Italian Fever (3 page)

“Yes,” she said. “I can go.”

So it was agreed. She was to leave that very night. Jean promised to have an interpreter meet her in Rome and drive her up to the villa in Ugolino. She called the neighbor with whom she had a reciprocal cat-care arrangement, canceled a lunch date, and made a new message for the answering machine.

Later, when she was packing, Lucy considered the questions she found most difficult to answer. Why had DV stayed on after Catherine left? And why had he never mentioned her departure? He had communicated with Lucy by express mail, sending lists and terse instructions; there was rarely a personal note. If he was anxious or unhappy, he hadn’t bothered, or hadn’t wanted, to let her know. But if Catherine had left him, he must have been more alone than he had ever been in his life: alone in his villa with his ghost.

And even the ghost, she speculated, couldn’t have been much in the way of company: DV had never learned more than ten words of Italian.

L
UCY HARDLY SLEPT
on the plane. It was crowded, noisy; the food was terrible, the usual. Some passengers were resigned; others never would be. She tried to concentrate on her book,
The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw
, but after a brief perusal of the excellent photographs of Bernini’s
St. Teresa
, her thoughts began to wander and she gave herself over to following them. She thought about DV and about DV’s writing. The fact that there would be no more novels meant she was out of a job, though it would take a month or two to get everything cleared away. This didn’t concern her, as she felt certain she could find another job; the years with
DV had provided her with many contacts and she knew how to do a great many useful things. She was enormously, inappropriately relieved that his unfinished book would not see the light of print, for it represented a departure she found troubling.

Everyone knew DV’s novels were thinly disguised accounts of his own life; that was what he meant by the word
realism
. He was fond of admitting this in interviews, as if the paucity of his imagination made the books more valuable. Of course, anyone who knew DV even slightly knew he exaggerated some things absurdly, particularly the invariable physical attractiveness of his narrators. These were always big, strong men with large appetites, big ideas. DV was not five feet five. He was not strong, was often ill, and had so thoroughly destroyed his digestive tract with bourbon that he subsisted on a bland diet of boiled meat and rice. He did have a large, rather handsome head, which was displayed to great advantage on the back covers of his novels. His dark hair and brows were thick, his nose strong and straight, his mouth shapely, and he had lively, soulful brown eyes. He had a big laugh he used when he needed attention and couldn’t get it any other way. The laugh was heard mostly in public, at readings and dinners, and especially during interviews, when he used it to cover embarrassing pauses.

He had been married three times, never for long. In his mind, the wives were all insane and he had done his best to rescue them from themselves, but it was hopeless; in spite of his passionate attachment to each of them, in the end he had had to save himself. He had not been able to save a large part of his income, however, which went out in alimony and child-support checks every month. In Lucy’s view, the wives were interchangeable, stupid, mean-spirited women who had spotted
him as an easy mark. He had two children by two wives, a boy of ten and a girl of twelve. These, presumably, would inherit his estate.

Lucy had met Catherine Bultman on a few occasions and once they had chatted briefly about Caravaggio, Catherine’s favorite painter. No one could figure out how DV had talked her into his life or what she saw in him. What he saw in her was obvious. She was beautiful, talented, intelligent, and eminently sane. She had refused to marry him, and the move to Italy was part of a plan he had to get her to change her mind. She had studied painting in Florence and spoke Italian fluently. DV promised her a studio of her own. He would write; she would paint—it would be a perfect artist’s paradise.

The first two chapters of the ghost novel were all about life at the villa, how the shattered American writer endeared himself to the gentle country people who worked for him, how the neighboring aristocrats delighted in inviting him for long, elegant dinners, after which he walked back alone through the groves of olives and the lane of cypress trees that sheltered the drive to his villa. On one of these walks, while brooding over the tempestuous affair he was having with a beautiful artist, he first saw the ghost.

One thing that was odd, Lucy thought, was that Malcolm Manx’s description of the affair was particularly painful and bitter. It was the closest thing to a description of real human suffering DV had ever written. It wasn’t good, by any means; his rendering of their lovemaking was the usual clot of hyperbole, but there was a scene in which, after a violent quarrel, the beautiful artist, perfectly sane and utterly cold, closes the door on the American writer, leaving him undecided whether to go to the window and watch her drive away or remain with his forehead pressed against the door—this, Lucy had been forced
to admit, was different from anything DV had written before. It was straightforward, sad, and touchingly rendered.

Was it possible that before DV fell down the well he had actually experienced the torture of love and loss, the overturning of everything, the 3:00 a.m. confrontation with the soul in which the ordinary, self-serving lies fail to disguise the unbearable truth, that through one’s own folly the beloved has been lost and that without the beloved there is no light, there is no life?

It seemed unlikely.

The hours dragged by. She skipped the movie and tried to sleep, but the large man snoring next to her made it impossible. The air supply dwindled and the constant cough of the woman two rows ahead guaranteed the passengers the opportunity to contract something virulent and debilitating. The attendants fanned out carrying coffeepots and hard rolls, and the edges of the closed window shades began to glow dimly. They had flown through the night into the morning. Lucy opened her shade and looked out into the pale light of the upper atmosphere. Soon the plane would begin its descent over France, then a brief turn over the Mediterranean and down into Italy. In spite of the sad nature of her mission, she felt a keen rush of excitement.

In the early chapters of the ghost novel, DV always referred to Italy as “she.” It was a convention Lucy despised. Italy was always revealing her treasures, turning her smiling face upon the visitor, spreading her table with the rich tapestry of her harvest, pouring out her hospitality, guarding her secrets, taunting her admirers with hints at the dark knowledge of her endless, mysterious, sinister past. She was a mother, a kind sister, a priestess, a strumpet, a generous, good-natured, but avaricious whore. DV couldn’t get enough of this sort of language.
The thought made Lucy so irritable, she decided to distract herself by queuing up for the bathroom.

Italy. La Bell’Italia. The smiling faces of her sun-loving people. It was guidebook talk. By the time Lucy got back to her seat, the plane was crossing her polluted, ineffable coast. Somewhere down there DV lay, out of this world now, but soon to be back in it; only this time, he wouldn’t be writing about the experience. His pen had been silenced by the rich, romantic soil of Italy. Now he would lie mute forever—how it would have charmed him—tucked away deep in her ancient, all-encompassing heart.

H
E WAS STANDING
at the front of the eager crowd, resting the small cardboard rectangle with her name scratched lightly upon it against the rail that separated those arriving from those receiving. Unlike his neighbors, he was not scanning the passengers hopefully; in fact, he was not even looking in their direction. He was entirely absorbed by a spot he had discovered on the sleeve of his elegant jacket. He brushed at it with his thumb, frowning fiercely, his brow furrowed in concentration. Lucy approached the rail and stopped in front of him. Gradually, reluctantly, he became aware of her presence and looked up at her coldly. “That’s me,” she said, pointing to the sign.

“Signora Stark,” he said without enthusiasm. He pronounced it “Staak.” He gestured toward the opening at the end of the rail. “Go that way,” he said. “I will meet you there.”

Lucy turned her cart back into the crowd, pleased to have a few moments to recover from the unsettling combination of his icy manner and his extraordinary good looks. He was not a big man, but he was bulky and strong, of the bullish physical
type Lucy classified as “stevedore,” and which she always found attractive. He had the wonderful tan skin and thick black hair one associates with the country she was now entering, but his eyes were a light, clear green, quite startling to look into, like finding a wolf’s eyes in a shepherd dog’s face. His expression was gloomy, humorless, and bored. She judged him to be in his early forties, several years older than she was, at any rate. Chauffering American women around was clearly not what he wanted to be doing with his time. Lucy wondered how much he knew about her mission.

She cleared the rails and fell into step alongside him. “I am Massimo Compitelli,” he informed her, chivalrously taking over her luggage cart. “I will be driving you to Ugolino.”

“Will you be staying with me there?”

He cast her a quick appraising look. “I will stay with you until you are finished with the authorities.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s a relief. How far is it?”

“A drive of perhaps three hours.”

She glanced at her watch. It would be well past lunchtime when they arrived. The coffee and roll she had eaten had left her light-headed and nauseated. She didn’t want to identify the remains of DV on an empty, rebellious stomach. “Could I get something to eat along the way, Signor Compitelli?” she said. “Just a sandwich would do.”

They had arrived at the elevator to the parking lot. He gave her a long, steady, curious look, which she ducked by fiddling with her purse latch. Just what sort of creature is this, his survey seemed to ask, this foreigner I am to be responsible for? Lucy looked up, smiling weakly. “I’m very tired,” she said.

He continued his scrutiny, his lips slightly pursed with thought. “Yes,” he said as the elevator door snapped open, disgorging a surprising number of people and luggage carts. “I
know a place not far from here where we can stop.” She followed him into the narrow elevator. A few other travelers pushed in behind and she was pressed against the back wall between two carts. He turned to her as they began their ascent to the parking lot. “Please call me Massimo,” he said.

Good, Lucy thought, sagging against the wall. He has made up his mind to befriend me.

Chapter 3

D
V
’
S BOOKS HAD NOT DONE
particularly well in Italy, although three of them had been translated and published there—the two that had been made into films and another, his last book, which was sold abroad on the strength of a movie deal that never came off. Massimo Compitelli worked for the Italian publisher, though Lucy was not able to determine in what capacity. He didn’t seem to be an editor. He did freelance work of some kind; it sounded a bit like agenting. Perhaps he was a scout. She questioned him about this over a grilled eggplant sandwich at the gleaming bar he took her to just on the outskirts of Rome, but his answers were cryptic. He was visibly appalled by her insistence on drinking a cappuccino with her food, but too polite to say anything. She tried changing the subject. “So you live in Rome?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And your family lives here as well?”

He forced a little puff of indignation through his chiseled nostrils. “My family has been in Rome for a thousand years.”

Ancestor snobbery, Lucy thought. The food, the excellent coffee, the sun that was warming the stones on the raised step where their table perched precariously, the fatigue of the journey, and the archetypal behavior of her companion combined to make her giddy. “Any popes?” she asked.

“What?”

“In your family. Any popes?”

He regarded her with suspicion. Was she making fun of his family? “Actually, yes,” he said. “There was one, a long time ago. A very short time, he was pope.”

“Was he a good pope?”

“No.” He took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and began feeling about for his lighter. “A very bad pope. He was murdered, I think.”

Lucy finished her coffee, excused herself, and went off in search of the bathroom, leaving Massimo to stretch out his legs into the sunlight, clearly content to enjoy his cigarette alone. When she returned, he rose languidly, flicking the cigarette stub into the street. They got back into the car.

Since leaving the airport, they had been on congested highways, careening through ugly suburbs, but now, suddenly, they were in the countryside, the gently undulating cultivated vineyards, the olive groves, the stands of cypress and umbrella pines, the steep, jutting hills capped with ancient walled towns that have for centuries charmed even the most jaded, travel-weary eye. If the beauty of the scene hadn’t taken her breath away, the speed at which they hurtled through it surely would have. However, Lucy noticed, Massimo wasn’t passing anyone. Indeed, they were occasionally roared down upon and left behind. Massimo appeared perfectly calm. She put her seat
back and gave herself over to dreamy contemplation of the landscape and the unexpectedness of finding herself in it. She felt a throb of gratitude to DV for dying here.

“You are married, Signora Stark?” Massimo asked.

Her head followed her eyes as she shifted them in his direction. He was studying the road ahead. “No,” she said. “I was. But not anymore.” He nodded. They both noted the quick inspection she gave to the wide gold band on his right ring finger.

“You can sleep a little now, if you like,” he said.

“Thanks. I think I will,” she said. And she did.

T
USCANY IS STUDDED
with beautiful little towns, each justly famous for something, be it the perfection of its piazza, the charm of its bell tower, the unusual frescoes in its church, the refreshing air of its hilltop setting, the view from its ancient walls, or the incomparable
bistecca
served at the restaurant, formerly a monastery, a castle, or a farmhouse, which can be reached by a short drive along a picturesque lake, a cypress-lined avenue, or a vineyard. Ugolino is not one of these. “Before yesterday, I never hear of this town,” Massimo commented as he turned down a rough narrow road between two fields of dry plowed dirt. “How did your friend find it?”