The Whirling Girl (2 page)

Italy is Dangerous

ALONG THE NARROW TWISTING road that led from the autostrada, Clare passed olive groves, meadows, red fields with shadowed furrows. A stretch of umbrella pines floated like obedient clouds. No further sight of the cream-coloured Mercedes. What cheap force had flooded up in her back there? She felt another light-headed rush and then another.

Italy was dangerous. She'd been warned of that by jealous friends before she left. The place was rife with handsome roadside mashers. She'd been quite right to flee. But what an idiotic thing to throw away her hat, which she had rediscovered in a trunk and decided would be a talisman of sorts; it had belonged to the dear old relative in Vancouver who'd taken her in as a runaway when she was just thirteen. She brushed back her wild hair. What had she imagined — that an eagle would swoop down and restore the hat, heralding her triumphal entry into a new exalted state of being, the way the first Tarquin had entered Rome?

Rough purple mountains appeared in the distance. On a nearer slope a vast rocky patch appeared, disappeared with a bend in the road, swung into view again, and became three-dimensional. A whole city pulling itself up into massive walls and ochre buildings and towers, like a child's pop-up book.

Cortona. The city older than Troy.

She rummaged in her bag for the directions the Italian solicitor had sent along with the key. The house was on a farther slope, behind the town. When she found it, would it be heartbreaking and lovely? Or would the walls ooze a toxic mix of forgiveness and guilt? Sometimes, in the weeks before she'd left Vancouver, the amazement of the bequest had opened before her like a reprieve. Sometimes it snapped shut like a trap.

She circled the base of the hill, wound through a maze of lanes, turned up onto a steep dirt track where the jeep had to straddle washed-out ruts. She peered at the notes again: “Just past some newly planted hectares of the olive, one must turn into the lane to one's left. One is home.”

THE LANE WIDENED INTO an area of rugged grass. Geraniums in terracotta pots perched along the edge. Treetops reached from below. The house seemed to grow right out of the slope, a house of lichen-covered stone with a side arbour of wisteria. It was ancient, weathered — the stone steps that led up to the arbour, too. One large window on the upper level scattered the setting sun from its many panes. Green shutters covered the others. Clare parked under a great gnarled oak. The air was thick with the scent of wisteria, and the sound of bees.

She was shaking. She let her gaze escape across the wide sweep of the valley, towards some distant cone-shaped hills half-lost in mist. She took out the big iron key, hefted out the plastic case that held the ashes. Her clothes had gone on to some other destination, but the suitcase with her art materials had made it. She dragged it to the double door on the lower level, and into a shuttered area where the space was divided by a ladder stairway. Was this one of those old farmhouses where the lower floor had once been a cattle barn? A scorpion skittered into a dark corner. She dropped the cases, and made her way up the ladder stairs.

THE ROOM SHE STEPPED into was striking and unexpected, yet for a moment seemed foretold. She experienced the same feeling she'd had on the freeway when the young man had come striding up.

Light poured through the great window, pooled on the uneven terracotta floor. A smoky mirror caught the view of distant hills settling in a froth of golden mist. At one end of the room a great stone fireplace rose, big enough to roast a calf in; doors of heavy wood and glass led out to the wisteria arbour at the other. Down a set of shallow steps she glimpsed copper pots above a black enamel stove.

One is home.

She stretched out her arms, turned slowly, faster, whirled, catching her reflection again and again in the cloudy mirror. Dizzy, she braced herself on the heavy sideboard that held the mirror, studied the woman with the wild shining hair as if this were an illustration in an old-fashioned book where the heart of the heroine was gold and pure.

In that mirrored land, the distant olive groves on the back slope of the hill that held Cortona looked close enough to touch. A ruined fortress loomed at the top, against a sky turning amethyst. A bell rang in Cortona. Perhaps the bell from the basilica of Santa Margherita, a saint whose story began like a fairytale — an innocent country girl, barely a teen, seduced to live with her noble lover in one of those distant hilltop towns that now glimmered across the plain in the last evening glow.

But real dusk was seeping in, reflections jittering in the warped panes of windows and doors. The wrought-iron lantern above the trestle table cast the merest slick of light. Catching a flash of movement, Clare whirled around. A lizard clung to a ceiling beam, its jewelled scales attracting the lantern light, its bright eyes sharp. Then with a tiny flick, it was gone, leaving a ripple of unease. Probably Italy was dangerous. Her helpful friends had warned her of the gangs of wandering gypsies or Calabrians, and the famous Butcher of Florence who slit the throats of lovers in the woods.

Were the doors all locked? She started to check, first the small oak door beside the fireplace. It scraped on the tiles as she eased it open. She stood with her hand on the door frame. Her uncle's room. In the shuttered gloom, the dark outline of a bed. She retreated.

Back down the ladder stairs, she twisted the iron key firmly in the lock. With the light on, she discovered it was a fine space. Not a trace of a former barn, the walls lined with books, a mellow brick floor.

Above a desk, though, hung the ugliest oil painting she'd ever seen, a paint-by-numbers stream gushing diagonally down a slope between brooding trees, lumpy striped rocks breaking the flow. Worse, on a shelf below, a purple hand mirror popped into view, the back stamped with a motto in fake gothic writing: “Seek and ye shall find.”

Her heart stopped.

So many innocent games he'd devised when she was little, because she had no playmates on the farm. Treasure hunts and paper chases, even a wooden puzzle-box that had required Zen-like patience, till she worked out how to spring the lock.

Seek and ye shall find.

Hadn't the obituary said that he'd been working on a book that would tell of some remarkable Etruscan find? Could these odd objects be clues in one last puzzle he'd set for her — this was why he'd brought her here? He must have left behind notes and papers — a true paper chase, giving further clues?

She started pulling books from the shelves, tearing open the desk drawers, checking out the alcove behind the staircase where she found a great luxurious tiled bath — then racing up the stairs, searching through the rest of the house, shying past the door into his bedroom, to pull open every drawer and cupboard.

Nothing. Except to discover that the great beautiful room upstairs was badly lit. How would she do her work? She spied the top of an angle-poise lamp poking up behind a big fireplace chair, but this turned out to have a tiny lemon-sized bulb, and worse, the lamp was wired to an almost unmoveable bronze statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf, the whole contraption so extraordinarily tacky that she could only shake her head. The low table this sat on was covered with a beautiful shawl of heavy silk, fringed with coloured crystal beads. The beads made a tiny tinkling music when she reached down and fingered them, before she worked up the courage to push open the bedroom door again and fumble for a light switch.

BESIDE THE BED THERE were three books.

Absurd to imagine he had made sure exactly those three books would be in that position, certain to catch her eye.

The two Everyman volumes were on top, worn gilt print on the spine, above a pattern of flowers.
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
. So many times she'd seen him pull one or the other from his pocket. She knew exactly where the art nouveau design on the frontispiece of Volume One would be stained because a child had spilled cocoa on it. She knew the page she should turn to, in order to find, in the upper left corner, a small black-and-white illustration:
Etruscan Dancing-Girl
. She knew how either of those compact little books would feel if she were to pick it up and open it at random:
Sutri, Nepi, Norchia, Pitigliano, Tarquinii
. The names of places that had held queerness and splendour. She had learned to read by spelling out those names, often pronouncing them wrong.

And under the top volumes? Without coming a step closer she recognized the book he had kept on a shelf in his study in that other farmhouse in western Washington, never knowing (she had thought then) how she had crept in there almost from the time she could read, to sound her way through the true grownup versions of the stories he had told her ever since she was very little. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Oxford edition, on the cover the helpless form of the young god of war, asleep, pinkly draped across the lap of a Venus who smiled a creamy smile.

A whistle broke the silence.

Just a bird?

She remembered a stout burled stick in a copper stand by the kitchen door. When she went to get it, foolish or not, she noticed a hunting coat hanging on a hook by the door, an old green coat with cargo pockets and cartridge loops.

She took the coat down. She buried her face in the quilted lining, caught the smell of once-familiar tobacco. Finally, a whiff of him. She sank down at the kitchen table, and stared through the glasspaned door to where the kitchen light shone on a flowering quince. A pinkish-white petal floated down, and then another. Watching this, waiting for another petal to fall, breathing the smell that the old coat released, she understood how absurd all this other caution was, how it hardly mattered about the thieving gypsies and the strangling Calabrians.

After a while, she turned the pages of a loose-leaf binder on the table. It held information about the house, the pages yellowed, typed with an old machine where the c and the g struck above the line of type. “If you hear noises in the night, they will be these: a wild boar (
cinghiale
) rooting in the woods beside the house or among the olive trees; a porcupine grubbing out the arum lilies along the drive; a screech owl. There is nothing to fear.”

But there's always something to fear, Clare thought.

It comes creeping up from inside if nowhere else.

IN RAINFORESTS OF THE upper Rio Negro, Clare, the imaginary traveller, had not been afraid. She had watched the ruby eyes of caimans gliding by, as her guide poled the dugout through dark waters. She had eased past giant anacondas on the trail. She had calmly gathered up her painting materials and slipped back to camp, when she heard the crashing of a jaguar in the brush.

Where The Bull Was Kept

HUDDLED INSIDE HER UNCLE'S hunting coat, on his dark bed, Clare listened to a little wind slipping through some unfamiliar Italian trees. She heard the rushing of a stream. In the rafters, night thoughts roosted. She tried to concentrate on just the whispers of air as they played through twigs and leaves, pretending this could be a new discipline, identifying growing things not just by leaf and bract and stem but by the sounds they made as the wind played through.

Then the moon reached in and said,
Hush now little Clare. Your mother's name was Selene, another name for the moon. You will never be an orphan, Chiara, because your mother will always be shining down on you.

On nights when she couldn't sleep, he used to comfort her with these words.

To the sound of the stream, Clare began drifting back and back to the true place, the good place, and darkness gave way to the full rich green of a coastal morning rising, where a man and a little girl were heading to a stream full of cutthroat, the man carrying his own rod and the girl's new one as he helped her through the fence into the field where the bull was staked, below the folly of a west coast farmhouse with an Italian tower. The bull was raising its head, shaking its chain. The man said, “Stand tall; show him that you are not afraid.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I would be. But he's staked, Chiara.”

They were playing hooky from a long list of chores. In his pocket were two hard buns with slabs of cheese, and in his other pocket was Volume One of
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
. They had only just started on these travels, which he would take her on whenever they managed to escape for the next brief years, Volume One illustrating the map of a city with its ancient gates and streets and ruins and the cemetery that held tombs like small brilliant houses, and such paintings on the walls. All this was described in a way so grownup that Clare let a lot of it flow over her. Bit by bit the pictures formed. Her uncle said they would go there together.

This was the prelude. Now, to inhabit the crucial moment that exploded some days later, to be truly there, she needed to summon up the smell of burning sun on clay, the glitter of Oregon grape against the cliff that dropped from the farmhouse to the field. And then little Chiara, digging, digging — in danger and hot young jealousy and fury — into that steep cracked wall of clay.

If she is quick — but has left enough clues — he will come and find her.

It turns out she is nothing in that house. He doesn't care that she did the drawing of the foxgloves just for him. She signed the drawing with the tiny upright fork shape he'd explained made a k sound in the Etruscan alphabet, “as in your name, Chiara,” signed it with the symbol only he would understand, to show how she absorbed everything he said. But he had left her picture on the table where her aunt could come and crumple it and throw it on the fire. Now Clare has the butcher knife and she is carving a place to disappear.

“Oh, what our Etruscans could have done with this cliff face, Chiara,” he'd said when they came back across the field the week before, his face lighting up in that way that made her feel peculiar power. “We'll pretend the cliff is limestone, shall we? Its location would have been ideal for our Etruscan friends to carve tombs.” Excited now, pointing out how the horseshoe shape of the cliff brought it into perfect view of the house above. “That is the essential element for an Etruscan city of the dead — in view of the habitation of the living.”

What a strange activity for a child.

“Shall we carve the entrance of a rock-tomb, like the drawing I showed you?” Dark hair falling in his face as he set down the fishing gear. What child wouldn't enjoy feeling singled out, special? What child wouldn't delight in taking turns with his fish knife to carve an elaborate house-front into clay, then being hoisted onto his shoulders so she could cut stick figures on the triangle shape above the columns? But as she'd wriggled down and begun to hollow out a true entrance between the columns, he'd grabbed her back, scolded her. Yes the Etruscans had carved tombs deep into the living rock, but this was only clay. It would be dangerous to burrow in there.

In deeper now, when it turns out she isn't special after all. Burrow deeper still! The hot sun baking the outer clay, the blood roiling through her brain as she carves her way to darkness, hacking out great reckless chunks with the stolen butcher knife.

Eventually she hears him calling. So what? She will live here. In the night she will bring blankets, a camp stove, food.

When she feels the down-rush of dusty earth, it is too late to call out or do anything but curl up like a snail and wonder, almost triumphant, if perhaps she will not be found till centuries later. Will she be fossilized by then, the clay turned to limestone at last, her curled body too?

What she smells next is his fear. Sharp as a knife it cuts a channel ahead of him, the stink of it. She keeps her eyes closed after he gets her free. He collapses to his knees outside, crushing her tightly to him, saying, “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” Her hand creeps to his armpit. She breathes his fear from her fingers, and the smell of love and almost-death. There will never be anything, ever, to match that moment.