The Light in the Ruins (2 page)

But if they were not here about Vittore, did that mean that something horrific had happened to Marco? She tried to convince herself that this wasn’t likely either. Francesca’s husband was in Sicily, and there was no fighting there. Still, he was a soldier—a captain—as well as an engineer, and the idea that he might be wounded or dead caused her to feel a wave of nausea, and she placed her palms flat on the stucco windowsill for balance. She told herself that she was overreacting; this had to be something else. Why would the army dispatch two officers to inform the family that an engineer was dead on a Sicilian beach or an archeologist had died at his post in a … a museum? Didn’t they send telegrams?

She felt Francesca breathing behind her. “Do you know them?” Cristina asked her sister-in-law.

Francesca shook her head. “Why would I know some thug and his sorry little sidekick?”

The driver was standing beside his vehicle, but the officers were approaching the villa. The German outranked the Italian but looked a decade younger: mid-thirties, Cristina guessed. Maybe thirty-five. The Italian had his dark hair pomaded almost flat on his head and a thin mustache he had waxed into a pair of curls. His cheekbones were sharp; he was a handsome man. The German
was two or three inches taller, his hair the washed-out color of the wheat fields in August. He was carrying a sidearm; the Italian was not.

“They’re going to want something, you know,” her sister-in-law added. “The barbarians are here to commandeer something. One of the cars, maybe. Or a truck. Maybe they’re after the sheep.”

“I hope that’s all it is,” Cristina murmured.

With one hand Francesca briefly rubbed her sister-in-law’s back and shoulders and reassured her: “You don’t need to worry about the boys. I am sure this is another annoyance. Not a new tragedy.”

The front door was open to catch whatever breezes might come in from the west, but the officers hovered in the entryway, their caps in their hands. Francesca beckoned them into the foyer, a wide and airy room itself, with a long flat window and shelves of Etruscan vases, amphoras, and kraters—some replicas and some original, but so common that the museums hadn’t a use for them. “My children are sleeping, so you’ll have to speak softly,” Francesca said, her way of greeting the two men.

The Italian nodded. “I am Major Lorenzetti. This is Colonel Decher.” He glanced into the kitchen and the dining room and continued, “Your home is as lovely as I’d heard. I presume you two are the marchese’s daughters.”

“I am the marchese’s daughter-in-law,” Francesca corrected him, emphasizing her father-in-law’s title in a fashion that conveyed how absurd she thought it was. Francesca believed that the very notion of dukes and princes and counts in the middle part of the twentieth century was ridiculous. She found it a source of unending wonder that her people were ruled by a dictator and a puppet king and her father-in-law owned a small fiefdom. Cristina knew that Francesca was fundamentally apolitical, but when pressed to claim an affiliation with any political structure or school of thought, the woman would express a vague predisposition toward the Hollywood star system in America, because studio heads and movie stars dressed well, made art, and left her alone. “This,” she continued now, motioning toward Cristina, “is the
marchese’s only daughter. My father-in-law has two boys and this one lovely girl.”

The Italian major bowed just the tiniest bit. “Of course. I spoke without thinking. You must be Francesca,” he said. “And you must be Cristina. Is the marchese home?”

“He and his wife, the marchesa”—and here Francesca again briefly paused—“are down in the olive grove with the overseer.”

“They’ll be back soon?”

“That’s likely.”

“Then we can wait.”

“If you wait quietly. Remember, my children just started to nap.”

The Italian nodded, but the German shook his head and scowled. Cristina worried that her sister-in-law’s insolence had gone far enough and jumped in. “Please, let’s wait for my father on the veranda,” she said. “It’s shady there and you’ll be more comfortable. I can bring you some iced tea.”

It was clear, however, that she had already waited too long to try to mollify their guests. In an Italian that was heavily accented with German, Colonel Decher snapped, “We don’t have time to wait, we’re due back in Florence. I don’t see why you can’t show us what we need to see as well as your father could. I understand there was a dig on your property in 1938. That’s why we’re here. We want to see the necropolis, and given our time constraints, we want to see it now.”

Cristina almost laughed. She had been shivering slightly, and now her whole body relaxed. This visit had nothing to do with either of her brothers. It had nothing to do with the needs of their armies’ quartermasters. This pair wanted nothing, it seemed, but to see the underground tombs on the far side of the vineyard. The family had come across the burial site when they had expanded the vineyard in 1937 and broken ground for a new shed that would accommodate a larger press and additional barrels. The builders had understood quickly that they had unearthed, literally, a small Etruscan tomb. The first vestiges they discovered? Three columns.
Two were mere stumps, but one still towered seven feet high when they cleared away the cedars and the brush and the soil. Then they found a pair of funerary urns. At that point the family moved their plans for the new shed to the other side of the vineyard, and a few months after that the archeologists and historians arrived for the dig. The younger of Cristina’s two older brothers, Vittore, had joined the group and found his calling.

“Yes, I can show it to you,” Cristina said. “But I hope you won’t be disappointed. It’s not really a necropolis. That would imply it’s much, much bigger than it is. And there’s not a lot there now. The artifacts that had value—the urns and the sarcophagi and the larger vases—all went to the museum in Arezzo.”

“Which means they’re probably in Berlin by now,” Francesca murmured, but she was staring out the window as she spoke and so Cristina did not believe that Decher had heard her.

“Fine,” the colonel said. “Show us whatever remains. Do we drive or walk?”

“We can walk,” Cristina told him. Then she said to her sister-in-law, “I’ll get some candles and take the gentlemen there. That way, you can stay with the children. If Father returns, I’m sure he’ll want to join us.” She glanced out toward the automobile, where the young driver was studying a map. For the first time she really looked at the private. He was German and might have been as young as she was. “Would your driver like to wait inside while we’re gone?” she asked Lorenzetti, but before he could respond, Decher said, “He’ll remain at his post.” And then the colonel pivoted smartly on his heels and started outside. Lorenzetti rolled his eyes and shrugged, a small apology of sorts, and motioned for Cristina to go first, as if they were entering a ballroom for a dance. Behind them, Cristina heard her sister-in-law snort.

They passed the statues beside the loggia and in the garden, Venus and the chimera, and then continued out toward the fields. The air was dry and the grass felt like twine as it brushed over
Cristina’s toes, and she found herself gazing at the high black boots that the two officers were wearing. She had slipped into her sandals before they had left the villa, because eventually they would have to cross a thin path carved into rock to reach the tombs. The path was no more than sixty meters long—two millennia earlier, it had been far more extensive—but there were sharp points on the tufa stone and it wasn’t smart to walk there in bare feet. Still, Cristina could not imagine wearing high leather riding boots in the heat of the afternoon the way soldiers were expected to. She had a pair a bit like them, but this time of year she wore them only at the very beginning or the very end of the day, when she was placing a saddle on her beloved Arabella and going for a ride.

Overhead they heard birds. They smelled jasmine and oleander. Neither Decher nor Lorenzetti said a word as they walked, and she stifled her own need to speak, including her interest in why they wanted to see her estate’s underground ruins. They passed the long rows of Sangiovese grape arbors and then descended a steep slope, and Cristina cut ahead of them because the brush was growing thicker and higher and they were approaching a path they would have to navigate single-file. In a moment they would reach the Y. If they turned right, they would continue through a copse of cedar and beech and reach the small Rosati family cemetery, including the modest Roman temple her grandfather had built. If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would turn from sod to stone, and it would seem as if they were walking inside a crag in a cliff. The sky would be reduced to a thin swath of blue, broken in parts by the branches of the trees that grew above them along the sides of this ancient channel. The stretch reminded her of the photos she had seen of the trenches from the earlier world war, minus the wooden planks on which the soldiers stood. And at the end they would reach the Etruscan tomb.

Finally Lorenzetti broke the silence. “Have you heard from Marco lately?”

She turned back to the major, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew my brother.”

“I don’t. Well, I don’t know Marco. I know Vittore.”

“How?”

“From Florence, of course. Sometimes we work together.”

She considered this, aware that Francesca would probably have interrogated the pair if she had been present and Lorenzetti had just announced that he knew Vittore. “Why didn’t you tell us this back at the villa?”

“I started to. But your sister-in-law didn’t seem especially pleased by our visit.”

“More the reason you should have.”

He shrugged. “Neither Colonel Decher nor I has any need to curry her favor.”

“Does Vittore know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Are you an archeologist? An art historian?”

“The latter,” said Lorenzetti. “I could bore you to death with what I know about Donatello and bas-relief. These days I am merely a soldier—or, to be precise, the host for Colonel Decher. The colonel has joined us from Paris. He’s come to the Uffizi because apparently there has been some discussion that select artistic treasures may have to be moved to Germany for safeguarding until the end of the war. Lately there seems to be a particular interest in Etruscan artifacts.”

She understood that
safeguarding
was a euphemism for theft. According to Vittore, the Germans were much more likely to commandeer art from the museums and cathedrals in the occupied lands than they were from their ally here in the Mediterranean, but as it grew apparent that Italy would be invaded, the German presence, measured in both curators and tanks, was growing.

“Of course, I know very little about the Etruscans,” Lorenzetti added. “I find their bucchero aesthetically interesting but understand next to nothing about the firing process—how some of their pottery wound up that remarkable black. But ask me about the old
sacristy in San Lorenzo? My lectures could have you sleeping like a baby in minutes.”

She turned to Decher. “Is your specialty Etruscan art?”

He dipped his chin and for the first time offered the tiniest hint of a smile. “Before the war I was an architect. Now I’m a soldier. All I know about the Etruscans comes from a single book I read in my quarters the other night.”

“Well, they were a great mystery as a people. Vittore finds it intriguing how little we know about them.” Then: “And you both work with Vittore at the museum? He’s never mentioned you.”

“I’ve known him since February,” said Lorenzetti. “But the colonel has known him barely a week. He and his adjutant just arrived. We all happen to be billeted at the same hotel and are all, to varying degrees, a part of the same little museum … team.”

“What do you do, Major Lorenzetti?”

“Just like your brother,” the Italian officer said, his voice delighting in the irony, “I oversee and preserve our nation’s rich artistic heritage.”

For a long moment, Cristina watched as the two officers stared at the arched doorways cut into the stone. The German paused to decapitate a couple of mushrooms with the tip of his boot. She had taken guests here before—family friends, her father’s business associates—and she had been present when Vittore had led his fellow students on tours. Initially everyone was unimpressed.