Tourmaline (10 page)

One morning in October he lay awake in bed trying to remember a conversation from the previous day. They’d all had supper together — he and Claire, Francis and Adriana. He’d been listening to Adriana and Francis speaking in Italian. Somehow Murray had intuited that the girl was saying something he deserved to know, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to interrupt and ask for a translation.

Now, the morning after, he couldn’t stand not knowing what he’d missed. He climbed out of bed, leaving Claire sleeping, and rode his motorcycle along the deserted road to La Chiatta. Only when he’d turned off the engine and paused to listen to the sea lapping behind the courtyard wall did he consider how early it was and how ridiculous he’d appear if he knocked at the door.

He snuck away as quietly as he could, though as he crossed the courtyard he had the prickling sensation that someone was watching him from an upstairs window. He resisted turning around to check. He pushed his motorcycle back up the long dirt drive. Doves cooed, hidden in the palms. Olive leaves rustled in the morning breeze. A silver moth fluttered around his head, bumping against his cheek as though to wake him.

The first moth in our Le Foci house was found by Nat floating in his cup of milk, its silver wings shaded gray by contrast. He picked it up by its soggy wingtip and laid it carefully on the table, then called the rest of us to come look. Lidia wasted only a quick glance and commanded Nat to finish his milk, which he did with gusto while the rest of us watched in admiration.

I found the second moth flitting above me when I awoke from my afternoon nap. I knew many Italian words by then, and one happened to be the word for
butterfly.
I announced its presence with a shriek of joy — “Farfalla, farfalla!” — causing both Francesca and Claire to rush to my bedside. They laughed when they understood what had excited me. Francesca threw open the shutters and the moth zigged and zagged across the room and drifted out the window.

Francesca, who was given every Wednesday afternoon off to visit her family in Capoliveri, had been about to leave to catch the bus, and now she tied a blue silk scarf around her head and excused herself. Claire picked up and folded my pajamas. I stared at the rectangles of blue sky and watched without a word as three silver moths flew into the room.

Three dancing moths. Before our eyes they became six, eight, a dozen and more. They were a mist of gauzy wings, a cloud filling the room, spreading down the hall like fog through a seaside village. It seemed as though a single moth had only to unfold its wings and release a haze of offspring. There were hundreds of moths, thousands, their silver, pink-lined forewings identical to hindwings, brown furry bodies the size of plum-pits, needle tips for eyes. Claire fanned them away from me with her hand. In such numbers their fluttering should have been thunderous — instead, they were eerily silent. But a moment later the silence was broken when the moths filled the bedroom where my brothers had been playing. They yelped with delight. The enemy force was attacking, quick, radio headquarters, call the troops, load, fire! Nat threw plastic soldiers at the moths, Harry trapped them in his cupped hands, Patrick batted at them with a rolled magazine. The enemy advanced. The allies were outnumbered, but still they held their ground. Duck, jump, run, stop, turn!

“Get out of the house!” It was Claire’s order, but this time the urgency my brothers heard in her voice struck them as ridiculous, and they continued their war. Claire held me with one arm and managed to grab Nat and Harry by their wrists, and she pulled us to the door. Patrick kicked the floor as he followed, furious to have the best game ever interrupted.

Inside the house Lidia threw open shutters and closed closet doors. She found an old set of bellows and set about puffing clouds of moths from one room to another. Though she’d never seen quite so many moths at once, she remained grimly calm. The moths came every autumn to feast upon blankets and sweaters. I fantasmi — the ghost moths. They were arriving in multitudes this year. In some later year, they would come in even greater numbers. That was the way life worked in Lidia’s scheme. The moths were proof that the future would outshine the past. Next year’s storms would be the worst storms ever. Or they’d be the mildest. If the next summer wasn’t the warmest, then the following summer would be. Or the one after. Every record set would be broken. Every war fought would be worse than the last.
Bella, horrida bella.
There were no surprises under heaven.

The season of the ghost moths. We loved them, loved to lose ourselves in the thick of their wings and feel the feathery wisps of their touch. We loved to hear them thumping against window-panes and watch their shadows moving like the reflections of raindrops on our bedroom walls. Meena loved to comb her claws through their midsts or hop up and catch one with a gulp, swallowing it whole. Our parents hated them. They bought little metal fans for each room and set the switches on high to drive away the moths. But the fans only seemed to draw more moths. They’d fight their way toward the center of the air current like fish struggling upriver and then turn on their wings and flit off, as though it were nothing more than a game to them. The best game ever.

No one noticed them leaving. We just woke up one morning in late October, wondered for an instant what had changed, and realized then that the shadows on the walls were gone. Lidia said something we didn’t understand about the sea. Francesca said that the little farfalle had turned into cherubini.

We would have been disappointed — rather, we were disappointed for a few hours, until Harry found the spider in the tub. It was black with white dots on its carapace and white chevrons on its abdomen, and it was about the size of Patrick’s thumbnail. Harry trapped it in a cup topped with paper and brought it into the kitchen for the rest of us to see. We gathered round, marveling as Harry dumped the spider into a deep crease in the paper. He asked for a toothpick. Patrick brought him a spoon. Harry flipped the spider over, and we were astonished to see it somehow manage to flip back and right itself. Harry touched it with the spoon again. The spider leapt into the air and landed on the table, and it would have escaped if Nat hadn’t crushed it with a rolling pin.

Harry pushed Nat in retaliation, pushed him right against the rickety table. The tabletop knocked against the shelf in a wooden cupboard. On the shelf the delicate glass flue of a lantern swayed drunkenly and then fell forward, shattering on the tile floor.

“Che è successo!” We heard Lidia’s voice before we saw her. My brothers fled. I was frozen by confusion. Lidia swooped down, spanked me once, and scooped me into her arms, holding me over her shoulder as she marched down the hall to tell Claire what trouble I had caused.

I suffered my resentment in my room, alone, for the next ten minutes or so, until I heard my brothers whispering in the hall and went to find out what important thing deserved secrecy. Patrick was holding a milk bottle; Harry was securing a piece of paper with a rubber band to serve as a lid. “Shut up,” Nat said when he saw me. I circled, preparing to kick him, but my attention was soon absorbed by the spectacle in the bottle — not just one striped spider but a whole clutch of them leaping toward the stick, bouncing against the glass and tumbling down upon one another.

My brothers had gathered the spiders from windowsills on the outside of the house. But they were all over the inside of the house as well. Now that we knew what to look for, we saw them everywhere — crawling on bookshelves, up flowerpots, across the tiles and planks of the floors, up walls, along ceilings. When we understood how plentiful they were, we began yelling with delight. Claire joined us on our hunt without understanding what, exactly, we were hunting for. When Harry showed her the mass of spiders underneath the living-room sofa, she herded us all out of the house again, and this time she wouldn’t let us go back inside.

These were the zebra spiders — minute spiders that could leap from the floor to a tabletop and were as wily a prey as minnows. They weren’t as beautiful as the ghost moths, but they were more interesting to us. To Claire, they were a new and worse kind of pest, somehow expressive of a mute hostility. If the house had an animate spirit, this spirit had taken a strong dislike to us, and with the moths and spiders meant to drive us away. And if the house were just a house, it was proving itself uninhabitable.

That same afternoon, Claire ordered us to stay outside until she returned, and she walked to Lorenzo’s villa, where she put to him an ultimatum: he would see to it that the Le Foci house was free of pests or the Murdochs would break the lease. Lorenzo poured her a glass of wine and promised to help. If the villa didn’t suit the Signora, he would find her another villa —
una villa più bella,
he assured her. He smiled gently, his mustache flattening across his upper lip. Claire felt startled by his kindness and recognized how excessive her distress must have seemed. She sipped her wine. When he offered her a cigarette she accepted, though she hadn’t smoked for years.

The problem was easily resolved, thanks to Lorenzo’s graciousness. For the same rent, he provided us with a new house in the hills between Marciana and Marciana Marina, with a magnificent view of the sea. Claire accepted before she even saw the place. And she made all the arrangements to move without even consulting Murray, sparing him from the distraction of life.

Some days the vibrancy of colors on the island astonished him; other days the clouds hung low to the ground, the air was thick with smoke from burning rubbish, and he couldn’t understand what the Italians were saying to him. Elba held no certain answers. But Murray grew increasingly resolute. He didn’t want to leave the island without taking with him a deed to Elban land. He hired a surveyor, Carlo Giovanni, who had recently lost his job in the local mining industry. Carlo wouldn’t give Murray a straight answer. Either the land on the east side of the island was worth more than the land on the west side, or the land on the west side was worth more than the land on the east side. Either Murray would prosper, or he’d fail.

He kept mislaying maps and forgetting appointments. He heard some men in a bar in Portoferraio laughing, and he knew they were laughing at him. Still, he wasn’t close to giving up. Often he didn’t come home for pranzo and siesta. Instead, he’d trail Carlo over rock croppings and through chestnut woods. Francis Cape tagged along and proved so useful as a translator that Murray offered to pay him, but Francis said he preferred the status of a volunteer.

If Murray could only put a claim down, he’d feel better. There was plenty of land to buy and plenty of islanders who wanted to sell. But where to begin. When to begin? How?

Uncertainty was beginning to make him agitated. He was losing sleep. He rattled lame jokes for his guests in order to keep them at dinners that lasted for hours. He shrugged when Claire announced that we were changing residences. He wasn’t home to help pack. And on the morning we were scheduled to move, he left the house early, before the rest of us had woken, he trailed the surveyor all day, and in the early evening he rode his motorcycle right past Marciana Marina and the cart road that led to our new house, and he returned to the villa in Le Foci.

It was a cool, clear autumn night. The light of a full moon filled the deserted rooms with a dim fluorescence; the fringes of curtains fluttered in the breeze. It took only a moment for Murray’s eyes to become accustomed to the dimness and another moment for him to realize his mistake and remember that his family had moved to a different residence. The first wave of panic passed, replaced by a puzzling serenity. He’d always preferred chaos to simplicity, noise to silence, society to solitude. But he felt inclined to linger in the empty house and enjoy the inventions of his imagination. To imagine, without much effort, life without a family or friends. The freedom of solitude.

Alone, without responsibility, in a villa filled with moonlight. He could consider what he might do if he could do as he pleased. He didn’t want to have to answer for his actions. He didn’t want to think about his reputation. For a good long hour he sat there not thinking about his reputation. All the jobs he’d quit since he’d come home from the war. His mother and uncles. The people of Elba. Adriana Nardi.

The truth was, he hadn’t seen the girl for weeks, ever since the early morning when he’d gone to La Chiatta. Sitting alone in Le Foci, he was trying not to think about her. He had no reason to think of her. She’d been busy, Francis Cape had said with a vagueness that had secretly annoyed Murray. But of course Murray had no right to know what she’d been doing. He didn’t really care about what she’d been doing. Most of the time, she couldn’t have been farther from his thoughts. And yet he experienced an odd sensation of unreality when he heard a noise and looked out the window to see the girl stepping from his mind onto the path beside the house, a mirage so vivid that he had to shake his head and look again. And she persisted, an apparition he’d conjured, making her way toward the front of the house, as real as the curtain he drew aside to watch her. He listened to the delicate crunching as she rolled her shoes over the pebbles, saw her wince when she turned an ankle, heard his own intake of breath, and knew exactly when she looked up to see him move back from the window.

He couldn’t will her away, nor did he want to. He just needed to compose himself. He was surprised at how boldly she knocked. People who knock like that always have a clear purpose.

Is anybody home? Buonasera…Oh, come in, you poor girl…. Without a coat, no less…. Murray, it’s Adriana at the door…. Put the water on for tea and fetch a blanket, will you?

She’d seen him at the window. And his Lambretta was parked in the drive. She knew — he knew she knew — that he was inside the house, just as she’d known that he’d come to see her at the break of dawn. Did she know he was alone? She knocked again and again. She kept knocking until he had no choice but to get up and answer the door, greeting the girl with a smile meant to convey calm, inviting her to come inside.