by Lina Simoni
“Late twenties?” Giuseppe ventured. “It’s only a guess.”
“Very well. I’ll have a conversation with Mister Bo tonight. You should rest now,” he smiled, “or Doctor Sciaccaluga will scold me.”
“I’ll try, Antonio,” Giuseppe whispered, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep. Please, come back tomorrow and tell me everything you found out. And tell Matilda to make sure all doors and windows are securely locked. I know that Ivano Bo wouldn’t hesitate to break into my home to kill me.”
“I’ll see your wife on my way out,” Antonio promised. “Good night.”
From his bed, Giuseppe watched the policeman as he silently walked out of the room. Streams of sweat trickled down his cheeks. His eyesight was misty from the realization that his life as he knew it may soon be over. He breathed deeply and concentrated on relaxing his muscles, which had become tense from his effort to remain in control and sound truthful while he had handed Antonio a story shamelessly studded with lies. Would that story be enough to keep the family secrets safe? He tossed and turned, wondering where Antonio’s investigation would lead. He cursed himself for having mentioned Ivano Bo. He had succumbed to fear. “God help me,” he murmured, “should Caterina’s true story transpire.”
The events surrounding Caterina’s disappearance had begun to unfold on January 4th, 1908, when Caterina awoke on the second floor of the palazzina to the persistent cooing of the turtle-doves nesting in the garden trees. In the blissful interlacement of sleep and wakefulness, she gladly remembered it was the day of Santa Benedetta, and consequently her school, run by the Benedettine nuns, would be closed. With a smile on her face, she reached for the tapestry rope hanging over her nightstand and pulled it. One minute later, Lavinia, a plump, middle-aged chambermaid who acted also as Caterina’s chaperone, entered the bedroom with a spirited gait. “Good morning, Miss,” she chirped.
“Morning,” Caterina yawned back. Suddenly she sat up. “I want to go out today. Downtown.”
“It’s a good day for an outing,” Lavinia nodded, pushing the shutters open. “Look.”
“Sunshine!” Caterina exclaimed as a bright light filled the room.
“And a perfectly blue sky,” Lavinia added. “Let’s get ready.”
By the time they left the house, the sun was still shining as a few strands of gray clouds peeked over the top of the hills. In a light-beige outfit topped by a brown cape, her sparkling, blonde hair flowing down her back, Caterina stepped out of the garden onto the sidewalk and sauntered along Corso Solferino under the attentive eyes of her chaperone. Shortly, Caterina and Lavinia left the main road and took a winding downhill street paved with rugged stone tiles. Ten minutes later they were in the old town, swarming with people, stores, markets, and peddlers in perpetual motion along the caruggi. Here the architecture never ceased to surprise the eye. Portals of marble and slate, religious symbols carved in thick walls, reliefs of noble figures, and Latin inscriptions graced even the darkest corner.
Unhampered by the noise and the confusion, Caterina and Lavinia headed to one of the main shopping walkways, Via Luccoli, stopping every now and then in front of the store windows, then later at Klainguti’s for a cappuccino, and then at Romanengo’s—a sweet-smelling pastry shop that had been a favorite of the Genoese ever since its opening.
“Happy?” Lavinia asked, noticing the glimmer of contentment in Caterina’s eyes after indulging in two mille feuilles and one éclair.
Caterina nodded a yes.
“Very well,” Lavinia continued. “Time to go to church.”
“To church?” Caterina exclaimed. “Why?”
“When I informed your father this morning that we would go downtown, he specifically asked that we stop by the cathedral for your prayers given that you’re not in school today.”
“I pray every day, twice,” Caterina moaned, “as soon as I step into the school and before I leave it. Nothing is going to happen if I skip a day. Besides, I don’t like the cathedral. It’s too big and intimidating.”
“Fine,” Lavinia conceded, “we’ll go to a different church. My church.”
“Your church?” Caterina asked, her curiosity tickled. “What is it called?”
“The church of the Nunziata. It’s only a short walk from here.”
Caterina grimaced. “Couldn’t you just tell my father that we went to church?” she begged.
Lavinia shook her head. “Sorry, Miss. I don’t lie to my employer.”
“What if I refuse to go?” Caterina said, taking one step back and planting her feet on the ground. An air of defiance had materialized on her face.
Lavinia’s eyes fired up. “You will do what I say, Miss. Or I’ll drag you back home. And then your father will take care of you.”
Caterina shrugged and mumbled, “Fine. Why does no one ever let me do what I want?”
“Are you serious?” Lavinia commented, sweetening her expression.
She was referring to the fact that Caterina had an uncanny ability to bend people’s will her way. At the palazzina, she was known for her stubbornness and hot temper. She could become infuriated on a dime if things weren’t going her way. One day, when she was eight years old, she had thrown her shoes out the window when Lavinia had insisted she should get ready to go to Sunday school. And another time she had rolled over a muddy flower bed in her new tailor-made organzine outfit because she didn’t want to partake in her piano lesson.
“You scare me sometimes,” Lavinia had commented after Caterina’s mud roll was over.
“Scare you?” Caterina said, covered in mud from head to toe.
“Yes,” Lavinia explained. “I can see your father in you.”
“What are you talking about?” Caterina scoffed. She twirled, mindless of the mud that dripped from her dress onto her patent-leather shoes. “I look like my mother. Everyone says that.”
“On the outside, yes. You have your mother’s features, her body type. On the inside, you take from your father. You are a Berilli, my dear, not a Pellettieri.”
“Is that a compliment?” Caterina asked coyly.
Lavinia took her hand. “You need a bath and a change of clothes.”
Growing up, Caterina’s disposition had softened. While her reactions were no longer extreme, she remained nonetheless a stubborn and unpredictable human being. She was famous for the food she refused to eat, the games she demanded to play, and the questions she posed over and over until someone came up with an answer that satisfied her. Her father ignored her temper tantrums, as if Caterina were a ghost, a creature from another world, while Madame always tried to entice her with loving words. In the end, she always gave in to Caterina’s whims. Madame hadn’t been this soft with her two sons, Lavinia recalled. She had been much more firm and in charge back then. But the age difference between Caterina and her brothers was so large it was as if Caterina belonged to a generation of its own. Clearly, Madame had no longer the stamina to discipline her as strictly as she had disciplined her sons in their young years. Perhaps it was her aging, perhaps there were other reasons Lavinia wasn’t aware of. It wasn’t lack of interest—for sure. Madame loved her only daughter. So did Lavinia. Despite her temperamental shortcomings, Caterina was a sweet child. There was something about her smile, which lighted her face like the sunshine, and something about her eyes, constantly sparkling like polished jewels, that captivated everyone’s heart. Her tantrums were always forgiven, forgotten, or told by Madame at social gatherings as entertaining anecdotes.
That Caterina should now claim that no one ever let her do what she wanted, Lavinia thought as the girl was still begging for more pastry and no church, was preposterous, a joke. Caterina always did what she wanted, no matter how inappropriate her wishes might be.
“Let’s go,” Lavinia said, sliding an arm around the girl’s shoulders.
The church of the Nunziata stood west of downtown, in the corner of a busy piazza by the same name. At the time Lavinia and Caterina entered the silent nave
, outside the clouds had multiplied and amassed to cover large chunks of sky. They sat on a bench and took their time reciting one section of the rosary and three Requiem Aeternam for the dead. On their way out, they lit candles at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary. When they stepped outside, the blue of the sky was fully hidden by a menacing layer of gray.
“We should head home,” Lavinia said. “It looks as though it may rain.”
“It’s not going to rain,” Caterina scoffed, “not on my day out of school. Let’s go look at more stores. It’s still early. I don’t want to go home.”
Without waiting for an approval, Caterina rushed across the piazza, avoiding an electric tram, a horse-drawn carriage, and a honking roofless automobile.
“Come back!” Lavinia shouted, scampering after her. “Foolish girl,” she muttered as she zigzagged to avoid the oncoming traffic. “Foolish and more stubborn than an old mule.”
The two had hardly stepped on the opposite sidewalk when a sharp lightning bolt lit the sky. At the thundering rumble that followed, a downpour of rain crashed onto the dry roads, flooding them in a matter of seconds and sending everyone scrambling for shelter. Lavinia and Caterina rushed through the closest open door, which happened to be the entrance to a bakery owned by Corrado Bo and his twenty-five-year-old son Ivano.
Ivano was a tall, lean yet muscular young man, with a head of thick black curls and two large, engaging, brown eyes. At the time Caterina and Lavinia entered the bakery, he was standing behind the counter, handing bread to a corpulent woman and taking the next order from a boy. Next to Ivano stood a second young man, Tony, the shop helper. While Ivano selected from the shelves the bread ordered by the customers, Tony took payment and handed back change. The room was more crowded than usual: besides the customers, a number of passersby, like Lavinia and Caterina, had sought shelter from the rain.
At some point, with no more customers requiring his attention, Ivano looked about the bakery, noticing at once the shine of Caterina’s blonde hair. He assessed her with a long look up and down her figure, quickly realizing from her outfit and demeanor that she was unlikely to live in that neighborhood and likely instead to belong to some wealthy hillside household. His instinctive adversity for the rich made him turn the other way. He had dated only working-class women up till then, insistently pushed to do so by his father.
“Rich women are empty-headed, son,” Corrado had advised Ivano almost daily ever since the boy’s first puberty symptoms had made their appearance, “and vain, capricious, and unreliable. You should marry a girl of your own class, a girl with her head on her shoulders, who will take good care of you and make you a happy man.”
In the Genoa of 1908 it wasn’t common for young people to cross the class boundaries in their choice of spouse. Nonetheless, Corrado was determined to ensure it wouldn’t happen to Ivano, despite the minuscule probability of it. And Ivano, drummed by his father’s marital advice, had grown over the years an ingrained dislike for the upper class even he, at times, was unable to explain. On that rainy afternoon, however, after his first instinctive withdrawal, he found himself staring at the young girl and hungering inside in an inexplicable way.
He approached her while Lavinia was brushing raindrops off Caterina’s cape.
“You’re soaking wet, Miss,” Lavinia said. “Please don’t catch a cold.”
“I won’t,” Caterina replied, combing her hair with her fingers. “My hair is only a bit damp.”
“Good morning, ladies,” Ivano said with a soothing voice. “Welcome to the best bakery in town.”
Caterina glanced at him distractedly, ready to produce a nod and a half smile, but the instant her eyes met Ivano’s, a shiver ran down her spine.
“Let me take your cape, Miss,” Ivano continued in his engaging voice. “I’ll hang it in the oven room. It’ll be dry in no time.” He took Caterina’s garment gently, with a soft grazing of her shoulders.
At the touch of his hands, Caterina flinched as if she had been brushed by fire.
“January is a crazy month,” Ivano said, cape in hand, as he disappeared behind a door. “Sun, rain, and more sun.”
The brief moments he spent out of her sight felt like an eternity to Caterina. At some point she turned to Lavinia, as if asking for an explanation. Lavinia shook her head and gave Caterina a reproaching smile.
“You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen,” Ivano murmured, reappearing.
Caterina blushed visibly as she lowered her eyes. A weakness in her knees made her sway.
“Thank you, young man,” Lavinia intervened. “We’ll be on our way shortly, as soon as I see a free carriage outside.”
The rain kept falling steadily, and for a long time not a single carriage drove by the bakery or stopped nearby. Inside the store, the customers became edgy as worries about the effects of the horrible weather on their homes and terraces became the main topic of their conversations. Meanwhile, eyes on Ivano, Caterina tried pointlessly to control her shaking knees.
Confused as much as she was, at a loss as to what he should say to Caterina, at some point Ivano reached under the counter and took out an instrument. “Music is a good way to pass time while we’re all trapped in here,” he said, sitting on a stool.
The instrument was a perfectly built and lovingly maintained Neapolitan mandolin, with a deep rounded body. It was made of rosewood and mounted four pairs of metal strings tuned like the strings of a violin. Corrado Bo had purchased the mandolin in Naples in 1882, when he had been twenty-four and a passionate student of music in its popular forms. Family downturns had forced him out of the music milieu back into the bakery trade. As he abandoned his dream of being a professional musician, he vowed that Ivano would grow up appreciating the beauty of the instrument and learn how to play the wide range of music the mandolin allowed for. He taught his son daily, starting at age five, showing him at first the rudiments of music, then the scales and the chords, and then the more advanced techniques. Ivano absorbed all that knowledge effortlessly.
It was with a quiver in his breathing that, on that rainy morning at the bakery, looking straight into Caterina’s eyes, Ivano began plucking the mandolin strings with a red heart-shaped plectrum. Dumbfounded by the attraction he felt for that girl from another world, he frantically searched his musical knowledge for an appropriate piece to play. He knew many ballads and popular songs, but somehow none of them seemed fit for the occasion. Then he thought of a piece his father had taught him long ago, one he had never particularly liked and hence hardly ever played, because it was an opera, his least favorite genre. Suddenly he felt an urge to play that piece, and to do so he groped through memories, hoping to remember the chords and be able to play them in the correct sequence. Caught up in his worries of failing in front of such an attractive young girl, he didn’t realize that the fingers of his left hand had begun to press swiftly the strings as the plectrum in his right hand was producing a perfect tremolando. He went on to play beautifully, as if he had played that piece every day of his life. It was the Serenata from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
The murmurs in the bakery ceased, and Caterina, Lavinia, and everyone present stared at the young musician in awe. When he stopped playing several minutes later, nobody dared break the silence. Then someone in a corner screamed “Bravo!” drawing the rest of the spectators in a long, heartfelt applause. Caterina, meanwhile, had kept silent, unable to move a muscle of her body or unglue her eyes from the magnetic face of her admirer.
“Look!” Lavinia exclaimed, pointing at a window. “It stopped raining. The sun is coming out. Young man, would you retrieve the cape so we can go home?”
With care, Ivano set the mandolin against the wall then recovered the cape from the oven room. “Here it is, Miss,” he said, placing it on Caterina’s shoulders. “I hope you enjoyed the entertainment.”
6
THE SHADOWS WERE LENGTHENING when Lavinia, holding a silver tray with all the tea fixings, began looking for Caterina. Her fir
st stop was the family living room, where Caterina liked to spend time in the afternoon. There were two living rooms at the palazzina. The largest one, furnished with many sofas and chandeliers, was reserved for parties and receptions. Located in the front of the house, easily accessible from the foyer, it was never open unless a social event was on the schedule for the week. The second living room, smaller and more intimate, located in the back of the house, was reserved for the family members. Lavinia entered it surefooted, certain that Caterina would be there. But she wasn’t. Perplexed, Lavinia placed the tray on a coffee table and moved on to the blue parlor, where she knew Madame was entertaining two lady friends. Perhaps, she thought, Caterina had joined them, now that she was no longer a child but a young woman soon to be introduced to society. The door of the blue parlor was ajar, so Lavinia peeked in: Madame was seated on the loveseat, and her two friends on the armchairs, facing her. They were sipping tea, likely served earlier by Viola, and conversing peacefully. No trace of Caterina. Next, Lavinia went upstairs, to Caterina’s bedroom, which was deserted. After exploring the kitchen, the dining room, the reading room, the laundry room, and the guest quarters, she scratched her head. Not for a minute did she think of entering the social living room, as no party was planned for the next several days. The curtains were drawn, the shutters closed tightly. That room often reminded Lavinia of a tomb. The only place left on Lavinia’s mental list was the garden, where Caterina occasionally groomed the hydrangeas. She was still musing over the girl’s untimely disappearance when she opened the palazzina’s front door and stood on the steps, from where she had a good view of the flower beds and the street. She saw no trace of Caterina but noticed that one of the social-living-room shutters was open. At once, she descended the steps to the garden, walked to the open shutter and looked inside. By the window, seated in an armchair, charcoal in hand, Caterina was tracing lines on a sheet of paper, her eyes squeezed tightly in the effort.
“What in the world are you doing there?” Lavinia exclaimed.