Tourmaline

by Joanna Scott

  Without any active insurrection, Nat usurped Patrick’s place as the leader of our group. Little Nat, who was just six years old. We found ourselves following his orders before we’d even admitted to ourselves that he was in charge. With Nat as our captain, we all felt within us an increased sense of individual purpose. We were whatever we were supposed to be. Nat filled his role with the confidence of an experienced actor playing a part for the hundredth time. Harry was adept at finding pieces of transparent quartz we could use as diamonds. Patrick, the most knowledgeable, provided solutions to all mysteries. And I was the lookout, the one to warn of intruders and other dangers when we were playing.

  After the night our father broke down and told Claire about his involvement with the Nardi girl, that regrettable embrace when she came to the house at Le Foci, both our parents stayed at home. Through the rest of the month, neither left the house, not even to sit outside on the terrace. It was beautiful weather — bright blue summer skies, with a soft, cooling breeze blowing off the sea, which we enjoyed after scrambling over rocks up the mountain. But Claire and Murray stayed inside, received no visitors, and ate their meals separately from us, behavior we interpreted as the expression of uselessness. Most adults had to pretend to have a purpose. Our parents had stopped pretending, and their indifference was affecting Lidia and Francesca. Francesca was growing fat; Lidia was growing careless and twice had dropped glasses on the hard tile floor of the kitchen.

  We had enough sympathy to feel sorry for the adults in our household but not enough to want to help them. We took our cues from Nat, who led us farther and farther from the villa each day. He could run in bare feet up the rocky slope of Monte Giove as if he were flying, he could leap down steep inclines, and he could stand on a precipice and flap his arms and make the sunlight glitter.

  Guarda! Look at me!

  Look at him!

  I’m a bird!

  Birds can volare. Volare, Jako Three. Let’s guarda you!

  How deep was our confusion? Sometimes I wonder if the quartz crystals we found on Elba were really diamonds, the pyrite gold, and all the colorful feldspar blooming with tourmaline. The whole island was the treasure chest our father had promised it would be, and we’d opened it with a magical key. We could have done anything if we’d let ourselves believe completely in the power of our wishes.

  Guarda! Jakos, guarda!

  He’s doing it, he’s really doing it!

  No!

  Sì!

  This is something I think I remember: blinking rapidly against the blinding sun, then staring wide-eyed as my brother Nat, just a dark silhouette bounded by light, flapped his arms wildly, then rose about six inches and hovered for a few long seconds in the air above the granite crag.

  He did! Jakos, he really did volare!

  He didn’t. I was guarding and he didn’t. Did I? Did I really do it?

  You did!

  He didn’t!

  He vero did!

  IN LA CHIATTA, HER VILLA sandwiched between olive groves and the sea, directly across the bay from Portoferraio, Signora Nardi waited for her daughter to come home. She waited with a calm that many considered unnatural, tending to the business of the Calamita leases with her characteristic placidness. From time to time she’d swing open the shutter above the table where she worked and look toward the meadow where Lorenzo’s cows were pegged out to graze. She would glide her hand along the table’s inlaid mosaic, smoothing the tiles. She would listen to her cook, Luisa, running water from the hose into the courtyard’s stone trough.

  There were some who wondered how a mother could be so calm in the face of her daughter’s disappearance, and some who suggested that the Signora had never really loved her adopted daughter. Others scoffed at such contemptuous speculation and said that the Signora was only pretending to be calm for the sake of dignity. Was she as calm as she appeared? No one dared to ask her, for they accepted the family’s privacy as a right earned by centuries of nobility. Elbans liked to think that they would have fought to protect the Nardi family, not because of the Nardis’ wealth but because three hundred years of the island’s past was preserved in the name.

  The islanders, though, had failed to protect the daughter. For this they blamed the American. Of course they blamed the American. There’d been talk about others involved in the girl’s life — romances she’d kept hidden even from her mother. There’d been talk that the girl was wild and desperate and would give herself to any straniero who flattered her. There’d been talk about the girl and Signor Americano even before she’d disappeared.

  She’d been gone for many months. The police had long since stopped searching for evidence. The people of Elba dreamed their dreams and whispered about our father. My brothers and I played our games. Signora Nardi went on waiting.

  Her closest friends spoke of her with a sternness that suggested disappointment. They loved Signora Nardi and would prove their love with a lifetime of loyalty, but they couldn’t understand why she didn’t wail and cry to the Blessed Virgin for help and solace, why instead she chose to wait as calmly as a mother will wait for her daughter to return from a dance. Signora, her friends wanted to say, there was no dance. Your daughter has gone away and no one can say when she will come back.

  Would she come back? Could she, Adriana Nardi, taken in like dirty wash when she was a young child, have no sense of gratitude? Her beauty was coarse — was it this that made her vulnerable to men who otherwise would have respected the family name? Or was it that the girl, raised to be a lady and educated to take her place in the world beyond the island, had been born to be a whore?

  Vado via perchè devo andare via, she wrote in the note she left behind. She had gone away deliberately and just as deliberately she would return. Whatever faults she had, whatever confusions drove her from home, the girl wouldn’t disappear forever.

  Signora Nardi had taken every logical action to find her daughter and had contacted everyone who might have had news of her. But there was no news. There were plenty of rumors. There were strange dreams and gossip and suspicion. But there was no reliable news, and Signora Nardi could do no more than wait for the sun to cross the sky, the olives to darken on their branches, the rain to start and to stop again, the mail to arrive.

  Only Luisa, the Nardis’ cook for more than thirty years, understood that the Signora’s calm hid a busy mind, and at any waking moment, whether she was alone or with company, silent or involved in conversation, she was engaged in recovering what she could from the past, sifting through memories of her daughter, looking for clues.

  Absence asks for the return of memory. With Luisa’s help, Signora Nardi tried to remember any action or comment that might have revealed traces of whatever secret had caused Adriana to run away. The girl had said one day last fall that she wanted to visit the prison at Pianosa. What did it matter that she’d said this? Luisa wondered. And then Luisa remembered that Adriana had said she wanted to learn to ski. Why suddenly did she want to learn to ski? And why didn’t the summer sun brown her this year as it had done in past years? Luisa wanted to know. No Elban girl should be so white! Was this evidence of something? Everything was evidence, as far as Adriana’s mother was concerned. Adriana’s hand bumping her forehead as she went to tuck a curl behind her ear — this was evidence. The distracted look in her eyes — this, too. And the faint rise at the corners of her lips as she smiled to herself, the hesitations in her voice, and the way she’d taken to drinking water in big, furious gulps.

  And there was the pleasant, droning ronzio — the sound of humming. In the months before she’d disappeared, Adriana had taken to humming, barely audibly but almost constantly through her waking hours. Hadn’t Luisa heard the humming? Adriana’s old, sweet habit of humming?

  Sì, sì, certo, Luisa had heard her bimba humming again, though she had to admit that she’d thought nothing of it. It was not unusual for girls of a certain age to make a habit of humming. But the Signora pointed out that she hadn’t heard her daughter
humming for many, many years. Didn’t Luisa remember how when Adriana was a young girl she seemed to breathe music, the sound like the whirring of wings following her everywhere? Didn’t Luisa remember how she used to hum herself to sleep and hum herself awake, how she hummed as she read and as she listened to stories? Remember, Luisa: she hummed the day the Germans bombed Elba in September, 1943, and she hummed through the night nine months later when the Allies attacked. Didn’t Luisa remember that night?

  Of course Luisa remembered. It was the night when Mario Tonietti, the widower of Signora Nardi’s sister, who had died of cancer in 1935, ran all the way from Portoferraio to Magazzini in his bare feet to tell them to hide. Luisa recalled how the oil lamp had flickered and gone out when Mario Tonietti entered the parlor. She remembered the high pitch of his voice, like the voice of a boy, rising to be heard above the sound of sirens and distant explosions.

  What wild stories people could tell about that night. Even as it was happening and windows lit up with the fires across the harbor, the stories were being told and retold. The story of a pregnant woman crushed by falling rubble as she ran from her home. The story of a man bubbling at the mouth with blood the color of blackberries. The story of a child shot in the back on the steps of Via del Paradiso.

  The night of June 17, 1944, when the Allies attacked Elba, and the French, the Germans, the Africans, the Italians shot at anything that moved. And not just shot. They had dogs, people would say afterward, real dogs that breathed fire like dragons. And poison arrows that melted men into puddles. And little grenades the size of peas that they’d force down the throats of old women.

  By the time Mario Tonietti arrived at La Chiatta, Massimo Volbiani and his wife were already dead. Irene Cartino was dead. Allegra Venuti was dead. Federico the grocer was dead. Cosimo the butcher was dead. They were all dead, killed for the crime of being alive. But there wasn’t time to mourn — Mario Tonietti, bless him, had come to lead the way to a cave below Volterraio, where they could wait out the night in safety.

  But Mario Tonietti’s stories had taken too long, and by the time he’d finished what he thought Signora Nardi needed to know, there were already voices in the fields and the nearby scattershot of gunfire. It was too late to run from the house, too late to do anything but hide the child in the cabinet under the kitchen sink and wait, frozen with awareness of their helplessness, for the fighting to end.

  What happened that night on Elba? No one could say for sure, not even the people who lived through it. No one could name the men who grabbed fourteen-year-old Sofia Canuti, took turns raping her, and cut her throat. No one saw it happen. No one would ever know for sure whether to believe crazy old Stefano Grigi, a fisherman from Marciana Marina, when he said that he’d helped bury the bones of a prisoner who’d been killed, cooked, and eaten by a band of soldiers. Which soldiers, Stefano? He had to admit he wasn’t sure. No one knew what to believe. The shroud of darkness made it impossible to distinguish between enemy and friend. The best you could do was try to save your family.

  For many years afterward, people came to Ninanina’s enoteca to trade the stories that had already been told many times. It was here that Luisa came to help her cousin prepare food. She would listen to the stories, and when she was tired of listening she would tell what she remembered.

  She remembered that Adriana had been a good girl that night and had followed her mother’s directions, huddling in the cabinet in absolute silence even after Signora Nardi closed the doors. How about that for courage! A child of ten spending the night in a dark cabinet and not making a sound. At one point Luisa had heard the distant shriek of what she’d thought was a woman but later learned was one of Lorenzo’s pigs that had been shot in the snout. She and the Signora and Mario Tonietti sat around the kitchen table, not daring even to whisper, waiting for the soldiers to burst through the door. But the soldiers never came to La Chiatta. By morning the sky was empty, the fields quiet, and when Luisa and the Signora opened the cabinet under the sink and brave Adriana tumbled out, they devoured her with kisses.

  Elbans who lived through that night would spend the rest of their lives remembering. There was so much to remember that Luisa forgot about how afterward she didn’t hear Adriana humming. Not for twelve years did she hear the girl humming. And then, all of a sudden, she’d started humming again.

  What did it mean, the humming? Ninanina asked. Luisa could only shrug. Girls of a certain age make a habit of humming. It probably meant nothing. But with Adriana gone Luisa shared Signora Nardi’s regret that she hadn’t listened more closely.

  When she comes home, Luisa told Ninanina with a pride that struck witnesses as defensive, she will ask her bimba to sing for her. She wanted to hear the girl sing a whole song, clear as a bell, start to finish.

  In the same house where she had waited with her daughter and cook and brother-in-law through the night of the Liberation, Signora Nardi waited for her daughter to come home. She knew how to wait. Through winter, spring, and summer, she waited patiently, deep in thought, though she was prepared to welcome most visitors, Claire among them, and would speak of her daughter as if she were expected home any minute.

  Adriana was safe — Signora Nardi believed this not just because she wanted to believe it but because in her absence she had begun to piece together the nature of her secret. She didn’t speak of this to anyone, not even to Luisa. Let the dreams continue and suspicion build against an innocent man. Signora Nardi had long ago concluded that Signor Americano was too foolish to be guilty of doing any serious harm. And perhaps a dose of suspicion wouldn’t hurt him. It might even do him some good. Malcolm Murdoch, the father of four boys, the man who had dragged his family to the island of exile — he could learn something about himself in the process of deflecting accusations. At the very least, he could learn the value of caution.

  Signora Nardi was an insightful woman. But insight didn’t save her from the occasional misjudgment. She believed her Elban neighbors had a powerful sense of justice and would never do more than trade stories about their dreams. In this sense our father was safe. Any action taken against him would have to be legal, and Signora Nardi would ensure that it didn’t progress to conviction. Murray had a protector in Adriana’s mother, a good fairy who would swish her wand and rescue him from peril at the last moment. No one would hurt him. Signora Nardi might as well have locked him in a secret vault and dropped the key into the sea.

  But as the engineer from Ohio had said at the first dinner on the Casparia, the most dangerous thing you can do is get out of bed in the morning. Signora Nardi, noble as her intentions might have been, confident as she was of the general goodwill of the Elban people and her daughter’s imminent return, couldn’t keep our father from getting out of bed.

  The moon over Elba is whiter than elsewhere, and the sea breeze is saltier. The soapstone is as soft as goose down. Obsidian tastes of licorice. Wells are lined with melted gold. The bladders of gulls are filled with nuggets of jargoon. A goat born on the eve of Ascension Day has hooves made of tin-stone. Beryls grow on persimmon trees. If you crack open a chestnut during an eclipse, you’ll find a fire-opal. If you wear clogs carved of peridot, you’ll add ten years to your life. The eyes of feral cats are amethyst. The eyes of wild dogs are citrine. Inside every hailstone there is a piece of sapphire the size of a pinhead. The shells of gull eggs are made of thin alexandrite. The shells of hummingbird eggs are made of hidden-ite. Cut open the bladder of a dying petrel and you’ll find schorl. Cut open the beating heart of a pigeon and you’ll find rubellite. Catch a falling star and it will turn to blue tourmaline in your hands. This is true.

  If my father were here, I’d ask for clarification. What is true, Dad? He’d say, everything I tell you. He knew about falling stars turning into tourmaline because he saw it happen.

  What else happened? I’d want to ask him. Is there anything that hasn’t happened on the island of Elba? What is possible, and what will never be more than the mind’s concoction? Where do
people go on an island when they want to go away?

  The rest, my father would say, I’d have to figure out on my own.

  The Life of a Rock

  BORN MALCOLM AVERIL MURDOCH INTO A FAMILY CLINGING TO its shrinking fortune, educated in private schools, contemptuous of his aristocratic friends but himself cursed with a prospector’s greed. Destined to crave the freedom to mess up his life. Malcolm Averil Murdoch, called Murray. Six foot one inch, weighing 190 pounds, brown-haired, green-eyed, an awkward dancer, inept at cards, good at checkers, a modern prospector who would be remembered in family history as the guy who lost a fortune on Elba. Elba! An island known to the rest of the world as a place from which exiled emperors escape. Soot Island.

  I’ll show you what can happen on Elba.

  He went ahead and left his job, borrowed money, and led us across the ocean.

  Here we are! How did we get here? Onboard the Casparia from Genoa, from Genoa to Florence, from Florence by bus to Piombino, and then the ferry. But we must have made a wrong turn somewhere. This wasn’t the island Murray had envisioned. There must have been some mistake. One mistake leading to a whole series of miscalculations. Claire, what went wrong? Claire, can we go home?

  She held him. They made love, moving together…. How would

  Claire have described it? Energetically? Lustily? With a hint of ferocity in their antics? Afterward, Murray felt ashamed, as if he’d hurt her. He had hurt her. Disgraced her. Forced her to bear the weight of suspicion that cast him as the man responsible for the death of a young woman. You’ll answer for your crime, Signor Americano.

  Just as lapidary involves shaping a gemstone to reflect light, suspicion involves shaping the recent past into a probable story. The effort of bringing something to light. You, Malcolm Averil Murdoch, where were you on the night Adriana disappeared? Were you sealing her inside a tomb? Were you burning her on a pyre? What were you doing? Tell us.