Vitto opened the door, turned back toward the bed. “What if perfection isn’t possible?” Robert looked at the wall.
Vitto said, “You’ve spent your entire life trying to create perfection, until it consumed you and burned all others in your wake. Why, I’ll never know. Maybe that can only be answered by you. But what if you’ve already created perfection and never realized it?”
Robert eyed his son again. “You think you’re perfect, Vitto? How do you think you got that way?”
Vitto pointed out the open door, toward the piazza, toward the hotel itself. “I wasn’t talking about me.”
Twenty-Four
Vitto points toward the door.
Robert says, “Turquoise.”
They walk to the next room, the next door, the next shade of color to be memorized by Vitto’s four-year-old brain. Vitto points. His father says, “Viridian.”
And the next. “Cyan.”
The colors are so real and alive to Vitto that they all look recently painted, wet and edible, like he could put a finger in whatever it was and taste it. According to Juba, colors don’t have taste; he said that after Vitto asked one day what yellow tasted like. Vitto isn’t sure he believes it. But he does know his father is losing interest in this fascinating game. With each door viewed and each color learned, Robert’s voice loses life and energy, his mind preoccupied with the statue Vitto pulled him from moments ago, begging him to name the colorful doors.
Vitto walks to the next room, points.
Robert hesitates, then says, “Sky.” And at the next room, “Cobalt.”
The colorful doors grabbed Vitto’s attention even before he could walk. When Magdalena or Robert or Juba would carry him from room to room, place to place, across the grounds, his eyes always locked on the doors, and he’d point at the color. His first word—even before Mamma or Da-da or mine—was boo. Blue.
He points at the next door, but Robert has had enough. “Enough for today, Vittorio.”
Vitto protests, but Robert leads him down the spiral steps toward the piazza, where other children congregate. He tells him to play with the others and returns to his work. But instead of playing, Vitto recites the colors over and over in his head until they are in there for good, chiseled into his mind the way his father’s statue was chiseled in stone, imprinted like when he’d look at something real hard and the image would stay forever.
Vitto counts the grownups on the piazza. Not including his mother and father and Juba—who is behind the bar cleaning glasses—eighteen men and women are doing various things like painting and designing and acting and writing and playing music. His mother, Magdalena, walks amongst them, in between and around them like the breeze itself, like a bee skittering from flower to flower, except slower—more like the syrup Juba pours on his hotcakes.
Magdalena stops when she sees Vitto watching her. He waves, and she smiles as her orange hair ruffles in the ocean breeze he can smell and feel but not see.
He memorizes the moment—that smile—somehow knowing it isn’t as real as the sadness he saw in the morning when he spied on her from the hallway. She was cutting an apple at the table and paused halfway through to look down at the knife in her hand, like the blade itself meant more than just cutting fruit. That’s when the tears came, then the sobs, and he didn’t know what to do, so he tiptoed out the door and into the bright sunshine, where he stared until he saw spots.
Juba once said the sunshine here was so bright it was white. Vitto answered that he could see through the bright and that the sun was all kinds of colors. And Juba laughed and patted him on his shoulder and smiled, because that’s what Juba does—he smiles when Vitto’s parents sometimes will not. Vitto memorizes moments like that too. Juba’s smile is as real as the colors of the rainbow, his teeth white like jarred milk, his eyes the color of chestnuts, his skin like the dark melted chocolate he sometimes pours on Vitto’s ice cream.
Vitto likes all those things, just like he likes Juba. Once he fell on the piazza and skinned his knee, and Juba covered the scrape with a bandage. Another time a guest dropped a chess piece, a knight, and the horse head came off. Juba used glue and put the head back on. That’s what Juba does. He fixes things. Vitto guesses that’s why Juba gives such good hugs, his arms powerful enough to show that memory can have a feeling as well as a look, a smell, and a sound.
Even at Vitto’s young age, he’s observed enough to realize what Juba’s role is, not only for the hotel but specifically for his parents. He is the bandage and the glue when things get scraped or broken, the hug when hearts need fixing. And Vitto is well aware that a lot needs fixing around the Tuscany Hotel.
Vitto sometimes hears people talking, the guests whispering when they either don’t know he is listening or maybe think he is too young to comprehend what is being said. And he has surmised from what he hears that his parents haven’t always been like they are now—often distant and confused, his mother always trying to figure out some unsolvable puzzle, his father painstakingly trying to get back to . . . something.
Magdalena, according to the whispers, seems more and more forgetful by the year. She’s taken to writing in her journal more and more often, even carrying it around with her during the day. Of her love Vitto has no doubt. Her hugs are nearly as good as Juba’s. But on a couple of occasions she squeezed so hard it felt like she was trying to squash him, and she left tears on his shoulder. Meanwhile, his father grows more agitated and frustrated under the surface, showing it only when people don’t see him. In public, Robert is the boisterous and flamboyant man of the hour, the life of every party ever held on the piazza, just as he’s always been before.
Before what? Vitto asks himself. But he already knows, already senses it, because if Juba has one flaw it is that he has eyes that cannot lie. So when Vitto asks him one day if his parents were different before he was born, Juba’s voice catches, and his eyes flicker just enough for Vitto to know the truth. So when Juba says, “Different how?” Vitto can tell he is being evasive, even though he doesn’t yet know the word.
“I mean, what were they like?”
“As they are now, Vittorio.”
But Vitto knows that not to be true.
* * *
“Vitto, wake up.”
He rolled on his back. Viridian. Cyan. Sky. Cobalt. Where am I?
Valerie hovered above him, nudged his shoulder. “Wake up. It’s your father.”
Pulled alert, Vitto leaned up on his elbows. He was in the same room as his family; he’d come here last night after his father sent him away. He’d slid under the covers with Valerie and hugged her as they slept. In the middle of the night William had come from his bed and joined them—all three in one bed, packed in like sardines in a can, but perfectly so.
On the floor and leaning against the far wall were two of the paintings he’d done last night. He nodded toward them.
“They’re beautiful, Vitto. Thank you.”
He pointed to the first one. “A Soldier’s Return. That’s what it’s called.” Valerie covered her mouth like she was about to cry. He pointed to the second painting, which depicted him and William sitting on the sides of their beds, facing each other. “A Father’s Return.”
And then he recalled the painting he’d done for his father and remembered why he’d been rustled awake. “Where’s Dad?”
“Outside,” she said, not panicked but concerned. “Oh Vitto, he’s as lost of mind as he was before he arrived here,” she said. “I think he’s completely stopped taking his medicine. Several of them have.”
Vitto laced his shoes, tucked in a fresh shirt, and walked out to the piazza. As usual, the space was full of their elderly guests eating breakfast at scattered café-style tables, apparently unafraid of the water they’d been told would shorten their lives. A life without the medicine is a life not worth living, an eighty-year-old man with a walker had said the day before. Now he was among the group playing cards. Some read the newspapers. A dozen had formed a walking club th
at slowly traversed the blue-tiled outline of the piazza until tired, twice daily—a couple with canes, three more in wheelchairs. Mrs. Eaves played the piano.
John emerged from the kitchen with a plate full of fresh bread, and his sunshine smile was contagious. The guests loved him, not only because of his cooking but because he’d somehow assumed the role of son or grandson to them all.
All in all, a typical morning at the Tuscany Hotel. But Valerie was right that the behavior of a few of the guests seemed off. Or rather, they’d seemingly slipped back to their previous behavior, the way they’d been before their arrival to the hotel—lost and confused, clutched by the cruel hands of senility. They asked for spouses long dead. They moved with questions in their eyes and hesitation in their steps and an endless litany of “Where am I?” and “Who are you?” One frantically insisted that he was late for work and had to catch the train, although he’d retired fifteen years before. Other guests, who’d become their friends, fretted over whether to get these lost ones to drink the water or simply do their best to calm them without it.
So far, Valerie had said, the regressing guests seemed to be in the minority. Most still took their medicine without wrangling. But some of their children, after reading Landry Tuffant’s latest newspaper article claiming Robert Gandy was possibly performing a form of euthanasia right under everyone’s noses, had arrived at the hotel, either to stop their parent from drinking the water or at least to have the discussion about what continuing to drink it might mean. Oddly, few seemed to doubt that the reporter’s claims were true. After witnessing firsthand what the water had done in restoring memory to begin with, it seemed that most could believe anything.
Vitto turned in a circle on the piazza, taking it all in. Tuffant was on the second floor with a notepad, observing the piazza from up high like a vulture. Was he waiting for the first to die? Was he that desperate for copy? That determined to revenge his father’s slip from the cliffs decades ago?
Valerie pointed toward the northern wing. Robert paced the tiled walkway in front of the first-floor rooms where, at every door, he’d stop with his nose inches from the painted wood as if waiting for his eyes to adjust and see something other than gray. He moved to the next one, and the next. Juba was with him, following him from door to door like a shadow, waiting to catch him if he should fall. Then Robert moved toward the northern entrance and passed through the archway leading out. Juba stayed with him.
Vitto and Valerie hurried to catch up, finding Robert and Juba around the corner, on the walkway outside the western wing, where the ocean loomed to the right and the wind rippled their clothes. Robert had paused as if confused, staring off toward the cliffs in the distance. Was he picturing Magdalena jumping, as Vitto often did?
“Magdalena,” Robert whispered. He turned, confused, and pointed toward the ocean. “She’s not in there. Where’d she go?”
Juba tried to corral Robert’s arms, but he batted them away and shuffled toward the cliffs.
Valerie ran after him. “Robert,” she called out, “let’s go back to the piazza.” Her father-in-law turned, stared as if he’d never seen her before, and continued on.
Vitto’s dream was still vividly imprinted in his mind—Robert naming all the colors of the hotel doors. It wasn’t the time, but Vitto felt pressed to say it anyway: “You memorized the colors, didn’t you? Since you couldn’t see them.”
Robert stopped, turned toward his son, then looked at Juba. “Who is he?”
“That’s your son, Robert. Vittorio.”
“Vittorio?” His eyes surveyed as his mind searched through the muck.
Vitto stepped closer and reached out his hand, but Robert only looked at it.
“Where’d Maggie go?” Robert asked Juba. “She’s not in there.”
Juba tried to turn Robert back toward the hotel, but he wasn’t having it.
“Why aren’t you drinking the water anymore?” Vitto asked, following again. “Some of them back there—they’re following your lead. Not drinking it because you aren’t.”
“Drinking what?” Robert asked Juba. “Oh, the water. Don’t drink the water. Magdalena drank the water.”
“You scared to die?” Vitto blurted in frustration. “Huh? Or are you scared to live?” Realizing right after he said it that his father wasn’t the only one. Until last night Vitto had been scared to live, and the same could be said of his mother, Magdalena, before she jumped.
Robert stopped, asked Juba again. “Who is he?”
The question stung.
Juba said, “That’s your son, Vittorio. And that’s Valerie, your daughter-in-law.”
Robert grinned, reached out and kissed Valerie’s hand. “How do you do?”
Valerie nodded, “I’m well, Robert. Please come back inside.”
Robert shook his head. “I can’t. I need to find her. I need to go to her. I need to swim in the ocean.” He started again toward the cliffs. Waves crushed against the rocks below them, misting the air. He used to swim in the ocean daily, every morning without fail—sometimes two or three times a day after Magdalena’s death.
Vitto raised his voice above the wind. “You haven’t always been color-blind, have you?”
Robert turned.
Vitto continued. “There was a time when you could see color.”
Robert’s jaw quivered. “Magdalena’s hair. Orange was the first color I ever saw. Her hair, like flames from a fire.” He smiled, but it faded. “You stole it all.”
“What?”
“Magdalena?” He’d turned toward Juba again. “She’s not in there.”
Not in where? Why does he keep saying that?
Robert pointed at Vitto but spoke to Juba. “If he comes any closer, I’ll jump. Tell him that.”
Juba didn’t need to; Vitto had already stopped following. “You stole it all?” What does that mean?
Valerie had her arm linked around Vitto’s just in case. But Juba gave them both a look that said not to worry, he would escort Robert safely to the cliffs as if they’d done it numerous times before. He’d be careful not to let him get too close—just close enough to see the vastness of it all and hear the power of the waves and surging tide. Juba’s presence would be calming for him. It always was.
“You stole it all.” Had he? He recalled his mother’s issues with her memory. Had he somehow stolen that too? He had no way of knowing his parents before he was born, because—other than in pictures where the two of them were always smiling—that was impossible. But he’d once heard a guest describe them together as being seamless as an eggshell. Two equal parts made whole the instant they met in Italy and later married upon reaching the States, with no seams or stitches to prove they’d ever existed apart. They’d been put on earth for one another.
“A puzzle of two, connected,” one guest had said, “the two for whom love was invented.”
“The original targets of Cupid’s arrow,” another had observed.
Seamless as an eggshell.
Until Vitto was born and a crack showed on the shell’s pristine surface.
A wound in human form.
Twenty-Five
Juba eventually talked Robert away from the cliffs.
He’d been in his room ever since, and Juba had returned to his work around the hotel, although his eyes never ventured far from that door, in case it were to open and Robert wander toward the ocean again.
After what Robert had said—“You stole it all”—Vitto had fought the urge to do the same, to hole up inside his room, but when he returned to the piazza to find William talking to Cowboy Cane and the old man laughing, he’d stopped to spy. Around William’s neck was his toy doctor’s stethoscope. Cowboy Cane squatted low so that William could listen to the man’s heart through his shirt. William focused, serious as he listened, and then he nodded some sort of approval. Cowboy Cane patted the boy’s shoulder and moved on, as did William to his next patient, an elderly woman in a wheelchair who smiled as if she’d known little William f
or ages. How much have I missed? His son was apparently now the pretend hotel doctor, and his bedside nature seemed second to none.
Across the piazza, Vitto’s easel loomed. He surveyed for his next subject, spotted the couple he’d seen walking hand in hand through the vineyard the other day, both of them laughing and lucid then, but now the wife appeared troubled and confused and the husband saddened. Like Robert and many others, she’d apparently stopped drinking the water. The longer Vitto watched, the more he could tell it had not been her choice. The husband wasn’t letting her drink. The pain of losing her too real to take the chance. But every so often he glanced at the fountain as if tempted.
Torn.
With one drink he could have her back. Was it that easy? Was it that hard?
Vitto brought a handful of canvas frames from the basement and sat down near the fountain to paint. Colors mixed and blended and soon formed a landscape, the hotel’s vineyard, the couple he’d seen holding hands taking form on the canvas just as he’d memorized the scene, like a snapshot, days ago. A dozen or more guests gathered to watch him work.
William continued to make his rounds. Valerie had begun playing her violin and several listened to her; the music especially soothing to those again stricken by memory loss. Their confusion detoured by the lovely notes, the fluidity of her movements, the bow effortlessly gliding across the strings.
Vitto put the finishing touches on his painting, stepped back to view it, and, after deciding it was exactly as he’d remembered, he carried it across the piazza toward the elderly couple he’d spied on earlier. He introduced himself to the distraught husband and shook his hand. His name was Phillip Rosenberg. His wife’s name was Anne. Vitto showed Phillip the painting; the old man stared for the longest time before looking up, wet-eyed.
“Thank you, young man,” said Phillip, eyeing his short, silver-haired wife watching the clouds, temporarily contained, temporarily focused on something, anything. “We’ve been married fifty-eight years.” He stole glances at her as he spoke. “I keep telling myself. It’s not the person who’s changing, it’s the illness. You try to put yourself in their shoes . . . You have to. You keep yourself busy to deal with the loneliness, but . . .”
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 22