A shadow passed over her features. “It has been almost seventy years since I left,” she said at last, her voice trembling. “And nearly that long since I have spoken of it.”
“Of what, Nonna?”
“Nevenero,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “The village we left behind. Do you know what it means?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“Black snow.” She gave me a dark look, as if the words pained her. “Neve, snow; nero, black. Such a cruel place, Nevenero. An ice village, so cold, so brutal you froze to death if you wandered too far from home. We ate what we killed—ibex and rabbit. We wore goatskin trousers and marmot furs. Our houses were made of simple materials—wood and slabs of granite—with high, wedge-shaped roofs that kept off the snow. Simple but strong. And always, no matter the position of the sun, the village was trapped in the shadow of the mountains. Day and night, it was dark. But the castle, built higher than the village, built right into the rock of the mountain, was even darker still.”
Nonna leaned forward, her eyes filled with emotion. “The village was so dominated by the mountains that roads were nearly impassable, so narrow that trucks jammed the sheer, glacial passages. It is a miracle we were able to leave at all. But we did leave: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and rivals—we all fled. We all came here to start over. And that is why we all forgave Giovanni. Despite his name, we forgave him. Forgiveness, however, is not the same as trust.”
I sat back in the recliner, trying to understand why so many people had fled Nevenero and what my grandfather had done to require forgiveness.
“Does Luca know about this?” I asked at last. “Or Bob?”
“We came here to start over,” she said. “We didn’t want the children to know.”
Nonna pushed her glasses up her nose and adjusted her wig. “I have photos somewhere around here,” she said. She pointed to a cabinet near her bed. “Look in there.”
I went to the cabinet, found an album in a drawer, and brought it to Nonna. She flipped through the pages, and I saw a series of black-and-white images of stone houses, miserable-looking children, goats knee-deep in snow. There was a family portrait of people whose features were a half rhyme to Luca’s—Nonna’s brothers and sisters, I guessed. Her parents. Her grandparents. Nonna pulled out a photo of a narrow valley carved between two snowcapped mountains. At the center of the valley, lifting like a sinister wedding cake, was a castle. It stood dark and solitary, surrounded by sharp peaks. All else was ice and shadow.
“That is Montebianco Castle,” she said, her expression filled with fear. “I never saw it up close. We were not allowed to go anywhere near it.”
I took the album and looked at the picture. “My grandfather lived there?” I asked, astonished.
“They didn’t mix with the villagers,” she said. “I didn’t meet your grandfather until we made the crossing.”
She turned the pages until she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. “Here it is,” she said, pulling a photo from a page and giving it to me. A young man stood before a steamer, the words “S.S. Saturnia” painted on the side. The quality of the photo was degraded, so grainy that Giovanni seemed little more than a stain of sepia bleeding through the page, but I could see that he was packed for a voyage. There was a suitcase in his hand and a steamer trunk sat at his side. An expression of wonder colored his features, a reckless readiness, the kind of expression that accompanies an act of faith. I could see that Sophia had been right about our resemblance: my grandfather was tall and broad-shouldered, with a wide forehead, large hands, and a deep cleft in the chin. Like me.
“That was the ship that took us from Genoa to New York,” she said, running a yellow fingernail over the picture. “I didn’t have the same class berth as your grandfather—I was down below—but we played cards up on the deck. Look here.” She glided the magnifying glass over the photo, so that it hovered about the steamer trunk. There, in tiny gold letters stamped into the leather, was the name: montebianco. “It was July 1949,” she said, her voice sad suddenly. “We didn’t want to go, but we had no choice. After they took my younger brother, Gregor,