Italian Fever

by Valerie Martin

  Perhaps at some point in the future she would look upon their brief affair as a charming interlude, but now she was keenly aware of how disappointing it had been. She could not, she would not, magnify it into a grand passion, but neither could she take it lightly. She was conscious of a wish to do it justice. He had not been changed, but she had; there was something humiliating in that confession. She knew more about herself now, and what she knew, she did not admire.

  She had proved an abysmally poor judge of character, that much was clear. In fact, she had gotten just about everything wrong. Antonio Cini was not a liar, but Massimo was. Catherine Bultman was not an artist struggling to maintain her integrity, but a self-centered opportunist. DV was not a victim of anything beyond his own drunkenness and a hopeless infatuation.

  And Lucy Stark was not a practical, principled woman who was perfectly content to look on the folly of others with distant sympathy, but a foolish, impressionable creature, as much a prey to longings and cravings, as eager to justify her own impulsive behavior with an appeal to the sovereignty of passion over reason, as anyone else. She had not, as Massimo observed, really known all that much about what was “in” her character. And now she did. She sat under the stars on a perfect night, alone in a romantic setting, struggling to come to terms with this new view of herself, which allowed her, among other unthought-of liberties, to admit that she still longed for the embraces of a man she did not particularly like. Such wisdom as this led directly to cynicism; she recognized this possibility and set herself against it. She knew that when we prove small to ourselves, it is an easy matter to assume the world is smaller still.

  And so she sat, far into the night, absorbed in the tiresome task of turning inward a searching and critical eye. When at last she gathered up the glass and empty pitcher, she was exhausted from the rigors of a profound introspection, but she had made peace with herself. She washed her few dishes and fell into the narrow bed gratefully.

  But she slept poorly. Again and again she woke, confused and dislocated, with shreds of unsettling dreams, and the impression of speaking or of hearing someone speak lingering in the dark air of the room. She had only just drifted into a deep and peaceful sleep when she was awakened by the racket of a car toiling up the driveway. The shippers, she thought, though a glance at the clock assured her that it was much too early; they were not scheduled to arrive until noon. She threw on a T-shirt and jeans, brushed her hair with her hands, and rushed out the door to the terrace where she was met by Signora Panatella, her apron askew, patches of flour dotting her arms and her hair, thrusting out, with an expression of great urgency, a brown paper parcel. “Buon giorno, signora,” Lucy said, taking the package. Signora Panatella revolved in her tracks, muttering a brusque “Buon giorno” as she disappeared down the steps. An unwilling messenger, Lucy thought. “Grazie, signora,” she called after her. “Grazie tante e arrivederla,” but there was no reply. She never liked me, Lucy thought as she went back into the kitchen. She inspected the package sleepily. There was no label, only the word “Lucia,” scrawled across the paper in an unusual purple ink. “Antonio,” Lucy said. Was it a parting gift?

  She went to the counter, cut the string with a knife, then, pulling away the paper, she sat down at the table. Inside she found a hand-written letter and a typed manuscript, not large, perhaps a hundred pages. She recognized the typeface—DV’s old Royal. This is it, she thought. The rest of the ghost novel. The pages were unusually clean for DV; only the occasional typo had been corrected neatly with a blue pen. She turned to the letter and read:

  Cara Lucia,

  I hope you will forgive me for not giving you this manuscript sooner, and also for certain misleading statements I made to you about what happened before you came here.

  When Signor Vandam died, I went to the farmhouse with Signora Panatella to help her find the name of someone to notify in America. I found this manuscript on the writing table. Your friend was evidently at work on it when he died. I took only a casual look before I realized that it concerned my family. Signor Vandam had not even bothered to change the names. I took it away with me that day.

  When you came to our house that first night, you spoke of an unfinished manuscript. I thought you might mean this one, but when you described it, I knew it was not so. You were looking for a ghost story. This, as you will see, is a story of the war.

  I did not like your friend, Lucia, but I did see him more than I led you to believe. After Caterina left, he became something of a problem here. In the mornings, he often took long walks, all the way to the town. To pass the time, and to keep an eye on him, I joined him on several occasions. From the beginning he expressed a great interest in the story of my uncle’s death, and then in all the stories about the war in this neighborhood. I know a great many. It is a time my grandmother has always enjoyed talking about, though only when my father is away. He cannot bear to hear of it. I thought it might be good for your friend to find out something of the region. Though I knew he was a writer, it did not occur to me that his interest, which was often intense, was because he was using my stories, sometimes even my exact words, for his own purposes.

  In the evenings, he drank a great deal, too much, and then he became difficult, full of anger and self-pity. He was a stranger to himself. At such times, he was convinced that my family was plotting against him. More than once I was waked very late at night to hear him shouting outside the house for my father to come down and fight with him. The next day, when he was sober, he appeared to have no recollections of these behaviors.

  Often I encouraged him to return to his own country. He repeated that he could not go until he convinced Caterina to come back. One day he persuaded me to tell him where she was, and the next morning he took the car and tried to drive to Roma. But he could not find his way, and in the evening he returned, much dispirited. He did not take the car out again.

  Obviously, I would prefer that these stories never be published, but after you and I parted today, I knew that to have a good conscience, I must send them to you, and trust to your discretion. You have spoken of Signor Vandam’s books as very poor and full of lies about himself. Of course, I am no judge of such things, but this writing does not seem so bad to me. The story is melodrama, but it is not lies, and Signor Vandam is not in it.

  Cara Lucia, I so much wish you would stay longer, and that we could pass again together an afternoon as delightful as this one was for me. I have been going over the conversations all this evening. In the morning, I will have Signora Panatella bring this package and this letter to you. I hope you will write to me, and when you have next the opportunity, you will return to stay in my house. There are many pictures and places I would want to show you. Until that time, I wish your trip to America without incidents.

  I send to you my most warm salutations, your friend,

  ANTONIO CINI

  Lucy put the letter aside and looked at the top page of the manuscript. A stranger to himself, she thought. Antonio’s description was an apt one. She pictured DV and Antonio walking together along the dusty road to Ugolino. Two more mismatched companions had probably never been seen in these parts. She glanced at the clock. There wasn’t time to read it all, but she could look into it now and finish it on the plane. She got a glass of water from the tap and sat down to DV’s manuscript, feeling, for the first time ever, a sense of keen anticipation for what she was about to read.

  The manuscript was untitled. It began with a description of the scene—the villa, the farmhouse, the piazza in Ugolino—as it looked during the last war. There was a brief sketch of the Cini family. The mother, a stern, devout matriarch, whose husband had died shortly after the birth of her second son. As he was many years older than his wife, the father’s death, though sudden, was not unnatural. The two fatherless boys, Gian Carlo and Giuseppe, shared a warm affection for each other, though they were different in every way. Gian Carlo, the heir, was a bookish, artistic boy, given to sketching architecture and researching the family
history in dusty volumes he brought down from the attic. He was tall, dreamy, and his health was poor. Giuseppe was athletic, he liked hunting and preferred to be outdoors. He took an interest in the property, especially the vineyards, and at an early age began plans for their improvement and expansion.

  DV told all this in a straightforward summary. Clearly he’d gotten the details from Antonio and filled in the rest with his own observations on their walks together.

  Then the story jumped ahead. It was near the end of the war. The Italians had surrendered to the Allies who had landed in Sicily and were steadily pushing north. The German army, once Italy’s partner in the Axis, was now an occupying force, furious with the Italians for having betrayed them. The Cini brothers had been enthusiastic supporters of Mussolini at the start, but as the war dragged on, Giuseppe became disillusioned, defied his mother and his older brother, and joined the partisans in the hills. The Americans landed in Sicily and began steadily pushing north. There were skirmishes all over Tuscany. After one such engagement, a German contingent passing near the villa learned from their informants that the capo of the local partisan unit was from the Cini family. They saw Gian Carlo on the drive near the farmhouse, mistook him for his brother, and shot him.

  “Quite a story,” Lucy said. She flipped through the pages to the scene of Gian Carlo’s funeral.

  They set out in the afternoon under a threatening sky. It was cold and damp. When the wind whipped up, the leaves made scurrying circles in the dirt. There were six of them, Giuseppe at the front of the coffin, his comrades ranged around it. In the night, they had made the coffin out of boards ripped from rifle crates. It was a poor box, but Giuseppe’s cousin Lorenzo Pica from Spello was a fine carpenter and he showed them how to plane the boards smooth and groove the edges and how to fit it all together so that it would be watertight, better than most in this war. The women, Signora Cini, their neighbor Elena Caravita, and her mother, stayed up all night with Gian Carlo’s body. They washed and dressed him and then they washed him again with their tears. They brushed his thick hair and buffed his nails and his mother slipped his father’s wedding ring onto his finger and her own gold cross into his hand. In the morning, the women came down and lined the coffin, first with blankets and then with a bolt of dark blue silk that Elena had brought from her chest. She had been saving it until the spring, in the hope that the war would be over and she could make a new dress for the celebrations. They laid Gian Carlo in the silk and left the box open on the big dining table. The women made coffee and they all went into the kitchen to drink the coffee and to eat hard bread. The men went out to their posts to find out whether it would be safe to bury Gian Carlo that day. That was when they got the news that the Allies were advancing on Rome and that, in reprisal for a partisan attack in Via Rasella, the Germans had rounded up three hundred and thirty-five Roman civilians, driven them in trucks to the Ardeatine caves on the outskirts of the city, lined them up, and shot them.

  With bitter hearts they met again at the villa and sat down to a bitter, joyless meal in the kitchen. When they told the women the news from the south, there were no tears, only bitterness closing them each in a circle of silence. They ate in silence, swallowed the wine in silence, and when the meal was over the only sound was their chairs scraping the stone floor as they pushed back from the table. They went out to the dining room where Gian Carlo lay in his poor coffin. They nailed on the lid, took their places on either side, lifted the box onto their shoulders, and set off down the long avenue of cypresses to the villa gate.

  The wind whipped their clothes and chilled their skin as they pushed on, carrying their heavy load, their leaden hearts heavy in their chests. They jockeyed the coffin over the deep ruts left by the trucks and tanks and caravans of supplies, past the abandoned tires, the mounds of spent shells, shards of broken radio equipment, empty ration tins, and the endless trail of cigarette butts. Giuseppe’s shoulder ached from the weight of the coffin. The edge wore a groove into his trapezius muscle and each step drove it in deeper. He welcomed the pain; he didn’t want it to stop. Elena and his mother walked ahead, holding hands. Now and then Elena raised a hand to push back a strand of her hair. She’d tied it all back tightly with a black ribbon, but the golden strands came loose in the wind. The skirt of her black dress pressed against her legs and she bent her head down to keep the wind from her face. Giuseppe let his cheek rest against the coffin and fixed his eyes on Elena’s back. He and Gian Carlo and Elena had played together as children, but now they were no longer children. The war had made them grow up all at once and cruelly; now Gian Carlo was gone, though he had been hardly more than a boy, and Elena Caravita—the wild, carefree girl they had shouted and sung with all the long, idle summers of their youth—was a bitter young woman leading a funeral procession. Giuseppe had known for some time that he loved Elena more than anything else in his life, except, perhaps, for Gian Carlo.

  As they turned into the cemetery gate it began to rain, all at once and very hard. The sky is weeping for Gian Carlo, Giuseppe thought. They carried their burden across the graves to the new hole that was black and deep. The men shifted the coffin down to their hands. Giuseppe was facing his mother, but she didn’t look at him. Elena was weeping into her shoulder and she was stroking Elena’s hair. As the men lowered the coffin, Elena sank to her knees, clutching his mother’s skirt. She turned toward the men. Her face was raised to Giuseppe’s but she was not looking at him. She was blinded by the rain, and her tears, and her grief. As he watched, her mouth opened and she let out an animal howl of grief. She fell forward, face down in the mud, and didn’t move, didn’t even turn her face aside. His mother knelt beside her, stroking her back and shoulders. Giuseppe felt his heart turn into something cold and dead. He looked down at the coffin. She was in love with Gian Carlo, they had been lovers; he knew that now. As far as Elena was concerned the wrong brother had been killed. It should have been Giuseppe. She would never change her mind about that.

  “Sad,” Lucy said. It was ironic as well, devilishly so. Antonio was right. DV’s style was melodramatic, but it suited the story. She looked through the pages to the end. The war was nearly over. The partisans in the north had ambushed Mussolini and his mistress as they tried to escape to Austria, executed them, and strung their bodies up by their heels in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The Americans had arrived in Tuscany and set up headquarters in the police station in Ugolino. They were in the bar giving out tins of Spam and chocolate. Elena and Giuseppe were there in the piazza, celebrating with their neighbors.

  And that was it; he’d gotten no further. Lucy looked back through the pages. They were hand-numbered to seventy, then ten more without numbers. Eighty pages, she thought, a perfectly unpublishable length. And it had taken him five months to get them, less than a page a day. Once Catherine left and he had abandoned the ghost novel, he was thrown entirely upon the unexercised resources of his own imagination. He was like a man rushing headlong and oblivious through a forest, who is suddenly struck blind and must feel his way forward, listening, stumbling, attentive, wary, his progress slowed to a crawl. She added to her picture of the floundering DV the appearance of a pale hand, reaching out to him in the dark wood, helping him to his feet, brushing him off, leading him out into the open. Gradually, with Antonio as his guide, DV had begun to imagine a world he knew nothing about. He was imagining himself into the past, into the war, into the alien mind of his rival. This was how he intended to get Catherine back. He was drinking, he was driving Antonio crazy, but he was working, too—slowly, to be sure, but at least he was working. Lucy got up and put the kettle on the stove, then took down the tea bags and a cup. He was certainly not the American writer endearing himself to the locals, but perhaps he wasn’t entirely unhappy. Though he must have felt trapped, especially after he got Catherine’s address from Antonio, then tried, and failed, to get to Rome.

  DV always got lost, Lucy thought. Even when he had a good map. Sometimes he had called her to say he couldn’t
find the bookstore where he was due to give a reading in five minutes. “I don’t know where I am,” he would complain, and she would say, “Is there a bank with a name of the town on it, can you see a street sign?” Then she would call the bookstore and say, “He’s coming. He got lost,” and there would be a little banter about how writers always got lost because they were wandering around in a fantasy world. The kettle boiled and she filled her tea cup. He got lost, she thought. He got lost in Italy forever.

  She would do as Antonio requested, though not solely because he wanted the manuscript repressed. She was certain no one, not even Stanton Cutler, would be willing to publish it. It was too short, unfinished; even if it had been finished, DV’s readers would not tolerate a book about dead Italians in which the popular American writer didn’t make an appearance.

  Later, Lucy put the manuscript in her carry-on suitcase, showered, and dressed for her trip. When the shippers arrived at noon, she was ready for them. They turned out to be two handsome men, one tall, one short, who knew only a few words of English between them. Lucy led them to DV’s apartment and pointed out the boxes, which they immediately attacked, taping and numbering each one with speed and efficiency; Lucy remarked to herself that Italy was indeed a land of contrasts. The boxes began to disappear one by one into a bright new van they had pulled up flush to the bougainvillea arbor. The taller one gave Lucy a form in four languages, which she filled out with Jean McKay’s address and phone number, the information that the boxes contained books, papers, and personal effects, and the promise that the shipping costs would be paid on arrival in the States. The whole process was finished in under an hour. Lucy received one of the many copies of the lading bill, there was a brief exchange of thanks and farewells, and they drove away.