Belladonna Read online

“You know I shall be pleased to help you, however well I can,” he goes on. “But that does not mean I should tell you precise details of how and what to do.” He takes a sip of grappa, distilled from his most recent harvest. “If you are sincere, you have much work to do. Once you begin, you must suppress the instinct to want to lash out for immediate results, and learn how to bide your time. Even if it takes years.”

  “It has already been years.”

  “Then it will be years more. There is plenty of time for all of it. You, my dear, are in far more contact with your need for revenge than you might imagine. I sense there is an unspoken fury within you threatening to explode.”

  “Yes. I want out,” she says. “I’ve said it to Tomasino already. I want out of myself. I wsant to become someone else. La bella donna. I want to be the Belladonna you think I am.”

  “That is good. It will keep you fighting.” He plants his cane firmly on the terrace and stands up. “Please, come with me, all of you. I want us to share a small something.”

  Leandro withdraws inside, then soon returns with a tiny vial, a tea towel, and a small bowl clutched in one hand. Beckoning with a large flashlight, he leads us down in the deepening twilight to one of the trees sheltering the stage of his outdoor theater. As he shines the beam up, we notice an owl carved into the bark. I’d never have noticed it in the daylight. Obviously, it’s not meant to be noticed.

  “Why an owl?” Ariel asks.

  “Why do you think?” Leandro replies.

  “Symbol of mortal wisdom,” I say. “Unblinking and exact.”

  “Yes,” he says. “And …”

  “Of nightly prowling, of the killer instinct,” Ariel says. “Waiting to pounce.”

  Leandro smiles broadly. We so rarely see him pleased like that. He turns off the flashlight and leads us back to the fountain of a laughing Dionysus. He pulls out several handkerchiefs, uncorks the vial, sprinkles some powder on his wrist, and quickly inhales it. I am taken aback, wondering if it’s snuff, or a strange drug. This is most unlike Leandro. I notice that Ariel has paled even in the dark. She takes a step back, ready to flee.

  Leandro sees our faces and smiles once more. “It is merely a little bit of snuff that Caterina mixed for me,” he explains. “You see, the gods are appeased only by ritual. We must soothe them if they are to believe we are sincere. This is a sneezing ritual, a story described by Casanova, told to me by my grandfather. To perform it correctly, Casanova’s lover gave him sneezing powder similar to that which I have here, and it caused both their noses to bleed. They put their heads together over a basin, so their blood could mingle together.”

  He gestures to us. “Like so.” He sprinkles a bit of powder and I snort it up. Matteo does the same. It tingles all the way down my throat and makes me want to giggle. Ariel slowly holds out her wrist. Please, my darling, trust him. It’s not a drug. He’ll do you no wrong.

  Once she and Matteo have inhaled, we follow Leandro’s lead and bend our heads down. Within seconds, our noses are dripping. Leandro passes us the bowl, and our drops of blood mingle with his. He scoops a palmful of water from the fountain and adds it to the bowl.

  “And now to Caterina,” he says, handing Ariel the tea towel so she can wipe her nose.

  I don’t want to know what Caterina is going to do. It doesn’t matter. We are partners in plotting, preparing ourselves for battle, bound in blood.

  Houses have souls. You can tell as soon as you walk inside whether they’re happy or miserable or neglected. Or maybe even haunted. I knew the minute I saw the rows of floppy straw hats hanging on marble hooks in the hall by Leandro’s kitchen that this was a safe house, despite its daunting history and grandeur.

  I still feel safe a year and a half later as the moonlight gleams on the wide terrace outside the library as we wait for Leandro to join us, preparing to toast in the New Year, 1950. Year of the Tiger, according to the Chinese. Yes, I should say we have much to be thankful for: a protected palazzo to hide in, a thriving child, adoring servants, and the daily company of the most charming embodiment of nonprying discretion, the Count della Robbia.

  This year is going to be different. We’ve been quiet long enough. Something’s coming. I feel it. Call it a hunch, and not just in my psychic kneecap.

  “Come on,” I say to Ariel as I fill her glass with a spicy vintage Brunello. She refuses to drink champagne. “Make a wish.”

  “That’s simple,” she says. “I wish I were a man.”

  “I wish that when I die I will know that I would come back as a man,” I say. “A whole man.”

  Matteo smiles wryly. “I wish I could come back as a dog,” he says.

  “Oh really?” I ask. “What breed?”

  “Neapolitan mastiff, maybe. Or an Irish wolfhound.”

  “I’ll get you some one day,” says Ariel. “Protectors. But you already are my protector. For that, I toast you, my Matteo.”

  She has a peculiar look on her face. I close my eyes and conjure her as a sleeping form inside a chrysalis, cocooned in darkness, gathering her strength. If that chrysalis were crystal-clear, I’d see her hunched over and hardening inside it, laying the foundation for the fortress of her psyche; the fearful quivering of the woman in Merano disappearing, bit by tiny bit.

  But looking at such a thing isn’t so clear, is it? What we wish for never is.

  That’s because down there in the blackness the little worms are gnawing. But leave it to my darling. She is making friends with the crawling creatures of the dark, so that she can conquer them and bend them to her will. Soon she will burst forth like the butterflies hovering over the honeysuckle under the kitchen window.

  And then you’ll wish that nice, quiet little Belladonna back again, won’t you? Once you know the truth.

  Too bad if it’s taking a bit of time. She can’t be rushed; no creature can emerge without a struggle. That would be as tedious as listening to the spoiled rich kids from the neighboring villas chattering about squandering their inheritance on gold-plated steering wheels and lazy months in Sardinia.

  Not that I should talk, pampered slug that I have become. At least I have superior taste. Leandro has been teaching me. We talk for hours nearly every day, about life and love and art and history and the Machiavellian conniving it takes to run a shipping empire and stay one tub ahead of Niarchos and Onassis. We talk, too, about suffering, and sometimes about Ariel. He always calls her Belladonna, so Matteo and I have taken to calling her that, too. Ariel will be no more. Once, though, I made the dumb mistake of calling her Bella.

  “Don’t ever call me Bella,” she screamed.

  “Why not?” I was taken aback by her fury.

  “Because that used to be my name,” she hissed. “Isabella. The pathetic little Isabella Ariel Nickerson. The sweet, docile thing who disappeared off the face of the earth. Or have you forgotten already?”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten. It was just a stupid mistake. And I’m sorry. I won’t ever do it again.”

  “Isabella’s dead. She died a long time ago. And Ariel is getting on my nerves. Ariel sounds nice, and airy-fairy, and pleasing. I don’t like who she is, either. I don’t want to be pleasing.”

  “Doesn’t Belladonna bother you?” I venture to ask.

  “Not the way Leandro says it,” she mutters.

  Don’t try to distract me from the scent of this path, my darling. I’ve seen you having more and more surreptitious little chats with Caterina Mariani, the strega cook, whose pasta is as toothsome as her potions.

  It’s about time, too.

  Even before our New Year’s toast, Belladonna had started coming up more regularly to the big house, to our regular Sunday lunches with Leandro. He’d sit at the other end of the immense wooden dining room table, and we’d talk of pleasant nothings, of the beauty of the gardens and the state of the harvest. Leandro did not visit our quarters, and as the months went by, Belladonna began to stroll away from the security of her room, and the anxiety finally started to seep out of
my heart.

  When we’d first arrived, Leandro put us in one of the guest cottages, where Belladonna retreated in a state of near catatonia for months. Perhaps because she was freed from worry about her surroundings, she allowed herself to regress emotionally, and was in a far worse state than she’d been in Merano. She took comfort from no one save Matteo, who’d communicate with her in some sort of pidgin sign language, and Bryony, for whom she’d try to rouse herself into some form of essential mothering. And from the radio. She’d asked only for a powerful radio, and she listened to it all the time. Often I heard her talking softly back to it, at all hours.

  At night, I used to hear Belladonna crying softly in the dark, her radio turned down low, but she wouldn’t let me near her to wipe her tears. During the day, when I brought her meals in on a tray as I used to do in Belgium, I’d catch glimpses of her pacing, scribbling in notebooks Leandro had given me for her use, talking to the voices on the radio. Plotting something, in her way, to keep herself from going completely mad.

  This is how she’s mourning what’s been lost, I told myself, on her own terms. Let her be.

  At least she felt safe in her room: Its windows were too high and too narrow to be breached. It was reached only through a passage hidden behind a hanging tapestry in the room I shared with Matteo, and opened out onto a small terrace with a sheer drop on all sides, shaded by tall hedges with thorns on top, planted in fat, deep terra-cotta pots. We have made it safe for her and safe for Bryony, but impregnable for intruders.

  Here, she imprisoned herself. All we could do was watch, and wait.

  Our little cottage used to be a retreat for the abbot of the monastery, which is what Ca’ d’Oro once was. Perched on a steep hill, its descending terraces overlooking the village below, surrounded by acres of sunflowers, grapevines, and olive trees, the immense palazzo is approachable only by one narrow, curving road. It looks frighteningly austere from below, but every time I approach it after a jaunt to the market I still feel a frisson of pleasure that this is what we can call our home. Maybe it’s the comfort we’ve found inside the solid ring of its thick stone walls, where there are wood ceilings decorated with painted zodiacs in the living room; multi-colored tiled floors in the halls, cooling our feet in the summer swelter; busts from Pompeii lining niches in the long corridor on the second floor, where the monks’ cells have been turned into bedrooms; and fantastic frescoes of dancing nymphs and satyrs painted on the walls in Leandro’s bedroom. Naturally, I gravitate to the kitchen, where copper pots hang over marble sinks and Caterina is bustling, chopping tomatoes with her husband, Roberto, but I also love to retreat to the reading room in the bell tower near the staff wing which overlooks the central courtyard, or to the turquoise swimming pool, which appears carved into the hill. From there it seems that the ground itself is the same color as Leandro’s ring.

  Where we all feel most at home, though, is the library. It is far more marvelous than the one in Belgium, which we never speak of, and I often find Leandro in it. Unless he’s gone off on one of his business meetings in Rome or Florence, but this is rare. His shipping empire seems to be run by capable lieutenants, and he leaves most of its aggravation to them. I suspect he’s been looking for leads to help us in our search, but so far he’s uncovered nothing. We don’t talk about it, and I’d never mention it to Belladonna. If it seems fruitless now, it may stop her before she is ready to leave our hidey-hole and start her hunt in earnest.

  At the end of the day Leandro and I often walk to the goldfish pond dappled with shadows from the cypress trees, past the fountain of Dionysus spurting water instead of wine, past the chapel and the family vault, down the winding path where the owl sits guard, to the theater with its open-air stage shaded by two giant trees, their branches intermingling over the boards. There, we often discover Belladonna sitting on the carved granite steps, watching patches of sunlight chase one another over the ancient stones.

  Sometimes we sit in the terrace off the library and watch her swinging slightly in a hammock strung between two gnarled apricot trees, sipping from the glass of watercress juice laced with Caterina’s tonic herbs, to strengthen her blood. Leandro is patient, waiting for her to harden. He knows she’ll come to him when she’s ready, the way I do already. In the meantime, he is content to instruct me in the ways of his world. His staff does, too. Naturally, they all love me because I speak their language, with a few Brooklyn gems thrown in for spice. And because I am so deliciously charming.

  Every morning there is a heated discussion about who will be allowed to watch over Bryony that day. Her favorite is the plump Roberto, probably because he always comes to her with a biscotti he baked specially for her, which good-naturedly infuriates Dino and Renaldo, who tend the horses; and Pasquale and Guido, the chauffeurs who tend the cars; and Bruno, the head gardener, and all the maids. Carla Fantucci, the head housekeeper, is most likely singing lullabies to Bryony. Even her taciturn husband, Mario, the butler, had been seen to crack a smile when Bryony grabbed onto his legs for balance when she was learning how to walk. It’s as if this laughing little girl with the strawberry blond ringlets and immense blue-green eyes has brought the house back to life, just as Leandro had hoped. Nowadays, the staff always seems to be singing: nonsense songs for Bryony, and folk songs and arias for yours truly, who has succumbed to instruction by Carla, who does not remark on the unnatural pitch of my voice. Belladonna diligently practices the piano and harpsichord, and once in a while I hear Matteo tripping over exercises and scales. It’s to keep his fingers nimble. He’d rather practice his card and juggling tricks and disappearing acts with the rabbits and his top hat, rehearsing for the children of the staff, who are less fearful of him now that he can amuse them. I guess he’s decided to be the world’s first silent magician.

  If only he could conjure the lost bits of himself.

  Still, Bryony is his delighted main assistant; she toddles around, trailing colored handkerchiefs and Roman coins, and Roberto gives her lettuce, which she loves to feed to the bunnies they keep in a hutch near the vegetable garden.

  I wasn’t too surprised when her first word was neelio, short for coniglio, the Italian word for rabbit. Belladonna bit her lip to keep from laughing when she heard it. When Bryony didn’t say the word Mama, I guess she was relieved it wasn’t puttanesca.

  To all the staff, Belladonna is simply who Leandro said she is, a friend who’d been ill for a very long time and who needs to be left alone to soak up the fresh Tuscan air. They’d no more dream of prying than judge any of us, and hope only that she feels a little bit better every day. They have more important things to worry about, like tending the endless expanse of gardens and the vines and the horses, or fixing the plumbing in the fountains, or painting the proscenium arch of the theater before a concert given by the local brass band. Matteo and I lend a hand whenever we can, and the days float by in a pleasant haze.

  In the meantime, I am worrying about my seat. Riding, that is. I’ve decided to become an expert equestrian, and Dino is trying to teach me. I’m pretty hopeless; I can’t get the balance right.

  “That’s because you’re unbalanced,” Belladonna said when I complained about it.

  “Oh really? Well, I’d like to see you try.”

  She frowned and said no more, so I was surprised when she woke me up early a few days later. “Come on, get up,” she said. “I want to get on a horse.”

  I groaned. I am not what you call a happy morning person. “Let me sleep.”

  “No. You have to come with me. I don’t want to be alone with Dino.”

  Dino, mind you, is probably about seventy-five, and a great-grandfather several times over. Rinaldo can’t be much younger. No one really rides anymore, and I suspect Leandro keeps the horses and their keepers on because, where the staff is concerned, he’s an old softy. To him, they are family, and he can’t bear to let them go.

  As I threw on my riding gear, Belladonna sat on the edge of my bed. Matteo was still snoring slightly.
“I want to be strong. I need to get strong,” she whispered. “I want out of myself.”

  I had been wanting to hear this for so long that I forgave her for awakening me. And as soon as she entered the stables, the horses all nickered. Botheration. I pretty much gave up my riding prospects right then. Belladonna was about to discover the pleasure of talking to and caring for animals, as well as learning from Dino. His grizzled face came to life every morning when he saw her, thrilled to be of use to Leandro’s special friend. He was quietly patient, and she was such a quick learner, surprisingly fearless, recognizing that mastery of a large horse could give her a sense of power she’d not felt before. I don’t know how she did it, but even the most recalcitrant nag seemed to adore her. Her thinness and pallor were soon replaced by firm muscles and a glowing tan the color of butterscotch.

  It was then that Leandro brought us Orlando Pitti, a big brawny Venetian with more black hair than I thought possible on a grown man, a bashed-in nose, and lots of crooked teeth. He smiles often, but his dark brown eyes are watchful, like Leandro’s. An accomplished black belt, he specializes in all matters of security. He’ll be living in the big house, staying close to teach us whatever skills we want to absorb.

  Our routine is simple. We get up, and Belladonna rides for an hour. We eat melon and bland toasted Tuscan bread for breakfast; then Orlando takes us to target practice before the heat becomes too much for our concentration. We alternate among rifles, shotguns, pistols, even a bow and arrow.

  “Shoot steady,” Orlando says. “Breathe carefully. Aim for his heart.”

  Every other day, we have a lesson in self-defense, and practice our falls and throws in the sweet-smelling piles of hay in the stables. Bryony mimics us, running around as we trip each other, dripping with sweat, pulling the horses’ tails as she screams Hiyaahh! whenever we do. After lunch, I lounge around, reading my way through the library; Matteo rehearses his magic show, or disappears on the grounds. He’s become friendly with the equally taciturn Marcello Rolandi, who works on the fountains, and they often tinker with the mechanics or stroll down to the village with Orlando for a glass of vino. Belladonna studies Italian and French, practicing with the staff, or she meanders through the gardens, stopping to pull a handful of weeds or prune a rosebush, a camera slung around her neck. Whenever Marisa Columbo arrives"she’s the fresco expert who drives down from Lucca every few months to check Leandro’s walls"she gives Belladonna a lesson in light and composition with the beat-up Leica I found in a drawer in the bell tower. I have been given the task of developing the film, for Belladonna panicked when we first went into the darkroom Leandro set up near the root cellar. Dumb, thoughtless Tomasino: I should have known better than to take her down anywhere in confining darkness.