She tapped the side of her nose and winked. “Look to Elena’s nephews, Ricci or Beniamino de Masson, Sophie’s youngest and oldest. The middle son, Tessa tells me, is too busy mismanaging one of Busacca’s stores. And Ricci owed his aunt gambling debts.” Yet somehow she thought Ricci an innocent.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation until they drifted again into a discussion of Elena.
“I still think that if I hadn’t goaded her, she wouldn’t have shot you,” Serafina said to Loffredo.
“Perhaps, but she was the one who shot me, not you. I would never blame you. You needed to find out the truth.”
“And sometimes the truth is buried deep and must be pried out of us,” Rosa said.
Serafina opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it.
“Elena wasn’t always like that,” Loffredo said. “Most of us mellow with age, either because we grow wiser or we are closer to our God.”
“Or we cannot debauch the way we used to in our youth,” Rosa said.
“But Elena,” Loffredo continued, “became a caricature of herself. She became less, not more.”
“So do people change?” Serafina asked.
Valois shook his head. “Definitely not. They carry their unique stamp from birth to their grave, and cannot change.”
“Oh, but I think we do, we grow and we change,” Serafina said. “Most of us for the better, even though, perversely, we long for the past. When we mourn for others, we long for a part of us we’ll never have again.”
“There you go, talking convoluted nonsense,” Rosa said. “Perhaps it was the disease from which Elena suffered that spiraled her downward. It drives people into madness, makes them blind, you know.”
“How did you know about her disease?” Valois asked. “You couldn’t have read the autopsy.”
“It was obvious to me,” Rosa said.
Loffredo rubbed his chin. “Dr. Tarnier told me she had syphilis. It was the reason he agreed to care for her. Normally women who are with child hire midwives, but because of Elena’s complications-”
“And because she made a generous bequest to La Maternite, he took her case,” Rosa said.
Rosa continued. “Elena was a syphilitics who’d gone mad. Did she know she was going to die, I wonder?”
Serafina shook her head. “We all know we’re going to die, but somehow we fool ourselves into thinking that our death is a long way off-maybe tomorrow or next week, but certainly not today.”
Chapter 35: Wind, Light, Water
Wind, light, water and the unending sound of the sea helped to mute the shattering events of their final week in France. Serafina and Loffredo sat alone with the setting sun onboard the Niger as it plowed through the Straits of Bonifacio and into the Tyrrhenian Sea steaming toward Palermo. Rosa had taken charge, declared that Fina and Loffredo must be left alone for the voyage, a brief honeymoon after they’d said their vows before a wizened priest in Cathedral St. Sauveur.
“Time enough for thoughts of home.”
She closed her eyes and let the sun play on her face, smelled seaweed and salt and tried to erase the images that pierced her mind over and over-standing before the heavy door to Elena’s studio, Don Tigro’s man cupping his ear in Marseille, Valois stroking his lapel, Loffredo lying on Elena’s studio floor. Instead she deliberately pictured him as he walked toward her in Vefour. She looked at him, stronger each day, but in need of more rest. If she couldn’t obliterate the sight of Elena swallowing her gun, how could he? Would the memory of her treachery ricochet throughout their lives? A shaft of light shone through a hole in the clouds and the wind picked up. They were sprinkled with sea foam, like a priest shaking holy water onto them. She remembered their simple wedding-Tessa and Rosa clapping, the crackers set off by Teo and Arcangelo. Despite the doctor’s orders, they’d consummated their love again and again.
“Think I should open Busacca’s letter?”
He stroked her hand and smiled. “Wait until we’re home.”
“I wonder…” She adjusted her scarf. “Not one letter from Vicenzu or Renata. Something in the air.”
“Fish.”
“Silly.”
They were quiet.
“But if I open it now, in this peaceful setting, I’ll have two days to prepare.”
“If you want. Perhaps it would be better. We’ll feel displaced when we arrive, I think. I always do when I return. We’ll see our town and it will be… other than what we’ve always known our home to be. It’s changing for the worse, I’m afraid, Fina. Soon it won’t be a fit place to raise our children, and we’ll need to make a decision. We must start thinking of it now.”
She thought for a few minutes. “I’ve decided. I won’t open Busacca’s letter now. I’ll offer it up for the repose of the soul of
…”
“Praying for she-devils?”
“For her unborn child who never had a chance. For the unknown woman dying alone in the Rue Cassette. How many lives did Elena take?”
“Everyone she ever met.”
They were silent, watching the molten ball sink behind the coast of Sardinia. Its fire licked the mountains and made their shadows dance while Serafina talked of style and dresses, the advanced state of French detection. She sucked in her stomach. Loffredo talked of France, the cuisine, painting, the state of French medical practice, their prisons.
“I never asked. Where did they keep you?”
“Prison de Mazas, near the Gare de Lyon. Most of us were awaiting trial. But the prisoners were treated with respect, at least I was, a more advanced system than ours.”
“Of course. Oltramari’s prison is a rat hotel built during the Bourbon rule.”
Their silence comforted and stretched beyond the blackened waters. The wind grew fierce. Her feet were cold.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She smiled.
Chapter 36: Oltramari
Serafina felt the wind, a blade at her back, as she alighted from the carriage. The piazza was dustier than she remembered. She held her skirts and looked at her home, the home of her ancestors, haggard in the noonday sun. The shutters were in need of paint, the stucco fading from rose to dirty ochre, water-stained close to the ground. Missing Carmela’s touch, the gardens were choked with weeds. The heat was different from the Midi’s joyous weight. It scorched, blinded, did little to comfort. And yet it was home.
Loffredo opened the gate and walked with her on the gravel path. When he opened the front door, the stone angel smiled down at her and she heard Maria’s piano, the crashing chords of a Brahms sonata. As she listened to the music, she watched the caretaker bringing her trunk and Loffredo’s luggage up to her bedroom-their bedroom-and like that, the trip was over, the mystery solved. Almost. She decided to wait until this evening after supper to read Busacca’s letter.
The domestic rose from her chair in the kitchen to greet them. Her lips trembled. Renata had gone to La Vucciria for fish, she told Serafina, and Toto wouldn’t be home from school for another hour, but Maria was in the parlor, her usual time to practice. When is she not practicing, Serafina wondered, certainly not stopping to open her arms to her mother whom she hasn’t seen in what, over a month.
“Give Maria her mood,” Loffredo said, kissing her on his way out the door to check on his office. “She’s letting you know how she feels. There’s time enough for her to grow up, but let’s not make her do it today. She’s hard to control, but we’ll find a way,” he said.
It would be easier with the two of them. She nodded. “We teeter between indulging her moods and praising her talent, difficult waters to navigate.”
Still, Serafina felt Maria’s petulance like a slap. Come to think of it, how did Loffredo know this, he had no children. But perhaps his wisdom was why they never fought, not yet at any rate.
“And Vicenzu sorts through the rubble,” Assunta said.
A strange turn of phrase, but then the housekeeper must be more aware of Oltramari’s poverty than Serafina realized. Assunta, like all peasants, understood that the price of bread was high and therefore business was bad.