Heaven and Earth

by Paolo Giordano

  The masseria didn’t have a real gate, just an iron bar, which I found open. Weeds grew in the middle of the dirt track. I hopped off my bike and continued on foot. It took me another five minutes to reach the house.

  I left the bike on its side and cleared my throat, but nobody appeared. I walked a few steps more to get out of the sun and into the shade of a pergola. The door to the house was wide open, but I didn’t feel I should just go in. I leaned over the table instead, intrigued by the plastic tablecloth that depicted a world map. I looked for Turin, but it wasn’t there.

  I put my headphones back on and walked around the house, peering through the windows, but the contrast between the darkness inside and the light outside was too stark. Then, in the back, I found Bern.

  He was sitting on a stool, in a shady corner, bent over the ground. In that position his vertebrae formed a strip of bumps down the middle of his back. Surrounding him were heaps of almonds, an infinity of almonds, so many that I could have lain down on top of them, arms outstretched, and been swallowed up.

  He didn’t notice me until I was in front of him, and even then he gave no sign of being surprised.

  “Here she is, the rock thrower’s daughter,” he murmured.

  A surge of humiliation rose from my stomach. “My name is Teresa.” He hadn’t asked me the whole time we’d been together that morning. He nodded, but as if the information were of no interest to him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Can’t you see?”

  He grabbed a handful of four or five almonds, removed the hulls, and dropped them into a separate pile.

  “Are you going to husk them all?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s crazy, there must be thousands of them.”

  “You could help me, instead of standing there, doing nothing.”

  “Where should I sit?” Bern shrugged. I settled on the ground with my legs crossed.

  We hulled almonds for a while. I noticed how many he had already husked; he must have been sitting there for hours.

  “You’re very slow,” he said at one point.

  “Well, it’s the first time I’m doing it!”

  “That doesn’t matter, you’re slow, period.”

  “You said we would bury the frogs.”

  “I said at six.”

  “I thought it was already six,” I lied.

  Bern glanced at the sun, uncramped his neck. I reached out listlessly to grab another handful. The trick to removing the hull more quickly was not to worry about the pulp ending up under your fingernails.

  “Did you pick all of them yourself?”

  “All of them, yes.”

  “And what are you planning to do with them?”

  Bern sighed. “On Sunday my mother is coming. She loves almonds, but they need at least two days to dry in the sun. And then you have to crack the shells, which takes even longer. So I’m late. I have to finish them by tomorrow.”

  I stopped. I was already tired and the pile hadn’t grown any smaller. I fidgeted a little to get Bern’s attention, but he didn’t take his eyes off the ground.

  “Do you like the new song by Roxette?” I asked him.

  “Sure.”

  But I had the impression it wasn’t true, that he didn’t know the song at all, or Roxette either. After a while he said, “Is that what you were listening to?”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  Bern hesitated before dropping the almonds. I gave him the Walkman. He put the headphones on and started turning the recorder in his hands.

  “You have to press play.”

  He examined it again, one side and the other, then returned it to me with a nervous gesture.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why? I’ll show you how . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  We went on working, not looking at each other and not speaking anymore, only the clicks of the hulled almonds, clack, clack, clack, until the other boys came looking for us.

  “What is she doing here?” Tommaso asked.

  Bern stood up to face him. “I told her to come.”

  Nicola, more politely, held out his hand and introduced himself, as if I couldn’t remember his name. I wondered which one of the three had played dead man in the pool. It was as if what I had seen that night gave me an unfair advantage over all of them.

  Then Tommaso said: “He’s ready over there, let’s go,” and he set off without us.

  A man was waiting for us in a clearing among the olive trees. “Welcome, my dear,” he said to me, opening his arms.

  A stole with two gold-embroidered crosses was draped over his shoulders and in one hand he held a small leather-bound book. He had a black beard, and his eyes were a very pale blue, almost transparent. “I am Cesare.”

  Five small holes had been dug at his feet, and the frogs were already in them. Cesare patiently explained to me what was happening: “Man buries his dead, Teresa, he always has. This is how our civilization began, and this is how souls are assured of their journey to a new haven. Or to Jesus, if their cycle has been completed.”

  When he said “Jesus,” they all made the sign of the cross, twice in a row, kissing their thumbnails at the end.

  In the meantime, a woman had approached, holding a guitar by its neck; she stroked my cheek, as if she had known me forever.

  “Do you know what the soul is?” Cesare asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Have you ever seen a plant that is about to die? Maybe of thirst?”

  In Turin our neighbors’ sentry palm had dried up on the balcony; the owners had gone on vacation without thinking about it. I nodded.

  “At a certain point,” he went on, “the leaves shrivel up, the branches droop, and the plant becomes a pitiable thing. Life has already left it. The same thing happens to our body when the soul leaves it,” he said, his head coming a little closer to mine. “But there is something they didn’t teach you in catechism class. We do not die, Teresa, because souls migrate. Each of us has many lives behind us and many more ahead of us, as a man, a woman, or an animal. Even these poor frogs. This is why we want to bury them. It doesn’t cost us much, does it?”

  He stared at me, satisfied, then, without looking away, he said: “Floriana, whenever you’re ready.”

  The woman took up the guitar. Since she did not have a shoulder strap, she had to bend a knee to support it. She started strumming arpeggios and singing a gentle song.

  After a few moments, the others joined in. Bern was the only one who kept his eyes closed and his chin slightly raised. I would have liked to hear him singing by himself, at least for a moment.

  At a certain point they joined hands. Cesare, who was on my left, gave me his. I didn’t know what to do about Floriana, who was playing the guitar. I saw that Tommaso was resting his fingers on her shoulder; not wanting to break the circle, I did that, too, and she smiled at me.

  The frogs were rigid, withered, there couldn’t really be a soul in those viscous bellies. I wondered whether Cesare believed it was still there or it had already flown away elsewhere. In any case, the bodies were blessed and the boys knelt down to fill the holes back up. “They’re part of some kind of sect,” my grandmother had said.

  Before I left, Cesare invited me to come back: “We have so many things to talk about, Teresa.”

  * * *

  —

  ALONG THE DIRT TRACK Bern pushed the bicycle by the handlebars for me. “So did you like it?” he asked me.

  I said yes, mainly to be polite. Only later did I realize it was true.

  “‘Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you,’” he said, “‘your burnt offerings are always before me.’”

  “What?”

  “‘I will not take a bullock from your house, or he-goats f
rom your folds,’” he went on, repeating one of the prayers that Cesare had read shortly before. “‘I know every bird in the heights; whatever moves in the wild is mine.’ It’s my favorite verse, when he says ‘whatever moves in the wild is mine.’”

  “You know it by heart?”

  “I’ve learned some of the psalms by heart, though not all of them yet,” he explained, almost apologetically.

  “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t had time!”

  “No, I meant why do you memorize them? What’s the purpose?”

  “The psalms are the only way to pray, the only way that pleases God.”

  “Is it Cesare who teaches you these things?”

  “He teaches us everything.”

  “You three don’t go to a normal school, do you?”

  As he wheeled the bicycle over a stone, the chain wobbled.

  “Careful!” I told him. “Cosimo just fixed it.”

  “Cesare knows a lot more things than what you learn in normal schools, as you call them. He was an explorer when he was young, he lived in Tibet, alone, in a cave. He thinks that at some point he didn’t even feel the cold anymore, he could easily survive at four degrees below zero without clothes. And he hardly ate anything. That’s where he discovered metempsychosis.”

  “Discovered what?”

  “The transmigration of souls. It’s spoken of in many passages of the Gospels, in Matthew, for example. But above all, in John.”

  “And you really believe it?”

  He looked at me sternly. “I bet you haven’t read even one page from the Bible.”

  We had reached the iron bar at the end of the track and he stopped abruptly. Handing the bicycle back to me, he said, “You can come again if you want. After lunch, the others nap, there’s only me.”

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIMES I WONDER why I went back to the masseria, if it was because I wanted to see Bern again—a curiosity that did not yet have a name—or simply because I was bored in Speziale. In any case, I returned the following afternoon, helped him with the almonds, and together we managed to hull them all.

  On my last day in Puglia, I spent the whole morning gathering up my things and packing them into my suitcase. Usually I was thrilled at the idea of leaving, but not that year. After lunch, I took the bike and pedaled over to the masseria.

  Bern wasn’t there, however. I walked around the house twice, whispering his name. The almonds were still there; without their husks, they looked strangely diminished.

  Back under the pergola, I sat down on the two-seater swing-chair and gave it a slight push. Two cats slept, lying on their sides, stunned by the heat. Then I heard my name being called.

  “Where are you?” I asked softly.

  Bern directed my gaze toward a window on the second floor, he, too, whispering: “Come closer.”

  “Why don’t you come down?”

  “I can’t get out of bed. My back seized.”

  I thought about all the hours he had spent hunched over the almonds. “Can I come up there?”

  “Better not. You’d wake Cesare.”

  I felt like a fool, talking to a window.

  “I wanted to give you something. I’m leaving tonight.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back home. To Turin.”

  Bern was silent for a few moments. Then he said: “Safe trip, then.”

  Maybe he would leave during the winter, and I wouldn’t see him again. “They come and go,” my grandmother had said. A beetle crawled near my foot; I crushed it under the sole of my sandals. Would they bury that, too?

  I picked my bicycle up from the ground. I was already straddling it when Bern called me again.

  “Now what?”

  “You can take some almonds. Bring them with you to Turin.”

  “Why, didn’t your mother want them?”

  I wanted to be rude and I probably succeeded. He seemed to think for a moment.

  “Take them,” he said finally, “as many as you want. Put them in the bike basket.”

  I set and released the brake a couple of times, undecided. Then I got off the bicycle and walked over to the almonds. I grabbed them, a handful at a time, and filled the basket to the brim. Before taking off, I hid the Walkman among the shells, with a piece of colored tape on the play button.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME my mother found the box with the almonds it was already February, maybe March. She had taken advantage of my being at school to come in and straighten up my room. She was constantly moving things, throwing stuff away. She left the box on the bed. When I came home and saw it, I felt, strangely, that I had neglected something important. I opened the box; it was empty. I ran my index finger over the bottom, where a fine powder had been deposited, and swallowed it with my saliva. It wasn’t sweet, it had no taste, yet it made me picture Bern again, bending over the shells, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

  But that afternoon was an exception. In those early years, toward spring, Speziale and the masseria began to seem unreal. I forgot about Bern and the others until it was time to go back there, in August. I didn’t know if it was the same for them. If they missed me, they certainly didn’t show it. When we saw one another again, we didn’t brush cheeks or touch hands, we didn’t ask about the months that had passed. They treated me as if I were merely another element of nature, a phenomenon that appeared and disappeared according to the seasons.

  As I got to know them better, I learned that for them, time had a different flow from what it did for me—or rather it didn’t flow at all. Each day was marked by three hours of theoretical instruction in the morning, followed by three hours of manual labor in the afternoon, with the sole exception of Sunday. That rhythm remained unchanged, even in summer. So I stayed away from the masseria before lunch, preferring not to get drawn into one of Cesare’s lessons. They made me feel stupid. He spoke about the myths of creation, about wedge or splice grafting on fruit trees, about the Mahabharata, all things that I knew nothing about.

  Every so often the boys went off with him alone, one at a time. They would sit and talk together in the shade of a large holly oak. Actually, it was always Cesare who spoke, while Bern or Tommaso or Nicola nodded their heads up and down. One day, Cesare told me that I was welcome to talk a bit if I wanted to. I thanked him, but I never had the courage to follow him under the tree.

  And yet, year after year, I, too, became part of the masseria. The summer following my first year of high school, and the one after the second. My father wasn’t thrilled about it, but he didn’t say anything, because knowing that I was at the neighbors’ place was better than seeing me moping around the house looking sullen all day.

  In return for the hospitality, I contributed to the chores as best I could. I picked green beans and tomatoes, I pulled up clumps of weeds from the dirt track, and I learned to weave dry branches into garlands. I was all thumbs, but no one criticized me. When my braid got so tangled up that I couldn’t go any further, Bern and Nicola rushed to help me. They undid the work to the spot where I’d gone wrong, then explained the sequence yet again: take that end, slip it under here, then in between, now tighten it, there, you can continue. They could have knotted those branches with their eyes closed, made miles-long garlands, even if they served no purpose: as soon as they were done, they burned them. When I asked Bern why they wasted so much time making them, then, he replied: “It’s for humility. Just an exercise.”

  I remember one evening when we were all under the pergola, where bunches of black grapes hung over our heads. Nicola was lighting a fire in the brazier while the other boys carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen. I had barely tasted the food. They were all vegetarians at the masseria, and at the time I hardly ate any vegetables at all. But I endured my hunger jus
t to stay there, in that peaceful stillness, removed from everything, close to Bern and the fire.

  Cesare entertained us with the story of when, at the age of twenty, he’d had a vision of his previous life.

  “I was a seagull,” he said, “or an albatross, anyway, a creature of the air. I flew across the sky, all the way to the shore of Lake Baikal.”

  He challenged us to find the lake on the tablecloth’s map. The boys scrambled to push aside whatever still cluttered the table and began furiously scanning the continents.

  It was Nicola who shouted first: “Here it is! Right here!”

  Cesare rewarded him with a taste of liqueur. Nicola sipped it triumphantly, as Bern and Tommaso glowered. Especially Bern. He stared at the tablecloth, at the blue speck of Lake Baikal, as if he wanted to memorize every single name on the map once and for all.

  Then Floriana served ice cream and calm was restored. Cesare went on talking about previous lives, those of the boys this time. I’ve forgotten what he said about Nicola; he said Tommaso had been a feline and that Bern had retained something subterranean in his blood. My turn also came.

  “And you, Teresa, my dear?”

  “Me?”

  “Which animal do you feel you have been?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try to imagine, go on.”

  They all looked at me.

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Close your eyes, then. And tell me the first thing you see.”

  “But I don’t see anything.”

  They looked disappointed. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

  Cesare stared at me from across the table. “I think I know,” he said. “Teresa has been underwater for a long time. She learned to breathe without oxygen. Isn’t that so?”

  “A fish!” Nicola exclaimed.

  Cesare looked at me as if he were seeing right through my body and through my past lives.