One Great Lie, page 13
On a night like this, with her tangle of anxiety, she wishes she weren’t on this island, with all its dusty remains of sickness and history. It was a lot of years ago, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with what’s happening to her right this minute, she tells herself. But she just wishes the ground wasn’t made of skeletons.
Chapter Twenty
Veronica Gambara, poet.
From a distinguished family, she received a prestigious education. When she was seventeen, she began sending poems to the famous poet Pietro Bembo, then thirty-two, who became her mentor. Little of her poetry was published during her lifetime, but she would correspond with many famous poets, including Bernardo Tasso and Pietro Aretino, who would later slander her, calling her a “laureated harlot,” essentially an educated slut.
(1485–1550)
In the morning, at breakfast, Avni doesn’t show up.
“Maybe someone should check on her,” Shaye says. She never seemed to like Avni, but she looks worried.
“I will,” Ashley says. “Be right back.”
Eliot and Leo are at the food table, piling up their plates. Hailey sips her coffee. “Does anyone know what she and Luca even did that day? She barely said anything about it.”
“Hot springs,” Katerina says. “Near Luca’s old village.”
“Tergesteo, or something? That’s what I heard her say,” Charlotte says.
“Testosterone?” Hailey cracks, and they all laugh.
“I think it was near his old village,” Katerina says. “I got the idea that it was fancy. Like, here’s the positive thing about ambition haunting you. The before and after. His village to some upscale spa place, I don’t know.”
Ashley is jogging back toward them. “She’s gone,” she says. Her cheeks are flushed. It’s already warm out this morning, and the air smells like lemons and seawater, sunny and beautiful smells, but Charlotte feels a sudden darkness. Dread is the word for it, even if she pushes that word away.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” Hailey says. “Like, out for breakfast somewhere?”
“Gone, gone. As in, there’s nothing in the room. No bags. Her bathroom is clean. No makeup, no shampoo, nothing. She left.”
“Why in the world would she leave?” Katerina says.
Eliot and Leo are back. “Cheese is the only food that matters,” Eliot says, and plunks down his plate.
“What’s wrong, you guys?” Leo asks. Leo’s like this. He notices things. It’s what makes him a great writer, Charlotte’s sure. He looks worried.
“Avni left,” Ashley says.
“No way,” Eliot says. And then to Charlotte, “I told you, they had sex or they didn’t.”
“God, Eliot,” Hailey says. “Stop it.”
“It’s not true anyway,” Shaye says.
“How do you know?” Eliot sticks a roll in his mouth.
“I know, okay? They didn’t. He wouldn’t. I just know. Jesus.”
“Jesus didn’t have anything to do with it,” Eliot says. “He wasn’t even here.”
“She was really confrontational with him yesterday. Maybe Luca kicked her out,” Katerina says. “I almost couldn’t blame him if he did. It was so disrespectful.”
“I’m going to call her. We need to find out what happened.” Ashley takes her phone from her pocket and tries right then, as they all wait. “No answer. One ring, like it’s turned off.”
“Way to leave without saying goodbye,” Hailey says.
* * *
It turns out Luca Bruni is gone too. At least for two days. He has to appear at a publishing event in New York, so Bethany Sparrow has arranged for a virtual visit with Ursula Sorrow, who happens to be a good friend of Luca Bruni’s. No one can believe their luck. Her, like, twelfth book just won another medal. She’s a little wacky, honestly. When she talks to them, she veers off in a hundred directions, and during the call, her face keeps freezing in weird expressions that make Eliot snicker. They all get the giggles like they’re in elementary school, even though Ursula Sorrow herself is talking to them, calling Luca Lulu and stuff like that.
Later, at the pool, Shaye swims laps, and Leo’s reading his third book on Italian history.
“I didn’t learn anything about writing, but hey. Now we know Lulu once pretended a banana was a penis at a fancy awards dinner,” Eliot says. His pink skin is actually getting brown, and he’s trying to grow a mustache, which they all make fun of.
“That was hilarious!” Hailey says.
Ashley was up in her room, but now there’s the sound of flip-flops approaching, and here she is, a towel around her shoulders. “Mystery solved,” Ashley announces. “I got a hold of Avni. Her mother got sick, she said. She had to catch the first plane out.”
“Oh, sad!” Katerina says.
“I didn’t really believe her at first, but she just said, ‘No! No, really. My father told me I had to come back.’ ”
It’s a relief. And it’s a double relief when Bethany Sparrow says that Eliot will be going on the next one-on-one trip, as soon as Luca returns. Charlotte was worried he’d pick Katerina, but she was wrong. Charlotte’s so glad she was wrong.
That night, though, she looks up the village of Tergesteo. She remembers the name thanks to Tergesteo/testosterone. But it’s not a village. Not at all. Her unease cranks up a notch.
“Shaye,” she says.
“What.” Shaye’s so irritable. She’s hard to be around, honestly.
“Tergesteo—where Luca and Avni went. It’s actually Esplanade Tergesteo. It’s a hotel.”
“So?”
“Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Not really. It’s a spa. They didn’t stay.”
“It just doesn’t feel right.”
“He didn’t do anything with her like you think.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me. I asked.”
“When? I mean, why?”
“Are you always so annoying? Dear God, how am I the only one with a roommate?” Shaye snaps.
Charlotte closes out the images of those glossy floors and curved glass walls and shining blue swimming pools with white chaises all around. She can’t imagine ever staying in a place like that, let alone with Luca Bruni. It looks incredible and expensive, like a dream, but she’d better just shut up.
Chapter Twenty-One
Compiuta Donzella (likely a pen name), one of the earliest Ialian female poets.
Three sonnets survive, and they discuss the only two life paths for a female besides becoming a courtesan: forced marriage, or a life of seclusion in a convent. Her talent was considered unnatural, miraculous, beyond the norm for her sex, so much so that for a while, even her actual existence was questioned, same as Nina Siciliana.
(Early thirteenth century)
“This was where all the papers—” Dante lifts both hands to indicate a rising. He and Charlotte stand in front of an open doorway, cordoned off. It’s part of a long white building, with curved arches and green shuttered windows. Charlotte cranes her neck to look inside. Picture a damp, musty cellar, and the smell of it too. She sees a pile of rubble—old brick, crumbled between two dark hovels. Also, the half-hearted signs of cleanup—a wheelbarrow full of debris, various tools tossed about, big bags of who-knows-what, no workers in sight. “This doorway…” Dante taps on the frame. “Was an iron grate? With holes. And so, the water… Whoosh! The old walls couldn’t take it this time. And when they fell, there was this… bella tesoro.”
“Beautiful something…,” Charlotte says.
“Treasure. Beautiful treasure.” Dante smiles. He combs his hair from his face with his fingers.
She was so happy when Dante called yesterday. Are you sure you want to spend your free day doing this? Showing me a convent? My guy friends at home would have to be bribed with food, Charlotte had said, when he’d suggested they meet at San Zaccaria. They are too busy playing American football and video games? he’d joked. Then he’d explained that his interest was natural, part of their culture. When students chose which kind of upper secondary school they wanted to attend—classics, science, fine arts, tech—liceo classico, literature and philosophy and history, was the oldest and the most demanding of all, not a place for sports teams. He thinks this is funny, that Americans have sports at school.
“Beautiful treasure, but bones, too.” Charlotte makes a face. She hasn’t forgotten that part. It’s eerie to think of that old cemetery, drowned by floodwaters.
“Yes, but the treasure! Even a record of dowry payments from the sixteenth century, when your relative was here. Isabella—I am forgetting. Your eyes are too pretty.”
It sounds like a line, but he seems to mean it. He pushes his glass up shyly. She smiles. “Di Angelo. Isabella di Angelo.”
“Of angels, of angels.” He taps his forehead, as if to set the name permanently in his brain. “Dottoressa Ricci keeps asking and asking, so I need to remember. This is how she is. She has the nail stuck on her head!”
He says it like it’s a compliment, but it’s hard to tell. “The dowry payments they’d make—I read about those.”
“A convent was much cheaper than if a daughter married. We see it on the list. Only hundreds of ducats, compared to thousands for marriage. More, if they were rich.”
“What would that be today?”
“Hmm. Impossible to say. A ducat was a gold coin. A piece of gold.”
“The convent was right here? It’s crazy to think of it. I have to take a picture so my family can see.” She fishes her phone out of her bag.
“Of course. It was over there, too, and gardens.” He points to the other side of the San Zaccaria church, with its flat white front that looks like a smashed wedding cake. “Let’s go in. There’s a surprise. Dai.”
They step through the doors of San Zaccaria, away from the July sun, and inside, the church is cool, deliciously cool. There’s a wax-and-wood-and-old-prayers smell, and above and all around, huge paintings and columns that rise to the high ceilings.
“Behind these paintings?” Dante whispers. “There are still the old grilles, where the nuns could listen to the service from inside the convent walls.”
“Man. They weren’t even let out to go to church? Wasn’t that the point of being in a convent?”
He makes a face. “Many of them were not even religious. Some tried to escape.”
“It’s so awful. Is this the surprise? The hidden grilles?”
“You’ll see.”
They walk down the aisle, then turn to view the huge paintings and altarpieces on either side of the church. “Who knows?” Dante says. “Your Isabella’s face could be right here somewhere in these paintings.” His eyes are so serious again behind his glasses that he seems to mean this, too.
“Wait. What do you mean? Really?”
“The nuns here? They were very important to art of the time. They hired these artists.” He nods toward the painting they stand in front of. “Commissioned them through the grilles of the convent! They approved the sketches, made the decisions. Financed it, even, through rich relatives. We study this in History of the Arts, three years.” He smiles.
“That’s a lot of art history in high school.”
“Is it?” he asks, and shrugs. “But the girls. They were artists themselves, too, you see? The nuns? And they put themselves in the art, their actual faces and figures. Set inside the paintings or sculptures. Images of their rings, their family coat of arms. Their own inscriptions on tombs. Signatures. To say, You will see me. Even though you have locked me away, I am here.”
“No way. I love that,” Charlotte says.
“Sometimes they painted their image in a place of honor. On the right side of Mary, or as large as a male saint.” Dante laughs.
“That’s amazing.” Charlotte’s beginning to love those nuns.
“They chose the artists. They decided the art. It was theirs. The art was the power.”
It gives her shivers, especially when she remembers how young they were. She wishes she was here, Isabella di Angelo, her face hidden in one of these paintings. She could be looking right at her and not even know it.
They’ve made a full circle, and now they’re at the front of the church again. “Over here,” he says. To the right, there’s a plain door marked with the words PLEASE CLOSE DOOR BEHIND YOU.
“Okay, this is the surprise, right?” she asks.
Dante just lifts his eyebrows mischievously. His dark eyes shine. He and Charlotte step down into a stone stairwell. A cool, damp mustiness circles around her. Dante takes Charlotte’s hand, leading her lower and lower underground. She likes the feel of his hand. She likes the look of the back of him, his curly hair, his jeans and T-shirt, hanging just-right loose and stylish on him. She likes the way he glances back over his shoulder at her and smiles again. Her heart trips with the adventure of it, and the giddy spookiness, too, because the stone walls close up in vaulted arcs overhead as they descend. Finally, here at the bottom of this subterranean place, the light is dim, except for a white beam shining on a large stone tomb.
It’s a crypt.
“Careful,” Dante says. They step onto a raised brick walkway, and as her eyes adjust to the light, she sees the most eerily beautiful sight. The crypt is flooded. Water surrounds them, covering the entire floor of the cavern. It’s a pool of mirrors, reflecting ancient stone columns, which appear to both rise from the water and descend into it, reflecting the tomb and the arches of the brick ceiling. The only sound is the drip, drip of water hitting water somewhere inside, an echoey, eternal sound. Shivers prickle up Charlotte’s arms, because it feels both sacred and strange. She sees the arched niches set into the walls too. Vaults with bones likely crumbled to dust by now.
“Who’s buried here?” Charlotte whispers, even though they’re the only ones down there. It’s the kind of place where a loud voice would be disrespectful and shattering.
“A few old doges. From the time the church was built? And rebuilt again in the 1500s.”
“Doges. They were the leaders of the city, right?” She read about them in her book.
“Duca? Duke, you say? Chosen from a powerful family.”
They walk along the brick path, passing slowly in front of each vault, dimly illuminated from above. They stop at the large upright tomb sitting at the center. The water shimmers. There’s a statue of a woman on the stone box. She wears Roman robes and a necklace, and she looks pleadingly toward heaven, with one arm outstretched and the other lifting her skirts from the floor. She’s so dramatic and unsettling and romantic that Charlotte feels her strength and her pain. Her image reflects in the water too. She appears to descend and to rise.
“Beautiful, yes?”
“Yes, very.” Charlotte wishes she could cross through the several inches of water along the floor and walk right up to her, but they stay on the path and look at her from a distance.
“Is it always flooded like this?”
“During the acqua alta, much worse.” With his hand, he shows her how high the water gets. Nearly to his waist.
“Yikes.”
“You see why Venezia does not have many crypts, yes?”
“Definitely.”
“We should get back to life,” he says.
* * *
Maria Luchessi, Dante’s mother, with her short, crimped hair and bold jewelry and piercing eyes, stares across the table at Charlotte. Charlotte was shocked when Dante asked her to come to dinner at their house above the bookstore. It was weeks before Charlotte met Adam’s dad, Don, and even then, it was, like, for two seconds passing him in the kitchen. And it doesn’t seem to have great meaning, either, the way meeting a parent might at home. It seems usual. A regular night. They’re sitting in the Luchessis’ small dining room, framed with tall, green shuttered windows and surrounded by the charming spillover from the Alta Acqua Libreria: a Roman bust on the sill, a wall jammed full of oil paintings in various sizes. A bookshelf holds hardbacks and paperbacks of all sizes and ages, but also a bronze horse, and an elaborate candlestick, and a beautiful framed drawing of an elephant. The tilting chandelier gives the room a warm glow, and the windows are open, and every now and then there’s the putter of a boat outside, or the sluicing sound of a gondola passing.
After getting a tour of the house, Charlotte now knows that there’s a tiny bathroom and three small bedrooms up that narrow, narrow stairwell—Maria’s, Dante’s, and the snug, book-filled alcove that used to belong to Dante’s sister, Bria, before she went away to university (as Dante says it) in Rome. Around the corner from the dining room and kitchen, there’s also a living room with an old red velvet couch, and carved wood end tables, and two green velvet chairs made soft and worn over the years.
That evening, dinner (bigoli in salsa—a thick noodle with a sauce, though Charlotte can’t quite tell what it is) is delicious, and she feels like she’s in a cozy hideaway with those wood beamed ceilings. Even though Maria’s tone is abrupt, and her laugh is sort of cynical, she seems to know something about everything, and her eyes warm with devotion every time she tells another story about Dante. She’s obviously really proud of him, and from the amount of times Maria mentions liceo classico, Charlotte understands that it’s the most prestigious program.
Dante is so much more relaxed at home, louder, less shy, and he leans back in his chair, and pokes his fork in the air for emphasis. They’ve asked Charlotte lots of questions about her life in America—about her parents, her sister, her plans for university, her city. And Charlotte’s learned so much about Dante tonight—how he loved his old dog, Luigi, now gone, and how he broke his arm the first time he played rugby, and how his father, who lives on the mainland, is a historian, and how his parents divorced when he was eight. How, God, he’s cute in that light, and maybe all lights, and how great it feels when she says something that makes him laugh. It’s like she’s won a million dollars when he laughs like that.
