Italian Fever (29 page)

“Sad,” Lucy said. It was ironic as well, devilishly so. Antonio was right. DV’s style was melodramatic, but it suited the story. She looked through the pages to the end. The war was nearly over. The partisans in the north had ambushed Mussolini and his mistress as they tried to escape to Austria, executed them, and strung their bodies up by their heels in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The Americans had arrived in Tuscany and set up headquarters in the police station in Ugolino. They were in the bar giving out tins of Spam and chocolate. Elena and Giuseppe were there in the piazza, celebrating with their neighbors.

And that was it; he’d gotten no further. Lucy looked back through the pages. They were hand-numbered to seventy, then ten more without numbers. Eighty pages, she thought, a perfectly unpublishable length. And it had taken him five months to get them, less than a page a day. Once Catherine left and he had abandoned the ghost novel, he was thrown entirely upon the unexercised resources of his own imagination. He was like a man rushing headlong and oblivious through a forest, who is suddenly struck blind and must feel his way forward, listening, stumbling, attentive, wary, his progress slowed to a crawl. She added to her picture of the floundering DV the appearance of a pale hand, reaching out to him in the dark wood, helping him to his feet, brushing him off, leading him out into the open. Gradually, with Antonio as his guide, DV had begun to imagine a world he knew nothing about. He was imagining himself into the past, into the war, into the alien mind of his
rival. This was how he intended to get Catherine back. He was drinking, he was driving Antonio crazy, but he was working, too—slowly, to be sure, but at least he was working. Lucy got up and put the kettle on the stove, then took down the tea bags and a cup. He was certainly not the American writer endearing himself to the locals, but perhaps he wasn’t entirely unhappy. Though he must have felt trapped, especially after he got Catherine’s address from Antonio, then tried, and failed, to get to Rome.

DV always got lost, Lucy thought. Even when he had a good map. Sometimes he had called her to say he couldn’t find the bookstore where he was due to give a reading in five minutes. “I don’t know where I am,” he would complain, and she would say, “Is there a bank with a name of the town on it, can you see a street sign?” Then she would call the bookstore and say, “He’s coming. He got lost,” and there would be a little banter about how writers always got lost because they were wandering around in a fantasy world. The kettle boiled and she filled her tea cup. He got lost, she thought. He got lost in Italy forever.

She would do as Antonio requested, though not solely because he wanted the manuscript repressed. She was certain no one, not even Stanton Cutler, would be willing to publish it. It was too short, unfinished; even if it had been finished, DV’s readers would not tolerate a book about dead Italians in which the popular American writer didn’t make an appearance.

Later, Lucy put the manuscript in her carry-on suitcase, showered, and dressed for her trip. When the shippers arrived at noon, she was ready for them. They turned out to be two handsome men, one tall, one short, who knew only a few words of English between them. Lucy led them to DV’s apartment and pointed out the boxes, which they immediately attacked, taping and numbering each one with speed and efficiency;
Lucy remarked to herself that Italy was indeed a land of contrasts. The boxes began to disappear one by one into a bright new van they had pulled up flush to the bougainvillea arbor. The taller one gave Lucy a form in four languages, which she filled out with Jean McKay’s address and phone number, the information that the boxes contained books, papers, and personal effects, and the promise that the shipping costs would be paid on arrival in the States. The whole process was finished in under an hour. Lucy received one of the many copies of the lading bill, there was a brief exchange of thanks and farewells, and they drove away.

She stood in the doorway, jangling the house keys until the truck was out of sight. Then she turned back into the apartment. There was one small item of DV’s Italian business left to attend to.

She had not packed the love letter with the rest of DV’s papers. Her reasoning was simple: She did not believe it belonged to him. She had left it where she’d found it, in the drawer next to his bed. But she knew if she didn’t move the letter now, it would fall into the hands of Signora Panatella, who would, Antonio had warned her, start preparing the apartment for Lucy’s successors the minute she was out of the driveway. In one sense, she thought, it would serve the elder Cini right to have the evidence of his current folly fall into the hands of the Panatellas, his former tenants. They would not be, as she had been, confused by the signature, for they had undoubtedly seen examples of the handwriting of all three generations of Cinis presently residing in the villa. But Lucy disliked providing her landlords with such fuel for gossip and sneering. Though it was unlikely that he would ever learn of it, she knew it would wound Antonio sorely if he ever did find out. Lucy was in the odd position of wanting to protect Antonio
from a humiliation he might never actively feel. But he would feel it, she thought. He was sensitive about his family; his father’s connection with Catherine was a thorn in the side of his highly developed amour propre and it vibrated painfully with the slightest breath of scandal.

No, she concluded, it was none of the Panatellas’ business, nor anyone else’s, for that matter. Her options were clear. The letter should be returned to its sender, sent on to Catherine, or destroyed. As she slipped the key into the door beneath the bougainvillea arbor, another possibility presented itself. She could send the letter to Antonio and let him decide what should be done.

Yesterday, on parting, she had exchanged addresses with Antonio. He had written his carefully into her notebook in small neat handwriting, completely unlike his father’s bold magisterial style. “Do you think you might ever come to America?” Lucy asked as she tore out a deposit slip from her checkbook to give him in return.

“I think that is very unlikely,” he said. “I am always here, you see.” He opened his hands, indicating the hills, the trees, the dome of the sky. The corners of his mouth lifted slightly in an expression Lucy might once have characterized as sardonic, though now it struck her as self-mocking, a form of modesty. He was, in the oddest way she could ever have imagined, an unassuming man. “But if you come to Italy again, Lucia,” he said, “you will not forget to visit me, I hope. And you will not stay in this.…” He dragged his eyes contemptuously over the farmhouse. “There are so many rooms in my house. If you would be interested, I will take you to see the frescoes of Piero in Arezzo and the
Madonna del Parto
, as well. That is not to be missed.”

“I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

If I survive the car ride, Lucy thought now as she opened
the door. Perhaps she could persuade him to let her do the driving. She crossed the chilly sitting room to the stairs, shivering involuntarily. This apartment was always colder than the smaller one. When she and Massimo had stayed here, he brought over all the blankets and piled them up on the big bed upstairs, the only one in the house that could accommodate two people comfortably. Massimo couldn’t stand being cold. Lucy looked up the wide staircase, recalling how laboriously she had climbed it then, how she had leaned on his arm while he paused on each step, how excited she had been at the prospect of passing the whole long night by his side. She hurried up the stairs, away from this memory, which seemed to come from a much deeper past than that indicated by its actual distance in time. On the landing, she stopped and stared into DV’s study, bothered by an even nearer recollection, that of closing the door behind her as she followed the intrepid moving men down the stairs. She had not done it for any reason, but she knew she had done it, had felt the latch slip into place as she released the heavy glass knob, but now the door stood wide open. “This house has a mind of its own,” she said. She stepped into the room and looked about. The shutters were closed, the light was dim, but she could see that everything was orderly and as she had left it, the bed neatly made, the table cleared, the chair drawn up against it. She pulled the door nearly closed and stepped back to see if it would drift open in response to some imperceptible slant in the floor. It stayed just as she had placed it.

“My mind is going,” she said, turning away. She must have been mistaken about closing the door. She went into the bedroom, opened the drawer in the bedside table, and took out the letter. The sounds of wood rubbing against wood as the drawer slid open and the whisper of the paper as she lifted the
envelope out of the drawer made sudden intrusive explosions in the ponderous stillness of the house. She could feel it brooding over her like some heavy, muffling feathered creature settling down upon the smooth, hard shells of its own future. Though she had no need to open the letter and had taken it with no intention of doing so, something in the eerie silence of the place made her want to rupture it, and the rustling of the paper seemed as good a way as any.

Again she read the elaborate address:
Carissima, amatissima
, but this time she pictured not the bland, world-weary countenance of the younger Cini, but the fierce-eyed hawklike visage of his father. The old man had courted Catherine with all the passionate abandon of the old, dead world in which he had come of age; it was the only way he knew, and Catherine had thought so little of his effort, she hadn’t bothered even to keep track of it. Or perhaps she had left the letter here on purpose to enrage DV, who would have had to spend some time over a dictionary figuring out what was going on right under his nose. Lucy imagined herself into the scene of her dead employer’s unhappiness. As mysteriously as Catherine had come into his life—for the entrance of the one who can totally destroy our happiness is always a cloak-and-dagger affair—Catherine was gone out of it, and he was left in a foreign country with no one to contradict the ringing of her harsh judgment against him. DV had been a man of few resources, with the interior life of a brick. He had believed Catherine was the real thing, the very thing he needed, and that she would open the way for him into the sacred grove of art, where inspiration and wisdom flow eternally in twin streams from the same mythic fount. Instead, Catherine had thrown him out, slammed the gate in his face, and adjured him to take up gardening.

This last image made Lucy smile; it was so like that of the
first expulsion, the one she had thought she saw echoed in Catherine’s paintings: DV, expelled from paradise, condemned to Tuscany.

The silence of the room was pierced by the harsh cry of a crow near the window, and then another, farther off, in response.

They had all just wanted to get rid of him, Lucy thought. Catherine, the old man, Antonio, the Panatellas, but he had refused to go. And after he was dead, everyone wanted to forget him, get him buried, distribute the proceeds, close the books. She recalled the night she was burning with fever and DV had visited her in a fury, shaking her until she thought her neck would snap. The old man had stolen his love, Antonio had stolen his manuscript, he had died ignominiously, confused and drunk, wandering alone in the dark. No wonder he was in a rage.

Lucy felt a pang of sadness and another of guilt. She had intended to visit his grave to make sure the stone was suitable and to plant something that would grow without care, but she had been so caught up in her foolish love affair that she had failed to do it and now it was too late. “I’ll do it when I come back,” she said, though she had no idea when that might be. She folded the letter and slipped it into its envelope. She would destroy this letter. It had done enough damage already. She reached out to close the drawer, but her hand stopped just short of its destination, for in this motion she had turned toward the doorway, where her eyes were assaulted by a sight that froze her from head to foot as thoroughly as if she had been plunged into a glacial pool. The door to DV’s study was open.

Lucy’s eyes strained forward in their sockets, and she was dimly aware that for some moments now there had been a barely audible sound; she could make it out with difficulty
through the roar of her own heart, a steady, scratching sound, like fingernails on smooth wood. She gave herself several moments of counsel before she could move even her eyelids. It was impossible for anyone to be in the room she had just vacated; the only entrance was from the landing. The scratching sound was not new; she had heard it before in this house, and it was probably attributable to mice or insects gnawing between the walls. The open door was obviously … well, it was obviously just one of those doors. This last rationalization was so feeble, it gave her more trouble than comfort. She could not recall ever encountering one of those doors before. But her fevered reasoning had sufficed to bring her heart down to a dull pounding, like a distant pile driver, and she was able to raise her hand to wipe away the moisture that bathed her forehead and upper lip. Except for the scratching sound, which was intermittent now, the quiet around her was intense. She took one, then another, step toward the landing, moving stealthily, in exaggerated slow motion, as if she really did expect to surprise some intruder, though the truth, she realized, was that she was actually moving as quickly as she could. In this way, she crossed the landing. If only all the shutters weren’t closed, she thought. How absurd this trepidation and caution would be if there were a flood of sunshine to light the way. She would stride into the room, look about boldly, and stride right out again.

At the threshold of the door, she stopped and looked wistfully down the staircase. Was there really any need to investigate further this nagging mystery of the open door? She had the letter; it was all she had come for. She could simply descend the stairs, lock the door, and walk away. Surely she would have no reason ever to enter this house again. As she had the thought that the scratching sound had stopped, it started up again. Then she heard something else, something small, but so
clear and recognizable, her heart took off before it like a spooked horse and she felt her ears pulling away from her head. It was the delicate whoosh of a piece of paper sliding off a table onto the floor. She was close enough now to see into the room by leaning forward. She would then have a clear view of everything but the bed. Just lean forward, she told herself. Just look in quickly and then go on down the stairs. Another moment of perfect silence passed, no scratching, no breathing; then Lucy rested one hand on the doorsill, stretched out her neck, and peered into the room.