Tourmaline (14 page)
Lamps were lit in all the rooms and in the mist the glow formed a yellow penumbra around the villa. When we arrived Harry was already in the kitchen in our mother’s arms. She was clutching him and crying, and the scene made clear to the rest of us what trouble we’d caused by staying out so late. We’d been gone for hours. Our mother was sobbing for the children she thought she’d lost. We understood all too clearly that we were responsible for her distress. But we would never forgive Murray for hitting Patrick, smacking him like a dog, just like Lorenzo would slap his segugia bitch when it wouldn’t stop barking.
If Murray hadn’t been so cruel we would have thought our mother’s reaction excessive and wondered if her grief had some other cause. Instead, we believed that we’d seen proof of an important set of truths. Our mother loved us; our father didn’t.
Patrick still had the mica schist in his pocket, and later that night he hid it behind a bookshelf and swore us all to secrecy. We’d intended to give it to Murray. Not now. Our wicked father would never know that we had two perfect little towers of pink tourma-line — not the rarest kind, not nearly enough to make us rich, but enough to convince us that we should keep looking for more.
What are the limitations of sympathy? How much can we really understand about someone else? What qualities are genuine? To what extent is our perception of others inflected by imagination? What are the limitations of imagination? What are the risks of imagination? What are the rules of imagination? What does imagination have to do with sympathy? With suspicion? Why does a child run away from home? Why did it take so long for Claire to notice that it was past eight o’clock, dinner had grown cold, and her children were missing? Why did Claire blame Murray for this? Why did Murray blame Claire? Why didn’t we answer them when they called into the darkness? Where had we gone? Where had all the children of Elba gone? Why did some come home and not others? When would carnivale begin? When would it end? Why were the children of Elba throwing fistfuls of flour? What was the meaning of flour? Why is celebration so similar to protest? What would happen to the children? Who will live a long full life and who will die in youth? Where was Adriana? How much did the mother know about her daughter? How much can any mother know? Claire, why didn’t you ask Murray more questions if you continued to harbor suspicions? If your sense of foreboding was so strong, why didn’t you say something to Murray later that night, after your children were safely in bed? Why did you avoid the subject? What didn’t you want to know? What did you fear? Why were you so content during the day and so nervous at night? What were you thinking while you sat on the rocks and stared at the sea? What were you reading out on the terrace while we were wandering in the hills? What were you thinking when you had ten guests for dinner and everybody but you was talking at once? What is learned through conversation? What was to be gained by remaining on Elba? Why continue to invest in a worthless plot of land? What is the point of a gemstone? Why is a blue tourmaline, an indicolite, worth more than the red, rubellite variety? Why should Murray waste his time roaming the island of Elba when he could be back home drawing a salary? So what if tourmaline is vitreous, pleochroic, trigonal, and piezoelectric? Why go against sound advice? Why don’t you just give up and go home, Murray? Why did you hit Patrick, Murray? Why wouldn’t we forgive him? What was happening? Why was Murray becoming a stranger in his own house? Why didn’t spring bring better weather? Why did it rain for twenty-seven days in a row in the month of March? Why did Claire stop giving Patrick and Harry their lessons? Who would loan us money? Why didn’t Adriana come home?
1 May 1814
What is my crime? No more than sharing with the people of France a fierce hatred of inequality. For this I was made emperor. For this I’ve been repudiated. For this I was forced to surrender to foreign commissioners. They say I am responsible for savage acts of violence. I say I am responsible for the freedom that my countrymen have come to consider their right. Three days ago I left Fréjus on what is supposed to be the final journey of my life. I insisted on appropriate honors. Captain Ussher refused. Colonel Campbell overruled him, and I walked alone up the gangway to the boom of a twenty-one-gun salute.
Did anyone stop to consider the name of the frigate? I am being taken to Elba on the
Undaunted
. I boarded the
Undaunted
at night, the music of cannon fire announcing that a great man was being expelled from the country he had tried to save. To Captain Ussher and his crew I am pitiable. To Colonel Campbell I am — he understands the coincidence — undaunted. And so he does his best to placate me.
I am a man who perspires profusely. I need no more than four hours of sleep a night. I am a great military strategist. And I recognize as well as anyone the Allies’ stupidity at sending me to an island so near the coast.
I have only to bide my time and plan my course of action upon my return to France. Here on the
Undaunted
I’ve been entertaining my hosts by answering any question they put to me. I’ve already explained to them that if Villeneuve hadn’t gone off to Cádiz and joined Nelson, I’d have had my army in London within three days. If I’d conquered England, I would have made her the greatest power in the world. And yes, the Duchess of Bedford was a good dancer, but her mother was too fat.
Francis Cape had arrived on the island in 1947, at a time when many Elbans felt the need to reinforce their isolation. And yet with the closing of the mines and a few years of poor harvest, they were beginning to weigh the benefits of tourism against the costs. Some Elbans made Francis feel welcome; others clearly considered him an intruder.
He stayed through the first winter at a small, spare pensione in Portoferraio, where he was the only guest for weeks at a time. His first inquiries about more permanent accommodations were met with shrugs. His early attempts to use his self-taught Italian and engage Elbans in conversation were met with condescending bafflement. Cos’ ha detto? What did you say? On gloomy days in February he was almost ready to abandon his project and go back to England. But then he’d be walking along the beach at Bagnaia and the sun would pop out from behind the clouds, or he’d be wandering in the hills above Poggio and the bells of San Lorenzo would begin to ring. There was the young woman in the Café Medici in Portoferraio who would sprinkle cocoa on his cappuccino and with a toothpick carefully outline the shape of a heart on the foam. There was the old woman named Ninanina, who’d invite him into the rustic enoteca she ran with her husband and serve him a plate of grilled anchovies and a glass of wine for free.
And there was the extraordinary Nardi collection, unknown to most of the world. Francis paid his first visit to the Nardi villa in April of 1950. From that point on he lost his lingering inclination to leave the island. He found a small, serviceable flat in Portoferraio. He transferred his savings to a local bank. And he promised the Nardis, the signora and the signorina, that with his book on Napoleon Bonaparte he would do justice to their hospitality.
Adriana had turned fifteen years old in the spring of 1950. She was a reserved child, with a sweet but wary face that reminded Francis of the Madonna in Piero della Francesca’s
Annunciation,
and Francis believed that she both craved attention and was filled with distrust. So he set out to win her trust. He brought her little figurines, porcelain kittens and mice purchased from the old woman who ran the enoteca in Portoferraio. Adriana accepted the gifts with a grim politeness that made Francis nervous. He decided that the figurines were too childish. He brought her colored pencils and paper but again felt from her cool acceptance that he’d made a mistake. He gave her a set of ivory coasters, which she understood to be a gift for her mother. He gave her a necklace of onyx beads but never saw her wearing it. He gave her a book of fairy tales in English.
The book was the first present that aroused any spontaneous response — a flash of a shy smile and a quick, probing glance, as if she were trying to find out how he knew what she most wanted. Though he’d conversed with her only in Italian, he’d assumed that, like her mother, she spoke some English and French — better French than English, as it turned out. But she wanted to learn English and told this to Francis by way of thanking him for the book, admitting her interest with a coyness that took him by surprise. She wanted to learn English. She said it once in Italian and repeated herself in English, embedding in the sentence a request: Would Francis teach her?
He began teaching her informally, stretching their ordinary conversations into lessons and reading with her through the book of fairy tales. She learned the words of a song sung by three heads floating in a well. She learned the words of a song sung by mermaids. She learned many useless things. But then Signora Nardi insisted on formalizing the instruction and paying Francis for one hour of lessons each day. He tried to refuse payment; Signora Nardi ignored him.
From the spring of 1950 through the next two years, Francis tutored Adriana in English. When he ran out of books he set her to work translating the letters in the archives and with her help deciphered passages he’d skipped or misread because of his limited Italian: a recipe sent to Napoleon’s chef for a particular kind of fish soup the emperor had liked, an eighteenth-century account of unearthing the ruins of an Etruscan ironworks, and an exchange between Elisa Baciocchi, Princess of Piombino, and Antonio Buoncompagni about the bodies washing ashore at Gorgona after the sinking of the
Queen Charlotte.
These were good, purposeful years for Francis. Besides tutoring Adriana he gathered voluminous notes for his book. He explored the island, befriended Elbans, and came to feel entirely at home, so much so that he began to resent the intrusion of tourists. In his opinion, Elba could do well enough without transforming itself into one big resort. He argued in favor of isolation, reminding the Elbans of their long history of self-sufficiency. When had they ever profited from affiliation? They could do no better than fish and tend their vines and keep their riches to themselves.
Adriana grew up, or at least older. In Francis’s perception she remained a child — a stern, poised, mature child, but still a child — because only a child could continue to adore him as she did. She cast him as the father she had lost, and Francis accepted the role. He believed that she needed to adore him. He, in turn, was fond of her and took it upon himself to help her continue the education they’d begun together. Though he knew that Signora Nardi would disapprove, he secretly gave Adriana money to help make her life more comfortable when she went off to study in Bologna. And when she applied for the fellowship at St. Hilda’s, he wrote a recommendation on her behalf to a relative, a second cousin who had some sort of function — Francis wasn’t sure what, exactly — at a college in Oxford.
And then Murray Murdoch arrived on Elba, and Adriana decided that Francis Cape was useless. In the weeks before she disappeared she took to receiving him with an indifference that was humiliating. He had only to look at her averted eyes to see what she didn’t want to see: a stupid, pretentious old man who could do nothing for her.
An old, old man, with rotting teeth, sour breath, rheumy eyes, gnarled fingers, and a disgusting habit of burping repeatedly into his fist all through a meal. He wanted to apologize to her for being so old. He wished she were old, as old as the gentlewoman who painted her face in the poem by George Turberville. A Hecuba rather than a Helen. He wanted to tell her all about his childhood to convince her that he was once young. She wouldn’t have believed it. Francis Cape was never a child. He had been old long before Adriana was born. He had always been old.
Napoleon died at the age of fifty-two on St. Helena. Francis was seventy-three. If he had died at fifty-two he wouldn’t have learned Italian, he wouldn’t have come to Elba, he wouldn’t have climbed to the top of Volterraio, and he never would have stood on the cliffs at Capo Vit at sunrise. But he also would have been spared knowing Adriana Nardi.
Until he’d met her, Francis had never experienced the problem of loving someone too much. He’d been a solid, decent English bachelor, his past sprinkled with solid, decent relationships. He could have married any number of good women but for one reason or another had remained single.
He wouldn’t have loved Adriana too much if he hadn’t become aware of how little he could do for her. He tried to please her and win back her adoration. He brought her books, he gave her money, he complimented her, he gave her more money.
He worked frantically on his history of Napoleon, felt simultaneously impassioned by his mission and ashamed of his inadequacies. Napoleon became the excuse to write about the magnificent beauty of Elba. Why would anyone want to leave? How could the little tyrant have been so foolish? On paper he ruled an island principality but in effect he was the emperor of paradise. Francis wanted to write a biography of the emperor of paradise. He didn’t want to write about Napoleon’s escape, but history obligated him to try. Every day he’d write another page or two. And every day he’d set aside the work he’d done and start over.
When my parents met Francis Cape they took him to be the respectable English bachelor that he was still pretending to be. Our mother felt a little sorry for him. Our father felt grateful for Francis’s assistance. Francis had introduced him to Lorenzo, our padrone, and helped him to find a place to stay on Elba. He’d served as a translator for Murray and told him whom to trust. And he’d introduced Murray and Claire to Adriana Nardi.
At first Francis didn’t mind Murray’s friendship with Adriana, for he saw that it was making her a little perkier, a little more interested in life. Whenever Francis told Adriana that he was going to see the Murdochs, Adriana was keen on going along. But soon enough Francis began to notice Murray’s inappropriate interest in the girl. What did he want from Adriana? He said he wanted to know whatever she could tell him about the island. Why did he care? What was at stake? Francis wondered if there was something he’d missed in the Nardi collection — not just a tantalizing fact about Napoleon but some sort of information that could have more material consequence. Something along the lines of a treasure map. Murray kept talking about the value of tourmaline. Had he found routes to ancient mines, perhaps? To intact veins of precious minerals?
