The Light in the Ruins (10 page)

“Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don’t cut out other women’s hearts.”

“We can.”

He thought about this. Then: “Look, you and I both did things in the war that, in hindsight, we may not be especially proud of. I know that. But I would not view your personal history as emblematic.”

“No, probably not. But you may be on to something.”

“That the killer is a man with a bad temper? Somehow I don’t think that’s a particularly brilliant insight.”

She shook her head. “Maybe this has something to do with the war. For someone to kill someone in such a … a dramatic fashion suggests a deep connection. A defining connection. And all the defining moments in Francesca Rosati’s life seem to go back to the war.”

He raised his glass in a toast. “You may be spot on,” he said. “But then again, you could probably say that for all of us. For our whole generation.” Then he swallowed the last of his limoncello and reached into his breast pocket for his wallet.

Cristina and her mother had a room that was barely big enough for its two slender beds in a modest hotel not far from the Uffizi. But they were going to clean out Francesca’s apartment over the next two days and certainly couldn’t commute back and forth from Rome. Florence was four and a half hours distant if Cristina was driving and a solid five hours if Beatrice was behind the wheel.

“I still believe Vittore will come help us, if we ask him,” Beatrice said. She stood in her nightgown before the window, which looked out on a street barely wide enough for two Vespas to pass. Cristina was lying in bed. She noticed a print of a horse on the wall, and though the artwork was journeyman at best, the animal reminded her of Arabella.

“He knows she’s dead. If he wanted to help, he would have volunteered,” Cristina told her mother.

“There’s so much to do.”

“Not really—especially since we’re giving her clothes and furniture to the church. Francesca didn’t have much at the end.”

“She still had the ring Marco gave her. And her rubies. The police said we might as well take them. They’re not evidence.”

“You have them?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“And Vittore really isn’t coming?” her mother asked.

Cristina sighed and rolled away from the horse. The painting managed to prick her sadness. Watching it was like worrying a hangnail.

“No, Mother,” she said finally. “He isn’t coming.” Her brother lived in Rome, too, but in a different neighborhood. He worked at the Vatican Museum. He and his wife and their two children had a lovely apartment on the Via Crescenzio, only blocks from Vatican City. Cristina knew he wanted to waste no energy burying their late brother’s dead wife.

Beatrice turned away from the window and seemed to think about this. Then: “Did you look at the photographs?” she asked.

Cristina understood instantly what her mother meant: the photographs that had been taken of Francesca’s corpse. What Serafina had referred to as the crime scene pictures. “I didn’t have to,” she answered. “I saw the real thing.”

“I don’t know how you are going to bear that.”

Cristina had made sure that her mother had not viewed the pictures. She herself had endured a flood of bad dreams last night, and she feared that she would again this evening. Serafina had offered to get them some pills so she and her mother could sleep. Now, as she pressed her head deeper into the hotel pillow and curled her knees up toward her chest, she wished that she hadn’t declined.

The truth was, however, that she hadn’t noticed Francesca’s heart until after the police had arrived. The principal image that was going to dog her forever was of her sister-in-law’s ribs: four of them sticking up like scaffolding against the inside of Francesca’s flesh—her sister-in-law, inside out. Whoever had ripped out the heart had pulled back the rib cage with such thoroughness that the ribs rose from the black marsh that had been her sister-in-law’s chest like dead, branchless trees. Like the trees near the tombs at the estate. The Nazis had blown up the medieval granary in the village as part of their withdrawal, but then, realizing that the British were already behind them, they had retreated back inside the
grounds of the Villa Chimera. There they had fought like cornered wolves. Eventually most surrendered; some clawed their way out. By the time the soldiers were gone, the olive trees had become creosote-colored matchsticks; the cypresses had been all but incinerated. And the villa was mere ruins.

No, Cristina thought now. She might forget the deep gash under Francesca’s jaw; she might forget how unexpectedly beautiful the woman’s hair had looked against the floor; she might even forget the sight of her vagina, exposed because of the way the nightgown had been ripped asunder; but she would never forget those ribs.

Before turning off the light in her bedroom on the other side of the river from the Rosatis, Serafina sat before her own small vanity. She thought of Francesca Rosati at hers, but she knew that she would have been thinking of the dead woman regardless of where she was sitting right now. Her own mirror was, by choice, much smaller than Francesca’s; it was the size of a hand mirror and rested on a thin, unadorned mount. She used it for applying her lipstick and makeup, and it was the only mirror in her bedroom. She did not want a bigger one because of the risks that came with a large mirror—the chance that she might accidentally glimpse the dwarf piece of pink cartilage that was all that remained of her right ear or the scars that tattooed her neck and back.

She placed a new auto club map of Chianti and Siena on the narrow table. It showed the roads near Pienza, Montepulciano, and Monte Volta. She stared at it, recalling the hills in which she had lived in 1943 and 1944, the roads on which she had traveled at night. Her eyes kept circling back to Monte Volta, however, and the granary the Nazis had blown up. She tried to remember details of the firefight at the villa nearby, but the memories mostly were lost; the fact that it had occurred would be forever scored upon her flesh and in her recollection of her agony when she’d finally awoken—both the physical pain and the terror when she felt the
scalp behind her right ear and discovered that most of her hair there was gone. Burned off in barely an instant. Certainly she knew of the firefight because the British Army doctors had told her about it at the hospital they had commandeered in Montepulciano. There was one physician who would shake his head as she lay on her side and he worked on her back, meticulously debriding the dead tissue, remarking that the only reason she was still alive was that she was young and strong. Infection alone would have killed most people, he said. He’d added that it wasn’t the worst of her burns that were the most painful; in those areas, the nerves were far too badly damaged to inform the brain that they were hurting. Months later, they had grafted skin from her legs onto her shoulder and back, but the procedure had done little to beautify the whorling topographic map there. And by then the scar tissue had made it impossible to raise her arm much higher than parallel to the ground.

Still, her last memory that she knew was precise—not fabricated from things people told her after the fact, her imagination crafting for her stories to use in lieu of accurate recollection—was the explosion at the granary. She was close enough to the village that she had witnessed the medieval brick and stone pancake into the small piazza before it. A whole group of the partisans had stood there watching, including Enrico, his wife, Teresa, and Salvatore. There had been a flash of light along the base, the concussive blast, and then the tower had fallen.

But not its twin. Cristina had been correct. When Serafina thought back on that moment now, she did indeed see that the second tower had remained upright and standing. Nevertheless, Teresa had taken her hand, as if they were witnessing the end of the world. Even Enrico, usually stoic and self-possessed, was shaking his head slowly in disbelief, stunned, his eyes wide and his slender lips parted ever so slightly. In much the same way that Teresa had taken her hand, Enrico had rested his fingers on his brother Salvatore’s shoulder, as if he needed help with his balance.

And then what? What happened next, as always, eluded her. It existed like fog, present but impossible to grasp. She would always
have the hairless, nerveless scars on her back and her neck, the ruined right ear, but they were a reminder of nothing. Nothing at all.

On the other side of the apartment she heard Milton turn off his light. She tried to imagine where the Villa Chimera was in proximity to Monte Volta, but couldn’t. She tried to find a reason that someone would wait eleven years to exact revenge on Francesca Rosati and couldn’t explain that either.

And so she pulled up her nightgown to her waist, lit and blew out one last match for the day, inhaling the smell of the sulfur, and pressed the black tip hard against the inside of her thigh. She held it there a moment longer than usual. Then she rose from the vanity, switched off the lamp by her bed, and climbed beneath the sheets. She knew it was going to be a long while before she slept.

BEATRICE ROSATI, Francesca’s mother-in-law, was not named for Dante’s muse, the inspiration for
La Vita Nuova,
as well as, more famously, the poet’s guide in the last book of
La Divina Commedia.
You might recall—and then again, you might not—that Beatrice relieves Virgil because Virgil was a pagan and thus never going to be allowed past the crowd control barriers that cordoned off Paradise. The Beatrice that obsessed Dante was a Florentine named Bice di Folco Portinari. Envision this moment (and, in all fairness, I am envisioning it the way Henry Holiday did in his exquisite nineteenth-century painting): Bice is walking beside the Arno River, dressed in white, the fabric clinging to her legs and outlining her slender thighs, and there is Dante. He meets her at the corner of one of the bridges that span the river. His left hand, at first glimpse, is moving casually toward his hip; it is only on a more careful study that one realizes his hand is actually going up to his heart. Meanwhile, his right hand is resting on the bridge’s waist-high stone balustrade, as if Bico’s beauty is such that he needs to steady himself when he beholds her
.

Florence, too, is magnificent in the painting. It’s the Florence I love, the buildings on the south side of the Arno built right up against the water but a pedestrian sidewalk separating the buildings on the north side from the river
.

Beatrice Rosati was named for an aunt who lived in Pienza. Nothing magical, nothing poetic
.

But how could I not think of Bice when I planned how I would kill Beatrice? How could I not think of Florence and the Arno, and how fitting it was that Dante was reaching for his heart when he saw her?

So here was my fantasy: after I had cut Beatrice’s heart from her chest, I would leave it atop the corner of the Florentine bridge precisely where Holiday had painted the poet’s hand
.

The problem was this: How could I be sure that an animal would not carry the heart away? Or, what would be even more frustrating, how could I be sure that some idiot human, not realizing what it was, didn’t swipe it into the waters below? And that would mean labeling the item as if I were a biology professor. And the label, if I wasn’t careful, would be evidence. (Likewise, if I wasn’t clever, I would risk embarrassing myself.) And wasn’t the extraction of a human heart a sufficiently memorable calling card? Good Lord, one would think so
.

Consequently, I resolved to box up the heart when I left it along the balustrade. Eventually someone would open the box and take it to the police
.

1943