about Giuseppe. What a man! The best in every way, you’d say. We all had to agree with you, the cocky sixteen- year-old.”
“I wonder what happened to her.” She spreads the washed sheet over the rim of the fountain.
“You were someone with a dangerous will.”
She walks over the paved stones, grass in the cracks. He watches her black-stockinged feet, the thin brown dress. She leans over the balustrade.
“I think I did come here, I have to admit, something at the back of my mind made me, for Verdi. And then of course you had left and my dad had left for the war.… Look at the hawks. They are here every morning. Everything else is damaged and in pieces here. The only running water in this whole villa is in this fountain. The Allies dismantled water pipes when they left. They thought that would make me leave.”
“You should have. They still have to clear this region. There are unexploded bombs all over the place.”
She comes up to him and puts her fingers on his mouth.
“I’m glad to see you, Caravaggio. No one else. Don’t say you have come here to try and persuade me to leave.”
“I want to find a small bar with a Wurlitzer and drink without a fucking bomb going off. Listen to Frank Sinatra singing. We have to get some music,” he says. “Good for your patient.”
“He’s still in Africa.”
He is watching her, waiting for her to say more, but there is nothing more about the English patient to be said. He mutters. “Some of the English love Africa. A part of their brain reflects the desert precisely. So they’re not foreigners there.”
He sees her head nod slightly. A lean face with hair cut short, without the mask and mystery of her long hair. If anything, she seems calm in this universe of hers. The fountain gurgling in the background, the hawks, the ruined garden of the villa.
Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden. As if all that remains is a capsule from the past, long before Verdi, the Medicis considering a balustrade or window, holding up a candle at night in the presence of an invited architect—the best architect in the fifteenth century—and requesting something more satisfying to frame that vista.
“If you are staying,” she says, “we are going to need more food. I have planted vegetables, we have a sack of beans, but we need some chickens.” She is looking at Caravaggio, knowing his skills from the past, not quite saying it.
“I lost my nerve,” he says,
“I’ll come with you, then,” Hana offers. “We’ll do it together. You can teach me to steal, show me what to do.”
“You don’t understand. I lost my nerve.”
“Why?”
“I was caught. They nearly chopped off my fucking hands.”
At night sometimes, when the English patient is asleep or even after she has read alone outside his door for a while, she goes looking for Caravaggio. He will be in the garden lying along the stone rim of the fountain looking up at stars, or she will come across him on a lower terrace. In this early-summer weather he finds it difficult to stay indoors at night. Most of the time he is on the roof beside the broken chimney, but he slips down silently when he sees her figure cross the terrace looking for him. She will find him near the headless statue of a count, upon whose stub of neck one of the local cats likes to sit, solemn and drooling when humans appear. She is always made to feel that she is the one who has found him, this man who knows darkness, who when drunk used to claim he was brought up by a family of owls.
Two of them on a promontory, Florence and her lights in the distance. Sometimes he seems frantic to her, or he will be too calm. In daylight she notices better how he moves, notices the stiffened arms above the bandaged hands, how his whole body turns instead of just the neck when she points to something farther up the hill. But she has said nothing about these things to him.
“My patient thinks peacock bone ground up is a great healer.”
He looks up into the night sky. “Yes.”
“Were you a spy then?”
“Not quite.”
He feels more comfortable, more disguised from her in the dark garden, a flicker of the lamp from the patient’s room looking down. “At times we were sent in to steal. Here I was, an Italian and a thief. They couldn’t believe their luck, they were falling over themselves to use me. There were about four or five of us. I did well for some time. Then I was accidentally photographed. Can you imagine that?
“I was in a tuxedo, a monkey suit, in order to get into this gathering, a party, to steal some papers. Really I was still a thief. No great patriot. No great hero. They had just made my skills official. But one of the women had brought a camera and was snapping at the German officers, and I was caught in mid-step, walking across the ballroom. In mid-step, the beginning of the shutter’s noise making me jerk my head towards it. So suddenly everything in the future was dangerous. Some general’s girlfriend.
“All photographs taken during the war were processed officially in government labs, checked by the Gestapo, and so there I would be, obviously not part of any list, to be filed away by an official when the film went to the Milan laboratory. So it meant having to try and steal that film back somehow.”
She looks in on the English patient, whose sleeping body is probably miles away in the desert, being healed by a man who continues to dip his fingers into the bowl made with the joined soles of his feet, leaning forward, pressing the dark paste against the burned face. She imagines the weight of the hand on her own cheek.
She walks down the hall and climbs into her hammock, giving it a swing as she leaves the ground.
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. Caravaggio has for instance given her
