Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness

That afternoon when we got home, we found an enormous sea serpent nailed by its neck to the doorframe. It was black and phosphorescent and, with its still-living eyes and saw-toothed, wide-open jaws, it looked like a gypsy curse. I was nine at the time, and so intense was my terror at the apparition that I lost my voice. My brother, who was two years younger than I, dropped the oxygen tanks, the masks and the fins and ran off screaming. Miss Forbes heard him from the twisting stone stairway that wound up the rocks from the dock to the house. When she reached us, she was pale and gasping for breath; but as soon as she saw the creature crucified on the door, she knew the cause of our horror. She always said that two children together are both to blame for what each does separately, so she reprimanded the two of us for my brother's shouts and went on scolding us for our lack of self-control. She spoke in German, not in the English her contract as governess called for, perhaps because she was frightened, too, and didn't want to admit it. However, as soon as she regained her breath, she switched to her stony English and pedagogical obsession.

"It's a Muraena helena," she told us. "So named because it was a sacred animal to the ancient Greeks."

Oreste, the local fellow who was teaching us how to swim underwater, suddenly appeared from behind some caper bushes. His diving mask was pushed up on his forehead, and he wore abbreviated swimming trunks and a leather belt with six knives of various sizes and shapes, for he knew no other way of hunting underwater than fighting the animals hand to hand. He was 20 years old, spent more time in the depths of the sea than on dry land and looked like a sea creature himself, with his body always oiled with motor grease. When she first saw him, Miss Forbes had told my parents that it was impossible to conceive of a more beautiful human being, but his beauty didn't spare him from her sternness: He, too, got a scolding, in Italian, for having hung the moray on the door without any possible motive other than that of frightening the children. Then Miss Forbes ordered him to take it down, cautioning him to give it the respect due a mythological creature, and sent us off to dress for dinner.

We did so immediately and tried not to make a single mistake, for after two weeks under the regime of Miss Forbes, we had learned that nothing is more difficult than day-to-day life. While we showered in the bathroom, in semidarkness, I noticed that my brother was still thinking about the moray. "It had people eyes," he said. I agreed, though I pretended I didn't, and managed to change the subject. But when I got out of the shower, he asked me to wait for him.

"It's still daylight out," I told him.

I opened the curtains. It was mid-August, and through the window you could see the burning lunar plain all the way to the other end of the island. The sun was suspended in the sky.

"It's not because of that," said my brother. "It's that I'm afraid to be afraid."

Nevertheless, when we got to the table, he seemed calm, and he had dressed and combed himself so carefully that Miss Forbes congratulated him and gave him two extra points for good conduct. I, on the other hand, lost two of the five I'd earned that week, because at the last minute, I'd rushed and arrived in the dining room out of breath. Each 50 points would give us the right to a double portion of dessert, but neither of us had managed to get beyond 15. It was too bad, because never would we come across more delicious puddings than those made by Miss Forbes.

Before starting dinner, we'd say grace standing over the empty plates. Miss Forbes wasn't Catholic, but her contract stipulated that she was to have us pray six times a day: She had learned our prayers in order to comply. Then the three of us would sit down, we boys holding our breath while she inspected the most infinitesimal details of our comportment, and only when everything seemed perfect would she ring the little bell. Then Fulvia Flaminea, the cook, would enter with the eternal noodle soup of that hateful summer.

At the beginning, when we were alone with our parents, meals had been like parties. Fulvia Flaminea would serve us, cackling around the table with an inspired disorder that made life happy, and then she'd sit down with us to eat a little from everyone's plate. But ever since Miss Forbes had taken charge of our destiny, Fulvia Flaminea served us in such dark silence that we could hear the bubbling of the still-boiling soup in the pot. We ate with our spines pressed stiff against the backs of the chairs, chewing ten times on one side and ten on the other, without taking our eyes off the rigid specter of that languid and stately lady while she recited from memory a lesson in manners. It was just like Sunday Mass but without the consolation of people singing.

The day we found the moray hanging on the door, Miss Forbes spoke to us of our duties to our country. After the soup, Fulvia Flaminea, practically floating on the sound of the sonorously droning voice, served us a charcoal-grilled fillet of snowy-white meat with an exquisite smell. I preferred fish to any other dish on earth or in heaven, and that reminder of our house in Guagamayal brought relief to my heart. But my brother pushed his plate away without trying it.

"I don't like it," he said.

Miss Forbes interrupted her lesson.

"How can you tell," she said, "if you haven't even tasted it?"

She gave the cook a look of warning, but it was too late.

"Moray is the most delicious fish in the world, figlio mio," Fulvia Flaminea told him. "Try it and you'll see."

Miss Forbes didn't change her expression. She told us in her severe way that moray had been the food of kings in antiquity and that warriors had fought over its liver because it gave them supernatural courage. Then she repeated, as she had so many times in such a short while, that good taste was not a faculty one was born with, that it couldn't be taught at any age but had to be imposed from childhood; so there was no valid reason for not eating. I, who had tasted the moray before knowing what it was, was in a quandary: It had a smooth taste, though a little melancholy, but the image of the serpent nailed to the doorframe was more urgent than my appetite. My brother made a supreme effort with the first mouthful, but he couldn't stand it: He vomited.

"Go to the bathroom," Miss Forbes told him implacably. "Wash thoroughly and come back to eat."

I was full of anguish for him, because I knew how hard it was for him to go through the entire house, now darkening with nightfall, to stay alone in the bathroom for the time it took to wash himself. But he came back quickly in another clean shirt, pale, his inner trembling scarcely noticeable, and he stood up quite well under the stern inspection of his cleanliness. Then Miss Forbes carved off a piece of the moray and gave the order to continue. I took a second bite with great difficulty. My brother, on the other hand, didn't even pick up his knife and fork.

"I'm not going to eat it," he said.

His determination was so obvious that Miss Forbes let it pass.

"All right," she said, "but you won't get any dessert."

My brother's relief inspired me with his valor. I crossed my knife and fork over the plate, as Miss Forbes had taught us we should do when we were finished, and said:

"I won't have any dessert, either."

"Nor will you watch any television," she replied.

"And we won't watch any television," I said.

Miss Forbes laid her napkin on the table and the three of us stood up to pray. Then she sent us to bed with the warning that we had until she finished eating to fall asleep. All our points for good behavior were annulled, and only when we'd earned 20 more could we enjoy her cream puffs, her vanilla tarts and her exquisite cherry cake again.

Sooner or later, we had to reach our breaking point. For an entire year, we'd been anxiously waiting for our carefree summer on the island of Pantelleria, south of Sicily, and the anticipated joy had been a reality for the first month, when our parents were with us. I can still recall, as if dreaming, the lunar plain of volcanic rocks, the eternal sea, the house, brightly whitewashed down to its brick frills, from whose windows on windless nights you could see revolving blades of light from African beacons. Exploring the still depths around the island with my father, we'd discovered a string of yellow torpedoes that had fallen there in the last war, and we'd brought up a Greek amphora that was almost a meter in length, wrapped in petrified garlands, at the bottom of which lay the dregs of some immemorial and poisonous wine.

But the most dazzling revelation for us had been Fulvia Flaminea. She looked like a jolly bishop and went about everywhere with an entourage of sleepy cats that got in the way of her walking, though she said she didn't tolerate them out of love but just to keep the rats from eating her. At night, while our parents watched programs for adults on television, Fulvia Flaminea would take us to her house, less than 100 meters away, and she taught us to distinguish the distant Arabic tongues, the songs and gusts of weeping that came in the winds from Tunisia. Her husband was much younger than she, and during the summers, he worked at the tourist hotels on the other side of the island, coming home only to sleep.

Oreste lived with his parents a little way off and always showed up at night with a string of fish or baskets of lobsters he had just caught, and he would hang them in Fulvia Flaminea's kitchen so that her husband would take them the next day to sell in the hotels. Then he would put his diving lamp on his forehead again and take us to hunt wood rats as big as rabbits that lay in wait for kitchen leavings. Sometimes we'd get home after our parents had gone to bed and have a hard time getting to sleep because of the clamor of rats fighting over scraps in the courtyards, but even that disturbance was one more happy ingredient of our happy summer.

The decision to hire a German governess could only have occurred to my father, a writer from the Caribbean with more conceit than talent. Dazzled by the ashes of the glories of Europe, he always seemed to be making excuses for his origins, in his books as well as in real life, and the fantasy he had imposed on himself was that not a vestige of his past should be left in his sons. My mother remained as humble as she had been as an itinerant teacher in upper Guarija and never imagined that her husband could conceive of an idea that wasn't providential. Neither of them could have thought seriously about what our life would be like with a lady sergeant from Dortmund who was determined to inculcate us by force with the antiquated manners of European society, while they went off with 40 fashionable writers on a five-week cultural cruise around the islands of the Aegean.

•

Miss Forbes arrived on the last Saturday in July on the regular ferry from Palermo, and as soon as we saw her, we understood that the party was over. In that southern heat, she came wearing military boots and a double-breasted suit, with mannishly cut hair beneath a felt hat. She smelled like monkey pee. "That's how all Europeans smell, especially in summer," my father told us. "It's the smell of civilization." But in spite of her martial getup, Miss Forbes was a pathetic creature who might have aroused our compassion had we been older or had she shown some trace of tenderness.

The world changed overnight. The six (continued on page 88) Miss • Forbies (continued from page 80) hours we spent in the sea every day, which since the summer began had exercised our imagination, were reduced to a single daily hour that was always the same. When we were with our parents, we'd had all the time we needed to swim with Oreste and to be amazed by the art and audacity with which he confronted octopuses in their own murky environment of ink and blood with no weapons other than his fighting knives. He continued to arrive at 11 o'clock in his small outboard motorboat, as always, but now Miss Forbes wouldn't let him stay with us one minute longer than was necessary for our brief lesson in underwater swimming. She forbade us to go to Fulvia Flaminea's house at night, because she thought it showed too much familiarity with the help, and we had to devote the time we'd previously spent hunting rats to the analytic reading of Shakespeare. It was impossible for us to conceive of a crueler torment than this new life of little princes.

But we soon realized that Miss Forbes wasn't as strict with herself as she was with us, and that caused the first crack in her authority. In the beginning, she used to sit on the beach under the multicolored umbrella, dressed for war, reading ballads by Schiller, while Oreste taught us to dive, and then she'd give us theoretical lessons in deportment, hour after hour, until it was time for lunch.

One day, she asked Oreste to take her to the tourist shops at the hotels in his motorboat, and she returned with a one-piece bathing suit that was as black and as iridescent as a sealskin, but she never went into the water. She would sun herself on the beach while we swam, and she'd dry the sweat from her body with a towel without taking a shower, so that at the end of three days, she looked like a cooked lobster and the smell of her civilization had become unbreathable.

Her nights were her release. From the very beginning of her command, we'd heard somebody walking through the house at night, grouping in the dark, and my brother began upsetting himself with the notion that he was hearing the drowned men of Fulvia Flaminea's stories. Soon we discovered that the walker was Miss Forbes, who led by night the sort of single woman's life of which she disapproved by day.

One dawn, we surprised her in the kitchen in her schoolgirl's nightgown preparing one of her splendid desserts, her body daubed from head to toe with flour and drinking a glass of port in a disorderly state that would have been scandalous to the other Miss Forbes. From then on, we knew that after putting us to bed, she didn't go to her room but went down to the beach to swim on the sly or stayed in the living room until very late, watching salacious television movies with the sound off, while she ate tarts and even drank bottles of the special wine that my father zealously hoarded for memorable occasions. Contrary to her own preachings of austerity and restraint, her nonstop guzzling was proof of her unruly passion. We'd hear her talking to herself in her room, declaiming in her melodious German entire passages from Die Jungfrau von Orleans. We heard her sing, we heard her sobbing in bed until dawn, and then she would appear at breakfast, her eyes puffy with tears, more lugubrious and authoritarian than ever.

Neither my brother nor I has ever again been so unhappy, but I was resigned to putting up with her until the end, for I knew that, no matter what, her power would prevail over ours. My brother, on the other hand, opposed her with all the impetuosity of his character and our happy summer turned into hell. The episode with the moray was the last straw. That night, while we listened to Miss Forbes's incessant pacing through the silent house, my brother let loose with the rancor that had been fermenting in his soul.

"I'm going to kill her," he said.

What he said surprised me less than the coincidence that I'd been thinking the same thing since dinner. Nevertheless, I tried to dissuade him.

"They'll chop off your head," I said.

"They don't have guillotines in Sicily," he said. "Besides, nobody will know who it was."

I thought of the amphora we'd rescued from the waters and the sediment of the fatal wine that was still inside it. My father was keeping it because he wanted to submit it to a thorough analysis to determine the nature of its poison, which its great age alone did not explain. To use it on Miss Forbes would be easy; no one would ever think her death had been anything but an accident or suicide. So at dawn, when we heard her collapse onto her bed, exhausted from her noisy vigil, we poured the wine from the amphora into a bottle of my father's special wine. From what we'd heard, the dose was enough to kill a horse.

We had breakfast in the kitchen at nine o'clock sharp, served by Miss Forbes herself, with the sweet rolls that Fulvia Flaminea had left in the oven earlier.

Two days after the substitution of the wine, when we were again at breakfast, my brother informed me with a disappointed glance that the poisoned bottle of wine was still intact on the sideboard. That was a Friday, and the bottle went untouched over the weekend. But on Tuesday, Miss Forbes drank half of it down while she watched racy movies on television.

Nevertheless, she showed up, as punctual as ever, for breakfast on Wednesday. As usual, she looked as if she'd had a bad night, and her anxious eyes behind her massive lenses grew even more anxious when she found a letter with German stamps in the breadbasket. She read it while she drank her coffee, something she'd often told us not to do; and as she read, her face brightened as if those written words radiated clearheadedness. Then she tore off the stamps and put them into the breadbasket with the leftover rolls for Fulvia Flaminea's husband. In spite of the morning's bad start, that day she accompanied us on our underwater exploration. We wandered through the clear sea until our oxygen tanks began to give out and we returned to the house without having had our lesson in good manners. Not only was Miss Forbes a flowering spirit all day but at dinnertime she seemed livelier than ever. My brother couldn't bear his disappointment. As soon as we sat down, he pushed aside the plate of noodle soup and grimaced.

"I've had it up to my balls with this worm water," he said.

It was as if he had tossed a hand grenade onto the table. Miss Forbes went pale; her lips hardened until the smoke of her anger began to clear and her eyeglass lenses clouded over with tears. Then she took them off and dried them with her napkin, and before she rose, she laid them on the table with the bitterness of surrender without glory.

"You two do whatever you want," she said. "I no longer exist."

She shut herself up in her room from seven o'clock on, but just before midnight, when she supposed us to be sleeping, we saw her pass by in her schoolgirl nightgown, carrying to her room half a chocolate cake and the bottle that still held more than four fingers of the poisoned wine.

"Poor Miss Forbes," I said.

My brother was not breathing easily.

"Poor us if she doesn't die tonight," he said.

That dawn, she talked to herself again for a long time, reciting Schiller in a grand voice, inspired with frenzied madness and topping it off with a wail that filled the house. Then she sighed several times from the depths of her soul and finished with a sad and drawn-out whistle, like that of a drifting ship. When we woke up, still (concluded on page 186) Miss • Forbes (continued from page 88) exhausted from the tension of the vigil, the sun was cutting through the blinds, but the house seemed sunk in a pond. Then we realized that it was going on ten and we hadn't been awakened by Miss Forbes's morning routine. We hadn't heard the toilet flushing at eight o'clock or the bathroom faucet or the sound of the blinds or the heels of her boots and the three deadly raps of her slave driver's hand on the door. My brother pressed his ear to the wall, held his breath so as to hear the slightest stirring of life in the next room and finally exhaled a sigh of liberation.

"That's it," he said. "The only thing you can hear is the sea."

We fixed our own breakfast a little before 11, and then we went down to the beach with two oxygen tanks each and two more in reserve before Fulvia Flaminea arrived, with her retinue of cats, to clean the house. Oreste was already on the dock, cleaning a gilthead he had just caught. We told him we had waited for Miss Forbes until 11 o'clock, and since she was still sleeping, we had decided to come down to the water by ourselves. We also told him that she'd suffered a crying fit at the table and possibly hadn't slept well and preferred to stay in bed. Oreste, just as we'd expected, wasn't interested in the explanation, and he accompanied us for an hour of wandering through the depths of the sea. Later, he told us to go up and have lunch, and then he went off in his motorboat to sell the giltheads at the tourist hotels. We waved goodbye from the stairs, pretending to be on our way up to the house until he disappeared around the escarpments. Then we put on full tanks of oxygen and went swimming without anyone's permission.

The day was cloudy and there was a rumble of gloomy thunder on the horizon, but the sea was smooth and clear and the light it gave off was all we needed. We swam on the surface until we were lined up with the Pantelleria lighthouse, and then we turned about 100 meters to the right and dove where we calculated we'd seen the war torpedoes at the beginning of summer. There they were: six of them, painted sunny yellow and with their serial numbers intact and resting on the volcanic bottom in such perfect alignment that it couldn't have happened by chance. Then we continued around the lighthouse, looking for the sunken city that had so often, and with so much amazement, been described to us by Fulvia Flaminea, but we couldn't find it. After two hours, convinced that there were no new mysteries to discover, we came up through the surface on our last breath of oxygen.

While we'd been diving, a summer storm had come up; the sea was rough and a flock of fiercely screeching carnivorous birds hovered over the furrow of dying fish on the beach, but the afternoon light looked brand-new and life was good without Miss Forbes. But when we finished our laborious climb up the stone steps, we saw a lot of people at the house and two police cars by the door, and then, for the first time, we realized what we'd done. My brother started to tremble and tried to turn back.

"I'm not going in," he said.

I, on the other hand, had the misguided inspiration that all we had to do was look at the corpse and we'd be safe from all suspicion.

"Take it easy," I told him. "Take a deep breath and just think about one thing: We don't know anything."

Nobody paid attention to us. We dropped the oxygen tanks, masks and fins on the porch steps and went in through the side entrance, where two men sat on the floor, smoking, next to a field stretcher. Then we noticed an ambulance drawn up at the back door and several soldiers armed with rifles. In the living room, the neighborhood women were praying in dialect, sitting in the chairs placed against the wall, while men gathered in the courtyard, talking about anything but death. I tightened my grip on my brother's hard, cold hand, and we went into the house through the back door. Our bedroom looked just the way we'd left it in the morning. In Miss Forbes's room, next to ours, an armed carabinière was keeping people out, but the door was open. With heavy hearts we looked inside, and as we did, Fulvia Flaminea burst out of the kitchen and shut the door with a shout of horror: "For the love of God, figlioli, don't look at her!"

It was too late. Never, for the rest of our lives, would we forget what we'd seen in that fleeting moment. Two civilian men were checking the distance from the bed to the wall with a tape measure, while another took pictures with a black-hooded camera, like the ones used by park photographers. Miss Forbes wasn't on the unmade bed. She lay on her side on the floor, naked, in a pool of dried blood that had spread over the floor of the room, and her body was riddled with stabs. There were 27 fatal wounds and, from the number and their obvious ferocity, it was deduced that they had been delivered with the fury of unappeasable love and that Miss Forbes had received them with the same passion, neither shouting nor weeping, reciting Schiller with her beautiful soldier voice, accepting the fact that this was the inevitable price of her summer of happiness.

"Never, for the rest of our lives, would we forget what we'd seen in that fleeting moment."

"My brother was not breathing easily. 'Poor us if she doesn't die tonight,' he said."