The Witch of Napoli (15 page)

Negri wagged his finger. “No work tonight. Just dinner – and a chance for those of us in Genoa to enjoy the pleasure of this beautiful woman you’ve kept for yourself for too long, Camillo.”

Negri wasn’t looking for proof; his tests with a local Genovese medium had left him convinced. He was simply trying to understand how it worked. “I accept the phenomena as real,” he had written in his book
Psicologia e Spiritismo,
“not only because they are reported by persons worthy of credence, even by scientists, but because I also have experimented.”

That night, the three of us took a carriage over to Negri’s second floor apartment in the Bocadâze, an old mariners' neighborhood just off of Via Aurora. Its large windows looked out to a small bay and a cobblestone beach crowded with small fishing boats. The evening was warm and the windows were thrown open, and you could hear laughter and chatter from the fishermen preparing to head out for some night fishing. Alessandra lingered at the window for a long time, staring out, contently sniffing the salt air and letting the breeze caress her face. She and the sea were lovers.

“What a wonderful place to live.” she whispered to me. “When I’m in Rome, I’m going to spend my summers here, Tommaso.” Typical Alessandra. She only had a few
lire
to her name, but she had the Midas touch when it came to turning destitution into dreams.

Negri was a bachelor, but his cook Gemma fed ten of us, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the small dining room. Most were professors or students from Negri’s university, and Gemma outdid herself – pasta tossed with
bianchetti
, broiled
bronzini,
and a special surprise for Alessandra. When we finished the fish, Negri slipped into the kitchen, returned to the table with a plate in his hands, and placed it ceremoniously in front of Alessandra.

Alessandra clapped her hands in surprise. “A pizza?”

“Genoa’s salute to Naples.” Negri gestured towards the kitchen. “Gemma is hiding in the kitchen until she hears you like it.”

The Genovese
faina
does look like a Neapolitan pizza – a thin pancake cut in triangles, but made of chickpea flour instead of wheat flour. Gemma had delicately seasoned it with rosemary and sea salt.

Alessandra took a bite and a big grin spread across her face. “
Deliziosa!”
She hopped up from her chair and headed for the kitchen. “
Signora
, I beg you, tell me how to make it.”

Alessandra spent the rest of the evening encircled by a harem of admirers who peppered her with questions about her mediumship. Everyone drank a lot and laughed a lot. They teased her about her famous jibe at the Englishman Huxley. One of the guests, Professor Baldinotti, pulled out his little
du botte
accordion and played “Santa Lucia,” and then a Neapolitan tarantella which got Alessandra up on her feet to dance and soon everybody was up and dancing and bumping into each other and falling down and Alessandra ended the evening by singing Peppino Turco’s famous Neapolitan song about the cable car up Mount Vesuvius:

That week, Alessandra produced table levitations four nights in a row. During the second sitting, she invited Dr. Pirelli, one of Negri’s plump colleagues, to get up on
top
of the table. He sat there, dumbfounded, as all four legs of the table lifted off the floor for several seconds before crashing back down again. All the time, my palm was squeezing the flash bulb, I’m thinking “Now! Now!” but Lombardi was too flabbergasted to speak, and we missed it. I should have just fired the damn flash. It was unbelievable.

But Alessandra topped it on our last night in Genoa.

“
I
t feels like a cat is climbing my right arm towards my shoulder…”

“Somebody is tickling me.”

“Something just pulled my beard!”

Everyone in the room that night was being touched, pinched and grabbed by invisible hands except me. The only thing I felt was a bead of sweat rolling down the back of my neck. Negri’s laboratory was small and stuffy, the windows closed and papered over.

The room was pitch black. Alessandra was convinced that light discouraged the spirits, and Lombardi and Negri were curious to see what she could produce in total darkness.

Baldinotti, the accordion player, seemed to be the spirits’ favorite target that night.

At one point, he declared, “I feel a hand fumbling in my jacket pocket…..” He fell silent for ten seconds, then announced, “I don’t feel it anymore…”

Alessandra’s voice piped up in the darkness. “The spirits tell you to put your hand in the pocket.”

“Certainly,” Baldinotti replied. “I am now doing that…..I can feel my handkerchief…..” Suddenly he exclaimed, “What the devil?…why, it’s tied in a knot!”

Huxley would have claimed trickery – Alessandra had slipped out of her chair in the darkness and tied the knot, or switched handkerchiefs – but what happened next certainly wasn’t.

Baldinotti saw it first. “Look! There! In the corner!” he exclaimed.

A faint, silvery ball of light – like in Naples when Lombardi’s mother materialized – had emerged in the darkness. It grew in brightness then began to pulse, pushing five luminescent tendrils forward in the heavy, still air, which slowly resolved themselves into the five fingers of a hand. It was clearly a woman’s hand, with long, thin, finely formed fingers, but it ended at the wrist – what Spiritualists call a partial materialization. It glowed with the phosphorescent light of a firefly. The spirit hand floated slowly across the room and halted next to Alessandra’s right ear, faintly illuminating her face. The fingers reached out and gently pushed Alessandra’s hair back, like a doting mother might do to her daughter, then came to rest on her shoulder, the fingers curling naturally and gracefully.

Our eyes by this time were well adjusted to darkness, and everyone could easily see the glowing hand on Alessandra’s shoulder.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Your mind simply can’t wrap itself around something so bizarre, so absurd, as a disembodied hand. There’s nothing in your experience, your reality, to compare it to. But it was there – and it wasn’t simply a hand wrapped in a white handkerchief, or a stuffed glove, or some cheap device made of pasteboard.

Negri, only centimeters away, raised his monocle and studied it.

“Can we photograph it?” he asked.

I had been so mesmerized I had completely forgotten I had a camera bulb in my hand.

“The spirits say no,” answered Alessandra. “But you may touch it.”

Negri passed control of Alessandra to Lombardi, then reached out and gently grasped the spirit hand, describing what he felt.

“I’m…I’m feeling a true hand…flesh… and bones are felt… the skin of the hand… warm…mobile fingers… fingernails…are all perceived…the hand gives off a light…I can see the bust and arms of
Signora
Poverelli… both her hands are held by Dr. Lombardi…”

The hand glided down the table, and when it reached Baldinotti it halted, and the palm opened up, inviting him to take it. He slowly reached up and laid his own palm gently on the spirit hand, and the ghostly fingers seemed to entwine his own, the light pulsing like the beating of a heart.

“Olivia…?” He sounded startled. The light seemed to pulse brighter. “Oh, God –
Cara
Olivia!” He leaned forward and kissed the spirit hand, then laid his cheek against it and began to sob.

I never learned who Olivia was, and Negri left that part out of his scientific account, but Negri did have the courage to include the astonishing materialization in his report, and defended its reality till the day he died, despite the fierce ridicule he received from skeptics.

It was a spectacular beginning to the tour, and Lombardi was ecstatic, but Alessandra paid a price for it. She did sittings six straight nights that week, and we usually didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight, and her cough seemed to be getting worse.

A
lessandra didn’t trust many people in her hard life.

She was hurt too many times, and rarely let down her guard. But Zoe captured her heart.

When we arrived at her father’s house in Lausanne, just outside of Geneva, the sassy, little six-year old ran to our carriage and thrust a bouquet of yellow daffodils into Alessandra’s hand.

“
Buongiorno,”
she chirped, and performed a dramatic, sweeping bow.
“Mi chiamo Zoe
.” Then she giggled and looked back to her beaming mother.

It turned out that “Good morning” and “My name is Zoe” were the only words of Italian she knew, but fortunately for us her parents spoke multiple languages, like most educated people in Switzerland. Professor Theodore Fournier, our host in Geneva, owned a magnificent, two-story house right on the water at Lac Leman. He was the same age as Lombardi, and the scion of a prominent financier who controlled the
Banque Cantonale de Genève
. They lived like the Medici, spent a lot of time in Paris, and Fournier’s wife Josephine decorated their house with Art Nouveau lamps and sculptures. Despite their money, they weren’t stuffy people. Josephine painted and ran around with artists, and Dr. Fournier was unconventional enough to investigate Spiritualism.

After a lunch of rabbit with mustard, Zoe led Alessandra down to the lake to feed the wild swans, trailed by a servant carrying a silver bowl filled with pieces of bread, and I tagged along. Before we even got there, the swans started honking and paddling towards the shore, eager for lunch. There must have been a dozen birds surrounding us, racing forward to grab the bread, then scurrying away in an attempt to gobble it down before another swan stole it from them. Alessandra had moved down the shore a little to feed a solitary swan out in the water, and I had started for the dock to inspect their sailboat, when I heard Zoe scream.

“Mama! Mama!”

I turned around and saw three birds chasing Zoe across the lawn, nipping at her legs, and lunging at the bread in her hand. Josephine came sprinting down the lawn to save her, but Alessandra got there first. She swooped up Zoe into her arms and laid into the birds, giving a swift boot to the biggest and sending the squawking trio to flight.

After that, Zoe followed her heroine “Tante” Alessandra everywhere.

I never saw Alessandra happier in her life than those two wonderful weeks in Switzerland.

No matter how late the evening sitting ran, she would get up early the next morning to eat breakfast with little Zoe. One morning, I came down and found Alessandra on her hands and knees in front of Zoe who was perched in a chair trying to keep from laughing.

“Meow” went Alessandra. She pretended to be a cat, rubbing her face against Zoe’s leg then looked up at Zoe with a sad face. “Me-o-o-w.” Zoe covered her mouth with her hands, trying hard to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t. She exploded in laughter and jumped into Alessandra’s arms, kissing her, the two of them rolling on the floor. Josephine had taught Alessandra how to play Zoe’s favorite game, “Poor Pussy.”

Language was never a barrier between the two of them – they shared the language of the heart. One evening, I found Alessandra in the library, Zoe nestled in her lap, reading a children’s story together. It was in French and Zoe would read a few lines then look at Alessandra who would nod her head and say something in Italian.

“You don’t understand a word she is saying,” I protested.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “As the French say, ‘
Pas de problème.’”
She laughed and hugged Zoe who stuck her tongue out at me and parroted Alessandra.

“
Pas de problème.”

I looked at Alessandra. “What does that mean?”

“It means ‘no problem,’ silly.” She tickled Zoe. “I learned it from my little
bambina
here.”

Alessandra spent most of her free time with Zoe, playing with her little black and white terrier Antoinette, playing tea party in her bedroom, and sitting on the dock in the sunshine eating apples and kicking their heels in the sparkling water.

Lombardi always believed Zoe was primarily responsible for Alessandra’s spectacular successes in Geneva. Alessandra’s spirit soared when she felt loved, and her psychic performance improved dramatically.

After the success in Genoa, she and Lombardi seemed to relax a bit in each other’s company. The first weekend we were there, Fournier took us all out for a cruise on the
Mademoiselle
, his magnificent, 25-meter sailboat – casually mentioning that it was designed by the British naval architect who built the Royal Yacht
Britannia
for the Prince of Wales. Their servants packed several baskets of cheese, bread and sausages to take with us, along with a half-dozen bottles of Valais white. Lombardi and Alessandra both loved their wine, and the two of them sampled liberally all the way across the lake to Évian-les-Bains, a pretty French town on the south shore with famous thermal baths catering to the rich. They toured the town with a bottle of Fendant and, on the way home, they sat together in the stern, well-lubricated, singing “Santa Lucia.” It was a blustery day, with a stiff breeze, and half-way back Fournier handed the wheel over to Josephine and clambered forward to reef a sail.

Before he reached the bow, a gust caught the sails and we suddenly heeled hard over.

“
Merda
!” Alessandra yelled, and flipped head over heels into the lake.

Lombardi dove into the water, suit and all, paddling furiously to her rescue. By the time we came about to pick them up, they were both laughing and splashing each other.