by Mary Malloy
“They do inspire,” Patrizio said beside her. His mind had obviously been going in a very different direction and after that he was silent for more than a minute. “If you like old things,” he continued, “may I show you our archaeological collection?”
Lizzie was surprised and pleased by the offer and readily assented. She looked around for Patrizio’s walker and saw Graziella at the door. Patrick spoke to her in Italian and she rolled the walker into the room. He apologized to Lizzie for having to use it and led her to the elevator adjacent to the chapel. The housekeeper glared at Lizzie, as if challenging her not to excite, confuse or hurt her charge.
“You must find me very decrepit,” Patrizio said as the elevator took them to the courtyard. “You have aged very little and yet I have become an old man, but thirty years is a long time.”
Lizzie didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was more than seventy years since he had met Theresa Kenney at St. Pat’s. She opened the elevator door and the old machine creaked its way down to the courtyard.
“When you were last here,” he said, “it was 1939, the summer before the war started.” He sighed. “That was the last happy summer in this house.”
“But after the war,” Lizzie said, wanting to cheer him up, “you said that you and your mother worked together on the collection. That must have given you both some joy, to work together on a shared project.”
“It was the way we survived. Honestly, just to get through each day was a struggle for us; the loss of Gianna, Adino, and the situation with Greta, it all left such a scar.”
Greta was a new name to Lizzie and she probed carefully. “Greta,” she said, “was she…”
Before she could continue, Patrizio put his hand gently on her mouth. “Don’t speak of her,” he said. “I’m sorry to have mentioned her name in your presence.” He turned to fragments of a Roman column that lay near them and changed the subject.
The recesses of the courtyard were filled with archaeological fragments that Lizzie had not noticed previously. Even in daytime the sun did not reach into the spaces behind the arches and she had not walked into or around the courtyard in the few days she had been here.
There were hundreds of carved stones, some cemented to the wall and others lying on the ground. They had to navigate around a gigantic foot, long separated from its marble body, to get to the objects Patrick sought, two Etruscan tomb chests.
“My grandfather found these to the south on the road to Marzabotto,” he said. “He was an enthusiastic archaeologist and he inspired my father to love the subject.” He described tramping through the hills south of the city looking for Etruscan and Roman sites. “The Etruscans were in this region almost three thousand years ago,” he said. He put his hand on one of the carved stone burial boxes. “My mother always loved these two sarcophagi because they captured something so essentially human.”
“I remember them,” Lizzie said, thinking of the letter Maggie had written to her parents in which she described them—on one a loving couple, on the other a mother and child. Maggie had said that both she and Lorenzo wept when they first saw them, and Lizzie felt the tears well up in her own eyes.
“I’m glad you remember,” Patrizio said, and Lizzie could see that there were tears in his eyes as well.
She felt that she might be getting into dangerous territory with Patrizio, playing in this way with his faltering memory and questionable mental health, and was somewhat relieved when Pina appeared on the stairs, having just come up from the garage.
“I’m astonished to see you here,” she said. “Uncle Patrizio, aren’t you tired with all this walking?”
“I am actually getting quite tired,” he said, “but Miss Kenney is such a delightful companion and she is interested in our fragments of the ancient civilizations.”
“I don’t want to keep you from your rest,” Lizzie said, “or from anything else that you might need to do.”
Pina was rather firm in insisting that he should go back upstairs, and led him into the elevator. As there wasn’t room for three, Lizzie stayed behind and was glad for the additional time to look at the archaeological collection.
It was spread around all four sides of the courtyard. Some of the flat plaques were mounted onto the walls and there were numerous inscriptions in Latin that challenged Lizzie’s limited knowledge. Once again her thoughts turned to her exhibit and she wondered if the two Etruscan sarcophagi could be included. They weren’t especially large, but they were made of stone and she expected they were enormously heavy. Each was less than four feet long and two to three feet across, and each had both a carved stone lid and a stone mortuary box, which was about three feet deep. She made a note to put these and the giant foot on her list and ask Carmine about them when he came.
“What were you doing down here with Uncle Patrizio?” Pina asked. She was walking down the back staircase to the courtyard.
“We were talking about the archaeological collection,” Lizzie said.
“He called you Miss Kenney,” she said.
“I know,” Lizzie lied. “I tried to correct him, but he just can’t seem to remember my name.”
“Does he think you are someone else?” Pina asked.
Lizzie mimicked the Italian shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I was happy that he was interested in talking to me about any part of the collection.”
“Uncle Cosimo will come this afternoon and talk to you about how the work is going.”
“Good,” Lizzie said. “Has your Uncle Patrizio gone back to his room?”
Pina said he had.
“Then I’d like to spend some time in the library,” Lizzie said, “while I can.”
“I’m sorry I can’t stay,” Pina said, “as I have correspondence that must go out today from my office, but you can call me if you need me.”
Lizzie thanked her and waited until she had gone down the steps to the garage before proceeding across the courtyard and up the stairs to the ballroom. She wanted to take pictures of the sarcophagus while she had the chance. She made sure that the doors into the library were closed and opened two of the shuttered windows to get the daylight from the courtyard. Having learned from Pina’s experience, she moved very slowly to keep a pile of dust from falling on her. She also turned on the three chandeliers.
“All right Mr. Well-placed Functionary in the Court,” she said, looking at the painted face on the mummy case. “John Haworth wants some pictures of you and I’m going to take them.”
She pulled the rest of the cloth off the case and found that it was in beautiful condition. There was no way, however, to get good photos of it where it lay against the wall, so with some effort she pulled out first the feet of the case and then the head and inched it across the floor to the center of the room. The wood floor of the ballroom was a smooth surface to move across, though Lizzie estimated that the sarcophagus must weigh several hundred pounds.
When it was finally in a clear space, Lizzie walked around it and took pictures from every angle. She concentrated especially on any place that had hieroglyphs, as John Haworth had said he would use those to identify the original occupant.
Putting her camera on the floor, she got down on her hands and knees to look more closely at the seam where the lid met the bottom of the box. She was curious if there was a mummy inside and wondered if she could open the coffin by herself without damaging it. The weight of the thing was no good in assessing this, as she didn’t know what sort of wood it was or how thick the sides were. Running a fingernail along the seam she found that it was sealed tightly, apparently with some sort of glue, which seeped out of the seam in several places.
As she stood up, a horrific scream rang out across the courtyard, a long, loud piercing cry that reverberated against the stones and was repeated several times before it ended in a pathetic strangling yell. She went to the window and saw Patrizio at his windo
w on the floor above, pointing at her and screaming with all the strength he had. Graziella quickly appeared behind him, pulling him away from the window, though Lizzie continued to hear him cry out pitifully for several more minutes.
She pulled out her phone and was going to call Pina, or Martin, or Jackie, or anyone who might take her ears away from the horrible sound, when she saw Cosimo Gonzaga emerge into the courtyard from the garage stairs and, hearing the sound of his uncle, run up the steps to Patrizio’s room.
Lizzie didn’t know what she should do or where she should go. There was no question that seeing her with the sarcophagus had instigated this attack of fury or extreme agitation or whatever it was. She saw Graziella and Cosimo come to the window of Patrizio’s room so that the former could point at her, and within a few minutes Cosimo had come to join her.
“I’m so sorry!” she said, with real concern. “This must have been caused by my moving the sarcophagus. It didn’t even occur to me that he would be able to see into this room.”
“I told you he once beat me for touching the thing,” Cosimo said.
“How am I to proceed here?” she asked. “I have such a short time to get the work done…” She didn’t want to sound unsympathetic, and she wasn’t, but she was frustrated. The exhibit and catalog were too important to her to be abandoned and they couldn’t be delayed. They were the centerpieces of the college’s centennial plans.
Cosimo was very businesslike. “First, let me assure you that Patrizio is not your responsibility. The Gonzaga family has a contract with St. Pat’s for an exhibit and I plan to honor that. Obviously, my uncle cannot stay in the house while you are working here, or when the pieces you want are removed for shipping.”
Lizzie agreed. “But where is he to go?”
“I will take care of that,” Cosimo responded. “As I said, Patrizio is not your responsibility.”
A half hour later the back doors of the courtyard opened and an ambulance drove in. Patrizio was taken down the main staircase on a gurney, loaded into it, and it drove out again. Both Cosimo and Graziella disappeared with the ambulance and Lizzie found herself alone in the house.
Chapter 15
Carmine Moreale’s phone voice proved to be just as charming as his voice in person and Lizzie was relieved to talk to him. She explained the strange circumstances that had transpired at the Gonzaga house and asked if she could take him to lunch.
“If you are alone in the house let me come there,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ll bring lunch. I am so anxious to see the collection.”
Lizzie agreed and he said he would be there in an hour. She returned to the library, which she had not been in since the morning when she had done a rushed survey and made more than 100 quick photographs. Now she felt relaxed for the first time in this room and had a chance to look more slowly. There were several things that she had not seen on that first furious glance, and now she began to notice details and to consider what things might work well in the exhibit. There were ceramic items, and artifacts made of bronze and glass, about which she knew too little to make a judgment.
When Carmine arrived, she rushed him through the entrance hall and salons, where he would have lingered to look at the artworks and the architectural details. “It is so wonderful,” he said. “They have hardly changed anything in the last two hundred years!”
In the dining room he planted his heels and would not be rushed. Lizzie had only used this room as a passageway and had only lingered that one time, when she and Patrizio stood at the balcony and looked into the courtyard, but Carmine found the light switch and turned on a series of wall sconces that illuminated a painted ceiling that Lizzie hadn’t even noticed before.
High above them a battle was played out within the walls of a medieval city. A seacoast lay just outside one portion of the painted stone wall and ships were lined up along it. In the central part of the ceiling, individual soldiers were painted with ferocious expressions, women held their torn clothes to their breasts, and horses picked their way across fallen corpses, some in armor. Along the edge of the painting, where the ceiling met the walls of the room, angels worked to keep a faux cloth from falling to the floor. These were the angels that Lizzie’s student assistants had found so amusing in one of the photographs they had studied, and seeing it here it was impossible not to be amused. Some of the angels peeked out from under the cloth, and one of them was in the process of falling—keeping himself aloft only by clinging to the cornice.
“Good heavens!” Lizzie said. “I have walked through here every day and never looked up.”
“This is actually a work that appears frequently in the literature on the Bolognese school of art,” Carmine said, “but hardly anyone ever gets to see it. It is by Annibale Carracci.”
“That can’t be Bologna,” Lizzie said. “It has the walls, but Bologna doesn’t have the sea coast.”
“It’s Constantinople, now Istanbul,” Carmine responded, pointing to the ships, “and those are the vessels that arrived from Venice in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade.”
Lizzie studied the details. There were at least two hundred people depicted in the foreground, and all had individual features and attributes. Behind them stretched an army of thousands. Now that Lizzie recognized the subject matter, she could distinguish the Moorish characteristics of the architecture, and the difference between the curved blades of the Easterners and the straight swords of the Europeans.
“There are some things from this event in the chapel upstairs,” Lizzie told her companion. “Maybe that is why the Gonzagas were inspired to have this painting done.”
“Maybe. What kind of things?”
“A corpse, for one,” Lizzie said, smiling. “Though he was apparently killed here before he even got to Venice, and there are some columns that Patrizio told me came from Constantinople.”
“Any idea how they got them? This house was clearly not built until late in the sixteenth century.”
“According to Patrizio they were in the church of St. Paolo Maggiore, and were moved here when the Gonzagas built their family chapel.”
Carmine nodded. “That makes sense. I’d like to see them when we’re done here.”
Lizzie agreed. “I can’t wait for my husband to see this,” she said. “He’s a muralist and the frescoes here are going to wow him!”
“I believe your husband is Martin Sanchez. Is that correct?”
“He is,” Lizzie said, turning to look at her companion. “How did you know?”
“I Googled you, of course. It says so in the biography on your college’s website. I’m a fan of your husband’s work,” he continued.
“You’ll get a chance to meet him. He’s coming here in two weeks.”
They talked as they walked from the dining room into the library, and Lizzie felt that with Carmine as a companion she was seeing it with fresh eyes. She certainly felt her enthusiasm for the collection returning. She quickly pulled the ledger out of the bookshelf and put it on the table.
“Here is a seventeenth-century drawing of the cabinet,” she said, speaking quickly to cover as much information as possible, “and here are the various lists.” As Carmine studied the image, she talked about how similar it was to the drawing of Ferdinando Cospi’s collection made the same year, and explained Martin’s theory that the artist had used a similar template for both and then filled in specific items from each collection. Before Carmine had a chance to respond, Lizzie went on to describe her plan to base the exhibit on this picture and to identify as many surviving things from it as she could.
“I have a preliminary list,” she said, opening her computer.
As Carmine digested all of the information she had flung his way, Lizzie asked if they might get the food out. “They don’t feed me here and I have had nothing to eat yet today.”
Carmine handed her a package and told her to take it to the far end of
the table. “We must keep some professional standards,” he said. “Keep the food away from any objects, artworks or papers.”
Lizzie opened packages of rolls, cheese, prepared meats and olives. “It’s a good thing I love this Bolognese food,” she said, “because you all seem to eat the same things for every meal.”
“Well, for breakfast, lunch and snacks, anyway. For dinner we go for pasta. Do you have any plates?”
“I don’t even know where the kitchen is in this house.” She remembered seeing a sideboard in the dining room and she went to find not only plates, but also silverware, goblets and linen napkins, which she brought back and put on the table.
“I also have a bottle of wine in my backpack,” Carmine said, gesturing to where it lay on the floor behind him. He looked as Lizzie set two places on the table. “You do realize that you have about $10,000 worth of tableware here?”
Lizzie smiled sweetly. “It was made to be used, and nobody else is using it.”
Carmine opened the wine with a corkscrew on his pocketknife and moved down to Lizzie’s end of the table.
“That seventeenth-century image is certainly a great place to start for an exhibit, especially in America, where I think people are less familiar with them.”
“I know. Pictures of similar collections are all over the museums here in Bologna, but no one I showed this to at home had ever seen anything like it.”
Carmine took a slice of cheese and one of mortadella and placed them on one half of a roll. “Where is the mummy?” he asked as he began eating. “I don’t see it here.”
“It’s in the ballroom next door,” Lizzie answered, “and I definitely want you to see it today.”
She talked through the list of things she hoped they would be able to send to Boston, starting with the alligator, and when they finished eating, they went up the staircase to the mezzanine that ran around the upper part of the library. The ceiling was quite low here and while Lizzie could just walk under it without stooping, Carmine was required to keep his head bent as he moved around first one side and then the other looking at the alligator and the way it was mounted. He had a good camera and as he took pictures he explained what he was looking at to Lizzie.
