The Sleeping Nymph, page 23
“These words all share a common root, one that’s extremely interesting from an etymological perspective, but also unusually prolific,” she explained.
Massimo’s stomach was on the verge of insubordination.
“Do you have to hold it so close to your nose? It was inside a heart,” he reminded her.
“In Greek, Thuos means sacrifice, or offering. Thumiào means to burn something, to immolate. And finally Thumòs: meaning ire, but also the emotional state of the soul, a deep-seated connection with the body, with blood and breathing,” she continued. She seemed relieved she could remember so much, and smiled slyly at him and at Parri.
“And there we have all the elements of this death,” she concluded. “This is the killer telling us: I sacrificed something for the greater good and I did it in anger.”
She snapped her diary shut.
“He’s angry and he’s scared: we’ve gotten too close to something he holds sacred.”
47
Francesco di Lenardo was standing with one hand on his hip and the other shielding his eyes from the rays of the sinking sun when he saw them coming toward him in the distance. He skipped down the flank of the mountain with astonishing agility for a man his age and soon he had reached the road that coiled through the forest, the mountain on one side and the drop to the river on the other. The road was so narrow there was barely room enough for a single car to pass through. When he reached Teresa and Marini, he wasn’t even out of breath.
“I’ll walk with you,” he volunteered once Teresa had explained they’d come specifically to see him.
To glimpse the face of the killer they were hunting today, they would have to dig much deeper into the past. They needed Francesco’s memories again.
They walked in silence, the shadows lengthening around their footsteps. Nearing its end now, the day had become imbued with a gleaming splendor. Birds flew back and forth across the sky, whole flocks changing direction without warning. Their flight was perfectly synchronized as if they were a single organism.
Francesco stopped to watch. They had come to a halt at a section of the road where the wall of trees in the adjacent forest was briefly interrupted, only to begin again a few yards down.
“An old firebreak,” he said, offering no further explanation.
Teresa had met people like him before, as solitary as the old larch tree that towered over the meadow a few turns down the road. She knew he needed time. If they insisted now, if they tried to rush him, he would simply retreat further into himself.
A young man emerged from a path among the trees, carrying a backpack on his shoulder and wearing a T-shirt tied around his head like a bandanna. His face looked flushed and tanned already, though it was only spring.
Francesco waved at him.
“This is Sandro, Krisnja’s sweetheart,” he explained, greeting the young man with a hug.
Sandro looked down.
“Yes, well, I’m her boyfriend,” he said with a sheepish laugh.
Teresa remembered him from the community meeting they had all attended.
“Sandro wasn’t born in the valley, but he might as well have been,” said Francesco. “He’s studying for his forestry diploma.”
The young man put his hands up as if to hide behind them.
“Mostly, I spend my time sampling the circumference of alder trees,” he said.
They all laughed. Sandro bid them farewell and continued on his way toward the valley. Francesco’s gaze followed him until he disappeared around a bend in the road.
“Many have left,” he said quietly, “but others have come to take their place. We could do with more young people like Sandro, for the valley and for the forest. Someday it’ll be Sandro looking after these woods. Right now, he’s learning that it’s important not to reforest every clearing, that it’s useful to leave the odd dead tree in the undergrowth for the scavengers to feast on. He understands how essential it is to leave untouched those trees that serve as meeting spots for animals preparing to mate. He’s learning how to safeguard the biodiversity of this landscape.”
Teresa peered into the undergrowth, where the colors of the forest faded into hues of darker green. It was a world submerged, its rarefied light possessing an almost tangible consistency.
“It’s to do with forest shade,” Francesco explained when she pointed it out. “Not all light is able to filter through the canopy and reach the ground. What does get through corresponds to just three percent of the spectrum, the part that’s no use in photosynthesis. In fact, you’ll find that in the denser forests, the shape of the undergrowth can be as stark as a desert.”
“You know this world well,” Teresa noted.
“It’s my world. We’re not so different from trees, after all. In fact, we’re more alike than we’d like to admit. Almost every living thing upon this earth is a plant—which tells us that plants are a long-running and near-perfect genetic experiment in both conquest and survival.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds a little creepy,” Marini observed.
“It is. But fascinating, too. Plants see light through photoreceptors scattered over their surface. Hundreds of miniature eyes that, in their own strange way, look out at the world just as we do. They can tell night from day, they wake up and go to sleep, they sense the changing seasons by observing the days expand or contract. Like all living things, they rest, too: when it’s dark, plants are known to droop, at times by as much as four inches.
“They’re equipped with a sense of touch and smell: they can sniff out neighboring plants they might potentially latch on to, analyzing their scent to determine whether or not they’d make healthy hosts. They use their roots to share nutrients with their weaker peers and if they’re attacked by parasites, they release toxins that make their leaves taste foul. They compete with each other, they fight. They have memories and a sense of balance that enables them to grow straight even on sloping ground. They communicate, too, in ways we can only partially comprehend.”
He crouched down, brushing his fingers over the earth.
“And that’s just what’s going on ‘upstairs.’ Underneath it all, there’s a vast and boundless neural network of roots. Plants make multiple complex decisions every day.”
“So as far as senses go, they’ve got the full set,” said Marini.
“They say plants are deaf, actually, but I wouldn’t be surprised if science eventually proved us wrong on that, too. Did you know that Darwin tried testing for that once? He’d later describe it as a moment of ‘madness.’ Darwin loved musical instruments, and one day he thought he’d play the bassoon to his Mimosa pudica and watch for a reaction. Nothing happened, of course.” Francesco looked at the forest again, his expression serious. “Perhaps the reason they’re deaf is simply that they don’t need to hear.”
He grabbed a fistful of soil.
“We know so little about all this vegetation, this organism that does our breathing for us,” he said. “This handful of earth is home to a million microbes, bound to each other by mechanisms of interdependence so complex that they still elude our attempts to recreate them in a laboratory. That’s why they die if they’re isolated from their wider habitat.”
Teresa had let him talk without interruption; there had been elements in Francesco’s account that had awakened some instinct within her.
Francesco stood up, shaking the dirt off his trousers.
“You think the heart they found at the turn into the valley is connected to Aniza’s disappearance, don’t you?” he finally asked them.
“I’m inclined to think so, yes,” Teresa replied.
Francesco turned toward the horizon. The sky was darkening. They heard a stag braying in the distance.
“Our elders used to say it’s the spirit of the day calling forth the night,” he murmured. “Now, a darkness has fallen upon this land, but this time there will be no dawn to follow it—only uncertainty and pain.”
Teresa stepped toward him.
“Someone in the valley feels threatened,” she said.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You know about botany; you might also know how to read nature’s more cryptic signs,” she persisted, not unkindly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me: thymus, for example.”
He shook his head.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at. You act as if you expect me to know something, but if you think I might have had anything to do with Aniza’s disappearance, you’re mistaken. Unless you deem an eight-year-old capable of murder.”
Teresa didn’t reply. She could sense his quiet outrage at what he perceived as an ambush and she could sense, too, Marini’s unease as he stood beside her.
“I think you’ve kept all of Aniza’s personal belongings,” she said.
The expression on Francesco’s face answered for him.
“I’d like to see them, please.”
48
The wooden steps creaked under Massimo’s feet as he followed Superintendent Battaglia and Francesco di Lenardo up the stairs to the top floor of the house. The attic had a sloping roof, with a skylight on one side that covered the full length of the wall and offered a breathtaking view of the Musi mountain range. The pinewood paneling brought the scent of the forest into the room, of unrushed work that followed the rhythm of the changing seasons, of a world Massimo barely knew but that seemed nevertheless to strike a chord with him, like an invitation to remember what he had forgotten.
The attic wasn’t the dusty, neglected storeroom Massimo had expected. It was the hidden heart of the house. In one corner a majolica stove lay in wait, ready to warm its surroundings when the next winter came. A velvet armchair had been turned to face the view, next to a pile of books that reached all the way up to the armrest. A heavy tome lay upon the padded seat.
Massimo ran his fingers over the cover. It was an anthology of old folk tales set in the woods. A dried edelweiss served as a bookmark, its furred silvery petals peeking out from between the pages. Francesco must have picked it himself when he was younger, down some perilous crag, perhaps, the kind of place where this milk-white plant—the so-called “rock flower”—tended to thrive.
He looked at Francesco, whose profile betrayed nothing of his emotions but whose body language spoke of wounded pride—like a man being subjected to some kind of deeply insulting examination.
“Her things are all in there,” he said, pointing to a heavily carved trunk pushed up against the wall.
A master craftsman had etched floral motifs—gentian blooms—into the wood. These had then been painted a deep blue. Even after all those years, the color still retained its shine.
Francesco sank to one knee and ran a hand over the wood.
“This was her dowry chest,” he reminisced. “Every young woman had one. It was meant to store her trousseau and she’d take it with her on her wedding day when she left her father’s house. It was considered essential to the formation of a new family. Women would inherit them from their mothers, who would, in turn, have inherited them from their own mothers. They traveled through history, passed on from female hand to female hand. This one is more than three hundred years old.”
He turned the key in the lock, then stopped as if in deference to his memories.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sighing. “I don’t often open this and I don’t enjoy doing it.”
“Take all the time you need,” said Superintendent Battaglia.
She was being gentle with him again now as if to concede that his doubtlessly sincere grief deserved a degree of sensitivity and tact even from those who barely knew him.
And this was, after all, Teresa’s way. She put people to the test, probed them with her razor-sharp barbs, because she knew—better than anyone Massimo had ever met—that humans spend every day of their lives pretending: out of laziness, or habit, or for the sake of convention, for some ulterior motive, for self-preservation. Or even, quite simply, to survive.
Francesco lifted the lid of the trunk and Massimo saw a date carved into the wood: 1706. He closed his eyes briefly, wishing he could run away from this place that suddenly seemed so full of bitter echoes from his own life. At the same time he felt as if he were being led by the hand on a journey that made him think, for the first time in a long time, that there might be hope for him yet. Aniza was leading the way, her face blurring in his mind with Elena’s.
When he opened his eyes again, Francesco was holding a white dress that resembled the one they had seen in Matriona’s tavern. The little bells sewn onto the sash tinkled softly.
“This is one of our traditional dresses,” Francesco explained. “My wife and I never had any children. I’d love for Krisnja to have this someday, to wear on her wedding day.” He smiled. “Though I think young people today have different tastes. As they should, I suppose.”
He carefully folded the dress and put it on the floor. Next, his hands shaking, he took out a photograph and quickly handed it over, as if he’d rather not look at it himself.
“Aniza is wearing the dress in this picture. It must have been around the time of the spring festival, not long before she disappeared. She was preparing to perform the Kölu, the ‘circle dance.’’’
Teresa Battaglia studied the photograph closely.
“And here’s some of her needlework,” said Francesco, opening a sewing box. “Some of these she’d just finished; others, she never got a chance to.”
The superintendent handed the photograph to Massimo and peered inside the wicker sewing box. He did the same and felt a pang.
Aniza had knitted a pair of baby shoes the color of meadows in spring, of marigolds and cornflowers.
It was too much. Massimo walked away, far enough that the sound of the superintendent’s voice and Francesco’s faded into a murmur.
His grip on the photograph tightened and finally he mustered the courage to look at it.
Aniza was staring at him from the surface of the grayscale image, white as a bride in a field of long grass. Sunlight streamed through the folds in her skirt until it looked, in parts, translucent. She’d put flowers in her hair. A few strands seemed to flutter around her face, lifted by a breeze forever crystallized in that image. The beginnings of a smile flickered on her lips. One hand hung in the air, caught perhaps on its way to tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
But it was the position of her other hand, cupped over her stomach, which hit Massimo like a gut-punch.
Massimo knew that instinctively protective gesture: Elena had done it, too, the night before.
His breath caught as he thought of the baby clothes they’d seen in the trunk.
She hadn’t made them for her friend.
He saw himself walk back toward Superintendent Battaglia, pull her aside, return her puzzled gaze and lean toward her—but it was as if someone else were doing it all for him.
“She was pregnant,” he whispered into her ear.
49
April 1945
Aniza walked through the forest like a bride: the path in the grass was the nave that led to the altar; the trunks of the centennial oaks were the columns that lined her passage. By now, the village was no more than the glimpse of a church tower behind her, its tip just visible over the tops of the tallest trees. Over her veiled head, the branches of hazelnut trees, acacias and sessile oaks were like enormous gnarled beams, their fronds forming a tunnel into the darkness and toward a new life.
She turned around and looked at her past. The line of the sun beat a quick retreat over the sphere of the weathervane on top of the church tower, and once the sphere had been swallowed completely by shadow, she dropped her knitting basket onto the grass and resumed her march into the depths of the forest.
Her footsteps were soon accompanied by the sound of a woman’s voice singing in the village. The melody soared into the sky like a smoke ring, twirling and twisting in the air, and spread through the valley, the woman singing heartily in her ancestors’ tongue of all the things that families did when they gathered together at dusk. It was a way of taking leave of the day and of greeting the arrival of evening, praying that it wouldn’t bring with it the phantoms that emerged from the mountain fog at nightfall, but only sweet dreams and dew to quench the thirst of the villagers’ fields.
From across the bridge over the river Wöda, another woman took up the call and their two voices chased each other in the air, carried by the wind that reared its head from the riverbed at twilight. Other voices soon followed from farther away. They were the “mothers of the valley,” those who’d given birth to the most daughters and whose daughters, in turn, had become mothers themselves.
Softly, Aniza joined the singing, her hand cradling her belly. It was still flat for now, but soon, the life it carried would grow. Her singing was matched by the primitive melody of the forest; when the wind found its way through the dry, hollow branches of fallen tree trunks, it was like hearing the sound of a flute.
Aniza looked up at the sky. She saw Venus gleaming overhead between the crowns of the trees. A silver-feathered barn owl took flight from a nearby branch, its wings flapping vigorously. It was the spirit of the night, summoned forth by the braying of the stag that ruled over the slopes of the Musi mountain range.
Aniza thanked the Mother for this good omen. She plucked the pale pink buttercups that lined her path and gathered them into a bridal bouquet.
The singing ended. People were closing their front doors now, and the animals were resting in their barns. Lamps burned bright, and the youngest had been put to sleep in their cots.
She got ready to wait, her heart beating faster.
He was on his way.
