The Light in the Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page B

called every fourth or fifth day from the hotel lobby, and he had phoned the house yesterday, which meant that he wouldn’t ring them again for at least another two days. And he never called them from the museum. She guessed she could phone him there, but what if Lorenzetti or one of the Germans was in the room? What if the Gestapo or the Italian Fascists were listening in on the line?
    “And you know what else?” Alessia asked.
    “Tell me,” she murmured.
    “At night, when no one’s there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there’s a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.”
    Outside the open window, Cristina heard her mother and father speaking with Francesca on the terrace. Francesca was telling them about the visit from the two soldiers and Decher’s unwillingness to wait for Father’s return to inspect the ancient burial vault. Beside her, Alessia chirped happily that her grandfather and grandmother were back and raced downstairs. And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.
    Beatrice Rosati, the marchesa, had not yet grown round with middle age. She was, like her daughter and both of her sons, willowy and tall. Statuesque. Still, she had often worried as her children were growing up that her boys appeared sickly and Cristina looked frail—and that her daughter was too slender to be pretty. Now in her two grandchildren, Marco and Francesca’s little ones, Beatrice saw the same thing and had the same fears: They were tiny. Their legs were sticks, their arms were twigs. Moreover, Massimo was a scaredy-cat, no match for his younger sister. Their grandfather assumed they were small because their diet the last year had been spotty. Even at the Villa Chimera the family had not been spared the privations that came with a ration card, and so much of what they grew and their animals produced was confiscated by the government.
    Nevertheless, there was also a part of her that rather enjoyed the idea that her grandson and granddaughter were so easily portable. Her husband, Antonio, could still lift one in each arm and carry them around the farm like two baskets of olives. When Marco was home on leave from Sicily, he spent long hours with them in and around the swimming pool, the children either using his shoulders as a diving platform as he stood in the shallow end or being pitched by him into the deep end as if they weighed little more than the firewood he might toss into the shed. Alessia could still disappear behind the statue of Venus off the loggia; Massimo could hide behind the columns atop the temple steps in the family cemetery. Neither looked a match for the chimera in the garden.
    Now she and Antonio sat alone in the kitchen, each nursing a glass of red wine from last year’s vintage. In the distance their remaining Chianina cattle were grazing, the animals’ hides so white they glistened when the light was right. Once the estate’s herd had rolled across the whole meadow, and from afar one might have supposed that the ground was blanketed by snow. Now all but a dozen had been confiscated, the herd winnowed three and four at a time by the government.
    “Perhaps I should go to Florence,” Antonio was saying. “Ask Vittore why he thinks those two officers were here today.”
    “I’ll go with you. I want to see Vittore, too.”
    “I find it so typical of the army to just descend on us with no warning, not wait for me to return, and then disappear into the night like common criminals.”
    “From what Francesca said, when they returned from the tombs they were unimpressed. It sounds like they were not even especially civil.”
    Antonio shook his head and