I took her in my arms. I couldn’t feel her hands on my back, and I suddenly remembered how she would never hold us when we were children — not me, not even Jacopo. She would only ever hold the air that surrounded us.
‘It’s a nice house,’ she said. ‘A bit gloomy, but nice. Do you live alone?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded, as if she had guessed as much.
‘You wear glasses,’ I said.
‘The light hurts my eyes. Since — since —’
It was the word ‘earthquake’ that she could not say.
‘I bought them from a Chinese man,’ she went on. ‘In Palermo.’
I asked if I could have a look.
She lifted the weights over her ears and passed them to me. Her eyes, which I could have sworn were once dark-brown, had faded to the colour of dead leaves at the bottom of a pond. Her gaze was questing, stunned.
‘They’re made from tea-stone,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a type of quartz, I think.’
When I put on the glasses, everything became muted, almost poetic. I felt I was looking at the present from some point in the distant future. Not the present at all, then, but the past. A world that was already gone. A memory.
I handed them back to her.
‘I’m glad you thought of me,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came.’
Eyes shielded once more, she looked beyond me. ‘We had nowhere else.’
Later, when I had shown them round, her maid, Lapa, spoke to me. ‘The earthquake, then the journey — she’s not the woman she was.’
We both glanced across the room. My mother was peering into a trunk of clothes, as one might peer over a cliff.
‘You know something, Lapa?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I can remember the woman she was.’
That same week, just before sunset, I passed a dead horse lying in the street, ringed by a horde of tramps and beggars. The horse had careered over the Ponte Santa Trinità, one of them told me, riderless and wild with fear, mane standing vertical. As it came down off the bridge, it skidded on the greasy paving stones, lost its footing, and broke a leg. Since it was worth nothing lame, they had decided to butcher it and parcel up the meat.
I was watching them dismantle the carcass, impressed by their dexterity, when a door opened further down the street and a priest stepped out. He looked left and right, then set off along the river. It was getting dark, and I only saw his face for a moment, but I was sure it was Padre Paone. A wave of dizziness: the world slid sideways. First my mother, now Paone. What could it mean? Circling the sticky lake of blood, I hurried after him.
I quickly closed the distance between us, and by the time he turned left, into Chiasso dell’Oro, he was only a few yards in front of me. I followed him down Via Lambertesca, through the Uffizi, then along the side of the Palazzo Vecchio. His walk seemed familiar. Not measured and solemn, as when he celebrated Mass, but halting, even a little obsequious. I was reminded once again of the day he appeared as Jacopo’s accomplice.
We passed Via del Corno, the House of Shells visible halfway down. Was it my imagination, or did he hesitate? I slowed too. Then he moved on, turning the corner into Borgo de’ Greci.
‘Father?’
The word had left my mouth before I could suppress it.
Startled, the priest looked round.
He had Paone’s slick black hair, but his face was rounder, and more cherubic. And he was far too young. Paone would be approaching sixty. This man was forty at the most. Perhaps that explained my mistake: it was Paone as he had been when I last saw him — Paone as I remembered him.
‘Can I help you?’ the priest said.
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’ Then, surprising myself, I added, ‘I thought you were the priest from my hometown. I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He smiled.
‘Oh, it’s not a disappointment. If anything, it’s a relief.’
The priest’s smile became uncertain. ‘Are you in trouble?’ Hands clasped, he moved a step closer.
‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’
I saw that he was tempted to probe further. In the end, though, he chose not to.
‘Go in peace,’ he said.
It was two or three weeks before my mother would talk about what had happened.
‘I was buried in the rubble,’ she said. ‘I could hardly breathe.’
I held her hand. Its swollen knuckles, its thin black veins. ‘You’re safe now.’
Her eyes veered round the room, as if the walls might tumble at any moment.
I had put her on the ground floor. I had covered the cold tiles with bright wool rugs and installed a stove made of white majolica. The first days had been difficult, though. She ate very little, and could not sleep. Unfamiliar sounds upset her — and almost every sound was unfamiliar. My sleep was broken too. When I woke I would often hear her talking to Lapa, her voice subdued and tremulous. Once, towards dawn, I heard the front door slam, and found her on the street-corner, warning a passerby not to go home, but to stay outside, in the open.
There had been several earthquakes, she told me later, occurring over a period of three days. The one that had frightened her most had come during the night. She remembered a rumbling that sounded like thunder, but in the ground rather than the sky, and a wind that was like no wind she had ever heard before. She was shaken from her bed. Plates and glasses smashed, and a wardrobe toppled over, landing on its face. She ran out on to Via Dione. There was no moon. In the darkness people’s screams were silver. She couldn’t explain what she meant by that. A neighbour knelt in the middle of the street. He was crushed by falling masonry. The bell rang in the steeple opposite, even though there was no one pulling on the rope. She watched a woman run past with a bird-cage, its tiny wire door flapping, nothing inside. She remembered her sister, and hurried back into the house. It was then that the ceiling collapsed. They were trapped in what remained of the hallway, not far from the front door. Luckily, it rained. They took turns drinking the black water that dripped down the walls. Later, after they had been dug out, they heard the ground had opened like a mouth. Modica, Ragusa and Scichilo were swallowed. Nothing but stinking, brackish pools where they had been. The sea had risen up; shoals of fish were found miles inland. She had seen a dead donkey in an orange tree.
Her jaw shifted, as if her teeth hurt. ‘All our family documents were lost. The record of who we are, and what we own. All gone. And people too — so many people …’
‘Flaminia’s all right, though?’
‘She’s in Palermo.’
‘Father Paone?’
‘Gone.’
There was nothing left of the house that Jacopo had built, she went on. Not a single stone. She had told him not to live out there. She had said it was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen, though. He never listened.
‘It was so brutal — so thorough.’ A shiver shook her. ‘But that isn’t what stays with me. What stays with me is that bird-cage, with its wire door flapping …’ She looked at me; her pupils had shrunk, and white showed above and below her irises. ‘I can see it now.’
Two months after my mother’s arrival in Florence, Jack Towne invited me to his villa near the Fortezza da Basso. On a hot, late August night I was shown into a parlour and asked to wait. With its muted furnishings and its padded walls, the room had the deep, airless silence of a mausoleum. Though I barely knew the man, somehow this seemed in character.
A quarter of an hour passed, and still Towne did not appear. I opened the door to the adjoining room and stepped inside. The silence intensified. There were three sofas upholstered in dark velvet — chocolate, damson, aubergine — and fixed to the ceiling was a large round mirror. The tapestry at the far end of the room depicted a scene of such complex debauchery that I had to turn myself almost upside-down to make out what was going on. In the corner, on a pedestal, stood a life-size sculpture of a goat. The burnt vermilion glaze told me it was Marvuglia’s work.