Italian Fever

by Valerie Martin

  A man’s naked figure filled the page, though the drawing was so skillful that the impression of size, of fullness, was created by a great economy of line. His hair stood out wildly on end, his eyes were black holes, and his mouth was stretched in a grimace of pain. The cause of his agonized expression was evident; his torso had been flayed from the neck to the abdomen. As if to display the full extent of his suffering, his hands gripped the flesh and held it open, exposing the bony white cage of his ribs, beneath which could be discerned the black knot of his heart. The drawing was frightening—it had been designed to shock—but what horrified Lucy most was the man’s tortured face, which was, in spite of the stylization, the sockets for eyes, and the strangely equine quality of the visibly grinding teeth, perfectly recognizable: It was DV.

  Lucy carried the sketch pad to the bed, turned on the nightstand lamp, for the room was shuttered and the light was dim, and stood gazing at the drawing for several moments. So Catherine had been here. Was this nightmarish vision her parting gift to DV? Lucy flipped through the other pages, but the pad was otherwise unused. She reached out to turn off the lamp, but before she did, on an impulse, she opened the nightstand drawer.

  An envelope lay inside, nothing else. She took it out and turned it over; there was no address, no stamp. As she extracted and unfolded the two pages inside, she noted several things at once: that there was no date, that the handwriting was bold—it looked masculine—that it was written in Italian, and that it was addressed with something warmer than the ordinary greeting. “Carissima, amatissima Caterina.” She turned to the signature, “Ti abbraccio, tesoro mio, Antonio.”

  Lucy had seen Catherine and DV together on only a few occasions, but she had seen enough to conclude that in Catherine DV had found a nature more passionate and a will far stronger than his own. She had been persuaded—how, Lucy couldn’t imagine—to accept his attentions for a time. He deferred to her. He wanted to change his life for her. Being with a “real” artist, he told Lucy, in a rare moment of candor, changed everything. He felt he was breathing a new, richer, more oxygenated air. He was exhilarated, breathless; he believed himself to be in love.

  As Lucy looked from the letter to the drawing, a prickly sensation moved along her spine. DV’s eyeless terror seemed to leap out from the page, to clutch at her, drawing her in. “What went on here, DV?” she said.

  The shiver was followed by a bolt to the heart, for there was suddenly the sound of heavy footsteps moving quickly up the stairs. Before she could move, the old woman who had plied her with vin santo the evening before stood in the doorway, her features set in an habitually obsequious expression that did not entirely conceal the deeper and equally habitual suspicion in her eyes. Lucy dropped the letter back into the drawer, then hastily closed the drawing pad while the old woman poured out a stream of language. “Non ho capito,” Lucy said, closing the drawer and moving toward her. “Mi dispiace.”

  The signora began again at a faster clip, but this time Lucy picked out the word pranzo and gathered that she was to follow her to the food she had prepared. They went back down the stairs together, out into the bright sunlit drive, Signora Panatella rattling on all the way. Her car, a vehicle that looked as unpredictable and temperamental as Lucy suspected its owner of being, was parked in the drive, the driver’s door left wide open. So she had driven up, noticed, with what must be excellent eyesight, the door Lucy had left slightly ajar, and come straight in to find out what she was up to. Now she went ahead to her car, reached across the driver’s seat, and brought out a basket, from which issued an aroma so tantalizing that Lucy’s only thought was to get closer to it. “Signora,” she said, taking the basket, “grazie tante. Molto gentile, you are so kind.” The bottom was warm; the old woman instructed her to keep one hand beneath it. Then, dismissing her repeated thanks with fluttery hand gestures and various phrases in which the word niente figured strongly, she climbed back into her battered automobile, started the engine, and drove off down the drive, leaving Lucy clutching her basket and blinking nervously in the bright afternoon sun. She felt chastised, yet curiously grateful, like a child who has been reprimanded and sent to her room, but with no harsh words and, at the end, an unexpected treat pressed into her guilty hand to ease the humiliation of the righteous judgment against her.

  DV’S FUNERAL WAS a simple business, performed without benefit of clergy and attended by mourners who were, for the most part, only distantly acquainted with the deceased.

  The mourners had all gathered at the piazza in Ugolino and, after the necessary introductions, had walked together out to the cemetery, where the coffin was already in place, balanced on a lattice of thin boards and a net of ropes over a deep, dark hole. Lucy was impressed by the number of locals who had turned out, dressed appropriately in black, to accompany the American writer to his grave. All three of the Panatellas were there, as well as the entire Cini family (The aristocrats, Lucy thought; DV would have appreciated that): the grandmother, a tiny white-haired, sharp-nosed, black-eyed lady brandishing a carved walking stick; her son, whom Lucy guessed to be seventy, though a very hale and sturdy seventy, unencumbered by feebleness or fat, and with a great shock of white hair that must have been a daily trial to the third Cini family member; his son, the heir, a gentleman in his forties, nattily dressed but seedy in spite of it. He wore his graying hair slicked back, which made it look darker, but it started farther from his temples than his father’s did and he had clearly combed it with close attention to the necessity for coverage at the crown.

  Paolo Braggio, DV’s editor from Milan, who had greeted Massimo with an enthusiastic hug and pumped Lucy’s hand gleefully, as if he had been waiting to meet her for many years, though she was certain he had no idea who she was or why she was there, was easily distracted from actually finding out anything about her by the arrival of Stanton Cutler, who really did seem to know him. Signor Braggio was a short, dense, fierce personage with fiery eyes and sudden manners, and as Lucy watched him embracing Cutler’s elegant waist, she thought the two looked as if they had been created to demonstrate the full range of human variety. Stanton Cutler’s languid gaze fluttered over the gathering as he divested himself of his fellow editor, settling on Lucy with a bemused shrug. What was to be done about Italians? his expression seemed to say. One had simply to endure them.

  They set out, walking in pairs. Lucy fell in naturally with her fellow countryman. “This is awfully sad,” he said. “And so sudden.”

  “I’m relieved you’ve come,” she replied. “I’m afraid the arrangements are a bit slapdash. It seemed important not to let him lie around in somebody’s refrigerator here.”

  “Perfectly right,” Stanton agreed. “You can take your time clearing things up once he’s buried. You’ve done an excellent job. It can’t have been easy.”

  “Actually, Massimo did it,” she said. “I just signed things so he could get the money wired to pay for it.”

  “And you’ll stay on a bit, at the villa?”

  Lucy smiled ruefully. “It’s not a villa. It’s a farmhouse.”

  “Um.” Stanton looked ahead at the party of Italians toiling up the hill ahead of them, for they had fallen behind. “Look at that amazing old woman,” he said. “She must be a hundred, and she has outstripped everyone.”

  “There is a villa,” Lucy continued. “It’s hers, actually. DV wasn’t in it.”

  Stanton gave her a sympathetic smile. He had been DV’s editor for nearly twenty years and understood better than anyone the essentially cavalier nature of his author’s relationship with reality. “Have you had any time to look through his papers?”

  “Only a little,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be much.”

  Stanton’s blue eyes opened wide. “But you did find the last half of the manuscript?”

  “No,” she said. “Was he finished with it?”

  “Well, I’m assuming he was. It was due in a week or so. DV was never late with a manuscript. He always needed the money.�
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  “That’s true,” Lucy agreed. “But I got the first half the day before he died, and he never told me he was finished. There may be some kind of rough draft in the house. I’ll have to look.”

  “Perhaps I can look with you,” Stanton suggested. “If there’s time, once we’re finished here.”

  For here they were, at the gates of the cemetery, where the unhygienic grave digger stood waving them in as if greeting guests at his dining room door. They wound their way through the less recently dead and arranged themselves around the coffin.

  Lucy stood at the head of the grave, or perhaps it was the foot—she had no way of knowing which end of the plain coffin was which—between Massimo and Stanton Cutler, feeling ill. It occurred to her that she had felt steadily worse since her arrival. Her throat was sore, her joints ached, and she was uncomfortable and hot, though the air was delightfully cool and fragrant. The scent of fresh-cut hay drifted over the cemetery wall from the fields just beyond.

  Paolo Braggio was to speak, translated by Massimo; then Stanton Cutler would follow. Lucy had declined the opportunity to comment on her employer’s life and death. Someone, probably Stanton, had managed to get a few large flower arrangements sent out, one of which nearly covered the lid of the coffin. Two more stood on wire frames at the far end. They were grandiose, elaborate, expensive bouquets; the local florist must have hung up the phone with a shout of joy when the order came in.

  Paolo Braggio began to speak, slowly and sonorously, pausing at the end of each sentence for Massimo to translate. This was a sad occasion, he observed, though he did not appear to be cast down; rather, he radiated life, good health, energy. He was a man who loved to speak and always had something to say; his tongue never failed him. Lucy observed the other mourners, buoyed by his self-confidence, listening attentively. Even the ancient Signora Cini, whose keen eyes never seemed to rest, looked him up and down with satisfaction. Massimo was more animated than Lucy had seen him before; his translations were exact. He paused now and then to choose the precise English word. His light eyes flashed when they met hers, as if to rivet her wandering attention. Braggio was going on about the relationship between American and Italian letters, the excitement of being, as he was, in a position to create an exchange of ideas between two important cultures, the one embodying the wisdom of the past, the other the hope of the future. DV, he believed, had been drawn to Italy, to this landscape, at this time, as American writers had been drawn before—here he named a few—and would be again.

  One of the names was Henry James, which he and Massimo both pronounced as one word: Enrijahmbs. The absurdity of this sound coupled with the outrage of mentioning the great chronicler of American innocence and experience in the same breath with DV made Lucy smile. She cast her eyes down, struggling to suppress her amusement. Summoning seriousness, she forced herself to concentrate on the coffin and to remember that its contents had once been her employer.

  And this worked; she was instantly sober, so much so that she noticed once again that she felt ill. Signor Braggio droned on, but she was no longer listening.

  There would be no talk of faith at this burial, no hints about the afterlife or reminders of the promises made to us by one who was rumored to have conquered the limitless kingdom of death. DV’s view—and in this, Lucy was for once in agreement with him—had been that all notions of an afterlife were wishful thinking. It would be so satisfying, so reassuring if the end of our busy lives were the beginning of something else. Nature herself seemed to make the case for death and resurrection; the seasons declared it, and so did the endless cycle of days and nights. To be, as DV was now, a rubble of bone and sinew, senseless and inanimate, DV’s form emptied of the conscious force that had been DV, this was an imponderable mystery, cruel, bitter, insupportable. That we must all be empty bodies, Lucy thought, envisioning the mortal mess inside the coffin, and never see the beautiful world again—no, anything was preferable to that.

  Anything but hell.

  Perhaps just down this road, Dante had stumbled upon his guided tour of the infernal regions, where the shades of the eternally damned raised their agonized howls to make vain inquiry after the living. There was a gate to hell, she recalled, somewhere in Tuscany.

  Paolo Braggio concluded his remarks with the fervent hope that DV’s countrymen would make the pilgrimage to this peaceful valley, this simple village, this humble grave, which had called DV, unbeknownst to him, from across the ocean.

  He made it sound as if DV had been lucky to fall down the well, Lucy thought. The group was quiet. She stared coldly at Signor Braggio, but he was looking down, keeping a respectful silence, which was clearly difficult for him, until Stanton Cutler should feel moved to speak.

  Stanton was gazing up beyond the grave at a cypress tree swaying slightly at its top in the pleasant breeze. He looked relaxed but alert, his habitual manner. He worked in a world full of hysterics and blowhards, but they never seemed to astonish or offend him. How does he manage it? Lucy wondered. Does his height liberate him from earthly concerns? He looked down upon Paolo Braggio, who was chafing visibly under the silence as he knotted his hands and cleared his throat, craning his neck up over his collar as if to escape an impending fist. Stanton began to speak. His voice was softer than the Italian’s, but it carried beautifully and he spoke slowly, allowing pauses for Massimo’s translation. DV had been his friend, he explained; they had worked together for many years, and he would feel the loss. He spoke of DV’s generosity and his energy. Lucy noticed he said nothing about his writing. He said DV had loved Italy and admired the Italian people for these same qualities. Lucy thought this was stretching the truth, but not much. DV did love wherever he was and always thought the best of people, the best being his conviction that they admired and trusted him. Perhaps his way was not so bad, though it was almost criminally naïve. This insight was the closest thing to an explanation for the popularity of his novels that Lucy had ever come across. She looked around the grave at the faces of the mourners. Wasn’t it just as well to assume their impenetrable expressions masked only good intentions, agreeable sentiments? The Panatella family kept their eyes on Massimo, who directed his translation to them. The parents were a stolid pair, dressed in faded black, their faces lined by work in all weather. Their hands, rough and reddened from service, hung limply at their sides. Their son, Lucio, looked respectable, a serious bourgeois who had doubtless exceeded his parents’ wildest hopes and directed their lives now with the same passionate interest they had once lavished on him. Facing them, across the grave, the Cini family occupied a different kind of air; they seemed to exhale it and breathe it in again: the air of the landed aristocrat. Lucy’s effort to imagine a docile interior landscape behind these countenances, so studied in arrogance, so vestigially haughty, met with more resistance. No, she concluded. They had not been charmed by DV. They had not been charmed by anything for several centuries. The old man had the bearing and regard of a raptor. The son studied Stanton Cutler with a tired smile; he looked decadent and as full of guile as a snake. Stanton concluded his remarks, thanking the assembled strangers who had gathered to bury another stranger in their midst. The Italians turned to one another, speaking softly. The grave digger and a dark, foul-smelling young man who must have been his son began to push and pull at the planks holding the casket over the grave. The assembly dispersed, ambling back through the cemetery to the town. They could hear the rough exchanges, the creaking and sliding of boards as the coffin was lowered skillfully into the earth.

  At the gate, Stanton and Massimo paused and shook hands with the others. First came the Panatella family, who murmured condolences, which Massimo didn’t bother to translate. Paolo Braggio said quite a bit, but the gist of it was that he was on his way back to Milan and would see Stanton in only a few weeks when they would meet in Frankfurt for the annual book fair. As he ran on, the Cinis stood quietly behind him, waiting their turn. The son, who was near Lucy, exchanged a few words with his father; then, t
o her surprise, he addressed her in heavily accented English. “Are you the agent of this unfortunate writer?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m his assistant.”

  “You help him to write?” His eyebrows shot up in dismay.

  “No,” Lucy said. The inappropriateness of the present tense grated on her. “I kept track of his business interests—his mail, for example. And I transcribed his novels onto the computer.”

  Signor Cini smiled weakly, closing his eyes for a moment as if he’d been subjected to an unexpected obscenity. “Ah, yes,” he said. “The computer.”

  His father interrupted at this point with some gruff questioning, which his son answered snappishly with what Lucy took to be the equivalent of “Shut up.” Paolo Braggio had released Stanton’s hand at last and the Cinis moved forward. Lucy was left in the awkward position of facing the scion and his mother, who eyed her warily, unwilling to speak. The son turned toward her, including her in an invitation to dinner at the villa. “We would be so happy if you would join us,” he concluded. Massimo, who seemed to think this a fine idea, said to Stanton, “I can drive you back to Florence afterward. There will be less traffic, and I am staying the night there, as well.”

  It was agreed. Massimo, Stanton, and Lucy would return to the farmhouse, then go on to the villa at nine, which was the Cinis’ dinner hour. There was more handshaking, forced smiles, polite exchanges. They walked out through the gate and back down the dusty road to the piazza. The old couple led the way, followed by Stanton and Massimo, then Lucy and the man she had begun to think of as “son of Cini.”

  “I’m afraid in all these introductions your name has become lost to me,” he said as they walked along.

  “It’s Lucy,” she said. “Lucy Stark.”

  “Lucy,” he repeated, trying it out, but it felt wrong to him. “Will you mind if I call you Lucia?”

  “Not at all,” she said.