RINALDO FUMIGALLI RODE INTO VALETTO on the back of Milo’s moped, a burgundy attaché case under one arm. When he stepped down in front of the villa, his cognac-brown oxfords crunching on the gravel, he peered out at the valley, craned up at the villa façade in the mild November sunshine, and I saw a slight deflation work into his shoulders, as if he’d expected something grander from Iris’s emails and telephone calls. I waited with Iris on the front steps before she bustled toward this manicured, willowy figure in a great flurry of apologies for his long journey south and gratitude that he would come all this way. They kissed on both cheeks and he called her mia cara professoressa.
Everything on Rinaldo’s person was a thing of refinement—from the Borsalino hat with the grosgrain band to the white alligator-skin watchband to the delicate Ben Franklin wire-frames perched on his big, aquiline nose—but the colours and patterns of his clothes made him look more like a stately piece of furniture than a retired criminologist turned Milanese private detective. I’d never seen so many shades of moth, taupe, or tan on a human being, and all of it had a weave, a texture. Iris introduced me to Rinaldo and I came down the steps to shake his slender, cool hand.
A few moments later, Rinaldo’s opposite arrived in the form of Orlando Fiorani, the Serafinos’ local lawyer. He came on foot in a shapeless black gabardine suit, a bulging, scuffed leather satchel under one arm, eating a cornetto out of a grease-blotted paper bag. He trotted up the stairs, wiped his crumby hand down one pant leg, and shook hands with each of us. Clearly embarrassed by his dishevelled, parochial appearance, Iris introduced Orlando by saying his law firm had been with the family for nearly half a century. Then she whisked us up the stairs and inside the entrance hall, where Donata took Rinaldo’s hat and overcoat and put out her hand for Orlando’s crumpled cornetto bag. She gestured toward the formal dining room, which had been freshly scrubbed, bleached and arranged as if for a court martial in some far-flung pocket of the colonies.
On the enormous walnut table in the middle of the room, there was a silver tray with a carafe of water and four glass tumblers. Lemon wedges floated in the throat of the carafe, and a little paper cone covered its mouth, presumably to keep out plaster dust from the pockmarked fresco above. Three high-backed chairs were arranged along one side of the table and then, ten feet from the opposite edge, a single chair with a brass ashtray on a stand next to it. But the real centrepiece was an outdated speakerphone and hulking fax machine at one end of the table, each attached to thirty feet of wiring, as if whatever was about to unfold would entail telexes and conference calls with the 1990s.
The legal basis of this meeting was unclear to me. An informal discussion before arbitration? A review of the correspondence? But then I heard Iris refer to me as il querelante, the plaintiff, even though I hadn’t brought any case or complaint against Elisa Tomassi, and she said that the complainant, la denunciante, the northerner, was due to arrive in fifteen minutes with the documents for review. Rose and Violet stepped into the dining room wrapped in their housecoats, their dogs trotting and wheezing behind them. They sat along the wall, and since I wasn’t comfortable with my role as il querelante, I went to join them.
Rinaldo took the middle of the three chairs and rested his attaché case on the table. He lifted the paper cone on the carafe and poured himself a glass of water, careful not to unload a lemon wedge, and took a few meditative sips. Orlando and Iris sat on either side, watching him drink, unwilling to approach the water tray, as if hydration were a matter of etiquette or rank.
Rinaldo said, ‘Since we have a little time at our disposal, perhaps we should review what my firm has ascertained in the course of our due diligence. I have asked my secretary to stand by in case we need additional documents from the files.’
I pictured Rinaldo’s secretary: a venerable Milanese stenographer in cashmere and pearls.
‘I also have some documents written in Aldo Serafino’s hand,’ offered up Orlando, running a finger along the bulging mouth of his leather satchel. ‘Including his holographic will’—he seemed particularly proud of the word holographic—‘dated before his departure in 1944. As it happens, my own father witnessed his signature.’
Rinaldo ignored Orlando and turned to Iris. ‘Signora, does my plan meet with your approval?’
Iris gave an approving nod and folded her arms. Rinaldo opened his attaché case and produced some loose-leaf pages written in loping fountain-pen cursive.
‘Allora, Elisa Tomassi was born in 1964 and is originally from the Ossola Valley, from a tiny village of chimney sweeps and woodcutters up in the Alps. She moved to Milan when she was eighteen to attend university on a scholarship, but she dropped out to enrol in culinary school and become a chef. In Milan, she and her husband owned and ran a restaurant for more than fifteen years, an establishment that was highly regarded and won several prestigious culinary awards.’
I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring on Elisa Tomassi’s hand and I wondered if the marriage was still intact. And she was a chef, not a mathematician or an ad executive or architect, and surely her culinary calling must have come from her mother, Alessia, who in turn had been taught to cook by my grandmother. There was something satisfying about making this connection, and I pictured a young girl standing beside Ida in the villa’s wartime kitchen.
‘Signora Tomassi owns an apartment in Milan, in the Isola district, and she now lets a room and sometimes the entire apartment to tourists on Airbnb, and this enterprise enjoys a 4.2-star rating among its former guests …’
I wondered if Rinaldo was going to read us a few online reviews of the apartment.
‘This is the apartment where she lived with her husband, teenage son and university-aged daughter until the restaurant burned down and there was a subsequent divorce. I gather there was no insurance.’ The word subsequent seemed to imply causality, as if the fire had also devastated the marriage. ‘These events transpired a few years ago. The son went to live in London with his father and the daughter stayed behind with the mother in the apartment.’
Even as a historian, I have always been unnerved by the brute facts of other people’s lives. But it’s not empathy that causes me to linger on the torments and hardships in the archive, or during interviews, it’s the galvanising fear that these things could happen to me. As I listened, I knew Rinaldo wanted to establish Elisa Tomassi’s motivation for wanting the cottage, but all I could think about was the award-winning restaurant burning to the ground, or the son going off to live with his father in England. Even a few years after Clare died, I would call Susan several times a week in her college dorm on some logistical premise, but mostly to make sure she was still alive and breathing in the world. Now, I found myself taking my phone out of my pocket to text Susan that I loved her and was proud of her, my go-to whenever I felt ‘the fog on the staircase’, the phrase I’d used in my few therapy sessions to describe this vague and recurring sense of dread.
Rinaldo continued thumbing through his notes while I looked at the screen of my phone, waiting for Susan’s reply, for proof of life and love. Elisa’s grandparents, Rinaldo said, were active in the partisan resistance after the 1943 armistice, an umbrella group of anti-fascists who pushed for liberation after the Italian government surrendered to the Allies and the Germans took control of the central and northern regions. The grandparents were living in Milan during the first part of the war before returning to the Ossola Valley after the bombings and the armistice. Her grandfather, Giulio Parigi, was involved in the short-lived Republic of Ossola.
‘A republic?’ scoffed Violet from the sidelines.
‘Sì, signora,’ said Rinaldo, enjoying some banter with his courtroom gallery. ‘They even had their own flag and official recognition from the Swiss. It lasted less than a month, before the Germans sent reinforcements and crushed everything. It was their last hurrah.’ Rinaldo flipped through some pages. ‘It is alleged that Aldo Serafino was given protection in a baita, a mountain hut, owned by Giulio Parigi and his wife, Carmela. They sheltered him after he was renounced as a partisan in the resistance during the German counteroffensive. These details, we are told, are contained in letters, as is the promise of the stone cottage upon Aldo’s death.’
Violet gripped the edge of her seat, the way she did during a televised pro-wrestling match. ‘Are we to suppose that our father travelled all the way up there, practically to Switzerland, during wartime?’
‘Didn’t he leave on horseback? I think I remember that,’ said Rose.
‘And where have these supposed letters been all this time?’ asked Violet. ‘Our father writes letters to some alpine peasants and promises a cottage that’s five hundred miles away?’ She waved a dismissive hand in the air.
From the back of the dining room, Elisa Tomassi’s voice called through the slatted sunshine: ‘Signora, there is only one letter, and it was written to your mother, but never sent. It was composed during Aldo Serafino’s last days, when my grandmother was caring for him.’
She must have been standing there for some time, listening to us assemble the outline of her life. Her boot heels rapped staccato against the terracotta tiles as she crossed the room, a slim cardboard box held close to her chest. As she approached the walnut table, she said good morning to everybody and Rinaldo gestured to the high-backed chair with the ashtray beside it. She sat down, her back straight, her knees together and rested the box in her lap. From the pocket of her plum velvet dress, she took out a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind I’d worn a thousand times in reading rooms and archives. She opened the lid of the box and placed the gloves on top of some handwritten pages in plastic sleeves. ‘If you wish to remove the pages from their plastic sleeves, then please use these cotton gloves to protect the old paper. It’s quite brittle.’
Rinaldo removed his wire-frame glasses and held them at an angle, one earpiece pressed against his lower lip. ‘Before we examine the documents,’ he said, ‘perhaps you would be willing to answer a few questions, Signora Tomassi?’
‘As many as you like.’
Apparently oblivious to the digital age, Rinaldo lifted a black-and-chrome Dictaphone from his attaché case. He pressed record, watched the miniature cassette begin to spindle, and aimed it out toward the complainant. ‘How did this letter come into your possession?’
‘I discovered it in my grandparents’ house, after my grandmother died.’
‘Both grandparents are deceased?’
‘Yes. My grandfather was killed by the Germans for harbouring partisans in the autumn of 1944, but my grandmother lived until she was in her eighties. She died in 1988, but I only found the letter in her attic just a few years ago among some other documents. We still own my grandparents’ house in a small village northeast of Domodossola.’
‘It seems she’s got a taste for real estate all around Italy,’ announced Violet.
‘Signora, please,’ said Rinaldo.
Elisa Tomassi addressed the side of the room. ‘I cannot change the past, or the wishes of the dead.’
Rinaldo asked, ‘In what way were your grandparents involved in the resistance?
‘They took supplies up into the mountains for the partisans by mule. My grandfather was a chimney sweep, woodcutter and carpenter and he knew the Alps very well. My grandmother was also a coordinator for the staffette.’
‘Cosa significa?’ asked Orlando.
‘The staffettas were women who worked in the resistance. They helped smuggle weapons and resistance newspapers, or acted as messengers. My grandparents ran their operation out of the Society for the Noble Burial of Cadavers, a charity they had started for burying the war dead. They hid weapons and supplies inside the coffins.’
‘Che coraggio,’ said Rinaldo. ‘And how did they meet Aldo Serafino?’
‘The partisans recruited Aldo to work in the Ossola Valley because he was an engineer and had already been sympathetic to the cause.’
‘Because he took in refugees like your mother?’ asked Iris.
‘Sì,’ said Elisa. ‘That was how my grandparents knew about Aldo.’
‘Please continue,’ said Rinaldo.
‘They needed someone who could live a double life up there in the towns, completely unknown, and then go out into the mountains at night to radio with the British and Americans, to organise the air drops. My grandparents were his cover. They employed him as a coffin-maker during the winters, when it was too cold to be in the mountains. But then—’ Elisa swallowed, adjusted her glasses, tucked some curls behind her ears. ‘Aldo’s real identity was revealed after he was denounced as a partisan during the German counteroffensive. He had to disappear into the Alps. My grandmother talked about him on her deathbed, but only referred to him as the engineer, l’ingegnere, his nickname in the resistance. It wasn’t until I found the letter that I realised who he was. My mother, who had never spoken about these events, confirmed that it was Aldo Serafino, the father from the villa where she’d stayed in Umbria.’
‘And what about your mother now?’ asked Rinaldo, looking down at his notes. ‘Why isn’t she here claiming the cottage on behalf of your family?’
‘She is unwell,’ said Elisa, straightening the empty fingers of a white cotton glove.
Rinaldo poured himself some more water and took a few sips. Susan finally texted me back—a kissy-face emoji—and it echoed through the room with pinging, submarine glee. I apologised, turned my phone to silent, crossed my legs.
Rinaldo said, ‘Thank you for being so forthcoming, Signora Tomassi. Could we now review the documents?’
‘Of course,’ said Elisa, standing up and bringing the box and gloves to the table.
Violet folded her arms and said, ‘My mother still has some of my father’s old letters and documents in the library, so we can compare the handwriting. This little hoax will be revealed as a forgery very handily.’
‘Naturally,’ said Orlando, finally composed, now pouring himself some water into a tumbler, ‘there is the matter of whether such a letter has been witnessed and how it stands against Aldo Serafino’s holographic will, which, as I said earlier, I happen to have in my possession here …’
Rinaldo put his two palms together, prayer-like, at the tip of his hawkish nose. ‘Perhaps we can ask Signora Tomassi to give us an adjournment while we review the letter. Shall we reconvene this afternoon? Is four too late? I want to make sure we have plenty of time.’
Elisa, who was still standing at the edge of the table, said that would be fine and turned toward the back of the dining room. When she was almost to the entrance hall, she stopped to address us again. ‘My grandparents were poor and mostly forgotten after they died. But they were heroes of the Italian people and they saved your father’s life. As you will see in the letter, the cottage was a debt of gratitude from your family to mine, when my grandmother had lost almost everything she had in the world. I know the right and moral thing will prevail.’
Violet leaned down to rub her dog’s stomach as he stretched into a ribbon of sunlight. ‘Rocky feels unwell … mal di stomaco. I will go and find some of the handwriting. Otherwise, you can call me on the intercom when this foolishness is over.’ She stood up and walked from the room, the dog ambling and grunting behind her.