The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Mon Dieu,” she said. “I was sure I would be long dead before you arrived. Come, help me to the tea table. There is much to discuss.”

  I took the wheelchair by the handles and pushed Dolores into the large salon on the first floor. The room was filled with Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas, mahogany side tables festooned with porcelain figurines, and a richly patterned silk wallpaper that wrapped the room in tangles of cherubs and harps. It was enough to make me dizzy. I didn’t plan to stay in Nevenero for more than a week, but the thought had crossed my mind that, should I stay longer, there would be some significant redecoration to be done.

  “Near the window,” Dolores said, and I steered her to a table covered with a white linen cloth. As I pushed her closer, I saw that the seat of her wheelchair was fashioned of wood, which Dolores had made more comfortable with a stack of pillows. “Open the curtains. I want to get a good look at you.”

  I pulled back a pair of green damask drapes, revealing a bank of medieval windows. Lozenges of thick colored glass captured the early-morning light. Nonna Sophia had said there was never sunlight in Nevenero, but she had been wrong: there was plenty of light, enough to see that Dolores’s eyes were pale green, her hair ashen, and her face so pale and wan, so thin and lifeless, as to give her the look of a skeleton.

  A cut crystal bell had been placed to one side of the table, a china teapot on the other, its pattern a Bavarian farm scene with roosters and cows painted in gray-blue. I positioned Dolores’s chair near the bell and then sat across from her.

  Dolores shook the bell, and Greta arrived to pour steaming black tea into our china cups. Dolores nodded, and Greta stepped back to a corner of the room.

  “Those beasts,” Dolores said, gesturing at the wound on my cheek.

  “There are more than one?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dolores said. “One can’t go outside without fear of losing an eye.” Before I could ask why Dolores allowed such vicious creatures at the castle, she asked, “Are you happy with your rooms? They are exceptionally well placed, facing Mont Blanc and the village as they do. The furniture is a bit worn, true. The last resident of those rooms was Maria, une cousine germaine of my late husband’s father. A Spanish princess. Destitute, of course. But beautiful . . .”

  “The rooms are fine,” I replied. I sipped my tea. It was bitter, overbrewed. I added sugar and milk.

  Dolores held up a long, bony finger, a garnet ring sitting just below the knuckle. “That expression on your face just now,” she said, narrowing her watery green eyes. “It is the very likeness of my late husband. He was more masculine, of course, a bit thinner. And your hair is a different shade of yellow, but I see an exceptionally strong family resemblance. There is no denying it.”

  “Really?” I said. “I know so little about my extended family. Do you have pictures of him? Or of Giovanni?”

  “There must be photographs somewhere,” she said. “I will ask Basil, my secretary, to look in the library.” Dolores took a sip of her tea, then added in a spoonful of sugar. Her hand shook, spilling drops of tea on the linen cloth. “It is rather uncommon that we should meet this way, don’t you think? Through lawyers and such.”

  “Yes, strange,” I agreed, suppressing an urge to go back to the subject of the photos of my ancestors. To ask all the questions that were floating through my mind. Questions about my great-uncle and my grandfather’s relationship: Had they been close or had they had a falling-out? Was that why Giovanni left Nevenero? I wanted to know why everything in the Montebianco family had gone so wrong. Why I was the last one left. “Not the usual family reunion, for sure.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “You, raised in some obscure corner of the world, without hope or resources, childless, divorced—”

  I felt myself recoil. After Turin, I had come to see my relationship with Luca in a different light. “My husband and I are back together, actually.”

  “Suddenly arriving here . . .” Dolores lifted her arms and opened them, embracing the whole of the Montebianco Castle. “To us.”

  I felt my cheeks burn. She made it sound as if I had crawled out of some ditch. “It is all pretty astonishing,” I said at last. “I’m still trying to get my mind around it.”

  “Yes, well, to tell you the truth, even after Francisco Zimmer told me of your existence, I couldn’t be sure that you were . . . one of us. But Francisco says that the test you took—what is it called?”

  “A DNA test?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Francisco claims that this variety of test is always correct. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent accuracy, he claims.” She looked down her regal, beaklike nose. “When it comes to family, one must be sure.”

  “Of course,” I muttered, feeling even more uncomfortable than before. I didn’t like the sound of my voice—part hopeful, part ingratiating. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, I wanted Dolores to approve of me.

  “I must ask,” Dolores said, leaning close, her voice falling to a whisper. “Did they really trace your relationship to this family through saliva?”

  “Through a genetic analysis,” I said.

  “Heredity used to be verified through church records,” she said. “Marriages and christenings.”

  “Now it’s done in a lab,” I said.

  A look of wonder filled her expression. Picking up her teacup, she said, “How strange the world has become.”

  Dolores lifted a silver spoon and tapped the side of her china cup, summoning Greta. She hurried to the table, filling first Dolores’s cup, then mine.

  I straightened in my chair, determined to get somewhere with Dolores. However unworthy she thought me, I was the heir of the Montebianco family. I deserved to know about their history. “I was hoping you would tell me more about the Montebianco family. And my role here.”

  “If there is anyone who can do that, it would be me,” she said, a hint of bitterness seeping into her voice.

  “My grandfather was extremely secretive about his past. I don’t believe that my parents knew anything about his family. Did you ever meet Giovanni?”

  Dolores waved a ring-encrusted hand. “Heavens no,” she said. “I married Guillaume when I was twenty-seven years old and he was forty. Giovanni left Nevenero long before then. But surely you knew your grandfather?”

  “He died when I was five years old,” I said. “He killed himself.”

  Dolores froze mid-sip, thought this through, then put her teacup down. “Suicide!” she said. “Well, that figures. He never did have the strength of character to face life’s challenges like a man. He ran off and left Guillaume to shoulder the family burden alone. My husband thought Giovanni would return one day to offer his assistance, but of course he never did. It was an enormous betrayal. No one remained to carry the family forward, you see.” She looked at me for a long, tense moment. “But now, there is you. Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco. Do you know why you were given that name?”

  I had yet to learn to spell the name, let alone parse its origin.

  “They are ancestral names, passed down from generation to generation. If your parents were unaware of the Montebianco family, as you believe they were, it must have been Giovanni who christened you thus.” She narrowed her large green eyes and examined me, as if looking for something to prove me worthy. “Despite everything, he must have felt compelled to continue family traditions. Did your father have an Italian name, too?”

  “Giuliano,” I said.

  “Ah, well, there you have it. There are a number of Giulianos in the family tree, just as there are many Albertas. The first Alberta Montebianco was born in the thirteenth century. You are her namesake. Isabelle, the second of your four Christian names, was the founding mother of the noble Montebianco line, a member of the House of Savoy who married Frederick, a native of this valley. A great beauty, if her portrait is to be trusted. And Eleanor, your great-great-grandmother, was simply extraordinary. French. Came to Nevenero from Bordeaux. Which must have been something of a shock. T
he weather is so terrible up here.”

  Dolores had explained all of my names except one. “And Vittoria?”

  Dolores closed her eyes. Her cheeks flushed, and I wondered if she felt ill. Finally, she opened her eyes and said, “The family has changed over the generations. The Montebiancos have risen to great heights and fallen to unthinkable lows. But there are some elements of the family that have endured, characteristics that make you different from other families. You might say Vittoria is one of those elements.”

  “Vittoria was one of my ancestors?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Dolores said. “The mother of Guillaume and Giovanni, as a matter of fact, which makes her your great-grandmother. And although her given name is Vittoria, she has always been known as Vita.”

  “Vita,” I said, rolling the word on my tongue. Vita. The sound itself seemed to pulse with energy. Life. Vitality. Vita. “It’s pretty.”

  “If only the name matched the woman,” she said bitterly.

  “Did Vita have something to do with why my grandfather left?”

  Dolores gave me a withering look. “You might say that, yes.”

  I waited for Dolores to continue, but I could see that the topic annoyed her. Finally, she said, “You were raised far from here, far from your birthright, far from the traditions and expectations of the Montebianco family. But now you are here, Alberta, and I will tell you this: You have a duty to fulfill. You have responsibilities to perform. You must come to understand your inheritance and take charge of it. Or you will find that your inheritance will take charge of you.”

  Dolores lifted the crystal bell from the tea table and gave it a quick shake, its clear, high vibrato ending the conversation. Greta jumped to the wheelchair, gripped the handles, and pushed Dolores away. From the hallway, Dolores called, “Meet me at two o’clock in the portrait gallery, and I will show you what I mean.”

  Eleven

  I left Dolores’s salon intending to go back to my rooms, but before I knew it, I was walking through a part of the castle Greta had not shown me. With its twisting hallways and staircases, its communicating corridors and bricked-up doors and circular rooms with multiple exits, the castle soon became a frustrating maze. After thirty minutes of wandering, I was thoroughly lost.

  As I had discovered earlier in the salon, the castle wasn’t as overcast as Nonna had believed. There were flashes of sunlight from time to time, and even whole hours of illumination in the morning. But for the most part, the castle was gloomy. Pools of gray shadow collected in every corner. And by afternoon, the place was dark as night.

  This wouldn’t have been a problem had the lights worked. But the electricity was a conundrum. Only a fraction of the structure had been fitted with lights and modern plumbing. The main source of heat came from kachelofen—German wood-burning stoves made of brightly glazed clay tiles. Stacks of logs could be found in every corner; the scent of burning birch and cedar and spruce lingered in the hallways. Chopping the wood, carrying and stacking it, and cleaning away the ash must have occupied Sal for hours each week.

  The west side of the castle, where Dolores resided, my sleeping chamber on the south side, and the various shared spaces on the first floor—the grand hall, the salon, the wide central corridor—these rooms all had kachelofen. The rest of the castle sustained itself as it had since the thirteenth century, with fireplaces throwing heat and chamber pots poisoning the air. Parts of the castle were so cold that hoarfrost grew like moss on the stone walls and my breath crystalized to smoke. Kerosene lanterns illuminated the unwired areas of the castle, and I found them scattered in hallways and left on the landings of stairwells, positioned in the darkest corners by Greta.

  Much of the castle had been uninhabited for decades, maybe longer, leaving the rooms in shambles, shut up and abandoned. The bolted shutters, the furniture covered in dust sheets, the cobwebs filling fireplaces, the bed frames without mattresses—these neglected spaces were in ruins. The scent of mildew filled the air, and I found whole swaths of ceiling had been eaten by water damage, then infiltrated by mold. When I opened the shutters of a sitting room on the second floor, hoping to let in a little fresh air, a pack of rats ran past my feet, fleeing the sunlight as if it were boiling oil. In another room—a huge ballroom filled with mirrors and cobwebs—I sat on a silk chair, only to disturb a clutter of spiders. They crawled from the crevices in droves, hundreds of legs climbing over my clothes, tangling in my hair.

  Dust sheets covered furniture in some of the rooms, while other pieces had been left to the elements. So far as I could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to it. No system for preservation. Objects that seemed valuable—a pianoforte inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a Turkish rug the size of a truck—were left exposed, while an iron candelabra and an ugly bit of taxidermy had been wrapped with care. In any case, all of it would have to be assessed, cataloged by an antiques dealer, and restored. Or sold. It would be an enormous job, I realized, one that Luca, with his systematic approach to life and head for business, might enjoy.

  Luca was never far from my mind those first days in the castle. Perhaps it was the fact that he had left Turin angry, or perhaps because we had been so close to repairing our relationship, but I wished he were at my side to see it all. He would have found my sleeping chamber romantic, the bidet fun, Dolores’s salon trippy. We could have stood at my window together and looked down over Nevenero, guessing which of the village houses had belonged to Nonna’s family or to my grandmother Marta. I wished I could talk to him, so that he knew how important our time together in Turin had been to me. He needed to know that the separation had been a stupid mistake and that whatever had been said and done in the past was forgiven.

  I took out the phone and held it near an ice-covered window, testing for a signal, but there was nothing. I had wandered into the east wing, which was even more neglected than the other parts of the castle. It hadn’t, from the look of it, been inhabited for a very long time, perhaps because it faced the mountains, leaving it colder and darker than the other wings. A section of the roof had collapsed, showing a slice of black granite and gray sky. Cracked windowpanes seeped cold air, while the shutters, many broken and hanging from hinges, did nothing to block it. I walked for ten minutes, shivering without my coat, only to find myself back where I’d begun, leaving me disorientated and dizzy.

  I had just arrived at the farthest corner of the east wing when I heard a strange sound at the end of the hallway. At first, I thought it was the wind, but when I listened more carefully, I could detect the fluctuations of a voice, then a second voice, behind a door. For a solid minute, I stood there, frozen in place, listening. There was a rise of strings and the swell of a piano’s crescendo. Someone was listening to classical music.

  Creeping to the door, I pushed it open. The music grew louder, filling a small, narrow space without furniture or lights. I was about to turn and get out of there when I saw, in the center of the space, a mound of something fleshy and liquid and very dead. Stepping closer, I found the bloody carcass of a goat, an ibex to be precise, its long gray horns curled against the stone. I crouched down to get a closer look. Its body lay open. White bone jutted from wet flesh where the fur had been ripped away. It hadn’t been dead long—the blood was fresh on the stone floor, and there was no smell of decay. Its large, liquid eye stared up at me, wide and lifeless. I touched its side. It was still warm.

  I was so disgusted by the goat that I had forgotten the music behind the door. But when I heard it again—the intertwining of violin and piano, an eerie duet—I knew I wasn’t alone. I stepped backward, toward the hallway, straining to see in the dim light. There was someone there, close by. Just then, I saw another door at the far side of the room. I had not entered a closet, as I had thought, but an antechamber, one that communicated with a larger room. I didn’t have time to consider the uses of such a space, or to question why a goat might have been slaughtered there, because at that very moment the hinges squeaked and the door began to creak open. Aband
oning the goat, and whoever waited beyond the door, I turned and ran.

  I was out of breath by the time I made it to the first floor, so unnerved, so turned around that I nearly ran into Greta in the corridor. She sidestepped me, lifted a silver tray above her head, and gave me a look of reproach. “Lunch is served in the grand hall,” she said, walking ahead.

  I followed her into a long room with wood-paneled walls. I had passed by the grand hall the night before, when it was dark and the outline of the long table was barely visible at the center of the room. In daylight, I found a frayed carpet over the stone floor, and a long, capacious cabinet stacked with silver plates. An enormous fireplace, fashioned of stone and decorated with the Montebianco coat of arms, filled the room with heat.

  Greta put the silver tray on the table, turned on her heel, and walked out of the room.

  “Hello, there,” a man said from the far end of the table. “Fancy some lunch?”

  The table might have seated fifty—it was long and narrow, stretching clear from one end of the hall to the other—but there were just two place settings. I walked the length of the room toward the man. When I reached him, I grasped the edge of the table, trying to catch my breath.

  “Are you quite all right?” he asked, looking me over.

  “I don’t know,” I said, taking the cloth napkin from the second place setting and wiping my brow. “I just saw something really strange.”

  He was a thin, pale man in his mid-fifties, with precisely clipped hair and a trimmed mustache, wearing a baggy sweater under a tweed jacket. He leveled his eyes at me. “Was it a dead goat?”

  “Oh my God, yes, that is exactly what it was!” I said, relieved that I wasn’t crazy. “Did you see it, too?”

  “No, but I did witness Sal with a live goat in the castle this morning, so . . .” He stood, pulled out my chair, and nodded to indicate that I should sit.

  “That isn’t unusual here?” I asked. “A dead goat in the castle?”