The Sleeping Nymph, page 18
Teresa needed to think. She needed to try to fathom what had happened inside the painter’s mind, what those distant days might have been like. She needed to form a connection with him, feel what he had felt, capture his hopes, his heartbreak. His obsession.
This old, mad painter was all she had. Aniza was ashes and dust by now, her body no longer there.
She remembered the way Andrian had stared at the forest outside his room. As if there were something there staring right back at him.
Andrian isn’t looking at the forest near his home, she reasoned. In his world, time has stopped. What he is looking at is Aniza’s tomb. Somewhere around here. He buried her where only he could see her. Where she would belong to him alone. And she’s still there where he can see her.
“Where are you?” she murmured. “Where did he hide you?”
37
April 20, 1945
The purple shadows of twilight were taking over the village. It was the hour when day and night brushed briefly against each other, the line of daylight moving up over the walls of people’s homes like an obedient army retreating in tight formation, a golden front creeping back toward the roofs while the flame of the sun flickered and died like a used candle behind the castellated ridge of the mountains.
As she walked briskly down the road that led to the church, Aniza inhaled those darkening hues with every breath. She felt that something inside her had shifted over the past few weeks. The sky over her life had always shone bright, but night had fallen now. It was a night scented with wildflowers and stolen kisses, two bodies intertwined on a meadow. And promises of eternal love, the fragrance of a secret passion that stole her appetite and her sleep, lighting up her cheeks with a crimson blush that—he said—made her look even more beautiful than she already was.
But ultimately, the night was made of darkness. It extinguished reason and tore down every defense. And above all, it brought betrayal—like every time she was forced to lie to her family. Aniza was torn between the person she was, and the person this love was demanding that she become. But in fact she had already made up her mind.
Katerina’s house was just across from the church, no more than a few steps away now. But Aniza turned left and took the footpath that would soon deteriorate into little more than a mule track. She glanced over her shoulder. No one must ever find out. No one would ever understand.
A trail of wild daffodils seemed to be pointing out the way, in among scatterings of acacia flowers whose whiteness matched that of her dress and clusters of dog rose. Mountain orchids bloomed darkly among rippling feather grass.
She pulled her shawl over her head and felt like a bride. The forest was the temple and nature was the god.
He was waiting for her.
38
“Aniza. So she really did exist.”
Marini spoke in a doleful sigh. Teresa couldn’t blame him. She understood that feeling of helplessness, the subtle but persistent melancholy that overwhelmed them every time they realized they’d come too late to save the victim. That sickening feeling, that fury: they had experienced it all before.
They’d gotten to Aniza seventy years too late.
“We can still find out what happened to her.”
It was Blanca’s suggestion, uttered with a note of urgency that warmed Teresa’s heart. And the way Blanca had said “we”—Teresa couldn’t help but smile.
“We’ll certainly try,” Teresa promised.
An expression of disappointment combined with concern dawned over the young woman’s face.
“That’s it?” she exclaimed.
Marini burst out laughing.
“You wish,” he said. “You might not know it yet, but when this lady says ‘we’ll try,’ what she means is that she’ll literally have us sweating blood until we’ve got the killer’s name and figured out a clear and unassailable motive.”
“Call me ‘lady’ one more time and you can fuck right off. Clear?”
“Crystal, ma’am.”
Blanca shook her head.
“So what happens now?” she asked.
Teresa drew her notebook out of her shoulder bag. She found a blank page and fixed her gaze upon the village.
“Now, we dig deeper.”
Francesco di Lenardo had invited them to attend a meeting of the local society for the preservation of Resian identity. The event was to be held in Matriona’s inn, where a sizeable and animated crowd had already formed. Teresa suspected the day’s agenda was likely to be dominated not by the preservation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of the valley, but by the murder of the young woman who had vanished all those years ago. Everyone was talking about Aniza now. She had, in a way, come home.
Teresa was surprised again by the depths of feeling that such a distant episode had seemingly elicited in the community; though unlike Francesco’s grief, the explanation that lay behind it was perhaps more mundane. Simply put, the Resia Valley had always been a world devoid of crime. The killing of Aniza—whether or not it was a killing—was probably the first time such an act had ever sullied life in the valley. And it had shuddered and clanged its way into the community’s consciousness like a metal cannonball falling down a flight of stairs.
As soon as the presence of strangers was detected, dozens of pairs of eyes turned toward the door. Suddenly the room went silent, the only sound a snort from Smoky. The dog had been anxious and restless ever since they’d set foot in the valley, pacing in endless circles, sitting every now and then to howl and bark, then standing again to resume his relentless fidgeting.
“Maybe he’s bored,” Blanca had suggested, though without much conviction.
“Ever since the Nymph came to light, things seem to be falling apart,” Marini had replied cryptically.
Teresa had shot him an angry look. She hated superstitions, and even more so those who pandered to them. Superstitions had done humanity no good whatsoever.
“I was only joking,” he’d clarified.
“I should hope so.”
Teresa returned the locals’ scrutiny without even bothering to hide her interest. She was searching for a common denominator on their faces, some visible sign of their shared ancestry. She’d heard that the people who inhabited that valley all resembled each other a little. That may have been the case in the not too distant past, Teresa mused, though that unifying physical trait—assuming there had been one in the first place—seemed to have long since been blurred and diluted.
Francesco walked toward them and that seemed to lift the shackles that had temporarily stopped the passage of time: conversations, previously interrupted, were resumed and people drew closer to the newcomers, their curiosity piqued.
“Calm down, calm down,” said Francesco, trying to keep them at bay. “Let’s settle down first, then you can all ask whatever you want to ask.”
The questions were numerous and Teresa patiently answered them all. She couldn’t give much away about their progress with the investigation, but she was eager to involve them all as much as she possibly could, to capture the mood of these women and these men who had never met Aniza but who’d been left wondering about the terrible fate that had wrenched her away from her family. She could feel the existence of a bond between these people that went far beyond those of mere neighborhood.
“Was there a murderer among us, or is the killer this man Andrian?” someone asked.
Others were looking around the room as if in search of an answer, but there wasn’t one—not for either of the two possibilities.
“It’s too early to say with any certainty who the perpetrator is,” said Teresa.
Eventually, once every aspect of the matter had been probed, the mood began to soften and conversations in the room took other trajectories, the chatter eased by a glass or two of good wine. People switched from Italian to a language made of a gentle, mysterious clicking of consonants, its tones harmonious and appealingly exotic.
Matriona was an attentive hostess. Teresa watched her weaving between tables, refilling glasses and serving fragrant appetizers. Some other women were helping her out. Teresa had noticed them because of all the people in the room, they had been the only ones who hadn’t approached her and who refrained from asking her any questions. Instead, they had stood watching her from a distance, their faces betraying no trace of emotion.
“You must try our wild garlic cream,” said Francesco, handing her a tray loaded with canapes.
The bread was still warm and the cream a vivid green. The smell, though, wasn’t as pungent as Teresa had expected.
“Go on, have some,” Francesco encouraged them. “You won’t find this anywhere else.”
“Is the garlic here special, too?” Massimo queried, taking a bite.
“It’s not just the human population of the valley that’s been affected by its seclusion.” Francesco gestured at the strings of garlic hanging from the ceiling. “Our variety is called strock. It’s red in color and produces small, sweet cloves. As with all precious things, it’s not particularly fruitful.”
Teresa and Blanca tasted it, too.
“Delicious.”
The refreshments began to edge—virtually unnoticed by Teresa—into a full lunch. She tried to protest that they had to return to the city, but Matriona was the first to insist that they should stay. She’d already brought out steaming bowls of soup.
“Our famous garlic soup. You can’t leave without trying some,” she said. “There’s calcüne, too. I gathered the plantain and bladder campion for the filling just this morning. And I bet you’ve never eaten wild carrot before.”
“We’ve never had any of the rest of it, either!” Blanca laughed.
Matriona patted her shoulder.
“Well then, it’s decided,” she said, moving on to look after her other customers, too.
Teresa pointed out the other women who were helping her out.
“I haven’t met them yet,” she remarked.
Francesco followed her gaze.
“They work in Mat’s farming business,” he explained. “They grow garlic and medicinal herbs, particularly mallow. They dry it out, then they package it and sell it as herbal tea or as a pharmaceutical remedy. As far as social and economic experiments go, it’s been a successful one, and a path through which many of our young women have reconnected with the land. Some who’d moved away have even come back to live in the valley.” He pointed at the ribbons tied around the peg boxes of the violins on the wall. “Each woman has her own kind of ribbon, in her own colors. She’ll use it to decorate the basket with which she goes foraging for plants and flowers. It’s a way of treasuring our traditions that also allows for self-expression.”
“You all have Italian surnames,” Teresa remarked. “Yet many of the women here have Resian first names. Not the men, though.”
Francesco nodded in agreement.
“Our language has been transmitted through the centuries in oral form alone. Only recently have we sought to codify it in writing—perhaps because we’re so close to losing it forever. Taking on Italian surnames was, I think, a natural consequence of the valley opening up to the rest of the world. I couldn’t say exactly when that happened.
“Many people see me as the guardian of our collective historical memory, but I’m not sure I’m old enough to remember what truly matters and regrettably, all of our ancient knowledge has been lost forever. We don’t know where we come from.
“But our women have always preserved some part of our history. They nurture it like a sacred flame to be kept alive forever. They’re the ones passing on our traditional names through the generations and teaching the kids our language. They’re the ones who bring this land back to life each spring, planting and harvesting their herbs. Well, all right, not all of them, perhaps. Some of them. But I have no doubt their numbers will only increase. Females of every species always take the utmost care of the one thing the males hardly even think about.”
“What’s that?” asked Marini.
“The future. It’s an innate genetic imperative.”
“In this place, the past and the future seem intertwined,” Teresa observed.
Francesco seemed to ponder her words for a moment.
“The ancients didn’t ascribe linear progress to time as we do,” he said. “For them it was a cyclical thing, like the seasons. Winter was a door into spring. Death was a passage to a new life. In this valley, too, the past is both a starting point and a place to return to.”
“Is it really true that you have no information at all about your origins?” asked Blanca.
She seemed utterly fascinated.
“None. We’ve lived here for almost two thousand years, but any traces of our arrival seem to have vanished altogether. The two things that speak to our provenance are both ephemeral and intangible: our language and our songs.”
“Your songs?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Ella von Schultz-Adaïewsky. She was a Russian composer and musicologist who lived in Italy for some time. She specialized early on in ethnomusicology. In 1897, she published a paper entitled ‘La Berceuse Populaire.’”
“The folk lullaby,” Teresa translated.
“She studied numerous traditional Indo–European lullabies, traveling extensively for her research. She theorized that there are soothing, sedative properties encoded in the very rhythms of the traditional ditties people sing to help children fall asleep. Also, that it’s thanks to an innate ancestral wisdom that lullabies exclude all musical patterns that might prove to have stimulating properties.
“Needless to say, it’s all much more technically complex than my summary suggests. Ella also pointed to the existence of sequences of notes placed on the downbeat of a bar of music, known as anacruses, which she described as having ‘unsettling properties unconducive to rest.’”
“Forgive me,” Marini interjected. “I’m not sure I understand what the connection is to the question of the origins of your community.”
“In this particular paper, Ella describes a Mingrelian lullaby. The Mingrelians are a people who inhabit a mountainous region on the shores of the Black Sea: the ancient kingdom of Colchis, home to Medea and possibly even the Amazons. Ella specifically visited the town of Tsaishi in the Caucasus. She described its people as ‘dark and fiery.’ She heard their traditional lullaby, a paeon epibatus, where the melody was accompanied by a beat tapped out with the foot.”
“Just like in your songs,” Teresa murmured, understanding what Francesco was getting at.
He nodded, watching her with a silent intensity.
“Ella wrote in her paper that she’d heard a version of that lullaby before,” he continued. “This had been during two visits she’d made to Italy toward the end of the 1800s, in a valley she described as picturesque.”
“Val Resia.”
“That’s right. Our home. Ella refers to it explicitly in her research and describes its traditional arias. The only difference she detected between the two lullabies is that ours is in iambic tetrameter, whereas the Mingrel version is in trochaic dimeter. But it’s the kind of technical detail that won’t mean anything to most people. To our ears—to most people’s ears—those two lullabies sound very similar—almost identical, in fact.”
He leaned forward then and stared at them each in turn, his eyes blazing.
“This means we have the flicker of a flame to illuminate our past—and it isn’t here, it isn’t across these borders that surround us but much, much farther East, in the Orient. And genome studies confirm it. We have science on our side now, telling us we’re not the delusional fools that we’ve been portrayed as for so long.”
He sipped his wine. His hands were shaking a little.
“There’s another difference, too,” he added, perhaps faltering a little.
“What is it?” asked Teresa.
“Our lullaby is also a funeral dirge,” he murmured. “In our community, the end is also a new beginning. We lull our dead to sleep, cradle them as they pass away. Death is merely a journey.”
Teresa thought back to his earlier comments on the ancient understanding of the cyclical nature of time, an old form of wisdom that seemed to have survived in that valley even as it had been forgotten everywhere else.
“What exactly is your theory on the origins of the Resians?” she asked him.
Francesco took a deep breath.
“Our story most probably begins near the shores of the Aral Sea. That’s where the pastoral communities from Mesopotamia came to settle. They were looking for pasture and found plenty of it there, though these steppes were ruled by brutal, oppressive clans. Eventually, the depression reached this part of the world, too: there was no more water left, nor enough grass for the herds. So the herdsmen moved northeast and ended up in the Caucasus.
“Tacitus signals their presence in his writings in what’s modern-day Ukraine and he provides detailed descriptions, too: unlike the existing populations of the steppes, whose manner was coarse, and who communicated through gestures and grunts, the newcomers lived in huts and dressed in comparatively elaborate clothing, engaged in both animal husbandry and agriculture, and spoke their own language. Tacitus referred to them as sclaves, because they were usually exploited and subjugated by the local horseback clans.
“They were also kept divided, and that separation led to slight linguistic divergences. It’s believed that they once again fled north-east around the sixth century, in the wake of the armies of the Huns. Four of these tribes eventually made it into our valley, bringing four different forms of archaic Slavic with them. The renowned linguist Hamp has identified us as a linguistically autonomous Slavic clan.”
Francesco fell silent, lowering his gaze to the linen tablecloth, which he was compulsively smoothing over with his fingers. He seemed lost in his own thoughts, as if that ancient past he had just described was now a series of images projected on to the white screen of that cloth.
