Tourmaline (22 page)

“Water,” he said.

Murray put one hand on a chair back to balance himself. He went into the kitchen and poured Nat a glass of water from a pitcher. Murray let Nat sit on his lap while he sipped the water. They sat a long time together. Nat smelled the odors of Murray’s skin, his sugary aftershave, his liquor. Eventually Nat finished the water in a gulp, and Murray carried him back to bed.

But Nat wondered why his father had been staring into the mirror in the living room. What was so interesting about a mirror? Nat went to see for himself. Murray was already stretched on the sofa again, his eyes closed. Nat positioned himself in front of the mirror and stared at his reflection. Bored with what he saw, he stretched his lips wide with his fingers and stuck out his tongue. That was better. He curled his upper eyelids inside out. There — that was even better. He made a fish face. He pushed up his nose to make a pig snout.

With the mirror on the wall adjacent to the entrance hall and the sofa against the perpendicular wall, Murray was not within the mirror’s range, so Nat couldn’t see him.

“Nat, go to bed. Nat! Nat, cut it out. I’m telling you to go to bed. Nat, I’m gonna be mad soon. Very soon. Nat! Nat?”

Nat the aardvark. Nat the platypus. Nat the vampire. Nat the wooden soldier. March in place, soldier! March march march march.

“Nat, honey, can’t you hear me?”

If Nat opened his mouth very wide, maybe he could see all the way to his stomach. He tried. What was that hanging from the roof of his mouth? It was a tiny baby bat!

“I’m talking to you, Nathaniel. Nat, goddamn it!” Understanding came to our father neither as a blast of awareness nor in increments. It came to him as subdued recognition, as though he’d already known what he was realizing for the first time. His son couldn’t hear him. With everything else in Murray’s life held in suspension, this was something irrefutable. Nathaniel couldn’t hear. Of course he couldn’t hear. Murray already knew this, had known without knowing that he knew it. Nat was deaf. Murray’s son had been ill, and now he was deaf.

“Nat.” Murray had crossed the room and was about to touch his shoulder when Nat whirled around.

“I’m not sleepy.”

Murray turned his head so his son wouldn’t be able to see his face. “How old are you, Nat?”

“I don’t want to go to bed.”

“Knock-knock. I said, knock-knock. Say
who’s there.
Nat, it’s your turn.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Go to bed.”

“What?”

“It’s the middle of the night. Go to bed.” “What?”

“Bed. Go. To. Bed. Vai!”

You thought you could keep it a secret, Nat. Well, your old dad has found you out. You can’t hear, can you? Can you? Nat!

“Nat!” He watched Nat shuffle down the hall in Harry’s old pajamas, the pants long enough to drape over his toes. “Why didn’t you tell us, Nat? We could have helped.” Without answering, Nat turned the corner into his bedroom. Murray stared down the empty hall in hopes that Nat would pop out from the room and say, Fooled ya!

Nat, you little imp.

But Nat had already gone back to bed.

Murray took one last look in the mirror, tightened his tie, and left the villa through the front door. He considered only as an afterthought how the left hand becomes the right hand in a mirror reflection.

Signor Americano set out walking. There were no stars out, and the cloud bed was smoky gray and swallowed the top of the mountains. The breeze carried the puckering fragrance of grapes. A quick rainstorm had passed through an hour earlier, and the ground, dry for months, was springy.

Signor Americano was going away. Somewhere. Nowhere. Direction contingent upon absence. Our father had no particular route in mind. He just wanted to get away. Go on, Dad, we won’t mind. Just be back by morning, okay? But how could he go back to the mess he’d left behind? A man decides to walk away from his family — one step after the other. His value contingent upon nothing, scarcity being the measure of worth. Signor Americano would make himself scarce for his family’s sake. And go where? Home? Home was bankruptcy — money increasing in worth with rarity. Home was the Averils and humiliation. Home was the past, the absence of the here and now.

If not home, then…

Croaking and chirping of frogs from the marsh below the verge. Accordion music of a cuckoo. Signor Americano could sing as loud as he pleased and no one would hear him. In this sense Nat’s deafness was inconsequential. A change in the weather…The value of song contingent upon the absence of an audience…A change of heart…

He wasn’t crazy. He was just drunk. Not so drunk that he was seeing pink elephants, but drunk enough to believe he was doing the right thing by going away. He imagined running his finger lightly over the slope of Claire’s nose, kissing her on the cheek, soothing her when she woke with a start. It’s okay, Claire. I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving for a while. I’ll be home in a few days. Don’t worry about me. Take care of yourself and the boys. Good-bye. I love you. Love contingent upon absence. He kept forgetting how much he did love her. And now, remembering. His innocence and stupidity. Not unlike Orson Welles in
The Lady from Shanghai.
It’s easy. You just pull the trigger.

He continued down the road toward Marciana Marina and from there picked up the coastal road. Outside of Procchio a truck full of fishermen rattled past, and one of the fishermen called, “Salve, Signore!” He waved back to show that he wasn’t afraid. The truck slowed, stopped, moved in reverse. He remembered only then that he’d forgotten his hat. The fishermen offered him a lift to Portoferraio. He accepted and climbed up into the bed of the truck. He rode in silence while the fishermen sang melancholy songs.

In Portoferraio he wandered through the streets that were brightening with dawn and finally found the lane leading up the east slope of the hill toward Fort Stella. He was tired. He was still drunk and wanted to be drunker. And he could think of nothing better to do than to go and find someone who considered him a scoundrel, pound on his door until he answered, and stumble into the hovel of a flat shouting, “Tell me something! Anything! Tell me about Napoleon!”

Francis Cape, dressed in a tattered blue-and-white-striped nightshirt, his white hair almost fluorescent in the dim light, held the door open. Murray stood in the center of the room. Francis asked him to leave. Wait — Murray wanted to hear about Napoleon. Was it true that during the year he was king of Elba, Napoleon passed a law to make his birthday a public holiday?

“You’re intoxicated.”

Signor Americano wasn’t intoxicated enough.

“Won’t you offer me refreshment?”

“I’m showing you the door.”

“Yes. A door. That’s a door. I know what a door is. This is a floor. That’s a ceiling. What else do you want to show me?”

“Get out of here.”

Francis might have been an old man, but he wasn’t old enough to be exempt from human courtesy. Malcolm Murdoch would teach him a lesson. You’re showing me a door. I’m showing you a man, Mr. Cape. Murray sat in the only chair in the room, an armchair with maroon upholstery as tattered as Francis’s nightshirt, and folded his arms. I’m showing you human dignity. I’m showing you persistence. Resistance. Revolution. And you’re showing me a…what is that, Mr. Cape? A butter knife?

“Leave now.”

“Golly, Francis. I mean…” I’m showing you the reflection of yourself, Francis Cape. Light bouncing off the emotion of hatred to form an image at equal distance from the surface. Francis Cape and Signor Americano being, at that moment, equally ridiculous.

Neither meant to do what he did next: Francis swiping that ridiculous little knife in front of Murray’s face, Murray leaping up, throwing a punch aimed at Francis’s arm, successfully knocking the knife from his hand and sending it clattering across the floor, then continuing the motion, his fist cutting upward at an angle to bang against Francis’s sternum. The old man so feeble that the thump sent him stumbling, and he tripped over his feet and fell, landing splat on his backside, where he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, his white knobby knees bare below the hem of his nightshirt, the look on his face so comical that Murray couldn’t help but laugh.

Francis looked up at Murray in confusion. Murray tried to shake away hilarity.

“Christ, I’m sorry, Francis. I shouldn’t laugh.”

Francis looked from Murray to the open doorway, from the open doorway to the ceiling, from the ceiling back to Murray. His expression hardened into accusation.

“Are you hurt? Here, let me help you up.”

Francis used the fringed arm of the chair to pull himself up. The white pallor of his face had darkened to a sickly gray. He moved backward a step, wobbled, but remained standing. With stoical control that had a vaguely fatigued quality to it, as if he’d rehearsed the scene too many times, he rested his hand on his chest and said, “Get out of here.”

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Get out of here at once. Leave, I tell you, and don’t come back.” An elderly scholar with an aching chest. An American investor in the middle of his life. As Murray rushed down the dark cement stairs of the building, he said to himself what he would have liked to say aloud: Francis Cape, you don’t know how lucky you are.

Murray headed back the way he had come beneath a sky that was the color of Francis Cape’s face. On the outskirts of Portoferraio, he boarded an empty bus. As far as he could tell, the bus was traveling south from Portoferraio. Somewhere in the hills between Portoferraio and Marina di Campo, he got off the bus and wandered up an unpaved cart road. He followed this past a shuttered farmhouse and continued along a footpath that cut through a barley field. The path ended, but he kept walking. In case anyone was watching, he walked in big bold strides, crushing the flower clusters beneath his shoes to suggest an urgent purpose.

He came to a gully and followed the edge to the bottom of a hill. He climbed through an olive grove, up the hill, and picked a single unripe olive. He gnawed it and spit out the bitter flesh and continued to suck on the pit. He saw a donkey standing in the dappled light beneath the branches of the biggest olive tree in the grove, its hide shivering over its barreled ribs, its ears scissoring angrily against a swarm of gnats. When Murray clucked, the donkey trotted farther away. Murray cupped his hands together as though cradling oats, and the donkey took a few lazy steps toward him and sniffed the air. Murray approached slowly. The donkey waited for him and nudged Murray’s hands apart with its nose. But the animal had no reaction to the deception. It stood patiently while Murray climbed onto its back. Murray gave a good kick, and the donkey squealed, flared its nostrils, but wouldn’t budge. “Yah, yah, andiamo!” The donkey flicked its ears angrily, took a step forward, and then paused to drop a little pile of manure.

Was that really you, Dad? Our father, Signor Americano. See what he did when he found himself in a pickle? He mounted an ass! The action relieving him, temporarily, of the awareness of his difficulties. Combine a donkey, mist, the smell of wild mint and thyme, maybe add the chime of a monastery’s bells in the distance, and you’ll have an experience that doesn’t match up with reality as you thought you knew it.

But the donkey wouldn’t take another step in any direction, so Murray climbed off. He slapped the beast’s rump, sending it at a trot down the hill. Murray followed the grass path in the other direction, zigzagging across the terraces uphill toward Orello and Barbatoia, up into the region hidden by the mist, where the cultivated land gave way to barren outcrops, to eroded lava flows, to buttes and cones and ancient volcanic plugs. A region where a prospector belongs, the place where Malcolm Murdoch should have headed long ago.

There’s no logic to the distribution of minerals, is there, Murray? The “perplexing irregularity in the outer crust of the earth” is how one geologist has described it. The best a prospector can do is to begin looking in an area where the rugged surface is bare of soil, the heart of rock exposed. Look, Murray. Keep your eyes open. As you walk along up into the mountains of Elba, look down at the ground for the shine of a lustrous surface, the glint of color.

He wasn’t drunk anymore; he was crazy. Not so crazy that his imagination completely controlled his perception but crazy enough to make the deliberate choice to ignore the facts of his situation. He was hungry. He wanted meat. A good bloody piece of Angus covered with A.1 sauce. A baked potato smothered in sour cream. Green-bean casserole, the kind Claire made using frozen beans and canned onions.

He needed a bath. His head ached. He owned a worthless plot of land. He was a thirty-eight-year-old Caucasian American man who’d taken his four young children and his wife on an extended vacation. He was a brother. He was a cousin, a son, an heir. He was, unfairly, the object of suspicion. But he could no longer pretend that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

He climbed further into the mountains, scraping the heels of his palms on the steep craggy slopes. He climbed to the plateau where the gods were sleeping after one of their long nights of carousing. He climbed past their marble temple. He climbed through the clouds. And there it was, high up on the mountainside close to the summit: a door cut into a scar of bare rock and a stony gallery leading deep into the heart of the earth.

Signor Americano leaned back against an outcrop of limestone and lit a cigarette. He told himself he didn’t have to rush into the cave. He could take his time about it. He needed to collect his thoughts, make a plan. Hesitation uncharacteristic for this impulsive man. But he was on the brink of something big, wasn’t he? The earth inviting him to come under the surface and have a look around, at no expense.

He smoked slowly, thoughtfully. Hesitation the perfect state for him right now. Holding himself in suspense in front of the mouth of the cave. Discovery ready to swallow him up.

Javan, the son of Japheth, stubbing his toe against a lump of Cyprus copper. The glint of silver in a campfire in El Rosario. Gold in the sand on Douglas Island. Vanadium in the asphalt of Peru. The history of discovery a history of fortunate coincidences — and failures. “Because the goldesmithes and goldefyners of London and many other namyd counynge menn had made many prooffes of the ewer and could fynde noe whitt of goold therein.” Frobisher, with his
Meta Incognita.
You know what they say: the chieftain was covered with mud and then dusted with powdered gold blown through tubes. The gilded king. Where is he? Somewhere in the mysterious wilderness, floating on a golden raft across a sacred lake. And suddenly his wife appears.