Book of Stolen Tales (21 page)

Dina chuckled and I was glad to see her relax enough to laugh. I thought about the Disney “Snow White” with the sad-eyed queen who wished for a baby girl. The image of her sitting in a window with her embroidery, pricking her finger and seeing a few drops of her blood falling on the white snow, was imprinted on my brain. How much the story had changed from its early versions. “Go on,” I said.

“This is in my own words now. The maiden bore a beautiful baby girl named Lisa. She sent Lisa to the fairies, each of whom gave her a charm. The last one put a curse on her—a poisoned comb would stick in her hair and cause her to die. The fairies enclosed Lisa in seven crystal caskets and locked it inside a room in the castle.”

“What, no dwarfs?”

“No dwarfs.” She laughed again. “The Grimms added them. The girl's mother was so grief-stricken she fell ill, but before she died she begged her brother the baron to keep Lisa a secret. His suspicious wife unlocked the door against his wishes. Jealous, and suspecting the baron kept this beautiful woman as a lover, she wrenched open the caskets and pulled the girl out, causing the comb to drop out of her hair. Lisa awoke. The wife beat her and cut off her hair. She forced her to wear rags and treated her miserably like a slave girl.”

“Amazing to compare that with today's version.”

“I haven't told you the ending yet. One day, the baron, who hadn't recognized Lisa, returned home from a trip and overheard her crying about her fate. He embraced his niece and banished his wife from the castle. Lisa married happily and the moral of the story is ‘heaven rains favors on us when we least expect it.'”

“Let's hope the heavens treat us that well,” I said.

A couple sat on our right. The woman curled her legs up on the bench and nestled beside the man. He put his arm securely around her and smoothing her hair away from her face, touched his lips to her forehead. Dina observed them, not with delight at seeing their fondness for each other, but as if they were a pair of alien creatures.

“I can't imagine what it's like,” she said, “actually wanting a man to kiss you like that. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Not now.” I thought of Laurel Vanderlin.

“But you have … in the past?”

“Sure.”

I didn't sense her question arose out of an interest in me personally. It almost seemed as if she were trying to comprehend how normal people felt.

“I'll never be able to fall in love.”

I looked at her with surprise. Her startling admission spoke volumes of Mancini's abuse. At some point, Mancini had ceased being her protector and become her lover. When did he cross that line and turn a kindly act into something sinister? I didn't want to press her on that issue right now. She'd had enough of bad memories. If Dina broke free of him permanently, given time, she might see love differently. She gazed out the window at the gray sea and said nothing more. The only sound I heard escape her lips was the rush of an occasional sigh. I sensed those deep sighs signaled an extreme loneliness welling up from the bottom of her soul.

We sipped sodas and coffees and listened to the low drone of the heavy ship's mighty engine sluicing through the water. Waves slapped the sides of the vessel, the regular swish of the salty sea like a magical soporific marking progress in time but seeming to suspend it as well. Eventually Dina succumbed to the watery lullaby and slept.

In repose her face looked like that of a sleeping child. But the image of innocence was belied by her injury. Although the swelling had gone down the bite on her lip still looked red and sore. Had she been brave, finding the courage to break away, keeping her presence of mind when she'd felt humiliated and afraid? Or had she lied to me?

On the one hand, her natural assertiveness didn't fit easily with the picture of the victim she painted. Especially in this day and age, unless she'd been locked in a dungeon like the abused women in sensational news stories, could anyone really be held against her will for years, even by a powerful tyrant? Why not try to escape much sooner? And why choose this particular time, when she'd just met me, to flee from him? The reason she gave for wanting to recover the volumes she'd sold didn't ring true. She had some other motive, but what it was eluded me. Even if she'd told the truth about her ill treatment by Mancini and his criminal designs, I still believed some undisclosed agenda motivated her.

More than once over the last few days I'd felt caught up in some wild fantasy. And the narrative seemed to grow ever more bizarre with each passing hour. The memory of Ewan's ruined face and bloated body was achingly real. I had no choice now but to see the story through to its end.

With hours stretching before me until we docked, I decided to look up de Ribera. I knew he rivaled Velázquez as the most important Spanish painter of the seventeenth century. The son of a Spanish shoemaker, he rose to incredible heights. His great talent propelled his meteoric rise but two women also played a crucial role. A narrative worthy of any modern-day celebrity. He fled Spain for Rome as a result of a scandal involving a painter's daughter and achieved almost instant recognition when he moved again from Rome to Naples. He had much better luck with patrons than Basile, because he married the daughter of an influential art dealer who championed the artist's work.

De Ribera's fascination with the grotesque was amply reflected in his many images of martyred saints on the cusp of death. I knew he also liked to paint individuals with disabilities and remembered pictures of a boy with a club foot and dwarfs. To my eye he had no intention to mock them but handled those subjects with a keen eye and sensitivity.

After de Ribera's meteoric rise to fame and subsequent wealth, he fell like a shooting star when a serious illness curtailed his work in the 1640s. A decade later he died in poverty. Had his fascination with the dark side of the human spirit led to his interest in necromancy, or was it more personal? I finally drifted off with his pictures still vivid in my memory and woke only when the intercom blared our arrival at port.

Twenty-One

November 22, 2003

Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

I
n Marseilles we caught a bus to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. White stucco buildings spilled onto flat sandbars at the shoreline. This was a working man's town. Springing up like an oddity at the town's center was a twelfth-century Romanesque church resembling a miniature medieval fortress. The vast green marsh of the great Rhône delta, called the Camargue, swelled beyond the town.

We found the post office with no trouble. The little depot flew the fleur-de-lys, wedged in between a café and a store selling “genuine” Camargue-inspired bric-a-brac. Dina did her best to coax the postal clerk into telling her where Renard lived but didn't get very far. He'd spoken rapidly in French so I had trouble taking it in.

“We may not be able to see the merchant at all,” Dina said after we left the post office.

“How so?”

“Renard lives in a remote area and doesn't encourage visitors. The clerk said we can get into his estate only on horseback or by foot. He doesn't allow motor vehicles on his property. He gave me the name of someone who might help us. Marc Hanzi knows everyone in the area. He lives near Les Alpilles.”

“The little Alps?” I asked. She nodded. “Well, there's something to be said for small towns. We'd never have figured that out for ourselves. Hanzi doesn't sound very French.”

“It isn't. Bohemian, most likely, Romany. Here, they're called the Manoush, not Gypsies. He's a Gardian. Have you heard of them?”

“A guardian—sure, like a protector.”

She laughed. “Sort of. It's spelled without the
u
. Gardians tend livestock like your western cowboys. They're quite famous. It sounds like finding Hanzi will be difficult enough.”

Thinking he lived in a village, I asked, “Is it far away?”

“Far enough. We should get started now.”

Not knowing what lay ahead of us or how easy communication might be, I checked my email and was reassured to hear from Corinne that Evelyn was in good spirits and they were enjoying each other's company. Evelyn owed Corinne three dollars at poker and Corinne was taking her winnings in baking.

Before leaving town I gave Dina cash to purchase new clothes and toiletries and enough extra that she wouldn't be stranded if we happened to get separated. We also bought knapsacks and transferred our belongings into them, along with some water, wine, cheese, and
fougasse
, a round bread topped with oil and olives. We followed a gritty sand road out of town leading onto the wide stretches of the marsh.

The road became a gravel trail, no more than a berm rising a few feet above the swampy ground. The sea lapped at the marsh edges far offon the horizon. Our path took us northward. The day was bright and clear, cool but sunny enough that we stowed our windbreakers and walked comfortably in our shirts. Even in November the marsh was lush with tall wild grasses, willows, and shrubs interspersed with open areas and pondlets. Flocks of pink flamingos burst into the air as we passed by. Our shoes left prints on the spongy ground. I thought of the Apsu, the watery element Mesopotamians believed lay under the rim of the earth. If the great deltas of the Euphrates and Tigris resembled this, I understood how their ancient surroundings could give rise to such a notion.

A herd of cattle lingered not far off. It surprised me to see a bull among them with no fence anywhere to be seen. “They just let bulls roam free around here?”

“They're only dangerous if you're waving a red flag,” she laughed. “These are the black bulls you see in the Spanish rings. They come from here.”

“Have you been here before? You know so much about it.”

“When you spend hours alone you read a lot. I used to imagine places to run to and this was one of them. Idyllic, no?” Although she still looked disheveled and weary after our mad race away from Naples, when she drew in a few deep breaths of the clean, sweet sea air she seemed at ease for the first time since I'd met her.

We made our way over to the D85A and hitched a ride to Arles. After standing with our thumbs out for more than half an hour, we were picked up by a trucker who took us past the town of Saint-Martin-de-Crau. He dropped us off at a little road that ran north into a sparse plain.

“I hope I got the directions right,” Dina said. “This should be Chemin de Archimbaud. There's a little settlement up here. It's supposed to be not too far to walk.”

I hoisted my knapsack over my shoulder and we traveled north again. This terrain was radically different from the Camargue. Flat table land stretched as far as the eye could see. The farmers' fields and sparse grasses were cut off in the distance by a gigantic stone massif. The beginning of Les Alpilles.

The place we found was not much more than a collection of farm buildings. A ruddy-faced woman in coveralls greeted us when we knocked at one of the doors. A broad smile crossed her face when we mentioned Marc Hanzi's name and she told us to take a track that meandered farther north across the plain.

We made good time and found his home fairly easily. A low structure of softly rounded white stucco, topped by a thatched roof and capped with a small white cross, it sprang out of the flat landscape like a curious mushroom. Its roof of thatch didn't resemble the English style but was neatly arranged in layers like a flamenco dancer's skirt. A herd of sheep and seven white horses grazed close by.

Hanzi's curious little house had no windows and only a simple wooden door. An enormous pair of bull horns hung over the lintel. No one answered our knock. “Don't tell me we've come all this way for nothing,” I moaned.

“Patience is a virtue, I suspect, especially around here. He'll show up sooner or later.” Dina's spirits had definitely taken a turn for the better since our arrival in France.

I wandered near the horses. They had squarish heads, short necks, and deep chests. Dina joined me and explained that their black skin and white coat were characteristic of the breed. They were never shod and considered to be very hardy. I knew next to nothing about horses but could tell the Camargues were smaller and stockier than Arabian thoroughbreds I'd seen. As we settled down near some willow brush to wait, hoofbeats drummed from somewhere behind the house.

Horse and rider pulled up in front of us. A genial-looking man whom I guessed to be in his forties dismounted. He was not tall. He wore a black, narrow-brimmed fedora, white shirt, and black vest and pants and carried a trident. A Camargue version of a herding stave, I supposed.

Dina addressed him in French and introduced me as her American friend. He replied to her in English that in the summer he ran riding tours of the Alpilles, and years of dealing with tourists meant he could converse quite well in English. He greeted us warmly at first, but his good humor vanished when he heard our request to hire horses to journey to Renard's. When he learned I wasn't an accomplished rider, Hanzi reacted with outright concern.