Chapter One: Page 5

“I was speaking figuratively, Signor Chiesa,” I say.

“But you know the tradition.”

“I’ve run across it in my studies,” I say. I don’t want to tell him of my years in Sicily. They’ve come on me here like a fever, and may yet pass; I’m not sure that I will have to live with them.

Chiesa seems aware of neither the vestibule’s heat nor his lack of hospitality, and we continue to stand together on the big woolen doormat. He’s probably like this with books, too—standing for hours in dim, airless stacks with his desk just a few steps away, arrested by words on a page. He is reading me now like a text. I work to turn his gaze aside.

“Mayor Agretta has great plans for Valparuta,” I say, and watch his thoughts shift.

Chiesa shrugs. “They got him elected,” he says. “No one wanted to be left behind.”

“Do you think he’ll succeed?”

He gives me a prickly, impatient look. “Do you?” he says.

I don’t. Yet Chiesa has tied himself and his archives to this legless plan of the mayor’s.

He knows what I’m thinking. “This collection stands on its own merits, Professoressa—researchers will come here whether or not we build another hotel or cook up some silly festival for tourists. But there was funding available through the mayor’s new commissione—a great deal of funding. I wanted it for my archives.”

“You petitioned the commissione.”

He grins suddenly. “I left them convinced that it was I who’d done them the real favor—all those spendthrift foreign eggheads waiting to be lured here for research, staying on for weeks, crowding the pensioni, eating and drinking like camels. Agretta isn’t the only one who can talk a dog out of his bone.”

I take him in as if he were a particularly fine sky. “They’ll never see it, what you’ve promised.”

“No. But the archives have been funded.”

I reach out then, take Chiesa’s sleeve between my fingers.

“Show me your archives, will you?” I say.

I’ve passed some kind of test. “I’d be delighted,” Chiesa says.

And this is when I see it. He looks at me straight on, with the sun full in his face, and his pupils are blown wide open.

The archivist is cranking something. There’s no other sign that he’s high.

It gives Chiesa’s face a strange drowned beauty, like a woman with belladonna in her eyes.