The journal didn’t say what had happened to the nurse, but it did remind Magdalena that Lippi had frightened her from day one. Sometimes his breath smelled of garlic and his clothes of sweat and his pores of stale wine. He yelled when he was drunk, and he drank every night—drank until he passed out. He broke wind more than he laughed, and when he laughed his teeth showed yellow. And there were other things, too, things that made sense of the bruises and the suffocating feelings that descended on her when he walked in the door. On more than one occasion she’d contemplated cutting his throat with the knife they used to cut apples or pouring the smelly liquid he used to clean his brushes into the wine until his eyes bulged and he choked on it.
“I’ll never call him father. No matter how many times he begs me, I will never call him father.” She’d written that more times than she could count, hard enough to indent the pages.
She flipped through more pages, catching herself up on her own history, wondering how much of it would stick past noon. When she’d gotten her first monthly blood at twelve, he’d told her it was a sign, a warning of what would happen daily if she ventured out while he was gone. She’d bleed until there was no more coursing through her veins. “Not true,” she’d scribbled in the margin. “More lies, Magdalena.”
She turned more pages, familiarizing herself with herself. One page held an account of a time in front of the Duomo in Florence, when she’d accompanied Lippi to the great cathedral on business. She’d wandered into the crowd while he was engaged in conversation, bumping into men and women gazing up toward Brunelleschi’s famous dome and wondering over the millions of bricks used to construct it. She somehow remembered seeing the plans before the work on it began in 1420. She’d never been inside the cathedral, yet she remembered the frescoed interior of the dome as if she’d painted it herself.
She’d bumped through the crowd, having lost track of Lippi, and upon tilting her head up to take in the scaffolding masking the new façade that soared white, ornate, and heavenly toward the blue sky, her hood had fallen from her head and her orange hair had unfurled for all those to see. Then, suddenly, arms were reaching toward her hair. Voices murmured. An artist, as if on instinct, turned her way, lured along by the rest of the bodies as they pressed close, too close, until it became hard to breathe.
Then, somehow, she was able to breathe again. That was the first time she’d seen the black boy, roughly her age, with skin dark as night, leaning against the green-and-white marble of the neighboring baptistery, singing. His voice was angelic, “from the heavens,” she would write that night in her journal. And the sound of his prepubescent soprano had lured enough of the crowd away from her to allow Lippi in to grab her, “roughly about the elbow,” she’d write, and pull her away. Never again would he take her to Florence.
You’re mine now, Magdalena.
She turned more pages, faster, fingers racing nearly as rapidly as her heart toward the end of the journal. “He’s a brute. He’s a beast. His hair is greasy and his nose upturned. My back hurts from the standing while he sits and paints and looks upon me. And then he does those things to me, knowing that I won’t remember come morning.” She didn’t know why she had refrained from writing down exactly what Lippi did to her, but part of her was glad. Perhaps some experiences in life were better not remembered. Perhaps it could be a blessing to forget, especially when she had no means of changing her fate.
But now she flipped to the end of the journal, where the final pages—soon she would have to write in the margins—brought about a smile even though she’d yet to read what was written. She moved from the bedroom for the second time that morning and slipped on her brown shoes, the soles—unnoticed by Lippi thus far—more worn by the day. She ignored the threatening note Lippi had left on the front door, warning her about the streets. She wrapped the light cloak around her shoulders, hid her bundled hair beneath the hood, and stepped out into the warm September air of the hilly Val d’Orcia. Into the air and sunlight that apparently, according to her notes, she had braved for fifteen days in a row now.
For a boy.
“A boy already built like a man,” her journal had told her, “with unruly blond hair that brushes his shoulders as he chisels away at his stones. He wields the hammer like a god, like a Titan.”
Her palms began sweating as she walked down the cobbled alley, the confusing soreness from the morning waning with every step toward the town square, which still looked as it had during the Renaissance, harmoniously laid out and strategically placed overlooking undulating hills.
A small town in the province of Siena, between Montepulciano and Montalcino, Pienza had been birthed from a dream, the ancient village of Corsignano transformed into a new utopian city combining the principles of classical times with those of the Italian Renaissance. Her journal had told her this too. It was the creation of one Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a wealthy humanist who would later become Pope Pius II and spend his summers as pontiff in the Palazzo Piccolomini with his Flemish tapestries and rooftop gardens. Magdalena imagined his court of cardinals meeting like flocks of red birds and getting fat off breads and wines and cheese, so plump they would have to walk instead of fly.
Wind swept over the hill and down the valley. As she navigated the perfectly proportioned streets, narrowed by tall walls of brick and bright travertine stone, Magdalena held her hood with one hand while gripping the open journal with the other, following a crude map she’d drawn at some point in the past few days to get her to the right destination. Chatter picked up as she neared the central Piazza Pio II, stepping in and out of sunlight and shadow, triangles of bright and shade, warm and cool against her face.
The piazza teemed with excitement, some kind of festival not mentioned in her journal. Shops and vendors hawked wine and homemade pasta, spices and perfumes, wheels of pecorino cheese. Kids played games, darting through the crowd, behind the town hall and around the well she had labeled in her notes as the well of the dogs. A circle of men took turns rolling the rounds of cheese around a wooden spindle, and Magdalena couldn’t help but laugh at the spectacle. She kept her chin pointed down, the hood around her ears, but spied from the top of her eyes.
A black boy stood across the piazza, chatting in a cluster of men and women, and periodically he’d glance at her. She looked to her notes, going back through the days, and noticed that she’d recorded the same experience each day she had come out. His skin was shiny black, his smile kind. More of a well-muscled man than a boy.
“Could he be the same one who saved me from the Florence crowd outside the Duomo with his singing years ago?” She’d written that question on each of the last seven days. “Does he watch me, or is he watching over me? And who is he?”
And then, as if on cue, he started singing. According to her notes he’d done the same on several of the days. If this was the same boy, his voice had changed. It was now deep, cavernous, echoing across the piazza. Her heart grew warm at the sound of it.
She listened until he finished, and after the applause faded, she stepped deeper into the piazza. The front of the Pienza cathedral stretched upward like a mountain on the other side of it.
Sometimes Lippi would usher her inside the cathedral to pray for his continued success—their continued success, for she was at least aware enough to know she was an integral part. “He is nothing without me,” she’d written in the journal he didn’t know about. And sometimes, instead of praying for their continued success, she’d startled herself by praying for his death—a violent death. Other times she’d simply pray to God for her memory to be restored. With memory she could escape. With memory she would be normal. So she’d secretly petition God to be rescued from this place—this beautiful place where she lived with a horrible man.
She heard the hammering before she saw him. Then there he was, outside the Palazzo Piccolomini’s loggia, standing in the shadow of a block of white marble carted down from the quarried hills, the stone looming two feet taller than his six-foot-plus frame. Her h
eart jumped into her throat, so she swallowed to get it back down.
A crowd of at least two dozen had gathered around him, watching him chisel into the stone. She flipped through her notes. In the past days she’d written down things the crowds had whispered about him.
“A talent to rival the greats. The equal to Michelangelo and Bernini and Donatello. A man born centuries too late.
“He astonished crowds in Florence before coming to Pienza. Lured to Pienza, they say, for a mysterious girl.
“He’s creating his own David.
“He’s come from the United States. On a steamship to Sicily. On a boat to Naples and up the coast to Pisa. Then Florence. Then Pienza.”
She stepped closer. He looked up as if he’d sensed her. Their eyes locked.
He stepped away from his statue, recognizing her, just as the notes said he would. But she was seeing him for the first time. Again.
“Your confusion—he finds this adorable,” her book had said. “He calls you his muse. He claims he’s crossed oceans to find you. He claims to have dreamt of you. Every artist needs his muse.”
She moved slowly, reading and learning as she walked, so she wouldn’t make a complete fool of herself. He told the crowd around him to stay put, that he had quick business to attend to. They listened, none of them moving—as if afraid to lose their spot—as he stepped around the palazzo and ushered Magdalena into the shadows where they could talk undisturbed.
Except he didn’t talk at first. His intimate embrace took her by surprise. His arms powerful, the hairs coated with dust. He kissed her on the lips and she melted, just as her notes said she would. She closed her eyes and imagined escaping with him to another place. He looked down upon her and smiled. “Magdalena.”
She’d practiced this on her way through town. Memorizing his name. “Robert.”
He hugged her, let go, stared into her eyes—his blue and hypnotic, hers swimming. “Magdalena, why is it that every time I kiss you it’s as if it’s our first?”
She smiled.
Her notes said he’d ask that too.
Sixteen
1946
The Gandy Gazette called it the Memory Hotel.
Newspaper and magazine articles were now being written about the “fountain of youth” in the middle of the piazza. Reporters from across the country, one from as far as Maine, came daily to witness the goings-on inside the Tuscany Hotel, which was as full as it had ever been in its heyday, only now with the elderly instead of the artistic. Not all were elderly, though. They had learned with the arrival of a dozen men and women over the winter months that senility—or Alzheimer’s disease, or whatever it was—sometimes struck those in their fifties. One guest was as young as forty-nine. Even for them, the water from the fountain seemed to bring them back to themselves.
The medicine also seemed to help those suffering from war trauma. Nine war veterans, some from each of the world wars, now had rooms inside the hotel. After a few weeks of drinking their daily doses of medicine, they’d shown the same elements of catharsis that John and Vitto had experienced—what John called bloodletting, letting free the humors, bringing out the war memories so that they could be talked about.
From the hundreds of recently arrived elderly guests, two of the men had been psychologists before dementia had derailed their careers, and they were both more than willing to meet daily with the war vets. John, despite being previously cleansed—it’s an ongoing process, Gandy—joined their daily sessions near the cliffs overlooking the ocean when he wasn’t cooking. Sometimes he still left with tears in his eyes. But at least he now had help in the kitchen. So many of the women—and a handful of the men—couldn’t wait to cook again, so John had to organize them in shifts.
One day Valerie caught Vitto watching a meeting of the war vets from afar.
She’d sneaked up on him, slithering her arm through his. He could tell she was trying to rekindle the magic they’d shared inside the olive press house weeks before—the laughter and stories they’d shared, her sense that her Vitto was back, finally back. But he was all too aware that his breakthrough that night and the handful of positive days that followed had been fool’s gold. The fountain water had churned up dirt that wasn’t ready to be flipped. He wasn’t really back. Maybe he never would be.
She sensed the slipping—the two steps backward, as she’d called it one afternoon—and was now trying desperately to keep him from reverting to what he now considered his new normal since the war. And that’s what they were like now—him distant, her trying to bridge the gap, trying to be the bridge for both of them because he was still not emotionally ready to hold his end.
“You should join them, Vitto.”
“I told you. I’ll never drink from that fountain again.”
“Then don’t. But drink something. Do something.”
She squeezed his arm and walked away, but not before getting in her last two cents, which was not her custom—not something someone trying to save a relationship would do unless she, too, was close to giving up. “You’re becoming too much like your mother near the end, Vitto.”
Perhaps those words had been meant to soften him, to leak into the cracks of his broken façade, but they only proved to do the opposite. Valerie had always loved Magdalena, but unlike Vitto she had no soft spot for his mother’s frailties. To her, Magdalena was not a perfect being. She was a woman who was beautiful in almost every way, who had encouraged Valerie’s friendship with her son, only to later resent her for stealing his heart and taking his attention away from her.
There’s a dark spot on her heart, Vitto. Valerie had said this to him when they were teens, and it had led to their first argument, because to him his mother was nothing but good, nothing but kind. That argument had lasted ten minutes, the cold shoulder only a day; after all, he’d written down their disagreement and buried it in the ground within minutes after she stormed from the room, calling him blind when it came to his mother.
Now she was saying he was too much like Magdalena. And maybe that was true, but it didn’t really change anything. It didn’t make him any more inclined to join the other war vets. He’d let enough out on that night during last call. And it certainly didn’t convince him to drink the water. In fact, as he and Valerie and, by proxy, William all seemed to grow more apart by the day, he watched the fountain with greater disdain.
He felt it each time a new arrival walked through the arches and into the piazza, bags in hand, surveying the stone and color and surroundings as if they’d entered some grand stage or made an early entrance to Elysium. They took their so-called medicine, those sips of water Vitto knew now weren’t just sips of water. His mother had once told him that if something looked too good to be true, it probably wasn’t.
Not totally.
“There’s two sides to every coin, Vittorio. Memory can be a double-edged sword. There’s always a pull and a tug, and eventually someone has to win.”
She’d looked solemn when she said it, and older. The moment was etched in his memory. He had been sixteen, and she’d already been showing the signs of, not dying perhaps, but certainly being on the tail end of something.
So every day he looked for signs when the guests—he tried not to call them patients—drank the water from that fountain. A wince of pain? Signs of choking? Rough going down? But most closed their eyes as if they’d just swallowed peace in liquid form.
I’m not blind, Valerie. In fact, I may be the only one here who sees clearly.
But he wasn’t the only one skeptical about the water. Now that the hotel was full of men and women his age, Father Embry, the priest at St. Dymphna’s in Gandy, had begun to visit daily, parking his ancient bicycle with its patched tires in the corner of the piazza. He never drank from the fountain, either, although he certainly took note of who did, spying curiously as the guests sipped and swallowed. But, unlike Vitto, who watched in wonderment of what might happen, Father Embry gazed as if waiting for something he knew would happen eventually.
Like he’d seen it before and was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Father Embry, who’d celebrated his ninetieth birthday during last call three weeks earlier, had soft hair layered like dove feathers and bushy white eyebrows to match. He was nearly as tall as Robert and Juba but thin as the brooms he used daily to sweep off the steps of his church. Lately he’d not only been spying on the fountain but also partaking in the card games and croquet matches and bocce games out on the lawn. He’d become one of them, in a sense, except for the fact that his mind was still sharp as a tack. Maybe he’d begun to hang around because, despite his mobility and mind, he was at the tail end of his life and priests get lonely too. Or maybe he was spying because he knew more than he and Robert and Juba were telling.
Father Embry had just left the hotel grounds to make his pastoral rounds when the hotshot reporter from San Diego made another scene on the piazza. His name was Landry Tuffant, and to Vitto he looked like someone who’d been perpetually needled on the playground as a kid. Short and thin and sickly, with dark hair pomaded back, he was the type that used his words as a substitute for physical toughness. And for days now he’d been sniffing around the hotel like a dog in heat—interviewing guests, pestering the staff, and insinuating that the so-called fountain of youth was nothing more than a confidence scheme, a way to steal money from the elderly and desperate. His recent articles had been the only ones to cast the hotel in a negative light, and he took pride in doing it. “Someone has to be the bearer of truth,” he’d sniveled to Vitto in passing just yesterday.
“A placebo,” Landry Tuffant now yelled across the piazza—Vitto noticed he’d waited until Father Embry was out the door and only a blip on the hilly distance—loudly enough to interrupt more than one conversation. “A placebo . . . or worse.”
The second time he yelled it, Mrs. Eaves stopped playing the piano and Valerie lowered her violin bow. Vitto had been on his way to the hotel entrance for another day of avoidance, another day of working on maintenance-type chores in the sun where no one could bother him, but Tuffant’s voice slowed his walk.
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 15