“Really, Molly,” Sebastian said, “you should be more careful. You could get hit over the head with an andiron or stabbed with a letter opener. Then how would Viola and I feel for having brought you here?”
“You’re the one who should watch your words!” Gemma said with a strange vehemence. She went over to Molly’s side. “Don’t listen to such rubbish!”
“Believe me, dearie, after all these years I’m as impervious as my mackintosh! And from the sound of it, it seems as if I’ll be needing it.”
She cocked her little head toward the window. They all listened. She was right. The rain was beating forcefully against the pane from the direction that boded the least good for the city.
10
The group in the salotto was about to retire to their rooms until dinner when Sebastian reminded the Contessa of something she had forgotten about in all the commotion.
“I hope you don’t think Molly is going to squeeze in with me or Viola, small though she is, Barbara. Where’s the room she can call her own for the weekend?”
The Contessa took a quick breath of utter astonishment, as if he had just asked the most embarrassing of questions. This was followed by a look of fear. She didn’t answer for so long that everyone stared at her, increasing her discomfort.
“Don’t tell me we’re going to have to board her out?” Viola said with a nervous laugh. “Surely there’s another room free?”
“Of course there is! Molly, why don’t you go to the conservatory until we make the arrangements. It’s at the far end of the hall. It’s especially delightful when it rains, and there are some lovely plants and flowers.”
“There always used to be lovely ones in the old days,” Signora Zeno said. “But you’ve probably ripped them out.”
The conservatory was a source of pride to the Contessa. She spent many hours there and occasionally entertained the local botanical society among its blooms and fronds. Far from having ripped anything out or changed the conservatory it was much the way it had been in the past—not just many of the plants themselves, but also the furniture and accoutrements, even down to the tins of rose spray made up from an old nicotine formula from the thirties by a retired pharmacist in the Dorsoduro quarter.
“Not at all, Marialuisa,” the Contessa said, trying to control her irritation. “Most of the plants there go back a very long way. What’s the point of having a conservatory if you don’t—don’t conserve the best plants of the past?”
Signora Zeno didn’t allow this to mollify her. As she moved slowly toward the door with the help of her cane, she said, “I would like to see what you consider the ‘best’ plants from the past! I remember the conservatory very well.”
She said something more, many of the words of which faded away, but enough was audible to indicate that she and Bambina intended to show Molly the way to the conservatory.
Molly got up, gripping her glass of gin, and was shepherded out of the salotto by Signora Zeno—two small forms, one shrunken, the other stunted. Behind them, considerably rounder but on much tinier feet, came Bambina, who managed to cast several final glances back at Urbino before the door closed behind her.
Dr. Vasco didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He got up from the armchair and walked to the opposite side of the room to the window. He spent a few moments looking out, then devoted his attention to the labels on some of the bottles in the liquor cabinet. Giving this up, he strode toward the door, excused himself, and left.
Only the Contessa, Urbino, Gemma, and the twins—posed for maximum effect against a collection of medieval tapestry altar cloths—remained.
“You’re thinking of putting Molly in the Caravaggio Room, aren’t you?” Gemma said. “It’s the only unoccupied bedroom.”
“Then you understand my dilemma.”
“After all these years, you’ll have Molly stay there?”
“Barbara has been ruled by superstition and a casual promise made to Alvise,” Urbino said, coming to the Contessa’s defense. “I’ve been trying to make her see the sense of using the room. It’s ready to be used now, isn’t it, Barbara?”
“More or less,” the Contessa said without enthusiasm. “It’s been ready for a year. I just haven’t had the—the occasion to use it.”
“What are you all going on about?” Sebastian asked. “Did Caravaggio sleep in one of the rooms here? Why didn’t I ever hear of it? Did you, Viola?”
“No. What is the Caravaggio Room, Urbino?”
“One of the bedrooms on the second floor. It has a Caravaggio painting.”
“I say! That’s interesting!” Sebastian said. “He’s more to my taste than Veronese.”
He cast a dismissive look at the painting over the fireplace.
“This is the worst time to open up the room!” Gemma said. “It’s bad enough that Robert is next door to it. I don’t want to be unreasonable! But the room itself? It was my mother, don’t forget! And—and Molly is so impressionable!”
“There’s no point in our even discussing it. There’s nowhere else to put her! There’s more staff than usual for the weekend and they’re already doubled up in their quarters. You’re not suggesting that I move your grandmother or Bambina! Or even Dr. Vasco.”
“What about Oriana and Filippo?”
“Oriana? She’d never spend a night in there. She pretends not to be superstitious, but I’ve seen her go hysterical if she spills olive oil, and God forbid you should put shoes on the bed!”
“Urbino, then,” Gemma persisted.
Throughout the exchange between the two women, Sebastian and Viola had been looking more and more puzzled. Viola came over to Urbino.
“What is going on?” she whispered. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll go mad!”
But he ignored her and said, “She’s right, Barbara. I can switch my room.”
“Never! You might not be family, but you’re too close to it. You never know how these—these curses work out, all in tricks and deceptions. Oh, listen to me! You would think that I was superstitious myself!”
“I hope you don’t think it’s superstition in my case, Barbara.” Gemma’s haggard face looked frightened, however. “It’s just that I don’t think it would be—be proper for Molly to stay in the room. You saw how she was picking up vibrations or auras or whatever she calls them. She was right about Urbino and about what she said to me and Robert, remember. Putting Molly in that room would be the wrong thing to do. Have her stay with me!”
The Contessa pulled the cord to summon Lucia.
“Molly will stay in the Caravaggio Room!” she said obstinately. “I don’t want anything to spoil this weekend, Gemma. I thought that if we all spent a civilized weekend here, we might be able to conduct the rest of our lives together with more good sense. Bad blood doesn’t have to stay bad! If we make too much of a fuss about this room—if we put too much emphasis on Molly, who, after all, wasn’t invited by me or anyone on your side”—she looked sharply at the twins—“why, then, we’re just fools looking for pain and grief. And I assure you, my dear, I am nobody’s fool.”
When Lucia entered the room a few moments later, the Contessa continued to show how determined she was by asking that the Caravaggio Room be made ready immediately.
“Yes, Lucia, the Caravaggio Room! Will you please see to it? Oh, the key. Very well, then. Let’s go together.”
The Contessa went out with Lucia, much with the manner of someone escaping to less odious duties—even if they might be the turning of a mattress or the beating of a rug—than those she would find if she stayed behind in the salotto.
Gemma, her face set and ashen, quit the room a few moments later without a glance at its three remaining occupants.
11
Urbino looked at the twins and said, “Of course I understand. You want to know—”
“I need to know,” Viola corrected. “The Caravaggio Room is close to mine.”
“How do you know that?”
A flush came into her face.
“Despite your and Barbara’s attempts to mystify Sebastian and me, it wasn’t difficult to figure out. A locked room. The room diagonally across from mine next to Robert’s is locked. Every other bedroom is occupied. Ergo—or should I say demonstratum est?—it’s the Caravaggio Room.”
“And how did you know it was locked?”
“Because I tried the knob. I wanted to see what everyone else’s accommodations were like. The door to that room was the only one locked.”
“Curiosity killed the cat!” Sebastian said. “Maybe that’s what happened to Bambina’s pussy.”
He burst into laughter, which earned him a withering look from his sister.
“Men are so adolescent! Don’t you ever grow up?”
She directed this rhetorical question not at her brother but Urbino. Urbino gave Sebastian a quick smile before answering.
“Proust said men don’t develop emotionally after the age of sixteen.”
“Well, there you are then!” Viola said, a spark of pique in her eyes.
Sebastian, with a self-satisfied expression on his good-looking face, brought things back to the matter at hand: “I think it’s pretty rum of Barbara never telling us she had a haunted room in this place.”
“It isn’t haunted.” Urbino quickly added: “There’s no such thing as haunted rooms or houses.”
“Yes, Daddy, and now would you look under the bed? But, seriously, tell me this: Why is Gemma so bent out of shape about the room and so afraid of Molly staying in it, and why won’t this Oriana woman sleep in it? Though you said you would.”
“And Gemma didn’t make any objection to your staying in it the way she did about Molly,” Viola pointed out. “Strange.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be quite so strange if Urbino finally filled us in on this room’s dark history.”
“Would you like some drinks?”
“So it’s going to be one of those kinds of stories!” Sebastian said. “All right, then. I’ll take Molly’s kind of poison, and if I know Viola, she’ll have a glass of very dry sherry.”
When they were seated with their drinks, Urbino read them the story of the Caravaggio Room. He had gone over it so many times before in his own mind and with the Contessa and their closest friends that he had memorized it like some bard of old.
It was a disturbing tale and most of the actors in it were gathered together at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini on this stormy night.
PART TWO
The Caravaggio Room
1
The Contessa had been married only a week and was already in tears. If she had known that they would be among the few tears she would shed in her marriage because of the Conte, they might have been far less bitter. At the time, however, they seemed a catastrophe.
It had all happened because she had been too eager to play the chatelaine. She had gone through the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini from the pianoterreno with its water entrance and lumber rooms to the wooden altana, or terrace, perched on the roof. The building was in need of repair, severely damaged as it was by the recent war and industrial pollution from the mainland. It had only been in the family for the past seventy years, the Da Capo-Zendrini family having moved from a smaller palazzo in the San Polo quarter.
She was confronted by that most intriguing and disquieting of situations. At the far end of one of the two wings devoted to the bedrooms was a locked room, the only one in the palazzo. It was on the side where the broad loggia overlooked the Grand Canal. When she went out onto the loggia and examined the louvered doors of this particular bedroom, she found that they too were locked.
“You will have to ask the Conte for the key,” the housekeeper said when the Contessa had asked her about the locked room. “I don’t have it.”
“What’s in the room, Vittoria?”
“It’s just another bedroom, Contessa.” She paused, then went on nervously: “It hasn’t been used in twenty years. Excuse me. I must see to something.”
That evening the Conte refused to answer anything about the room and forbade Barbara to ask him or other members of the family any more questions.
“And don’t ask the staff either. If I learn that you have, I’ll be very upset. It might lead to my giving them immediate notice. The room is no concern of yours!” When he saw the tears in her eyes, he added more softly: “My father made me promise on his deathbed to keep it locked as long as I live and to exact the same promise of my children. All you need to know is that it’s not a happy room. Someday it will all be explained.”
“But what do you mean by an ‘unhappy’ room, Alvise?” Predictably, the story of Bluebeard and his wife had flashed through her mind. “You frighten me.”
“That is exactly what I do not want to do, my dear. It is for your own good to forget the room exists. It cannot harm you if you do.”
The Contessa, whose understanding of psychology was more advanced than her husband’s, was well aware of the harm that can be done when we try to bury our fears or unhappinesses. But she sensed that her husband, reasonable so far in all his behavior and expectations, would brook no opposition on the locked room. She never broached the topic again, telling herself that it was just another idiosyncrasy of the Italian family she had married into. As the years of their marriage went by, she didn’t so much forget the room as accommodate herself to living with yet one more mystery and to meeting one more obligation.
When her husband died almost twenty years ago, the Contessa found a large, thick envelope among his private papers. Written on it in his hand in Italian was:
For my beloved wife, Barbara
To be opened after my death
With fear and curiosity, the same emotions that she associated with the locked room, she opened the envelope. Inside were many sheets of paper. The top sheet bore the cramped handwriting that had become the Conte’s near the end of his life.
My dear Barbara,
I hope I have not caused you much sorrow in our life together, for you have been the light of my life, my beloved English rose, as I call you. But I know that there was one time, when our marriage was very young, when I did, and I fear it has been a continuing sorrow. I hope you have forgiven me long before this. If you haven’t, perhaps you will be able to do it once you’ve read this.
It’s about the locked room on the second floor. It’s been called the Caravaggio Room since the nineteen twenties when I was just a boy. I told you that I promised my father never to open it in my lifetime. I would have exacted the same promise from the son or daughter we never had, who would have inherited the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
I should have spoken about it to you long ago but the happiness of our life together made it more difficult to recount its sad history. I felt that its blight would fall on our marriage.
It’s for you to decide what to do, now that I am gone and after you have read the following pages. Whatever you do, however, never sleep in the Caravaggio Room or have any blood relative of the family do so—or anyone you truly care about.
I love you with all my heart and will be with you forever.
The Contessa laid aside this page and began to read the others.
I am writing this in my forty-fifth year upon the occasion of my marriage. It is a time to take the measure of the past and to look forward to the long future I hope to share with my beloved wife. I hope and pray that our future will be blessed with at least one child and that this child will, in the course of events, inherit the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. It is to this child that I address these lines, which explain in as full a fashion as I can remember them certain events of extreme importance to our family. I cannot trust that I will not be taken away suddenly by the will of God, or that my memory will not fail me.
There is a room on the second floor of the palazzo which has come to be called the Caravaggio Room. It has been locked since May of 1938, nearly twenty years ago, a day I remember very well.
Less well remembered, since I was only a boy of nine at the time, was the discovery made by my
father, the Conte Amerigo, may God rest his soul, that eventuated in the designation “the Caravaggio Room.”
One winter—the year was 1922—my father made an unusual discovery in one of the rooms of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. The family had moved to this palazzo on the Grand Canal thirty years earlier. The previous owner, a man sadly without any heirs or immediate family, in my estimation a form of living death, fell seriously ill and was eager to make a sale to move to a warmer climate. My grandfather was in a position to meet this ailing man’s rather outlandish financial expectations. The building in the San Polo quarter was sold and the family moved to the “new” Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. Our family finally had what they had wanted for centuries: a splendid palazzo, this one designed by Cominelli, on the Canalazzo.
Following the death of my grandfather, my father was taking stock of the palazzo from top to bottom. He was rummaging through one of the lumber rooms on the pianoterreno. He said that he had a premonition when he found a bundle wrapped in canvas in a trunk large enough to contain the body of a man.
When he unwrapped it, he found a painting of sixty-six by fifty centimeters. It was dark with age, and mold had invaded one whole lower corner. It was a portrait of a round-faced youth holding a mandolin, and with lipstick, rouge, and a white flower in thick auburn hair that resembled a wig. At first my father assumed, with good reason, that it was a young woman. On closer examination, however, he determined that it must indeed be a young man, strange though he looked with his makeup and in a green robe that slipped provocatively off one shoulder. This young man stared at my father with a mocking kind of smile.
For no other reason than that my father played the mandolin, he immediately liked the painting. Nothing identified either the name of the painting or its painter.
The next day my father took the painting to one of the good Armenian monks on the island of San Lazzaro in the lagoon. The monk was a man who loved art and who was a master at cleaning paintings. When he saw the painting, he blessed himself. “By our Blessed Mother,” he said, “this is either a Caravaggio or a devilish imitation. It could be very valuable.” The name of this painter meant nothing to my father, whose knowledge of art was limited to the great Leonardo and Michelangelo and the obscure painters of the portraits of the Da Capo-Zendrini family that hung in our portrait gallery. Neither did he care for its possible value. He wanted to hang it in the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
Death in the Palazzo Page 4