Tourmaline (33 page)

You want to hear about the war? His own father, a shepherd from San Piero, bringing pecorino and fresh milk to the group of English soldiers camped on Monte Capanne.

Though it is damp and cold today, I’m told that Elba has had a mild winter this year. It is only the beginning of March, and finches and sparrows are singing in the hotel garden, the almond trees have already shed their blossoms, and the vines on the trellis are budding. I’ve opened my window a crack to let in the fresh air.

Still, the island at bassissima is like a theater before a show opens. Elbans are waiting for their audience, and those of us who are tourists are treated to a gentle bemusement. Why have we come to the island in winter? Don’t we know any better? What sort of people are we who at this time of year are able to leave jobs, homes, families, and come to Elba to do nothing? How did we earn such a ridiculous privilege?

Of course I remember you. You had a rock named King George.

A what?

The first time I met you, you took me into your room to show me your rock. You’d named it King George, and you kept it in a shoebox lined with black tissue paper. You’d made a little cardboard throne and filled it with chalk dust. You used a piece of wood for a table, dried leaves for the plates. King George was a piece of rose quartz.

Really? I sip my water. She smiles at me. I think about the murky passage from infancy to childhood, when the experiences we survive become confused with experiences we imagine.

Of course I remember you. Everyone who was on the island at that time would remember you and your brothers. You couldn’t have realized it, but we were looking out for the bambini Americani, making sure you didn’t get into any harm and didn’t cause too much trouble.

In Florence last week, as I crossed the piazza to enter the Baptistery, a young boy — he couldn’t have been older than seven or eight — stuck his hand in the back pocket of my jeans, searching for my wallet, which I keep in the inside breast pocket of my jacket. I grabbed his arm, pushed him away, we exchanged a glare, and that was that. He went looking for another stupido Americano, and I went into the Baptistery.

“At lower right, near some open trap doors, a red devil is tormenting some of the damned. He has a robust hairless body, claws instead of feet, and bat’s wings; his face is not strongly characterized but it is an animal’s one with a few human features. Goat’s horns emerge from the nape of his neck.” —
Devils in Art,
Lorenzo Lorenzi

During my second visit to Elba, last April, I found a zebra spider in the crumbled stones of the castle at the top of Volterraio. On that same trip I saw specimens of blue and pink and watermelon tourmaline in the mineralogical museum. The day before yesterday, a group of children threw flour at me when I was wandering through Porto Azzurro.

When my brothers and I were growing up in a series of rented houses in various communities in the northeast, we remembered Elba as a place of refuge and magic, and we never stopped longing to return. We had a sense that our father was responsible for giving us the experience of the island, but we also knew that he’d made it necessary for us to leave. We were ashamed of him, even though we didn’t know what, exactly, he’d done wrong.

In the years that followed our stay on Elba, up until the time he fell ill, Murray was always struggling either to find a job or to hold on to one. After he quit the job he’d found upon returning from Elba, the Averils would have no financial dealings with him. His mother’s death in 1968 ended all vestige of connection with that side of the family. From then on, Murray clung to us, his children and wife, like a man adrift after a shipwreck.

I don’t think I’d offend him with these words. He never pretended that he didn’t need us. And he was far more forgiving than I will ever be.

Mi scusi, non mi ricordo di lui.

Murdoch. My father owned property on Elba back in the 1950s.

Murdoch…Murdoch…no, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name.

I imagine a young Elban woman sitting by the window on a train, traveling from Genoa to Marseilles. None of the other passengers tries to speak to her. They can tell that she is deep in thought.

She is thinking about the man, her lover, the guard on Pianosa. They used to meet in a room in Marina di Campo, a dusty little room overlooking the tin roofs of storage shacks. He was at the window, pulling the shutters closed, when she told him she was pregnant. He gave a nervous laugh and started buttoning his shirt back up. He might as well have smacked her.

Now she is heading toward Marseilles, toward Nice, toward Paris. She feels desperately lonely, wants to weep, would start weeping if there weren’t strangers sitting across from her, had cried herself to sleep for three nights in a row back in Portovenere. But loneliness doesn’t make her any less determined.

Our house in Le Foci is no longer standing, but I found our Marciana residence on my first visit to Elba. With the help of a map my mother had marked, I made my way from the hotel to Procchio, from Procchio to Marciana Marina, and up from the port into the valley.

The house is below the village of Marciana, situated in the upper slope of Valle Grande. The shutters were closed, the drive empty, the front gate locked, and no one answered when I rang the bell.

The road to the house cuts between terraces of vineyards and olive groves. I parked along the verge and climbed over the wire fence and up through the vineyards until I had a good view of the house. It was smaller than I’d expected, though it looked well-kept, with cyclamens blooming in pots along the windowsills and the soil around the olive trees freshly turned over.

I kept climbing up the eastern slope of Monte Giove, along a footpath that wound through cobwebs of dead pine. Goldfinches and woodchats flitted about, and at one point I heard the scrambling noise of some large animal retreating further into the woods. I was surprised by how far the sounds of the island travel. I heard dogs barking all the way from Marciana Marina. I heard cars on the road leading into Poggio. I heard roosters crowing in the valley.

After an hour or so I reached the ridge connecting Uomo Masso with Monte Giove. This area is part of the park system, and I found myself on a well-marked path leading to Marciana. Just outside of the village I turned off on a cart road and made my way to Madonna del Monte. The doors of the church were locked. I took in the view of the sea sparkling beyond the outcrop of Capo Sant’Andrea and then followed the path that led to the stone table and benches.

I thought I remembered that it was right here where I’d seen my brother Nat float in the air, and this was the reason we’d all been laughing — laughing so hard that Harry fell off the stone bench.

Over the last year I’ve had to trace and retrace memory through conversations with my brothers and mother. I admit that I’m still not exactly sure what is true.

If you keep listening, the man on the landing in Portoferraio will keep talking. He was telling you about the English soldiers on Monte Capanne. And then the Americans and their laughter, as if nothing had happened. They came to bring gifts of clothes, shoes, food. They were always laughing, having fun, playing football on the beach, bathing in the sea. They stayed for a month. They didn’t want to go back to the war.

I can see on the television the American news I am missing. Interest rates are falling. There was an earthquake in Seattle. No one was killed, but damage is extensive.

A woman’s voice blurs in echo in the courtyard. Tires squeal when a car brakes on the hotel drive.

“You’re going to Elba
again?
” Of all my brothers, it’s only Nat who has come right out and called me an idiot for writing about our family. He’d rather remember our time on Elba the way he wants to remember it, without the interference of uncertain history. He tells me that if I have any doubt about what happened, I should keep it to myself.

Murdoch, you say? Mur…doch? Ah, yes, of course! Signor Americano. He bought land in the Mezza Luna zone. He should have stayed and built a hotel. That’s the way you get rich on this island.

Truthfully, the only person I’ve met on Elba who remembers my father is a bald little man of ninety who has lived in Sant’Ilario his entire life in the same little house where he was born. I met him last time I was here, after having read about his mineral collection in one of the guidebooks. His living quarters are upstairs. He’s given over the downstairs rooms to his collection, which includes more than five thousand specimens of semiprecious stones.

Behind the dusty glass of a display case, there is a white opal with a vibrant rainbow surface. There is a black opal striped like a painted egg with blue and green. The specimen of alexandrite is greenish gray by daylight but turns, as he showed me, a beautiful maroon under a fluorescent light. The man has many specimens of lapis lazuli, cat’s eye, and almandine. And though he has no diamonds, his prize is an amethyst geode the size of a basketball.

When I told him about my father, he took me into the back room, where the less valuable minerals are displayed, and showed me a large chunk of schorl dated March 1957. This, he said, came from my father’s property, along with quartz crystals and a piece of acquamarine, the rest of which he had to keep in a drawer because, as I could see, he didn’t have the space to display everything.

He is a bony, frail man, yet he is surprisingly nimble. When I returned to his house for a second visit a few days ago, I asked him, “Signore, come sta?” and he replied, in English, “I am still here, no?”

Though he remembers that my father was the owner of the land where the piece of black tourmaline was found, he does not remember ever meeting my father. He remembers my mother, though. He remembers her carrying a box of stones weighing ten kilos into his house. He remembers her saying that she thought the stones were worthless but he could have them if he wanted them. He told her that no stones are worthless.

I imagine a girl lying alone on a bed in a boarding house in Paris. She is bleeding heavily and has already gone through three sanitary napkins in the course of two hours. She’d been warned that she would bleed. But how much blood is too much? How can she know?

The phone out in the hallway is ringing. No one answers it. She falls asleep and dreams only of the sound of the ringing phone. When she wakes up half an hour later, the phone is still ringing, and she drags herself out of her room to answer it.

Pronto? She means, Hello. She means, Bonjour.

It is the ragazzo she met the other day at the carousel in the Tuilleries. He wants to take her to dinner. She wants to cry with joy, she is so desperate.

How can you presume to know what I went through, Signor Americano?

How can I presume to know about a twenty-one-year-old Italian woman who in 1956 went to Paris to terminate an unwanted pregnancy?

I dunt know nuttin about nuttin, our father used to say, holding up his newspaper to shield him from us — his strategy for forcing us to complete our homework without his help.

The last mine on Elba closed down in 1982. Rio nell’Elba is one of the island’s starkest villages, and the surrounding land, the iron-red earth gouged and abandoned by the mines, has been devastated repeatedly by brushfires.

I walked through gritty, empty Rio nell’Elba the other day. I stopped at a bar for a caffè and had a short conversation with the barista about America. He had been in the navy and traveled to Montreal, Norfolk, New Orleans, and San Francisco. We talked about the winters in upstate New York.

After leaving the bar, I walked out of town up the road toward Volterraio. I picked some lavender as I walked along. I collected colorful pieces of quartz. I saw a white horse grazing on the marshy grass beside a creek.

I imagine a young woman sitting beside my father in a room lit only by moonlight. She has come to ask for help. Signor Americano might know of a doctor. Signor Americano might even loan her money.

She can’t find the words she needs to explain her situation. She can hear my father’s nervous breathing as he shifts his position on the sofa. He reaches for her, and all at once she perceives his mistake: he thinks she wants to lure him away from his family. She regrets having provoked such misunderstanding. Or else she doesn’t regret it at all.

Last night I was woken by a storm. I got up and stood at the window for a long while. Palm fronds blew about like ribbons in the wind. Wisps of fog floated between the sea and the dark bed of clouds. Water spilled from the drainpipe extending out over my terrace. The noise of the wind, a low steady humming, was the sound of memory returning.

In 1944 Elbans gave Americans gifts of amethyst, agate, quartz, hematite, and tourmaline. Blue tourmaline lodged in a block of granite, the spiked blue inside the transparent crystal the exact blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea on a clear afternoon. Take this, keep it so you won’t forget. Come back and visit us. We will welcome you. We will share our treasures.

I picture Adriana Nardi on the ferry bound for Piombino. It is a cool, bright autumn day. Fluffy cumulus clouds drift lazily from the open sea toward the mainland. The water is tinted maroon through the lenses of the young woman’s dark glasses. It is the same color as her fingernail polish. She is wearing a camel-hair coat and a beret to match. She has wound her red silk scarf twice around her neck, leaving the ends loose to flutter in the wind. Her leather purse is a paler red. Her shoes, made in Florence, rise on two-inch spindly heels. Her net stockings are black. Black cuffs of her lambs-wool gloves, a Christmas present from her mother, peek out from her pockets. Her earrings are simple ruby studs. The rest of her jewelry, packed in her suitcase, she intends to sell.

Surf churning against the headlands of Polveraia. Rain turning the cart ways of the old open-cast mines to mud. Vine stumps sprouting. Cormorants diving in the harbor of Marciana Marina. Smoke puffing from stovepipes. Cars slowing to round the bends of mountain roads. Rain disappearing into the tangle of genista and broom. The rich fragrance of wet moss. Boulders frozen midway in their tumble to the sea.