Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (3 page)

At last the doctor came, administered the quinine, and wedged himself into a brocade chair. “Now if your woman will bring me— Ah, yes.” Mamma had come with a decanter of Scottish whiskey, our best Venetian goblets, and a plate of rum-soaked babas. I gripped my bamboo rod as he touched the curve of Mamma’s bodice, the thick rope of her braid, her slender waist, and her cheeks, white with rage.

“More wind . . . harder,” the count snapped when Mamma left. Sweat soaked his linen nightshirt. I had already changed the bedsheets. Yet he swore I let him “wallow like a pauper in filth.” We couldn’t wash, dry, and iron linens fast enough for the sweat, vomit, and soil of his illness. No amount of rosemary and lavender oil could sweeten that room.

Dr. Galuppi tucked a bit of snuff in his ample nose and watched me fan the count, round eyes roaming my body until, tiring of this, he took out a medical text and read while the count grunted himself into fitful sleep.

As Paolo had predicted, fever passed swiftly into chills. The count woke with a start and demanded that I cease my infernal fanning and bring blankets, furs, and a fire in the brazier.

“Do it, girl,” the doctor said, barely looking up. With the fire lit, sweat poured down our faces, but he kept avidly reading, sometimes sketching strange machines in a leather notebook.

“Close the windows and lie with me. Rosalia, keep me warm!” the count moaned. Slowly the quinine did its work. The tremors ceased and he entered a lull between fever and chills.

“Good, now try
my
tonic,” Galuppi announced, closing his book and pouring two liberal glasses of whiskey. He motioned me to a chair in the corner. “Sit there. We may need you.”

I took my seat, and in the manner of gentlemen, they promptly ignored me, as if I were one more marble bust along the wall. Which was the worst of a servant’s lot, I often wondered: the ceaseless work, pain in every joint, raw, cracked skin, and long hours, or the airy dismissal into nothing, to be called back to life with a flick of the hand? When the count waved at the fur mountain over him, I was to understand: take this away. “A man can go mad in the company of servants,” he muttered.

“Certainly, certainly. Everyone’s talking about the scene between that woman of yours and Maestro Toscanini. Clearly she’s a hysteric of the most troublesome kind. However, she’s a great favorite of your wife, I believe.” The count nodded, sighed, and pressed his head into the mounded pillows.

“I have made a careful study of hysteria,” the doctor continued, tapping his book. “The condition is often curable by means of intriguing mechanisms, sadly underused in Italy. With these mechanisms our Anglo-Saxon brethren have excised madness from diverse subjects, or at the least made them more malleable.”

I must have appeared to be attending to the gentlemen’s talk, for the count lifted a fleshy hand from the coverlet, indicating me. “You. Leave us. Close the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the dim cool of the corridor, I breathed deeply, free from the sickroom stench. Nannina and Mamma were helping the exhausted laundress. Paolo and the countess must have been reviewing the household accounts again, for I heard murmuring in her study. Barefoot, I crept back toward the count’s chamber.

“Copious injections of ram’s blood . . . patients as tranquil as sheep,” I heard through the door. The count must have spoken. “Of course, some casualties. There’s much to be learned.” The rosewood bed creaked. In a rustle of sheets, surely I mistook the next report. Was it possible that doctors closed inmates in coffins pierced with holes, lowered them into water until the bubbles ceased, then hauled up the coffins and tried to revive the near-drowned victims? “Confronting death calms the lunatic.” Some muttering followed, which I couldn’t understand, and then: “Whirling chair . . . electric shocks to the female organs sometimes efficacious.” I leaned against a marble column, sickened. The doctor’s voice again: “You must eat lightly now, Count. I’ll ring for the girl.” Panicked, I scurried to the kitchen to rinse my face, steady myself, and seem to be returning for my orders.

“Count Filippo is sleeping quietly,” Paolo announced after our servants’ dinner. “You’re free until morning. I will attend to the count.” But I noticed that he didn’t turn left to the sickroom but right, to the private rooms of the countess.

“She isn’t feeling well?” I asked.

Mamma and Nannina exchanged glances. Nannina’s brow arched. “I suppose they’re reviewing accounts.”

Mamma stood up. “Lucia, let’s go swimming. Come, there’s a full moon.” Soon we were running down to the rocks, hair flying behind us. I remember that night as pure joy. Still in our sweat-stiffened linens, we swam through a milk-white path laid out by the moon that seemed to stretch across the bay to Vesuvius. Warm waves washed our loosening bodies apart and then together. We caught the iridescent waters in our hands as the sickroom smells and weariness drained away. We were mermaids, princesses, sisters.

“We’re almost free,” I said into the star-sparkled heavens. “Either the count dies, or he gets better and goes back to Capri until the wintertime.”

“And when he goes, the doctor goes,” Mamma added dreamily. “If he doesn’t, I’ll poison his whiskey.” Floating on the gently heaving water, we both laughed. My hand caught hers in the water.
I’ll treasure this night forever,
I thought, and I did. It buoyed me through rough waters. It’s here with me now, so far away from Naples. Too soon, bell towers rang for midnight as we dried ourselves, wrung out our shifts, and hurried barefoot to the villa. It would be our last night on our cot.

When I brought Count Filippo his breakfast, he seemed much improved, his color returned and brow clear of sweat. A morning breeze had freshened the room. Perhaps shamed by the basins of foul waste I’d taken out in the days of his sickness, he was even cordial, using my name, thanking me for his tray and asking to see the countess “when it is quite convenient.”

“He’s better,” I reported happily to Nannina.

“Good, but if you don’t have to be nursemaids today, it’s time to scrub the stairs,” she observed.

I groaned. Cleaning the great marble staircase was the job I hated most. Mamma and I worked together, polishing each step with pumice stone, and then scrubbing with soap that burned the eyes. Our knees, shoulders, elbows, and hands ached. Usually she sang or we told stories as distraction from the pain. That day she was silent. We seemed to be scrubbing the Alps. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was released.

Paolo called down the wet stairway that the Duchess Annamaria was receiving that morning and the countess wanted me to go with her, carrying Nannina’s almond cake and helping servants at the palace, but first I must braid my hair neatly and put on my best dress. Mamma’s dark eyes squeezed to slits as I hurried to change. I remember with bitter regret her hunched shoulders and flame-red hands as I passed her soon after, easing carefully down the wet steps, attentive to the cake on our silver tray and my clean, starched apron, as if I were the mistress and she the serving girl.

“I’ll be back soon, Mamma,” I promised. She didn’t answer, and ever since, the sting of lye soap has recalled for me the sting of wrenching guilt when I tripped off like a little lady, leaving her to scrub the steps. What defense do I have but youth? As I walked along the elegant Riviera di Chiaia with the countess in her splendid rose morning dress, my spirits lifted and the old fantasy returned: I was the treasured daughter of a countess. Tutors would come to me. I would be presented in society, never insulted, never called
bastardina.
The count, my father, would have Paolo’s face and manner, wise, kind, and comforting.

We reached the palace. “Bring the cake to the kitchen,” the countess said, “and help with the sewing for now.” And so my fantasy ended. In the servants’ hall I was given bread, cheese, and a chair by a lighted window. After lunch, for entertainment with coffee, I was called to the drawing room. I’d never seen such a dazzle of jewels and lace, beautiful women chattering like birds, noblewomen and ambassadors’ wives. I was to read Dante aloud, thus refuting a claim made by a viscountess that lower classes were incapable of comprehending the Poet. I was given a text, and the countess showed me where to begin.

I read slowly, attentive to meter, as she’d taught me. The chattering slowly ceased. Painted lips opened slightly, as if one of their fluffy lapdogs had commenced a recitation. Joy and pride infused me in that shimmering room as the divine words flowed from my mouth. The maid discreetly set a water goblet at my side, and I, Lucia Esposito, drank from crystal among noblewomen.

Prettily sent away after reading, I dropped stitch after stitch, reimagining my triumph until the housekeeper said: “Go home now, girl. Your mistress says she won’t need you this afternoon.” So I was a nameless “girl” again. I dawdled back to the villa, wandering through a park along the bay, watching rich children with their hoops and young dandies on bicycles. How often would I curse my ambling feet that afternoon!

Nannina was chopping onions when I returned, and Paolo was in his windowless, ledger-lined office. “Teresa’s ironing,” he said over his shoulder. “Go help her.” I never reached the laundry. A strange whirling sound came from the terrazzo. Looking down, I gasped. The count and Dr. Galuppi sat watching a spectacle: a huge, hairy man, a hulking gorilla, turned a giant wheel that drove a spinning chair. A woman was strapped in this chair, black hair like a whipping tail behind her, the face blurred. I peered more closely. Mamma! Now I was running, flying downstairs.
The bastards, the bastards, the bastards!

Once on the terrazzo, I saw that her face was sickly white, mouth stretched out in wordless howl, her apron stained with vomit. When I screamed,
“Stop! Let her go!”
my voice vaulted back from the walls, the orchard, and the bay. I screamed myself hollow, stunned by the sound. Both gentlemen stared. A servant dared shout at them? The gorilla man stopped dead. As the whirling chair slowed, clattering to stillness, my mother flopped forward like a rag doll, black hair matting her face.

“Ugo, bring the girl here,” the doctor snapped. Rushing to help Mamma, I was scooped up and delivered to the doctor. Despite his fleshy frame, the grip on my arms was crushing. “Start the chair again! Don’t move, girl, or we’ll spin her another hour, and you as well for your insolence.”

“Never mind, I’ve seen the chair,” said Count Filippo like a child bored with an old toy. He cut himself thick slices of prosciutto with a long, ivory-handled knife and refilled his goblet as Mamma retched. My stomach heaved with hers. At a sign from the doctor, Ugo untied her; she tumbled to the ground.

“Mamma!”

“Be quiet, girl, or we
will
spin her again!” Galuppi said. “Ugo, bring the Taming Box.” Then to the count: “I copied this design from an American journal.” Eagerly, the count examined a padded black box designed to fit over a human head. Galuppi demonstrated the gag, blindfold, earplugs, airholes, and chair whose seat was a chamber pot. Mamma hadn’t moved. When I tested the doctor’s grip, it tightened as he continued placidly: “Immobilized, cut off from external senses, alone with his—or her—madness, the tranquilizing effect can be profound. Even for extreme cases”—he nodded toward the hulking Ugo—“the mere threat of it induces obedience. Thus the device both cures and pacifies the most difficult inmates.”

The count looked in wonder at the box. “Fascinating. How long are the patients contained?”

Mamma heaved. I tried again to yank free, but a jerk of my arm sent tearing pains to the shoulder. “Twelve, twenty-four, even thirty-six hours for extreme cases.” In their excitement, neither noticed Mamma rising slowly to her haunches, one hand parting a curtain of hair. Nor did they see Paolo hurrying toward us. “You heard the girl scream,” Galuppi continued. “Was that a normal sound, a sane human voice? I tell you, my friend, hysteria can lurk in the young. It travels through blood; like mother, like daughter. Ugo, prepare the girl.” I was lifted in massive arms, helpless as a rag.

Mamma tried to stand; her legs crumpled. Paolo had reached the count. “We’ve had no trouble with Lucia, sir,” he panted. “She’s quite obedient.”

Sweat beaded the count’s brow. “Nonetheless, Dr. Galuppi will examine her. You may watch, Paolo.”

The doctor’s fleshy hand palpated my skull. “The science of phrenology is exquisite.” He stopped at my temples. “Here, for instance, we find stubborn willfulness.”

“We do not find her so, sir,” Paolo declared.

Galuppi smiled. “I advise the Taming Box to inoculate against hysteria.”

As Count Filippo watched me struggle, his nostrils flared. None of the men saw Mamma moving stealthily to the table.
No, Mamma, don’t. Yes! Save me
. The box was coming closer, the manacles readied for me.

In a flash swift as a tiger’s leap, Mamma lunged forward, seized the decanter, and threw it at the count. It shattered on his bulging brow. Sometimes in dreams I see my last memory of him: blood streaming down the starched white shirt. My mother snatched the ivory-handled knife, light on her feet as a street fighter, facing now Ugo, now the count and doctor. Where did she learn this? When she lunged at Ugo, he jumped. The great hands opened. My trap sprung, I ducked away.

“Go, Lucia! Run!” Paolo hissed.

Mamma was nailed to the earth. I jerked her free. “Come!” The knife clattered on stone and she moved stiffly as a doll across the wide terrazzo.

“Paolo, stop them!” I heard behind us.

We reached the street. Mamma was stumbling, still dizzy, as Paolo appeared, grasped her arm, and helped me pull her between water carts and peddlers. She stopped to vomit; he let her gulp water at a fountain and then hurried us through the wide avenues before plunging into the warren of dark, narrow streets winding through the Spanish Quarters, where we could slow to a walk. “Bastards!” Mamma panted. “I’ll kill them both.”

“Teresa, you understand who you are and who he is? A word from Count Filippo and you’ll be locked in a prison forever. The countess couldn’t help you. It might even give him pleasure to have her see you locked away.”