Italian Fever (10 page)

For she was lost in time. She was conversing with people who were lost to her, some to the past, some, like her grandmother, no longer to be found among the living. She rehashed the four-year argument that had been her marriage; she upbraided a landlord who had taken advantage of her when she was in school. The line between sleeping and waking fantasies was obscure, more and more difficult to trace. In the late afternoon, the rain stopped and she woke. A few horizontal shafts of light splayed across the floor like the fingers of a pale hand. Then, as she watched, neither sleeping nor fully awake, the fingers rushed up over the footboard of the bed and leapt into the air as two flames, one red, one blue. There was a rushing noise, like wind, and the hissing and crackling of a wood fire. She tried to lift herself, for she was frightened and wanted to escape, but her body was inert and unresponsive. The flames, she understood, were communicating with each other; they were deciding her fate. Would she live or die?

Later, it was dark. She woke again, soaked in sweat, and dragged her fingers through her hair; the fever was breaking. Now she would get better. But she was so weak, so empty, so thirsty, and hungry. How long ago had it been, that last meal? She reached out for the lamp switch, found the cord, felt along it for the plastic switch box. But something was wrong. The
box had a toggle switch—surely she was not mistaken—but this box had a button. Still she pressed it. There was no light. Then, as her heart expanded so abruptly that she felt it as a blow to her rib cage, a hand closed over hers and another stripped the quilt from her shoulders. She shouted, “No!” flailing out into the darkness, but the hands were strong and pinned her back against the mattress. Now there was harsh breath over her face, fetid and hot. The hands held her tightly by her shoulders and shook her. Why was he so angry? She tried to hold her head still, but she was too weak. She could feel her chin repeatedly striking her breastbone. Her tongue got in the way of her teeth and she bit it hard; for a moment, everything was red. “Lucy,” he said angrily, shaking her as if he intended to break her neck. All around, the silent room seemed to brood over her struggle; the darkness was an accomplice, a further agent of terror. She had recognized the voice, knew, in some powerless center of knowing, that what was happening could not be happening. “DV,” she cried out. “Stop it.”

At once he released her and she fell back a long way, for a long time, falling and falling through black space. Then she felt the give of the mattress, the compression of the soft material in the pillow. Feathers, she thought with relief. She opened her eyes and looked out into the empty darkness of the room. The rain had started again and far off she could hear a low roll of thunder. She passed her tongue over her lips, tasting blood.

The horror of the encounter clung to her in the darkness, and she to it, as to a friend. Why was he so angry? She concocted a paranoid narrative in which DV had been murdered and she had been poisoned. Soon she would join him in the dreary cemetery at the end of the dirt road in Ugolino, and no one would be able to do a thing about it. It would be a strange
but not entirely unimaginable coincidence that she had come out to arrange one funeral and ended up the subject of another. She waved away the obvious problem of a motive; the Cinis were certainly dreadful enough to murder Americans just for the interest of the thing. Or perhaps they were annoyed with the Panatellas for turning the farmhouse into a hotel and had decided that if everyone who stayed there turned up dead, it would soon fail as a business venture. She sat up, fighting panic, turned on the lamp—it
was
a toggle switch—and pushed back the covers; she wanted most of all to be out of the bed. The light emphasized the absurdity of her imaginings and the cold floor gave her a jolt sufficient to turn her thoughts to practical considerations. One part of the dream, if it had been a dream, had been true. Her fever had broken and she was now damp and cold. She rummaged among the bedclothes for her sweatshirt, then, pulling it over her arms, stumbled off to the bathroom. No matter what the result, she would rinse the blood out of her mouth and brush her teeth.

She succeeded in this operation and determined that the blood was seeping from her gums and was not the result of an injury to her tongue. It was disquieting to have bleeding gums, but much less so than finding hard evidence of a supernatural encounter. She was alone, she was sick, but surely not dying, and DV was dead, but surely not murdered. She was ravenously hungry and cold. Her head was clearer than it had been in many hours. Whole sentences containing not only sense but grammar passed through her mind and she followed them with pleasure. Her stomach, though empty, felt calm. She tried a few swallows of water, careful not to gulp it down, though it was tempting to do so. “What good water,” she said, setting the glass on the counter. A few moments passed without incident.
She drank a little more, watching her reflection in the mirror, a pale, ill woman in a sweatshirt, drinking water. Her hair needed washing and her face looked haggard, but her eyes were clear. “I’m making a comeback here,” she said. She would try the tea again, and if that went well, maybe a cup of bouillon.

Chapter 8

L
UCY WAS NEVER ABLE
to recollect, though she tried often enough, the sequence of thoughts that led to her decision to leave the apartment that evening. Doubtless she was overconfident, restless from being ill and cooped up in bed. She had drunk the tea, the bouillon, and even nibbled at a few crackers she found in the bread box, all with no ill effects. It had stopped raining. She had become obsessed by the problem of DV’s missing car keys. She feared a relapse, which might make it impossible for her to look for them in the morning. Though she had no idea where she would drive, she felt trapped without access to the car.

So she pulled on her jeans and sneakers, took up the house keys, and went out onto the terrace. It was chilly, damp, and breezy. The air was alive with the odors of wet vegetation. The geraniums in their planter boxes stood tall on their turgid stems, presenting, like jewels on velvet, the drops their petals could not absorb. The sky promised more rain; the clouds
were thick, black, moving like water on the upper air currents. Best to go now, she advised herself, before it starts up again.

She was careful on the steps, which were wet and slippery. The effort it took to get down them reminded her that she was still unsteady on her feet. It was equally difficult to negotiate the gravelly decline of the drive, but she achieved the second terrace without mishap. Beneath the dripping shelter of the bougainvillea arbor, she turned the locks and opened the door into the sparsely furnished sitting room. She closed the door firmly behind her—she didn’t want to be surprised by unexpected visitors again—and deposited the heavy key ring on the table just inside. Then she crossed hurriedly to the staircase. She was thinking that there was another reason for her visit: She wanted to look at that letter again.

When she turned on the light in DV’s bedroom, she recalled the scratching sound she had heard the night before. She leaned against the door frame, studying the blank plaster wall behind the bed. It was mice; an old house like this must be mouse heaven. That was why everything in the kitchen was in jars and tins. She went to the nightstand, opened the drawer, took up the letter, and shook it open. She read again the fervent address, then scanned the first paragraph for words she recognized. These were mostly adjectives,
sincero, appassionato, furioso
, combined with occasional nouns,
i tuoi occhi sereni, i tuoi capelli come un fuoco d’oro
. This last bit about hair like a golden fire was strong evidence on two counts: first, that this was in fact a love letter, and, second, that it was intended for Catherine Bultman, who, Lucy remembered, gazed out upon the world from beneath a cascade of thick blond curls of the type commonly referred to in romances as a “mane.” Lucy turned the page over and looked at the closing. The handwriting was strong, the name
Antonio
so firmly
pressed into the paper that she could fairly feel the pressure of the pen. She tried to picture Antonio Cini, fired with passion for his American neighbor, bent over some antique desk in his somber mansion, concluding his paean of praise and longing with this clear and resolute signature.

She couldn’t picture it. He seemed to her too lifeless and, though he was certainly not thin or frail, too desiccated. Why would a woman as confident and energetic as Catherine Bultman give such a man, no matter what his lineage, a second glance?

But then, of course, she ran up against a problem, which was that Catherine had given DV, who had not even the recommendation of an impressive family tree, something presumably more penetrating than a second glance. If she had been willing to entertain DV’s inelegant pursuit, might she not have responded to the effusive entreaties Lucy held in her hand?

It was hard to tell. Lucy had never been much courted, had never received compliments, written or spoken, on the serenity of her expression or the effect of her hair. Your hair, she thought, like straight brown hair; really, it was not surprising that she hadn’t. She didn’t think of herself as unattractive, when she thought about the question at all, which wasn’t often, but she knew she was not likely to inspire the sort of ardor that resulted in secret letters, impulsive trysts, or imprudent promises. She was steady; that was what the occasional admirer had seen in her. She was clearheaded, reliable, and nice enough to look at. That was what her husband had been drawn to: a pleasant, friendly young woman, resourceful and competent, who could support him while he went through law school, which was exactly what she had done. This had meant working hard and not seeing much of him, a situation that she’d believed would be rectified once he finished school. And
it did change, but not, as she had anticipated, for the better. She saw less and less of her more and more successful husband, who, she understood at last, was consumed by fear of failure, and by ambition, greed, and an insatiable appetite for attention, driven by these forces as if by furies, so that he had never a moment’s rest or peace of mind. Their marriage had long been a battlefield. They fought about money. When he was in school, there was never enough of it. He was extravagant, preferred silk shirts to health insurance, refused to see the importance of paying bills on time. Then, when he was working and there was quite a lot of money, it still was never enough, and he resented every penny Lucy spent on herself.

She had applied for the job as DV’s assistant without any definite plan in mind. DV was impressed by her; he saw what everyone saw: steadiness, competence. During the interview, he told her that his former assistant, who was leaving him to marry a Finn, was giving up her rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. Lucy came away with the offer of a good job at an adequate salary and the phone number of a promising lodging. Later that afternoon, as she stood in the sunny kitchen alcove of her future home, looking down over the quiet tree-lined street, she took what felt like the first deep breath since her marriage. And that was how she had come to prefer liberty to passion.

But now as she leaned against the bed, looking at the letter she could not comprehend, it occurred to her that what kept her from understanding it was not so much that it was written in a foreign language, but that it issued from a foreign universe, the universe of desire, passion, and obsession. If she had never received such a letter, wasn’t that only the inevitable outcome of a condition that rendered her unable to imagine ever sending one? Didn’t the woman who had received these effusions inhabit another plane of consciousness, a place of tempests
and transports, where the postmen didn’t drive ugly gray trucks but arrived trailing clouds and folding wings? No, Lucy thought, her conclusion was incorrect. She hadn’t chosen liberty over passion. Passion had never been one of her options, nor was it ever likely to be.

This revelation left her weary and disgruntled. It was as if the letter offered her a glimpse at an intriguing dramatic scene, but she was allowed to see it only through a keyhole. She had to get down on her knees and peer through the door, knowing that she would mistake everything because of the limitation of her view. And the door was locked. It had always been locked.

She dropped the letter back in the drawer and, pushing Catherine’s drawing pad aside, lay down across the bed and drifted into a light sleep.

She awoke with a start. Someone had fired a gun outside, nearby, near the drive. She sprang to her feet, staggered to DV’s study, and leaned over his desk to look out the window. It was still dark. How long had she slept? The gravel of the drive reflected a little light; was it the moon between clouds or the dawn? And she was right: There, at the far edge, a man stood bent over his boots, and on the ground next to him she could make out the long metal shaft of a rifle.

“DV’s ghost,” she said, though there was nothing ghostlike about the man; he looked perfectly solid, preoccupied, as only the living could be, with the matter of his bootlaces. Surely in the ghost realm, petty annoyances like bootlaces and shirt cuffs ceased to be at issue.

Was it Antonio Cini? Lucy rapped at the glass, but he was too far away to hear her. He stood up, felt about in his pockets, and drew out a pack of cigarettes. Then, because she was hardly awake, confused by her illness and light-headed from lack of nourishment, she arrived at the unlikely conclusion
that the man who now turned his back to the house to light his cigarette, inclining his head in a way she was sure she recognized, was Massimo.

“He came back early,” she said, rushing headlong from the room, for all the world like a woman running to meet a lover, down the stairs, across the sitting room, and out the door. But no sooner had her feet touched the drive than three hard bits of reality came down upon her with the force of boulders clattering down a mountainside. First, the man, who was surely not Massimo, was nowhere to be seen. Second, the weather had changed for the worse; it was bitterly cold, gusty, and wet. An icy blast sent her cowering back under the arbor, where she discovered a third fact, the most alarming, the most irrevocably hard: The metallic click she had heard as she stepped off the terrace was the sound of the door, which was equipped with an automatic lock, blowing closed behind her.