What wild stories people could tell about that night. Even as it was happening and windows lit up with the fires across the harbor, the stories were being told and retold. The story of a pregnant woman crushed by falling rubble as she ran from her home. The story of a man bubbling at the mouth with blood the color of blackberries. The story of a child shot in the back on the steps of Via del Paradiso.
The night of June 17, 1944, when the Allies attacked Elba, and the French, the Germans, the Africans, the Italians shot at anything that moved. And not just shot. They had dogs, people would say afterward, real dogs that breathed fire like dragons. And poison arrows that melted men into puddles. And little grenades the size of peas that they’d force down the throats of old women.
By the time Mario Tonietti arrived at La Chiatta, Massimo Volbiani and his wife were already dead. Irene Cartino was dead. Allegra Venuti was dead. Federico the grocer was dead. Cosimo the butcher was dead. They were all dead, killed for the crime of being alive. But there wasn’t time to mourn — Mario Tonietti, bless him, had come to lead the way to a cave below Volterraio, where they could wait out the night in safety.
But Mario Tonietti’s stories had taken too long, and by the time he’d finished what he thought Signora Nardi needed to know, there were already voices in the fields and the nearby scattershot of gunfire. It was too late to run from the house, too late to do anything but hide the child in the cabinet under the kitchen sink and wait, frozen with awareness of their helplessness, for the fighting to end.
What happened that night on Elba? No one could say for sure, not even the people who lived through it. No one could name the men who grabbed fourteen-year-old Sofia Canuti, took turns raping her, and cut her throat. No one saw it happen. No one would ever know for sure whether to believe crazy old Stefano Grigi, a fisherman from Marciana Marina, when he said that he’d helped bury the bones of a prisoner who’d been killed, cooked, and eaten by a band of soldiers. Which soldiers, Stefano? He had to admit he wasn’t sure. No one knew what to believe. The shroud of darkness made it impossible to distinguish between enemy and friend. The best you could do was try to save your family.
For many years afterward, people came to Ninanina’s enoteca to trade the stories that had already been told many times. It was here that Luisa came to help her cousin prepare food. She would listen to the stories, and when she was tired of listening she would tell what she remembered.
She remembered that Adriana had been a good girl that night and had followed her mother’s directions, huddling in the cabinet in absolute silence even after Signora Nardi closed the doors. How about that for courage! A child of ten spending the night in a dark cabinet and not making a sound. At one point Luisa had heard the distant shriek of what she’d thought was a woman but later learned was one of Lorenzo’s pigs that had been shot in the snout. She and the Signora and Mario Tonietti sat around the kitchen table, not daring even to whisper, waiting for the soldiers to burst through the door. But the soldiers never came to La Chiatta. By morning the sky was empty, the fields quiet, and when Luisa and the Signora opened the cabinet under the sink and brave Adriana tumbled out, they devoured her with kisses.
Elbans who lived through that night would spend the rest of their lives remembering. There was so much to remember that Luisa forgot about how afterward she didn’t hear Adriana humming. Not for twelve years did she hear the girl humming. And then, all of a sudden, she’d started humming again.
What did it mean, the humming? Ninanina asked. Luisa could only shrug. Girls of a certain age make a habit of humming. It probably meant nothing. But with Adriana gone Luisa shared Signora Nardi’s regret that she hadn’t listened more closely.
When she comes home, Luisa told Ninanina with a pride that struck witnesses as defensive, she will ask her bimba to sing for her. She wanted to hear the girl sing a whole song, clear as a bell, start to finish.
In the same house where she had waited with her daughter and cook and brother-in-law through the night of the Liberation, Signora Nardi waited for her daughter to come home. She knew how to wait. Through winter, spring, and summer, she waited patiently, deep in thought, though she was prepared to welcome most visitors, Claire among them, and would speak of her daughter as if she were expected home any minute.
Adriana was safe — Signora Nardi believed this not just because she wanted to believe it but because in her absence she had begun to piece together the nature of her secret. She didn’t speak of this to anyone, not even to Luisa. Let the dreams continue and suspicion build against an innocent man. Signora Nardi had long ago concluded that Signor Americano was too foolish to be guilty of doing any serious harm. And perhaps a dose of suspicion wouldn’t hurt him. It might even do him some good. Malcolm Murdoch, the father of four boys, the man who had dragged his family to the island of exile — he could learn something about himself in the process of deflecting accusations. At the very least, he could learn the value of caution.
Signora Nardi was an insightful woman. But insight didn’t save her from the occasional misjudgment. She believed her Elban neighbors had a powerful sense of justice and would never do more than trade stories about their dreams. In this sense our father was safe. Any action taken against him would have to be legal, and Signora Nardi would ensure that it didn’t progress to conviction. Murray had a protector in Adriana’s mother, a good fairy who would swish her wand and rescue him from peril at the last moment. No one would hurt him. Signora Nardi might as well have locked him in a secret vault and dropped the key into the sea.
But as the engineer from Ohio had said at the first dinner on the
Casparia,
the most dangerous thing you can do is get out of bed in the morning. Signora Nardi, noble as her intentions might have been, confident as she was of the general goodwill of the Elban people and her daughter’s imminent return, couldn’t keep our father from getting out of bed.
The moon over Elba is whiter than elsewhere, and the sea breeze is saltier. The soapstone is as soft as goose down. Obsidian tastes of licorice. Wells are lined with melted gold. The bladders of gulls are filled with nuggets of jargoon. A goat born on the eve of Ascension Day has hooves made of tin-stone. Beryls grow on persimmon trees. If you crack open a chestnut during an eclipse, you’ll find a fire-opal. If you wear clogs carved of peridot, you’ll add ten years to your life. The eyes of feral cats are amethyst. The eyes of wild dogs are citrine. Inside every hailstone there is a piece of sapphire the size of a pinhead. The shells of gull eggs are made of thin alexandrite. The shells of hummingbird eggs are made of hidden-ite. Cut open the bladder of a dying petrel and you’ll find schorl. Cut open the beating heart of a pigeon and you’ll find rubellite. Catch a falling star and it will turn to blue tourmaline in your hands. This is true.
If my father were here, I’d ask for clarification. What is true, Dad? He’d say, everything I tell you. He knew about falling stars turning into tourmaline because he saw it happen.
What else happened? I’d want to ask him. Is there anything that hasn’t happened on the island of Elba? What is possible, and what will never be more than the mind’s concoction? Where do people go on an island when they want to go away?
The rest, my father would say, I’d have to figure out on my own.
B
ORN MALCOLM AVERIL MURDOCH INTO A FAMILY CLINGING TO
its shrinking fortune, educated in private schools, contemptuous of his aristocratic friends but himself cursed with a prospector’s greed. Destined to crave the freedom to mess up his life. Malcolm Averil Murdoch, called Murray. Six foot one inch, weighing 190 pounds, brown-haired, green-eyed, an awkward dancer, inept at cards, good at checkers, a modern prospector who would be remembered in family history as the guy who lost a fortune on Elba. Elba! An island known to the rest of the world as a place from which exiled emperors escape. Soot Island.
I’ll show you what can happen on Elba.
He went ahead and left his job, borrowed money, and led us across the ocean.
Here we are! How did we get here? Onboard the
Casparia
from Genoa, from Genoa to Florence, from Florence by bus to Piombino, and then the ferry. But we must have made a wrong turn somewhere. This wasn’t the island Murray had envisioned. There must have been some mistake. One mistake leading to a whole series of miscalculations. Claire, what went wrong? Claire, can we go home?
She held him. They made love, moving together…. How would
Claire have described it? Energetically? Lustily? With a hint of ferocity in their antics? Afterward, Murray felt ashamed, as if he’d hurt her. He had hurt her. Disgraced her. Forced her to bear the weight of suspicion that cast him as the man responsible for the death of a young woman. You’ll answer for your crime, Signor Americano.
Just as lapidary involves shaping a gemstone to reflect light, suspicion involves shaping the recent past into a probable story. The effort of bringing something to light. You, Malcolm Averil Murdoch, where were you on the night Adriana disappeared? Were you sealing her inside a tomb? Were you burning her on a pyre? What were you doing? Tell us.
I was just fooling around.
Coward.
Yes.
All she’d wanted was to talk with you. Just talk. You answered her with the pretense of understanding. She ran from you, ran to the cliffs above Cavo and threw herself off. Is that what happened, Murray?
Maybe. Probably. Suspicion feeding on probability. Suspicion growing against you. Suspicion growing inside you. Stop looking at me like that! Elbans all over the island waking up from dreams about the investor from America, telling their dreams to their friends, shaping the dreams into evidence.
Everywhere he went, people were whispering. That’s him, that’s the one. Signor Americano. Pss, ssss, wind in the pineta, surf against the rocks. Suspicion generated by the need to tell the perfect story. Testimony rendered secondary by the powerful shock of logic. The truth brought to light. It couldn’t have happened any other way, of course. Of course.
Psss, over there. That’s him.
Signor Americano, wait! No, he wouldn’t wait. He would run. If he kept running maybe they’d tire of the chase and give up.
Did you do it, Murray? Tell the truth. What is the truth? Like everyone else, he wouldn’t know until Adriana had been found.
The contagion of dreams passed from neighbor to neighbor until finally, inevitably, it reached the Murdoch’s villa. Murray Murdoch watched his wife toss and turn in her sleep. He heard her moan and grind her teeth. He caught her when she sat bolt upright.
“It was just a dream, Claire.” Never say
just,
Murray. You should know better.
He didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer to tell him, what the dream was about. They both only pretended to go back to sleep. They lay awake, side by side, until dawn brightened the room and Lidia arrived with the coffee and frothy warm milk. Claire read a book as she sipped her coffee. Murray read last week’s
Herald Tribune
only up to the second page, where there was an article about an explosion in Palermo. A car loaded with dynamite. Three bystanders killed, including a young boy.
Signor Americano needed a drink. He drank wine at lunch, but by late afternoon he wanted a tall bourbon on ice. Another one, prego. Another one.
“Murray, you’re drinking too much.”
“You always say that, Claire.”
“I haven’t said it since we left New York.”
“You haven’t needed to say it. You’ve thought it. I can always tell when you’re thinking it.”
“Does it bother you to hear it said aloud? You’re drinking too much.”
“So I’m drinking too much. What else? Smoking too much. Spending too much money. What else?”
“That’s enough, Murray.”
“Messing around with young girls. Is that what you were dreaming about last night, Claire? Me doing it with the Nardi girl?”
“I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Why not? Because you don’t want to know what really happened?”
“I already know what happened.”
“Maybe there’s more to tell.”
“Like what?”
“Like about how I strangled the Nardi girl with my belt. And carried her body all the way to Cavo in a potato sack tied to my bike. And threw her off the cliff there.”
“Nope. You hadn’t mentioned that. Murray, if I were you I’d make that drink my last and go to bed. I’m going to bed. Good-night, my dear. Don’t stay up late. You could use a good night’s rest.”
Murray Murdoch loved his wife. And he loved his boys, he really did. He could prove his love by leaving them, sparing them humiliation. And at the same time he could make up for his earlier cowardice, offering himself as sacrifice. He imagined closing the door behind him and standing with his back to the villa, facing the angry mob. I’m the one you want. At least he’d die with the knowledge of his heroism. Instead, he had nothing better to do than finish the bourbon and try to keep his mind from wandering.
Focus, Murray. It might help to stand, stretch, look at yourself in the mirror. Notice how your reflection is just as distant from the mirror on the farther side as you are distant on this side.
But what about…
Don’t think it, Murray. Claire’s dream last night?
Consider, Murray, how when light passes through a surface, rays are refracted at different angles of incidence, depending upon the medium.
What did Claire dream?
Think about light, Murray. The fact of an image. These are your own hands you’re holding in front of you. The hands of Malcolm Averil Murdoch — lacking the luminosity of gemstones, lacking the beauty of tourmaline.
What happened to Adriana?
Think about something else, Murray.
He could use a drink, but the bottle was empty. Wine, then. There was no wine. Then he’d finish the grappa. Go ahead. Just a swallow left. Not enough to keep him focused, but enough to un-balance him. He teetered, rocked back on his heels, forward on his toes, and would have fallen against the glass if Nat hadn’t appeared in the corner of the mirror holding an empty cup.