and then retire. He met her in the hallway. I noticed, but put no meaning to how slowly they walked to her chambers and how close together.
Mamma and I went to our cot, sweating in the summer night. “Woman of the street,” she muttered. “He meant whore.”
“He also called you an angel. And we’re safe now. You just shouldn’t trouble him again.”
“I’m not like you. I don’t read books,” she said bitterly. “All I can do is sing. You’re Countess Elisabetta’s little pet, but what about me? Maybe she’ll find another singing servant and send me away. I’ll never be a diva. I’ll never be anything.” She turned to the wall, shoulders heaving.
I lay rigid, shamed and helpless. In the heavy darkness, I imagined myself vanished, like a reflection in wet marble, gone when the marble dries. Would Mamma be happier then? The darkness blurred with tears. Our damp shoulders nearly touched, yet our pains were oceans apart. When the great pendulum clock tolled midnight, Mamma slipped barefoot from the room. Was she taking one of her nighttime walks? I listened with dread for the low groan of the great front door. Silence. When she finally returned, a cool hand touched mine.
“Where did you go?” I whispered.
“For laudanum. Do you want some?”
“No.”
“Of course not. You’re a child. You don’t worry about anything.” She gathered me in her arms, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry, Lucia,” she whispered. “You know I love you. It’s like—when fog covers Vesuvius, it’s still there, but you can’t see it. Remember that with me. I’ll always love you. Always!” she said, her breath hot on my neck. “Now sleep.” I did, although in my jagged dreams a sea-monster count hounded us into a watery maze.
Chapter 2
FEVER AND CHILLS
Malarial fever brought Count Filippo near delirium by morning. He thrashed on his massive rosewood bed, cursing the African heat and demanding more breezes. For hours I beat the sodden air with ostrich feathers bound to a bamboo rod. Every muscle burned. If this was punishment for the octopus, it was more than enough.
“Take me to Capri,” he demanded. “Where are you, Bettina, Rosalia, and Isabella, my ripe peach?” At each name, the countess winced.
Paolo had asked Dr. Galuppi to bring a vial of his best Peruvian quinine, told Nannina to prepare for the doctor’s notorious sweet tooth, and relieved the countess of her sickroom duties. “Keep fanning until the fever turns to chills,” Paolo whispered to me. I pictured Roman galley slaves chained to bamboo rods.
At last the doctor came, administered the quinine, and wedged himself into a brocade chair. “Now if your woman will bring me— Ah, yes.” Mamma had come with a decanter of Scottish whiskey, our best Venetian goblets, and a plate of rum-soaked babas. I gripped my bamboo rod as he touched the curve of Mamma’s bodice, the thick rope of her braid, her slender waist, and her cheeks, white with rage.
“More wind . . . harder,” the count snapped when Mamma left. Sweat soaked his linen nightshirt. I had already changed the bedsheets. Yet he swore I let him “wallow like a pauper in filth.” We couldn’t wash, dry, and iron linens fast enough for the sweat, vomit, and soil of his illness. No amount of rosemary and lavender oil could sweeten that room.
Dr. Galuppi tucked a bit of snuff in his ample nose and watched me fan the count, round eyes roaming my body until, tiring of this, he took out a medical text and read while the count grunted himself into fitful sleep.
As Paolo had predicted, fever passed swiftly into chills. The count woke with a s
tart and demanded that I cease my infernal fanning and bring blankets, furs, and a fire in the brazier.
“Do it, girl,” the doctor said, barely looking up. With the fire lit, sweat poured down our faces, but he kept avidly reading, sometimes sketching strange machines in a leather notebook.
“Close the windows and lie with me. Rosalia, keep me warm!” the count moaned. Slowly the quinine did its work. The tremors ceased and he entered a lull between fever and chills.
“Good, now try my tonic,” Galuppi announced, closing his book and pouring two liberal glasses of whiskey. He motioned me to a chair in the corner. “Sit there. We may need you.”
I took my seat, and in the manner of gentlemen, they promptly ignored me, as if I were one more marble bust along the wall. Which was the worst of a servant’s lot, I often wondered: the ceaseless work, pain in every joint, raw, cracked skin, and long hours, or the airy dismissal into nothing, to be called back to life with a flick of the hand? When the count waved at the fur mountain over him, I was to understand: take this away. “A man can go mad in the company of servants,” he muttered.
“Certainly, certainly. Everyone’s talking about the scene between that woman of yours and Maestro Toscanini. Clearly she’s a hysteric of the most troublesome kind. However, she’s a great favorite of your wife, I believe.” The count nodded, sighed, and pressed his head into the mounded pillows.
“I have made a careful study of hysteria,” the doctor continued, tapping his book. “The condition is often curable by means of intriguing mechanisms, sadly underused in Italy. With these mechanisms our Anglo-Saxon brethren have excised madness from diverse subjects, or at the least made them more malleable.”
I must have appeared to be attending to the gentlemen’s talk, for the count lifted a fleshy hand from the coverlet, indicating me. “You. Leave us. Close the door.”
“Yes, sir.”
In the dim cool of the corridor, I breathed deeply, free from the sickroom stench. Nannina and Mamma were helping the exhausted laundress. Paolo and the countess must have been reviewing the household accounts again, for I heard murmuring in her study. Barefoot, I crept back toward the count’s chamber.
“Copious injections of ram’s blood . . . patients as tranquil as sheep,” I heard through the door. The count must have spoken. “Of course, some casualties. There’s much to be learned.” The rosewood bed creaked. In a rustle of sheets, surely I mistook the next report. Was it possible that doctors closed inmates in coffins pierced with holes, lowered them into water until the bubbles ceased, then hauled up the coffins and tried to revive the near-drowned victims? “Confronting death calms the lunatic.” Some muttering followed, which I couldn’t understand, and then: “Whirling chair . . . electric shocks to the female organs sometimes efficacious.” I leaned against a marble column, sickened. The doctor’s voice again: “You must eat lightly now, Count. I’ll ring for the girl.” Panicked, I scurried to the kitchen to rinse my face, steady myself, and seem to be returning for my orders.
“Count Filippo is sleeping quietly,” Paolo announced after our servants’ dinner. “You’re free until morning. I will attend to the count.” But I noticed that he didn’t turn left to the sickroom but right, to the private rooms of the countess.
“She isn’t feeling well?” I asked.
Mamma and Nannina exchanged glances. Nannina’s brow arched. “I suppose they’re reviewing accounts.”
Mamma stood up. “Lucia, let’s go swimming. Come, there’s a full moon.” Soon we were running down to the rocks, hair flying behind us. I remember that night as pure joy. Still in our sweat-stiffened linens, we swam through a milk-white path laid out by the moon that seemed to stretch across the bay to Vesuvius. Warm waves washed our loosening bodies apart and then together. We caught the iridescent waters in our hands as the sickroom smells and weariness drained away. We were mermaids, princesses, sisters.
“We’re almost free,” I said into the star-sparkled heavens. “Either the count dies, or he gets better and goes back to Capri until the wintertime.”
“And when he goes, the doctor goes,” Mamma added dreamily. “If he doesn’t, I’ll poison his whiskey.” Floating on the gently heaving water, we both laughed. My hand caught hers in the water. I’ll treasure this night forever, I thought, and I did. It buoyed me through rough waters. It’s here with me now, so far away from Naples. Too soon, bell towers rang for midnight as we dried ourselves, wrung out our shifts, and hurried barefoot to the villa. It would be our last night on our cot.
When I brought Count Filippo his breakfast, he seemed much improved, his color returned and brow clear of sweat. A morning breeze had freshened the room. Perhaps shamed by the basins of foul waste I’d taken out in the days of his sickness, he was even cordial, using my name, thanking me for his tray and asking to see the countess “when it is quite convenient.”
“He’s better,” I reported happily to Nannina.
“Good, but if you don’t have to be nursemaids today, it’s time to scrub the stairs,” she observed.
I groaned. Cleaning the great marble staircase was the job I hated most. Mamma and I worked together, polishing each step with pumice stone, and then scrubbing with soap that burned the eyes. Our knees, shoulders, elbows, and hands ached. Usually she sang or we told stories as distraction from the pain. That day she was silent. We seemed to be scrubbing the Alps. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was released.
Paolo called down the wet stairway that the Duchess Annamaria was receiving that morning and the countess wanted me to go with her, carrying Nannina’s almond cake and helping servants at the palace, but first I must braid my hair neatly and put on my best dress. Mamma’s dark eyes squeezed to slits as I hurried to change. I remember with bitter regret her hunched shoulders and flame-red hands as I passed her soon after, easing carefully down the wet steps, attentive to the cake on our silver tray and my clean, starched apron, as if I were the mistress and she the serving girl.
“I’ll be back soon, Mamma,” I promised. She didn’t answer, and ever since, the sting of lye soap has recalled for me the sting of wrenching guilt when I tripped off like a little lady, leaving her to scrub the steps. What defense do I have but youth? As I walked along the elegant Riviera di Chiaia with the countess in her splendid rose morning dress, my spirits lifted and the old fantasy returned: I was the treasured daughter of a countess. Tutors would come to me. I would be presented in society, never insulted, never called bastardina. The count, my father, would have Paolo’s face and manner, wise, kind, and comforting.
We reached the palace. “Bring the cake to the kitchen,” the countess said, “and help with the sewing for now.” And so my fantasy ended. In the servants’ hall I was given bread, cheese, and a chair by a lighted window. After lunch, for entertainment with coffee, I was called to the drawing room. I’d never seen such a dazzle of jewels and lace, beautiful women chattering like birds, noblewomen and ambassadors’ wives. I was to read Dante aloud, thus refuting a claim made by a viscountess that lower classes were incapable of comprehending the Poet. I was given a text, and the countess showed me where to begin.
I read slowly, attentive to meter, as she’d taught me. The chattering slowly ceased. Painted lips opened slightly, as if one of their fluffy lapdogs had commenced a recitation. Joy and pride infused me in that shimmering room as the divine words flowed from my mouth. The maid discreetly set a water goblet at my side, and I, Lucia Esposito, drank from crystal among noblewomen.
Prettily sent away after reading, I dropped stitch after stitch, reimagining my triumph until the housekeeper said: “Go home now, girl. Your mistress says she won’t need you this afternoon.” So I was a nameless “girl” again. I dawdled back to the villa, wandering through a park along the bay, watching rich children with their hoops and young dandies on bicycles. How often would I curse my ambling feet that afternoon!
Nannina was chopping onions when I returned, and Paolo was in his windowless, ledger-lined office. “Teresa’s ironi
ng,” he said over his shoulder. “Go help her.” I never reached the laundry. A strange whirling sound came from the terrazzo. Looking down, I gasped. The count and Dr. Galuppi sat watching a spectacle: a huge, hairy man, a hulking gorilla, turned a giant wheel that drove a spinning chair. A woman was strapped in this chair, black hair like a whipping tail behind her, the face blurred. I peered more closely. Mamma! Now I was running, flying downstairs. The bastards, the bastards, the bastards!
Once on the terrazzo, I saw that her face was sickly white, mouth stretched out in wordless howl, her apron stained with vomit. When I screamed, “Stop! Let her go!” my voice vaulted back from the walls, the orchard, and the bay. I screamed myself hollow, stunned by the sound. Both gentlemen stared. A servant dared shout at them? The gorilla man stopped dead. As the whirling chair slowed, clattering to stillness, my mother flopped forward like a rag doll, black hair matting her face.
“Ugo, bring the girl here,” the doctor snapped. Rushing to help Mamma, I was scooped up and delivered to the doctor. Despite his fleshy frame, the grip on my arms was crushing. “Start the chair again! Don’t move, girl, or we’ll spin her another hour, and you as well for your insolence.”
“Never mind, I’ve seen the chair,” said Count Filippo like a child bored with an old toy. He cut himself thick slices of prosciutto with a long, ivory-handled knife and refilled his goblet as Mamma retched. My stomach heaved with hers. At a sign from the doctor, Ugo untied her; she tumbled to the ground.
“Mamma!”
“Be quiet, girl, or we will spin her again!” Galuppi said. “Ugo, bring the Taming Box.” Then to the count: “I copied this design from an American journal.” Eagerly, the count examined a padded black box designed to fit over a human head. Galuppi demonstrated the gag, blindfold, earplugs, airholes, and chair whose seat was a chamber pot. Mamma hadn’t moved. When I tested the doctor’s grip, it tightened as he continued placidly: “Immobilized, cut off from external senses, alone with his—or her—madness, the tranquilizing effect can be profound. Even for extreme cases”—he nodded toward the hulking Ugo—“the mere threat of it induces obedience. Thus the device both cures and pacifies the most difficult inmates.”
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