Italian Fever

by Valerie Martin

  “Why would it not start?” Massimo objected. “It is a new car.”

  “Oh, it probably will,” Antonio agreed. “It’s just that it hasn’t been started in so long. Perhaps the battery will want recharging.”

  Lucy frowned. There was always some complication. “Surely DV used it now and then,” she said.

  “No. As a matter of fact, I know he didn’t. He never went anywhere, you know, your friend. That car has not been moved in”—he did some mental calculations on his fingertips—“I would say it has been five months.”

  Lucy stared at him blankly, trying to incorporate this unexpected vision of DV as an expatriate recluse into the store of knowledge she already had about him. It wouldn’t fit; it didn’t make sense. “DV loved to drive,” she said.

  “Did he?” Antonio replied.

  “It is of no importance,” Massimo put in. “If the car is not running, I will send someone to start it up in the morning.”

  “Let me offer an alternate plan,” Antonio said. “I have nothing to do and I would be happy to drive you, Lucia. The post office can be difficult; the workers there are without manners. I could be of help to you there, and, in addition, you would not have the worry of leaving the car at the station.”

  “You ankle is still so weak,” Massimo reminded her. “It would be much better if you did not drive. I have never liked this idea.”

  “I couldn’t inconvenience you,” Lucy protested, though she could see that it was already decided between the two men and nothing she said would change that decision. She had been assigned to Antonio’s care. The thought of half an hour alone in a car with him sent a needle of pain along the length of her spine, and she took a big gulp of red wine as an antidote.

  “It is no inconvenience,” Antonio assured her. “Nothing could please me more.”

  She smiled at this exaggeration of what she took to be his true feeling, which was, at best, idle curiosity. He is motivated by such weak and desultory forces, she thought. Even now, he was distracted from his disingenuous protest by the arrival of his father and grandmother, who appeared in the dining room trailing the cloud of disgruntlement that was the effluvia they exhaled. Lucy exchanged a look with Massimo, so brief that she couldn’t read it, but it reassured her nonetheless. Antonio rose from his seat. “We will go in now,” he directed. As Lucy passed in front of him, his fingers brushed her bare elbow. To her consternation, this contact, so accidental and surely innocent, made her flinch. Antonio marked her response. “Lucia,” he said softly behind her, reprimanding her, and she felt the heat of blood flushing into her cheeks. The old man stood at the head of the table, fixing her with his raptor’s eyes as she moved toward him. Behind her she could hear Massimo and Antonio exchanging what sounded like opinions. Why was the old man staring at her so fixedly? she wondered. He looked as if he wanted to tear her apart.

  The gold and bronze of the sunflowers called up an unbearable memory—Lola in summer, long bronzed legs, full golden breasts, her golden mane loose and wild in the wind in a furious contest with the blazing sun.

  Lucy sighed. It really was astounding how completely wrong DV got everything. First a comparison between a sunflower and a woman was just not appropriate. The colors were wrong; sunflower petals were not gold, nor were their centers bronze. It was as if he’d never seen one. Then there was the obvious leglessness of the plant, as well as the mathematical neatness of the petals about the center, the very opposite of the wild golden “mane” of the woman. Bad as it was, the sentence had caused DV some difficulty. He’d scratched out the word hair and, just to muddy things up and make the reader forget sunflowers and think of lions instead, he’d substituted the word mane. He’d inserted loose and wild, and changed contest to competition, then back to contest.

  Poor man, Lucy thought. He had no gift at all, but because he made so much money, he was doomed to keep at it, year after year, page after page. Whenever he’d been interviewed, he’d talked about the sheer physical and mental torture of writing, how it took so much out of him, how he stumbled away from his desk like a fighter from the ring, bruised, battered, wondering where he would find the courage to go in for another round. Interviewers loved this sort of talk. They never thought to say, Well, if it is so inhumanly difficult, why not do something less arduous and possibly more fulfilling, something more suited to your abilities? Instead, they emitted sympathetic noises and wrote it all down. The artist suffers for his art—this was the accepted and ubiquitous party line subscribed to by the press.

  But why, Lucy wondered, why exactly did they have to suffer so much? She didn’t imagine that DV’s difficulties, which were largely the result of a failure to master basic grammar and syntax, were comparable to the Olympian agonies of an artist like Michelangelo, or even to the stoic, brain-racked labors of Flaubert, or Henry James. No, DV was not an artist of that caliber. He was just a man who wrote books and shouldn’t have. But even he suffered and even he imagined that it was in the service of the great god Art and that it was to be expected. If the Master was so cruel, so notoriously merciless and demanding, why enter his service? What was the charm of it?

  Lucy pulled the chair out, sat down at the table, and gave her attention to the last writing DV had done before his death. There wasn’t much of it. Malcolm Manx was still in the countryside, recovering from a love affair, but very soon things began to change. The Porsche modulated somehow into a rented Ford and Malcolm wasn’t meeting anyone on his travels. He spoke to no one but the occasional shopkeeper, and no one was particularly nice to him or impressed by him. In fact, in a brief encounter with a gas station attendant, he was treated rudely and shortchanged of fifty thousand lire, but he was so intimidated and inept at the monetary system that he didn’t realize it until much later. Then, although the money meant nothing to him, he felt angry and humiliated. His broken heart got worse instead of better; he realized that the woman, Lola, had left him not because she was neurotic, haunted by a nightmarish past, torn by her attachment to an old or even a new lover, but because she had found him boring. Everything reminded him of her. He stopped driving and started walking. The fields of giant sunflowers regarded him attentively as he passed. They’re just plants, he told himself, but they were far from still. Their giant featureless faces rotated silently on their thick stalks, following the sun all day long. And, of course, like everything around him, they put him in mind of his lost love.

  He was drinking a lot and not leaving the house. He fell on the steps and banged his hip and shin. Then, abruptly, the voice changed. Malcolm was sitting at a desk, pouring out a glass of bourbon. He picked up his pen and wrote:

  I have lost the thread of this story. I thought I knew how it would end, but I was wrong. After you left—that was not in the plan, though it was in the story—after you left. After she left, he

  That was it. After she left, he … Why had he stopped mid-sentence? Was he interrupted? Did the phone ring, or did someone knock at the door?

  Or did he see someone through the window? The man with the rifle?

  She looked out the window, across the drive to the place where she had seen the man. It was late afternoon, the sky was pale, the air cool, and there was a stillness in the scene that fascinated her. Nothing moved, not even the leaves on the trees, and there was not a sound to be heard. Massimo had gone to Rome, to the arms of his family, where he would be welcomed, fawned upon, served, where his wife would be impatient for the children to get to bed so that she could be alone with him. Oddly, this vision did not disturb her. In fact, she liked the thought of him there, comfortable and at ease among his own things in the city that was also, in a deep, familial way, his own. She was not, she knew, in any sense a threat to that world of his, and she assumed that he knew this. He had surprised her by telling her that he did not ordinarily “have affairs,” because he hadn’t the time or interest, didn’t need such diversions, and he confessed that he had never made love to an American woman before.

  “And what do
you think of it?” she asked. “Is it different?” They were lying in the big bed in DV’s apartment. She had rested her head against his chest; their legs were casually entwined.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Very different.”

  “In what way?” she persisted.

  “In a way that is sweet,” he said. “It is because you are so shy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought I was immodest and noisy.”

  He made a snorting sound—was it a laugh or difficulty in breathing? Then he changed the subject.

  A small bird, some variety of sparrow, with a reddish stain across its breast and dark patches near its beak, had alighted on the windowsill and hopped right onto the desk. Lucy kept still. One so seldom sees a wild bird this close, she thought. The bird eyed her, tilting its head from side to side cautiously, then, satisfied that she was not dangerous, fell to picking at the edge of DV’s notebook. Lucy’s thoughts wandered back to Massimo, to his lovemaking, which so astonished her. Twice in the night, sleeping fitfully in what she thought of as DV’s bed, she had waked to find his hands moving over her, and without speaking, in a state of dreamy arousal so complete and free of self-consciousness that the memory of it made her blush, she had encouraged his caresses. It was all so easy, this affair; it was like falling into a feather pillow. And the certainty that she must give it up soon gave it a poignancy that she could hardly bear, though she knew she would bear it when the time came. There was no particular reason to keep it a secret, but it irritated her that Antonio Cini had guessed something of it. And that was just it—he could only guess something, and that something was to him, no doubt, contemptible, or merely laughable. Wasn’t this just what American women always did? They came to Italy to find lovers, and why shouldn’t they be accommodated, since it was so easy, they were so willing, and then, of course, they went home and worked up their little adventure into a grand affair, something to curl up with on those long, cold, bitter American nights alone. She had read all this in his eyes. Surely he would find some subtle way to prod her about it on the ride to the train station tomorrow, just as she hoped to prod him about his pursuit of Catherine Bultman. It promised to be an unpleasant, though possibly rewarding, trip.

  The bird had given up on the notebook and moved on to a pencil. It lifted the eraser in its beak, dropped it back to the table, then lifted it again. Each time it struck the wood, the pencil made a sharp rap, even and surprisingly loud, like the ticking of a clock. That was because, Lucy observed, the room was so quiet and still. The bird was maniacally occupied by this activity, as if it were practicing some important, necessary exercise. Bird calisthenics, she thought. She had not moved and did not move, so that her own stillness had become part of the room’s furnishings, at least as far as the bird was concerned.

  This was where DV had stayed in the last months of his life, alone, day after day, working on his poor novel. Perhaps he had been visited by this busybody sparrow before the bizarre accident that ended his life. That accident was another subject she intended to touch upon during the drive with Antonio. He was adept at avoiding it, or had been so far. But this time she would press him, and because they would be closed up in a car, he wouldn’t be able to get away.

  The bird had worked the pencil to the edge of the desk, where it slipped over the side and dropped to the floor. In the same moment, a queer, thin breeze ruffled the pages in the neat stacks of paper she had arranged across the desk. It was too much for the bird, which took off in a minitornado of feathers, out through the open window and off into the dull afternoon. The pencil rolled toward her feet; the floor wasn’t level, she observed. The breeze brushed past her, cooling her cheeks and forehead. It was odd, like a current of cool water in a warm stream. It was odd, she thought again, this brief, specific chill, and then she felt a deeper cold that gripped her at the base of the spine and rushed up the length of her back, as palpable as a fingertip. The sensation in her scalp was unmistakable; the skin tightened, so that the hairs on her head, though they were not bristling like the fur on a cat’s back, were, in some vestigial, cellular way, standing on end. If she moved even a finger, she knew the illusion that she was not alone would be dispelled, but she did not move. Instead, she listened intently. The breeze had dropped off as quickly as it had come up, and her ears strained into a void in which nothing save the listener breathed. Eventually, she heard her own heartbeat, which had steadily elevated. Whoever it was, whatever it was, was just behind her; she felt a gathered energy at her back exerting a barely perceptible pressure upon her, like the intangible, ineluctable press of eye beams. She was being watched.

  Slowly, with an effort of will disproportionate to the difficulty of the action, she turned in place and looked back at the empty doorway, the bare landing, and beyond that to the open doorway of DV’s bedroom. Then her eyes started from their sockets and her heart lurched in her chest like an engine thrown carelessly out of gear, for there was someone there looking back at her. Her hand flew up to contain a shout of alarm. She recognized her observer; it was her own reflection in the mirror on the open door of the wardrobe. But this discovery only intensified her terror and confusion, for she was sure, wasn’t she, didn’t she remember closing that door a few hours ago, turning the key firmly in the latch? She was certain she had not opened it again. She rushed out across the landing and confronted her distraught, noticeably pale reflection. She examined the wardrobe, which was as she had left it, empty but for a few wire hangers. Next to it stood the suitcase she had packed that morning, which contained DV’s clothes, shoes, everything that had been in the wardrobe. The suitcase was open; the drawing pad lay across the top of the folded clothes. She had been unsure what to do with it. She was unsure what to do with everything, she concluded, closing the wardrobe door. The latch was old. It must not have caught properly and the bedroom floor, like all the floors in the house, was uneven, so the door had opened on its own. The spell had been broken by her brisk movement; she was her practical self again. The isolation of this house and the omnipresence of DV in it had played upon all that was suggestible in her. Or rather, it was DV’s omniabsence, the volume of the evidence that he had been here but was no more.

  It was only that the lock was old. As she turned the key, the mechanism gave a sturdy resistance and she struggled with it briefly, turning the key hard until she felt the lock had seated. She gave the door handle a pull to make sure it was locked, then went back into the study and looked over the boxes of books she had spent the morning packing, the books no one wanted, which would be so expensive to ship back to the States, it hardly seemed worth it. Yet it would be a shame to disperse them. It was one of the many curious ironies of DV’s personality that though he wrote trash, he seldom read it. Lucy calmed herself with the problem of the books. If the estate would pay for the shipping, perhaps she could buy them cheaply herself.

  But there was no telling what the estate would pay for, or even, at this point, who the estate was. Jean McKay had approved Lucy’s plan to go to Rome for a few days, asking only for whatever papers Lucy thought might interest her, and various records the accountants were after. Everything else was to stay at the farmhouse until she returned, a situation that would make Signora Panatella weep with frustration. Lucy had put it out that she was off to Rome on business for the deceased tenant, an excuse Antonio Cini had seen through as if she’d held up a pane of window glass, but which the Panatellas would probably accept. Americans were always moving about on business, and they were notoriously wasteful and extravagant in the process.

  Why did it bother her, she wondered, what these people thought of her, since in a short time she would disappear from their lives, and they from hers, entirely, as if, like DV, she had fallen into a hole in the earth? She reached across the desk and pulled in the windows. She would sleep in the smaller apartment, where she was less likely to be visited by phantoms. In the morning, after the brief ordeal of an excursion with Antonio Cini, she would make her way to Rome and to Massimo. Though
he had been gone only a few hours, she longed for him with a visceral ache she had never experienced before.

  Chapter 13

  AMONG THE MODERN MYTHS that had failed to excite Antonio Cini’s devotion was the one that confers prestige upon the owner according to the size and power of his automobile. Or so Lucy concluded as she climbed into the narrow confines of the Cini car, an unimpressive pale blue steel box on wheels, with an engine that complained bitterly at the challenge of reversing on the mild incline of the farmhouse driveway. The interior was dusty, the plastic seats were covered with cheap black cloth covers printed over in a frightening array of pink dots, and the floor mats were gritty with gravel deposited by the shoes of previous passengers over what must have been a considerable period of time. Antonio did not fasten his seat belt, and Lucy, after a brief struggle with the recalcitrant strap on her side, which was so designed that it could not actually fit across anything resembling a human body, gave up and let it snap back into its preferred position against the door frame. The little car lurched down the driveway, rattling so hard she braced herself by clutching the strap over her head and jamming her feet against the front panel of the floorboard. Antonio was entirely occupied with the wheel, the gearshift, and the clutch, so Lucy took the opportunity to observe him. For some reason, he had decided to make himself agreeable to her, and the effort subtly altered his appearance. She would not, she admitted, ever be able to say he was an attractive man. His body was too slack, his muscles lacked tone, and his skin was sallow. His mouth was a bilious purple, and he had the kind of heavy beard that always looks unshaven, though a red-rimmed nick near his chin and another close to his ear testified to a recent effort. His general aura of ill health, poor diet, and insufficient exercise was intensified by his taste in clothes, which ran to synthetic fibers and colors that clashed with his skin. Today, for example, he was wearing a light blue turtleneck shirt of a fabric that had an unnatural sheen to it and brown woolen pants with elastic insets at either side of the waistband to accommodate a vacillating girth. But his expression was more alert, less sour than she had seen before. He had arrived at her door exactly at the appointed time, bearing a gift that took her entirely by surprise, for it revealed both thoughtfulness and generosity, two qualities she had not expected to discover in his character. She glanced between the seats to where it lay across the floor, a sturdy but elegant walking stick, carved from a light golden wood, with a silver handle in the form of a leopard’s head.