During the next few hours, I tried not to rush over immediately to see Bern. In the evening I lingered with my grandmother and my father on the terrace, going on at length, telling her about the school year, until I was bored by my own voice. My back was to the railing, but as soon as I got up to help with the dishes I glanced in the direction of the masseria; beyond the foliage of the olive trees I glimpsed a very faint, yellow gleam of light, which seemed to be an infinite distance away.
In the morning the sky was milky. I told my grandmother that I was going for a walk and that I might stop by to say hello to the boys. I was wearing the new swimsuit under a white sundress and I hoped she couldn’t see how I was shaking. In the straw bag was the soap bar with the weed; I would give it to Bern right away, partly to surprise him and partly because keeping it at home was too risky, with Rosa touching everything.
But my grandmother stopped me. “Breakfast first.” A sour-cherry croissant waited on the table next to a glass of milk. I hesitated, then I perched on the edge of the chair and she sat down across from me. I broke off a piece of croissant with my fingers and chewed it.
“Good?” my grandmother asked.
“You know it’s my favorite.”
Now I’d have to go back into the house to brush my teeth again and I’d lose more time.
“Well, enjoy it. You won’t find these in Turin.”
One of her books was lying on the table. I turned it over to look at the cover. The Skull Beneath the Skin: A Cordelia Gray Mystery.
“Are you enjoying it?” I asked, just to say something.
She waved her hand. “I just started it. It’s not bad.”
“Do you always guess who the killer is?”
“Almost always. But sometimes these novels trick you, you know.”
There must have been a cicada hidden somewhere close by, because every time I moved, it suddenly fell silent before resuming its tireless chirping.
Not far off, Cosimo was tinkering with the irrigation system. He stood in the center of the spray with his arms folded.
I finished the croissant in silence and drank the milk. My grandmother started fiddling with a corner of the book jacket.
“You won’t find him at the masseria,” she said finally.
“What?”
I had some greasy crumbs stuck to my fingers, but there was no napkin. I wiped them on my legs.
“Bern. You won’t find him.”
I rested an elbow on the table. Although the sky was overcast, the light was strong, it hurt my eyes. The buttery taste of the croissant rose from my stomach as a burp, which I held in. My grandmother let go of the book and reached her hand toward me, but I drew back.
“Remember when you asked me about him, on your birthday?”
“Yes.”
“It was true that I hadn’t seen anyone from the masseria for some time. Bern and that other boy . . .”
“Tommaso?”
“No, not Tommaso. Yoan.”
“There is no Yoan.”
“Maybe you didn’t get to meet him. He arrived at the end of last summer. They worked here in December, he and Bern, for the olive harvest. The oil turned out to be exquisite. But you tried it, of course, I sent it up to your—”
“And then?”
My grandmother sighed.
“After the harvest there wasn’t much to do, so I didn’t call them. But a few weeks ago I was curious to know how they were. Bern had told me he was having some problems in mathematics. I had offered to help him and I felt guilty about not having asked him about it again. So I went to the masseria. It was already July, I think. There was only Cesare’s wife, Floriana, and from her I learned . . . well, about what happened.”
I saw my father pop out from behind the house. Seeing us there, he quickly disappeared again.
“What happened, Nonna?”
“It seems that Bern got into some trouble,” she said, looking steadily at me, “with a girl.”
With my finger I picked up the remaining crumbs one by one. Instinctively, I put my finger in my mouth and sucked it.
“What kind of trouble?”
My grandmother smiled sadly. “The only kind of trouble you can get into with a girl, Teresa. He got her pregnant.”
I jumped up abruptly. The chair fell over backward, clattering onto the stone. My grandmother flinched. “I’m going to see,” I said.
It didn’t even occur to me to straighten the chair back up.
“You can’t go there.”
“Where’s the bike? Where the fuck did you put it?”
* * *
—
I FOUND the iron bar across the dirt track padlocked. I dropped the bike on the ground and ducked under the bar. On my right I noticed a tree laden with yellow pears, many of which had fallen.
There was no one at the masseria. I sat on the shaky swing-chair, without swinging.
So Bern got a girl pregnant.
I watched the cats slinking along the walls. A gigantic one with a reddish coat stared at me for a long time.
Bern got a girl pregnant. Why wasn’t it me?
I didn’t move when I heard the sound of an approaching car. Cesare and Floriana were dressed for town, he in a blue cotton suit and tie, she in a floral-print sheath dress. Behind them walked a boy with his head down, he, too, dressed up, but without a tie. Cesare had cut his hair. I wanted to run to meet him, but instead I remained still.
“Teresa, my dear,” Floriana said, taking my arms and swinging them open, as if she wanted to see all of me. “We were at mass. Were you waiting long? With this heat. I’ll run and get you a glass of iced tea right away.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
My heart was out of control. I was afraid she could feel it pulsing in my wrists.
“But of course, a little iced tea to cool off. I made it yesterday. And I used agave instead of sugar, so you don’t have to worry about your figure. You haven’t met our Yoan, have you?”
With that she quickly disappeared inside the house. Yoan gave me a kind of bow, not saying a word, then he too went off. Cesare loosened his tie, puffing because of the heat. He took a chair from the table and placed it in front of me.
“We found this parish,” he said. “It’s a little far away, in Locorotondo, but the priest is open to ideas, and I believe he thinks highly of me. Don Valerio. He’s doing a nice job with Yoan. The boy is Orthodox, even if he doesn’t really know what it means. I’d like for you to meet him, Don Valerio, that is. Are you just passing through, or are you staying awhile this year too?”
Something in the way he spoke made me suffer more intensely.
“You’re not lucky with the weather,” Cesare was saying, “perfect until yesterday, but now . . . too humid.”
“I came to say hello to Bern.”
Not to seem rude, I added: “And Nicola.”
Cesare slapped his palms on his knees. “Oh, Nicola, that blessed son of mine! Since he’s been at university we see very little of him. But he’s doing well, I must say. He took all the exams except one.”
“And Bern?”
Cesare didn’t seem to hear me. He was trying to remove a stain from his shirt with a saliva-moistened finger. His beard had disappeared too, that’s what else was different. His round face, clean-shaven like that, had something childlike about it.
“Nicola arrives in four days,” he said, “he’ll be here a week. I think he will have to study, he always says he has to study, but I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you.”
Floriana returned to the yard with a glass of iced tea. The rim was white with lime; it wouldn’t have bothered me under other circumstances, but at that moment I decided that I would not put my lips to it. Every detail struck me as a new betrayal: Cesare’s appearance; Floriana, who instead of staying with us immediately went to hang
laundry; and the new boy, Yoan, who had changed in the meantime and was slinking away, half naked, toward the fields.
I had spent so many hours dreaming of the masseria and of all of them.
In order not to ask about Bern for a third time, I asked where Tommaso was.
“Tommi has his own life now. He works in Massafra, in a resort for rich people. What is it called, Floriana?” He raised his voice so she could hear him.
“The Relais dei Saraceni.”
“The Relais dei Saraceni, that’s right. Probably whoever came up with the name didn’t know what the Saracens did around here.” He chuckled and, by reflex, I smiled too.
I could simply have asked him outright: Is it true that Bern got a girl pregnant? But I felt it would have been a slap in the face for Cesare. I saw him lean back in his chair and take a deep breath.
“I don’t think we’ll be having lunch. Too hot. But you’re welcome if you want to stay awhile.”
“They’re waiting for me at home.”
Somewhere Yoan was beating an almond tree to make the fruits drop. You could hear the smacks of the branches he struck, followed by the sound of the nuts falling to the ground, like a hailstorm. Cesare rubbed his face eagerly. “In that case, I’ll tell Nicola you’re here.”
* * *
—
I CAN’T BEGIN to describe the days that followed, the state I fell into. It was something like my fear of the dark when I was a child, when I would stare at the mosquito coil until I could sense the room breathing. There was no reason to stay any longer, except for the remote, irrational hope that Bern might return. Nonetheless, I decided to wait for Nicola’s arrival.
I spent many hours in the pool, lying on an inflatable raft. As I lightly pushed myself from one edge to the other, I thought back to the night when the boys had dived in. The pool had been emptied and refilled several times since then, the water treated with chlorine and anti-algae agents, but perhaps some molecules from Bern’s skin had survived. I wet my hands and rubbed them over my stomach and shoulders.
My grandmother had continued being as considerate as she was on the first day. She was even willing to leave the sofa and come and read on one of the lounge chairs by the pool to keep me company. She huddled in the patch of shade cast by the umbrella, and once she even put on a bathing suit. Her legs, which I had not seen bare for years, were flaccid and pale, dotted with brownish-colored spots. That afternoon she sat there for a long time, rapt, the closed book in her hands, as if pondering something. Then she turned toward me resolutely and said: “Did you know that your father had almost been married before meeting your mother?”
I clung to the ladder to keep the float from rotating.
“He was your age when he met her. Her name was Mariangela. A beautiful girl.”
I slid off the raft, into the shallow water.
“When he told me he wanted to marry her, I nearly had a stroke. I did not agree, but your father is stubborn, as you know. So we made a deal: first he would finish university and then he would marry Mariangela.”
I tried to picture the girl, but I couldn’t. For a moment, my grandmother turned her head toward the villa. Something seemed to have troubled her.
“So he went to Turin to study at the Polytechnic. When he came back here during vacation he raced over to see her, but as soon as he saw her he realized that she no longer meant anything to him. They broke up that same afternoon. It was a horrible summer for everyone.”
She stretched her legs out in front of her and flexed her feet.
“The year after that he met your mother,” she added in a neutral tone.
“Does she know?”
“Your mother? Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“You think he never told her?”
“Oh, Teresa! It’s not a given that because two people get married they tell each other everything.”
I had inherited my grandmother’s curved toenails. I had not yet made up my mind whether they were a mark of beauty or a flaw. She complained that with age they tended to become ingrown.
“It just goes to show,” she added, “that it’s foolish to think that the differences between two people disappear only because one wants them to. All your father got for it was wasted years that he could have put to much better use. He and Mariangela would have been happy together, almost certainly.”
“How do you mean, happy?”
“Unhappy. I said they would have been unhappy together.”
“I thought you said ‘happy.’”
My grandmother shook her head. She smoothed her thighs with her hands.
“Look how ugly my knees have become,” she said, squeezing them like a couple of oranges.
She turned to smile at me. “There’s always a lot to know about someone else’s life, Teresa. You never stop learning. And sometimes it would be better not to start at all.”
* * *
—
ONE EVENING Nicola came to see me. From the window I saw him standing next to Rosa, the difference in height making her look minuscule. It looked like she was instructing him about something. Nicola nodded, but I couldn’t make out their words, and anyway I wasn’t interested. I let him wait awhile as I dressed and brushed some mascara on my eyelashes.
Right away I noticed that his manner was different; now he had a kind of studied composure. He suggested we take a walk, but I begged him to go out. My grandmother’s villa had started to feel like a prison.
There weren’t many people at the Scalo. We sat down at a table in the center of the patio. Nicola went to get us a couple of beers. He seemed proud to finally be able to show me how urbane he was, happy to be alone with me. I immediately regretted having persuaded him to take me there. We didn’t seem to be able to get any kind of conversation started.
“Your father says you’re doing well at university,” I said listlessly.
“He tells everyone that. But I’m really average. Would you like to come to Bari? I could take you one of these days.”
“Maybe.”
His hands were rather striking, they were big and very smooth on the back. He had overdone the cologne.
“Do you have a girlfriend there?” I asked, to divert him from any fantasy about the two of us together, including a trip to Bari.
He darkened. “Not really.”
The strands of lighted bulbs trembled in the wind. Some were burnt out. I wondered if they were the ones from last summer.
“And you?” Nicola said.
“No one special.”
But I didn’t want him to think I was pathetic. All that time spent waiting for someone I wouldn’t see again. I added: “Just a few flings.”
“Flings,” he repeated, disappointed.
“Him, where is he?”
Nicola leisurely took a sip of beer. “I don’t know. He disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“He left. You probably noticed that he was already acting a bit strange last summer.”
“Actually, no.”
I didn’t know why I was becoming so aggressive, as if it were all his fault.
“Strange how?” I asked.
“He became . . . I don’t know. Edgy. Callous, especially toward Cesare.”
It always struck me whenever Nicola referred to his parents by their first names.
“Cesare is tolerant,” he said. “As far as he’s concerned, a person can behave any way he wants, as long as he doesn’t offend others. But Bern . . . provoked him. Especially after he started reading all those books and waving them under Cesare’s nose.”
“What books?”
“Any that stood in opposition to God. Almost every day Bern left one of them for Cesare to find on the table. He highlighted the worst passages so he’d notice.”
He’d picked up a dead twig that landed on his benc
h and was now carving vertical lines onto the pale tabletop.
“There was no reason to treat him like that.” He hesitated before continuing: “You know what Cesare told me once?”
“What?”
“That Bern’s heart was touched by the evil one.”
“The evil one?”
“The devil, Teresa. Cesare knew that the evil spirit lived somewhere in Bern. He prayed every day that it would not awaken, but it did.”
“Do you really believe these things?” I asked heatedly.
The twig snapped in his fingers. Nicola looked at it, disappointed, then tossed the two pieces away. “If you knew him well, you’d believe it too.”
I did know him well. We’d been together in the reed bed. He had used his tongue on me.
“Just because Cesare says so doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Bern was angry with him because Tommaso left. Bern said Cesare had driven Tommaso out. But that’s not how it was. It’s normal for those who turn eighteen to move away from the masseria to go and live on their own. If it hadn’t been for Cesare, Tommaso would still be living in that orphanage near the prison. But Bern wouldn’t forgive Cesare for it, no matter what. They’ve always been thick as thieves, those two. Remember the night of Tommaso’s birthday, how they cried?”
Instinctively, I turned toward the spot where Bern and Tommaso had lain on the stony ground during the celebration. There was nothing but flat rocks out there. And farther on, the barbed wire, the scrubwood, and the tower. For a moment I thought I could see an animal darting through the nettles.
“And the girl?”
Nicola studied me as if to gauge how much I already knew. If I hadn’t mentioned her, I could tell he wouldn’t have brought her up at all. He shook his head, as if there was nothing he could say about that.
“Who is she?”
He brought the glass to his mouth, but realized it was empty. He looked a little distraught. Maybe he’d imagined a different kind of evening. I pushed forward the beer I’d hardly touched and he nodded.
Heaven and Earth Page 5
