by Mary Malloy
“Did your mother ever get to produce her Shakespeare?” Lizzie asked, and then immediately regretted that she had let the veil slip, but Patrizio didn’t notice.
“She did,” he said, still smiling simply. “How did you know?”
“She mentioned it,” Lizzie said cagily.
“‘Merchant of Venice,’ ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ anything that was set in Italy she considered fair game for her courtyard. She loved Shakespeare.”
It was a very different entrance into the “Wonder Chamber” today. While she had been greeted with indifference by Pina and hostility by Patrizio the day before, now she was warmly welcomed. Patrizio gave her a history of the collection and pulled several pieces out to show her.
“This box is from Mexico,” he said, setting one of the artifacts carefully on the table. “It is from the sixteenth century, and look at how different it is on the two sides. On one is a tree, the source of life, and springing around it are animals of many kinds, and flowers that have grown to a gigantic size, and here,” he said, turning it around, “is the priest, holding up his cross.” He looked up at Lizzie. “It is capturing that moment of confusion when the old ways are supplanted by the new.” He turned the end to face her and pointed out the figure of the traditional god, symbolically depicted as a jaguar.
He pushed the box toward her and Lizzie picked it up. It was made of a light wood and had once had an arched top that was now missing. The shape of it was indicated in the tall rounded side walls of the box, and there were still old hinges and a keyhole present. The colors of the pigments were remarkably vibrant and, like Patrizio, Lizzie was struck by the incongruous presence of the black-robed priest among the colorful foliage.
Patrizio was clearly tired from walking and standing, and Lizzie helped him into a chair.
“You said there was a catalogue that I might see?” she said hesitantly.
“Of course,” he said. He pointed to one of the bookcases that was covered with a screen and told Lizzie that if she put a finger through the screen on the lower right shelf she would find a key. Once the door was open, Pat had Lizzie run her hand along the volumes until she touched a big ledger book, bursting with extra papers. She pulled it carefully from the shelf and put it on the table in front of him.
“This is it,” he said. “All the records of the collections in the house.”
Lizzie had known that records would have been kept since the collection was first started—those early founders of the collections were men of science, who would have documented everything they had. She quickly began to see that Patrizio’s ledger book was filled with earlier inventories and descriptions than the one she had seen, as well as later typed lists. Cosimo had obviously known nothing about this when he sent her the inventory from the 1950s.
“Some things were lost over time,” he explained, “and many items went missing during the war, when we had so many people in the house, including Nazi soldiers who had no respect for the property of any Italian. We hid as much of the cabinet as we could, under the stones of the courtyard and behind walls in the cellar, but we had to hide so much and there wasn’t room for everything. We had a Michelangelo candlestick that was stolen then.”
She wondered if he could possibly be correct about this. Had Michelangelo even made candlesticks? She wondered if he might have translated the word incorrectly.
“There was a Michelangelo in the collection that was stolen?” she asked.
Patrick nodded. “My mother kept it in her bedroom and loved looking at it so much that she didn’t want it to go into hiding during the war, and a Nazi officer stole it.” He suddenly saw the photograph of the 1677 drawing of the cabinet lying on the table and said, “Oh here this is! I have been looking for it.” He slid the photo into the ledger as he pulled out a printed list for Lizzie. “Here is a catalogue of the paintings,” he said, “made by someone from the Art Museum after the war. At that time, my mother and I went through the house and tried to see what had been lost and damaged, and we also made a new list of what survived from the cabinet, but I haven’t been able to find that list either.”
“Perhaps she put it somewhere for safekeeping,” Lizzie said gently, thinking of the original of that list sitting in the library at St. Pat’s, and the copy of it that was on her computer.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps she did.”
He was obviously very tired and though Lizzie tried to direct the conversation back to Michelangelo, he would not follow. She thought she should try to find either Pina or Graziella, but had no idea where they might be or how to contact them. She went to the door into the dining room and then through it to look into the Chinese Salon, but neither woman was in either room. When she returned to ask Patrizio about this, she found him asleep in his chair.
Had she not had Cosimo Gonzaga’s blessing to “take anything in the house” for her exhibit, and the expectations of Father O’Toole and others that she would return from Bologna with a plan to proceed, she would have felt a lot more guilty about sneaking around Patrizio, pretending to be someone else and taking advantage of his nap to copy the documents from his ledger book. But her time was limited and the demands were real.
Taking her cell phone from her bag, Lizzie used the camera on it to photograph all the loose papers from the ledger. She wanted to capture images of the pages in the book as well, but she feared waking Patrizio by taking it, and so she simply pulled the separate sheets out quickly but silently and went about the job. When she had photographed those, she went systematically around the room, photographing every shelf. Most of the cabinets were unlocked, but where they weren’t she found that the same key would open all.
Here were the ostrich eggs, the tortoise shells, the blowfish, and the small Draco dandinii, the dragon-like salamander that had delighted Jimmy. On a shelf near it she located the other item on Jimmy’s wish list, the ceramic krater with its five lyre-playing sisters, surrounded by ceramic cups, plates, and shallow bowls with handles. There were bronze or copper bells, keys, pails, plates, spoons and ladles that had all turned green over the centuries, and many small decorations for clothing in the same metal: pins, beads and toggles that would have held cloaks together.
On a long bottom shelf she found the six-foot narwhal tusk lying side-by-side with a Marquesan club. They were the only things in this particular cubical of the cabinetry and Lizzie was very happy to see them. She was on her knees and had stretched out her hand to move the club to see the details of it when she felt a hard blow on her shoulder.
She turned quickly and saw Patrizio standing above her, his cane raised to strike her again. She managed to deflect the blow from her head with her arm, but had some difficulty getting to her feet and wrestling for the cane at the same time.
“Thief!” he screamed. “Thief!”
“I am not a thief!” she called, hoping Pina or Graziella would hear them and respond.
It did not take long for her to disarm him. At 93, he was much weaker than she, and though he had hurt her, she didn’t want to hurt him; she was alarmed when he stumbled backwards and fell.
“Help!” she cried. “We need help!”
Pina came rushing into the room and Lizzie could see that Graziella was not far behind her. The conversation between them and Patrizio as they helped him to his feet was in fast-paced Italian, with many gesticulations. The only word that Lizzie could recognize was “Thief!” which Patrizio repeated several times in English, always pointing at her.
“What happened?” Pina finally asked, turning to Lizzie.
“He was asleep at the table and I was looking at artifacts on this low shelf when he started hitting me with his cane,” she said breathlessly.
Graziella asked Pina for a translation and then shook her head in disbelief. Lizzie thought she was telling Pina that it simply wasn’t possible.
“He stood up on h
is own and crossed the room and hit you?” Pina asked incredulously.
Lizzie held up her arm, where an ugly bruise was forming. “Before he fell asleep, we were having a very friendly conversation,” she said. “This was entirely unexpected.”
Graziella guided Patrizio into a chair and then left to retrieve his walker, mumbling something that Lizzie was certain was aimed at her. He seemed such a pathetic old man, but she was his constant companion; wouldn’t she know that he was capable of occasional feats of strength?
“Are you injured?” Pina whispered. She gestured at Patrizio, who had once again fallen asleep in his chair.
“No,” Lizzie answered, rubbing her arm and reaching around to touch the place on her shoulder that had received the first blow. “Nothing is broken. It all just took me so completely by surprise.”
When Graziella returned, Pina asked Lizzie if she would mind going through into the ballroom while they took Patrizio away. “I’m not sure what sort of a response he might have to your presence.”
Lizzie agreed and went through the door, closing it all but a crack. She watched as Graziella woke her charge and told him it was time to go back to his room. He was a docile shadow of what he had been earlier, first as a charming host and companion, and later in his savage rage. The two women helped him put his hands on his walker and practically moved his feet for him as he left the room.
It was with some satisfaction that Lizzie saw that the ledger and its contents were left on the table and as soon as the room was empty she went back and resumed her plan to photograph everything. She started with the narwhal tusk and Marquesan club, which she pulled from their place near the floor and arranged on the long table to get better pictures. Page-by-page she photographed the entire ledger. She laid on her back on the table and photographed the alligator from several angles.
When Pina returned she was putting the ledger and its contents back together.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Pina said. “He is so unpredictable now.”
“There is nothing you could have done,” Lizzie said. “I will have to be more careful in how I approach him and the collection.”
“You’re staying then?”
“Yes, of course. Now that I have seen what’s here I know what a terrific exhibit it will make in Boston.”
“And the regrets you voiced yesterday, about depriving him of his familiar surroundings?”
It seemed too crass to say that Patrizio’s cane had relieved her of any concern she might have felt for the old man, but she realized that, in fact, it had. She knew Patrick was loony, and she felt sorry for him, but she had a job to do and she was going to do it.
“Everything will be returned when the exhibit ends,” Lizzie said. She didn’t think that she owed more of an explanation to Pina. She took the ledger book and put it back in the bookcase where it belonged, but didn’t lock the case or return the key. If Pina didn’t know about the key, Lizzie would not be the one to inform her of it.
Chapter 13
The packing and shipping of such an old and valuable collection as that belonging to the Gonzagas required expertise. Cosimo was involved in a shipping company and would handle the actual transportation, and a company that specialized in moving works of art would pack the collection. Before any piece could be approved to travel, however, it needed to be examined by a professional conservator, and possibly either repaired, or scheduled to be repaired in Boston. The conservator would also determine what sort of exhibit mounts might be required, so that the designer and fabricator in Boston could begin their work. Lizzie had been told while she was still at home that one of the conservators from the Museum of the University of Bologna, Carmine Moreale, would take on the work for this project and she had an appointment to meet him for coffee at the end of his workday.
She was particularly anxious to get out of the house after her extraordinary morning. Once Patrizio was taken off to his room she had accomplished a lot. Worried that she might not have another chance, she had photographed all the documentation of the collection, and every object that might possibly be included in the exhibit. As she walked to the University Museum to meet Carmine, she stopped at an office store and had printouts made of all the various versions of the catalogue lists.
She also sent a quick email to Jackie: “Some very nutty stuff going on here, about which I will write more later. Can you check and see if there was a student at St. Pat’s in the late 30s or early 40s named Theresa Kenney, and if so, where she went from there? Thanks, Lizzie.”
Arriving early so that she could look at the University of Bologna Museum, Lizzie wandered from room to room, interested in how the oldest collections were presented, and wondering if she should use modern cases in her own exhibit—ones that might seem to disappear around the objects—or old-style cases that would make their own statement and establish a sense of another time. This museum had what was left of the collections of Ulisse Aldrovandi and Ferdinando Cospi, as well as other scientific collections that had been amassed during the nine-hundred-year history of the University.
As the first two Gonzaga collectors had been a student of Aldrovandi and a collaborator of Cospi, it was not surprising that there were many similarities in the collections. Here were the alligators, the narwhal tusks, the blowfish, ostrich eggs, and elephant tusks. There were also ethnographic objects, and the range represented the same locations and potentially the same sources as did things in the Gonzaga collection: travelers who had gone to the New World, to Africa and Asia as traders and missionaries when Europeans were expanding their networks of commerce and colonization to distant locations.
Interpretive labels in both Italian and English provided Lizzie with information on a number of objects that had analogs in the Gonzaga collection, and she took many notes and pictures for her file. There were other systematic collections that were still among the oldest of their kind in the world, though none so old as Aldrovandi’s. There were minerals, shells and corals, and a fascinating anatomical museum. Several different anatomists and artists had begun work in the eighteenth century on making models of human fetuses in different stages of development, then moved on to fashioning human musculature in wax attached to actual skeletons, and finally made straightforward full-size wax models of organs.
The exhibit culminated in a full-length figure of a nude woman, neatly dissected to show the embryo in her womb. Her back was supported on a pillow, but her neck was arched, exposing the strands of a bead necklace. Her legs were crossed casually, her lifelike hand gently touched one thigh. Real hair had been attached both to her pubic area and her head, where it was arranged in a long plait over her shoulder.
A nearby label described the development of scientific obstetrics in eighteenth-century Bologna, and mentioned Luigi Galvani, a professor at the University who was the first to make a connection between neurophysiological circuitry that went from the brain to the uterus to start contractions. Lizzie was thinking that he must be the man juggling books in front of the Gonzaga house, and was pondering the difference between that memorable memorial statue and the wax model of a woman being autopsied in front of her when a man’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Are you Professor Manning?”
“I am,” she said, turning to see a man coming toward her, his hand extended.
“I’m Carmine Moreale,” he said. “I know we were supposed to meet outside the museum, but I suspected that you might be here in advance.”
Lizzie had been given his resume when he was hired for the project and she knew that he was thirty-four years old, born in Rome, educated in Bologna and Florence, and had studied art restoration in London and New York. He spoke English with more of an Italian accent than anyone she had met so far. From the time Maggie Kelliher became part of their family, all of the Gonzagas had learned English as children and had spent significant time in the U.S.; most of them had gone to St. Patrick’s C
ollege. They spoke English with almost imperceptible inflections of their native tongue, but Carmine’s accent was so extreme that at times he sounded like a comedian mocking an Italian. He added a vowel to the end of every word, whether it had one or not.
“Letsa getta summa coffee,” he said to Lizzie after they exchanged their first pleasantries.
He asked her how mucha she hadda seena of Bologna and when she said she seen nothing so far, insisted that they walk down the Via Zamboni from the University, past the two famous towers that were the symbol of the city, and along the Via Rizzoli to the Piazza Maggiore, the central square. Carmine was a knowledgeable and funny guide and knew the city and its history very well; as an art historian and conservator he also had inside information on works of art and their various restorations.
“I love to walk here,” he said, pointing out the porticoes that covered the sidewalks on all the major streets and most of the minor ones. Some of them were more than a thousand years old, he explained. “You can walk for miles and miles along Bologna’s streets and never be exposed to the rain or sun.”
When they reached the great fountain topped by a gigantic statue of Neptune, he explained to Lizzie how the Bolognese people had dismantled it during World War II, when the city was occupied by the Germans and bombed repeatedly by the Allies. Neptune was surrounded by mermaids who shot water out of their nipples and even in the midst of his serious explanation, Carmine could not help laughing, and Lizzie was relieved because she had been desperately trying not to crack up as she looked at them.
They sat at one of the many small cafes that surrounded the square and looked across it at the unfinished front face of St. Petronio’s, the principal church in a city that had a church on almost every block. Marble panels had been placed along the bottom third of the red-brick wall and there had obviously been an intention in the distant past to cover the entire surface.
“Is it being restored?” Lizzie asked.