The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova Page A

without a visit.‖ He leaned back and stretched his legs. ―They‘re a little strange—eccentricis the way to put it, I guess, but very kind. Are you game?‖
    ―I said I was,‖ I pointed out. I preferred staying alone with my father to visiting strangers, whose presence always brought out my native shyness, but he seemed eager to see his old friends. In any case, the vibration of the Fiat was lulling me to sleep; I was tired fro m the train trip. A spell had come over me that morning, the alarmingly belated trickle of blood my doctor was always worrying about and for which Mrs. Clay had awkwardly supplied my suitcase with a mass of cotton pads. My first glimpse of this change had brought tears of surprise to my eyes in the train lavatory, as if someone had wounded me; the smudge on my sensible cotton underpants looked like the thumbprint of a murderer. I‘d said nothing about it to my father. River valleys and village-piled distant hills became a hazy panorama past the car window, then blurred. I was still sleepy at lunch, which we ate in a town made up of cafés and dark bars, the street cats curling and uncurling around the doorways.
    But when we pulled upward with the twilight toward one of twenty towering hill towns, stacking themselves around us like the subjects of a fresco, I found myself wide awake.
    The windy, cloud-swept evening showed cracks of sunset on the horizon—toward the Mediterranean, my father said, toward Gibraltar and other places we might go someday.
    Above us was a town built on stilts of stone, its streets nearly vertical and its alleys terraced with narrow stone steps. My father guided the little car here and there, once past a trattoria doorway that streamed light onto the damp cobbles. Then he steered cautiously down the other side of the hill. ―It‘s in here, if I‘m remembering correctly.‖ He turned between dark guardian cypresses into a rutted lane. ―Villa Montefollinoco, at Monteperduto. Monteperduto‘s the town. Remember?‖
    I remembered. We‘d looked at the map over breakfast, my father tracing with one finger past his coffee cup: ―Siena, here. That‘s your focal point. That‘s in Tuscany. Then we cross just into Umbria. Here‘s Montepulciano, a famous old place, and on this next hill is our town, Monteperduto.‖ The names ran together in my head, but monte meant mountain and we were among mountains for a large dollhouse, small painted mountains like children of the Alps, which I‘d traveled through twice now.
    In the impending darkness, the villa looked small, a low-slung farmhouse made of fieldstone, with cypress and olive trees clustered around its reddish roofs and a couple of leaning stone posts to mark a front walk. Light glowed in the windows on the first floor, and I found myself suddenly hungry, tired, filled with a young crankiness I would have to hide in front of our hosts. My father took our bags from the trunk of the car and I followed him up the walk. ―Even the bell‘s still here,‖ he said, satisfied, pulling on a short rope by the entryway and smoothing his hair back in the gloom.
    The man who answered came out like a tornado, hugging my father, slapping him hard on the back, kissing him soundly on both cheeks, bending over a little too far to shake my hand. His own hand was enormous and warm and he put it on my shoulder to lead me in with him. In the front hall, which was low beamed and full of ancient furniture, he bellowed like a farm animal. ―Giulia! Giulia! Quickly! The big arrival! Come here!‖ His English was ferocious and sure, strong, loud.
    The smiling tall woman who came in pleased me at once. Her hair was gray but it gleamed silver, pinned back from a long face. She smiled at me first and didn‘t bend over to meet me. Her hand was warm, like her husband‘s, and she kissed my father on each cheek, shaking her head through a gentle stream of Italian. ―And you,‖ she said to me in English, ―must have your own room, a good one,