And it wasn’t only his looks—she was also drawn by his way with patients and their families. Matteo saw the hardest cases, patients with incurable cancers, yet he always managed to find the right kind word and reassuring gesture. She’d never forget how he’d sit with Signore Boninno, the owner of the salumeria that made the best arancini in town. Boninno was a large, red-cheeked, bubbly man who fell apart after learning he had advanced liver cancer. He became so depressed and terrified that he refused all treatment, insisting he be left alone to die. Somehow Matteo managed to talk sense into him and give him hope. In the end, Boninno lived another five years, long enough to see his teenage son join him at the shop and teach him the secret rice-ball recipe.
Yes, Matteo was handsome and a compassionate doctor. But perhaps what humbled Nina most of all was the way he could look directly at her face, her terrible face, and tell her how beautiful she was.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream as she fumbled for aspirin in the medicine cabinet. She cringed at the sight of her reflection in the mirror. Her thirty-nine-year-old eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles starting to form underneath. The birthmark covering the right side of her face smoldered like the embers of a dying fire. It used to be bright red when she was a child, but over the years, the color had darkened into a deep purple. A large eggplant covering half her face. Melanzana, her classmates used to call her in school. Beautiful? Who in their right mind would possibly think that?
The only thing remotely beautiful was her body. From the time she’d filled out in eighth grade, everything from the neck down turned out well, as if to compensate for the blight above.
Matteo Crespi might have been looking at her face, Nina was beginning to realize, but the only thing he saw was a place to put his cock. She laughed again, this time with tears in her eyes, recalling that long-ago day when her father went berserk in the kitchen, screaming and hurling dishes against the wall. But it wasn’t her fault, Nina had wanted to tell him; she was barely sixteen when the high school history teacher took advantage of her. “Puttana!” her father had yelled, grabbing her arm when there were no more dishes in the cabinet left to break. “The only thing she’ll ever amount to,” he announced to her mother, “is a whore.”
Her parents were ashamed of their daughter, even before the disaster with the teacher, from the very beginning, in fact, when she entered the world with her ugly red mark—“Il segno del diavolo,” her mother whispered to the priest after Mass one Sunday. They were simple, uneducated people—her father worked on the docks and ran errands for one of the local Mafia bosses; her mother cleaned houses and prayed to the Blessed Virgin every day. They believed the mark was a sign of sin, their daughter’s and their own, and could never see past it.
Alone, she visited the secret clinic in the basement of an abandoned building on Via Cavour, where women went to pay for their sins. So scared she could barely speak, Nina somehow managed to confide in a nurse, a young, smart, political type from a well-to-do family, who bristled as she heard Nina’s story. The nurse urged Nina to leave Naples and go north, where more forward-thinking Italians, who didn’t break their children’s arms when they made a mistake, lived. She should consider a career in nursing, helping people who needed help, like herself at the moment. There was a small nursing school outside Turin, the nurse told her; she gave Nina the contact information and made her promise to call. And two days after high school ended, Nina left home with a rucksack and her good-luck-charm bracelet, hoping to find those forward-thinking Italians who would accept her for who she was. The teachers were sympathetic when she arrived and helped her get settled. Nina proved to be a natural at nursing. Instinctively, she understood the language of the vulnerable.
After graduation, Nina took a job at the Ospedale Santa Cristina in Rondello, where she’d remained for over fifteen years. She was now a senior nurse, in line to become head nurse.
Yet just as her father had predicted that morning in the kitchen, she’d turned out to be a whore after all—Matteo Crespi’s whore.
“Puttana!” she yelled at her reflection in the mirror.
3
Dr. Ruggiero lived on the northern edge of Favola, a few meters off the main road that ran through town. His house had two floors and a red-tiled roof like everyone else’s, but that’s where the similarities ended. Ruggiero’s house looked like no one had lived there for years. The burnt-orange paint had faded and was peeling, the windows were cracked, shutters hung at odd angles, and weeds and wildflowers sprouted from every crevice. The house appeared so rickety that a strong wind might topple it over at any moment.
Luca tugged at his grandmother’s coat when the doctor didn’t answer the bell, begging her to leave. Only after the third ring did the door open. Ruggiero stood gaunt and frail like his house, hunched over to one side, his skin mottled and wrinkly. Yet he dressed as if he were going to the opera: a white collared shirt under a red V-neck sweater and tweed jacket. His brown suede shoes matched his jacket.
“Ah, what do we have here?” He smiled, taking the fruit tart Letizia Taviano had baked for him. This was how most Favolans paid their doctor, a basket of fresh fruit from the garden or a prepared dish. “Just in time for breakfast. Come.”
They followed him as he shuffled toward the kitchen, Nonna practically dragging Luca through the narrow hallway—dark, dank, and creepy, just as Luca remembered.
“So,” he asked, not turning around, “the boy is still sick?”
“No,” snapped Luca. “The boy is fine.”
Nonna gasped. “Luca!”
“It’s okay, signora. The saltiness is a good sign. Please, sit.” He gestured toward the small farm table in the kitchen. “I was just having my morning coffee and craved something sweet.”
Ruggiero withdrew a small pocketknife from his pants and began carving up the tart with the meticulous strokes of a surgeon, despite the tremor in his hand. He offered them a piece, but Nonna insisted they’d already had breakfast. They waited while he sipped his coffee and ate one piece of tart after another.
“So how is Giovanni?” he asked, crumbs falling from his lips and catching on the snags in his sweater.
“He’s good,” Nonna replied unconvincingly.
Ruggiero’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better tell him to come around. He’s due for a checkup.”
Nonna nodded. As much as she worried about her husband, she didn’t believe the doctor could help. At seventy-seven, Giovanni was still strong as an ox, working the farm from dawn to dusk, weekdays and weekends. His problems had more to do with the mind than the body. He was so hard on himself whenever something went wrong—with his family, with the farm, with just about everything. If only he could relax more and see the good in life.
“That was delicious,” said Ruggiero, wiping his mouth and making room on the kitchen table. “Time for business. Up you go, boy.”
Expecting a wild boar to round the corner at any moment, Luca shook his head and clung to his grandmother’s arm. Nonna, too, was surprised by the doctor’s odd request.
“The lights in my office are out,” explained Ruggiero. “So don’t keep me waiting, boy—hop up here on the table.”