by Blanca Miosi
“I think I finally got rid of her this time. It’s her fault the manuscript went blank.”
He set the manuscript on a desk that looked like it had come from a close-out sale of used furniture. He opened to a certain page and left it there awhile. I preferred not to ask questions. It seemed like an intimate ritual.
“Now let’s get going to my place,” I said.
“Don’t you want to see where I found the manuscript?”
It did seem like a good idea. On the flight he had told me the entire story of meeting the strange little man. I really did want to see the cemetery and went willingly. I wanted to know more about the entire business. We set out walking and eight minutes later arrived at a large churchyard. The wind was making short work of the few remaining leaves on the trees, and the bench Nicholas gestured toward sagged, according to him, more desolately into the earth than usual. Throughout the couple of hours we stayed there, we saw no signs of the used bookseller. Nicholas was downcast, as if he had actually expected the book salesman to appear at any moment.
“Let’s go, Nicholas. He’s not coming.”
“You believe me, don’t you?” he said, clasping the manuscript under his arm.
“As strange as it sounds, I actually do.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go for it,” I said with a tinge of defensiveness. I never knew what Nicholas was going to come out with next.
“Out of curiosity, your uncle’s business is called “the Business”? Is it a euphemism...?”
“Everyone just always calls it the Business. Uncle Claudio always called it that, and that’s how it’s registered.”
We continued down the sidewalk.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“In Tribeca.”
“I know a way to get there you’re really going to like.” He motioned for me to follow and soon we were going down a staircase to take the subway.
It was my first time in a New York subway, or any underground transportation for that matter. There were only a few people, so we sat where we wanted, and, just as any anonymous group of people, we civilly marked our respective territories by staring off into space. In a while, Nicholas nudged me, and we went to the door. When we got up to the street, I immediately recognized Tribeca. I was in awe that we could get there without having to subject ourselves to the relentless traffic, though, to be honest, I actually preferred driving and listening to my favorite music.
“The subway is the quickest way to get around, Dante. That’s how I get around Manhattan to see my agent. When I see him, that is, and it’s been awhile.” He forced a smile and dug his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.
“My house is just two blocks from here,” I said and began walking. I was overcome with a sudden urge to see Quentin.
“Signore Dante!” Quentin exclaimed when he saw me at the door. “I was not expecting you!”
“Forgive me, Quentin; I didn’t have time to call you. How is everything?”
Quentin made to remove my jacket, but I waved him off and hung it up myself.
“Everything is fine, signore.” Quentin said no more on account of the presence of a guest.
“This is Nicholas. He’s a friend of the house, Quentin.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Nicholas.”
“Nicholas Blohm, Mr. Quentin; very pleased to meet you,” Nicholas responded. And he truly did seem pleased. Nicholas was staring at Quentin as if he were a marvelous ghost. Nicholas reached out to shake Quentin’s hand, and I know the poor butler was befuddled.
“Has anyone called, Quentin?”
“Ms. Irene has called several times and asked for you to get in touch with her as soon as you return. Also a gentleman who declined to give his name, though I’m sure he was Italian,” Quentin informed me while studying Nicholas.
“Don’t worry, Quentin; Nicholas can be trusted. He’s kind of like my bodyguard. So what did the guy want?”
Quentin looked at Nicholas now with unfeigned curiosity. “Nothing much. He just asked after you and if I knew when you would return. Of course I gave him no information. It was yesterday night. He seemed to be calling from a party of some sort because the background noise was terribly loud.”
Nicholas and I exchanged glances. We were both thinking the same thing: the man from the restaurant.
“What would you like for dinner, signore?”
“Don’t worry about dinner, Quentin; just get some take out. I need to talk with you.”
“I’ll take care of it, Dante,” Nicholas offered. He waved us on and stayed behind in the living room.
I went to the library and asked Quentin to sit.
“Quentin, did you get the transfer?”
“Yes, signore Dante, it’s in my account. As you instructed, I took the check to Ms. Irene, but she refused to accept it. She said she wanted to talk with you, but as I was not authorized to give her your number in Rome, I did not do so. I have the bank statement in my room.”
“You can give it to me later, Quentin. Now I need to know if anyone else came or asked after me. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in my absence?”
“Besides those calls, no, sir. Forgive my indiscretion, but do you know who the young man accompanying you is?”
“He’s a good friend, Quentin, and he’s helping me solve a problem. By the way, lately we’ve been talking a lot about you.”
“Me, sir?”
“Yes, you.” Quentin’s face cracked me up, and I let out a loud laugh that did me good. I had been bottling up too much stress lately.
“You laugh just like your Uncle Claudio. He was a very jolly man, you remember?”
“How did you meet him, Quentin?”
“I began working for Mr. Adriano, your grandfather, when Mr. Claudio was just a little thing, signore Dante. I had lost my parents in the war and was wandering about the streets. Mr. Adriano drove by one day and saw me digging through the trash. He ordered the car to stop and asked what I was doing. ‘Looking for food,’ I answered. ‘Get in,’ he said, opening the door for me, and I got in. I was so hungry and desperate I didn’t stop to think twice. You grandfather had just returned from Bern and was setting up house at Villa Contini again. The Germans had destroyed the place. As Mr. Adriano used to say, they managed to take many valuables with them when they fled. When we got out of the car, Mr. Adriano himself took me to the kitchen and told a woman who I later learned was the housekeeper to feed and clothe me. Ever since that day I have been working for the Contini-Massera family. The boy Claudio, your uncle, always teased me for being skinny, and I always laughed. He was so very funny.”
“So you’d known Uncle Claudio since he was a boy.”
“Yes, signore, and your father as well, Don Bruno.”
“Do you remember Francesco Martucci?”
“Of course. He was the son of Mr. Claudio’s nursemaid. As you know, your nonna died when Claudio was but a few months old, and Francesco’s mother nursed him.”
“People say that Francesco was also the son of my grandfather Adriano.”
“I could not say, signore. If he were, it would have occurred during the war before I knew them.”
Quentin was silent, as if suddenly he felt he had said too much.
“What do you think of Francesco Martucci, Quentin? Tell me honestly.”
“I think he is a good man. He distanced himself from the family at a young age because he wanted to be a priest, but I think he did so because he wanted to get away.”
“According to Uncle Claudio, Francesco was his best friend, practically a brother. Do you think so?”
“Your Uncle Claudio was one of the most humane people I have ever known. Just like his father, Adriano, who saved me from the streets.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Quentin.”
“I always had the impression that Francesco envied your Uncle Claudio. Just a bit,” he added.
“Why? According to what he himself told me, Uncle Claud
io left him part of his fortune, and they were always good friends.”
“It wasn’t over money, signore Dante.” Quentin’s voice was so low I barely caught his words.
“What, then?”
“What I am going to tell you is a very delicate matter, but it is the truth. Francesco was always in love with la sua mamma.”
“My mother?!” I asked, stupefied. Coming from her, nothing surprised me anymore, but it shocked me to think so of Francesco Martucci.
“Yes, signore Dante. The masters always think that we servants are mere furnishings of the house. Sometimes they do things as if we did not exist and had no feelings.”
“Quentin, don’t be embarrassed. I want to know if there was anything between Francesco and my mother.”
Quentin closed his eyes halfway and began to remember.
Francesco and Carlota
“From her first visit to Villa Contini, the child Carlota took our lives by storm. She was just seven years old and would stay with us for long stretches at a time. Everyone in the family was delighted to cater to her whims. Carlota’s mother was a very good friend of Mr. Adriano, and it was an above-board friendship. There was nothing more than healthy camaraderie between them. I can fully attest to that as I have observed from every nook and cranny in the house like a shadow invisible to the owners.
”As a child, besides being capricious, Carlota was exceptionally beautiful. I have hardly ever seen such an angelic creature, yet her exterior was in complete discord with her personality. We servants knew that the bright goodness shining on her surface was actually coldly calculated for her ill-intentioned schemes. The amazing thing was that it was entirely unnecessary, because she got anything she asked for anyway. To her mother’s eyes, she was a poor, darling angel who had lost her father. To Mr. Adriano—may my patron rest in God’s glory—she was a magic fairy who turned everything she touched into joy, and the child knew very well how to please him. She was the world’s greatest flatterer. I have no idea how, but she managed to make all of us servants look bad since her arguments were irrefutable. She would tell Mr. Adriano we put sand in her bed on purpose to give her a rash; and it’s true that her skin was as soft as a flower petal, just like the girl in charge of bathing her used to say. ‘I’ve never seen a child with such beautiful skin,’ she would say. But Carlota would go complain to Mr. Adriano and convince him that the girl assigned to bathing her scrubbed her with a coarse bristled brush. And sure enough, she would reveal a back that had been mysteriously scratched.
”Her stays at the villa also affected Claudio and Bruno. They both favored this girl with brown braids who always waited to greet each of them with flowers. As time went on, the child Carlota turned into a young woman, and the brothers started seeing her as a real woman, especially after the fifteenth birthday party Mr. Adriano threw for her in the villa. As far as I can recall, I had never witnessed such a magnificent party as that. For the first time the young Carlota appeared dressed in heels that day. Her dress—which had driven the seamstress batty the entire previous month due to Carlota’s constant changes and fickle whims—made her sparkle like a true fairytale princess, exactly like the ones in the books I used to borrow from the library. The fantasy worlds entranced me.
”I think that was the day Claudio and Bruno both fell in love with her, or realized they already were. And Francesco, who by that time already had every intention of becoming a priest, admired her with those strange eyes of his, the iris far too large. I remember how he got short of breath when she walked by him toward the main hall. No details were lost on her. She looked at him and blew him a kiss. That’s when I realized there was more than friendship between them. I would never have expected it of Francesco, since he was such a calm young man. He looked to Claudio as his leader. Francesco had a delicate constitution but an intelligence that, people said, far surpassed any scientist’s IQ. His ambition to become a priest grew even stronger when he figured out that Carlota would never be his. After that party, young Carlota’s visits grew more frequent, but she tended to come only when Claudio and Bruno were away at college. And, what a coincidence! It just so happened it would be Francesco’s day off. He was smart enough to manage excused absences from seminary.
”Villa Contini is a little palace with thirty eight bedrooms, of which only five were occupied by the family: Mr. Adriano; his esteemed mother, the nonna; the sons Claudio and Bruno; and, from time to time, Carlota. It was very easy to get lost in all the nooks and crannies; even I, and I know every hidden corner of the place, can’t get through all the rooms in one day. If Mr. Adriano were home, he would never be found with the family members except at mealtime. Thus, the young Carlota could go and do as she pleased. But a trace of evidence always remains. Despite the utmost care, in this case on Francesco’s part, for someone whose eyes are trained to maintain order in every square inch of the house, the slightest bit of disturbed dust was enough to let me know that something strange was going on. And what I found was more than a bit of dust. It was irrefutable proof that in the room with ivory-colored walls the maiden Carlota was no longer a maiden.
”The passion between them apparently burned so strongly that they were less and less cautious. I believe they truly were in love, signore Dante. And I wondered how in the world such a beautiful young woman could feel anything for such a plain, graceless man as Francesco. But love tends to be blind, of course, and, in this case, it offered an incentive that for some women becomes an obsession: nothing intensifies lust as greatly as a prohibition against the desired object. I think that was young Carlota’s main motive: to sleep with a future priest. Seducing a man who was going to take the vow meant she would become the very temptation of Christ, a temptation for which any man would be willing to break any vow—except Francesco, who was intelligent and knew the ground he was walking on. I suppose that if she had her reasons, he had his. He wanted Carlota, he loved her, and he knew that sooner or later she would be Claudio’s; but he wouldn’t give her up whole. It was around this time that Francesco decided to break forever with Carlota and the Contini-Masseras, though shortly afterward Claudio sought him out and they remained friends. I don’t know if Francesco actually loved Claudio, and if what he did with Carlota was enough to make up for the fact that he was a bastard son with no right to Mr. Adriano’s fortune. People said that Claudio’s nursemaid had Francesco first, when Claudio’s mother was gravely ill in Bern. That’s just what I’ve heard, but since I didn’t live with them then—I was trying to survive in Italy under the constant harassment of the Fascist rule—I can’t confirm that.
”What I did hear one afternoon while Francesco’s mother was getting supper ready was, ‘Don’t wait around for anything here, Francesco. Go your own way. You’ll be the pope one day; I just know it. Once you’re in the Roman Curia, Adriano Contini-Massera will recognize you as his son. Until then, you’re just the nursemaid’s boy.’
”Clearly, belonging to the papal court was akin to being nobility, and I think that was Francesco’s true motive at first. But after his mother died, he threw himself into his studies and apparently became a specialist in dead languages. He came to be one of the most highly sought-after researchers, so much so that even the Soviets—who after the war were vehemently opposed to religious matters—allowed him to live in Armenia and teach at the university. That was big talk at the house.
”Young Carlota had stopped coming by the villa for a time, but one bright day she showed back up. Claudio and Bruno were now fully grown men, and she had chosen Bruno. Claudio sulked about like a lost soul, and Carlota knew it. She consoled him on many occasions, including on her wedding night. While Mr. Bruno got himself good and drunk, those two christened the marriage in the wedding suite.
”From my way of seeing things, Francesco was always a decent man. Perhaps his only indiscretion was with Donna Carlota, and that was a long time ago. And that would have been the end of it for me, if I had not happened to find them conversing in a restaurant once before we cam
e to New York. It was one afternoon just days before our trip. I had to buy a few personal items, because it was my first time to go to the United States, and you just never know—Americans are so different from Italians! It got to be lunchtime, and I chose at random one of the many restaurants all over downtown. But what was my surprise to see them sitting at a corner table! It was a rather dark little booth, but not dark enough that I did not recognize them, and I could hear their voices. It was an intimate conversation with a certain nostalgia, with words that trailed off and long silences.
”‘Carlota, you never remarried after Bruno’s death. You could have married Claudio.’
”‘I didn’t love him, and you know that.... The only one I’ve ever really loved is you.’
”‘But you know it’s impossible.... It’s much too late.’
”‘It’s never too late. And what if Claudio leaves you part of his fortune? That’s what he led me to think.’
”‘I wouldn’t accept it. It would be ridiculous.’
”‘Why do you say that?’
”‘Claudio is dying...and so am I. I can assure you...if only I could...’
”‘Oh Francesco! How in the world.... What happened?’
”‘It’s too long to tell. Dante will inherit everything, but Claudio doesn’t trust him. He loves him, but he thinks he’ll end up squandering the fortune. Even so, I think he has no choice but to leave it to him. So then you’d have what you always wanted.’
”‘Dante is good for nothing; that’s a fact, but it’s Claudio’s own fault. I know him very well, Francesco, like a mother knows her son.’
”‘What are you saying, Carlota?!’
”‘You’ve always kept things from me, Francesco. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Dante is the child they told me had died. No doubt it’s one of Claudio’s dirty tricks. Maybe he wanted to safeguard the boy’s life. A child of his would be an easy target for any of his enemies. I know everyone thinks I’m just a fool, and you’re the only one who’s ever really appreciated me, my love. But I’d never put my son’s life at risk. I just let them think what they want about me.’
