by Joanna Scott
FROM ANCIENT ROMAN TIMES up through the 1920s, Italy derived most of its iron from the mines on Elba. But when we lived there, most of the mines had closed or were in the process of closing. Older men were unemployed, the deep wrinkles on their faces permanently stained a rusty yellow, and the young men who had survived the war and returned to the island were commuting to mainland jobs. New hotels were relatively small-scale. While there were tourists on the island, they usually arrived in yachts and didn’t wander far outside the harbors of Portoferraio and Porto Azzurro.
To our young eyes, however, Elba was an abundant haven. We had no more awareness of the poverty on the island than we did of the battles being fought around the globe. What we saw were plates heaped with polpo lesso and scampi, grapevines sprouting new leaves, barley stalks trembling as they grew taller before our eyes. Harry remembers in particular the cap of cream on every cup of fresh milk. Patrick likes to describe the bowl in the kitchen that was stacked high with plums in summer, persimmons in winter. Every meal lasted for hours, and one meal followed so quickly after the last that we forgot what it was like to feel hungry. My older brothers didn’t have to go to school or help with chores. I didn’t have to take a bath every day. None of us had to be in bed by any particular time.
We didn’t care that Claire and Murray were inattentive to us. Back in America we would have considered ourselves neglected and wondered what could be more important to our parents than seeing to the care and well-being of their children. But on Elba it seemed right and good that we were given the freedom to wander on our own.
In the morning Francesca would make us promise to stay within calling distance of the house, and then she’d go back to her room and fall asleep. She never knew how far we’d climb up the east side of Monte Giove. We played our game of Giant Ants, perfecting the rules as we went along. We decided that our ants would collect rubies and sapphires and tourmalines, along with gold; only green twigs could be used as antennae; when we were within sight of the ants’ horde of gold we could approach it only by hopping on our right foot; if we were touched by an ant’s antennae we had to spin three times and then fall to the ground; if we were dead, we had to stay dead until that round of the game was over. We called ourselves Jako One, Two, Three, and Four.
Qui, Jako Three!
Dove?
Guarda!
Io guarda la treasure.
Stai ferma!
You— io getta you!
We took over from our father the belief that we could find our fortune in the solid, integral stuff of the earth. Patrick showed us how to look for glassy beveled cubes with faces that sparkled when you tipped them to catch the sunlight, alloys speckled with yellow, black metallic rocks streaked with silver. He identified the pieces of pyrite, quartz, fluorite, and argentite in our collection and convinced us to discard chunks of marl and limestone. We didn’t find another geode, but Harry found a smooth, hard puddle of tuff. We chipped away at it until we each had a handful of shards. We found frothy, shiny gray rocks that were probably obsidian. And once we found a trace of what must have been indicolite, the valuable blue form of tourmaline, tucked between points of white feldspar on a piece of granite too big to lift.
We used a flat-topped boulder for cleaving crystals and pounding smaller rocks into chalk. We argued about what to do with the chalk. Harry wanted to collect it in jars. Nat wanted to use it to paint our faces. Patrick wanted to scatter the chalk in the wind.
Jako Four,you’re supposed to stai dead.
Shut up.
You shut up, you’re dead. Jako Four is dead and la treasure’s mio mio mio!
Mio!
Mio!
You lose, you bigga fat loser!
We came to know the terrain from different perspectives. The vista from the stone terraces midway up Monte Giove was always strange to us, Elba always in disguise. Which way was Portoferraio? Was that Corsica or the mainland we were seeing? We weren’t sure. Patrick and Harry disagreed about the island to the north. Harry said it was Capraia, Patrick said it was Gorgona.
But when we were scrambling up and down and across the slopes, the land seemed as familiar as the four of us were to each other. We knew everything that could be known about the earth. We knew the weight of a rock before we picked it up. We knew its hardness and cleavage. We knew what was valuable.
Lascia me!
Guarda, it’s, it’s…
Jako Three.
What did you find?
Io found la treasure. Follow me.
Who among us first noticed? And what did he notice, exactly? None of us can explain. I wonder if together we noted some change in the air, perhaps an odd shape in the clouds or a glory’s rainbow diffraction when the sun shone through the misting rain. How quiet it was. So quiet we could hear a snake wriggling in the grass. Jako One, come in. Are you scaredia? If you’re scaredia, close your eyes and sing. What are the songs you know by heart? Ascolta —four boys singing without making a sound. Can you hear me, Harry? Io can hear you. Nat? Sì? Oliver? Sì? Patrick? Donta mova there, donta speak. Now talk con me. You’re talking ma not talking. Think con me. We hear thinking!
None of us is sure what happened on Elba, but my brothers and I all remember the sensation of finding ourselves suddenly capable of miraculous power — the power to speak to each other without talking aloud. Nat’s explanation was that the mountain itself was magic. Patrick reminded us of the crystal he kept under his bed. Harry wanted to know whether what we were experiencing was good magic or bad magic.
Whatever had happened, Patrick insisted that we must keep it secret. The rest of us agreed. The need for secrecy was so clear that we didn’t even bother to seal our pact with blood and spit.
We cut our game short and went home early that day. As soon as we reached the place where the path intersected with the dirt road heading toward Poggio, we turned back into four ordinary young boys babbling together so loudly that we scared a whole flock of starlings from a telephone wire. They rose in a smoky mass. We shouted and threw rocks that fell far short of their mark. We picked up more rocks and threw them into the air.
The disappointment we felt at not bringing down a single bird grew out of proportion. None of us had ever hit a bird with a rock, but now we thought ourselves ridiculous for having failed. Even stronger than our disappointment was our sense of shame. Four boys against a flock of starlings, and we didn’t have a single trophy to show for it. Forgetting what had happened to us on Monte Giove, we talked of nothing but the birds — how close they were to us, how poorly we’d aimed — as we trudged up the stairs into our house. We didn’t speak to Lidia when we passed her in the kitchen, and we didn’t bother to wake Francesca to tell her we were home.
We gathered in the living room and waited in sulky silence for our dinner. Neither of our parents was at home. We didn’t care. Lidia served us bowls of green gurguglione, which we ate for the first time without complaining. Francesca and Lidia joined us for supper. Francesca asked us what was wrong, but we were too tired to speak, and soon Francesca and Lidia were engaged in a stormy conversation we didn’t even try to follow. We put ourselves to bed. I didn’t want to be alone so Nat let me share his bed.
I lay close enough to Nat to feel his warmth without touching him. I felt better, the foggy, inexplicable sensation of shame was dispersing, and in my dopey state I remembered our game of the ants of Monte Giove. I looked forward to tomorrow.
When we weren’t in the woods, our language was as coarse and plain as ever, but we wondered if our magic had left some visible trace on us. At home we would study the adults for signs that they’d noticed a change. As far as we could tell, they didn’t notice anything. Lidia and Francesca had taken to whispering between themselves, and our parents spent much of their time away from the house. That Claire and Murray were absorbed in problems of great magnitude might have worried us if we had known, but no one bothered to tell us.
Money was one problem. No one, not even Francesca, who often s
hared gossip with us, told us that our father’s mother had stopped sending money, and the uncles wanted Murray to justify the money he’d already spent. Lidia needed money to buy our food. Lorenzo gave our parents another month’s grace on the rent, but when the month passed he began charging interest.
Murray, biding time, trying to make work for himself, put in a bid for more land in the San Piero zone but couldn’t raise the money to meet the deadline for a down payment. He waited for other land to come on the market. Every farmer he met talked about someone else who was selling his land. But no one wanted to sell to the investor from America.
We had no idea what trouble our parents were in. We would go off each day to a different world and leave the bland, real world of adults behind. They could have their real world. We didn’t want it. A world worth only the value of its resale, a world without magic. That’s what we’d been taught to think; no one ever bothered to correct us.
So we didn’t know about the dreams. Everyone else on Elba seemed to know about them, but not us. Everyone was talking about the dreams, about the peste di sogni spreading across the island.
It was a fisherman in Porto Azzurro who had the first dream. He dreamt that he was in the crypt of the Parrocchiale, keeping guard at an open tomb. Inside, a girl was sleeping on a marble pallet. He recognized her as the Nardi girl. He felt no need to wake her. When a man, a stranger, came along with a bucket of wet concrete, the fisherman put his finger to his lips to signal him to be quiet. The man nodded. He set down the bucket and began mixing the concrete with a huge wooden spoon, stirring it like a thick pot of minestrone. Then he began stacking bricks across the entrance to the tomb and slathering them with the concrete. The fisherman tried to stop him but discovered that he couldn’t move or speak.
Who was the man? his friends wanted to know after the fisherman had recounted the dream. The fisherman couldn’t say. Was the man a stranger? Yes. Was he American? Yes, he must have been American because he was wearing the helmet worn by U.S. troops — a detail that had great weight among the listeners, since most of them remembered the American soldiers who came to Elba in ’44, and they remembered their helmets.
At first, though, the fisherman’s dream seemed no more than a fanciful concoction, and while the friends talked at length about it, they didn’t presume the dream to have an importance worthy of sharing with others beyond their circle. But when one of the fisherman’s friends happened to hear his sister-in-law’s cousin talking about her own dream after mass two days later and the cousin said the name Nardi, the fisherman’s friend exclaimed aloud at the coincidence.
The second dream, the one dreamt by the cousin, a seamstress from the tiny village of Lacona, involved fire. The seamstress had dreamt that she’d seen the glow of a fire on little Isola della Stella, and she’d swum all the way across the strait to investigate. By the time she reached the island the fire had burned out. She climbed over the rocks and found the charred body of a girl lying amidst smoldering embers. The girl was still alive, barely, but burned beyond recognition. The cousin asked her name, and she said, Nardi. Then she fell silent, and her eyes rolled back in death. The cousin started to run. She tripped over the outstretched legs of a man. He was sitting on the ground across from the bier, smoking a cigarette. The cousin begged him for help, but he looked at her with the blank look of a foreigner who doesn’t speak or understand the language.
Two dreams became three. At Ninanina’s enoteca in Portoferraio, one of the men who had worked briefly for Murray listened to the fisherman’s friend finishing the story of the cousin’s dream, and then he told about his own dream. He had dreamt that he’d been helping the American signore test explosives on a hill above Rio nell’Elba when he’d seen the Nardi girl wandering across the slope. He called to her but it was too late. There was the pop of dynamite, and thick smoke filled the air.
Someone else described a dream that he’d heard from the maid of Signora Claudia Patresi, a wealthy, ancient, bedridden woman who’d come to the island from La Spezia five years earlier to die in the company of her niece. She was dying slowly. In Claudia Patresi’s dream, she’d been ice-skating on a long, deserted river — she hadn’t been ice-skating since she’d visited Vienna in 1892! — and she’d skated up to a man who was fishing just as he was pulling a fish from the hole. But it wasn’t a fish. It was a girl. The Nardi girl, her face the color of clay, her cheeks swollen by the grip of the hook.
Three dreams became four. Four became eight. But what are dreams? people asked. Dreams are hopes that have gone rotten. Dreams are your punishment for drinking too much wine. Dreams are the stories the devil whispers in your ear while you are sleeping.
Eight dreams became ten, twelve, sixteen. In Poggio, in Capoliveri, in Zanca, Procchio, Carpani, people gathered to tell their dreams. Those who forgot their dreams upon waking drank blackberry tea to help them remember. People did not only dream of the Nardi girl. They dreamt that the sea was so thickly covered with dead fish that they could walk all the way to Corsica. They dreamt that Volterraio erupted. They dreamt of talking dogs and moving statues and church bells that wouldn’t ring.
What are dreams? How can you tell a true dream from a false dream? Who’s to say that everyone, from the fisherman to old Claudia Patresi, wasn’t lying? Why would they lie? Why wouldn’t they lie? And why not blame everything on the power of suggestion?
Twenty dreams. Twenty-one, twenty-two. The roar of argument in the bars grew louder. What about life? Truth? Here, this, a hand in front of your face! What are dreams? Add a hundred of them together and you get nothing.
Francis Cape stood at the counter in Ninanina’s enoteca and sipped his wine. He didn’t say much, but he listened carefully. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d admit this to Ninanina when she was refilling his glass, and she’d flash a dark look and say, “You know what dreams can tell us, Francesco, sì?” But when he said no, he didn’t, she’d only shake her head.
What can dreams tell us? The people of Elba were divided. Most were skeptical at first, wary of confusing dreams and reality. A few of the most fervent believers were prepared to accept the dreams as revelations. Local clergy had nothing to say about the matter. The editor of Portoferraio’s local newspaper attributed the dreams to xenophobia, but he couldn’t publish an editorial about what amounted to no more than hearsay.
What can dreams tell us? Francis Cape, himself capable of the wildest, most impure, unspeakable dreams, had always thought dreams were no better than ridiculous. He was shocked to see his Elban neighbors treating their dreams with increasing solemnity. They might have been a religious people, but their priests were adept at keeping superstition in check.
Whoever heard of dreams being responsible for turning hundreds of people against an innocent man? This was the gist of what Francis Cape wondered as he listened to the Elbans. And this was the question our mother asked our father after she finally went to see Francis Cape at his home and asked him exactly what he’d meant by his warning.
“Salem, Massachusetts,” Murray said in reply to Claire, standing behind her with a tumbler of scotch in his hand, watching her reflection in the mirror. Her face was covered with her hands; her hair fell in a curtain. “Salem in the sixteen hundreds.”
“Oh, Murray, come off it.”
“They say that colorful dreams come from abstinence. Maybe that’s the problem with these people. They’re not getting enough.”
“It’s not funny, Murray.”
“Dreams are funny. They are hilarious. Nightmares are the funniest kind. Harry dreaming last month he cut off Ollie’s winky by mistake. Remember? And then there was Nat’s dream about gentilissima Lidia cooking the cat!”
“Murray…”
“I love you, Claire.”
“What’s this about?”
“I’m telling you I love you.”
“This is serious, Murray.”
“Nothing more serious.”
“Stop it.”
“
I haven’t had a dream in…I can’t remember how long it’s been, it’s been so long.”
“Murray.”
“You want me to stop?” “Yes.”
“Whoever heard of dreams turning people against an innocent man? You’re right, Claire. It can’t happen.”
“We need to leave Elba. You need to stop this.”
“Stop this?”
“Murray…”
“You want me to stop?”
“Yes.”
“You really want me to stop?”
“Yes. No.”
“You don’t want me to stop?”
“No.”
“It feels good?”
“Yes.”
“You sure? I can stop if you want me to.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You do want me to stop?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“Don’t stop, Murray. OK?”
“OK.”
What are dreams? They are stories we tell ourselves when we are alone.
Then the body decides to return us to reality — the reality of stomach cramps, sore throats, swollen glands. The fact of pain. The necessity of food, oxygen, and water. The fact of fever.
It was Meena the cat who got sick first, though our parents hardly noticed. We noticed, but we couldn’t do anything but watch her ribs pulse beneath her fur and her tongue twitch as she panted. She lay on Nat’s bed for three days without eating or drinking. Her nose was hot. The insides of her velvety ears were hot. And then on the fourth day she dragged herself to her water bowl and drank until the bowl was empty. By the fifth day she was as sly and quick and aloof as ever.
Harry was the next one to fall ill. He complained of a headache, and when Francesca felt his forehead her hand jerked away from the shock of heat. She put him to bed and sent a neighbor, Marco Scozzi, to fetch our parents, who had gone into Portoferraio to have lunch.