The Last Enemy (29 page)

Her throat tightened. O God, let me cry, she prayed, but the tears wouldn’t come. Just an overwhelming ache of sadness. God had been merciful to Rita, more merciful than to her. Her niece had died happy, looking forward to motherhood. She’d had all of the joy and none of the sorrow. Imagine a woman of Rita’s age trying to raise a child alone in Italy. What could she have been thinking? It would have been dreadful. Unforgiving stares, repressed snickers, open snubs! Italians don’t like non-conformity. Rita was saved from all that and worse. The child might have died before its mother, as her Camillo had done. Rita was better off now.

Her niece’s furious rage had come upon Amelia without warning. Month after month, Rita had placidly accepted Umberto’s harsh sarcasm, Artemisia’s cruel mockeries, never responding. She could have stopped them, Amelia admitted to herself. But if she had, Artemisia would have turned on her, so she had let them be. After several months of viewing such torture, Amelia had concluded that Rita was morbidly dull, that she didn’t understand or even care how much she was despised. But she had been wrong. Rita had cared.

What caused her to strike out at Rita? She had tried repeatedly since Good Friday to remember the exact sequence of events, to record the day’s happenings in some order, to write it all down for Umberto, and the police. Her head ached with trying, but it was still just a jumble of words and accusations. It had begun years ago, this wreckage of her brain, this piling up of detritus, and ended on Good Friday when Dottor Saldelli confirmed what she already knew.

The burned soufflé was what finally pushed her to consult the doctor. The dinner had been so important to Umberto. Giorgio Zangarelli, multimillionaire many times over, member of parliament, former adviser to the PM, was their guest. Umberto was helping the swarthy Calabrian to research his history, to
discover
his family’s patrician roots. Zangarelli was determined to become a Knight of Malta and was willing to pay—or do—whatever was necessary to make it happen. And in return, Zangarelli was helping Umberto with his investments. Amelia had begged Umberto not to intercede on Zangarelli’s behalf, not to dishonor their name by supporting Zangarelli in his ridiculous pretensions. “Just because he’s rich, he acts like our equal. We can sell the Sisley if we need money that badly. It’s worth at least a million,” she had proposed.

“Money is what counts and a million is pocket change. Next to money, all the rest—name, titles, honors—are just trimmings,” he had responded, ignoring her advice as he always did.

The night of the dinner, of Zangarelli’s introduction to the Hospitallers of Umbria, Umberto had bragged, rather ostentatiously Amelia thought, about her skill in the kitchen. Always the aristocrat, he had laughed it off when Lucia had served supermarket ice cream instead of chocolate soufflé, but for days afterward Amelia had endured his biting comments. He had even accused her of being slovenly. That had hurt more than anything. “House proud,” was how her mother had once described Amelia.

Ten long years her mother had cared for her father, ten torturous years after the first whispers of Alzheimer’s, as a brilliant, witty mathematician turned into a garrulous child. And now it was the daughter’s turn. Dottor Saldelli had offered Amelia hope, explaining carefully and slowly—too slowly, already speaking as though to a child—about fetal research, new drugs. But what could he know of the torment in store for her family, for Paola . . . for Umberto? Dearest Umberto, who had absolutely no patience. And Artemisia, how would she treat a mother with Alzheimer’s? The thought of her daughter’s reaction terrified her.

Friday, after lunch in the sitting room, thinking about the future—unbearable to contemplate—she had decided at a little after 4:00 to take the peonies that the florist had delivered earlier in the day to the cemetery. Camillo had so loved valerian pink peonies. “More English than the rose, more English even than my mother,” he had said of them laughingly. Don’t think about Camillo, not yet, she told herself. Concentrate, think of what I should write in the letter first. She closed the filigreed box. It must be perfect, no mistakes.

I walked quickly through the deserted streets, out Porta San Giacomo and down the cemetery road, through the iron gates that were still unlocked. I removed the roses and threw them into the nearest dumpster before refilling the vases with water from the chapel fountain. When I returned, I found Rita inside, placing a statue of the Virgin—a horrid cheap thing—on Camillo’s altar. I snatched it up and we traded insults, two grown women! Then out of nowhere, Rita said she was pregnant, that she was planning to marry John Williams. She made outrageous claims. The house, our house—seven hundred years in the family—belonged to her; we would have to leave. She had a will that proved her claim. I laughed. It was one of those apocryphal wills that Anna scribbled whenever she was angry at one of us. Remember how we laughed when we found seven of them hidden throughout the house after her death.

She put down her pen and took another sip of wine. I shouldn’t have laughed, she thought. Rita had had a screaming fit and accused Artemisia of plagiarizing the ideas in her book from a manuscript in the library. And then she accused Paola of being a terrorist, a murderer. Paola would go to prison, she threatened.

After the humiliations that they had endured, catering to that upstart Zangarelli to save Paola. No, she mustn’t write any of that about Paola . . . or Artemisia. That’s not for the police to know. Mentioning the will is okay though. Thanks to Lucia, everyone in Assisi knew about Anna’s wills. She continued writing.

I must have struck Rita with the statue. I was holding it in my right hand and Rita was lying face-down on the vault floor. I dropped it and tried to turn her over but I couldn’t. My hands shook so. There was just one tiny drop of blood on the step. I ran for help to the front gates but they were locked. I cried out, but no one came. I let myself out the side gate with my key and walked back to Assisi as quickly as I could. When I came through Porta San Giacomo, I rang Sophie’s bell. I told Sophie everything, even that Rita was pregnant. Sophie insisted that Rita couldn’t be dead; she said she was probably just stunned. She insisted on going back by herself. Stay in the flat, she said. Don’t talk to anyone until I return! Umberto, I couldn’t stop shaking.

But Rita wasn’t stunned, she was dead. When Sophie told me, I wanted to call you immediately, but Sophie said I mustn’t, that I would go to prison. She had taken care of everything; the police would never know. She even returned with the peonies. They were my excuse for being outside the house. Tell the police you left home to bring the peonies to me, Sophie said. But it all went horribly wrong, and it was my fault. I didn’t see anyone, coming or going, so I thought it would be safer to tell the police that I had been home all afternoon. It all became so complicated, Umberto. Dottor Cenni told me yesterday that he will arrest Sophie, and this morning I heard Fulvio tell you the same thing. I listened at the door, just like Lucia!

Amelia read through what she had written. It rambled on so. Suicide notes were short and to the point.
Forgive me, darling.
I love you. Remember me always
—something like that, but how else were the police to know what had happened? She owed it to Sophie to tell them, but not those things about Paola and Artemisia. Those she would keep to herself.

The room had grown quite warm. She hoped Umberto couldn’t hear the water gurgling in the pipes. It was just the sort of thing that would attract his attention. He might even come up to check on her. She lifted her glass to drink and saw that it was empty. She poured the last of the bottle into her glass and slowly counted the pills, one by one, as she swallowed. She thought of a tradition they had in Spain of eating twelve grapes to welcome in the New Year. But this was hardly like that!

Her missal, the one Anna had given to her on her wedding day, lay on the night table. She searched through its pages until she found the funeral prayer that the priest had intoned that morning. She read it aloud:
O God, Whose attribute it is always to
have mercy and to spare, we humbly present our prayers to Thee for the
soul of Thy servant Amelia which Thou has this day called out of this
world, beseeching Thee not to deliver it into the hands of the enemy. . . .

23

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Artemisia stood at the attic window looking out at the distant outline of Spello—
Hispellum
, in Roman times, when the town had served as a retirement home for pensioned-off legionaries. “Retired Roman soldiers!— That’s a good one,” her nanny, Marie, had said thirty years earlier looking out the same small window. “Tourist crap! Roman soldiers didn’t live long enough to retire. Imagine it, tomato gardens in the day, Roman orgies at night, and for the meat course, feeding their holier-than-thou neighbors to the lions.”

The attic room in which Artemisia was now standing had been Marie’s bedroom. Here, late at night, lying in the creaky iron bed with its straw-filled mattress and mended flannel sheets, Artemisa had learned to love Marie and hate her mother. They would lie together like two stacked teaspoons, Marie hugging Artemisia around the middle to keep her from falling out of the narrow single bed, and Marie would talk about Sicily, and witchcraft. Everyone in Sicily believed in black magic but only special people like her grandmother practiced it. Casting spells was her grandmother’s trade. “The only way to keep others from beating you down,” Marie said. “Make them afraid of you!”

Artemisia had never thought about it when she was a child (it had seemed perfectly natural at the time), but the maidservant who dusted her father’s law library, ironed his socks, scrubbed pots and pans, and toilets—maliciously at times, using the pots and pans brush—who said
Si, contessa
, twenty, maybe thirty, times in a day with a sweet smile, was the same woman who spat on the rough bleached floorboards of her attic room at night. “English
putana
,” Marie had recited like a mantra when Artemisia’s mother had once made her re-iron a white linen tablecloth, twelve feet long and five feet wide. “Look,” her mother had said, pointing to a slight yellowing on the edge, “it’s scorched. Wash it again please, Marie, and re-iron it.”

Marie said other things, too—delicious, terrible things. One hot summer’s evening, after she had returned from a beach outing to the Adriatic, she’d found Artemisia in her room, lying on top of the counterpane, kicking her heels and sobbing in a white rage. The countess had gone to open a country fair at Costa di Trex and had taken Camillo with her. Artemisia had been left at home—punished for striking her brother. That same night Marie told Artemisia that the countess had come to Italy because she couldn’t get a man in England. “Bloodless old sow,” she had called her, “dried up, like the parched earth of Puglia, eyes the watery blue of the dirty Adriatic.” Marie had a fixation about the dirty Adriatic.

When Marie was homesick, she would talk to Artemisia of the Sicilian indigo sea that raged below her grandmother’s house in Cefalù. Whitecaps and seabirds riding high on the pristine blue-violet waters, huge crashes of white flecked foam smashing against the rocky coastline, spraying the promontory above with the damp bouquet of brine and crushed sea shells. Marie said the Adriatic, which belonged to the mainland, was a warm cesspool of slime, devoid of strength or beauty. She worshipped strength and beauty. The men of Cefalù were dark and wiry, the strength of panthers in their limbs, and the small-boned women were dark beauties, with wild hair frizzed by the sea air and coal black eyes, descendants of the original Sicanians and Greeks. The others were imposters, Normans who had come to Cefalù nine hundred years earlier to steal and had forgotten their way home.

Artemisia was jealous of her brother, who had silky yellow hair and blue eyes. Camillo was her mother’s favorite. But Marie mocked Camillo’s pale hair and pale eyes. “Mommy’s little fairy,” she had called him in the guttural language of Sicily, which only she and Artemisia could understand.

On her eighth birthday, Artemisia’s parents moved her bed-room from the attic to a room on the second floor, to sleep with the adults. She didn’t want to leave her little room and begged to stay in the attic with Marie, who helped her to dress and bathe, and who took her for long walks to the top of La Rocca, where they could almost see Sicily in the distance. At night in her attic room, Artemisia could hear Marie through the open door, moving around, talking to herself, and the hall light, a bare bulb that hung from a looped wire, cast a soft tawny glow into her room until the early morning hours when Marie rose to begin her day’s work. Her room was a square box, with a small iron bedstead, a bureau with three ill-fitting drawers, and hooks on the wall for her dresses, but Artemisia could see into all the corners of the room at night, and if she stood on the bed, she could almost touch the ceiling.

Her new room on the second floor had a twelve-foot-high ceiling, and there was no hall light to cast a friendly glow into the dark spaces surrounding her bed; her mother insisted that she sleep with the door closed. That first night, after her birthday celebration, she lay in the suffocating darkness.
Hail Mary, full of
grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women and blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
, she prayed out loud. If she chanted the
Hail Mary
until early morning light, she would ward off the dead who hovered in the vast spaces above her head, vampires who would suck her blood if she slept! She knew about vampires because Marie had seen them in Sicily.

The next morning, when Marie came to dress Artemisia for school, she found her charge huddled by the doorjamb, stiff with cold. “I fell asleep and the vampires came for me,” she told Marie, the tear tracks visible on her soft cheeks. When Marie told the count that Artemisia was afraid of the dark, he said she should have a nightlight but her mother disagreed. She reminded the count that Camillo had also been afraid of the dark and that it had lasted less than a week. She’ll get over it, she told the count, and he concurred.