The Light in the Ruins

  That small part of her that had momentarily analyzed their kiss—that had seen in her mind a painting by (and the name flashed in and out of her head) Francesco Hayez—had now been subsumed by desire. All she was aware of was his tongue and his hands and his thigh, the fact that they were all alone, and how beautifully their bodies fit together.

  Francesca sat on the terrace and watched the late afternoon sky growing black in the distance, and how the cypress trees at the edge of the village, across the ravine and near the granary, were starting to bow in the breeze. The storm would be here in minutes. She sipped her wine and listened to her children giggling as they played a card game on the rug in the library behind her, on the other side of the open doors. The German lieutenant had returned to the villa three times in the two weeks since he had given Cristina that necklace, and this worried Francesca. She neither liked this Strekker nor trusted him, in large measure because he was a Nazi, but also because he was a part of that whole crowd at the Uffizi that her brother-in-law loathed. Idiots and philistines and racists, the whole lot of them, Vittore had said. And yesterday when the lieutenant had been here, he had hinted that even more of his associates would be coming in a few days to see the Etruscan tombs and the estate. Not just the usual crowd—that Decher and Lorenzetti and Voss. A swarm of others. And this time, the lieutenant said, he wanted to show them all of the villa and the gardens and the cemetery, because, he insisted, the Villa Chimera itself was a work of art.

  She wished her in-laws would draw a line in the sand and stop this lunacy. Tell their daughter to steer clear of that Nazi lieutenant. She wished Antonio would forbid the Germans from setting a single foot on his land. Wasn’t he (and even in her mind she said the words with disdain) a marchese? She was confident that if Marco were here he would intervene. He would talk to his sister. He would talk to his father. He would end this madness.

  When she looked up, she saw Cristina in the doorway. Her sister-in-law was leaning against the frame and smiling. “I love it when the air is this charged,” she said.

  In the distance they could both hear the tinkle of the bells on the sheep as they were herded into their barn.

  “Right now you love everything,” Francesca scoffed.

  “It’s true. I think I feel like you must have felt when you and Marco were first dating.”

  “I rather doubt that. The man I fell in love with didn’t walk around in a German uniform and pillage our country’s sculptures and paintings.”

  “I know who he really is. I know what’s beneath that uniform.”

  “Do you? Well, that is nothing to be proud of.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Francesca stood up and sighed. She threw the last of her wine into the grass beside the terrace. “Come,” she said. “We should close the shutters before the storm arrives.”

  Vittore paused for a long moment on the thin curb on the Via Ghibellina outside the Bargello, honestly not sure where he was going. Then he decided. He started walking east, away from the city center, toward the cramped apartment where a woman his age named Giulia slept with him for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that he brought her food. Her husband had died fighting in Greece, and her father had been dead for years. Her mother now lived in Fiesole, and sometimes he walked there with the young woman—she wasn’t precisely his girlfriend—especially when he had brought food for her mother as well. Giulia had a face as round as a cheese wheel, the gloriously plump cheeks of a toddler, and eyes that were at odds with the reality of the world: they always were filled with mirth, even when she was tired from her job as a typist at the radio station. She was not heavy—it was impossible to be heavy these days—but Vittore presumed that ten or fifteen years from now, when this war was merely a series of horrific and degrading memories, she might be. Sometimes he fantasized that they would be married then. He imagined that she would be a wonderful mother. In his mind, they were living in Rome. He had always wanted to live in Rome. Her hair was the brown of a clove, and it framed her face like a wimple.

  He found a vendor in the piazza near Santa Croce who sold him two eggs, a couple of stale rolls, and a slice of moldering ham at a price that was exorbitant, but not nearly as high as it would have been if he weren’t wearing a uniform and armed with a pistol. Then he continued on his way to Giulia’s.

  Giulia wrapped herself inside Vittore’s shirt because it was the first article of clothing she found on the floor by her bed, but she only buttoned the bottom third. As she stood, he pulled at the tail from his spot on the mattress, less because he desired one last glimpse of her round derriere (Is there any part of her that is not spherical? he wondered briefly) than because he knew it would make her feel desired. She swatted at his hand good-naturedly and continued on to the apartment’s only other room, a square with a single window the size of a serving tray that was part kitchen, part dining room, and part den. There she boiled the eggs and put the rolls beside the pot of water so the heat from the top of the stove would soften them. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with the ham.

  “Fry it,” Vittore suggested. He had pulled on his pants and followed her. “Won’t that kill whatever’s on it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “It is a very scary piece of meat,” he agreed.

  “And you were assured it was ham when you bought it?”

  “I was. The fellow swore on his life.”

  “I think it’s from a rat.”

  He held up the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Too big. Have you ever seen a rat this big?”

  “You’ve never been to the basement of this building. The rats are bigger than dogs.”

  “I say you fry it in oil.”

  “I say we fry it in kerosene.”

  “Then we can’t eat it.”

  “I know. But I also won’t have to fear that whatever creatures are on it will hatch and crawl into my bed tonight.”

  He dropped the meat onto the wooden block on the counter and pulled her to him. He ran his hands under the shirt—his shirt—and massaged her back. “Only I’ll crawl into your bed tonight.”

  “And shouldn’t I fear you?”

  “No one fears me,” he said.

  She dipped her head and rested it against his chest. Her hair felt as soft as velvet and shone in the ray of light that came in through the window. “Maybe I fear you’ll stop coming,” she murmured.

  He lifted her head and spied the long crevice between her breasts. “Why would I stop coming?” he asked. He resisted the urge to push the fabric aside and take one of her nipples between his lips.

  “Because you’ll get yourself killed. It’s what you men seem to do. And then we women starve. Or we sleep with archeologists and we still starve.” Her words were playful, but her voice, he realized, was completely earnest. She meant every word that she said.

  “I don’t expect I’ll get killed.”

  “No one expects to get killed.”

  “I may die of aggravation. But I won’t get killed.”

  She pushed against his chest and he released her. She put some water in a cast-iron skillet—she hadn’t any olive oil—and tossed in the slice of rotting meat.

  “I don’t imagine you have to eat like this when you are at your villa,” she said. “In my mind, I see honey and goat cheese and wine.”

  He shrugged. “I’m never there. Strekker is, it seems. But not me.”

  “Is that the German who has designs on your sister?”

  “Yes. He has no foot, but he has a driver. He has no knowledge of Italian art, but Decher is always sending him off to Pienza or Siena to bring some back. Me? I am in the museum protecting the collection from our vaunted ally. But here’s the damnedest thing—I actually think Strekker’s interest in my sister is growing … serious.”

  “A marchese’s daughter? He’d better be serious. It’s not as if your sister is some slatternly Florentine secretary. You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a unifo
rm who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat.”

  “You’re selling yourself short.”

  “I’ve just sold myself for rat meat,” she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

  While much of the estate was resting or asleep during siesta, Beatrice and Antonio braved the high summer sun and walked along the edge of the vineyard and surveyed the Sangiovese grape arbors.

  “The Germans are taking some of the relics we gave to the museum in Arezzo. One of the amphoras and the hydria,” Antonio said when they came to a stop. He stood with his hands on the wooden fence, and Beatrice noted how he was gazing out at the long field as he spoke. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—meet her eyes. “That Major Lorenzetti told me.”

  “Where are they taking them?” she asked. “Berlin?”

  “No. Rome. Colonel Decher is giving them to some Gestapo liaison there. He wants him to see the triangles and what he insists are swastikas along the lip of the urn. He wants him to see the profiles of the revelers, the shape of their skulls. It’s a … a gift.”

  Beatrice frowned. “I really don’t like that man.”

  “Decher? He’s not the worst. He’s actually starting to grow on me. I found him rather clever the last time he was here. He was an architect before the war.”

  “He likes our wine and our cheese. He likes the view from the terrace. That doesn’t make him clever.”

  “He’s Vittore’s boss,” Antonio said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “He’s a Nazi. Don’t you forget that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “So they are stealing Etruscan pottery from the museum and giving it away like hostess gifts,” she said, her tone vacillating between resignation and disgust. “What next? They’ll pinch a Botticelli for some field marshal in France?”

  “At least the pottery is remaining in Italy.”

  Somewhere in the brush at the edge of the vineyard they heard a wild boar snort. Beatrice thought the ground looked a little dry, even for this time of the year, but the leaves on the grapevines seemed healthy enough. “It won’t for long,” she said.

  “Perhaps not,” Antonio agreed.

  She looked at him. “There’s something more.”

  “There is.”

  “Go on.”

  He resumed his stroll and so she did, too. “Decher and Lorenzetti want to bring that Gestapo fellow here—the one from Rome—so he can see the tombs for himself. It seems he is interested in Etruscan art.”

  “We can’t allow that,” she said. “We can’t have Gestapo here.”

  “I don’t think we really have much of a choice. Besides …”

  She waited, but she feared she knew what he was going to say. “Besides,” he continued, “I think we need to be good citizens. Loyal. We have to for Vittore’s sake and we have to for Marco’s sake. And let’s face it,” and here he paused and waved his hand over the vineyard and then in the direction of the olive grove and the fields where once there had been herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, “we have to if we want to hang on to all this.”

  “They just keep coming,” she said, aware of how plaintive and desperate her tone suddenly sounded. “First it was the Nazis from Florence and then it was the Nazis from Arezzo. And now it’s these Nazis from Rome.”

  “And then there is Cristina’s … friend. The lieutenant.”

  “They’re losing the war, Antonio.”

  “They’re? We’re losing the war, my dear. We’re losing the war.”

  “And yet we seem to be getting in ever deeper with the Nazis.”

  Overhead they heard the planes that so interested their daughter, and reflexively they both looked up. “I know,” her husband said. “I really do. But I don’t know what else to do.”

  1955

  SERAFINA KNELT CAREFULLY before the mushrooms, hoping to conjure a memory from 1944. She tried to focus, allowing her fears to trickle out, and held lit matches over the caps—a few the size of her fist—and the stems. Already she had examined the pedestals and the paintings in the tombs, concentrating on the Etruscan men with their angular Vandyke beards, some of whom were eerily reminiscent of the partisans with whom she had lived and fought. Now, even though the smell almost made her sick, she breathed in and out, hoping to resurrect a moment, any moment at all, from that awful summer.

  Finally, angry at the way memory was failing her once again, she stood up and lit a cigarette. She walked once more through the different chambers, using matches to gaze at the paintings on the walls. And then she paused. Looked up. She climbed onto the pedestal so she was nearer the ceiling and brought the small flame close to the image there. There were birds. Seven, eight … nine of them. They were darting amid nearly black clouds, though there was also a portion of golden sun peering out from behind one of the thunderheads. And suddenly she knew that if she followed the sun’s rays across the vault’s ceiling, she would see that they were illuminating a boy in a boat, a young fisherman, who despite his age was manfully managing the small vessel against waves taller than he was.

  She jumped off the pedestal and climbed onto the one beside it, following the sunlight. Sure enough, there was the boy and there was his boat. And there were more birds.

  She’d seen this ceiling before, and it was clear that it could have been at only one time in her life: when she was in the hallucinogenic agonies, in and out of consciousness, after she had nearly been burned to death in the firefight. Someone was holding her hand, telling her to be brave. Be brave. They were getting her help. She recalled a man’s voice. And a woman’s. She remembered them forcing her to drink whenever she awoke, the water tasting fetid and stale, but the burns had left her so dehydrated they were constantly trying to get fluids into her. And was it possible that they had a small fire at the edge of the chamber and were boiling water? They were draping wet rags on her wounds. Somewhere nearby was machine-gun fire. And explosions that she thought were grenades but might have been small artillery.

  And, kept always on her side because of the way her back was an undulating swamp of seared flesh, by the light of a torch she had seen the birds and the boy and that sun whenever she had awoken and looked up.

  It may have been hours and it may have been days, but at some point before the British had secured Monte Volta, the partisans had taken her away from the battle and out of the sun and hidden her here in an Etruscan home for the dead.

  “Where is Vittore staying?” Serafina asked Paolo after she arrived at the police station Friday night and settled in with a cola on the other side of his desk.

  “The Boccaccio. I moved Cristina there, too. I couldn’t let her stay in the hotel where her mother was killed. We have a man on the corridor of their floor and a man watching the lobby.”

  “And his family in Rome?”

  “There is a wife, Giulia, and a couple of little girls. They have a guard, too.”

  “But we can’t watch them forever.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll see. For all we know, they’re in no danger at all. Maybe whoever killed the marchesa just wants Vittore and Cristina.”

  “He killed Francesca.”

  “Point noted.”

  “What about other relatives? Cousins, uncles, aunts?”

  “The war and old age seem to have already taken many of them,” Paolo said.

  “But not all.”

  He reached for his notes and his eyeglasses and looked at the papers. “Let’s see. Beatrice had a brother and a sister. Her brother died in a car accident in 1928 in Bologna. No children. Her sister is a widow. She married in 1919 and her husband died of cancer last year. Her name is Elena and she lives in Naples. She and her husband had three children, two boys and a girl. The boys were killed in Greece in 1941 and Egypt in 1942. The daughter married a British soldier after the war and they now live in London. Her name is Bianca. They have a child who’s five. Antonio—the marchese—had a brother who died when they were boys. A hiking accident of some sort.”

  “
So there is Elena and Elena’s daughter’s family in London.”

  “That’s right. At the moment, Elena has protection. Her daughter in London—that whole little family—does not.”

  “Any progress on those names Cristina gave us?”

  “Francesca’s lovers or those soldiers from the war?”

  “I was thinking of the war, but I guess that’s just my bias right now.”

  “Let’s start with Francesca’s lovers. We have come across no American museum curators or executives visiting Italy this week on business or pleasure. We have found two Aldos living in Florence who have criminal records, but I don’t see either as the sort whom Francesca would have dated—or, to be specific, the sort to have taken her to restaurants like Il Latini.”

  “Any Giovannis?”

  “With a criminal record? One. He is seventy-seven.”

  “Not Francesca’s type.”

  Paolo nodded and passed her his notebook so she could read in detail about the two felons named Aldo. One, she saw, was a young thief who lived with his mother and worked at a gas station at the edge of the city; the other was an accountant who once stole from his company. Now he worked for the municipal utility and lived with his wife and two children. Neither had ever done anything violent.

  “What about the Italian major and the German colonel?” she asked. “I don’t see anything about them here.”

  “Giancarlo Lorenzetti now teaches at the University of Milan.”

  “And?”