“It seems that Giuseppe suffered extensive brain damage,” he told a disoriented Matilda. “Most of his body functions are impaired. He can’t move. He can’t talk. He can emit sounds, but nothing that resembles words. He can swallow liquids, and that can keep him alive for some time. It’s impossible to predict how his illness will evolve. The likely course of it, I’m sorry to say, is that he will die. It could happen in a few hours or in a few days. It may even take months if the doctors can continue to feed him. Even if he should regain consciousness, he may never be able to function like a normal person again.” He sighed. “He’s not dead at this moment, but you should consider him as such. It’s best for everyone.” He took Matilda’s hand. “I’m awfully sorry, Matilda. I wish there was something I could do.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Matilda said coldly. “I’ll make the rest of my family aware.”
The stupefied doctor watched her leave the ward, wondering what in the world Giuseppe had done to her to make her act in such a detached way.
Matilda took her time returning home, where in the meantime Antonio had lined up the family and all the servants in the social living room and was subjecting everyone to a thorough interrogation. Weary from the events of the past two days, Caterina had retired to her old bedroom, where she had immediately fallen asleep. The moment Matilda stepped into the living room, Umberto looked at her with eyes of fire.
“You knew! You knew all along! How could you? How could you have lied to us for over two years? You put us through a mock funeral! A mock funeral, do you understand?”
Matilda said nothing.
“What was in that coffin, mother?” Umberto screamed. “I lifted it to set it in the mausoleum, and so did Raimondo. What was in it? Tell me!”
Matilda lowered her eyes to the floor. “Stones.”
Umberto stepped back. “Stones? We buried a coffin full of stones?”
Eugenia lifted her chin and turned her face to the back wall.
IT WAS PAST NINE O’CLOCK at night when Ivano returned to Via San Lorenzo, looking for Caterina. He had felt comfortable leaving Caterina in Antonio Sobrero’s hands, but his comfort vanished at once when he found no one in at Eugenia’s home. Enough time had passed, in his opinion, for Antonio to have set things straight at the
palazzina
and for Caterina and her aunt to have returned to Via San Lorenzo as agreed. He waited in front of the building for over an hour, fencing off Ottavio and Grazia, who kept asking him questions about where and how he had managed to rescue Caterina. Time passed, the darkness deepened, the street emptied, and Ivano realized that Caterina and her aunt would not be coming back that night. That’s when he began to fear for Caterina’s life.
“I’m going up there,” he told Grazia, who every so often glanced out of her living-room window, not out of pity for Ivano but out of discomfort for the prolonged presence of a musician-baker in close proximity of her home. “If you see Caterina,” he continued, “tell her to wait here. I’ll check back in a couple of hours.”
When he arrived on Corso Solferino, a feeling of deja-vu overcame him. He remembered the time he had spent knocking and plucking his mandolin; Giuseppe having him arrested; and the long night in jail. Rage took hold of him as he crossed the garden and banged his fists on the door. This time, when Guglielmo opened, Ivano saw a different man. The butler’s impassible face was rumpled and his once stern lips were stretched into a tentative smile. His voice, when he spoke, had a high pitch, so different from the business-like timbre Ivano had heard so many times before.
“Yes, Mister Bo,” Gugliemo said. “Miss Caterina is here.”
“Is she all right?” Ivano asked. He sniffed the air, wondering if the odor of alcohol he was smelling could possibly be emanating from the butler’s mouth.
“Yes,” Guglielmo said. “She’s asleep. I’ll tell her you came when she wakes up.”
With that, Guglielmo closed the door. His body swayed as he climbed the stairs to the third floor. Rigidly, he sat on his bed. A half-full bottle of whiskey stood on his night table. He had seized it full from Giuseppe’s reading room after returning from the hospital. With a jerky move, he brought the bottle to his lips with every intention of emptying it before day dawned.
As for the rest of the servants, they were all wildly agitated. They told about Caterina’s arrival to their colleagues in the nearby houses, and each and every one of them told other servants, adding a third source, besides Grazia and Ottavio, to the news that were spreading from building to building without respite. In truth, there was also a fourth source of gossip at work downtown, because Corrado Bo had taken care of telling Caterina’s story to everyone on Piazza della Nunziata. By morning, most of the city knew, and Antonio found himself answering questions and making public statements in front of the numerous reporters crowding the entrance to the police station.
The previous night, before leaving the
palazzina
, he had made three decisions and taken steps to begin making sense of that bizarre situation. First, he had placed Matilda under house arrest, a precaution that would give him time to understand completely the extent of her involvement in Caterina’s reclusion. Second, he had sent a policeman to the hospital to monitor Giuseppe’s state. The policeman was to inform him at once should Giuseppe regain consciousness. He had meanwhile charged Giuseppe with a number of crimes, including conspiracy and kidnapping. Third, he had arrested Doctor Sciaccaluga for filing a fraudulent death certificate. By the middle of the night, Damiano was in the city jail, awaiting arraignment.
As for Eugenia, she spent the night at the
palazzina
, ignoring Matilda’s shouts that she should leave.
“How dare you give me orders,” she snapped at Matilda. “This is
my
house! You married a bum, who didn’t even have the right to inherit from my parents in the first place!”
She stood in front of Matilda hands on her hips, taking in every inch of her sister-in-law’s petrified face. Then she retired to a guest bedroom, where she fell into an agitated sleep. She hadn’t slept in the paternal home in thirty-one years. Tossing and turning, she began little by little to realize the magnitude of what had just happened that night. By the stroke of midnight, the truth had sunk completely into her: a stranger under the false pretenses of a brother had ousted her from her house; this stranger had treated his own daughter like a disposable object; the family name was ruined; and the Berillis would soon be the joke of the town. Shortly, she began to scream. Viola rushed in and saw Eugenia lying on the bed in disheveled clothes and with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She was clutching the sides of the bed with both hands as she kept screaming. Nothing Viola or the rest of the servants did could stop Eugenia’s bestial shouts.
From her bedroom, Matilda heard the screams but did nothing other than continue to cry. When around three in the morning Eugenia began to vomit, Guglielmo, despite the whiskey he’d consumed, dragged her downstairs and drove her to the hospital. When they arrived, Eugenia was still vomiting and screaming. The doctors who admitted her had never seen such a condition before and didn’t have the faintest idea how to cure it. They placed Eugenia in the isolation ward and kept her under tight observation. She would spend two weeks there. During the first week she had continuous vomit attacks and difficulty breathing, screaming at night as if she were prey to nightmares from which she couldn’t escape. Her symptoms subsided during the second week. When they disappeared, the doctors discharged her with moans of relief.
The morning after her return to the
palazzina
, Caterina awoke in her bed unsure of where she was. Then she recognized her bedroom and heard the cooing of the turtle-doves. She remembered what had happened, and was once more overcome by disbelief. She dressed quickly and rushed down the stairs. All the rooms in the house were silent as the servants had unanimously decided to sleep in after the scare Eugenia had given them in the middle of the night. That unexpected silence frightened Caterina: it was deafening, like the silence she had breathed for two years in the corridors of the House of Hope. It was with a mix of joy and fear that she toured the first floor: the two living rooms, the reading room, the dining room, the hallways, the kitchen, and at last the blue parlor, where she saw Matilda on the loveseat. She wasn’t embroidering, only staring out the window with vitreous eyes. Her body was rigid, her face marmoreal. Without redirecting her gaze, Matilda knew her daughter was in the room. She murmured, “Good morning, Caterina.”
Caterina sat on an armchair. One minute went by before Matilda spoke. “Would you please listen to what I have to say?”
Caterina nodded.
Slowly, Matilda turned to her daughter. At first she spoke calmly, her voice becoming more and more flustered as her speech progressed. She told Caterina about the threatening letters and the cat on the door, and how Giuseppe had fainted at its sight. After that, with a torrent of words she was unable to dam, she confessed to all the falsehoods. She told how Giuseppe had spread the news that his daughter was first sick and then dead and how everyone–Raimondo, Umberto, Aunt Eugenia, their close and far friends, the city authorities, the clergy, and the entire town–had been led to believe those lies. Then she told her own secrets. She spoke about Arnaldo Della Tessiera, her missing hymen and the humiliating visit she had endured as a young bride, and the pact between her parents and Filiberto and Giulia Berilli. She told about Giuseppe’s threats to drag her and her family in the mud had she dared disobey him.
“I’m a coward, Caterina,” she said at the end of the story, “and I’m ashamed. I sacrificed you to save myself. I deserve your contempt. But I didn’t do what I did because I don’t love you. On the contrary, my love for you is so deep I have no words to describe it. I acted this way because I’m weak and incapable of standing up for what I believe. Night after night, for months, I dreamed I’d get up in the morning and tell Giuseppe what a despicable man he was and explain to the world that you were alive and well in a convent, and then I’d travel to it, all by myself, to take you home. When morning came, however, I couldn’t talk. I wanted so much to hate your father; instead, I always cared for him like a devoted spouse. I can’t explain why, but there’s a part of me that lives only in my dreams and I’m incapable of expressing with my actions or my words. I can’t fight my husband, Caterina, as in my youth I couldn’t fight my father. It took Giuseppe’s near death to give me the strength to undertake a trip to the convent. When I arrived, the nuns told me you had fled with a man the day before.” She brushed her forehead with the tip of her fingers. “I’m not asking you to forgive me or understand my struggle. I’m asking you not to hate me, if you can.” She paused. “I missed you. I know it must be hard for you to believe me, but I thought of you day and night while you were gone.”
Then Matilda became silent, and Caterina felt helpless in that silence, as she had felt in her childhood at the end of Raimondo’s nightly games. Her throat closed up and her lips trembled as her eyes filled with tears. “I missed you too, mother,” she said in a broken voice. They stood up in unison and embraced.
Matilda was the first to speak again. “I must ask you questions, darling. Who’s the man you fled the convent with?”
“Ivano. Remember him? Yes, I still love him.”
“Oh, darling,” Matilda moaned. She wanted to explain to Caterina how misplaced her love was, but swallowed that thought and asked instead, “How did he find you?”
Caterina shook her head. “I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that he never stopped looking for me. Wouldn’t you say that’s love?”
Matilda grazed her daughter’s cheek. “I guess it could be.”
“My turn to ask,” Caterina said. “Where’s Lavinia? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Matilda replied. “She left this house on the very day your father found you with,” she paused, “the baker. We never saw her again.”
“His name is Ivano. You can say it,” Caterina nodded. “It won’t bite you.”
Matilda lowered her eyes, unable to bring herself to call Caterina’s loved one by his first name.
“Does Lavinia have any family, someone in town who may know where she is?” Caterina asked.
“I wouldn’t know. But you could ask the servants. They may know something about her.”
An uncomfortable silence settled between mother and daughter. Caterina couldn’t find anything else to say. As for Matilda, she was gathering the courage to ask the next question, the one she dreaded the most. Her voice came out raspy, unsure.
“What you said when we left you at the convent, about Raimondo … Is there truth to your words? Did he do things to you?”
Caterina squeezed her fingers around the armrests while visions Raimondo’s body crowded her thoughts. She wanted so much to tell someone about Raimondo’s sick games, share the burden that had weighed on her for so many years. A wave of sounds rose inside her throat, crawling into her mouth and pushing against her lips. As much as she tried, she couldn’t speak. She looked at her mother’s distressed eyes, at the pain painted on her face as she anxiously waited for her reply. When she finally spoke, her words sounded to her as if they had been uttered by a third person, a stranger who stood by her side.
“I made that up,” she murmured with the air of a guilty party who is confessing her misdeed. “I didn’t know what else to say to make you and father change your mind and take me back to Genoa with you.”
With a deep sigh of relief, Matilda took Caterina’s hand. “I am so glad it’s not true,” she said. “But if it’s not true, who were you intimate with as a child?”
“Don’t ask,” Caterina murmured. “I beg you.”
Matilda caressed her on the cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated over and over.
Later, in the privacy of her room, looking out the window at the stately pink oleanders that had been a symbol of her childhood, reliving the conversation with her mother, Caterina realized she was incapable of begrudging the woman who had brought her into the world and suffered at the hand of so many people. She should talk to Antonio Sobrero right away, she decided, and ask him not to press charges against her mother. She was on the way out of the
palazzina
when Viola stopped her in the foyer.