She stood in the doorway, jangling the house keys until the truck was out of sight. Then she turned back into the apartment. There was one small item of DV’s Italian business left to attend to.
She had not packed the love letter with the rest of DV’s papers. Her reasoning was simple: She did not believe it belonged to him. She had left it where she’d found it, in the drawer next to his bed. But she knew if she didn’t move the letter now, it would fall into the hands of Signora Panatella, who would, Antonio had warned her, start preparing the apartment for Lucy’s successors the minute she was out of the driveway. In one sense, she thought, it would serve the elder Cini right to have the evidence of his current folly fall into the hands of the Panatellas, his former tenants. They would not be, as she had been, confused by the signature, for they had undoubtedly seen examples of the handwriting of all three generations of Cinis presently residing in the villa. But Lucy disliked providing her landlords with such fuel for gossip and sneering. Though it was unlikely that he would ever learn of it, she knew it would wound Antonio sorely if he ever did find out. Lucy was in the odd position of wanting to protect Antonio from a humiliation he might never actively feel. But he would feel it, she thought. He was sensitive about his family; his father’s connection with Catherine was a thorn in the side of his highly developed amour propre and it vibrated painfully with the slightest breath of scandal.
No, she concluded, it was none of the Panatellas’ business, nor anyone else’s, for that matter. Her options were clear. The letter should be returned to its sender, sent on to Catherine, or destroyed. As she slipped the key into the door beneath the bougainvillea arbor, another possibility presented itself. She could send the letter to Antonio and let him decide what should be done.
Yesterday, on parting, she had exchanged addresses with Antonio. He had written his carefully into her notebook in small neat handwriting, completely unlike his father’s bold magisterial style. “Do you think you might ever come to America?” Lucy asked as she tore out a deposit slip from her checkbook to give him in return.
“I think that is very unlikely,” he said. “I am always here, you see.” He opened his hands, indicating the hills, the trees, the dome of the sky. The corners of his mouth lifted slightly in an expression Lucy might once have characterized as sardonic, though now it struck her as self-mocking, a form of modesty. He was, in the oddest way she could ever have imagined, an unassuming man. “But if you come to Italy again, Lucia,” he said, “you will not forget to visit me, I hope. And you will not stay in this.…” He dragged his eyes contemptuously over the farmhouse. “There are so many rooms in my house. If you would be interested, I will take you to see the frescoes of Piero in Arezzo and the Madonna del Parto, as well. That is not to be missed.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”
If I survive the car ride, Lucy thought now as she opened the door. Perhaps she could persuade him to let her do the driving. She crossed the chilly sitting room to the stairs, shivering involuntarily. This apartment was always colder than the smaller one. When she and Massimo had stayed here, he brought over all the blankets and piled them up on the big bed upstairs, the only one in the house that could accommodate two people comfortably. Massimo couldn’t stand being cold. Lucy looked up the wide staircase, recalling how laboriously she had climbed it then, how she had leaned on his arm while he paused on each step, how excited she had been at the prospect of passing the whole long night by his side. She hurried up the stairs, away from this memory, which seemed to come from a much deeper past than that indicated by its actual distance in time. On the landing, she stopped and stared into DV’s study, bothered by an even nearer recollection, that of closing the door behind her as she followed the intrepid moving men down the stairs. She had not done it for any reason, but she knew she had done it, had felt the latch slip into place as she released the heavy glass knob, but now the door stood wide open. “This house has a mind of its own,” she said. She stepped into the room and looked about. The shutters were closed, the light was dim, but she could see that everything was orderly and as she had left it, the bed neatly made, the table cleared, the chair drawn up against it. She pulled the door nearly closed and stepped back to see if it would drift open in response to some imperceptible slant in the floor. It stayed just as she had placed it.
“My mind is going,” she said, turning away. She must have been mistaken about closing the door. She went into the bedroom, opened the drawer in the bedside table, and took out the letter. The sounds of wood rubbing against wood as the drawer slid open and the whisper of the paper as she lifted the envelope out of the drawer made sudden intrusive explosions in the ponderous stillness of the house. She could feel it brooding over her like some heavy, muffling feathered creature settling down upon the smooth, hard shells of its own future. Though she had no need to open the letter and had taken it with no intention of doing so, something in the eerie silence of the place made her want to rupture it, and the rustling of the paper seemed as good a way as any.
Again she read the elaborate address: Carissima, amatissima, but this time she pictured not the bland, world-weary countenance of the younger Cini, but the fierce-eyed hawklike visage of his father. The old man had courted Catherine with all the passionate abandon of the old, dead world in which he had come of age; it was the only way he knew, and Catherine had thought so little of his effort, she hadn’t bothered even to keep track of it. Or perhaps she had left the letter here on purpose to enrage DV, who would have had to spend some time over a dictionary figuring out what was going on right under his nose. Lucy imagined herself into the scene of her dead employer’s unhappiness. As mysteriously as Catherine had come into his life—for the entrance of the one who can totally destroy our happiness is always a cloak-and-dagger affair—Catherine was gone out of it, and he was left in a foreign country with no one to contradict the ringing of her harsh judgment against him. DV had been a man of few resources, with the interior life of a brick. He had believed Catherine was the real thing, the very thing he needed, and that she would open the way for him into the sacred grove of art, where inspiration and wisdom flow eternally in twin streams from the same mythic fount. Instead, Catherine had thrown him out, slammed the gate in his face, and adjured him to take up gardening.
This last image made Lucy smile; it was so like that of the first expulsion, the one she had thought she saw echoed in Catherine’s paintings: DV, expelled from paradise, condemned to Tuscany.
The silence of the room was pierced by the harsh cry of a crow near the window, and then another, farther off, in response.
They had all just wanted to get rid of him, Lucy thought. Catherine, the old man, Antonio, the Panatellas, but he had refused to go. And after he was dead, everyone wanted to forget him, get him buried, distribute the proceeds, close the books. She recalled the night she was burning with fever and DV had visited her in a fury, shaking her until she thought her neck would snap. The old man had stolen his love, Antonio had stolen his manuscript, he had died ignominiously, confused and drunk, wandering alone in the dark. No wonder he was in a rage.
Lucy felt a pang of sadness and another of guilt. She had intended to visit his grave to make sure the stone was suitable and to plant something that would grow without care, but she had been so caught up in her foolish love affair that she had failed to do it and now it was too late. “I’ll do it when I come back,” she said, though she had no idea when that might be. She folded the letter and slipped it into its envelope. She would destroy this letter. It had done enough damage already. She reached out to close the drawer, but her hand stopped just short of its destination, for in this motion she had turned toward the doorway, where her eyes were assaulted by a sight that froze her from head to foot as thoroughly as if she had been plunged into a glacial pool. The door to DV’s study was open.
Lucy’s eyes strained forward in their sockets, and she was dimly aware that for some moments now there had been a b
arely audible sound; she could make it out with difficulty through the roar of her own heart, a steady, scratching sound, like fingernails on smooth wood. She gave herself several moments of counsel before she could move even her eyelids. It was impossible for anyone to be in the room she had just vacated; the only entrance was from the landing. The scratching sound was not new; she had heard it before in this house, and it was probably attributable to mice or insects gnawing between the walls. The open door was obviously … well, it was obviously just one of those doors. This last rationalization was so feeble, it gave her more trouble than comfort. She could not recall ever encountering one of those doors before. But her fevered reasoning had sufficed to bring her heart down to a dull pounding, like a distant pile driver, and she was able to raise her hand to wipe away the moisture that bathed her forehead and upper lip. Except for the scratching sound, which was intermittent now, the quiet around her was intense. She took one, then another, step toward the landing, moving stealthily, in exaggerated slow motion, as if she really did expect to surprise some intruder, though the truth, she realized, was that she was actually moving as quickly as she could. In this way, she crossed the landing. If only all the shutters weren’t closed, she thought. How absurd this trepidation and caution would be if there were a flood of sunshine to light the way. She would stride into the room, look about boldly, and stride right out again.
At the threshold of the door, she stopped and looked wistfully down the staircase. Was there really any need to investigate further this nagging mystery of the open door? She had the letter; it was all she had come for. She could simply descend the stairs, lock the door, and walk away. Surely she would have no reason ever to enter this house again. As she had the thought that the scratching sound had stopped, it started up again. Then she heard something else, something small, but so clear and recognizable, her heart took off before it like a spooked horse and she felt her ears pulling away from her head. It was the delicate whoosh of a piece of paper sliding off a table onto the floor. She was close enough now to see into the room by leaning forward. She would then have a clear view of everything but the bed. Just lean forward, she told herself. Just look in quickly and then go on down the stairs. Another moment of perfect silence passed, no scratching, no breathing; then Lucy rested one hand on the doorsill, stretched out her neck, and peered into the room.
There was a man sitting at the table, his back to the door, hunched over a sheet of paper, holding a pen poised above the page in one hand, his cheek resting in the open palm of the other. Though there was everything in the picture to excite Lucy’s terror—the sheer impossibility of it was enough to unhinge her reason—there was nothing of threat or danger in the aspect of the man. He did not appear to sense her presence, or if he did, it was of no interest to him. As Lucy watched, her brain awash in conflicting assertions about the exact nature of reality, the pen came down and scratched out several words across the page, then lifted, poised again for action. The man stretched his fingers from his cheek to his eyes and rubbed them hard, then readjusted his position so that his chin rested on the ledge of a loose fist. Lucy had not moved a hair; indeed, she had hardly breathed since the moment her astounded eyes had found him. He studied his page and she studied him, both of them motionless and absorbed by their contemplations. Everything about him was familiar, though it was difficult in the gloom of the shuttered room to make out much in the way of particulars. And there seemed to be a deeper gloom, a gathered gloom, about the entire figure of the man, as if he absorbed what little light there was, so that he was outlined by a nimbus of darkness. How could he even see what he was writing? she thought uselessly. But evidently he could see, for the pen came down again, this time in a series of quick strokes, striking out the words he had just written. He threw the pen down on the page and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shuddered; was he weeping?
Lucy relaxed her grip on the sill, but her knees were much too weak and her brain much too startled to attempt anything as demanding as speech or motion. She was condemned to stand in this tense, attenuated posture, watching an unbelievable tableau. The pen began to roll toward the edge of the table, claiming the attention of its owner, who lifted his face from his hands and looked down upon it. He stopped its progress, took it up again, and, as he did so, something caught his attention. He turned his head slightly. Lucy could see a little of his profile. There was a piece of paper near his foot; this was what he had noticed. He stared at it for several long moments, as if he was not sure what was to be done about it. Then, slowly, with an effort that seemed enormous and completely disproportionate to the task, he pushed back his chair and reached down through the dark air to retrieve the page that had strayed from him. Lucy drew in her breath and held it. Her mouth stayed open, her throat contracted over a sound she could not utter, and her heart bucked in her chest. As the man leaned over the floor, he turned toward the doorway and Lucy saw his face. It was DV.
Her head whirled; the world whirled about her head. She was fainting; she would fall into the room. He remained as he was, one arm stretched out to reach the paper, his face lifted over his shoulder to take her in, for he saw her, too; she had no doubt of that. His face was ravaged almost past recognition. The gray webbed skin stretched taut against the bones, his dark lips looked more like a black smear than a mouth, and his eyes, red-rimmed and hollow, were wide with a speechless horror, as if he were ever in the presence of his own reflection. And yet those eyes burned into the space between them, burned into Lucy’s consciousness with such force, they seemed to hold her up. What agony was this, what unthinkable depths of suffering had he endured? He held her in his gaze for a moment with an expression of such mute and eloquent pleading that her fear evaporated and she understood he was incapable of harm. He was incapable of everything but suffering. And when she had understood this, he released her. Giving a sigh so deep that it seemed to come from the bottom of the world, he turned away, back to the problem of picking up the page, which he accomplished. Then he took up his pen again, bent over the table, and resumed the eternal labor of his composition.
“Oh Lord,” Lucy said. She let herself fall back against the wall and slid down to the floor, where she sat with her legs splayed out before her, unable and unwilling to move. Her breathing was rapid and deep, as if she had been running. She closed her eyes and rolled her head back against the wall. It was impossible. That was all she knew. DV was certainly dead. He was not still sitting in this damned farmhouse trying to write a decent sentence. People had hallucinations; she had had one—that was possible. She opened her eyes. She was still holding the letter; she had, in fact, been gripping it so furiously, it was creased and damp. “I’m burning this,” she said. “First opportunity.” She pressed her palm against her chest. Her heart was still beating away in there, pumping ordinary blood in the ordinary way. She edged along the floor toward the stairs. She wasn’t looking into the room again. She didn’t need to. She could tell he had gone; she could feel it in the air, which had perceptibly lightened and grown warmer. She could see a slab of light across the floor at the foot of the staircase pouring in from the window near the door. Just get down there, she advised herself, any way you can. She negotiated the first few steps sitting down, like a baby. Then she stuck the letter in the waistband of her pants and hauled herself up by the rail, holding on to it with both hands while she made her way down to the sitting room. Her heart rate had slowed, but her thoughts raced out of all control, leaping and raging, colliding with one another, crashing up against the solid walls of reason and sanity, which she was now heartily grateful she had spent so many years constructing. She had never imagined they would have to stand against such an assault as this, but stand they did. “I’m not mad,” she said. She crossed the sitting room and threw open the door upon the fresh, welcome light of day. It was behind her now, this thing, this horror, whatever it was; it was gone and she would never speak of it to anyone as long as she lived. She breathed in and out slowly, counting a
few breaths, and then she concentrated for a moment on the reassuring beauty of the bougainvillea flowers, still blooming, though it was certainly late in the year. She heard the sound of a car in the distance, approaching rapidly along the road at the bottom of the hill. She lifted her head, listening closely. Yes, it was making the turn into the drive. It was the driver, coming to take her away from here, to the airport and then to Brooklyn. Back to Brooklyn! she thought with a thrill of pure joy. She stepped out into the drive. She could see the car now whirling up the hill, and as she watched its steady progress, she was overcome by a powerful exultation. DV would be here forever, but she did not have to stay. “Andiamo,” she said, striding purposefully away from the house and down the drive to welcome her deliverer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ROME, “the eternal city,” has perhaps earned its sobriquet for the never-ending restoration work that has occupied its industrious citizens for centuries. Since Lucy Stark’s visit, the scaffolding that for so many years hid the Galleria Borghese from view has come down, revealing an impressive facade of beautiful proportions and nearly blinding whiteness. The visitor now enters via a grand staircase, there are modern bathrooms, a souvenir shop, and long, long lines of eager art lovers waiting to get inside.
I would like to thank Stefano and Anna Rizzo, Roberto Chiappini, Mavi Cini, Alice Falconi, and Walter Falconi for their hospitality and patient interest in my questions about all matters Italian, from property law to plumbing.
Thanks also to my agent, Nikki Smith, for her tireless defense of my interests; to my editor, Robin Desser, for her energy and enthusiasm; to John Cullen, for reading and correcting this manuscript repeatedly, intelligently, and generously; and to my daughter, Adrienne, as always, for inspiration.
Italian Fever Page 23
