A Hundred Million Years and a Day
Page 13
‘Blue. Pépin.’
‘That’s right! Actually, that reminds me, there’s something I have to tell you about that dog …’
I know, Mama. I’ve known for a long time. Please, lie down. You’ve had a long trip, you must be tired. It took a lot of fossils to get to this point.
‘Your poor fingernails, Nino … They’re in a terrible state!’
Don’t worry. It’s my job. Put down your suitcase. Lie down and close your eyes. See, it’s comfortable, isn’t it? Later, we’ll celebrate our reunion. We’ll go to the opera, we’ll dance and dance. And when you’re tired, you can lean on me.
Sitting close to the bed, I listen to her breathing slow as she drifts into sleep. And now I leave, on tiptoe.
Now I turn out the light.
Spring
This is a land where quarrels last a thousand years. Nobody has come here in a long time. The old-fashioned buses lie on their sides, rusted elephants dying on the cold concrete of windswept backyards. They no longer run along the grassed-over road that leads to the abandoned village. Here, there is nothing to see, nothing to do. Nothing but ruins and sorrow.
Nobody has come in a long time, except for him. An old Italian, a giant stooped by the years, a face of stone behind thick glasses. He walks along paths opened up by the sun after a long winter. He passes empty houses, the forest under granite cliffs, crosses the log bridge, or what remains of it. He walks along the plateau, stopping only to sleep. Setting off again, he grips the mountain by its iron handles and steps over it.
When he was younger, he would make this pilgrimage every year. His visits grew more spaced out over time – that’s life. But this year, 1994, is special. Special because it’s the last year. Next year, he will no longer have the strength. That’s life too, and it’s not so bad. He’s not a young man any more, as his children and grandchildren like to remind him; they tried to persuade him not to come. At eighty-seven, it’s not sensible. And all for an old, old story.
He goes down into the combe on the same path. For the first time, he looks tired. He sits down for a long moment, in the place where the tents were before. A whisper of things that we cannot hear: they are for him only. He has changed in forty years: his slowness has become sublime, his patience infinite. But this place is the same. He remembers it well. He remembers everything.
The old man is about to leave when a colour catches his eye, down below. So he walks across the sky, he walks all the way to the colour. He walks beyond his age, beyond the bones that grumble and crumble and bend his giant body.
The melting snow has revealed some clothes. A jacket, a sweater, a woollen vest. They are well preserved, scattered over a path that runs along the east side of the combe. Inside the sweater is a label with the owner’s name. He knows without looking that the name lacks two little letters, a suffix that only he ever pronounced. His glasses fog up – it’s sweat, he thinks, rubbing at the inch-thick lenses.
Finally he turns away. He leaves without touching the jacket, the sweater, the vest. When he gets home, his wife will ask him why, from the large bed that she has not left since she fell ill. Why didn’t he pick up the clothes? Umberto says he doesn’t know. That he just remembers thinking, as he took one last look back:
This is the most beautiful place in the world.