Medusa - 9 (15 page)

She got the key out of her pocket with her right hand, then transferred it to her left. This too was part of the ritual, for when the little house had magically appeared, on her seventh birthday, she had been
mancina
. It had taken a lot of time, and much pain, for her parents and teachers to cure her of her perverse left-handedness, with its implication of being one of the sinister, of having been touched by the Adversary.

But her parents had also given her this house, perhaps in part as recompense. Many of her memories might have been falsified, but not those of that birthday. The work had been done secretly, over the winter, and her parents had played their part to the hilt. When the day came, they had tied a length of muslin across her eyes and then led her down the garden of the villa amid a banter of jokes and teasing phrases, before placing her just right and then removing the blindfold. And she literally had not been able to believe her eyes. Nothing in the rest of her life – not even Leonardo – had been as magical and as sweet as that moment.

As the front door creaked open, the odours leapt up and assailed her. She stooped to pass under the lintel, then straightened up as much as she could, her hair brushing against the ceiling. The first time she had taken him there, Leonardo had immediately banged his head on a beam and fallen against her, perhaps in surprise. They were wearing only their swimming costumes, and both had laughed excessively at this bizarre accident befalling two adults in a house made for a child. A light sprinkle of plaster dust had coated Claudia’s bare shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts. Leonardo had solicitously brushed it away, with many apologies for his clumsiness.

Against the wall to her left, between the windows, hung a blank banner of black satin. Her mother had not permitted mirrors in the family apartment in Verona, except in the bathroom, claiming in her sometimes slightly creepy
Südtirolisch
way that they stole your soul. But in the case of Claudia’s playhouse her father had prevailed, arguing that it would make the main room seem lighter and bigger. After Leonardo’s death, she had not been able to bring herself to remove or destroy this mirror which had witnessed so much, but neither could she bear to meet its implacable gaze, so she had covered it over with a layer of cloth.

Below it stood a tiny dresser, a perfectly proportioned miniature replica of the one in the living room of the apartment, and indeed by the same manufacturer. She opened the cupboard and retrieved one of the bottles of Cinzano Rosso she kept stacked there, then took a glass from the shelf above. The sweet red liquid, tinged with bitterness at the edges, flowed down her throat and brought a summery glow to her body. The light glowing through the squat four-paned windows was thin and weak, but with the help of the alcohol it created the right effect. The angle of the sun around the equinox was of course identical at either end of the year, but autumn had all the momentum of summer behind it, while winter’s exhaustion held spring back.

Now she moved across the room, past the fireplace, the table and chairs, and the pretend stove on which she had lovingly cooked pretend meals for her dolls. The door at the end led to the bedroom where she had taken a nap after lunch every summer day as a child. The rules had been clear. Nights had to be spent in her room at the villa, but this house was hers during the day. Her parents were not permitted to intrude, although Claudia had contrived to invite some of her school- friends. She had made the most of that privacy and freedom then, and even more later.

She closed the door behind her and hung her coat on the peg behind it, despite the fact that the lower half trailed on the tiled floor, then lay down in a foetal crouch on the tiny wooden bed. The pillow absorbed her head and released its own hoarded scents in return. This bedding had never been washed since the first time that she and Leonardo had lain there. She could still smell the hair lotion he had used, and more, the very scent of
him
. Curiously, her own she could not distinguish, although it must profusely have been there.

But how had it all begun?

Her glib memories, when she consulted them, tended to unreel the affair like a film or a play, where every action and phrase is foreknown and inevitable, but they were false. It hadn’t been like that. It couldn’t have been. On the contrary, not the least of the thrills involved had been that they were both finding their way all the time, each of them anticipating an excruciatingly embarrassing rebuff at any moment.

The very fact that Leonardo had come out from his barracks in Verona to the villa, one weekend when he must have known that Gaetano was away at a NATO conference in Brussels, ‘in order to return some books on military history that Colonel Comai was kind enough to lend me’, incurred a slight risk in itself.

Claudia had received him on the patio behind the villa. She had been swimming in the small pool that had now been buried beneath the concrete parking lot of the new apartment block, and was wearing her bikini with a towelling robe over it. It was an August afternoon, a still, massy heat that threatened thunder.

He had apologized profusely for disturbing her and kept rather distractedly insisting that he should leave at once. Claudia had invited him to stay for tea, and had succeeded in making him feel that it would be impolite to refuse. She had then removed the towelling robe, with the excuse that it felt clammy, and clad only in the bikini had basked in the sun for some time, prompting the tongue-tied young lieutenant with a series of questions about his family, background and aspirations. She had not looked at him, but had felt very strongly his eyes upon her. When tea was brought, she had slipped back up to her room in the villa and returned wearing a silk wrap that she allowed to fall open from time to time, particularly when she leaned forward to pour the tea. When he finally left, she had told him that he was most welcome to return at any suitable time.

‘You don’t need to invent excuses,’ she’d told him. ‘I get quite lonely and bored here when Gaetano’s away. I would welcome some company.’

No, that couldn’t be right. She would never have been so forward, so
obvious
. Not the first time, anyway. And even if she had, he would never have taken her up on it, fearing some disgrace that could ruin his career for ever. So how had it all begun?

Of one thing she was sure. Their initial meeting, outwardly unexceptionable, had been at the regiment’s annual dinner and ball, an occasion that could hardly have been more public. The colonel had naturally introduced some of his ‘stable’, as he called them, to his much younger wife, and then encouraged them – under the circumstances, practically ordered them – to dance with her. His legs were already giving him hell, the merest intimations of the torment to come later, when they’d had to have the chair lift installed at the villa. At that stage Gaetano could still stand, walk and, when required, march without undue difficulty, but he couldn’t have danced with any pleasure, even if he’d wanted to. As it happened he didn’t, but neither did he want Claudia to be left seated with him, a sad wallflower, while the other wives tripped the light fantastic and engaged in a bit of mild and utterly harmless flirtation.

Lieutenant Ferrero had taken up his duties with an alacrity which Claudia had initially ascribed to the young man’s desire to ingratiate himself with his commanding officer. They had performed a polka, a gavotte and a foxtrot together before Leonardo relinquished her to one of his fellow officers. She had wanted him immediately, of course, and equally immediately dismissed the thought. Quite apart from anything else, she was well aware of being about ten years his senior. As a military city of long standing, Verona had more than its share of ‘barracks blowflies’, as they were known. Lieutenant Ferrero would have had no difficulty in getting his needs attended to quickly, safely and cheaply.

But at the end of the evening he had returned, and in a subtly different manner requested Claudia’s company for the last dance, a slow waltz. She had been wearing a silk shawl, but the hall was so hot and stuffy now that she removed it, making the full effect of her very low-cut dress visible for the first time.

As soon as the music started, she became aware that something was wrong. Earlier, Leonardo had been an exemplary partner, moving gracefully, always dead on the beat, never leading aggressively nor hanging behind. Now he seemed to have turned slightly spastic. His body was bent at an odd angle, and his movements seemed gauche and inhibited. He might almost have been Gaetano, on the few occasions when she had managed to tempt him on to the dance floor.

When she tightened her arm on her partner’s back, pulling him towards her, trying to straighten him up, the reason for his awkwardness became apparent: a massive erection that even his military-issue underpants were barely able to restrain. Their eyes met and locked.
Das Blick
, her mother had told her once. That was where love began. All it took was that unfakeable, petrifying look, and you were lost.

Nevertheless, as yet nothing had in fact been lost. They remained the only people present who were aware of what had happened. At the conclusion of the dance, Leonardo, now making no attempt to conceal his predicament from her, had very correctly returned her to her husband’s side without a word spoken, bidden them both goodnight and left with his fellow officers. Then, ten days later, he had appeared uninvited at the villa, supposedly to return some books. Nothing illicit had occurred at that meeting either. Gaetano had been abroad, but the servants were very much in evidence and Claudia was expecting a woman friend for dinner that evening.

So how had the affair itself begun? Another meeting at the villa had been arranged, that much was certain. And it must have been done in person, face to face, before Leonardo caught the train back to Verona that first time. There were no mobile phones in those days. All calls to the barracks went through the switchboard, and as desperate as she had been, Claudia would never have risked putting anything in writing. The most insistent of the versions that presented themselves to her now had it that she had invited him – on the front step of the villa, completely out of the blue, dismayed by the imminent prospect of his physical absence – to return the following Wednesday. She might have told him that she was having some friends over for the day, an interesting and influential couple who might well prove helpful to his career. She had certainly known that her husband would be attending a two- day meeting at the Defence Ministry in Rome to report on the NATO conference.

She had given the servants those two days off, explaining that in her husband’s absence she would be returning to Verona. There was still the risk of snooping neighbours, of chance encounters in the village, even of Gaetano’s unannounced return due to illness or a cancellation. In short, she had gone slightly mad, deranged not so much by the sexual prospects in store, although that was a powerful drug, as by an irresistible sensation that the contingent chaos of everyday life was finally cohering into a meaningful narrative that she had to follow, no matter where it might lead.

Yes, but how had it all begun?

However the invitation had been phrased, Leonardo had come, and to the tradesmen’s entrance at the side of the villa, which Claudia had left open. She explained this by saying that it was the servants’ day off and that she would be entertaining her guests by the pool in the garden and might not hear the doorbell. In reality it had been to minimize the possibility of his being seen by prying eyes.

She had been swimming topless in the pool when he arrived, and for a moment she thought she had been too brazen and ruined everything. Confused by her nudity and the absence of any other people, Leonardo looked as though he was about to bolt at any moment. When she picked up the towel she had left at the edge of the pool, wrapped it around her torso and climbed out, he had accepted with a brief nod her story about how the other couple had cancelled at the last moment for family reasons. She had calmed him down by putting her top back on and then producing a man’s swimsuit from the wicker chest where the towels were kept and insisting that he go into the house and put it on. She kept a variety of spare suits for visitors, she said, in case they had neglected to bring their own. In reality, the suit was Gaetano’s.

Leonardo had obeyed her instructions, like the polite young man he was. When he emerged from the villa, Claudia had to fight very hard against her instinct to stare shamelessly at the swimsuit, so very much more interesting did it appear than when worn by her husband. They both went into the water and swam energetically for some time, pretending to each other and to themselves that this was the point of the exercise. Then they emerged, rubbed themselves roughly dry, and lay down side by side on the large beach towels spread out in the sun.

After a while, Claudia had sat up and started applying Ambre Solaire to all the bits of her that she could reach, chattering on the whole time about the extreme sensitivity of her skin and the potentially disastrous effects of the August sun. She had then turned over and asked Leonardo to spread some of the fragrant bronze oil on her back, please. Oh, and just undo the strap of my top, would you, so as not to leave a white strip on the tan. She might even have told him to rub her harder to make sure that the oil penetrated the skin deeply, or some such nonsense. It had been like revisiting her adolescence, but with all the knowledge and authority of her current position. Which she had used quite mercilessly. She wouldn’t have put anything past her.

He’d complied with her instructions without a word, but stopped when he came to her buttocks, but she’d asked him to keep going, yes, and her thighs as well please, all the way up to the costume, because the skin was so sensitive there and even a minor burn could be agonizingly painful. He knelt close above her to do this work, straddling one of her legs with his, and from time to time their bodies had touched.

Once it was over, he lay down beside her again. They didn’t speak – the heat permitted that – but she knew that he was looking at her and lifted herself up on her elbows to reach for her cigarettes, her breasts just clearing the reclining bikini top so that her nipples showed a few centimetres from his fingers. But still he made no move.