his son. Some goats. He will help me destroy this terrible legacy.
Each week he expects to deliver the child, and each week he returns to Nevenero. Lately, his manner has changed.
“It is very strange,” he said, swallowing back the words as if they were too angular. “The child should have been born many months ago. It is long overdue.”
“How long?” I asked, trying to count out the weeks, but I have no sense of time any longer. There are only the seasons. It was the beginning of the winter. November.
“Eighteen months have passed since the soldiers left,” he said. “And when I examine your daughter, I see no change. She fattens. C’est tout.”
It was true: Vita had become enormous, so large that she could not leave her room. She slept most of the time, her body round and ripe.
“It should have been born by now,” I said.
“In fact, we don’t know,” he said, without meeting my eyes. “A human infant remains three-quarters of a year in the womb. But a creature like Vita . . . We don’t know, madame.”
November 1931
The twin boys, Giovanni and Guillaume, were born on Toussaint, a sign, I believe, that we have been given a reprieve. After all I had feared, and all that might have been, we have avoided the worst.
Giovanni arrived first, claiming the title of his ancestors, but Guillaume was not inferior. He is a fine child, heavier than his brother, more alert. They are identical twins, not les faux jumeaux, but their behavior is nothing alike: as Giovanni cried, Guillaume looked about the chamber, astonished by the world. Not a sound. Not a cry. Simple acceptance that God has placed him here among us.
The doctor met my eyes after the boys were cleaned and wrapped in linen. We had an agreement. If the baby was like Vita, he would slit its throat and dispose of the body. If the baby was free of Vita’s deformities, we would allow it to live. Both boys are healthy. Both free from Vita’s afflictions. They will live, and with God’s blessing, Vita will pass away, giving over the future of Montebianco Castle to them.
Fifteen
For days after finishing Eleanor’s memoir, I could think of little other than the terrible history I had discovered. The strange scenes of Vita’s childhood—the crushed butterfly, the exorcism, her encounter in the village—haunted me, filling me with an immense sense of sadness, not only for the little girl born into an era of ignorance, to parents who could not comprehend her mental and physical challenges, but for the teenaged girl who had been the victim of sexual violence. That my grandfather had grown up in the shadow of this violence, the child of rape, the child of a mother incapable of caring for him, explained a lot, as did the fact that Vita had clearly suffered from a serious genetic disorder.
And yet, discovering that my family carried a congenital illness lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders. Giovanni and Marta’s stillborn babies, my dead brother and sister, my own series of miscarriages—they were all the result of some error in our genetic code. For the first time in months, I felt free. I wasn’t to blame for my inability to have a child. I, like Vita, was a victim of inheritance.
Reading Eleanor’s memoir made me want to meet my great-grandmother more than ever. If only I could see her, I believed, I could reconcile Eleanor’s exaggerated and emotional account with my own. All that week, I waited to see Dolores, but after our talk in the portrait gallery, she had taken ill and had not left her rooms. I was alone for much of the time, left to wander the castle and the courtyard, which left me edgy and ill at ease.
But I didn’t truly begin to panic until the end of the week, when Zimmer did not show up. No one at the castle appeared to place any importance on the day of the week, but after I had counted seven days, and Zimmer had not returned, I knew that Basil had been telling the truth: Zimmer was not coming back for me.
Down the corridor from the grand hall, tucked in a nook, sat the single connection to the outside world: a rotary telephone.
The castle was isolated, but if the telephone worked—and Basil had said that he was constantly making calls for Dolores, so it must—then we were not entirely cut off from the world. I could get in touch