The Light in the Ruins

  “In Petroio? I passed it on the way here.”

  “That’s the one. You should talk to him.”

  “He knows something?”

  “He might. He’s married now, of course. But as a boy, he had such a crush on that girl.”

  “That girl? Francesca? Cristina?”

  She nodded ruefully. “The younger one. The pretty one. Cristina—the one who slept with the Germans.”

  Before leaving the village, Serafina spoke with a pair of old men sipping espresso in one of the cafés, as well as the pharmacist, the butcher, and a young mother pushing her baby in a stroller. None of them could add anything to what the first woman had told her of Cristina—or, to be precise, what that woman had alleged of Cristina—but the butcher admitted that some people had certainly been jealous of the Rosatis’ wealth. One of the old men she interviewed said there was a necropolis on the property but all of the artifacts had been confiscated by the Nazis; then his friend corrected him, insisting that the relics were given by the family to the museum in Arezzo long before the war, and there were far too few tombs to call it a necropolis anyway. They bickered until Serafina thanked them and moved on.

  Finally there was the pharmacist. He sucked in deeply on his cigarette and said that he most certainly remembered Francesca: she had a fierce, wonderful tongue, he recalled. He wasn’t surprised that a marchese’s son had fallen in love with her; he said he thought she was the most interesting woman ever to walk the grounds of the estate. She actually belonged in a villa named after a beast that breathed fire.

  “You liked her?”

  “I did,” he said ruefully. “I really did.”

  “Can you think of a reason why someone might have killed her?” she pressed him. “Can you think of anyone who hated her enough to murder her?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Especially after what people say she went through. They say her husband died right in front of her eyes—in her arms. Marco, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And of course Francesca outlived her children. Was it three?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  He nodded. “They say she was at the villa when the children were killed in the fighting.”

  “It was after the fighting,” she corrected him. “A land mine the Nazis had left behind.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “It was,” she agreed. “Did you know Marco?”

  “I would have recognized him on the street. But he wouldn’t have known me.”

  “So you can’t think of any reason why someone would have wanted to kill her.”

  “No. Her family, maybe. But not her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘her family’?”

  “Well, the Blackshirts and the Nazis looked favorably upon the Rosatis. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with some people.”

  “As I understand it, the Nazis commandeered the estate,” Serafina said.

  He shrugged. “Commandeered it? Or were they welcomed? When a lot of people were hungry in the war, the Rosatis seemed to want for nothing.”

  “Were they that close to the Fascists?”

  “There were plenty of stories. And there were Nazis at the villa all the time in 1943 and 1944. The staff cars were always coming and going.”

  She thought about what the old woman had alleged of Cristina. “What do you remember about the youngest of the marchese’s children? Cristina?”

  He smiled a little wistfully. “She was such a young beauty.”

  “She still is. How well did you know her?”

  “I knew her better than Marco, because she would come into the shop as a little girl and then as a teenager. She was always with her mother or the cook or, later on, with Francesca.”

  “What else?”

  “There is no what else.”

  “And Vittore? The middle child?”

  “A bookish boy. A bookish man. A scholar of some sort.”

  “An archeologist.”

  “Where are they now? Vittore and Cristina?”

  “In Rome.”

  He sighed. “It’s a shame to see the villa in such disrepair. If they can’t afford to live there, they should sell it. Someone should fix it up. Maybe those Americans who are always coming to see Pienza. The tourists.”

  “I gather repairing it would be an expensive proposition.”

  “It would be,” he said.

  The bell on the door behind them tinkled as a customer strolled in: another young mother, a little boy in shorts holding her hand. The pharmacist snuffed out his cigarette and turned to the woman, and so Serafina thanked him and left. She thought she would head up to the Villa Chimera; she wanted to wander around the grounds of the estate and still have time to interview the fellow at the terra-cotta factory before it closed for siesta.

  Milton’s BMW groaned as it bounced its way up the twisting gravel driveway to the villa, and Serafina parked at a pull-off fifty meters from the main house and walked the rest of the way. The weeds were rampant and rose through the white rocks like wheat. Likewise, the lavender along the walkway to the villa was so overgrown that a person could barely see the stones. A tortoiseshell cat, rangy and feral, leapt through a broken window along the first floor of the once proud estate and raced down the hill toward the Tarantine marble hole that had been the swimming pool.

  The front door was long gone and so she walked right in. Immediately the two pigeons that had been perched on a high shelf in the foyer dove through the entryway, nearly hitting her head on their way past, and flew up into the blue sky. They could, however, have escaped from the house even more easily through the enormous hole in the roof. She found the smell of cat urine almost overwhelming; clearly that tortoiseshell did not live here alone. She wondered how the birds and the cats cohabited in this shell of a house, and presumed the birds took the high ground and that was that. There was bird shit, some of it calcified, along the kitchen counter beneath a rafter and on the stone windowsills.

  As Cristina had told her, most of the furniture was gone. Anything left inside the villa was broken and worthless. Still, she found a massive two-legged dining room table at roughly a forty-five-degree angle and a great pile of brown rags in the shadows. After a moment, she realized that once they had been white linen napkins and a tablecloth. There were colorful pieces of broken glass all along the floor in the kitchen and the pantry. Murano glass, she suspected. Wine goblets, based on what looked like a pair of stems. Two sconces dangled by their electrical wiring along one wall, and on the wall opposite them she saw two holes where another pair had been ripped out.

  She walked around the corner into what she expected would be a living room or conservatory and was instantly bathed in sunlight: the exterior wall, all the way to the second floor ceiling, was gone. The fissure was easily eighteen to twenty feet high and perhaps a dozen feet wide. The sides were charred black. There was a small pile of rubble she navigated carefully, and once outdoors, she saw a much larger mound of debris shoveled to the side.

  From here she could observe the olive grove, which was the same riot of growth as all the gardens and grass on the estate, and what she guessed were the rolling hills on which the sheep and the cattle had once grazed. Where Cristina had ridden her horse. In the far distance, she noted Mount Amiata. Much closer, no more than three kilometers distant, she could see the village of Monte Volta and that hulking, iconic granary tower. The town was separated from the Villa Chimera by a deep valley. She walked farther into the grass and sat down, breathing in the aroma of the wildflowers and yellow broom. She stretched out her legs, and her mind moved back and forth between the stories Cristina had told her of Francesca’s children at play in that swimming pool and what she herself had experienced somewhere near here. Based on the vista and the angle of the granary, she guessed the villa where they had fought and where she had nearly been killed was a few kilometers to the west.

  It couldn’t possibly have been here, she tried to assure herself. The views of
the granary and the village were all wrong.

  She sighed. She tried to recall what her mother and father had sounded like and she couldn’t. She tried to recall either of her brothers’ voices and those were gone, too.

  Instead she heard in her head the imagined laughter of Francesca’s little boy and little girl as they amused themselves in that swimming pool. Massimo. Alessia. Cristina had told her that she used to make doll clothing for Alessia and they played together with the dolls on the tile and the chaise longues beside the water. But that vision wouldn’t linger either. Her mind kept roaming back to the sounds of the British rifle she had used throughout the summer of 1944; she felt once again the bruising, painful thud against her shoulder each time she fired it. It was either pathetic or grotesque, but while Cristina was playing dolls with her niece by that swimming pool, she was shooting German engineers at railheads or taking an ax to railroad ties. Her first assignment, in the late autumn of 1943, had been to slice the tires of Wehrmacht staff cars parked at an estate outside Pienza and cut the phone lines she found extending from the villa. A month after that she had helped ambush a trio of particularly despicable SS officers and their three guards when they were dining at a restaurant in Radicofani. In response the Germans had rounded up and executed thirty-six men, women, and children from the village—six Italians for each German who had been killed. They had lined them up against the eastern wall of the church and emptied half a dozen machine guns into them. It was more or less what Enrico and Salvatore had hoped would occur: the SS officers would be dead and the Nazis would respond in a brutal, draconian fashion. Then, the two brothers expected, the area villagers would rise up against their occupiers. Instead, however, the Tuscans had remained sheep after the slaughter; their partisan band had actually lost volunteers. Five members defected, no longer trusting Enrico’s judgment, and went home. She, of course, had stayed. She had no home to return to. Besides, Enrico and Teresa and Salvatore were her family now. The Tarantolas. The miners and winemakers and a couple of renegades from the Italian army. A few girlfriends. A sister. A wife. At the group’s largest, there were forty of them. By the time she was nearly killed, they had scattered into detachments of five and six.

  Now she stared up into the cloudless sky, wishing she had brought her cola here from the car, and licked her lips against her thirst.

  Mostly she had killed Germans in the war. But not entirely. Though she had never executed a collaborator, she had shot other Italians in one violent battle with a group of Blackshirts as the Fascists had retreated north with the Nazis in the summer of 1944. That would have been eleven years ago now.

  And then there had been the brief, vicious skirmish not far from this very villa. It was an incendiary grenade that had almost killed her.

  She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn’t. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.

  A few years ago she had had a lover who was a physician, and he had examined the ruin that was the flesh on her back and neck and the side of her head and wondered how she had endured the pain when she had first been burned. He had guessed a lot of morphine. He’d told her it was possible the phosphorous had continued to smolder hours afterward. Imagine, he’d remarked, almost talking to himself, white smoke wafting into the air from your shoulder and side like a campfire the next morning. He’d made a bad joke that he would have begged someone to shoot him. He had no idea that she had. Once, when they were making love, he had noticed the small, recent burn marks dotting the insides of her thighs. Each was the size of a match head. She had tried to convince him they were bug bites. He had begged her to stop.

  In 1952 she had made an attempt to find Enrico, hoping he would tell her precisely what had happened. Aside from her, Enrico and Salvatore were the only members of their small brigade who hadn’t bothered with fake names. Even Enrico’s wife had made one up. They did this so that if they were ever captured, they couldn’t give the Germans real names and thus endanger real families. Neither she nor Enrico and his brother had any family, so it didn’t matter. And so it would not be until after that last firefight, when she woke up from whatever stupor had engulfed her—protected her, really—that she would change her name. Serafina. The burning one. Her new identity. It was and would be forever who she was. What she was.

  She never did find Enrico. Even with the resources of the police at her disposal, she was unable to track him down. In all likelihood he had died in 1944 or 1945. Or perhaps he and Teresa had survived and moved to America. He’d sometimes fantasized about moving to New York City. Actually talked about the Statue of Liberty, which, like many Tuscans, he considered to have been inspired by Pio Fedi’s memorial for Giovanni Battista Niccolini in Santa Croce. Thought Fedi should have gotten more credit. Either way, dead or alive, Enrico and Teresa were gone.

  She opened her eyes and focused on the granary tower. Its collapse, she feared, was forever going to be the last thing she would recall from that day.

  Before leaving the estate, she went down the hill to try to find the tombs, following the directions Cristina had given her. She walked gingerly along the prickly tufa. She passed the remnants of the grape arbors and then, as Cristina had instructed, turned to the left and felt as if she were descending into the earth. She worried briefly that she had made a mistake, especially when the ground had risen up around her on both sides and the crevice grew narrow. But then she arrived, almost suddenly, at the cul-de-sac. She counted four arched doorways and randomly selected one. She passed the remnants of the three columns, ducked her head, and went inside.

  And swore. Her purse was back in Milton’s car, and that meant she had no matches to really see the burial chambers—or whatever was left of the chambers. The paintings on the walls of the dancers and musicians she’d been told about. The images of the fruit trees. Inside, it was not quite as cold as a cave, but the air was markedly cooler than it had been a dozen feet behind her. Here was a small world never to be warmed by the sun.

  She felt before her as she moved in the dark because Cristina had warned her that the pedestals for the funerary urns in the first rooms were still present, as were the platforms for the sarcophagi, and she didn’t want to trip over them in the dark or crack her shins against them. In a moment she found one of the pedestals, touching it first with the toe of her shoe and then with her fingers, and sat down, staring back through the blackness at the window of daylight. If she breathed in deeply through her nose, she could smell faint vestiges of the ground above her—field grass and wildflowers—but mostly she smelled mold and dampness and something vaguely fetid. She thought of the corpses she had seen at the morgue and the odor of the polluted wounds from the war. The smell of her own back and skull as subcutaneous flesh fought infection and tried desperately to heal in that summer of 1944.

  This odor was reminiscent of that, but also of something else. Something distantly familiar but nevertheless, like so much else in her life, unreachable.

  One of the older partisans, a fellow who might have been forty (which, when she had been seventeen and eighteen years old, had seemed downright geriatric; no more), had managed a vineyard and talked often about the flavors of wine. Wines, in his vocabulary, could have hints of blackcurrant or burned toast, of green olive or aged oak. Of spices and fruit trees and resins. Everything had an association.

  Finally she rose and started back to the villa, frustrated with herself for having left her purse in the car.

  The old woman’s nephew was named Ilario, and he was muscular and short and his black mustache was thick. He sat beside her in one of the wooden chairs the factory workers had placed in a copse of chestnut and fir trees. He explained that when they didn’t go home for siesta, some of the men would come to these chairs and sit and smoke in the shade. He said he was married, which she already knew, but he volunteered proudly that he was going to bec
ome a father for the first time that autumn. Serafina had guessed he was twenty-eight, and she was close. He said he had just turned twenty-seven.

  “So why has a detective come all the way from Florence to talk to me? Should I be scared?” he asked, the otherwise casual remark made toxic by the flippancy of his tone.

  “Unless you’ve done something wrong, I doubt it.”

  He smirked a little lecherously and looked down at her legs. “You haven’t had a baby yet,” he said. “A man can tell.”

  “Have you heard about Francesca Rosati?” she asked, ignoring him.

  “I heard just this morning. People were talking about it when I got to work. No baby?”

  “No baby. How well did you know Francesca?”

  He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and pretended to rub at his biceps. In fact he was flexing it, showing it off. “I knew her. Not well. I didn’t have time for the likes of her. I had a job to do at the Villa Chimera. Many jobs, in fact. But mostly I helped manage their sheep and their cattle. Me and an idiot Sardinian twice my age. I was only a teenager, you know. But still, I had real responsibility.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the likes of her’?”

  He looked Serafina in the eyes and said, “They said someone cut her throat and then cut out her heart. At least that was what people said was in the newspaper. Is that true?”

  “It is.”

  “Well, then, it was only a matter of time. She was … Oh, you’re a lady. A lady with a gun, maybe. But look at your dress, your shoes. I can tell you don’t use the word I would use to describe Francesca.”

  “Try me.”

  He shook his head. “I will say only this—she saw people as toys. Especially men. She thought she was better than all of us.”