I cannot help but imagine avalanches. The great cracking of ice and the thunderous tumult of snow falling, crushing, killing. One hundred men buried in snow! Such devastation, and yet, they fight on. What strength they have, these men. What dedication. Endurance of this kind inspires resolve in me. It helps me bear my own avalanches. Vita tests my strength, and yet I battle her. Battle her hungers, battle her rages, battle the strangeness and shame until I am little more than a husk. The truth is that I am old and tired. I cannot fight much longer. Ambrose used to say I was ashamed of Vita, that my vanity was offended by her existence, but it is not out of pride that I have locked her away. I used to believe that terror would kill me, but it is not so. Exhaustion erodes the body more than fear. Vita will kill me, as I expected, not with her savage teeth, but with her relentless vitality.
There are times I observe her, as if watching an exotic animal in a zoo. She has become that to me, my daughter, a strange and unknowable thing. Something of the animal kingdom. Something studied by the likes of naturalists like James Pringle. I try to see her for what she has become. She is nearly fifteen years old, and has all the attributes of a woman. Sometimes, when I see her from a certain angle, she is almost pretty. And then she turns to me, baring her yellowed teeth, and I know her not at all. I see a monster. I look away in disgust. She understands that I am revolted. And again, we are at battle.
Perhaps the time has come for me to lay down the sword and surrender. Now that Ambrose has died, and I am alone to care for our child, I must accept that there are limits to my power. The Lord knows that I can’t do anything to change Vita. I have accomplished what I can. The greatest evils of her childhood have been subdued. The priests did much to alter her proclivities toward violence and their instruction has allowed her to read the Bible. She does not attack when we are nearby, but only surreptitiously, when she believes she is unwatched. As Ambrose used to say: the child has been trained like a dog—to be quiet, docile, tame. She follows commands without understanding them. Not that she could ever integrate into the world outside the castle. Even now, almost two years after the incident in Nevenero, the villagers have not forgotten her. They would kill her on sight if she were to go there. Instead, she has created her own solitary habits. She sits on the east lawn, by the pond. Sometimes, she disappears into the mountains. What she does there, alone in the snow and ice, I cannot imagine, but when she leaves, she is gone for many days at a time. She returns calm, almost at peace. This alone is enough for me to be thankful.
I passed an hour with Vita today before leaving her to the surgeon.
She was found in the mews in a terrible state. The groundsman came to me in the library, his face white and twisted with fear. “Mademoiselle is unwell” is all he said, averting his eyes in the way they all do when speaking of Vita: with shame and confusion. I put my book aside and followed him through the courtyard to the mews.
“She is in the northeast tower?” I asked.
“In the mews, madame,” the servant said. “Where the soldiers were sleeping.”
The soldiers may have left, but the smell of them remained, the scent of sweat and wine, and the mineral odor of blood and festering wounds.
Vita stood in the shadows, beyond the hay piles, her eyes wide. It was a look I had never seen before, one of confusion mixed with shock.
“Vita, come,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She stepped closer. The dead of winter, and she was without shoes—that was the first thing I noticed. The second was the blood on her hands and on her dress. On her legs and her feet. Blood everywhere.
“What has happened here?” I asked, beginning to fear that she had raided the barns again. The goats were always in danger when Vita was unattended. We relied on them for cheese and milk and meat all winter. We could not afford Vita’s plunder.
But as she came closer, I understood that this was not one of her usual episodes. My child was in pain. For the first time in many years, I felt something close to the sentiments I had felt at her birth: awe at what I had created. Compassion.
Vita threw her hands in the air, to show me the blood, waving her arms in a crazed fashion. She was not in her right mind. She howled and howled and howled, and the pain in that howl alerted me that something terrible had happened, some new violence. Finally, I understood that Vita had been violated.
I dismissed the groundsman, telling him to go to Nevenero to fetch the village doctor. Then I asked Vita to explain. In a number of gestures she made me understand that the soldiers had tied her hands to a post and covered her head with a sack. I could see that she didn’t understand what had happened. There being no hope that she should marry, I had never thought to explain the nature of men and women’s relations. She must have been utterly unaware of what the soldiers wanted from her when she came to the mews. She had wandered into a trap without knowing how to defend herself.
Later, in the tower, the doctor examined her, but his concern was less for mending Vita’s wounds than for discerning what variety of creature Vita was to begin with. He brought the candle close to her, illuminating the pallid skin of her cheeks and neck, the white hair that grew over arms and chest, the unnatural feet. He looked at her as if she were a demon.
“What kind of beast is this, madame?” he asked.
“She is a Montebianco,” I said. “And you will treat her with respect.”
What a look he had as he put the candle on the table! How his hands trembled as he took up the scissors and thread! I thought he would turn and flee the tower. I took out my purse and gave him an enormous sum so that he would stay and tend to her. Pocketing the bills, he lowered his eyes and did not raise them again. He sutured the wounds and promised to return with medicine from the village. “Do not speak of this to anyone,” I said as he left.
All that night, I sat at Vita’s bedside. She was asleep, spots of blood staining the sheets, and it seemed to me that, in her weakness, she was more my daughter than ever before.
The perfume pleases Vita. It came today with the shipments from Paris, a crystal bottle wrapped in cloth. I unwrapped it and the air filled with the scent of oakmoss and bergamot. I knew she would like this gift. Fragrance has always soothed Vita, her sense of smell being extraordinarily acute, and perfume has had the added benefit of brightening the atmosphere around her, which is often tainted by an unsavory odor. While I have given her vials of eau de toilette and some bottles of cologne, this is her first real perfume. It is called Mitsouko, by the French perfumer Guerlain, and is rather strong in character, which, I believe, suits Vita very well. After all that she has suffered, I hope the gift will give her some happiness. Indeed, she smiled for the first time since the incident after smelling it.
June 1930
The doctor returned today to see Vita. Her recovery has been remarkable, he told me, much faster than expected. He watched her feed—one can hardly call it eating—in the chamber outside her rooms. We gave her a chamois, fat and old, with thick, curved horns, and it was reduced to bones in a matter of minutes. Our good doctor was astonished at this but said nothing. Money has made him discreet. The chamois will hold Vita for nearly a week.
Now that the village doctor is accustomed to Vita’s abnormalities, he has become a kind of guardian to her. He has taken to teaching her about the medicinal mushrooms he used to cure her—varieties that grow in the shady, moss-heavy crevices under the spruce trees. He explains how to find them and how they heal the body. One afternoon, after rambling in the mountains, Vita and the doctor made a list of the mushrooms they had collected:
—Boletus
—Lentinula edodes
—Trametes versicolor
—Inonotus obliquus
—Grifola frondosa
Vita is happy—this child who grew up without a father’s love—to have a teacher. When they returned from their excursion, she placed the mushrooms in a line on her table and studied them, lifting the delicate caps, brushing her fingernails over the fibrous stems. T
hen she ate them and asked for more. The doctor asked if he might take her to the forest regularly, to show her where the mushrooms grow. “She might find pleasure in the hunt,” he said.
“But, Doctor,” I said, making sure we were alone. “You have heard of her violence. Aren’t you afraid for your life?”
He looked at me for a moment, as if weighing his response. Finally, he said, “No, madame. She is violent only when violence is acted upon her first. When shown kindness, she is kind. That is the way of animals and humans alike.”
I wanted to cry at this simple wisdom. He understood my child the way her father never had.
Promising to come back the next month, the doctor tipped his hat and left.
He kept his promise and returned some weeks later. He wore thick-soled boots made for climbing the foothills of the valley. But Vita was too ill to search for mushrooms. A malady had come over her suddenly, leaving her lethargic. She couldn’t eat or leave her bed. She stared out the window of the northeast tower, gazing past the pond to the mountains beyond.
I had brought in a priest, believing it a spiritual malady. The spring in Nevenero is a trying season, with its bursts of brilliant warmth obliterated by snow and ice. But it wasn’t melancholia that had got ahold of Vita. After the doctor examined her, he informed me that Vita would have a child.
There are many ways we could kill the child. The nurse could feed it poison. Or drop it from the window of the tower. Or bring it to the kitchen, where it would be quietly strangled. The only certainty is that it must be done. I must redeem myself for the weakness I showed with Vita. The legacy of the Montebianco family must dissolve into the mountain air, disappearing from the earth like the fog at sunrise.
It would be best if it were to die before it lives, its heart stopping in the womb, before it sees the world at all. I lost three children in this fashion. Stillborn, marbled in blood, they were taken away and buried before I could love them.
But Vita’s child is healthy. If one watches the strength of its movements in her belly, the thumping of its feet against her body, it becomes clear that there is little hope for a miscarriage. It is strong. It grows. And thus I must be resolute. I must become as hard-hearted as Ambrose.
The doctor comes every week to examine Vita. He has agreed to help me. He has promised to tell no one. And in return, I will give him land outside of Nevenero. A house for his son. Some goats. He will help me destroy this terrible legacy.
Each week he expects to deliver the child, and each week he returns to Nevenero. Lately, his manner has changed.
“It is very strange,” he said, swallowing back the words as if they were too angular. “The child should have been born many months ago. It is long overdue.”
“How long?” I asked, trying to count out the weeks, but I have no sense of time any longer. There are only the seasons. It was the beginning of the winter. November.
“Eighteen months have passed since the soldiers left,” he said. “And when I examine your daughter, I see no change. She fattens. C’est tout.”
It was true: Vita had become enormous, so large that she could not leave her room. She slept most of the time, her body round and ripe.
“It should have been born by now,” I said.
“In fact, we don’t know,” he said, without meeting my eyes. “A human infant remains three-quarters of a year in the womb. But a creature like Vita . . . We don’t know, madame.”
November 1931
The twin boys, Giovanni and Guillaume, were born on Toussaint, a sign, I believe, that we have been given a reprieve. After all I had feared, and all that might have been, we have avoided the worst.
Giovanni arrived first, claiming the title of his ancestors, but Guillaume was not inferior. He is a fine child, heavier than his brother, more alert. They are identical twins, not les faux jumeaux, but their behavior is nothing alike: as Giovanni cried, Guillaume looked about the chamber, astonished by the world. Not a sound. Not a cry. Simple acceptance that God has placed him here among us.
The doctor met my eyes after the boys were cleaned and wrapped in linen. We had an agreement. If the baby was like Vita, he would slit its throat and dispose of the body. If the baby was free of Vita’s deformities, we would allow it to live. Both boys are healthy. Both free from Vita’s afflictions. They will live, and with God’s blessing, Vita will pass away, giving over the future of Montebianco Castle to them.
Fifteen
For days after finishing Eleanor’s memoir, I could think of little other than the terrible history I had discovered. The strange scenes of Vita’s childhood—the crushed butterfly, the exorcism, her encounter in the village—haunted me, filling me with an immense sense of sadness, not only for the little girl born into an era of ignorance, to parents who could not comprehend her mental and physical challenges, but for the teenaged girl who had been the victim of sexual violence. That my grandfather had grown up in the shadow of this violence, the child of rape, the child of a mother incapable of caring for him, explained a lot, as did the fact that Vita had clearly suffered from a serious genetic disorder.
And yet, discovering that my family carried a congenital illness lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders. Giovanni and Marta’s stillborn babies, my dead brother and sister, my own series of miscarriages—they were all the result of some error in our genetic code. For the first time in months, I felt free. I wasn’t to blame for my inability to have a child. I, like Vita, was a victim of inheritance.
Reading Eleanor’s memoir made me want to meet my great-grandmother more than ever. If only I could see her, I believed, I could reconcile Eleanor’s exaggerated and emotional account with my own. All that week, I waited to see Dolores, but after our talk in the portrait gallery, she had taken ill and had not left her rooms. I was alone for much of the time, left to wander the castle and the courtyard, which left me edgy and ill at ease.
But I didn’t truly begin to panic until the end of the week, when Zimmer did not show up. No one at the castle appeared to place any importance on the day of the week, but after I had counted seven days, and Zimmer had not returned, I knew that Basil had been telling the truth: Zimmer was not coming back for me.
Down the corridor from the grand hall, tucked in a nook, sat the single connection to the outside world: a rotary telephone.
The castle was isolated, but if the telephone worked—and Basil had said that he was constantly making calls for Dolores, so it must—then we were not entirely cut off from the world. I could get in touch with someone in the nearby villages of Pré Saint Didier or Palézieux. I could try to call Luca. I could try to get ahold of Enzo. It didn’t matter who I called. As long as I made contact with someone outside of Nevenero, they would surely get me a helicopter.
The trick was getting to the phone without anyone finding out. Dolores was aware that I wanted to leave, and there was no objective reason I should hide the call, but I felt an instinctive fear of being overheard, as if Greta or Sal would stop me. And so I waited until the middle of the night before slipping from my room. I didn’t turn on the lights, and I felt my way into the corridor, fingering my way along the rough stone walls, inching forward through the darkness. The stone steps of the stairwell had been worn down over the centuries and were so slippery that one misstep would send me tumbling headfirst into a deep, twisting abyss. Finally, I sat and slid the rest of the way down on my butt, like a child sneaking downstairs after bedtime.
I was just feet from the telephone nook when I heard the muffled sound of footsteps. Fearing that Sal had come in from the mews, I ducked behind a curtain, pressing myself against the window. Holding my breath, I looked outside. The world appeared fractured, distorted by the honeycomb pattern of blown glass. The shuffling came closer, then closer still. What would Sal do, I wondered, if he found me? What could he do? I was free to walk through the castle. There was nothing to stop me. Yet, I was sure that if he discovered me hiding behind the curtain, there would be trouble.
When the soun
d passed, I peeked out from behind the curtain and found not Sal but Greta shuffling slowly away. What she was doing there in the middle of the night was beyond me, but I had more urgent business to worry about, and I hurried into the alcove, where I fell into a velvet chair next to an old-fashioned rotary telephone perched on a wooden table. That there was a working landline telephone at all was a testament to the Montebianco wealth. Even if the village had been populated, and the service was paid for by more than a single family, it would have been a technical feat to get the wires all the way up to Nevenero, let alone to keep service in repair through the winter. However they had managed it, the important thing was that it was there. And it worked.
I picked up the receiver and listened. The tone beeped in intervals, insistent, waiting for me to dial a number. The only number I knew was for the Miltonian; I had called Luca there every day for years. A clicking tapped in my ear as the number registered, but I couldn’t get through. I was met with nothing but an incomprehensible recording in rapid Italian. Finally, I managed to reach an operator, and in a matter of seconds, I heard the jarring sound of country music under Luca’s sweet, somewhat querulous voice.
“Luca,” I said, feeling suddenly panicked, breathless. “Hello? It’s me. Bert. Can you hear me?” I glanced at the cuckoo clock in the hall. It was four a.m. in Italy. That meant it was about ten at night in Milton. I had no idea what day of the week it was, but from the sound of it, I guessed Friday.
“Bert?” Luca said. It was more a statement of disbelief than a question. “Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“Yes—I mean no,” I said, standing and walking into the hall to make sure I was still alone. “I need your help.”
The Ancestor Page 14