The Light in the Ruins (20 page)

“Why didn’t you join them?”

“I wanted to be alone. I wanted some quiet.”

He paused. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“No, not at all! I was actually getting bored.” She took a yellow flower he didn’t recognize, each of its petals shaped like a pinecone
and spotted like a leopard, and placed it behind the pin that held the Iron Cross to his tunic. “There. Now you have some color,” she said. Then she shook her head and added, “You must be roasting inside that uniform.”

“I am.”

“I promise, you won’t be court-martialed if you take off your jacket. I won’t tell a soul.”

“What about the flower?”

She plucked it from behind the medal and placed it behind his ear. “Better?”

And with that, he unbuttoned his tunic and slung it over his shoulder. He felt the box with the necklace in his jacket’s hip pocket bounce against the very middle of his back.

She was vaguely aware of the necklace as she kissed him on the terrace beside the swimming pool, but mostly she was savoring the same dizzying rush she had experienced when they had stood alone together in the tombs. Now, as she felt his tongue against hers and his fingers upon the sides of her face, she was conscious of the way that seemingly every nerve in her body was tingling. She stood on her toes in her sandals and could feel her legs shaking. Her whole body was trembling. Certainly she had kissed other men—boys, actually. Other boys. She had felt boys’ hands on her breasts; she had been aware of the desperate urgency they felt—she, too, sometimes. Never, however, had she felt quite this same voraciousness. This hunger. And so for the briefest of moments she wondered what it was about this kiss that was different, and she recalled a painting by a Milanese Romantic from the previous century: a man in a hat and a young woman in a mauve dress that fell to the floor. Her face was in his hands, too. But the image lasted in her mind only as long as a breeze, because then she was relishing the feel of his lips against hers and the way their whole mouths and tongues seemed to be merging. She wrapped her arms around the small of his back and pulled his body against hers, and suddenly they had
moved in such a way that his thigh was between her legs—Had she done this? Had he? No matter, no matter at all—and the pressure against her groin was causing her heart to race. She was quivering between her legs, and the sensation became electric when his hands slid down her body, down her neck and her ribs and her hips, and suddenly they were caressing her rear, just the merest wisps of cotton clothing separating her skin from his. She allowed her own hands to drift down from his back and across his hips, reaching for the bulge at the front of his uniform pants, all the while rubbing and grinding herself against the hard muscle of his thigh.

That small part of her that had momentarily analyzed their kiss—that had seen in her mind a painting by (and the name flashed in and out of her head) Francesco Hayez—had now been subsumed by desire. All she was aware of was his tongue and his hands and his thigh, the fact that they were all alone, and how beautifully their bodies fit together.

Francesca sat on the terrace and watched the late afternoon sky growing black in the distance, and how the cypress trees at the edge of the village, across the ravine and near the granary, were starting to bow in the breeze. The storm would be here in minutes. She sipped her wine and listened to her children giggling as they played a card game on the rug in the library behind her, on the other side of the open doors. The German lieutenant had returned to the villa three times in the two weeks since he had given Cristina that necklace, and this worried Francesca. She neither liked this Strekker nor trusted him, in large measure because he was a Nazi, but also because he was a part of that whole crowd at the Uffizi that her brother-in-law loathed. Idiots and philistines and racists, the whole lot of them, Vittore had said. And yesterday when the lieutenant had been here, he had hinted that even more of his associates would be coming in a few days to see the Etruscan tombs and the estate. Not just the usual crowd—that Decher and Lorenzetti and Voss. A swarm of others. And this time, the lieutenant
said, he wanted to show them all of the villa and the gardens and the cemetery, because, he insisted, the Villa Chimera itself was a work of art.

She wished her in-laws would draw a line in the sand and stop this lunacy. Tell their daughter to steer clear of that Nazi lieutenant. She wished Antonio would forbid the Germans from setting a single foot on his land. Wasn’t he (and even in her mind she said the words with disdain) a marchese? She was confident that if Marco were here he would intervene. He would talk to his sister. He would talk to his father. He would end this madness.

When she looked up, she saw Cristina in the doorway. Her sister-in-law was leaning against the frame and smiling. “I love it when the air is this charged,” she said.

In the distance they could both hear the tinkle of the bells on the sheep as they were herded into their barn.

“Right now you love everything,” Francesca scoffed.

“It’s true. I think I feel like you must have felt when you and Marco were first dating.”

“I rather doubt that. The man I fell in love with didn’t walk around in a German uniform and pillage our country’s sculptures and paintings.”

“I know who he really is. I know what’s beneath that uniform.”

“Do you? Well, that is nothing to be proud of.”

“You know what I mean.”

Francesca stood up and sighed. She threw the last of her wine into the grass beside the terrace. “Come,” she said. “We should close the shutters before the storm arrives.”

Vittore paused for a long moment on the thin curb on the Via Ghibellina outside the Bargello, honestly not sure where he was going. Then he decided. He started walking east, away from the city center, toward the cramped apartment where a woman his age named Giulia slept with him for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that he brought her food. Her husband had died
fighting in Greece, and her father had been dead for years. Her mother now lived in Fiesole, and sometimes he walked there with the young woman—she wasn’t precisely his girlfriend—especially when he had brought food for her mother as well. Giulia had a face as round as a cheese wheel, the gloriously plump cheeks of a toddler, and eyes that were at odds with the reality of the world: they always were filled with mirth, even when she was tired from her job as a typist at the radio station. She was not heavy—it was impossible to be heavy these days—but Vittore presumed that ten or fifteen years from now, when this war was merely a series of horrific and degrading memories, she might be. Sometimes he fantasized that they would be married then. He imagined that she would be a wonderful mother. In his mind, they were living in Rome. He had always wanted to live in Rome. Her hair was the brown of a clove, and it framed her face like a wimple.

He found a vendor in the piazza near Santa Croce who sold him two eggs, a couple of stale rolls, and a slice of moldering ham at a price that was exorbitant, but not nearly as high as it would have been if he weren’t wearing a uniform and armed with a pistol. Then he continued on his way to Giulia’s.

Giulia wrapped herself inside Vittore’s shirt because it was the first article of clothing she found on the floor by her bed, but she only buttoned the bottom third. As she stood, he pulled at the tail from his spot on the mattress, less because he desired one last glimpse of her round derriere (
Is there any part of her that is not spherical?
he wondered briefly) than because he knew it would make her feel desired. She swatted at his hand good-naturedly and continued on to the apartment’s only other room, a square with a single window the size of a serving tray that was part kitchen, part dining room, and part den. There she boiled the eggs and put the rolls beside the pot of water so the heat from the top of the stove would soften them. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with the ham.

“Fry it,” Vittore suggested. He had pulled on his pants and followed her. “Won’t that kill whatever’s on it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“It is a very scary piece of meat,” he agreed.

“And you were assured it was ham when you bought it?”

“I was. The fellow swore on his life.”

“I think it’s from a rat.”

He held up the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Too big. Have you ever seen a rat this big?”

“You’ve never been to the basement of this building. The rats are bigger than dogs.”

“I say you fry it in oil.”

“I say we fry it in kerosene.”

“Then we can’t eat it.”

“I know. But I also won’t have to fear that whatever creatures are on it will hatch and crawl into my bed tonight.”

He dropped the meat onto the wooden block on the counter and pulled her to him. He ran his hands under the shirt—his shirt—and massaged her back. “Only I’ll crawl into your bed tonight.”

“And shouldn’t I fear you?”

“No one fears me,” he said.

She dipped her head and rested it against his chest. Her hair felt as soft as velvet and shone in the ray of light that came in through the window. “Maybe I fear you’ll stop coming,” she murmured.

He lifted her head and spied the long crevice between her breasts. “Why would I stop coming?” he asked. He resisted the urge to push the fabric aside and take one of her nipples between his lips.

“Because you’ll get yourself killed. It’s what you men seem to do. And then we women starve. Or we sleep with archeologists and we still starve.” Her words were playful, but her voice, he realized, was completely earnest. She meant every word that she said.

“I don’t expect I’ll get killed.”

“No one expects to get killed.”

“I may die of aggravation. But I won’t get killed.”

She pushed against his chest and he released her. She put some water in a cast-iron skillet—she hadn’t any olive oil—and tossed in the slice of rotting meat.

“I don’t imagine you have to eat like this when you are at your villa,” she said. “In my mind, I see honey and goat cheese and wine.”

He shrugged. “I’m never there. Strekker is, it seems. But not me.”

“Is that the German who has designs on your sister?”