The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Is this why you stay here?” I said, gesturing to the wall of Joseph’s drawings, to the abandoned toys. “In case he returns?”

  “My son is coming back,” she said, and for a moment, hope burned in her eyes, giving her a look of a woman who believed with all her heart in a miracle. “You promised to help me find him. I know you didn’t lie to me, madame. I know you’ll bring him home.”

  As we left, I stepped over a rag doll, ripped and stained, its arms torn off, its dress frayed. The cloth was so old it had begun to disintegrate at the seams, and I wondered if it could be the same doll Eleanor had given her daughter, Vita’s first friend. When I picked it up, I saw gashes in the face, the smooth skin deformed by Vita’s sharp teeth. The linen was stained with brown drops of dried blood. The eyes stared blankly, devoid of life.

  Twenty-Three

  The next evening I was sitting in my rooms near the fire when Basil came to visit. I had sent a message to him through Greta, asking him to come see me. He must have thought I needed some cheering up, because he had a folio of Ernst Haeckel’s etchings of jellyfish and squid in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other. While Vita had forbidden genepy, there was no restriction on bourbon. Basil threw a log on the fire, poured out two glasses, and sat down across from me.

  “I saw the nursery,” I said, raising my glass to him.

  “Ah, I haven’t had the heart to go there since . . .”

  “Joseph made drawings of blue men,” I said, sipping the bourbon. “Dozens of them.”

  Basil considered this, and then said, “Greta brought one to me after he disappeared. They are very evocative.”

  “There is this word, ‘Simi.’” I showed him the page. “Do you know what it means?”

  Basil shook his head. He had no idea.

  “Do you think there’s some connection?”

  “Between blue men and a child’s disappearance?”

  “It sounds ridiculous, I know,” I said. “But maybe Joseph was trying to express something that frightened him. Some kind of abuse.”

  “Are you suggesting that Vita hurt Joseph?”

  I remembered the incident in Eleanor’s memoir in which Vita killed the men in Nevenero. I remembered the look of triumph on Vita’s face as Dolores lay dying. Vita was capable of hurting people. But was she capable of hurting a child?

  Basil finished his glass of bourbon, poured another, and went to the fire, where he poked the logs with a fire iron.

  “Vita had an extraordinarily difficult childhood,” I said. “Was she ever treated for trauma?”

  “Psychological care was simply not done for most of Vita’s lifetime,” Basil said. “In Eleanor’s time, Vita was considered a vessel of the devil. The cure for that was exorcism, prayers, fasting—all to rid Vita of evil spirits. As time passed, so did the approaches. If you look in the family archives, you’ll find all varieties of reports. There is one account of a Jungian therapist brought in to explore the archetypal origins of Vita’s behavior. There was discussion of shock therapy, which did not happen, thank goodness. She endured every kind of diet and physical regimen.

  “Guillaume and Dolores were quite anxious to understand the real danger her existence posed to them . . . genetically, but to get a definitive answer to that question meant bringing in doctors, and while the question of what was actually wrong with Vita might have been answered through testing, Guillaume refused to allow her to be seen by anyone who might expose the family’s past.”

  Basil left the fire iron against the wall and returned to the seat across from me. I could see, in the brightening of the flames, the creases lining his brow. “After Guillaume died, Dolores hired more researchers, authorized genetic samples to be taken from Guillaume’s corpse, and paid a small fortune to find you. She made mistakes, I agree. The latest pharmacology had made its way here, and Dolores had been dosing Vita with powerful sedatives, which left Vita disoriented and angry. She also gave Vita SSRIs of various types—Paxil, Prozac, Celexa. She had a terrible reaction to these medications. They drove her into indescribable rages. She would become wild, confused, violent.” Basil paused, met my eyes, and continued. “I’m not saying that Dolores had it coming, but . . . at times, she could be quite cruel.”

  As I took this in, I felt a new sympathy for what Vita had endured. And yet, I couldn’t dispel the suspicion I felt. “Do you think Vita could have hurt Joseph?”

  “Impossible,” he said. “She is far too weak. She cannot even get down the stairs of the northeast tower without Greta or Sal to help her.”

  I took the drawing of the blue man in hand and looked at it again. The large hands and feet, the enormous eyes: I couldn’t help but believe it was a clue to something.

  “Have you heard of the Beast of Nevenero?” I asked.

  Basil looked at me with surprise. “Yes, of course. It is one of the local monsters,” he said. “A legend of sorts. It is quite well-known.”

  “Does this legend have anything to do with Vita?”

  “If you are asking if Vita is that creature,” Basil said, giving a strained laugh, “the answer is no. She is not the Beast of Nevenero. I know there were such rumors in the village, but they do not reflect reality.”

  “What is she, then?”

  “It is a question I have asked myself many times,” Basil said. “You read Eleanor’s memoir. You know that Vita’s condition has been the central question of the Montebianco family for generations. I myself have tried to look into it. There is a clue in Eleanor’s memoir, when Eleanor writes about the grandfather of Ambrose, Leopold Montebianco. Do you recall it? She wrote that madness and deformity began to appear in the Montebianco lineage after the time of Leopold.”

  Leopold? I thought, taking a deep breath. Which ancestor was Leopold? I tried to recall the family tree, painted on the ceiling of the library. Vita’s parents, Ambrose and Eleanor. Vita’s grandparents, Vittorio and Flora, the woman whose portrait hung outside my room who had died in childbirth. And then Alberta and Amadeo, the prince of Savoy, parents of Leopold. Counting the generations, I calculated that Leopold was my fourth great-grandfather. “What did Leopold do?” I asked.

  “It is hard to say, as he didn’t leave much behind. He has been mentioned in various documents in the archives as an amateur naturalist, an eccentric man who made discoveries of some significance in these mountains, but he has largely disappeared from the family records. There is a reference in one of the family catalogs to a field notebook, which I’ve been trying to get my hands on. But that notebook is gone. I have looked through every nook and cranny of this castle for it.”

  “What do you think he discovered?” I asked.

  “Something extraordinary, from the sound of it,” Basil said.

  I remember that evening—Basil and I warm and tipsy near the fire—with a kind of longing, the variety of nostalgia one feels about a singular point in one’s life before everything shifts. Those last moments of ignorance before the telephone rings with bad news, the hour before the baby is born dead, the endless frozen swerve before the car crashes. When I reflected about that night later, it seemed an instance of innocence so pure as to be sacred.

  The next morning, I was drinking coffee near the window when I heard the commotion in the courtyard. The dogs were going crazy, their barking high-pitched with panic. I heard Sal call out for Greta, and saw her scurry across the courtyard, joining him at the gate. They were looking at something just beyond, while holding back the dogs.

  Luca! I thought. Finally, Luca had come. I had been wrong. He had come for me after all.

  I opened the window and shouted at Greta that I was coming down. My biggest fear was that Sal would hurt him. He had shot Dr. Feist, after all, and he had shot me. There was nothing stopping him from shooting Luca, too.

  I threw on some clothes and hurried to the corridor, scrambling down the steps as best I could. My leg had healed considerably, but it took nearly five minutes to join them in the courtyard. Everything was a jumble
in my mind as I rushed to the gates—all that I had learned about the Montebianco family, my new commitment to adopt a child, our plans to start over. Now that Luca had arrived, all the difficulties that had happened would take on a different meaning—they were the backstory of a new and better future. My strange ancestry would be a puzzle we would solve together, our failing marriage the preamble to a new life. Whatever genetic problems I carried could be studied and overcome. That day would be a new beginning. We would start again, together.

  By the time I arrived in the courtyard, however, I knew that these dreams could never happen. The first thing I saw was a pair of leather boots, the laces caked in ice, splayed open over the icy flagstones, followed by a hand, blue gray and mottled with black from frostbite. At last I forced myself to look at Luca’s face, which stared up at me, deformed, stiff and inexpressive. The dogs hadn’t been barking at Luca’s intrusion into the courtyard. They were barking at his corpse.

  I threw my crutch aside and fell onto my knees next to him. He had been battered by the elements. His face was swollen, the skin distorted and hard, as if a plastic mask had been laid over his features. I grasped his hand. It was ice-cold, stiff, the fingers frozen through. A swath of skin on his chin was gone entirely, as if ripped away, and his eyelids had frozen open. I stifled a sob. This was my oldest and best friend, my husband, the person who had loved me despite everything. I blinked away tears, fighting the scream that rose in my throat. “No,” I sobbed. It was the only word that came. “No. No. No.”

  “You know this man?” Sal asked, a morbid curiosity in his eyes.

  “He’s my husband,” I said. I couldn’t say his name. Not to Sal.

  “Oh, madame,” Greta said, her voice filled with alarm. “Come with me. Sal will carry him to the mews.” She came to my side and helped me stand. I must have collapsed again, because I remember holding on to Luca, holding tight, as if he might come back to life if only I held on hard enough.

  When at last Greta helped me up, Sal said, “The dogs found him. Lord knows how long he’s been out here. From the look of it, I’d say weeks, even a month. I’m guessing they tried to hike here from one of the ski towns.”

  “They?” I asked, looking past Luca at the snowy wilderness beyond the gate.

  Sal led me past Luca, to a body lying beyond the gate. It was Bob, Luca’s father.

  The sky was dark, the clouds shrouding the courtyard in a mist so thick that the chapel doors seemed, as I approached, to materialize from a cloud. Inside, the haze cleared, burned away by candles lit throughout the nave. The warm, flickering light made the stained glass scintillate and the rows of wooden benches glow, even as Luca and Bob’s bodies—laid out on blankets near the altar—remained covered in shadow.

  In the spring, when the roads cleared, Sal would transport my husband and his father down the mountain, and they would be shipped back to Milton for burial. But for the rest of the winter, they would lie frozen in the chapel. I would visit them every afternoon, sitting in the freezing cold, grappling with all I had lost.

  On my first visit, I sat on a bench and looked at Luca. There he was, the man I had loved, the lips I had kissed, the hands that I had held. For years, he had been the entirety of my family. All hope of starting over had slipped away with his life. I understood then what I had not been able to fully grasp during our separation: my future was so entwined with his that I didn’t know how to go on without him.

  I knelt over my husband, looking at him, trying to remember what he had looked like before. It wasn’t his face, that still mask, not his eyes frozen open in a horrid gaze. Not his hands stiffened to claws. Everything that had made me love this man had been siphoned away, and yet, it comforted me to be there next to his familiar body. I lowered my head to his chest, half expecting to hear the faint thrum of his heart. A wave of longing overtook me as I pictured him next to me in the enormous bed in Turin, the luxurious sheets wrapped around us, his eyes alight with the possibilities of what lay ahead. It had been many years since I had prayed, but I whispered a prayer then for Luca.

  As I turned to leave, I saw a book on the altar. Making my way around the baptismal font, I found a thick Bible covered in dust and spiderwebs, the name “Montebianco” stamped in gold into the leather. The pages were thin and covered in tiny foreign words, but at the back of the Bible, folded into the binding, I discovered a registry of baptisms and marriages and funerals. Glancing down the list, I read names and dates matching those in the mausoleum—all my ancestors who had lived and died before me—but what interested me more than the Montebianco deaths were the dates written in the column under Marriage.

  In the past century, there had been only a handful of additions: Eleanor and Ambrose, August 14, 1909; Giovanni and Marta, June 9, 1949; Guillaume and Dolores on September 3, 1971. The mostly empty page seemed too empty, like some great reproach to my grief. I searched my pockets for a pen and, steadying my hand, wrote out our names and the date of our marriage in the family Bible.

  Twenty-Four

  Luca’s death had opened a wound, one that throbbed with the sharpness of Bernadette’s knife. I took the painkillers Vita had given me and slept for days at a time. When I woke, I’d watch the world from the recesses of a trance. The sun fell softly over the stone floor of my rooms, settling on the flakes of ash from the hearth, filling the air with light and warmth—and still, I saw only the endless darkness of the truth: I would spend my life alone. Never would I find love or have a child. Never again could I pretend to be like other people. A normal life could not be for me; it wasn’t written in my genetic code.

  One night, a banging at my door woke me. I pulled myself out of bed and, with the help of my crutch, hobbled to the door and unbolted the lock. Sal stood in the hallway, Dolores’s wheelchair parked before him.

  “Get in,” he said, gesturing to the wheelchair.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, half asleep.

  Sal gestured again to the wheelchair, with its shining copper armrests, Dolores’s pillows on the seat. “Now.”

  I lowered myself into the wheelchair, adjusting the pillows to cushion my wound. Sal pushed me down the corridor and steered me through a series of narrow connecting hallways, before stopping abruptly at a door on the east side of the castle. He opened the door directly onto the east lawn, where I could see—standing in the snow—Vita.

  Sal parked the wheelchair, lifted me out of it, and carried me over the east lawn, his boots crunching through the snow.

  “Sal, put me down,” I said. “I want to walk.”

  To my surprise, Sal released me. I limped behind him, the snow soft under my feet. Perhaps spring was coming. I didn’t know the month, but the harsh bite of winter had left the air. Vita stood on a flat of snow before the high, dark mountains. I limped past the frozen pond, past a dead animal lying in the snow, blood staining an ellipse of color around its body. It was a rabbit, I saw, half-eaten by some wild creature, its long furry foot jutting into the air. Something about the position of the body, and the bloodstained snow, reminded me of Dr. Ludwig Jacob Feist.

  At last, I made it to the top of the east lawn, where the castle grounds met the mountain. Sal greeted Vita, nodding at me as if he had delivered a trophy.

  “I brought this, like you wanted,” Sal said, and took a leather pack from his shoulder. “Bernadette says she’s low on some things.”

  “Thank you,” Vita said, taking the pack. She opened it, examined the contents, then nodded to Sal. “Tell Bernadette to send me a list of what we need.”

  Sal nodded in return and turned back to the castle, leaving Vita and me in the dark, windy night. It was moonless, without a cloud in the sky. Stars filled the darkness, an uncountable explosion of brilliance, proof that we were just one small piece of an immense, burning universe.

  A gust of glacial wind blew down over the east lawn, cutting through me. My teeth began to chatter. Vita shot me an assessing look, one part pride, another part exasperation. “Surely you’re not
so sensitive to the cold as that?”

  “My grandfather would have said exactly the same thing,” I said. “He was always taking me out in the snow underdressed.”

  Vita nodded, as if she knew exactly what I meant, and then, sliding out of her coat, she handed it to me. The warmth of her body lingered in the silk lining, as delicate as an embrace.

  “Tell me. What was the date upon which my son killed himself?”

  I gave her a sidelong glance, wondering why she had decided to ask this now. “I believe the death certificate said July 1993.”

  “And he left no note?” she asked. “No explanation?”

  I shrugged. “Not that I know about.”

  “It is so . . . unlike my son,” she said. “He was a very strong-willed man, with great moral conviction. I can’t imagine that he would harm himself.”

  “My grandmother Marta had died that year. Maybe he missed her.”

  Vita thought this over for a minute. Then she shook her head. “I don’t doubt that they were extremely in love and that my son missed his wife when she was gone. But that wasn’t the reason.”

  “Then what?”

  Just then, as if in answer to my question, I saw it—something moving at the edge of a cove of evergreen trees. An ibex, I thought. A wild animal feeding on rabbits. I couldn’t see more than a shift of movement in the shadows, a presence obscured by spruce and cedar branches.

  “These are the Icemen,” Vita said and walked quickly up to the trees, leaving me to struggle behind. I dragged myself through the snow, my leg throbbing with pain, until I saw them clearly.

  There were two of them, both men, both tall and skeletal with broad shoulders and long white hair that tangled to their chests. They wore cotton pants and leather vests that exposed their arms to the cold. Their eyes were large and blue below heavy brows, but most startling of all was the luminous, almost phosphorescent quality of their skin. Standing in the pocket of the east lawn, they seemed to glow.