Tourmaline (20 page)

The only other customers left in the café besides Murray were two German couples. Next year there would be more Germans on Elba. And French, Slavs, Swedes, British. And Americans. More and more each successive year. Proving that a nation can’t blast its way to imperial rule — ownership must be bought, paid for with hard cash. Money money money. Murray no longer had hopes of making a profit or even paying the loan back to his uncles. All he wanted to do was go home and start his life over again. Yes, of course, and civilization wanted to start the century over again.

He wanted to be with Claire, to be alone with her. He didn’t want to have to share her with the rest of us. He didn’t want the responsibility of children anymore. Four sons were too much to handle. They wandered off into the hills after dark. They were rude. They bumped into people. They broke things. They spilled things. They got sick, and when they got better they wanted nothing to do with their father and didn’t even speak the same language.

Who did speak Murray’s language? Not the people around him. Even Francis, an Englishman, had misunderstood him to mean that he’d done actual physical harm to the Nardi girl. Only Claire spoke the same language. Mrs. Claire Murdoch. She needed to know what Murray had done — and what he hadn’t done. He would tell her about Adriana’s appearance that night in the empty house in Le Foci. He would ask Claire to forgive him.

He left, forgetting about the bill. He felt an unexpected, unfamiliar wave of relief as he melted into the shadows beyond the café lights. Darkness belongs to fugitives. He could almost taste it on his tongue. Though the alcohol in his blood made him lurch, he perceived his steps to be smooth, stealthy, buoyant. As long as he was still free, he would find a way to remain free.

“Signore!”

But if he were caught —

“Signore, per favore!”

If he were apprehended —

“Signor Americano!”

If he were chased by a young Italian man, a waiter who wanted nothing more than payment for the bill but who in Murray’s mind became the leader of a mob, if he were chased and apprehended, he would be torn to pieces. So he must run. Run fast, Signor Americano! He must run from his accusers. A girl was missing. Suspicion was growing. Run, Murray! He ran, stumbled, and somehow, even in his drunken state, managed to stay on his feet and keep running. He ran along the flatlands road leading toward Portoferraio. At one point the wind was behind him, then, a moment later, against him. Eventually — he had no idea how far he’d gone — he heard only the echo of his own footsteps slapping the paved road. With a great wheezing breath, he slowed to a walk. He tried to pretend that he was just an ordinary man returning home from a drink with a friend. A leaden fatigue came over him. He had no idea what time it was. He expected to be startled at any moment by the beam of a flashlight on his face. We’ve found you, Signor Americano! But no one found him. He didn’t know where to go next. He told himself that he shouldn’t go back to the villa. He mustn’t go back. But he wanted to go back. And so he did.

Of suspicion, accusations, confessions, and missing girls, my brothers and I knew nothing. We did not hear our father return home late that night, nor were we woken by our parents’ fierce whispers. It was the night Murray told our mother that he was responsible for Adriana’s disappearance, but we slept soundly, and when we woke the next morning, Elba seemed as fresh and promising as ever. The rooster crowed; the goats complained; the motorcycles and milk trucks passed noisily up on the road toward Poggio.

Of the four of us, Nat was the most tranquil — and the one most indifferent to our parents’ troubles. He was often the first to wake, and he’d go outside alone and watch the chickens scratching in the yard. He’d collect the eggs for Lidia, cupping each one between his hands to feel its warmth, and if the rest of us still hadn’t woken, he’d walk down the road to the Scozzi farm and watch Marco Scozzi milking the goats. Sometimes he’d return with a round of pecorino, a jar of plum jam, a bag of peaches. Marco Scozzi called him Cherubino, and when Nat looked at him, confused, Marco pointed at the swallows swooping across the sky. There you are, Marco had said. And so Nat went away understanding that he was a little bird and someday would be able to fly above the clouds.

I am a bird.
Nat would repeat this to himself.
I am a bird, a bird, a bird
— and this served as a ready explanation for the intervals of silence. Nat had become a bird. You don’t have to die to become a bird. You just have to get very sick and then get better. And when you’re better you will be able to see everything with such clarity that you won’t need words anymore. You won’t need much of anything besides a little bit of cheese and bread and jam and water, and maybe one of Marco’s fresh peaches still warm from the sun. You won’t even need parents. And though you won’t have much use for your brothers, you’ll tolerate them because without them you’d be bored.

Without any active insurrection, Nat usurped Patrick’s place as the leader of our group. Little Nat, who was just six years old. We found ourselves following his orders before we’d even admitted to ourselves that he was in charge. With Nat as our captain, we all felt within us an increased sense of individual purpose. We were whatever we were supposed to be. Nat filled his role with the confidence of an experienced actor playing a part for the hundredth time. Harry was adept at finding pieces of transparent quartz we could use as diamonds. Patrick, the most knowledgeable, provided solutions to all mysteries. And I was the lookout, the one to warn of intruders and other dangers when we were playing.

After the night our father broke down and told Claire about his involvement with the Nardi girl, that regrettable embrace when she came to the house at Le Foci, both our parents stayed at home. Through the rest of the month, neither left the house, not even to sit outside on the terrace. It was beautiful weather — bright blue summer skies, with a soft, cooling breeze blowing off the sea, which we enjoyed after scrambling over rocks up the mountain. But Claire and Murray stayed inside, received no visitors, and ate their meals separately from us, behavior we interpreted as the expression of uselessness. Most adults had to pretend to have a purpose. Our parents had stopped pretending, and their indifference was affecting Lidia and Francesca. Francesca was growing fat; Lidia was growing careless and twice had dropped glasses on the hard tile floor of the kitchen.

We had enough sympathy to feel sorry for the adults in our household but not enough to want to help them. We took our cues from Nat, who led us farther and farther from the villa each day. He could run in bare feet up the rocky slope of Monte Giove as if he were flying, he could leap down steep inclines, and he could stand on a precipice and flap his arms and make the sunlight glitter.

Guarda! Look at me!

Look at him!

I’m a bird!

Birds can volare. Volare, Jako Three. Let’s guarda you!

How deep was our confusion? Sometimes I wonder if the quartz crystals we found on Elba were really diamonds, the pyrite gold, and all the colorful feldspar blooming with tourmaline. The whole island was the treasure chest our father had promised it would be, and we’d opened it with a magical key. We could have done anything if we’d let ourselves believe completely in the power of our wishes.

Guarda! Jakos, guarda!

He’s doing it, he’s really doing it!

No!

Sì!

This is something I think I remember: blinking rapidly against the blinding sun, then staring wide-eyed as my brother Nat, just a dark silhouette bounded by light, flapped his arms wildly, then rose about six inches and hovered for a few long seconds in the air above the granite crag.

He did! Jakos, he really did volare!

He didn’t. I was guarding and he didn’t. Did I? Did I really do it?

You did!

He didn’t!

He vero did!

IN LA CHIATTA, HER VILLA
sandwiched between olive groves and the sea, directly across the bay from Portoferraio, Signora Nardi waited for her daughter to come home. She waited with a calm that many considered unnatural, tending to the business of the Calamita leases with her characteristic placidness. From time to time she’d swing open the shutter above the table where she worked and look toward the meadow where Lorenzo’s cows were pegged out to graze. She would glide her hand along the table’s inlaid mosaic, smoothing the tiles. She would listen to her cook, Luisa, running water from the hose into the courtyard’s stone trough.

There were some who wondered how a mother could be so calm in the face of her daughter’s disappearance, and some who suggested that the Signora had never really loved her adopted daughter. Others scoffed at such contemptuous speculation and said that the Signora was only pretending to be calm for the sake of dignity. Was she as calm as she appeared? No one dared to ask her, for they accepted the family’s privacy as a right earned by centuries of nobility. Elbans liked to think that they would have fought to protect the Nardi family, not because of the Nardis’ wealth but because three hundred years of the island’s past was preserved in the name.

The islanders, though, had failed to protect the daughter. For this they blamed the American. Of course they blamed the American. There’d been talk about others involved in the girl’s life — romances she’d kept hidden even from her mother. There’d been talk that the girl was wild and desperate and would give herself to any straniero who flattered her. There’d been talk about the girl and Signor Americano even before she’d disappeared.

She’d been gone for many months. The police had long since stopped searching for evidence. The people of Elba dreamed their dreams and whispered about our father. My brothers and I played our games. Signora Nardi went on waiting.

Her closest friends spoke of her with a sternness that suggested disappointment. They loved Signora Nardi and would prove their love with a lifetime of loyalty, but they couldn’t understand why she didn’t wail and cry to the Blessed Virgin for help and solace, why instead she chose to wait as calmly as a mother will wait for her daughter to return from a dance. Signora, her friends wanted to say, there was no dance. Your daughter has gone away and no one can say when she will come back.

Would she come back? Could she, Adriana Nardi, taken in like dirty wash when she was a young child, have no sense of gratitude? Her beauty was coarse — was it this that made her vulnerable to men who otherwise would have respected the family name? Or was it that the girl, raised to be a lady and educated to take her place in the world beyond the island, had been born to be a whore?

Vado via perchè devo andare via,
she wrote in the note she left behind. She had gone away deliberately and just as deliberately she would return. Whatever faults she had, whatever confusions drove her from home, the girl wouldn’t disappear forever.

Signora Nardi had taken every logical action to find her daughter and had contacted everyone who might have had news of her. But there was no news. There were plenty of rumors. There were strange dreams and gossip and suspicion. But there was no reliable news, and Signora Nardi could do no more than wait for the sun to cross the sky, the olives to darken on their branches, the rain to start and to stop again, the mail to arrive.

Only Luisa, the Nardis’ cook for more than thirty years, understood that the Signora’s calm hid a busy mind, and at any waking moment, whether she was alone or with company, silent or involved in conversation, she was engaged in recovering what she could from the past, sifting through memories of her daughter, looking for clues.

Absence asks for the return of memory. With Luisa’s help, Signora Nardi tried to remember any action or comment that might have revealed traces of whatever secret had caused Adriana to run away. The girl had said one day last fall that she wanted to visit the prison at Pianosa. What did it matter that she’d said this? Luisa wondered. And then Luisa remembered that Adriana had said she wanted to learn to ski. Why suddenly did she want to learn to ski? And why didn’t the summer sun brown her this year as it had done in past years? Luisa wanted to know. No Elban girl should be so white! Was this evidence of something? Everything was evidence, as far as Adriana’s mother was concerned. Adriana’s hand bumping her forehead as she went to tuck a curl behind her ear — this was evidence. The distracted look in her eyes — this, too. And the faint rise at the corners of her lips as she smiled to herself, the hesitations in her voice, and the way she’d taken to drinking water in big, furious gulps.

And there was the pleasant, droning ronzio — the sound of humming. In the months before she’d disappeared, Adriana had taken to humming, barely audibly but almost constantly through her waking hours. Hadn’t Luisa heard the humming? Adriana’s old, sweet habit of humming?

Sì, sì, certo, Luisa had heard her bimba humming again, though she had to admit that she’d thought nothing of it. It was not unusual for girls of a certain age to make a habit of humming. But the Signora pointed out that she hadn’t heard her daughter humming for many, many years. Didn’t Luisa remember how when Adriana was a young girl she seemed to breathe music, the sound like the whirring of wings following her everywhere? Didn’t Luisa remember how she used to hum herself to sleep and hum herself awake, how she hummed as she read and as she listened to stories? Remember, Luisa: she hummed the day the Germans bombed Elba in September, 1943, and she hummed through the night nine months later when the Allies attacked. Didn’t Luisa remember that night?

Of course Luisa remembered. It was the night when Mario Tonietti, the widower of Signora Nardi’s sister, who had died of cancer in 1935, ran all the way from Portoferraio to Magazzini in his bare feet to tell them to hide. Luisa recalled how the oil lamp had flickered and gone out when Mario Tonietti entered the parlor. She remembered the high pitch of his voice, like the voice of a boy, rising to be heard above the sound of sirens and distant explosions.