by Joanna Scott
It was Francis who had persuaded the Signora to seek help from the local police. And it was from the police rather than Signora Nardi that Francis learned about the possible involvement of a foreigner. An American man who went by the name of Murray Murdoch? It was such an obvious identification that Francis didn’t bother to point it out. Everyone on the island knew or knew about the investor from New York and his interest in Adriana Nardi. So why wasn’t Murray asked some probing questions?
Apparently, Adriana had been seen by a taxi driver talking with an older man somewhere on the road — the driver couldn’t say exactly where — between San Giovanni and Lacona. Is that so? Francis Cape was startled, but only for a moment. He wanted to point out that Le Foci was between San Giovanni and Lacona. But the Signora was explaining that the man had been old. A rich old white-haired straniero, most likely one of the millionaire yachters who docked in Porto Azzurro — this was the type of man Signora Nardi wanted to find.
Why didn’t she allow herself to harbor suspicions about Murray Murdoch? Francis wanted to ask Signora Nardi this but couldn’t. It was impossible to ask Signora Nardi anything. He couldn’t ask her about the search for her daughter; he couldn’t even ask her if she was well. Tutt’OK? This was one of his favorite greetings, and he called it out to his Elban friends when he passed them on the street. Tutt’OK? Everything was not OK with Signora Nardi, he already knew this, and anyway, he was expected to speak only in English.
He wanted to help. You can’t help, Mr. Cape. He wanted to — “To what?”
“To…”
“To what, Mr. Cape?”
He heard the chatter of sparrows out in the terrace garden, a garden as harsh as the Signora, with bramble roses and juniper thistles and gravel paths winding between meager olive trees. But on the Nardi property was also the beautiful garden in the ravine that Adriana had tended when she was home. Francis had been there many times since Adriana’s disappearance. Already the lilies were blooming, and the ground was carpeted with purslane and chickweed. He didn’t bother to pull the weeds; he wanted to see them grow, spread, choke the garden, destroy it. He hoped that Signora Nardi wouldn’t send someone to weed the rock garden. He wanted to suggest this. He wanted to suggest —
“To what, Mr. Cape?”
“To suggest…”
“Yes?”
“The American investor. Shouldn’t you find out more about him?”
“I know what I need to know.”
“He is American.” He’d been wanting to say this to her — Murray Murdoch is American! He wanted to startle her with his insinuation. But she just smiled coldly and danced her fingernails with a clatter across the table’s mosaic tiles.
“He came here many times. Excuse me for reminding you of this. But I don’t understand why you —”
“He is not an old man. Now do you understand, Mr. Cape?” What could she possibly have said that would extend the meaning she conveyed with her eyes? Eyes with mud-colored irises, eyes telling him that there was nothing he could do or say in his own defense.
How slowly she moved when she reached for her tea. As though she were underwater, swimming away from Francis, out of his reach.
She was an agile woman — he hadn’t realized how agile until that moment. Nor had he realized that her hostility was isolated, directed at him alone. He’d mistaken her dislike of him for natural reserve. But she wasn’t a reserved woman, she wasn’t even unfriendly. She simply despised Francis Cape. She’d despised him from the day they first met, and now she despised him for having something to do with the disappearance of her daughter.
Francis was an old man. A very old man. Yet he wasn’t an American. Signora Nardi was looking for a wealthy American man, not an elderly librarian from London. He was confused. Francis Cape was an Englishman. So why should Signora Nardi despise him? He only wanted to help.
Not knowing what else to do, Francis added another lump of sugar to his tea. He stirred and stirred, but the sugar wouldn’t dissolve. Looking into his cup, he thought he might have dropped in a pebble by mistake. Then he discovered he could dig the edge of his spoon into the lump and crumble it.
Francis said he hoped the bad weather was over for the season. Signora Nardi hoped so too.
Soon it was time for Francis to leave. He stood. She offered to show him to the door. He declined.
“Arrivederla, Signora,” he said, knowing full well that she’d hear this as an insult. “Buona giornata.”
His knees were stiff, his jaw ached, and he needed to fart. How had he gotten so old? How old was he really? he asked himself as he stood outside the Nardi villa. He was surprised to realize that with his thoughts in such a swirl he could remember the year of his birth but not the day.
How old am I, Adriana? Tell me.
You are very very very very old, Mr. Francis Cape.
It would be easy to cast Signora Nardi as a type of woman familiar to readers of Victorian novels. She was stern, dusty, stuck in the past, repelled by the present, indifferent to the future. I find myself picturing her in a decrepit wedding dress with an ancient, cobwebbed feast laid out on the table. But my mother insists that Signora Nardi was a woman you would think you could know at a glance, and then you’d realize you didn’t know at all.
Signora Nardi was not what she seemed. Not dusty. Not stern. And not loveless. She was no worse than solitary. She chose to stay alone in the villa day after day in order to be available. It was good for a daughter to know that her mother would always be at home. Signora Nardi wanted her daughter to be free to fill her life with experience, to find out what she could about the world, to travel and make friends, meet men, find love, and all the while to enjoy the certainty that she had a home and her mother was there. She could leave home. She could come back. Her mother was waiting.
Our mother often thought of Adriana’s mother waiting in her lonely villa for her daughter to return. She imagined the Signora sitting inside her dark house, flinching at every unexpected sound. She imagined the Signora as a child, a little dark-haired beauty romping through the vineyards and olive groves, light-footed, light-hearted. Claire imagined being that child.
She’d only met Signora Nardi once, had thought afterward of Miss Havisham, and yet was surprised to feel at the same time the discomfort of recognition, the sense that in this strange, lonely Elban woman she was seeing a version of herself. The Signora had come to our home seeking help instead of revenge. She was prepared to trust Murray. The fact of this sank in slowly. Signora Nardi was not the kind of woman who would have been flagrant with trust. She was cautious. She had every right to be suspicious of Murray and instead believed he was innocent. Such confidence of judgment. Claire wanted the Signora to persuade her of her husband’s innocence. As the days passed she kept thinking about her, kept returning to the memory of their brief conversation, kept trying to imagine the thoughts of the Signora, kept trying and failing to understand why she felt such a profound connection to this woman after her single visit, and eventually decided that the only way she could understand the Signora was to see her again.
Delayed by the rain and her own reluctance, Claire didn’t visit the Nardi villa until the end of March. Coincidentally, she went the morning of the same day when Francis would pay his last visit.
Signora Nardi didn’t have a phone, and since Claire didn’t have the courage to write to her she arrived unannounced. The cook let her in and showed her to the library — a room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, with shuttered French doors, closed and bolted, that would have opened to the garden. A grand piano filled one corner. The room was lit by a crystal chandelier that seemed to Claire too ornate for the setting. Arranged without any apparent order on some of the shelves at eye level were stone carvings, masks, iron arrowheads, and spear tips. Other objects in the collection, including the porcelain cup from which Murray had drunk his peppermint tea, were kept locked in a cabinet at the back of the room. On the walls were portraits, one of a man in a tasse
led uniform, another of a woman in Victorian dress holding a lapdog, another of a gray-bearded man holding a pen.
Claire browsed through books while she waited. She pulled down a dusty copy of Marco Polo’s Travels, but the pages were fragile so she carefully returned the book to the shelf. She was trying to make sense of the Italian in the prologue of Boccaccio’s Decameron — “Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti” — when she heard a door shut down the hall.
“Buongiorno, Signora.”
“Signora Nardi, buongiorno. Sono, sono, mi dispiace…” “Speak in English.”
“I apologize. For arriving here without warning. I’ve been wanting to come see you again. You’ve heard nothing from Adriana?”
“Nothing. Come sit with me.” Signora Nardi led her to the chairs on the far side of the glass cabinet. The cook appeared and transferred from her tray a little pewter coffeepot, hot milk and sugar, and a plate piled with meringues and chocolate biscuits.
What did they talk about? Even as soon as the afternoon of the same day, Claire wouldn’t clearly remember the content of their conversation. They talked of Adriana — her education, her talents, her fellowship at Oxford. Signora Nardi had said something about Adriana’s sullenness — what, exactly? Talk had turned to the island economy. The struggling iron mines on Elba. Local quarries. The inlaid serpentine on the library floor. What predictions had the Signora made about the island’s future? Claire couldn’t remember. What had she said about her own health? Claire couldn’t remember.
Strange for Claire to remember their first encounter so vividly, the second with such difficulty. If she’d gone to the Nardi villa in search of understanding, she came away with no better sense of the Signora than before. But if, in fact, she’d gone for reassurance, somehow she’d received a fair dose. She’d left feeling comforted, though why or how she couldn’t say. She felt certain that the Signora was more than just a good woman. She was a deserving woman. And she was powerful. And, as Claire had already sensed, she was potentially impetuous. Despite what others said about her, Signora Nardi hadn’t finished with the world.
Spring on Elba that year was variable, with the sun rising behind storm clouds, burning through noon mist, and sinking from clear skies. It was hard to believe during a crystalline afternoon that we’d woken that morning to the sound of rain spilling from the roof. Single days were broken into pieces by the weather. My brothers never went back to school. Everything seemed mysterious to us. If a week might last a month, how could we make plans? We could only make up ways to occupy ourselves from hour to hour.
Only Murray made plans. He planned to buy more land in Cavoli, Chiessi, Pomonte. He’d heard about a grotto filled with tourmaline outside of San Piero. He roamed the area for days looking for the cave but never found it.
He considered purchasing an old farmhouse and the surrounding land in the plain between Marina di Campo and Porto-ferraio. He wired his mother for money, but she refused and again advised him to come home. He wrote to his uncles. They didn’t bother to write back.
After finding shotgun shells on his land, he posted NO HUNTING signs. He decided to build a fence. He hired two men from Porto-ferraio to work for him and paid them the equivalent of fifty dollars each for a week’s worth of doing nothing, since the wire fencing was never delivered. The next week he put them to work building a stone wall around the property. They worked slowly. Their siesta lasted three hours.
Murray ran his Lambretta off the road on his way home from the bank in Portoferraio one day. He was able to get the motorcycle started again, and he arrived spattered with mud but absorbed by anticipation of the next day’s work. He was glad to find that Claire had waited for him instead of eating dinner with the rest of us. After changing his clothes, he opened a bottle of sparkling wine. Lidia had left them a plate of anchovies and a round of bread. A sip of the wine filled him with warmth, the white flesh of the anchovies melted like butter on his tongue, and when he blinked he found Claire looking at him from across the table without the sharp query of suspicion in her eyes.
A spring night on Elba. Claire and Murray, tousled, half dressed, bleary from the wine, made love on the sofa and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Nat woke up late, went to the bathroom to pee, and then trudged sleepily into our parents’ room, climbed onto the bed, and fell asleep between pillows that he mis-took for our parents. Meena, inadvertently locked outside, yowled in the night, but no one heard her. When the rain began she took refuge beneath a board leaning against the garden shed. When the wind blew the board away, she scampered back to the villa and shivered in the doorway. And when the man emerged from the darkness, walking up the gravel path with the stiffness of a stilt-walker, and pounded weakly on the door, Meena didn’t bother to move, for she knew what would happen in a minute or two if the man just kept knocking.
The door opened, and Meena scampered inside between Claire’s feet. Claire suppressed an exclamation. Without a word she led Francis Cape into the front hall, where he stood dripping, trembling, his lips moving in soundless words.
Murray appeared, wearing only his trousers and undershirt. “Francis?” he asked. Could it really be Francis? Old Francis Cape gone out of his mind?
“It’s me, all right. I’m here as a friend, you know.”
Claire and Murray exchanged the familiar glance that people share when they believe themselves in the presence of insanity.
“I’m here to warn you.”
“Come into the kitchen, Francis. Have a cup of tea. You need to calm down, collect your wits.”
“It’s you’s the one in trouble.” Startled by his own slurring speech, he shook his head, clenched his hands together to steady himself, and said, “I mean to say, I’ve just come from Uccello’s, you remember it, the enoteca, we’ve been there, all of us, back when.” He stopped abruptly, leaving Claire and Murray to fill in the rest of the sentence: back when Adriana was with us.
“Sit down, Francis. Sit and catch your breath, at least.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re soaked.”
“The rain came in at the last minute. And there I was without my car.”
“You didn’t drive?”
“My car wouldn’t start. I walked.”
“You walked!”
“From Portoferraio? All the way from Portoferraio? My God, Francis!”
“I don’t mind a good walk. I never mind a good walk. It’s something I do quite well, you know. I walk. I can walk five miles at a stretch. And I know the roads. The moon was out only ten minutes ago. Then the downpour, all of a sudden. The rain this season. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve had wet springs, dry springs, but never such weather as this.” He paused, looked first at Claire and then at Murray with an expression that both of them read as directly accusing.
“I was at Uccello’s,” he continued, “and the little woman there — you remember, the one called Ninanina. Ninanina, who is said to have the power of foresight. Did I ever tell you that? Ninanina pulled me aside, and she said to me, she said, Tell your American friend to take his family and get off the island. Tell him he must go home. She said it in Italian, of course, but I am giving you an accurate translation. Tell your American friend to pack up and go home. In my neighborhood, you, Murray Murdoch, are my American friend. And according to Ninanina, you and your whole family should leave the island as soon as possible. There is trouble brewing.”
He was panting from the effort of speaking. Murray and Claire stood in silence. Ninanina — Murray tried to recollect — was the kind old woman who once had given him a second bottle of wine for free. Claire remembered her as the woman who offered her cheek to Francis when they’d walked into her enoteca.
“What trouble?” Murray finally asked.
“There are rumors. That’s all I know. That’s all I could gather.” “I don’t understand,” said Claire.
“Neither do I,” said Murray.
“There are rumors,” said Francis slowly, “concer
ning the disappearance of Adriana Nardi. And the involvement of the investor from the United States.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Murray spat with a fury that would seem courageous to Claire when she later recalled it.
“I am only the messenger.” Francis’s voice had become measured, even velvety. And his obvious consciousness of his effect was taken in by Claire, who in an instant decided once and for all that she abhorred the man. But at the same time she knew that the news he was bringing made them dependent on him.
Murray was only enraged. He circled the front hall sputtering, mumbling, protesting, pulling at his ears, kicking the wall. He’d replaced Francis in the role of the madman. Inadvertently, Claire met Francis’s eyes and shared with him the same sympathetic glance she’d shared with Murray only minutes earlier.
There was no more talk of tea, and when Francis reached for the door, neither Claire nor Murray tried to stop him. Claire was already heading for the closet where we kept the luggage we’d purchased in Genoa. Murray was still walking in circles.
They argued in quiet, fierce voices. Claire wanted to leave the island the next day. Murray insisted on staying. He said he would not be driven away by rumors. He would not be the scapegoat of people who had no better way to entertain themselves than to turn on a foreigner. The islanders were provincial, uneducated, bigoted. They doubled their prices as soon as Murray walked into the room. Their children were bullies. Their police were abusive. And don’t forget — they shared a recent bloody history of collaboration with their mainland brothers. How easily guilt transforms into hate. They needed a stranger to hold responsible for their own negligence, and they found him in Murray, who, even if not entirely blameless, had done no one any real harm.
Claire and Murray didn’t go to sleep until long after midnight. Their argument deteriorated into a cold standoff. Claire said she’d take the children and go to Paris and from there book a flight home. Murray said he’d leave when he was good and ready to leave.
But by the next morning Claire’s resolve to return to America had weakened. The sky was clear, the morning clouds tinged with pink, the sea shimmering, the breeze fresh, the oranges sweet and bloody. The barking of dogs set the roosters crowing — or vice versa. The bells of San Lorenzo were ringing. Lidia was knocking on their bedroom door.
