The House in Amalfi (8 page)

As I walked slowly down the
scalatinella
, birds flew twittering from their nests and rabbits bobbed their white tails and disappeared into the tangled undergrowth. Then there it was. A small golden house gently folded into the green cliff side. I stood there, looking at part of my past. There was only the purr of the sea and the hum of crickets. I thought my house looked as lonely as I felt.

Jon-Boy had told me that it had been built in the 1920s to accommodate the mistress of the rich owner of the Castello Pirata. She was a pretty young opera singer from Naples, and the house was within easy reach of the Castello, if you were young and agile as the young lovers were, yet discreetly tucked away. Solid rock had been blasted to make room for the house, which in the end had turned out to be smaller than the mistress expected, but it was so beautiful she fell in love with it and forgot to grumble.

It was small and square, with four tall French doors facing the terrace on the ground floor and five square windows above. Its flat roof was topped with a little Moorish-style dome tiled in the blues and greens of the sea. Narrow fluted columns, twisted like candy, supported the three graceful arches fronting the shady patio and the veranda above. From this, broad shallow steps led to a series of terraced gardens and down to the small cove.

I could hear the soft trickle of a waterfall and remembered the fall spilled down the cliffside, guided by carefully placed boulders, meandering on through gardens, shaded, here
and there, by a beautiful ancient cedar. Halfway down the slope was a fanciful marble belvedere, a domed pergola where I imagined the little opera singer used to sit watching the sunset and sipping wine, the way Jon-Boy so often had. Now it was smothered in trailing blue morning glory, bright as the sea.

But when I looked closer I saw that the ancient cedars were growing over the roof of the house and their branches had been twisted by years of winter winds into fantastical shapes. Wild creatures had made their homes in the undergrowth. The old wooden shutters were weathered to a silvery sheen and latched tight by bands of rusted iron, and over the upper windows tattered awnings flapped forlornly in the breeze.

I closed my eyes, summoning up a picture I had carried in my mind all these years. Jon-Boy and I were sitting on this very terrace. It was evening and as usual he had a glass of local Campania white wine while I had lemonade I’d made myself from lemons picked that morning from our very own trees. I’d run barefoot all summer and the soles of my feet were tough as leather, my dark hair was bleached copper by the sun, and there was a crust of salt on my skin from my latest swim. I could smell the salt on me, and the lemons, and the jasmine curling around the fluted white columns.

I was like a wild creature in those days, with no one to answer to, no one to tell me what I must do. When I was tired, I went to bed. When I awoke, I got up, eager for another day. I always headed straight to the white-tiled kitchen, where I’d butter a hard crust of yesterday’s bread, or maybe it was even the day before’s—Jon-Boy and I were not very good at shopping. I’d slather it with fig preserves that tasted of sugar spiced by the sun; then I’d put the espresso on to brew for whenever Jon-Boy woke up. Which might be noon or sometimes even
later, depending on where he’d been the night before. And of course, who he’d been with, though I never really knew about that part of his life.

I never tried to wake him or peek into his room. Young and innocent though I was, somehow I knew not to go there. I just waited instead.

Sometimes a girl would be with him, young and pretty, some tourist he’d picked up in Amalfi the night before, and I’d be pink with jealousy, refusing even to talk to her. Jon-Boy would laugh and make some excuse for me and they’d drink the coffee I’d made and then go off together. I never asked where he was going and he never told me, and he never asked me to go with him. But I always knew he would come back for me.

I’d already be in my bathing suit. I remember it even now; it was bright red, very old, and way too small. It smelled of summer, that suit, and I never, ever, wanted a new one. I’d gallop down the million steps to the cove and head into the water, wading until it came up to my shoulders, cool and so clear I could see the dozens of little fish darting curiously around my toes. Then I’d hurl myself forward and head toward the horizon in the fast crawl I’d perfected in the Evanston school pool.

There was nothing to beat that feeling. It was total freedom, just me and the cool, crystalline blue sea, with the early sunlight sparking off it turning my spray to miniature rainbows. I could have swum on forever, all the way to Capri even.

I’d turn and float on my back, searching the lush, indented coastline. If you didn’t know the house was there, you might never notice it, but I knew to look to the right of the
scalatinella,
to where the twisted cedars sheltered it. I’d catch a glimpse of its blue and green tiled dome, its green-striped
awnings, and its golden walls, and I’d smile, secure again as I turned and swam lazily back to shore. To the fresh-squeezed orange juice that I knew, if Jon-Boy was there and he was alone, would be waiting for me.

I was jolted back from my dream of the past by a new sound. From behind me came the shuffle of sandaled feet. I swung round, half-expecting to see Jon-Boy, but found myself looking instead at a Japanese man, so old he seemed ageless. A fragile gray beard drizzled to a point just below his chin and his wild gray eyebrows swept to points somewhere near his bald pate. He was thin and wiry, with skin the color of pale sandstone and a clear gaze that belied the wildness of his appearance. He looked like a faun carved in some ancient stone frieze or like a lean, benign Bacchus or a bit like the wild goats I remembered leaping sure-footedly, down a steep cliff on an island off the coast.

He was just such a natural part of the habitat, it seemed he might have grown out of it. Which in a way he had, for this was Mifune, the man who had created the very garden I was standing in, many years before I first saw and fell in love with it.

It was Mifune who had instilled in me my love of plants and trees, of boulders and running streams and fountains. Mifune who had taught me how the seasons worked with nature and Mifune who unknowingly had led me to my career as a landscape architect.

Next to Jon-Boy, Mifune was the most influential figure in my life. He’d been my only friend here. We had spent hours,
days, weeks that led into months, and months that drifted into a year in each other’s company. He had shaped my life with his practical words of wisdom, and even now I never took on a new project without first thinking what Mifune would have done with it.

Seeing him now, in this garden,
my
garden, after almost thirty years, shocked me into silence. He had seemed to me old then, and I’d thought he surely must be dead. For a long moment we stood and looked at each other. Then, “Mifune,” I said, “of course you won’t remember me, but I’ve never forgotten you.”

“
Va bene, la piccola
Lamour Harrington.” A wide toothless grin split his lined parchment face and his pale eyes sparked with pleasure. “Can it really be you?” he asked, in Italian. “After all these years, you have come home again?”

I wanted to run to him, to hug him, but I remembered his formal Japanese ways and instead I bowed deeply, giving him the respect he deserved. “But Mifune, you told me that you were going to return to Japan, that you would find your old life there, your old customs, your own people.”

He, too, bowed his head with its few remaining wisps of hair. “I returned one time, signorina. But I realized that the world I had left behind as a young man no longer existed. All was changed and nothing was reality. So I came home again. To Amalfi.”

Observant as always, he had noted my ringless left hand and called me
signorina
. “Like me, Mifune,” I said, “but I’m only here on vacation. I’ve come to see my old house.”

He laughed, a small, almost soundless chuckle, “This place possesses you when you are young. You can never be happy anywhere else. Haven’t you found that out yet,
piccolina
?”

“Happiness is an art I lost years ago,” I said. “I don’t know how to find it again, Mifune. I don’t even know what it is.
Recently I was thinking about when I was a child in Rome with Jon-Boy, and I remembered
that
feeling was what happiness was. And then he brought me to this house, this
paradiso,
and I found out there is a different, truer kind of happiness.”

“Happiness is all in the spirit,” Mifuni said, “and I can tell from your eyes that you have lost that. Part of it is losing Jon-Boy. What the rest is I will not ask. It is no longer important. You are here again, back where you belong.”

“I need to find Jon-Boy again,” I said. “I need to know what happened that night. I need to know how he died so I can banish my dreams, and my ghosts.”

He nodded gravely. “I understand.”

I thought quickly of my busy life in Chicago, about my business commitments and my few close friends. I thought of Alex and of his betrayal. I thought of Jon-Boy and Mifune. All my
good
memories were here, in Italy.

My apartment had been sold. I no longer had a home. I was alone in the world, and what, after all, did I have to go back to? My greatest pleasure was growing things, creating gardens from seemingly impossible spaces, like this one, where Mifune had allowed me to help him plant the sloping cliff side into a panorama of verdant green pleasure. Now it was a shambles of overgrown crumbling terraces that threatened to tumble into the turquoise sea. The dark green cedars sheltering the house bent under the burden of their untamed branches, and the sweet golden house I remembered as my real “home” looked neglected and desolate.

Like me, the house needed to get its spirit back, and I suddenly knew we would do it together. I would leave the past behind, make a fresh start. I’d become self-sufficient, grow olives on my hillside, grow lemons, tomatoes, cultivate my wild terraces. I’d buy one of those pretty cows and make my own mozzarella; I would keep chickens and eat real eggs, not
store-bought ones. . . . I was dazzled by my unknown independent future.

“I guess I’m home again, Mifune,” I said, smiling as that first pang of pure, true happiness danced through my veins again. “I’m back where I belong.”

I remember clearly the day I met Mifune. Jon-Boy and I had been in the little house for about a week and every morning we rose early and ran down to the sea for a swim. That is, I swam while Jon-Boy watched. “Don’t go too far out, honey-bunch,” he’d warn me. “I don’t want to have to rescue you.” Of course he knew I was a good swimmer, even then, far better than him, and in these safe waters I’d hardly need to be “rescued.”

That morning, however, I’d knocked on his door to wake him and gotten no reply. I knocked again, but I didn’t open it. I never did. I knew Jon-Boy would have answered if he was there. I ran down to the kitchen to see if he was already squeezing juice for me; then I checked the terrace and the garden.

Deciding he must have gotten up really early and gone to the market in Pirata without me, I threw on my red bathing suit and raced down the
scalatinella
to the cove.

Of course I also understood now that Jon-Boy had probably left me asleep the previous night and gone out on the town. I didn’t blame him; a man with a seven-year-old kid couldn’t be expected to stay home all the time. At least that’s the way I thought then.

The boats were bobbing up and down at the jetty, and with a hand over my eyes I scanned the bright silvery sea. The sun
was emerging from the clouds and it was a perfect morning. I waded out, then dived under.

After about half an hour, I emerged from my watery world and plodded, tired, back up the steps. I was looking forward to the cup of coffee I’d fix for Jon-Boy and me, and a slice of that lovely crusty bread, but when I pushed the front door it would not open. I pushed and pushed, but it was firmly stuck.

I tried the French doors. They were latched from the inside. I climbed up to the kitchen window. It too was latched. I contemplated scaling one of the columns to the upper terrace but had the sense to know I’d probably break my neck.