The Sleeping Nymph, page 19
“The land of the Amazons,” said Blanca in quiet awe. “What an amazing story!”
Everyone laughed at that.
“It’s funny how of all the things he told us, the bit you’re most interested in is the part that’s a myth,” Marini teased her.
“That’s what you think.”
“That’s what history says, actually.”
“To tell you the truth, we’ve got plenty of Amazons here among us,” said Francesco. “Our women are strong and independent—very much so.” He looked up then, his gaze becalmed. “You’re going to meet one of them soon. I think you’ll be astonished when you set eyes on her.”
This was the moment Teresa had been waiting for and now that it was about to happen, her heart began to hammer in her chest. They were going to meet Krisnja, Aniza’s great-niece.
They were about to see, alive before them, the face of the Sleeping Nymph.
39
When she wasn’t busy attending classes at university, Krisnja volunteered at the valley’s ethnographic museum. The museum consisted of a series of open-plan rooms housing a permanent exhibition on the ancient art of itinerant furniture-making from which—up until a few decades ago—so many generations of Resians had made a living. Adjacent to the main complex was another building constructed in a more old-fashioned rural style: a reproduction of a typical local dwelling.
Francesco had told them Krisnja would be waiting for them there, in the annex.
“Ready?” said Marini, with a wry look on his face designed, perhaps, to temper his own nerves.
They’d obsessed over the Sleeping Nymph for so long now that it seemed inevitable they would be disappointed: surely the resemblance between the two women couldn’t be as pronounced as they’d been told, and it was impossible that the allure of the mysterious painting could be found intact in a real living person.
“Ready or not, we’re going in,” said Teresa.
The sun was enveloped in enormous whorls of gray that swirled around the mountain peaks, forming clouds that looked like dark, oppressive whirlpools. The weather had shifted again; the day had turned dark, the sky gloomy and pale; gusts of wind carried the scent of rain. In the distance, the dark space between two mountain peaks was sliced open by fierce flashes of lightning.
They left Smoky in the car, with the window rolled halfway down. Inside the annex was a flight of wooden stairs, and from behind the door that had been left ajar at the top of the staircase they could hear the voice of a woman singing in the Resian language, a gentle, languorous ballad. Teresa was reminded of the songs she would hear the farmers sing when, as a child, she would go out with her grandparents to gather hay for the beasts, or to harvest the ripe, syrupy fruit of the grapevines, when the air was still warm but the leaves were already laced with the colors of the approaching autumn. She could almost smell the scent of those days now, taste their sweetness on her tongue.
The door sprang open with the gentlest of touches, and Teresa suddenly found herself immersed in the past. The place smelled of the hand-carved wooden benches that lined either side of the room, of the baskets of viburnum hanging from the walls, flanked by other handicrafts and photographs of aging faces that stood out like statues sculpted out of time. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the rafters. There was a stove ensconced in the other wall, with an antique cauldron perched on a stool next to it.
And there she was, her profile concealed by a mane of dark hair that cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. She was wearing a long black skirt embroidered with flowers along the hem and a white blouse tied at the waist with a sash the color of cornflowers. She’d rolled up her sleeves all the way to her elbows and was sifting through a hamper filled with tiny white flowers, releasing the familiar honeyed fragrance of chamomile into the air—a scent made all the more intense by the process of desiccation the flowers had been put through, which would have taken the best part of a year.
Outside, there was a storm brewing, but in that room Krisnja kept singing her song of peace. It was an enchanted moment, and they were loath to interrupt it. Her voice rang with calm dignity against the force of the elements pounding at the windows and seemed to nullify their fury as if it had the power to tame nature itself. Blanca gave Teresa’s hand a quick squeeze; she knew exactly how Teresa felt.
The singing stopped, and their breathing stopped with it.
Krisnja turned around. Teresa felt like she was looking at someone she had always known but never met before. She gripped Blanca’s hand in turn as if to say, Feel what I am feeling.
That’s her.
The Sleeping Nymph stood reincarnated before them, the perfect oval of her face, her straight nose, her eyes—as black as Teresa had pictured them—ever so slightly slanted, her hair falling in waves over her breast, so similar to the way it looked in the portrait, but alive and gleaming.
Krisnja made them coffee the Resian way, in a saucepan. It was difficult not to stare at her, but she seemed not to mind.
“Francesco told me the story of the portrait,” she said as she handed them a plate of sope—sliced bread dipped in egg batter, fried and glazed with sugar.
Marini and Blanca tucked right in, but Teresa spared a thought for her glucose levels and decided to abstain. Krisnja joined them at the table.
“It’s all been such a shock for him. He adored Aniza. When I was little, he used to tell me how much I resembled her all the time. Then one day he stopped saying it. I suppose he thought he should stop comparing me to a dead woman. But I could see it in his eyes anyway, every time he looked at me.”
She faltered for a moment, then glanced at Teresa.
“Do I really look like her?” she asked.
Teresa showed her the photograph she carried of the portrait.
The young woman covered her mouth with her hand.
“So that’s her,” she whispered. “I could never bring myself to ask Francesco for his old photographs of her. They’re like sacred relics to him.”
“Francesco speaks of you with great fondness,” Teresa said.
Krisnja smiled.
“I’m very fond of him, too. He’s always been there for me, as if I were the daughter he never had. Ewa, my grandmother, was widowed at a very young age, and my father left the valley when I was little, abandoning my mother, Hanna. In some ways Francesco took his place, though I’ve grown up surrounded almost entirely by women.”
“I get the feeling that among your people, it’s you, the women, who are more dedicated to preserving your cultural heritage,” Teresa remarked as she studied the various objects exhibited in the room.
Krisnja’s expression turned somber.
“Our community is going through a difficult time, a painful time. We’re divided in ways we never have been before, not in all the many centuries of our history.” She gestured at the displays and at the many panels that illustrated the valley’s past. “That’s one reason I’ve chosen to stay here. It’s my duty to keep watch over the truth. To bring it back to light.”
The car rolled through the driving rain. Blanca sat in the back with a pensive look on her face, lost in reverie and holding Smoky close. Marini drove slowly, peering over the wheel as the car sliced through a wall of rain. Torrents of water on either side of the road were carrying their load of silt down the mountain.
Teresa felt exhausted as if the day’s exertions had finally caught up with her the moment she had gotten back into the car and shut the valley out. All emotions came with a physical weight: she knew this for a fact. They could crush your heart and your body, and they burdened your back no matter how strong your shoulders were.
Teresa was like a sponge, soaking up the mood of the world around her, making its light and its shadows her own. She had absorbed plenty of darkness so far, but somehow, she had managed to convert most of it into fire and a burning appetite for life. The darkness had sunk to the depths of her soul, and she had learned to live with it, to treat it like a poison best left undisturbed. She had let it settle as deep as it would go—but nevertheless it was still there, and every now and then she felt it rise to the surface like a toxic fume.
The ricochet of water on the windscreen was hypnotic. Teresa’s eyes closed of their own accord. Images of Matriona, Francesco and Krisnja flitted across the blank screen of her mind like cards on a poker table.
The alarm on her phone went off, reminding her that she’d have to take her daily insulin injection in an hour. She made a quick calculation: she had plenty of time to get to headquarters, draft a perfunctory report and then pierce yet another hole through her own skin, which was so much more delicate than it looked and which sometimes no longer felt like hers. She had plenty of time to find that she was alone again, a little more bruised than she had been when she had woken up that morning. A little more tired.
Names and words stood out now like paths on a map she was still struggling to read.
Rain. Origins. Krisnja. Illness.
More rain. Francesco. Memories. An illness that erases memories.
She opened her eyes just enough to see. The storm was getting worse. Marini kept having to slow down to avoid dead wood and leaves that had fallen across the road. The wind whistled through the trees, in gusts strong enough to break branches. Buckets of rain lashed at the car windows.
Teresa’s eyes closed again.
“Maybe we should stop here and wait it out,” she heard Blanca say.
“We’re almost at the highway, just a few more turns,” Marini reassured her.
A terrifying roar ripped across the sky, a clap of thunder rattling the frame and windows of the car.
Blanca screamed.
“We’ve awakened a hostile god.”
Only after her lips had closed around the last word did Teresa realize that she had been the one to speak. She could still feel the words now on the tip of her tongue, heavy and unwelcome. It wasn’t the kind of thing she usually said.
She opened her eyes again. All she could see before her now was a relentless, furious cascade of metallic gray cutting through the world like a guillotine, a screen of water whipped up into foaming white swirls by the ripping wind. All of a sudden, in the midst of that soaked inferno, Teresa glimpsed the dark silhouette of something else, something standing in the middle of the short stretch of straight road they were on. She focused her eyes and with each frantic swipe of the windscreen wipers, the shadow took clearer form. Until it was too late.
“Careful!” she yelled.
Instinctively, she took hold of the steering wheel and pulled it toward her.
The car swerved and smashed through the crash barrier, rolling down the edge of the road for the duration of a terrified scream before crashing to a halt against a tree trunk.
The silence that followed was very brief and bedlam soon ensued, Smoky barking nonstop and the rest of them shouting at each other to check for damage. Blanca kicking at the door to try and get out. Marini grabbing hold of the girl and dragging her out onto the grass.
Teresa was gasping for air. She wasn’t in pain, but she had entered a stage of benumbed confusion that was, for her, worse than death.
“Superintendent! Can you hear me? Superintendent!”
Marini was shaking her. She was still in the front passenger seat with her seat belt on. Instead of replying to Marini, she grabbed his arm.
“Did you manage to avoid him?” she asked.
He stared at her uncomprehendingly.
“Avoid what?”
Teresa looked up toward the road, which shimmered like a mirage under the relentless rain.
“There was someone there. Didn’t you see him?”
She watched the color drain from his face. Marini quickly clambered back up to the road and disappeared from sight. Smoky led Blanca to Teresa. The young woman’s unseeing eyes were wide open in terror and her blood must have frozen inside her, judging by how pale she looked. Rivulets of water ran down her face like semi-transparent veins.
“Are you all right?” she asked Teresa.
Blanca looked like she was on the verge of tears.
Teresa mumbled a yes, grabbing hold of Blanca’s outstretched arm as she stepped out of the vehicle.
Marini soon returned, sliding down the embankment to save time. There was a deep cut across his forehead, but the rain kept washing the blood away.
“I didn’t see anyone,” he said with an expression she was unable to decipher. “There was no one there, Superintendent.”
The roar of the storm around them began to fade as the gale dwindled into mere rain drumming against the carcass of their car.
Teresa looked away and her eyes fell upon the sharp cliff edge just feet away from where they had come to a stop.
What have I done?
40
Massimo prodded at the bandage on his forehead and let slip a curse. He could feel the stitches underneath pulling at his skin.
“Does it hurt?” Blanca asked.
He rubbed her arm.
“No, it doesn’t,” he said soothingly. “How are you feeling?”
She let out a long breath.
“Nervous.”
She and Smoky had been lucky to escape without a scratch, but Blanca was anxious: she’d had to leave her dog with de Carli in the waiting room of A & E. Now, she couldn’t stop fidgeting and her restlessness had infected Massimo, too. He had tried to reason with her, but then he’d remembered how important Smoky was to her and realized that she wouldn’t rest until they’d been reunited—like a mother with her lost child.
They were both waiting for Superintendent Battaglia to emerge from the treatment room, where she was being looked after for a sprained wrist. According to the information Massimo had gleaned from a nurse who’d just come out of that same room, the superintendent hadn’t broken anything.
But it wasn’t physical injuries Massimo was worried about. He had to talk to her so that he could tell her that no one blamed her for what had happened—least of all him. They’d been lucky and this was just an unfortunate accident that they’d already put behind them. Soon, the memory of it would fade altogether and he never intended to mention it again.
She had looked so mortified, so scared, so ashamed of the inexplicable impulse she had acted upon.
For a minute, Massimo had really believed he’d run someone over. He’d climbed back up to the road with a knot in his stomach, terrified and nearly throwing up at the thought that he might find a body splayed over the tarmac. But there had been nothing except a few broken branches and a blanket of windswept leaves. There were no words to describe the sheer relief he had felt in that moment, but that sensation had quickly morphed into concern: the Teresa Battaglia he knew would never have behaved so recklessly.
“Go home,” he told Blanca. “There’s no point in both of us waiting.”
She shook her head.
“No, I want to make sure she’s all right.”
He patted her head in response but was so surprised by his own gesture that he quickly pulled his hand away.
“Of course she’s all right,” he said comfortingly.
“Then why won’t she come out?”
“Because she’s a police superintendent who’s been involved in an accident,” he lied. “You’ve no idea how many forms she’s going to have to fill in. It’ll take forever. Go on, go. De Carli’s been waiting to drop you home.”
Her frown deepened.
“Is she going to be in trouble because of the car?”
“No. There was a branch blocking the road. I didn’t see it because of the rain, so I had to swerve at the last second.”
She briefly fell silent as if she were weighing his words.
“Is that the ‘official’ story?” she asked.
Massimo grimaced.
“If you call it ‘official’ it sounds wrong,” he replied. “It’s just what happened, isn’t it?”
She smiled.
“It is.”
“Off you go, then.”
“All right, I’ll go, but please tell her I’m not upset with her.”
Massimo beckoned a nurse over to help Blanca.
“Of course,” Massimo replied.
He stared at the door of the treatment room. It was so quiet it might as well have been empty.
He held his face in his hands. How would Albert Lona react to this? If he’d been waiting for an excuse to have a go at the superintendent, fate couldn’t have handed him a better chance than this. They would have to close ranks around her, Massimo and all the others, too.
He was startled by the touch of a hand upon his back.
“Hey. It’s me.”
It was Elena. She eyed the bandage on his forehead apprehensively.
Massimo stood up.
“Hi. You didn’t have to come,” he blurted out. “I told you I’d grab a taxi. How are you?”
She drew back.
“You’re asking me? You’re the one who’s almost had his head split open.”
Massimo realized how he must look to her, his clothes crumpled and stained with blood, and the bandage on his head so much bigger than the wound it covered.
He pointed at his forehead and forced a smile.
“My head’s all right. Really, you shouldn’t have troubled yourself.”
But instead of relaxing, her expression grew harder.
“Right. I guess there’s nothing I can ever do for you,” she said.
He raised his arm as if to touch her, but then let it drop to his side.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean? I was worried, and with good reason, I think.”
