I was in Russia when Italy outlawed capital punishment in 1948. Only high treachery against the republic can get a person hanged by the state. Can you imagine? I cut the throats of two women, nearly decapitating one, and exhumed their hearts from their chests. And still they have no plans to execute me.
So here I am. Yet again a survivor. They tell me I will be here as long as I live.
We’ll see.
Nevertheless, it is not unpleasant. Trust me, an Italian prison is infinitely more tolerable than a Soviet POW camp.
Once Serafina even came to visit. We spoke of our families. My beloved Teresa. Her brothers. We spoke briefly of the Rosatis.
It’s clear that Serafina has a greater well from which to draw forgiveness than I. I reminded her that Francesca and Cristina had sentenced her to death, too. The Germans could just as easily have shot her when they murdered my wife and my brother. But she insists the family hadn’t a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?
I really have become quite the Dante scholar: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.”
Serafina may think I’m a crazy person, but I’m not. She has her scars, too—and not only the ones I saw when she turned her head and her hair fell aside. We are both living out our lives in a Purgatorio. The difference? I arrived from the Paradiso, once young and married and so in love. But Serafina, she who was born alone in a fever dream of fire? She whose very skin is a tapestry of loss? Serafina, of course, arrived from the Inferno.
Acknowledgments
In 2004, Michael Barnard, owner of Rakestraw Books in Danville, California, put a small, remarkable memoir in my hands: War in Val d’Orcia, by the marchesa Iris Origo. The book chronicled life on her sun-drenched Tuscan estate when the nightmare of the Second World War rolled like a tsunami across her and her husband’s lands. Michael urged me to read the memoir because my wife and I were about to visit our good friends Greg Levendusky and Pam Powers at the modest Italian podere, or farm, they were endeavoring to rebuild at the edge of the village of Montisi. Their new home was not far from the corner of Tuscany where Origo had once straddled two eras: she was a noblewoman, an anachronism even in 1943 and 1944, but at the same time she and her husband were pioneering landowners who modernized their property and tried to improve the lives of their tenant farmers. Origo was also a gifted writer, and her book fascinated me.
Meanwhile, I was mightily impressed by the way that Greg and Pam had restored the old Tuscan farmhouse and revived the land, and by the simplicity of their world in Montisi.
So in so many ways my thanks for this novel have to begin with the late marchesa Iris Origo and with my good friends.
I am also, however, profoundly grateful to Z. Philip Ambrose, professor emeritus at the University of Vermont. Although Professor Ambrose and I both live in northwestern Vermont, we first met at a summer choral concert at Sant’Anna in Camprena, an abbey perhaps six kilometers from Montisi. It is indeed a small world: six degrees of separation will always trump million-to-one odds. I was hoping Professor Ambrose could help me with my Etruscan history. He did that, but he was also an invaluable guide through the fictional village of Monte Volta and the experience of rural Italian civilians in the Second World War.
In addition, I want to thank a pair of physicians, William Charash and Marc Tischler. Dr. Charash, division chief for trauma, burn, and critical care surgery at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont, provided insight into Serafina Bettini’s burns and how she might have been kept alive and then treated in 1944. Dr. Tischler, a cardiologist at Fletcher Allen and the director of the echocardiography laboratory there, helped me to understand the state of open-heart surgery in the 1950s and how a serial killer might extract a human heart. Both physicians are also associate professors at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
Laura Renzi Goodyear was my all-important feet on the ground in Italy, researching there and explaining to me what parts of the investigation the Florence polizia might have handled and where the carabinieri might have fit in. (And big thanks to Krista Patterson Jones for suggesting Laura.) She was a spectacularly good researcher, and I am deeply appreciative. I used much of what she taught me and, I confess, disregarded other historical details. In any case, all credit for the minutiae in the investigation that are accurate goes to Laura; all blame for the liberties goes to me.
Thanks also to Jeremy Julian and Allegra Biery, with Northern Trust, for helping me understand the work of an American banker in Florence in 1955.
There were a great many books that were helpful, in addition to Iris Origo’s memoir. Among them was Douglas Preston’s and Mario Spezi’s riveting and unforgettable The Monster of Florence. It is, like all of Preston’s work, absolutely terrific—but it also allowed me to follow an actual investigation. Rick Atkinson’s powerful The Day of Battle helped me learn the specifics of the fight for Sicily. (In addition, I found the epigraph for this novel in his extraordinary history.) And two wonderful novels inspired me and took me back to Italy as I was writing this story: Olaf Olafsson’s Restoration and Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace. Both novels are haunting and beautiful and brilliantly capture what life might have been like in Italy during the Second World War. Moreover, Olafsson’s fictional Tuscan villa is downright magical.
Big thanks as well to Jane Gelfman and her staff at Gelfman Schneider—Cathy Gleason and Victoria Marini; to Arlynn Greenbaum at Authors Unlimited; and to Todd Doughty, John Fontana, Suzanne Herz, William Heus, Judy Jacoby, Jennifer Kurdyla, Jennifer Marshall, Sonny Mehta, Beth Meister, Anne Messitte, Roz Parr, Russell Perreault, John Pitts, Andrea Robinson, Bill Thomas, and the whole wondrous team at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. And, of course, enormous thanks to my editor there, Jenny Jackson, who is grounded and smart and insightful, and capable of walking me in off the ledge when characters die or I need to delete three-thousand-word scenes. Without question, these are the attributes a writer needs in an editor.
Finally, I am so blessed to be married to Victoria Blewer. She, along with our wise-beyond-her-years daughter, Grace, read this book at different stages. The two of them always offered their suggestions in a fashion that can only be called diplomatic.
I thank you all so, so much.
Books by Chris Bohjalian
NOVELS
The Sandcastle
The Night Strangers
Secrets of Eden
Skeletons at the Feast
The Double Bind
Before You Know Kindness
The Buffalo Soldier
Trans-Sister Radio
The Law of Similars
Midwives
Water Witches
Past the Bleachers
Hangman
A Killing in the Real World
ESSAY COLLECTIONS
Idyll Banter
A Note About the Author
Chris Bohjalian is the critically acclaimed author of sixteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Sandcastle Girls, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, and Midwives. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and three of his novels have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.
Other titles by Chris Bohjalian available in eBook format
Fiction:
The Sandcastle Girls 9780385534802
The Night Strangers 9780307888860
Secrets of Eden 9780307589705
Skeletons at the Feast 9780307449559
The Double Bind 9780307389411
Before You Know Kindness 9780307276940
The Buffalo Soldier 9781400045334
Trans-Sister Radio 9781400032983
The Law of Similars 9780609606292
Midwives 9781400032976
Essay Collections:
Idyll B
anter 9781400080717
Visit: www.chrisbohjalian.com
Like: facebook.com/pages/Chris-Bohjalian/25378292117
Follow: @ChrisBohjalian
For more information on Doubleday books
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Chris Bohjalian, The Light in the Ruins
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