Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (92 page)

“So it’s true,” she whispered, and then turned to me.

“But my dear young woman,” she said, as if she were talking to a child, to Eleanora. “Bury these if you will, but you would always know where they were. And some day, some time, you would tell someone.”

“No,” I said vehemently. “No, Principessa. Never. It would hurt someone I love.”

She laughed, a bitter sound. “You love no one here,” she said coldly. And, as with Lucia, the earthy expletive broke from her.

“
Mama mia
… you say love? You make me laugh, signorina. What do you know about love? You sicken me …”

Her voice was harsh now, chilling me. I felt she had become unmanageable, though I tried to reason with her. “Don’t you see,” I cried. “I was hiding these things! So that no one could — ”

“But one day you will say to someone, “My aunt was murdered, and I have the proof.” Her eyes were blazing in the dusky light, and she palmed the gold watch and locket. “Crucify us, you would do that, yes I know.”

She scrambled up, glaring down at me. “Signorina, I am afraid not,” she said menacingly. “And you too want to take what is ours away from us … you too, from foreign soil, want to torment us. That woman! All of you, you Americans, like locusts, like a plague … with your dollars … we hate you, don’t you know that? All of us, we hate you!”

Her eyes were cold and terrible. I fell back. Such anger, such rage … what had I done, after all? I had fallen in love with her country, with her city, with her estate, her way of life, and with her son. And in my wild love affair with Italy, with Firenze, had tried to erase the traces of a murder … two murders. I wouldn’t have harmed the Monteverdis … never, never. My intent had been only to cover up the bloody hands of those who had been responsible for Mercedes’s death, and Elizabeth’s death.

I had been a deliberate accessory to a crime … two crimes.

And she looked at me like that!

“I was in your room,” she said quietly. “I see that your luggage is ready to go. Why don’t you go, signorina?”

“That was my intention,” I said and, backing up, was afraid. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. The face, fine, and the product of a thousand years of Florentine civilization, was suddenly evil, cruel. The strong, gray-white hair, tidily piled into a chignon at the nape, seemed Medusa-like. The woman who confronted me was a woman I was afraid of.

“I’m going now,” I said.

“You can take the car,” she assured me, her lips curving into a strange smile. “After all, they’re both dead, she and the Contessa. You might as well claim the car.”

“I thought I’d call a taxi.”

My lips were dry. I was
dying
to call a taxi, have a strong, experienced Italian driver help me get my bags into the back seat of his vehicle and take me away from the Villa Paradiso. Paradiso! Villa Infernale would be more to the point.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said briskly and, incredibly, smiled. “Let me help you with your luggage.”

“I don’t need help. Thank you, but — ”

“I say again, you don’t need a taxi,” she replied and walked past me, striding over the grass, to the house. She disappeared inside it.

I panicked. Oh no, I thought. I won’t let her get the best of me. Certainly not. I streaked over the grass and went round the house, scrabbling over the pebbles in the driveway. I came to the courtyard and the Principessa was coming out the front, with a bag under each arm. Over her shoulder was my cosmetic case, dangling loosely.

“Is there anything else?” she asked politely, as she dropped the bags to the ground.

“That’s all, and thank you. Now I’ll go in and call a taxi.”

It was a pleasant, warm evening, but my teeth were chattering. I spoke between them, trying to discipline myself. “Thank you, signora.”

Because her face was so strange. So determined. I was terrified at the look in her eyes. And when she picked up my bags again, opened the back seat of the Lancia and stowed them in, I wanted to scream. And I guess I did.

“I
said I was going to call a taxi!”

“But you won’t,” she said grimly. “Get in.”

She came toward me threateningly.
“I
said get in.”

“No.”

I saw the other car, already parked on the road. I saw that and then faced her again. My voice shook; I was ashamed of it, but my God, her infuriated eyes! She stood in my path, like a bull at a
corrida
, with the same inflamed eyes. This is terrible, I thought, this is terrible … and I tried to sidestep her. With that, a hand came out and whacked me in the face. Like a sledgehammer. A strong, brutal hand. It brought tears to my eyes and I ducked as the hand came toward me again.

“Get in the car,” she said.

And now I knew. That there was no escape. If I didn’t get in the car she would shove me in, whamming at me with that hard, pitiless hand. I was her prisoner. This woman planned my destruction and, by whatever means, was determined that I was to die. Like the others. She would silence me, to protect her family’s interest, with whatever means possible. I would never live to tell the tale. I saw it in her hard, wicked, implicable face. That there would be no one left to reveal the terrible truth. I was to be the final victim.

I took one look at that cold and determined face and scrambled behind the wheel of the Lancia. Frantically, I started the motor. In the rear view mirror, as the car spurted forward, I saw the Principessa climbing into her own car. The dust churned up as my wheels circumnavigated the turn of the driveway, and then I was rocketing down that narrow, serpentine road, the spit of gravel pitting the metal of the car.

I should have let Peter come for me, I thought, stepping on the gas. The other car, behind me, screamed with a shriek of the tires, and I saw it in the oblong of the overhead mirror. What the hell was she doing? I asked myself, but knew. Why, she wanted to drive me off the road …

I knew what was in her mind, I knew. Please, I thought … others had died before me. My aunt, and then the little dog, and Elizabeth. It wasn’t this madwoman who had brought about those other murders … but this madwoman would protect, perhaps with her life and at the cost of mine, the person who had done them. I was expendable too … and as I rounded a turn, knew it wouldn’t even make headlines. An American girl had plunged to her death, at a break in the road, and cindered to her end.

And no one would be blamed.

It would be only a few lines at the bottom of a column. Of interest to no one. Just another tourist accident. But my life means more to me than that, my mind shrieked, as I came to one of those terrible, open places, where the valley below, thousands of feet down, was brilliantly lit, hospitable. I pressed down on the gas, standing on it, praying. The other car was so near, and that white, hideous face behind the wheel, the teeth drawing the lips back … if she sideswiped me now it would be the end. I would hurtle down, over and over, and would be shipped back to the United States in bits and pieces.

No, I thought wildly. No. I will not die like that. And realized that only a desperate measure on my part could save me. The brilliant lights of the other car blinded me, and breath rasped in my throat. I rounded another bend, the car zooming behind me like an implacable Nemesis, and I made up my mind. I stepped on the gas and — I think I was praying — drove into a plane tree at the side of the road. The tree loomed up at me and I said to myself, “God help me,” and the car crashed into the tree. My car door opened and I flew into the air, my ears singing, and lay there, listening to an Italian song, a very beautiful one.

“Come back to Sorrento …”

Pain seared my body. I knew at once that one of my arms was broken, and then I saw the flames, as I blacked out. But not for long. I realized, almost instantly, that I was at the very edge of the road, and I was looking down at the lights below, in the valley. I saw the other car plunging over the cliff, like a toy, rolling over and over, and there was no sound, simply a hulk of metal leaving the road and plummeting down, down to the valley, with its lovely lights, and the homes down there, the restaurants, the art treasures, and the immemoriality of an ancient, timeless city.

I picked myself up, painfully, and looked down over the mountainside. Red streaked into the night sky, and I screamed, knowing she was in there, in the burning wreckage. “But she’s Gianni’s mother,” I was screaming, and was still screaming when a car shrilled to a stop, and a shocked motorist climbed out from behind the wheel.

“It’s a friend of mine,” I said, sobbing. “Can’t you help, won’t you help? You must help her, you must help …”

• • •

Sirens sounded, in the night, and there was pandemonium.

I knew I could never tell my mother and father about it. It had happened to me, not to them, and I was a grown woman who, adult, had to take what happened to me in stride. My childhood days were over. My life, as a mature human being, had begun. A veil had been drawn, between me and my girlhood, forever. There was no going back: there was only the forward thrust of my life, now and for the rest of my days.

There was never any proof of anything. Two women had died, women whose days were, in any event, numbered. Women who had lived long lives, who were, at the end, ready — perhaps — to die. I was too young to be positive of anyone being ready to die. But they had lived many decades, had had, for a good many years, the best of all possible worlds, in the fragrant Eden that was the Villa Paradiso. So many others spent miserable, mean days in tenement and slum, without golden memories or beauty to fill their eyes. And died, untimely, in squalor and sadness.

Mercedes and Elizabeth had, at least — until that final, shocking moment — been engirdled by loveliness, each day secure in the golden eye of a sublime enchantment. I couldn’t feel deeply sorry for them, not for long. They had had a good life, those two women.

It was the Principessa I thought about in the dark nights, when sleep came hard. She had died, at aged sixty-one, protecting those she loved. She had tried to kill me, but I tended to forgive that, because I thought highly of love and fealty and commitment to honor. I sometimes wondered if I too would not be capable of deeming another person expendable, if that person threatened those dear to me. I wonder about it, and have no answer.

But the dead, who lie in the ground, are fortunate, at that. Better than a living death, such as the Principe. Bereft, querulous, he suffered a mental breakdown. His constant question: “Where is my wife? Won’t you please tell her I’m waiting for her?”

The rest of us look at each other, unable to answer. Gianni takes my hand and says, “
Cara
, don’t look like that. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s in another world.”

But tawny-haired Eleanora goes to him, sits on his knee, her eyes turned inwards. They have secrets together, perhaps. They share something, possibly something horrible. I wonder if they are both guilty, or if one shares the other’s guilt. Children are never children for long. The child and the old man, quiet, sit in the sun, their hands interlaced. And a cool breeze lifts the little girl’s hair, making it a shimmering haze, like molten gold.

I don’t feel anything more for my new family than I did when I met them. But I deeply love Gianni, my husband. Peter said to me, “Barbara, this isn’t your world. Won’t you come home? With me?”

I thought it over carefully, very carefully. Peter was like someone I had known all my life, the boys I had gone to proms with, had dated, had thought I would marry. But I guess I inherit a trait of my great-aunt’s, the late Contessa. I have a rage to live. To see
different
things, to move onward and outward, to discard the familiar and the safe. So I said no to Peter and yes to Gianni. One day, when my dotty father-in-law dies, I will be a Principessa, but it doesn’t mean anything; only vulgarians use titles. I will live my life a simple woman, Signora Monteverdi. My concern is Gianni, the child I will bring to life before next summer, and the integrity of our lives, just the three of us.

But I love the villa! Oh, how I love it … every branch and bush has meaning for me, every blade of grass. The late Contessa loved it so much that she never went back to the land of her birth. I’ve made a trip, to see my parents, but Mercedes never even touched foot on her native soil again. She loved Italy with a passion, adored Florence and the villa just up the hill, with all her heart and soul. And she was fond of its one-time owners, the Monteverdis. She thought they were wonderful people.

And some of them are.

But like the rest of humanity, some of them aren’t.

Her will, written in Italian — because in her heart of hearts Mercedes had become Italian — was shown to me by the signores Predelli and Pineider. It was like a poem. I have never forgotten those words from a woman I never saw, never smiled at, never touched. But who, God knows, changed the entire course of my life.

This was her dictum, transcribed only a year before her death:

“Could you translate for me?” I asked signore Predelli, and, nodding, he did as I asked. “It reads, in English, like this,” he said, and I listened, wishing I could have heard the sound of my aunt’s voice reading it And knowing that it was a forlorn longing. But I love the words she had said, and I will never, ever forget them.

To that long line of noble Italians, the Monteverdis of Florence, I bequeath their lost birthright. May they love their land as I have loved it. May they endure for another thousand years.

I like to think that Mercedes knows I live there now. That it would please her. And that she is aware that a girl from America breathes the soft Florentine air, loves it passionately, and breeds children, as she could not, who will “love the land” as she loved it, and whose progeny, carrying on the Monteverdi line, might endure for another thousand years.