The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  I woke, startled, gasping. I had never felt anything like it, that pain mixed with the disorientation of my hallucination. I cried out as the knife dug into muscle, prying the bullet from my tissues. Leaning over the side of the mattress, I threw up.

  Greta poured a shot and brought it to my lips. I drank it down and lay back again. My mind was bombarded with strange images, so vivid, so real, that I couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Where had I been? Where was I now? The pain paralyzed me, but so did the genepy. The whole world seemed twisted and unreal. Bernadette, standing over me with her bloody knife. Greta, holding a blood-soaked cloth. I fought to sit up, struggling to get off the mattress, but Sal pressed his forearm against my windpipe, pushing me back down onto the table. “Stay still, madame,” he said, as my consciousness slipped away again.

  Back in the trophy room of my hallucination, the Iceman was gone. Instead, I found another creature, a female, her face an echo of the Iceman’s face, a pallid, pitiful thing, her skin tight against her cheekbones, her nose flat, the jawline hard and exposed. A single blue blood vessel, thick as a garden snake, pulsed across her forehead, throbbing and twitching over her scarred cheek and cleft chin. The image seemed to waver, the edges bend away, as if melting. I tried to touch her, but my hand hit a hard, reflective surface. It was my own image, reflected in a gilded mirror, my own pallid face, myself asking: What are you?

  I screamed and felt a hard whack across my back. I had vomited in my sleep. Once, then again, a hand slapped me. Suddenly, a shot of air rushed into my lungs. The jarring experience of coming back to reality left me dizzy. I gasped for breath, inhaling with all the force I could muster, shivering with sweat and agony.

  “Breathe,” Greta said as she helped me sit up. I felt nauseated, beaten. “That’s right. Breathe. You are fine, madame.”

  As I woke, the world seemed to swirl and buckle. I heard the dogs barking in their pen, and above, in the rafters of the mews, a row of crows sat watching, silent witnesses to my suffering.

  My wound sutured, Bernadette said something I couldn’t understand—I later learned she spoke Franco-Provençal—and jumped off a chair onto the floor, like a child escaping from the dinner table. I blinked, trying to see clearly through the thick miasma of my stupor. Bernadette was half the size of Sal but wearing the same burlap trousers and boots. I watched her walk across the room, sure that I was hallucinating. But it was no hallucination. Bernadette the cook was a cretin.

  When I woke—treacherously hungover, everything throbbing with pain—I lay behind the curtains of my four-poster bed. A fire burned in the kachelofen, and a makeshift nursing station had been set up nearby—bandages, scissors, a glass bottle of disinfectant, and the bottle of Bernadette’s homemade genepy. The bed was made up with clean white sheets. Pulling back the covers, I saw that Greta had dressed the wound, but my thigh was as swollen as a tree trunk. When I tried to get up, an explosion of pain shot through my body. The very thought of drinking more made me ill—the gin hangovers of my previous life were nothing in comparison to what the genepy did to me—but the pain was so strong that I poured myself a shot and drank it down.

  The next days passed in a blur of sleep and misery. The wound became infected, and I could do nothing but stay in bed, suffering. I slept and woke and slept more and woke again. I swallowed more genepy, trying to stop the pain. The images in my mind bled into the reality around me until everything took on the hue of a dreadful hallucination. Soon there was little to separate the dream world from the waking one.

  Greta fed me my meals, sitting by my bed and spooning Valpelline soup—hearty fare made of cabbage and meat—into my mouth. She changed my bandages, put logs on the fire, dusted and swept, replaced empty bottles of genepy, and left. She emptied a porcelain bedpan that, she informed me with pride, had been in the family for three hundred years.

  Some days after my surgery, when I was strong enough to sit up in bed and eat alone, Greta arrived one morning with a tray of coffee, slices of black bread, and a jar of strawberry preserves. A luxury, she said of the preserves, dropped with that month’s helicopter delivery and sent up by Bernadette.

  “When was the helicopter here?” I asked, a rush of disappointment hitting me. The helicopter had come and gone without me.

  Greta shrugged, then went on to explain the arrangements being made for Dolores’s funeral, describing the bouquets of flowers they had taken from the greenhouse, and the prayers they had chosen to say in the chapel, and the dinner Bernadette would prepare after the internment in the mausoleum. I stared at her in amazement. Greta behaved as if she were innocent, as if she had not colluded with Sal and Vita, and Dolores had died of natural causes.

  Later that day, I woke from a nap to hear a flute playing in the courtyard of the castle. I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the window, pain shivering through me each time I put pressure on my leg. Pushing back the heavy curtains, I found a small, morbid party below, dressed all in black and walking together to the chapel: Basil and Greta, Bernadette and the dogs, led by Sal playing the flute. At the tail end of this party came a large, limping figure wearing a black veil. Vita. The matriarch. The family secret.

  That night, after Dolores’s funeral, when the castle was quiet and dark, I woke to a presence in my room. I strained to see, but the sky was cloudy and moonless outside my window, and the fire had gone to ashes hours before. And yet, I could feel the hot gaze of a living creature standing nearby. I heard the slow intake of breath, and the slow exhale of it. Fumbling with the matches at my bedside table, I lit a candle. The room popped into clarity, revealing Vita.

  She stood at the side of my bed, gazing at me through the curtains, her fingers wrapped around the bedpost. She wore her funeral clothes, a black velvet coat and a black silk dress, the bodice dotted with dark embroidery, the skirt stiff with crinoline. She came closer, and I saw that the dark markings on her dress were not the silk of embroidery at all, but moth holes, large and frayed. Light from the candle fell over her pale face, illuminating the deep lines and wrinkles in her skin. Perhaps it was the weak light, but it seemed to me that Dolores’s death had brought her closer to her own. Her eyes seemed hollow, skeletal.

  “What is it?” I whispered, hearing the tremor in my voice. I did not want her near me, let alone hovering over me like that.

  “I came to help you.” She glanced at my bedside table, filled with bandages and bottles. She put her hand on my leg. I flinched.

  “This is your fault,” I said, struggling to pull myself up in bed so that I could face her. “You sent Sal after me.”

  “It wasn’t time for you to leave,” she said. Her voice was so low I could hardly hear her. “There is too much left to do. You haven’t the slightest idea of your responsibilities or how important you are. It is time for you to learn what must be done. I may not be here much longer to show you.”

  “I want to know what we are,” I asked. “What happened to make us . . . like this?”

  Vita sat on the bed at my side, her face filled with emotion. “That is not something I can tell you,” she said. “You won’t understand unless I show you. And in order for you to see it, you must be strong. You must heal.” She pulled the covers back from my leg and unwrapped the bandage. “Now, let me see the damage.”

  The swelling hadn’t gone down. My thigh was thick, the muscle bursting the skin like cooked sausage. Green pus had seeped everywhere, suppurating at the suture, hardening to a yellow crust beyond.

  Vita shook her head, dismayed. “There is something wrong here,” she said. “You aren’t healing as you should. I don’t understand. You are young and strong.” Her eyes fell on the bottle of genepy on the bedside table. Her expression soured. “Did Sal give you this to drink?”

  “Greta,” I said. “To help with the pain.”

  “Of course. When it comes to ignorance and superstition, you can always rely on Greta and Sal. This,” she said, taking the bottle in hand, “is as toxic as the wine
I gave Dolores.” She turned, opened the window, and flung the bottle out. There was a crash of glass as it hit the flagstones of the courtyard below. Vita returned to my bedside, smiling, satisfied. “That takes care of that.”

  Cold air had chilled the room. The image of Dolores, poisoned, her face twisted in pain, appeared in my mind.

  “Here,” Vita said. She pulled a cloth bag from the bedside and removed a foil of capsules. “These are antibiotics,” she said. “Take them with food.” She pulled out another pack of pills. “These will kill the pain more effectively than genepy,” she said. “But they can be addictive as well, of course. You must only take enough to get you through this. Do not accept anything from Greta. Nothing. Do you understand?”

  I took the pills and swallowed them with water.

  “I know this is not easy,” Vita said, placing her hand on mine. “But life is not easy for us Montebiancos.”

  “I read Eleanor’s memoir,” I said. “I know what you went through.”

  Vita’s expression shifted, and she seemed to consider me with more care. “Do you?” Vita asked. “Do you really know what it is like to suffer?”

  And in that moment, as we sat together in the candlelight, I almost confessed the one thing I had never told anyone, the secret I had carried with me every day since I lost the last baby. My child, born after many hours of labor, had not died immediately. When the nurse brought him to me, and I held him in my arms, he was alive. His body was small and his head large, and he was covered, as Vita had been, in fine white hair. His feet were wide and flat, with an elongated second hallux (as Dr. Feist had called it) clotted with blood. He stared up at me with large blue eyes, and in the seconds before he died, as he struggled to breathe, he opened his mouth, revealing rows and rows of tiny, sharp teeth.

  Twenty-Two

  My recovery was slow and painful, the days stretching around me, elastic. Basil came to my room bearing books, bags full of leather-bound classics he chose from the library. Stories became a place of respite, a refuge from the thoughts that swirled through my mind like acid in a stomach. I clung to these books with the same obsessive need I had felt for the genepy, reading them with an addictive greed. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës. I became lost in these stories the way one might get lost in the hallways of the castle: one minute I knew my way, the next I was subsumed in a cataclysm of darkness. I read Frankenstein many times that winter, enthralled by the tortured monster who climbed through the very Alps that rose outside my window, a creature betrayed and despairing, a wounded son and murderer, a thing wanting love but finding only death and despair. In this regard, I should be grateful for my injury. Had it not been for my time in bed, I might never have come to love books as I have, or developed the desire to write about my own tragic life.

  A week or so after I began taking antibiotics, Greta removed my bandage to find the swelling had gone down.

  “Good,” she said, as she changed the dressing. “Very good.” She brought me a crutch and placed it near my bed. “This is not necessary,” she said, sweeping away the porcelain bedpan. “Now you will walk to the toilet.”

  At first, I used the crutch only to get to the green silk screen of my bathroom. Then, I began making small trips around my room, from the bed to the window, from the window to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the toilet, pushing myself a little farther each time. I began to venture out into the hallway, where there hung the portrait of my third great-grandmother—Flora Montebianco, 1819–1858—who was married first to Cosimo Montebianco and then his younger brother, Vittorio, making her my third great-aunt as well. Flora, Basil explained, had died giving birth to Vita’s father, Ambrose, a fate that seemed to mark her with a jealousy of the living. Flora stared out from her portrait with such bold intensity that I felt she was recording all my actions, slyly assessing me from the cage of her gilded frame.

  During those painful weeks of convalescence, I longed for Luca to arrive, although in truth, I was beginning to accept that he might not come for me. My husband was not the kind of man to make false promises, but then again, our relationship had been so broken for so long that I couldn’t blame him for backing away. Still, I wanted to see him and to tell him I was sorry for everything. Sorry that my depression and anxiety had separated us. Sorry that I had not understood how much I needed him. But most of all, I longed to tell Luca that his love and acceptance had saved me from more than loneliness, more than being shunned by our community—his love had made me feel alive.

  And then, one afternoon, it seemed Luca had finally arrived. I lay in bed when an abrasive whirring came rattling through the windows. I sat up just in time to see the dragonfly body of a Eurocopter descend. I grabbed my crutch and hobbled into the hallway, trying to stay upright. It was a slow and painful trip. I made my way down the corridor and to the central staircase, and was able to hop from step to step, clutching at the balustrade for support, all the while keeping my mind on my goal: the courtyard, the helicopter, my husband, home.

  I had just made it to the landing and was about to embark upon my final descent when, from out of nowhere, an animal blasted past me, knocking me down. Fredericka, the Bergamasco shepherd, was loose in the house. I fell, shielding my head with my crutch. Fredericka’s teeth bit into the wood, gouging it. I had pushed her away with the crutch, and was trying to fend her off, when I heard a flurry of footfall on the stairs. There was a click of a leash, and Greta yanked the dog away. She wrestled her down the steps and tied the leash to a wooden finial.

  “Jesus Christ!” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  Greta shrugged, as if to say that it wasn’t Fredericka’s fault, that it merely was her nature to attack, and that I should know better. But I wasn’t swearing at the dog: through the thick, handblown glass of the bay windows, the helicopter lifted off and flew away.

  “The monthly supplies,” Greta said, seeing my disappointment. It hadn’t been Luca after all.

  I stood and began dragging myself away, but Greta grabbed Dolores’s wheelchair, stationed nearby, and pushed it to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Sit,” she said, gesturing for me to get in. “I want to show you something.”

  I had hardly sat down when Greta walked down the hall, pushing me fast, the wheels of the old chair wobbling as if they might fall off. We spun around the edge of the west wing, toward the north side of the castle. There was no electricity in that ruined part of the structure, as I’d learned in my early explorations, and so Greta stopped to grab a lantern. I gripped the handles of the wheelchair until my knuckles went white.

  Finally, we stopped at a set of double doors. Greta opened them and pushed me inside. I lifted the lamp and put it on a table, so that it cast a flickering light over a large room. Looking around, I found a nursery. Or, at least, it had once been a nursery. It was as abandoned as the second-floor ballroom. Cobwebs hung in the corners and a thick layer of dust coated everything.

  And yet, from the doorway, I could see that it had been used in the not-so-distant past. The walls were covered with colorful drawings, the kind you see in a kindergarten classroom, only the large sheets were curled at the edges and mottled with mildew, some ripped, others hanging from one corner. Old-fashioned toys—rocking horses and Lincoln Logs and wooden blocks—were mixed up with modern ones: a doll house, its rooms fitted with miniature furniture; puzzles and picture books; a Playmobil village with hundreds of figurines; stuffed animals—monkeys and puppies and kittens with glass eyes. Along one wall, a muddle of dolls lay in disarray, abandoned babies waiting for their mothers to return.

  I turned to Greta, who was watching me carefully. “Was this Joseph’s room?”

  “Vita let him play here,” Greta said. “This was her nursery when she was a child, then her sons came here, too.” She bent down and picked up a wooden train. “Joseph loved this! He played with it for hours.”

  I used the crutch to hobble to an enormous table filled with LEGO pieces. At the center of the table sat
a castle, its towers tall and sturdy, its drawbridge raised. Nearby, small houses clustered together into a village. It was a reproduction of Montebianco Castle, with the village of Nevenero below.

  Greta walked to the wall and pulled down a drawing. “This was his,” she said. “He liked blue. I don’t know why, but it was his favorite color. He always drew everything in blue.”

  I took the drawing. A blue man with long hair and enormous eyes stood alone, surrounded by rocks. The hands were large and the feet enormous, out of proportion to his body. Below the picture, Joseph had written the word “Simi.”

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Greta shrugged. “Something he made.”

  I walked to the wall of drawings. There were more creatures like the first, all drawn in blue crayon. Some climbed rocks. Others stood in trees. There were men and women and children, all with the same characteristics of the Icemen. The wall was full of Joseph’s drawings.

  “Did he have a story about these drawings?” I asked. “They all have the word ‘Simi.’ Do you know why?”

  “He was always making up stories,” she said, looking at the pictures with care. “And Vita did tell him many things that happened in these mountains. The local legends and myths and such. Some of these might be drawings of those stories.” She turned back to me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Sometimes he liked a toy and played only with it for months. It was like that with the blue men.”

  “Was he ever afraid?” I asked. “Afraid of Vita or . . . anything else?”

  “Madame Vita is not all bad. She loves children,” Greta said. “She loved Joseph. She helped me. She hired me when I needed to leave Germany and let me bring a child. Not everyone would do that, you know. She was kind to my son.”