Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Before the night was over, Vango had dug two deep holes at the top of the cliff.

  He buried Mazzetta in the first and the donkey in the second.

  He couldn’t manage to undo the donkey’s collar, so he buried it with him.

  He made two crosses on the ground with wild fennel flowers.

  Vango lingered on the cliff top, in front of the mounds of fresh earth. He knew that Mazzetta had died defending Mademoiselle.

  But this didn’t assuage the hatred raging inside Vango.

  What he did feel, however, was an instinctive sense of respect before these two corpses, the strange respect that all civilizations show toward human beings once they have stopped breathing.

  In the old days, in the Carmelite seminary, Father Jean used to remark to Vango how, in the history of humanity, if a land had existed, a single one, where the living were afforded the same respect as the dead, it would have been sweet to live in such a place!

  At dawn, Vango passed by Mademoiselle’s house again.

  Helped by the early light, he searched the premises for traces of the kidnappers. He couldn’t find any. Higher up, in Mazzetta’s lair, even the bullets that had killed the donkey and his master had vanished. It was a perfect job.

  Vango closed up the house as if its owners were going away on vacation. The lock was a bit stiff. They’d never had any need of it. He hid the key in the hollow of the olive tree and thrust his hand into the foliage to feel how firm the olives were.

  Suddenly, down on the ground against the roots, he caught sight of the little ball of blue silk. He picked it up. And the handkerchief of his childhood spread out between his fingers. The blue handkerchief that knew everything but said nothing, while hinting at tales of inscrutable kingdoms.

  Vango noticed the star. It had been embroidered just above the sloping bar of the capital V. But it hadn’t been there the day before. The handiwork looked unfinished. The fifth point of the star hadn’t been completed. The saffron-colored thread was still hanging loose.

  Mademoiselle had wanted to embroider the memory of Vango’s mother, Stella, in that silk.

  She had been interrupted by the men arriving. The handkerchief had fallen to the ground, between the snaking roots.

  Vango climbed the winding path and crossed over to the other side of the crater, where he was surrounded by Malfa’s oldest vines. He could see the black smoke of Stromboli on the horizon, as well as the island of Panarea, the outline of Filicudi and, even farther off, the top of a huge stone that marked the invisible presence of his monastery. He wasn’t ready to return there yet.

  He reached the port at the hour when the fishermen return. He slipped through outstretched nets, onlookers, and sailors. He made straight for a small, rusty, corrugated-iron hut.

  Vango knocked on a sheet of metal as if he were knocking at the door of a cottage.

  A woman in rags was busy crushing an eggshell.

  “It thickens up the grub, gives me something to chew on,” she said. “And that’s a start. It means you’ve got something between the teeth.”

  “Are you Signora Giuseppina?”

  “Signora Pippo Troisi,” she corrected him.

  “I knew your husband a long time ago. He was a good man.”

  “Yes,” she replied with great tenderness, before asking, “And do I know you?”

  “No,” Vango answered hastily, because he didn’t want her to remember. “I’ve just got here and I’m leaving with the next boat.”

  “In four minutes!” declared Giuseppina, who knew the timetables of all the boats that might bring her love back to her by heart.

  When Vango greeted this information with silence, she updated it: “In three minutes and forty-five seconds.”

  Around her neck she wore the handsome watch the doctor had given her.

  “I want to talk to you about a very old story,” said Vango.

  “You’ve landed on the right person.”

  “Why?”

  “I only like old stories.”

  “Do you remember the beginning of the autumn of 1918?”

  “Yes. There were a few big storms.”

  “A man was killed back then.”

  “Bartolomeo Viaggi, twenty-nine years old. Three daughters. Only one of them’s still with us. And his wife died too, very soon afterward.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Yes. It’s sad when people leave.”

  “People say you know something about Bartolomeo.”

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  Giuseppina’s eyes shone. She had never spoken about this to a single person.

  “I want to know who killed him,” said Vango.

  “Who told you about this?”

  “Answer my question, please.”

  She was staring at Vango very attentively.

  “I can tell you about Bartolomeo. It wasn’t Mazzetta who killed him, even if he was involved in the business. It was the other one, the third one.”

  “His name?”

  “Who told you about me? I recognize you. I . . .”

  “Tell me the name of the third man.”

  “His name was Cafarello, Giovanni Cafarello. He left for America, for New York. He abandoned his father up there between the mountains. A father who died alone last spring, at the age of a hundred.”

  Giovanni Cafarello. That name was now etched in Vango’s mind forever.

  He looked at the woman leaning toward him. He thanked her.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Tell me who you are. Tell me you saw Pippo Troisi not long ago.”

  Vango moved off. The boat was there. The crowd was squeezed along the dockside. Giuseppina had knelt down on the ground, like a woman from the deserts in front of her tent.

  “Please,” she begged him. “Tell me. Is Pippo alive? I recognize you now. I know who you are. Vango!”

  Vango stopped. He went back over to her and said softly, “He’s alive.”

  There were tears of genuine joy on her cheeks.

  Vango jumped into the boat.

  A man helped the woman stand up again.

  “Lean on me, Pina. Calm down. . . .”

  He had just stepped off the same boat, having sailed from the island of Lipari.

  He was smiling.

  It was Monday. What bliss. The best day of the week. He had dressed up with his red tie. He was dancing.

  Dr. Basilio was going to have lunch with Mademoiselle.

  “Tell me . . . Is something wrong, Pina?”

  “Pippo is alive,” she whispered.

  The doctor smiled. This woman, Pina Troisi, was the only person he truly understood. Both of them had chosen an inaccessible love. She loved someone who had disappeared. He loved someone who was a mystery.

  “Who told you that your husband is alive?”

  “Vango, the wild boy of Pollara.”

  “Where is he?” asked the doctor, suddenly standing up straight.

  “He’s leaving.”

  The good doctor Basilio ran across the black stone jetty. But the boat was already some distance from the dock. He saw Vango. And Vango spotted him.

  Neither of them waved.

  A little later, the doctor discovered the locked door at Mademoiselle’s house.

  Hope had flown away.

  Everland, Scotland, October 1935

  The small plane flew by a second time, close to the tower. But this time, the pilot had a clear view of the man running toward the stables. A woman was chasing him. She was wearing a white nightshirt hitched up to her thighs.

  “Tell me I’m dreaming,” muttered the pilot.

  But he wasn’t dreaming. It was Mary the housekeeper, down below.

  Paul increased the altitude and began a wider loop to make it look as if he was heading off.

  The plane was a Sirius, the single-engine aircraft with which Lindbergh had broken records over the Pacific. Paul owned one of only fifteen models in existence.

  Slowing down, he headed toward th
e waters of Loch Ness. He could see the edge of a forest already turning an autumnal yellow, as well as some remote sheepfolds in the hills.

  Paul was both amused and perplexed.

  “Mary! Mary!” He kept saying her name over and over again, his eyes as wide as saucers.

  There were various explanations competing in his mind for the scene he had just stumbled on. He started to fantasize about a double, a triple, and even a quadruple life for Mary, who, for all that she looked like an elderly spinster straight out of a storybook, was perhaps the most brazen woman in the Highlands.

  Mary had started working at the castle when Paul was born, twenty-six years earlier. He was finding it hard to imagine that she had hidden her libertine lifestyle for so long behind her blushing cheeks, behind her maternal tenderness and her thick woolen stockings.

  “No . . . it’s just not possible.”

  He swerved sharply, putting the wing of his little seaplane into the vertical position. He was heading for the castle once more. It only took him a few seconds to fly over fields crisscrossed with low stone walls and arrive above the main driveway.

  Mary was now alone in front of the stables. Her arms were spread wide, and she was signaling crazily at the plane.

  Just before he rose up to fly over the castle’s black roof, Paul saw the stable door burst open and a black horse gallop out of it. Its rider hadn’t taken the time to saddle it up. He was riding bareback, holding on to the halter strap and kicking his mount vigorously in the flanks.

  The aviator and the horseman passed each other.

  A few meters farther off, as he turned around, Paul saw the rider jumping over a first wall.

  This man was unlikely to be one of Mary’s lovers. And, most pressingly, he had just stolen a horse.

  Paul nosed his plane up over the castle. He had decided to give chase.

  Overcome with admiration, Mary fell to her knees, which were somewhere in the midst of the folds of her nightshirt, and gazed on at her hero’s derring-do.

  He began by climbing vertically, high in the sky. All that was visible was a black dot surrounded by smoke. The roar of the engine became inaudible. Continuing with his loop, Paul let his machine rest on its back before putting on a burst of speed as it headed for the ground, tracing a perfect circle. The plane slowly corrected its position as it approached land.

  Mary held her breath. She was pretending to shield her eyes as she shrieked in fright, but in fact she was spying proudly on the virtuoso skills of the young fighter pilot.

  The plane completed its looping when it was level with the heather, which it sheared in a purple haze. It was now very close to the ground and heading directly for the horseman, who was in turn galloping toward the plane. Neither of them deviated at all.

  At the last moment, Paul put his foot down on the accelerator, and the horse passed between the plane’s two floats.

  Confronted by the castle for a second time, Paul realized there was no sense in what was he was doing.

  He had no intention of sacrificing a horse he loved, or of decapitating a man he knew nothing about, still less of landing his seaplane on the ground when the only surface it tolerated was water.

  And so Paul had to concede that his aim had been to dazzle a seventy-year-old woman who was sitting in the grass, waving admiringly up at him and the sky.

  Aside from his elusive sister, Ethel, who was so often absent, Mary was the only person he had left to impress. Even on the day when he had become the youngest wing commander in the Royal Air Force, Paul had dined alone in his big castle.

  The horseman disappeared into the forest.

  The plane performed a final circuit to impress the public.

  When he landed on the loch, a small boat came to meet him. Mary was in the bow.

  Her comfortable arms hugged Paul. She wasn’t wearing her nightshirt anymore. She was wearing what she called her Sunday best, which consisted of the black outfit and apron she had donned every day since her thirtieth birthday, almost half a century ago. But, as a special treat, she was also wearing a sort of white choker that gave her a special Sunday look, according to the reflection in her tiny bedroom mirror.

  “You were magnificent. I was scared stiff.”

  You’d have thought she was talking to a trapeze artist after a night out at the circus. She kissed him.

  “Bravo . . . bravo . . .”

  “Tell me,” said Paul.

  Suddenly, she recalled her own adventures.

  “Oh, it’s dreadful,” she said.

  “Tell me all about it.”

  “I came in search of you instead of Peter. We’re very wary now. He’s busy mounting guard with his son.”

  It was difficult to find anybody on the property on a Sunday. Paul insisted that everybody take the day off. The staff played at hide-and-seek in the castle in order not to show their faces. And Mary enjoyed sleeping late.

  “Well? Who was he?” Paul still wanted to know.

  “He got in through the window when I was up on the second-floor landing. If you only knew what a fright it gave me. I was hardly wearing a stitch. I mean, I was just about to go to the —”

  “But what did he want?” interrupted Paul, who wasn’t eager to hear about Mary’s calls of nature in any more detail.

  She leaned toward him and whispered in his ear, “He’s a common thief.”

  She was speaking in hushed tones in the middle of the lake, as if the old carp or even the Loch Ness monster might overhear her secrets.

  “So tell me what he stole. . . .”

  She glanced to the left, then to the right, then took a deep breath before whispering even more quietly, “Nothing.”

  Things were calm that night. Paul had gone on the prowl in the forest at dusk. He had found the hoofprints, but they disappeared into the bushes.

  The next morning, just as everyone was getting up, there was the black horse, grazing on the castle’s lawn.

  “Look,” Mary urged, opening Paul’s curtains.

  So the horse thief hadn’t even stolen the horse.

  Mary felt rather deflated.

  “But what if it’s a fake?” she suggested.

  “The thief?” inquired Paul, stretching his arms in front of the large window.

  “No, the horse.”

  “The horse?”

  “Yes. It could be a fake.”

  Paul scratched his head.

  “A fake horse?”

  “If he swapped your horse for another one.”

  “Why?”

  “To steal yours.”

  Paul peered out the window. He was trying to keep a straight face.

  “Well, it’s a very good job. For a fake.”

  All day, Mary kept an eye on the animal that was tethered near the steps. She even kept guard for the night shift. She was convinced it was the Trojan horse and that it would open up in the middle of the night to release the intruder.

  The suspense was dreadful. But the next day, she had to admit that all the horse had off-loaded was one or two shovelfuls of fresh manure.

  The story had almost been forgotten by the following week, when Paul caught the thief.

  “That’s him,” declared Mary in a state of great excitement.

  Paul had discovered him snooping around in the castle cellars. He was a very young man who barely spoke any English. Paul took him up to the dining room, where he locked them both in.

  A dozen people passed by the door that morning, curious to see in what state Master Paul was going to hand over the thief who hadn’t stolen anything.

  Mary already felt sorry for the young man.

  “I do hope Paul won’t be too hard on him. The child’s a vagabond. He didn’t know what he was doing. And Paul’s become very strict, now that he’s an officer.”

  But she was almost vexed when the master of the castle came out alone, clearing a path through the little crowd gathered on the landing to say to Mary, “Give him some work clothes. We’ll keep him on to look af
ter the horses.”

  “But . . . Paul . . .”

  “And feed him, Mary. He’s been sleeping rough in the woods for weeks.”

  Paul headed off.

  Mary soon found herself face-to-face with the thief. The crowd had dispersed.

  “What’s your name?” she asked fiercely.

  His answer comprised two syllables, which she translated into a good Scottish name that was more familiar to her ears.

  “Andrew. Good. Well come on then, Andrew. And watch your step.”

  She stopped to feel the young man’s shoulders.

  “There’s not a lot of you. Some of Paul’s old clothes should fit you, but I’ll need to take up the sleeves. Take those shoes off for me. You’re making my wooden floors mucky.”

  The boy was quick to obey her. She took his muddy shoes without making a disgusted face, like the washerwomen who spend their whole lives dealing with the grime of others. She was less bothered about clean hands than she was about maintaining a glistening waxed parquet floor.

  They walked down an endless corridor, the young man padding behind her in his socks.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “From the East.”

  She looked out the window in an easterly direction. He must have come from Nethy Bridge or Grantown, over that way. She felt sorry for anyone who had grown up beyond the grounds of the estate.

  “Ah, from the east.”

  “Yes, the East,” the boy repeated.

  “And do they like roast beef over that way?”

  A delicious smell was assailing their nostrils. Mary pushed open the kitchen door.

  When someone had sad eyes and dirty shoes, it didn’t take long to win her over.

  Ethel turned up two weeks later, in the middle of the night.

  Her headlights slowly swept over the driveway leading up to the sleeping castle. An owl was flying low ahead of her.

  Since her trip to Paris back in the summer, she had spent only a few days at Everland. Paul had given up remonstrating with her about how often she was away. The time they spent together was too short; they had to make the most of every second.