Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  Again he nodded but offered nothing more. Muto come un pesce, (mute as a fish) I thought, remembering a favorite locution of my father’s. He’d used it as an admonition for discretion as well as a way to tell Elijah and me to shut up.

  Perhaps a direct question would get Locanda talking. I asked him if he was one of the boys Alberto used to beat up.

  “Who told you Alberto was a bully?”

  “His priest mentioned it at the symposium.”

  “Rather indiscreet of him,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “But no, Albi never struck me. I was a year older than he, and a little stronger at the time.” He smiled. “If I remember rightly, we acted as a team.”

  “You mean you both beat up the others?”

  “We were young children then.”

  “The child is the father of the man,” I said.

  “Boys are violent creatures. They lack the restraint that comes with maturity. It’s unfair to expect them to behave like civilized adults.”

  “And when he was sent away to study with the friars, did you stay in touch?”

  He shook his head. “No. He was gone for five or six years. I saw him only once or twice in that time. We both changed a lot during those years.”

  I asked him how so.

  Locanda made a face, as if annoyed, and asked me why I was so interested in his friendship with Alberto.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I never met him and I was curious.”

  “It was the twenties,” he said at length. “I can tell you that for many years we found ourselves on opposite sides of the era’s political struggles.”

  “Then you were . . . I mean, I assume, given your age, that you were . . .”

  “A fascist? Why do you assume that?”

  I stumbled over my words, fearing I’d insulted him. “Just that I understood that Professor Bondinelli was with the partisans during the war. If you were on different sides, well, I figured you meant the fascists.”

  Max took a drag of his cigarette and regarded me for a long moment. “Now you’re talking about the war. I said the twenties, not the forties. A different time altogether.”

  I was thoroughly confused. “I . . . Scusi, but I don’t understand.”

  “Alberto was indeed with the partisans during the war. At the end of the war, that is. I, alas, like almost all males of my generation, found myself in the military. And then in a prisoner-of-war camp. So, yes, we were on different sides then as well.”

  “What about during the twenties?”

  “We hadn’t seen each other in many years by that time. He’d been with the friars. But we ended up at university together.”

  “That’s when you saw him steal the books?”

  “Yes. The friars gave him an excellent grounding in Christian theology and history. But the . . . brainwashing didn’t take. Alberto was fiercely anticlerical in those days. And he wasn’t above pinching a couple books.”

  “His priest suggested he was rebellious.”

  “He claimed to be an atheist. I recall he joined up with a secretive society of anarchists. At least they thought they wanted to be anarchists. Just teenaged Communists suffering from some existential crisis of faith. Communist faith.”

  “And what groups did you join?”

  “I wasn’t much for joining.”

  “Surely you belonged to some group or another while at university.”

  “I worked at one of the student newspapers,” he said.

  “Then we have something in common. I’m a newspaper reporter back home.”

  He smiled a weak, dismissive smile. “I wrote opinion pieces. No reporting.”

  Vicky entered the room, and Locanda rose to greet her with a “carissima and a kiss on both cheeks. “What took you so long? I’ve been dying of boredom without you.”

  That stung.

  Vicky practically glared at me. I fancied she was sizing me up as one wrestler might another before busting a folding chair over his head. Taking the seat next to her lover, she asked me what I was doing up at the crack of dawn.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “The rooster and Veronica . . .”

  “Who’s Veronica?”

  “The sick girl. The one with the rash.”

  “Oh, right. I wanted to sleep in myself, but Max offered to take me into town to shop.”

  She batted her eyelashes at him, and, marooned, I felt superfluous and unwelcome at the same table with the happy couple. I debated whether to gulp down my coffee or abandon it. I had more questions for Locanda, of course, but this was not the moment.

  Berenice returned with a cup of tea for Vicky. Placing it on the table, she cast a dirty look at the steaming infuso. Or perhaps the target of her disapproval was Vicky, not her breakfast beverage. Berenice withdrew again, and Vicky proceeded to squeeze some lemon into her tea—I preferred milk—stir it absently, and take a sip. Then she eyed me again. She couldn’t quite disguise her expression, which was one of those nettled, annoyed-by-my-proximity-but-not-sure-how-to-send-me-packing looks. I sympathized. I, too, wanted to shake the dust of that room from my heels, but if I was being polite, I couldn’t exactly tap-dance my way off stage vaudeville-style.

  “I suppose you have plans with the others,” said Vicky.

  “No. I thought I might explore the grounds today. Maybe do some reading.”

  “There’s not much to see here. Just olive trees and old, useless grapevines.”

  “I think they’re quite beautiful in their retirement,” I said. “In a knotty, arthritic way.”

  Vicky wasn’t convinced but let it go. “If Max would put in a pool like I told him, we could escape the heat with a swim.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll find plenty to keep me busy.”

  I thought of the library and its trove of photographs. Was I actually brazen enough to mount a second invasion of his study? I wanted to tell myself no, but . . .

  “If you’re interested in swimming,” said Locanda to me, “there’s a little stream over the hill. It’s a pleasant, private spot for a dip.”

  “I loved to swim when I was a girl.”

  Vicky pursed her lips, squeezing them into a meaty mush of lipstick, presumably indicating what she thought of what I had or had not loved to do as a girl.

  And then something unsettling happened. Until that moment, notwithstanding his sexy young girlfriend, Max Locanda had behaved like a humorless, cold-blooded prig. Aloof and reserved, bordering on rude at times. I had been waiting for him to show some overt sign of debauchery, but he’d defied my expectations from the start, never more so than when he surprised Bernie and me in our passionate embrace. He seemed more a prude than a Casanova. But just when I’d resigned myself to having misjudged my host’s character, his true self shone through. As Vicky peeled an orange, Locanda fixed me with a penetrating stare and, without the slightest hint of shame, addressed me in Italian.

  “If you’re not shy, signorina, know that here at Bel Soggiorno we have no objections to guests swimming in puris naturalibus.”

  I nearly choked. Vicky took another unenthusiastic sip of her tea, unawares, as Locanda stubbed out his cigarette and smiled.

  He urged Vicky to finish her tea and hinted at a little something bright and shiny from Torrini’s if she was a good girl. She cooed, replaced her cup in its saucer, and gathered up her skirts.

  “Sono pronto!” she said, jumping to her feet.

  “That’s pronta, cara,” corrected Locanda. “With an A.”

  A brief contretemps ensued, with Vicky pouting and whining that she’d heard him say pronto with an O hundreds of times. Why was it wrong when she said it?

  “Because, amore, you are a woman. Feminine, ‘pronta.’ I am a man, masculine, ‘pronto.’

  “It’s silly,” she said with more drama than the situation merited. “I see how a woman is feminine, but how can you tell with words? Like that,” she said, pointing to an apple in a basket on the table.

  “Mela,” answered
Locanda. “La mela. It’s feminine.”

  “What’s feminine about an apple?” she whined, practically weeping. “How am I supposed to know?”

  Locanda smiled indulgently. “It’s very simple. You turn it over and look underneath.”

  That didn’t go over well. Now in tears, Vicky stomped from the room, and Locanda, drawing a sigh, followed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The beauty of Tuscany lies in its tranquil landscapes. I can’t describe it in its winter vestments since I’ve never seen it, but I remembered its hot summer haze of seventeen years before. And in the cooling autumn, it was redder and golder, no less lazy, but more inclined to welcome. If only a few degrees more temperate than the sizzling month of August, late September still managed to paint the panoramas and skies and cypress trees in a different palette, one that suggested work was nearly done and rest was coming.

  With my awkward breakfast behind me, I wandered out through the salone to the terrazza, then into the garden for a solitary stroll. The others, save Locanda and Vicky, were surely still in their beds, sleeping off the indulgences of the night before. I had the grounds to myself.

  A canopy of green-and-white ivy climbed the long sturdy pergola leading to a copse of trees and a gentle hill. I meandered down the shady corridor, stopping to admire wildflowers and spy on a gecko resting on a bed of pebbles. A few steps farther, a bee buzzed over a meager bunch of yarrow, what the Italians called Achillea millefoglie. This was perhaps the last hurrah of the season for the little white flowers, which, thanks to my late mother’s gardening passions, I knew would have thrived better in direct sunlight.

  The pergola’s cover of ivy provided the day’s last moments of cool until dusk. I could sense the gathering heat settling over the land just yards away in the open sunlight. An idyllic escape, peaceful and redolent of smoky cypress and earthy mushrooms. The kind that spring up overnight at the feet of mossy trees. At the end of the path, I emerged from the shade and was greeted by Diana, goddess of the hunt. Frozen in stone in the tall grass, she stood straight, her waving garment draped off one shoulder to expose a breast and her entire right side. She clutched a bow in her left hand. A sleek hound heeled beside her. I approached her tentatively, studying her weathered concrete features, mottled by moss and lichen, and noticed that both her nose and quiver of arrows had been broken off somewhere in time. I thought of Locanda’s warning of boars on the property and wondered if the huntress was on their trail. Silly thought. Then I worried for real that there might be cinghiali in the area after all. Max had said they were primarily nocturnal, but the last thing I wanted to do was stumble over a sounder of sleeping boars. There were plenty of leaves and tall grass on the ground, after all. And I’d seen lots of berries, chestnuts, and roots for them to eat. They could be anywhere.

  I took leave of the statue and stepped carefully through the broken cypress twigs and needles, away from the trees, the earthy odors of decay and hints of skunk, making my way down the grassy hill.

  I reached the bottom and wandered through a shady glen about a hundred paces until I came to a small brook, most probably the one Locanda had mentioned at breakfast. The water trickled through the creek bed, which wended its way through the grass, heading—I could only imagine—to the Arno far below and eventually to the Ligurian Sea. A leaf floated by on the swirling current, and I followed it on foot, thinking of Arturo Bondinelli yet again.

  He was indeed a puzzle, having died mysteriously without a clear identity left behind. And even though I was spending the weekend among people who’d worked with him, grown up with him, lived with him, they couldn’t tell me with any degree of certainty who he’d been. Was he short-tempered, demanding, hypocritical? What were his politics? A Christian Democrat, yes, but that didn’t necessarily tell me anything of substance about him. Then there was Giuliana, the girl who purposely approached me to tell me about the professor’s past. She claimed he’d been a partisan during the war, but just as quickly she cast doubt on his character and past sins. And, of course, she refused to repeat her insinuations in the presence of anyone besides me. Until, of course, her outburst at dinner the night before.

  I recalled Lucio’s late-night story. Had he actually been pointing a not-so-subtle finger at Bondinelli, mocking his reputation and legacy for the amusement of those who knew him best? But why do that? Why not just accuse him openly? And did his clever little roman à clef even matter if the professor had fallen into the river by accident? Or if he’d thrown himself off a bridge to end it all? But why would a man who, by all appearances had achieved peace with himself, resort to suicide just one day before the opening of the symposium he’d been planning for more than two years?

  And so, effortlessly, my thoughts turned to the third dark possibility, namely that someone might well have pushed Bondinelli into the Arno. If true, such a scenario cast Lucio’s story in a more sinister light. Because if someone had indeed murdered the professor, why shouldn’t I harbor doubts about Lucio who’d mocked him as a fraud and a false saint?

  Strolling alongside the creek, I drew a sigh, wishing I’d never accepted poor Bondinelli’s invitation in the first place. But since I had, and since the tragedy had occurred, I knew I couldn’t ignore it until it had been explained to my satisfaction. That was surely one of the reasons I wanted to dig through Locanda’s study. Not that I believed him capable of murdering his old friend, but he had known him longer than anyone else. Longer even than Padre Fabrizio. No, I wasn’t sure how Bondinelli had come to die in the Arno, but I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to find out. And the first step for me was to pin down Lucio on the meaning of his tale.

  The stream continued to burble on its merry way. At some point during my rumination, I’d lost the floating leaf. I stopped in my tracks and, throwing a glance behind me, checked to see if anyone had followed me through the woods and down the hill. As far as the eye could see, the countryside was mine. A thought occurred to me.

  Then I scolded myself. Was I really thinking of taking a dip in the inviting stream? Even with Max Locanda’s explicit permission and encouragement to swim in puris naturalibus? I settled instead for removing my shoes and splashing through the water barefoot. After a half hour or so, as the sun climbed high in the morning sky, my toes had gone pruny and cold. I dried my feet, slipped back into my shoes, and set off up the hill toward the villa.

  It was just past ten when I washed my hands and face in the small bathroom on the second floor. I’d managed to slip in between the late risers, some of whom had performed their ablutions, and others who hadn’t yet answered the cock’s crow and were still sawing wood in their beds.

  I took some fruit, a brioche, and a caffellatte to Veronica in my room. She said she was comfortable, with no fever at all, but the itch would not relent.

  “Hand me the bottle of amamelide. It’s the only thing that helps.”

  She slathered the witch hazel on her arms and neck, then, having first claimed she wasn’t hungry, changed her mind and wolfed down her breakfast.

  “I want to read now,” she informed me as she’d wiped her lips with a napkin. “You can take all this away.”

  She lifted a thin volume from the bedside table, Le vite dei santi, the Lives of the Saints. It was a children’s book with bright illustrations on the cover. She seemed quite well recovered to me, except for the rashes, so, despite wanting a brief nap myself, I left her alone in my room.

  Besides some chatter and the clanging of pots and pans coming from the kitchen, Bel Soggiorno was quiet at half past ten on a Saturday morning. The dining room was empty and the tables cleared. I feared the late risers had missed their chance at breakfast; Berenice had a schedule to maintain, and she didn’t strike me as the type to indulge dormiglioni. Sleepyheads. Perhaps Lucio could charm an orange or a coffee out of her, but the smart money was on no more food before pranzo.

  I wandered out onto the back terrazza looking for signs of life. Deserted, if you didn’t count the three sparrows nos
ing around for crumbs left over from the previous evening’s cocktail hour. As I was in exile from my own room, I resigned myself to an early siesta in the salone. I was still tired from the late night and the noisy tag team of Veronica and the rooster. Back inside the house, I intended to stretch out on one of the divans, but a glance through the door down the corridor gave me other ideas. I knew Locanda and Vicky were in Florence to buy her something bright and shiny to satisfy her magpie proclivities, but I wondered if any of the guests were about. A quick inspection revealed no one, so I chanced it. I slipped into Locanda’s study.

  Yes, I knew I was doing wrong. Over the years at the newspaper, my intense curiosity had found a home, and it had only become more demanding of me for professional reasons since. There were, of course, no professional reasons for me to be snooping through Locanda’s things, but I rationalized my transgression with a promise that I only wanted to see if there was a typewriter I might be able to borrow. Okay, that was disingenuous of me.

  In the light of day, the room presented few obstacles to a cursory examination. I could see everything Locanda kept on his large desk: letters, bundles of documents, an old telephone, an adding machine, and a halfdrunk glass of water leaving a ring on the leather-bound blotter. The glass ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. On the edge of the desk were a little wooden stand of office stamps and well-worn red, black, and blue ink pads, as well as five chewed-up old pipes in a revolving rack. They must have tasted grand, I thought. Circling around behind the desk, I noted some fountain pens lying jumbled like pick-up sticks alongside pencils of varying length, thickness, and sharpness. Some of the pens had blackened nibs while others were stained blue. There was an ink blotter with a silver handle shaped like one of those spouting fish you see in fountains. The metal had been blackened and blued and tarnished by what looked like years of use. I could see no dictionary, but that was hardly surprising. My father had taught me that Italians didn’t need dictionaries for spelling guidance.