“I send my love to all of you and leave it to you to spread it around in direct proportion to how much anyone needs it. Love, Tina-Lina.”
As a researcher Caterina had been trained to read between the lines of texts. This was as much a habit for her as it was for a veterinarian to see mange on the skin of a friend’s dog or a voice teacher to hear the first faint signs of excessive vibrato. Her sister’s email left her uncomfortable, chiefly because of what it revealed about her mood but also at her own initial self-satisfaction at reading it. “ET, phone home,” she said in a soft voice.
She shifted from the mood of the email to its contents. What had begun as a wild surmise on her part was now confirmed as a distinct possibility; indeed, more than that. She thought of those long fingers, that beardless, puffy face, utterly devoid of the exciting angles and lines of the male face, even at the age of sixty, which Steffani had been when that portrait was painted.
She turned off the computer, picked up her bag, and went downstairs, but not before checking that the cupboard and the door to her office were locked. Roseanna had left. As she closed the outer door to the building, Caterina noticed a sign saying that the library was closed until the end of the month. It was warm outside, so there would be no suffering on the part of the people who used the reading room as a warm place to spend their time. But it was entirely possible that they also needed a place where they could pass the day.
Thinking about this and other things, she walked toward home, not the apartment where she was living but her parents’ home down near La Madonna dell’Orto, the area of the city that would ever be home for her.
She could have taken a vaporetto if she had walked back to the Celestia stop, but she didn’t like that part of the city very much, however well-lit most of it was, so she chose to walk through Santa Maria Formosa, out to Strada Nuova, and home the same way she used to return from school.
So much taken with the thought of Steffani’s life was she that, at first, she paid no attention to the man who appeared beside her, as if to pass her, and then fell into step with her. She glanced aside, but seeing that it was not anyone she knew, she ignored him and slowed her steps to let him pass in front of her. But he slowed his as well and kept pace with her. They came down into the campo, which was dark at this hour. The paving stones were covered with a thin film of humidity that dissipated and reflected the lights. A few meters beyond the bridge, where light also came from the windows of the shops on her right, she stopped. She didn’t bother to pretend she wanted to take something from her bag; she simply stopped and stood still, waiting to see if the man would move off. He did not.
The vegetable stand had already closed up and gone, but there were a number of people crossing the campo, and three or four were within hailing distance, though she didn’t know why she thought of it in those terms.
“Do you want something?” she asked, surprising herself but, apparently, not the man.
He turned and looked at her, and she didn’t like him. Just like that: instinctive, visceral, utterly irrational, but equally strong. Her instincts told her this was a bad man, and the fact that he stood and looked at her and said nothing was bad. She wasn’t in the least afraid—they were in the middle of a campo and there were people around them. But she was uneasy, and the longer it was that he didn’t say anything, the more uneasy she grew. He was an entirely average-looking man, about her age, short hair, no beard, normal nose, light eyes, nothing to remember.
“Do you want something?” she repeated, and again he didn’t answer. He stood and looked at her, studying her face, her shoulders, the rest of her body, and then again her face, as though he were memorizing everything he saw.
The desire to run or to strike out at him and then run came over her, but she pressed her body into obedience and remained standing still. A full minute passed. From somewhere to her right, a church bell began to ring eight-thirty, and she was late for dinner.
She started walking toward the bridge on the other side of the campo. She did not look behind her but she listened for his footsteps. Her mind was humming and she could no longer remember if his footsteps had been audible before. As she reached the bridge, the desire, the need, to turn and see if he was behind her became all but overwhelming, but she resisted it and continued up and down the bridge and then into one of the narrowest calli in the city. As she entered it, she prayed that someone would approach from the other end, but it was empty. She shook with the desire to turn around, but she kept walking until she was out of the calle and at the next bridge.
Up and down and into Campo Santa Marina, where she had to decide which way to go. Turn right and save a few minutes, but pass down Calle dei Miracoli, which was a narrow place with little foot traffic, or continue straight and come out by San Giovanni Crisostomo and run into the heaviest foot traffic in the city as she went toward Strada Nuova and home. She continued straight ahead.
Sixteen
SHE MADE NO MENTION OF THE MAN AT DINNER, NOT WANTING to alarm her parents but also not wanting to alarm herself. He had done nothing to menace her, had not even spoken to her, yet he had unsettled her and, she admitted to herself while trying to pay attention to a story her mother was telling, had frightened her. The city was a safe island in a world that seemed to be going increasingly off its axis; to read the papers was to fear that some infection was abroad. She returned her attention to her mother’s story, and to her food. Homemade polenta made from grain sent to her father by an old friend who still grew corn in Friuli. The rabbit came from Bisiol, where her mother had been buying rabbit for twenty years. The artichokes were from Sant’Erasmo; her mother had recently joined a cooperative that delivered a basket of vegetables and fruit to the house twice a week. The purchaser had no choice about what was delivered: it was what was in season, and it was organic.
Her mother had complained about never having eaten so many apples in her life, but when Caterina ate one of them, cooked in red wine and covered with whipped cream, she would gladly have signed her mother up for another two months of apples. They talked of many things: her father’s work, her mother’s friends, her sisters’ marriages, her nieces and nephews. Caterina wondered, should it happen that she someday had an estate to leave, whether she would be happy to leave it—in the event of her not having husband or children—to her nieces and nephews? They were only children now but who knew what they would become as adults?
As her parents continued to talk and she continued to half listen to them, she thought about Steffani. He had passed most of his life in Germany, going back to Italy only occasionally and usually for fairly short periods. How much had he seen of his relatives or their children? Had he even seen them, known them, tossed them in the air and played with them and sung his songs to them? And the cousins, these men who descended from the children’s children of his cousins, with what right did they stake a claim on his papers and estate, and where had the idea of a “treasure” come from? No one had explained that to her. The only reference she’d found to his estate mentioned that, after his creditors had been paid, there remained “2,029 florins, some papers, some relics, medals, and music.” It was that “and music” that hit her with force. Exclude that and the man had lived seventy-four years: some papers, some money, some relics, and some medals. Treasure?