by Joanna Scott
It was easy for a man to do whatever he pleased with a girl. In some ways, it would be easier to have his way than not, and for this reason most men in Amdu’s position would have continued with the expected action. But Amdu wasn’t like most men. Though it was difficult to adjust the claim to protect the profound humility he expected of himself, he would have argued that he was better than most men. At least, he was born with the potential to be better. If he saved the girl from slaughter, he would be worthy again. Somehow he must make her understand. She must live—this was the miracle Amdu could perform in order to regain his faith.
If saints could earn the trust of birds and fish and lions, then Amdu could earn the trust of this island girl. He reminded her again that he had come in peace. He spoke in French now, explaining that he wanted to help her, not hurt her. But she must stay very quiet and still—as still as an egg in a nest, he whispered. He felt her lips move against his palm. He lifted his hand. “Whisper,” he told her, though it would have been better not to speak at all. She seemed to understand. When she did finally speak, her voice was barely audible. At first Amdu thought she was moaning. But the word she was saying was “mamma”—an easy word to recognize. “Whisper,” he said again in French. “You understand?” With the side of her head still resting against the ground, she nodded. “Oui,” she said. Oui—signifying the fact of a shared language.
“You do understand!”
“Oui.”
“You understand that I am here to help you?”
“Oui.”
“And if I let you go, you won’t run into the open and make a target of yourself?”
Oui. Non. She meant . . . Amdu assured her that she didn’t need to explain. He understood that she understood. He released her, raised himself up and off her as though dismounting from a bicycle. An old bicycle—that was his immediate association. He’d never made love to a girl, but he did have an old bicycle back in Dakar. He remembered that his father had promised him a motorbike when he returned from the war. He wanted to tell the little princess this, but she was rubbing tears from her eyes with the ball of her hand, smearing dirt across her cheek.
“You have a dirty face,” he whispered.
“You have a . . . a nose,” she whispered back, forgetting the French word for bloody.
The exchange prompted timid smiles, but only for a moment. A cold fury replaced the girl’s smile, and Amdu’s features bunched in puzzlement. Why was she angry with him if she knew he was trying to help her? He reminded her of this: he wanted to help her.
“But why . . .” she began, choking on the words.
“No sound,” he reminded her. “Sound will bring the soldiers.”
They waited, sitting separately now, tucked close against the hedge. Amdu kept his head tilted until his nose stopped bleeding. He thought it strange to see a carefree gull gliding overhead. And from the distance rumbled the innocent sound of a motorcar. How could life just go on while nations were battling for control of this insignificant island? And where was the captain who wanted to cut out his tongue? And who was winning the war?
Out of respect for the girl, Amdu avoided looking at her and didn’t notice that she was crying, heaving with silent sobs, until she moaned again, “Mamma.”
Amdu whispered, “You mustn’t worry”—a stupid thing to say, he knew. Of course she should worry. Her mother was probably dead, along with her father and any brothers and sisters she might have had. It would be a miracle if this girl survived. Amdu’s miracle. He would make it happen.
They continued to wait, and eventually the girl stopped crying. She wanted to go back to her home. Amdu tried to persuade her to wait. He didn’t like waiting any more than she did, especially when he was so hungry and thirsty. “But we must wait,” he insisted again when the girl started to rise to her feet.
“What are we waiting for?” she wanted to know. Amdu didn’t have an answer, so he made one up. He said they must wait for reinforcements. The girl pondered this. Would the reinforcements save her mamma? Oui. She could wait, then, at least for a little while longer.
The sunlight had softened into late-afternoon haze by the time they heard the woman calling from the back of the villa, calling a name that was like a little song, Adriana, an appropriate name for the girl, this player of little songs.
“Mamma!” she shouted back, springing to her feet.
“Wait,” Amdu urged. But Adriana was done with waiting.
“You come with me,” she commanded, beckoning him to follow, a positive sign, Amdu thought, a sign that he had earned her trust. But as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t come with her. Instead, he withdrew in the opposite direction, scrambling half-upright and loping away, keeping close to the ground, stumbling over loose clods of earth, falling forward onto his hands, pushing himself up, and running between the olive trees toward the wall at the eastern edge of the Nardi land, not noticing that the girl he’d saved was standing with her hands on her hips, watching him.
ON THE TRAIN crossing the marshland of New Jersey, Mrs. Rundel remembers none of this. She remembers only that when she woke up this morning, she felt better than she does now. She remembers this as an abstract idea without being able to recover the sensation. Conscious of mild chest pain, she wonders if she is having a heart attack. Her forehead is damp from the effort of her breathing. There’s a heaviness in her limbs, as though she’s recovering from anesthesia. Despite her discomfort, fatigue is a growing temptation.
She glances at the man next to her, the one who is moving his lips to form silent numbers as he listens to a recording on his cell phone. He is close enough to bump elbows with her, yet he seems perched at a distance, like a squirrel in a tree. He is not someone she would ever want to seek out for assistance. But then, she doesn’t intend to be in the position where she’d need to ask any stranger for help.
They are only ten minutes or so from Penn Station. She tells herself that once she’s out of the train she’ll feel better. And then she’ll go on to work or she’ll call her husband from a pay phone and he’ll come to get her and bring her home. Either way, this episode will be behind her.
But whatever future she has left feels very far away right now. Even what is real and present seems to be shrinking, receding in the distance. Or if not receding, then losing volume, becoming transparent. The seat in front of her seems made of cellophane, the man beside her of crepe paper and air. Voices are coming through long cardboard tubes. She remembers how her children liked to tape paper-towel tubes end to end and make a pipe reaching up the stairs. Where are her children now? She has to remind herself that they are all grown up. But she often has to remind herself of this. Sometimes she lets her grown daughter remind her.
Ma, I’m not a little girl anymore!
Wasn’t there something she’d wanted to tell her children? All that’s left of the impulse is the feeling of having forgotten something, and even this has become too vague to matter much. What matters is her effort to orient herself so she can figure out what is wrong. But it’s like trying to will a Ferris wheel to stop.
Strange, that she can be so aware of her distorted perception and unable to control it. She knows what the voices should sound like. She knows that the seats on a train are separated only by a single narrow armrest. She knows as well that this temptation of sleepiness is dangerous and she should try to resist it. Didn’t her husband have a great-uncle who went climbing in the Alps and fell asleep in the snow? It’s said that the mind starts to wander when hypothermia sets in, making it harder for the body to rouse itself against oblivion. She is letting herself surrender, like Robert’s great-uncle. Or was he Robert’s great-grandfather? Anyway, it’s not an unpleasant sensation. Just the opposite, infatti. Like drifting off to sleep after making love. There are some things she’ll never forget. The rippling inside her, the smell of Robert’s shampoo as he rested his head on her chest, the coolness of the sheets on her skin. And then the jingling of la sveglia, and . . . how do you say it? Up and
Adam? The lie of purpose that Americans tell themselves.
She is looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope while her children are chattering in the kitchen. Who said, Appearances are deceiving? The objects around her are not as small as they appear. The shrinking world makes the body tired. She is very tired, but still she knows it’s not polite to fall asleep in public, either on a train or during a meeting. Think of all the unnecessary words communicated during an average meeting. All the wrong directions a topic can lead. That meeting last week regarding a mascara ad, for instance, and the time wasted arguing about mirrors. The Germans invented mirrors, someone announced. No, the Venetians invented mirrors. No, the Turks invented mirrors. It depends on what you mean by mirrors.
Isaac Newton solved the problem of refraction by making a telescope that worked with mirrors rather than lenses. Una scoperta dietro l’altra. Cosa? Who pointed out that if Isaac Newton had recorded his discoveries in verse, he would have been left alone? But wait . . . wasn’t that said about Galileo?
And then, all of a sudden, the whoosh of the tunnel’s darkness, a change so startling, despite Mrs. Rundel’s twenty years’ experience on this commuter train, that it stops her labored breathing altogether, and the thought that pushes away all other thoughts is of her mistake: she should have asked for help while she could still speak.
She does need help—she’d readily admit this. Now she has only the vaguest sense, hardly articulable, that if she wants to stay alive and remember what she’d been trying to remember earlier, she’ll have to depend upon the action of strangers, whoever they are: the woman closing her lipstick tube; the financial adviser, who is hearing that the price has just risen to eleven and fifty cents per share; the husband, who is trying to talk his way back into an affair, pleading, “If you, if you, listen, if you would just listen to me”; the lawyer, who repeats, “Three hours!” to his companion, the unemployed software designer; the student, who is still thinking about liverwurst and how there’s something a little bit spiteful about it, given that every night for the past week he has asked his mother for tuna; the woman who is reading in The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources about the water needed to produce an average diet in sub-Saharan Africa.
These are the people in Mrs. Rundel’s immediate vicinity. Only the student, who works as a lifeguard in summers, has first-aid training. The woman who refreshed her lipstick is a secretary in a malpractice insurance firm. The woman reading about water speaks English, French, Russian, and Polish fluently. She is from Kraków and has recently come to work in New York after spending three years in the Sudan. The financial adviser has a new baby daughter, and last week he and his wife made an offer on a house in Westfield. The lawyer worries constantly that he’s a bore, but he can’t shut up. The husband involved in the affair, desperate for reconciliation with his lover, is fifty-nine years old and on his third marriage. No one in the vicinity has any reason to suspect that he is talking to an answering machine.
GIULIA NARDI didn’t tell the Moroccan soldiers that the painted plate they smashed, the one where she set outgoing letters, had been a gift to her ancestor from Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline. She didn’t say that the scene on the plate had shown a happy satyr chasing a nymph, whose golden hair encircled the full length of her body. The gold tint had been particularly striking, and to reinforce the effect Giulia had placed beside the plate a small basket wrapped in brocade. Such details were her signature. She liked symmetry and echo, subtlety, and unobtrusive symbolism. She was always searching for ways to enhance beauty—but only to the observant eye. The writing desk in the library, for instance, had on its surface carved cupids set against a painted landscape. A visitor would have to look closely to see that the landscape was of the fields of La Chiatta, with Volterraio rising in the background.
The soldiers under the command of General De Lattre de Tassigny did not look closely at Signora Nardi’s furniture. They were looking for members of the occupying force—to smash them or to shoot them. Bang! they said, using the English word. Bang! Despite the warmth, they wore dark capes over their white robes. Their faces were mottled with patches of dried mud. They were obviously weary from the night of battle. They were impatient. They were looking for enemy soldiers. And they were looking for something to quench their thirst. They’d seen the lemon trees in their terra-cotta pots in the Nardi garden. Surely, then, the estate must have a stock of the sweet lemon liqueur—what was it called?—that the men had tasted early this morning in a bar in Portoferraio. No? Mais pourquoi pas, madame et monsieur? Why not? Or are you hiding something, madame et monsieur? You speak French, oui? Bien, nous parlons en français. Vous n’avez pas un peu de liqueur? Que n’avez vous pas, madame et monsieur? Rien? Rien! This is what happens to people who have nothing to offer eager soldiers. One of them fired into the wall. Bang! In the head next time, madame et monsieur. These men have had a long day. They have not been treated to the hospitality that they, the liberating force, had expected from the Elbans. So far they’ve had to take what they wanted. Bang! Another soldier fired high into the cornice. And what they wanted was Germans who were said to be hiding in the cellars of Fascists. Are you Fascists, madame et monsieur? Oui? Non? If you don’t have Germans, then can you provide something to placate the soldiers of General De Lattre de Tassigny? Non? Oui? Remember—bang bang in the head, madame et monsieur.
There was a desperate quality to the threats of these young men, which suggested to Giulia Nardi that they were trying to hide their youth behind bravado, just as they hid their unbearded chins behind their red scarves. She was terribly afraid of what they could do—afraid to the point of feeling a coppery taste in her mouth that made her nauseous, as though she were already tasting their bullets. But she wasn’t afraid of their brutality. She was afraid of their ignorance. They would let one thing lead to another simply because they didn’t know any better.
Foolish men with guns. She’d been expecting them to arrive after nightfall, if they were going to arrive at all. Instead, they’d come to La Chiatta when the late-afternoon light in the courtyard and gardens had a golden sheen, like the gold on the smashed plate. That plate had been one hundred and thirty years old—and good riddance to it. Giulia Nardi would sacrifice an old plate and the rest of her possessions in order to save what really mattered.
All she could hope to do was keep the soldiers from wandering around the villa and finding Adriana. Giulia would have to keep them distracted. Come with me, then, gentlemen. Gentlemen indeed! They laughed at her invitation and followed her down the stairs to the kitchen. Their bluster softened as she motioned to Mario, who grabbed a bottle by the neck as though it were a goose and began shaking it. Così—Mario will pour grappa for everyone.
“Grappa, grappa, capito?”
“Grappa, oui”—everyone knows what grappa is. Salut, then. Cin-cin.
Adriana would hear afterward about how Mario drank with the marocchini while her mother and Luisa looked on. Her mother would tell her how the grappa improved the mood, and the soldiers became more respectful after a couple of glasses. She wouldn’t speak of her worst fear: that Adriana would wander into the kitchen while the soldiers were still there. Later, she would insist that there had never been any real danger. The soldiers didn’t look more than eighteen years old, and they clearly shared with every other sane human being a desire to put an end to the war and go home. And when two officers appeared at the door in search of these men, when they reprimanded their troops for entering a private residence, when the officers apologized in French to their kind hosts for the intrusion, the soldiers’ bravado melted away entirely, replaced by mute obedience. Once they were inside the room, one of the officers saluted, touching his fingers to the tight-fitting kepi on his head, and promised recompense for any damage. The other Frenchman, apparently the superior officer, expressed gratitude and said that without the help of the Elbans, the Allied divisions could not expect to be victorious in their offensive. “Viva l’Italia!” the
officer proclaimed ridiculously. “Viva l’Italia!” Mario echoed, raising his glass. “Viva l’Italia!”
The officers of the French Colonial Division drank with Mario and the soldiers. They ate the bread and pecorino that Luisa laid out on the table. Giulia watched as the soldiers rubbed their fingers to loosen crumbs, their awkwardness suggesting that bread was a novelty to them. She stood patiently while the officers questioned Mario about the depths of the Magazzini inlet. In their interview, they disclosed more strategic information than Giulia would have thought acceptable: there was a special boat squadron waiting to approach the island under the cover of darkness and bring additional troops, they said. But they were uncertain where to land. Mario advised that farther east would be better, since the shallow water near La Chiatta was treacherously rocky—a judicious lie, Giulia sensed, and with silence she signaled agreement. Land the boats on the sandy beach at Bagnaia. That would be better. And the soldiers could follow the road there either toward Portoferraio or across the island to Rio Marina.
How long would it take on foot from Bagnaia to Portoferraio? the officers wanted to know. Or at least they pretended they wanted to know. In fact, they pretended poorly, offering questions to hide their lack of purpose. But Mario played along and asked for a map of the island, and the request gave Giulia the excuse to leave the kitchen.
She climbed the stairs and headed through the salotto to the library. Brown petals from a japonica on the loggia had blown across the floor through the open door, and the perfume of jasmine saturated the air. It was strange to find the world so serene, the sky so empty, and Volterraio as stark and unyielding as ever in the distance. Giulia felt as if she had walked into the painted panel of the writing desk, into a false landscape designed to trick perception, where space was only an illusion and the colors had been ingeniously chosen to hide the reality of war.
