She turned the glass in my direction, and a single blue eye expanded under the thick lens, as hard and bright as a blown-glass marble. “Come, sit down,” she said. Her English was heavily accented, her voice clear and direct, forceful, not at all the voice one would expect from an eighty-six-year-old woman.
I sat across from Nonna on a wobbly recliner. Up close, her skin was mottled with moles and freckles. A few hairs grew from her chin and ears, and her hands were dappled with liver spots. She looked me over, skeptical, and I wondered if she’d forgotten me.
“It’s Bert,” I said, feeling my cheeks go warm. “Luca’s wife.”
“I know who you are, child,” she said, glancing back to the door, looking for her grandson. “Is Luca here, too?”
“He’s working,” I said. “He told me to tell you he’ll be here Sunday, with Bob, to take you to church.”
“Oh,” she said. She focused on me with a strange intensity, as if trying to understand why I had come without Luca. “So remind me: Who do you belong to?”
The older generation always asked who your parents and grandparents were, as if you were nothing more than a weak reflection of an ancestral original.
“My parents were Giuliano and Barb. I’m the grandchild of Giovanni and Marta Monte.”
“Giovanni’s granddaughter,” she said darkly, her brows settling into a furrow. “Of course, I see the resemblance. You look just like your grandfather when he was young. Around the eyes. Attractive, your grandfather. Nessus dubbio a riguardo.”
I barely remembered my grandfather. He had died when I was five years old, and only fragments of him remained with me: the smell of his cigarettes, the glimmer in his blue eyes as he laughed, the shiny leather shoes he wore, the tassels flopping. I was about to ask what other similarities she found between us when Nonna pulled herself up off the couch and walked to the kitchen.
“Coffee?” she asked. “Milk or sugar?”
“Black,” I said, eyeing the paperback she had been reading: Amore proibito. A bare-chested hulk of a man held a redheaded pixie in his bulging arms on the cover.
Nonna returned with the coffee. She had trouble managing, so I took the cups, set them on the coffee table, and helped her sit. When she had settled in, I pulled out the envelope from Turin.
“I was hoping you could help me with something, Nonna,” I said, slipping the papers from the envelope and giving them to her. “This came in the mail, but I don’t know what it says.”
Nonna spread out the pages over the table and picked up her magnifying glass. The lens tracked over the lines, the words popping into view. She paused at the golden seal and a blaze of foil exploded at the center of the glass.
“My goodness, I never thought I would see this again,” she said.
I leaned across the coffee table to get a closer look. She angled the magnifying glass over the seal and I saw it again: the castle above two mountain peaks.
“This was everywhere in Nevenero,” she said. “All over town. In the post office, on street signs, on the door of the café. Everywhere.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“The Montebianco coat of arms.” She put down the magnifying glass. Her face had gone ashen. She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “Where did you get this letter?”
“It came this morning,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Registered mail.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose.” She sighed a deep and resigned sigh. “It was only a matter of time before they found you.”
I considered this a moment. Before they found you. The way she said it, her voice accusatory, her eyes filled with a sudden wariness, made it seem as though this was my fault and that I had been hoping to be found.
“Who is they?”
“The House of Montebianco.”
The name on the letter flashed in my mind. Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco.
“According to this letter, the Count of Montebianco died six months ago.” She tapped her magnifying glass against the edge of the coffee table, as if the rhythm helped her think. “The lawyers representing the family estate looked for his heir.” Tap, tap. “They have come to the conclusion that there is not one Montebianco left in the world.” Tap, tap, tap. “Except you.”
I must have appeared utterly baffled, because Nonna said it again, only more slowly.
“This letter is from the legal team representing the House of Montebianco. They claim that you, Alberta, are the last of the Montebianco family line. They want you to come to Turin for an interview regarding your inheritance, which is explained”—Nonna shifted through the papers and pulled out the fancy-looking one with the golden seal—“here, in the Count of Montebianco’s last will and testament.”
“What else does it say?” I asked, a mixture of wariness and wonder bubbling up in me, the same restrained hope I felt when a pregnancy test came back positive: a new possibility was forming in my life.
Nonna bent over the pages with her magnifying glass. “I can hardly read this, there is so much legal language here, but this page outlines what you could inherit if you are proven to be the heir. There is the title and a property.” She bit her lip, her expression going somber. “Montebianco Castle,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “A death trap, to be sure.”
“But there is obviously some kind of mistake,” I said. “My name is Alberta Monte, not Montebianco.”
She leveled her gaze at me. “You are Giovanni’s granddaughter, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
“Then you belong to the House of Montebianco as sure as that seal does.”
Although I had heard everything she said, I could not process what was happening. Pieces of information were coming to me, but they didn’t make sense. There was the Montebianco name, an inheritance, my grandfather, a golden seal. The facts collected in my mind, but I couldn’t read them.
“You knew about this before?” A shade of an accusation slipped into my voice.
“Of course we knew,” she said, dismissing my question with a shrug. “Your grandfather Giovanni was born a Montebianco. He shortened his name when he naturalized as a citizen. Many of us did that, you know, to fit in. Jews. Eastern Europeans. Italians. But he had a more specific reason, of course. Oh, he was a proud man, your grandfather, not one to speak badly about his family, but we knew he’d run away from them. Who were we to blame him for trying to bury the past? We were all doing the same thing.”
As she spoke, I felt more and more confused. Who had he run away from? And why would he speak badly about his family? “But what was there to bury?”
A shadow passed over her features. “It has been almost seventy years since I left,” she said at last, her voice trembling. “And nearly that long since I have spoken of it.”
“Of what, Nonna?”
“Nevenero,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “The village we left behind. Do you know what it means?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“Black snow.” She gave me a dark look, as if the words pained her. “Neve, snow; nero, black. Such a cruel place, Nevenero. An ice village, so cold, so brutal you froze to death if you wandered too far from home. We ate what we killed—ibex and rabbit. We wore goatskin trousers and marmot furs. Our houses were made of simple materials—wood and slabs of granite—with high, wedge-shaped roofs that kept off the snow. Simple but strong. And always, no matter the position of the sun, the village was trapped in the shadow of the mountains. Day and night, it was dark. But the castle, built higher than the village, built right into the rock of the mountain, was even darker still.”