The Witch of Napoli (31 page)

“One more floor!” I shouted. We were almost there.

“My medical bag –Negri has it!” Lombardi yelled. “Get it!”

We hit the lobby and newspaper reporters rushed us, shouting questions, flash guns going off, people yelling and screaming.

“Let her breathe!” Lombardi shouted. “Please, give her room!”

I spun around, trying to spot Negri. Where the hell was he! My eyes swept the room, and I saw Damiano and Parenti, and Fournier lifting Zoe onto the bell desk to keep her from being trampled, and then Negri, standing on the piano bench, gaping at Alessandra. He didn’t see me. I started for him.

Then I heard Doffo scream.

“Pigotti!”

Doffo was frantically waving his hands.

“Pigotti!”

I looked in the direction he was pointing.

Pigotti was shoving his way through the milling crowd towards Alessandra, a pistol in his hand. “He’s got a gun!” someone shouted. People started screaming, backing away, falling over chairs to escape.

There was nothing I could do. I was too far away.

I watched the crowd part, Pigotti shove Renard out of the way, then raise the gun and aim it at Alessandra. Lombardi looked up, saw the gun, and stepped forward, shielding Alessandra.

The roar of the gunshot echoed off the wall.

Lombardi staggered backwards, and a bright red patch of blood slowly spread across his starched white shirt. Someone tackled Pigotti, knocking the gun from his hand, and he went down kicking and screaming, swallowed up by the angry crowd.

A
lessandra never got to see Lombardi buried.

She was in the hospital for five days, and the Jews bury their dead quickly. Renard found a synagogue on Via Cappella Vecchia and the rabbi handled everything. Dr. Lombardi’s wife and family had disowned him, so nobody from Torino came down for the service. Renard and I attended, and afterward we went over to his rented apartment with the rabbi to collect Lombardi’s things. Inside his closet, I found his personal diary, covering the year 1899 and his investigation of Alessandra.

The last entry, written the morning of December 21, was a poem to her.

I slipped the diary into my pocket for Alessandra.

It would mean a lot to her.

Alessandra was released from the hospital the day after Christmas, and we took her back to Piazza Dante. By then she knew that Lombardi was dead. I stayed with her until New Year’s Day, then accompanied Renard to the train station. Huxley had already left for England. The newspapers were focused on the shocking murder of Lombardi, and Huxley and his team had slipped out of Naples without talking to the press about what had happened upstairs that night. As he boarded his carriage for Paris, Renard handed me an envelope –money to pay the rent on Alessandra’s apartment for another month. He shook my hand.

“Write me, and let me know how she is doing.”

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, I gave Alessandra Lombardi’s diary, the page folded back to his last words to her. We were sitting at the table talking about him, when we heard a knock on the door. It was Venzano.

He hurried over and handed a telegram to Alessandra.

“La Befana left this in my stocking.” He smiled. “But I believe it’s for you.”

Back in London, Henry Tyndall had issued an official statement to the
London Times
regarding the Society’s investigation in Naples. Huxley hadn’t signed it, but the other three had.

Huxley resigned his position with the Society a week after returning to London. He never paid Alessandra her hundred pounds sterling.

Two months later, Hardwicke delivered the team’s final report to the Society’s Board of Directors. Renard sent me a copy. What
was
the source of that mysterious force which smashed a wooden table to smithereens, and tossed a six-foot, 200-pound man across the room like a rag doll? With fraud and trickery eliminated, Hardwicke noted, there remained but two possibilities – an unknown power of the human mind, like Lombardi believed, or an “intelligence external to the medium.”

He couldn’t bring himself to say spirits of the dead.

As I stood in the rain yesterday and watched Alessandra’s coffin being lowered into the grave, it occurred to me that Alessandra already had the answer.

Eventually, we’ll all know.

A
ntonio is a fast writer.

It’s three
P.M.
now, and he already has the first two articles for the Sunday edition written and sent to layout. I’ll go down to the darkroom later tonight to choose the lead photo from Giorgio’s assembled pile.

After Lombardi’s murder, Alessandra left Naples and moved to Rome. She never married, but found her sunny apartment and got a cat, just like she had always dreamed of. Her vindication in Naples allowed her to support herself by giving private séances. Ironically, her apartment was just around the corner from the Vatican, but the Church stopped pursuing her once she disappeared from the news. Pigotti? He’s rotting away in a prison in Naples. Ten years earlier, he would have gone to the gallows, but Italy abolished capital punishment in 1889.

I quickly worked my way up the
Mattino
ladder with Venzano’s support, and a decade later moved to Rome to work for the
Messaggero
as sub-editor then managing editor, then the big seat. Alessandra and I saw each other often, and she always came to my house for Christmas. Doffo’s here too. I brought him up to Rome as soon as I became editor, and he’s busy skewering everybody. I’ve given him free rein to go after what Garibaldi famously branded "that pestilential institution called the Papacy." He and Pietro have a place now. Pietro still works for Cardinal Uccello, and keeps Doffo supplied with secrets and scandals.

Alessandra stayed in her apartment until her consumption finally forced her into the hospital. I used my pull to get her into a private sanitarium in Trastevere, across the Tiber, but close enough to the
Messaggero
office that I could visit her every day.

On Monday, I’ll take the train to Paris to meet Monsieur Pathé and pitch him on my idea of making a film about Alessandra’s life.

I told Alessandra about it the night she lay dying. She had lost a lot of weight, and the long sleeves of her dress now hid ulcers instead of Pigotti’s cigarette burns. But the ruins of her beauty were still visible, in her long black hair, untouched by grey, and in her eyes.

“Who will play me?” she whispered.

“How about Pina Menichelli?” I said, reaching out to take her hand.

She smiled. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful.” I knew she would like that. She had seen Pina in
Il Fuoco,
and the vamp had become her favorite actress.

“But first we have to convince Monsieur Pathé,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

Alessandra began to cough violently, and Maria appeared at the door with fresh handkerchiefs. Alessandra waved her away, and fell back into her chair, exhausted.

“My bureau…” she said, pointing to her bedroom. “… small blue box…”

I went in, found the box and brought it to her.

“Open it, Tommaso” she said.

Inside was a silk purse, and inside that was a tiny cat figurine carved in alabaster. Alessandra looked at me and smiled.

“Take Bastet with you.”

Just before midnight, she took a turn for the worse, and the doctor pulled me into the hall and warned me the end had come. She died early the next morning, her hand in mine, as the sun flooded through her window and the light in those luminous eyes of hers faded away.

Bastet’s here in my pocket.

I’ll let you know what happens.

END

The Witch of Napoli
is a work of fiction. Its inspiration was the true-life story of controversial Italian medium
Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918)
. Parapsychologists cite Palladino’s table levitations as some of the most baffling and impressive feats of psychokinesis ever observed and recorded. In the many historical books, newspaper stories and scientific reports dealing with her life, you’ll find many memorable quotes, descriptions and observations expressed in the unique language of the 19th century. I managed to slip a few of them into my novel. They include:

“Her large eyes, filled with strange fire, sparkled in their orbits, or again seem filled with swift gleams of phosphorescent fire, sometimes bluish, sometimes golden. If I did not fear that the metaphor were too easy when it concerns a Neapolitan woman, I should say that her eyes appear like the glowing lava fires of Vesuvius, seen from a distance in a dark night.”
– Monsieur Arthur Levy penned this evocative description of Palladino after attending a séance with her in 1898 at the house of celebrated French astronomer
Camille Flammarion
. The astronomer later included Levy’s description in a book he published in 1907 entitled “
Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author’s Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants.”

“As a child, she saw eyes glaring at her in the darkness, and was frightened one night when invisible hands stripped off her bedclothes.”
– Eusapia Palladino’s mentor and champion Dr. Cesare Lombroso shares this gossip about Palladino in his 1909 book entitled
After Death—What? Spiritistic Phenomena and Their Interpretation.

“I was like a wild animal, a forest bird, and these foolish stranieri wanted to make me into a prissy English girl. They dressed me in pinafores and starched blouses, wanted me to take a bath every day, to comb my hair, to use a fork at the table.”
– Eusapia Palladino reminisces in a short autobiographical essay about her life, published in 1910.

“Here in Naples, we have a woman who belongs to the humblest class of society. She is nearly forty years old and very ignorant. But when she wishes, be it by day or by night, she can divert a curious group for an hour or so with the most surprising phenomena. Firmly held by the hands of the curious, Alessandra levitates furniture, holds it suspended in the air like Mahomet’s coffin, and makes it come down again with undulatory movements, as if they were obeying her will. She produces raps and taps on the walls, the ceiling, the floor far distant from her. She can make musical instruments – bells, tambourines – positioned in a corner of the room far beyond her reach play without touching them.”
– Dr. Ercole Chiaia of Naples first alerted Dr. Cesare Lombroso to Eusapia Palladino. This is an excerpt from the oft-cited letter he wrote to Lombroso in 1888 inviting Lombroso to investigate Palladino.

“A luminous hand with exquisite delicacy applied itself to his lips, preventing him from continuing.”
– Dr. Giuseppe Venzano attended a séance with Palladino in Genoa in 1907 during which a deceased lady friend of his materialized in the room.

“If there ever was an individual in this world opposed to the claims of spiritism by virtue of scientific education and, I may add, by instinct, I was that person. But I glory in saying that I am a slave to facts. …I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that, in hysterical and hypnotized persons, the stimulation of certain centres of the brain, which become powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, may give rise to a transmission of cerebral or cortical forces which can be transformed into a motor force. In this way, we can understand how a medium can, for example, raise a table from the floor, pinch someone by the beard, strike him or caress him – phenomena frequently reported during séances. Do we not see the magnet give rise to an invisible force which can deflect a compass needle without any viable intermediary? What is needed is the development of instruments to establish the reality this occult force. We were unable to detect existence of the X-ray until science gave us photography and the vacuum tube. Once we had the necessary instruments, doubt was dispelled.”
– Selected comments made by Lombroso during his investigations of Eusapia Palladino.

“She has the hyperaesthesic zone, especially in the ovary. She has the hole in the esophagus that women with hysteria have, and general weakness, or paresis, in the limbs of the left side. She exhibits a persistent cough from tuberculosis, a disease endemic in Naples. It is easier for her to be magnetized than hypnotized. Methodical passes of the hand over her head can free her from headache (cephalea), and quiet her agitation of mind, and upward magnetic passes can provoke her in a state of semi-catalepsy, just as passes in the reverse direction can remove distortions of her muscles and paresis….She experiences a desire to produce the phenomena; then she has a feeling of numbness and the gooseflesh sensation in her fingers; these sensations keep increasing; at the same time she feels in the lower portion of the vertebral column the flowing of a current which rapidly extends into her arms as far as her elbow, where it is eventually arrested. It is at this point that the phenomenon takes
place…like
they had been dipped in lye.”
– For an extensive and often amusing series of “scientific” observations Lombroso made about Palladino, see his book
After Death—What? Spiritistic Phenomena and Their Interpretation.

“I did not consider it worthy of the dignity of a savant, and a naturalist, to be present at such spiritistic séances. I shared that degree of distrust and suspicion which should always accompany the observation of the abnormal…”–
Comment made by Lombroso following his conversion.