Waking the Moon

had been with him and her cousins for only a short while; she had visited them often before, of course, but this was different. This was like an exile. “I found it. Afterward…”

“But I thought my mother died!”

She was amazed. Close as she was to her father, he had never spoken of her mother: it was a forbidden topic. Cousins and aunts here in Florence had told her that she died in childbirth. Angelica herself suspected something less dramatic. Her father and one of the hired girls, or a wealthy student, or… These things happened; so Angelica let it be. No one in Florence cared, and no one at home in the States knew.

But on that late-winter afternoon her uncle had only shrugged, and avoided looking at her eyes. “Perhaps she did,” he said after a long moment. Outside silver wands of rain tapped at the high windows overlooking the piazza. “We do not know.”

“Wh—what do you mean?” Angelica reached for her glass of aquavit—her young aunt claimed it stimulated the appetite—and without wincing downed it in a gulp. “Tell me.”

“You must never tell your father that I did so.” Her uncle poured himself another glass. “But it is not right, that you do not know. Especially now,” he added softly.

“It was years ago—well, you know how long it has been.” Her uncle leaned across the divan to stroke her hair. “My sweet girl—it is so difficult to remember you have already been to university! Nineteen,” he murmured, then went on.

“Your father was traveling to Rhodes, to meet with some of his friends—the university professor and some others, I do not recall. Their plan had been to rendezvous at Athens and depart from there on your father’s boat —Cefalu, the same boat he has now—but their flight from London was delayed, and there was some confusion regarding how long it would take them to get to Rome. Luciano has always been impatient: he decided to go on alone, and await them at Mandraki Harbor. That is a fine yacht harbor on Rhodes, but it is a dangerous passage in the summer. He went from Cape Sidhero on Crete to Kasos, and thence to Scarpanto—Karpathos. His plan was to continue on to Mandraki and meet his friends.

“He stayed overnight on Karpathos, and early in the morning decided to leave for Mandraki. He should have had a relatively safe passage—the Karpathos Strait is not dangerous, once you leave the shadow of the mountains—but at midday a storm came up. From nowhere, your father said. The sky was without clouds, and in the near distance he could see that the waves were unruffled; but the Cefalu was hard beset. He was forced to make landfall on an island. A godforsaken place, no larger than our villa near Poggibonsi. It was without water or any living thing, no trees or grasses; only a tiny beach surrounded by lava stones. It was fortunate for your father that the Cefalu was well provisioned, because he was marooned there for two days. He tried to radio for help, but the storm kept up, and he was unable to reach anyone. By daylight he explored the islet, but there was little enough there, and he was afraid the winds might swamp the boat. But the second night it was calm enough that he left Cefalu where she was moored and took the Zodiac to shore, to sleep there. He had so little sleep, I think that it affected his wits, but your father is angry when I say that.

“So he camped on the little spar of rock. A charred place, he told me; but when he returned with his friends a few weeks later they found gold and skeletons in the waters there—they brought divers, in hopes of finding treasure, and they did. I believe it was one of those islands burned up by a volcano long ago, but you know I do not pay much attention to your father’s work.

“That night he had only a driftwood fire, and his blankets against the wind, and a bottle of Tocai he found on Cefalu—still, not an ugly picture, eh? The storm had fled and there was a full moon, which made the sea look like blue snow—that is how your father described it. Blue snow.”

Her uncle fell silent, staring at the windows. The panes shuddered as water cascaded from a gutter overhead. After a moment he turned to her once more.

“She came to him in the night. He woke and she was there—not with him on the island, but in the water. Swimming. He wondered how she could swim, the bottom was so sharp with rocks, but she swam well. It was still dark but he could see her quite clearly from the beach, and he told me that he knew immediately she was a woman and not a dolphin or other fish—or a man.

“He watched her for some time, and then she came onto the shore. She was naked—no bathing costume, no bathing shoes, nothing to protect her from the wind or the stones. Only in her hand she carried a very old mirror made of polished metal. He thought she must have stolen it from some ancient tomb or grave, because he knew by looking at it that it was very old, not a thing a young girl swimming alone off the coast of Rhodes would have!

“She knew he was there watching her—and when she came ashore she walked directly toward him. The water behind her like blue snow and the full moon in the sky. She was beautiful—of course she was beautiful! An hallucination, they are always lovely! Young, and very slender, and though she had long legs she was not tall. So that you inherited from Luciano. And she had wide hips and high breasts and long hair that was very dark and curled, and huge golden eyes, though how he could see the color of her eyes I do not know because it was dark. Even in the moonlight it is dark. He said she was not like any woman he had ever seen before—not because of her beauty, but because of how she was put together. Such small bones, and so delicate but very very strong.

“And so he lay with her, and in the morning she was gone. He never saw her again.”

Angelica stared at him. “But what about me! He must have seen her again, if she was—if she was really my mother!”

“Luciano says he did not.” Her uncle gave her a piercing look. “Perhaps he never saw her in the first place, eh? But some months later he was in London, staying with friends, and in the middle of the afternoon there came a knock at the door and when they opened it—pfff! There was a very nice basket from Harrods, and a blanket, and inside the blanket was a baby—and with the baby there was that—”

He pointed to the tarnished-looking mirror on the table before her: a round mirror the size of her two hands, carefully wrapped in chamois leather, and decorated with an octopus’s elegant dark coils. “A fairy story, eh? I do not believe all of it, but you are here, so—” With a heavy sigh he settled back upon the divan beside her, and raised his glass in a toast. “Cede Deo.”

“But who was she? What was her name?”

Her uncle smiled sadly. “I do not know, my darling. We none of us know. Not even your father—”

“But he must—you said—”

“Perhaps he does know. But he has never told me. He said only what I have told you already—that she was beautiful, and also that she sang, and he found her songs very interesting. They were old songs, he told me, very old songs. I am only a financier and so I do not know about these romantic things! But he said they were in a language we no longer remember.”

“But isn’t there a picture? Or a birth certificate? Somebody has to have something—”

Her uncle’s eyes widened. “My dear! You must not be so distressed—here, I will have Giuletta bring you some warm milk and biscotti—”

Angelica looked stricken. “No—I mean, isn’t there anything else? A photo, something—”

Her uncle pursed his lips, frowning. “I can show you what your father showed me,” he said at last, and went over to the tiers of bookshelves that covered one wall. “Here—”

He pulled a heavy volume from the wall. Angelica craned her neck to read the title.

Kietisch-mykenische Siegelbilder.

Lavender-smelling dust rose when her uncle blew upon the cracked binding. “One of his books. See?”

She glimpsed a brightly colored plate of a vase, the pink clay fragments carefully repaired and painted with a wide-eyed octopus.

“Like yours, eh?” Her uncle cocked his head at the mirror on the table. “Scungilli. But this is what I want to show you—”

Beckoning Angelica closer he held up the book to display another illustrated plate. “He showed me this, afterward. Many years later. He said it reminded him of his woman from the seashore.”