The afternoon with my mother passed quickly, almost imperceptibly, as did supper back at home and the night spent in my childhood bed.
The dress would arrive in Speziale by mail within twenty days or so. If Bern were to ask how much it cost, I planned to say nothing and lie to him. The cost of the dress and shoes would have gotten us at least a thousand miles closer to Kiev.
A few weeks later I went with him to choose his suit. I’d had to convince him that he needed one; he insisted he could get by with what he had, Danco’s clothes that he’d worn at my grandmother’s funeral, possibly asking Tommaso if he could borrow something. I’d had to be as firm as I could, swearing that I would not marry him in a suit worn at a funeral, or in a waiter’s uniform.
Inside the store, in a shopping mall outside Mesagne surrounded by industrial warehouses, he was as recalcitrant as a child. He’d take a jacket from the salesclerk’s hands, scowl at the price tag, then shake his head and hand it back without trying it on. He went on like that until the young man ran out of options.
“You can’t spend less for a wedding suit,” I said, practically begging him.
“Two hundred euros!” he exploded, barely lowering his voice.
Suddenly I felt a great weariness. I slumped into a chair. Even with the air-conditioning, the heat was unbearable. The clerk brought me some water.
Seeing me like that, so pale, discouraged, and withdrawn, must have produced a reaction in Bern, because without saying a word he grabbed the two-hundred-euro blue suit from the rack, entered the dressing room, and came out a couple of minutes later with the pants dragging on the floor and the jacket open on his bare chest. When he spread his arms and twirled around, I could see his dark nipples.
He let the clerk bring him a white shirt, a pair of loafers, and a tie. The tie was garish, but I didn’t say anything so as not to break the spell. Bern paid for everything and we left the shop, then the mall, and walked out into the parking lot that stretched as far as the eye could see, melting in the July sun.
* * *
—
HE AND DANCO got hold of some village festival lights, three impressive white arches with intricate forms in them: hundreds of little round lightbulbs screwed in one after the other. It required ropes to hoist them and props to hold them up. When they were all turned on together, they lit up the night at the masseria.
I didn’t ask where they’d gotten them, just as I didn’t question where the wooden tables and benches came from, or the tablecloths and dozens of candles, also white, to be hung in glass jars from the tree branches. Certainly Danco deserved much of the credit. He knew people throughout Puglia, people whom he could ask for favors.
The preparations swept me along to the day of the wedding almost before I knew it. I found myself rushed down the steps of Town Hall in Ostuni, clinging to Bern’s arm, already his wife at that point, ducking between bursts of raw rice.
Afterward we walked down the dirt track to the masseria, as the sun faded slantwise and lengthened our fused shadows, Bern’s and mine, from behind, so that they nearly touched those of the first row of fruit trees. The countryside and we two, one thing at last.
The guests followed us, grouped in small clusters; from time to time someone moved ahead to photograph us. Tommaso was the only one who’d stayed behind at the masseria, in order to supervise the young people from an agricultural cooperative who were acting as chefs and waiters.
Then night swallowed up the last remnants of light and we all found ourselves under the hundreds of tiny lit bulbs.
“There have never been so many people here,” Cesare said, placing a hand on my cheek.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“And why should I?”
“You always imagined it as a place of peace.”
He slid his hand from my face to my neck, a touch so intimate that I would have drawn back with anyone else, but not with him. His presence on that day filled me with faith.
“I always imagined it as a sacred place,” he corrected me, “and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it.”
He smiled at me. He was searching for something hidden in my expression.
“Once I told you that in your previous incarnation you were an amphibian, do you remember?”
I remembered it, of course, but I was astonished that he did.
“Well, today I’m sure of it. You’re able to adapt to many worlds, Teresa. You can breathe underwater and on land.”
I was on the verge of confiding in him what was weighing on my heart even in the midst of that festivity.
We want to steal a baby. We want to steal our baby.
I sensed that he felt the presence of that secret. His eyes encouraged me, but I turned my head away.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“Don’t run off. I’d like to introduce you to someone.”
I followed him under the pergola. Cesare touched the shoulder of a woman with loose black hair in a blue dress that revealed her slender legs.
“This is my sister, Marina. Bern’s mother. I don’t believe you’ve ever met.”
But I had realized it before he said it, I could tell from her close-set eyes, identical to those of my husband. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have said she was his older sister. A child clung to her leg. Marina blushed.
“Bern told me not to bring him, but what could I do?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, though I couldn’t look at the little boy again, instantly reconstructing another portion of his life that Bern had kept hidden from me: the new family of the sister-mother whom he never mentioned, who had been added and then removed from the list of guests, and finally left there with a pen stroke that only partially crossed her out, present and absent at the same time. And a little half brother who would have been just a few years older than our daughter, if fate had been favorable to us from the beginning.
“Marina is very happy to meet you,” Cesare said.
But she had already lowered her head to the child and whispered that he should behave.
“Had you been here before?” I asked her, just to say something. I remembered the piles of almonds, Bern’s disappointed expectation, when his back had stiffened up from all the hulling.
Marina nodded. “I like the flowers you put in your hair,” she said.
I wanted her to compliment me again. I hadn’t known her until a few minutes ago and suddenly she was the most important guest at the party.
But she was finding it difficult, awkward. She said, “When are we leaving, Cesare?”
“After the cake,” he replied amiably.
Then the child darted away, running between the forest of legs, as if fleeing from that conversation. Marina went after him, hurriedly apologizing to me. Cesare responded to my look with a hint of a smile, then he too turned away.
* * *
—
I TOOK PART in snippets of conversations, I laughed even when I didn’t understand the jokes, I wandered around making sure that everyone was relaxed, that everyone had had enough to eat. From time to time I looked for Bern, and saw him surrounded by other guests, too far away. But I didn’t allow that distance to bother me. I was determined to enjoy it all, every second of it.
Corinne snatched me away from a group of high school classmates who were asking me some leading questions about my life at the masseria.
“Your father is making a scene,” she said, her face angry and tense. “He’s complaining that the wine is bad, and okay, so it’s not good, but he shouldn’t have attacked Tommaso. He accused him of serving it cold on purpose, to cover up the taste.”
We reached the drinks table, where my father stood facing Tommaso. He took me by the shoulders.
“Here you are, good. We need to get some other wine, Teresa. This one is poison. Tamponi spat it out into the flowers.”
Tamponi was his office manager. Even earlier, at Town Hall, my father’s attention had been focused mainly on him.
“Don’t we have anything else?” I asked Tommaso. He shook his head.
“But what were you thinking of, serving this stuff?”
“Maybe it’s the bottle, Dad.”
“I’ve already tried three. Three! And this guy keeps looking at me with that shitty smile!”
“You see?” Corinne burst out, as if it were my fault.
Tommaso said, “What do you want me to do, Mr. Gasparro? Oh, wait, I have an idea, bring me that amphora,” he said, pointing to the amphora for the trip money. “Maybe I can manage to turn water into good wine. And if I can’t, you can throw stones at me, like old times.”
The most vivid part of my imagination saw my father lunge across the table to grab him, but luckily the musicians had arrived. Friends of Danco, enlisted from who knows where and in exchange for who knows what, they were his personal wedding gift to us (though Bern and I hoped he would not forgo slipping a little money into the amphora). Together the guests all moved toward the players and someone dragged me along and pushed me into the center of the circle that had formed.
The young man with the tambourine bowed to me and soon afterward Bern materialized, just as disoriented. He was the first to respond to the urging that came to us from all sides, moving his arms and legs as he whirled around me. He was better than me at dancing the pizzica, but what did it matter? I looked at him: my husband. I put my trust in him.
“Take off the shoes!” someone shouted. He bent down and untied my shoelaces, and I stepped onto the ground with my bare feet. That may have been the green light that the guests had been waiting for, because the circle around us broke and everyone started dancing.
Bern whispered in my ear that he was the happiest man on earth. Then, as if it weren’t enough to confide it to me alone, he shouted: “I am the happiest man on earth!”
I lost sight of him and found myself dancing with other people, at one point even my father, whom someone had pushed into the fray. I danced for a long time, in a kind of daze. By the end my head was spinning. I was on the verge of stumbling, so I picked up my shoes, which everyone had carefully avoided, and made my way through the crowd to the pergola.
In the kitchen there were stacked pans, serving plates with leftovers, piles of dirty dishes. The young people from the cooperative were busily working amid that chaos, yet they smiled at me in turn, somewhat awed.
I went into the bathroom. The mirror returned the image of my loosened hairdo, the flower buds that Marina had complimented drooping to one side, my cheeks mottled. I was a little sorry to have lost my earlier composure, to see the unrefined farm woman I had become reemerge from beneath the makeup. I moistened a washcloth and used it to scrub my face.
At that moment the door swung open. In the mirror I saw Nicola towering there, he too disheveled, the knot of his tie undone. Instead of backing away, he closed the door behind him.
“I’ll be out of here right away,” I said, but he didn’t move.
He was breathing hard. He took another step forward, grabbed me by the elbows, and lowered his face to the back of my neck, as if to sink his teeth in it. Raising his head, he started kissing my neck passionately, moving up to my ear, before I could break free. I banged my wrist on the edge of the sink, pushing him away.
“Get out!” I said, but even then Nicola didn’t leave; wide-eyed, he was staring not at me, but at my image in the mirror.
“Get out, Nicola!”
He sat on the rim of the bathtub and looked around, as if making contact with the room again, with every single object. Then he covered his face with his hands.
I felt a little guilty now, seeing him so dejected, but I was afraid of what he might do if I got too close.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer.
“You had too much to drink. Why didn’t you come with Stella? You could have brought her.” He shook his head again. He got up, turned on the tap, and stood there blankly, watching the flow of water.
“Feelings are always so uncomplicated for you, aren’t they?” he said tightly. “So clear-cut. But you still haven’t understood a thing, Teresa. Not about me and not about this place. And not about the man you married, for sure.”
I placed the damp washcloth on the sink so he could use it.
“See you outside, Nicola.”
I opened the door. I glanced down the hall, in both directions, to make sure no one had seen us, that there were no witnesses to that betrayal that I had not taken part in.
* * *
—
THEN IT WAS TIME for the cake. I watched the creation pass by, carried by two young men; its rounded tiers were decorated with multicolored fruit, shimmering under a layer of aspic. The waiters took it to the holly oak, where a table had been set up. I didn’t know that Bern had planned to serve it there. Once again I felt myself being dragged along reluctantly, and once again a circle formed around me.
Bern climbed up on the bench and held out his hand for me to join him. There were whistles and applause. Danco called for us to give a speech, and others joined him. But I wouldn’t have been able to say a single word and Bern ducked his head behind my back. The guests quieted down, expecting one of us to say something.
That’s when Cesare stepped forward: “Since the bride and groom are a bit overwhelmed, I’d like to say something in their place. If they give me their permission, of course.”
I remember that moment very clearly, maybe better than any other: the trunk of the holly oak, Bern and I, the cake with the pieces of fruit arranged in circles, then Cesare, and farther on, the waiting crowd.
“Thank you, Cesare. Do save us,” I said, before it might occur to Bern to stop him.
Cesare took another moment to collect his thoughts.
“Teresa and Bern chose not to join in marriage under the guidance of the Lord,” he said finally. “This does not mean, however, that God is not looking down on us, on all of us, at this precise moment. Even though He hasn’t been invited, He holds us in His warm, strong embrace. Can you feel it?”
He turned to the guests, his forefinger held up as if pointing to something in the sky.
“Can you feel that gentle pressure in the air? I feel it. It’s the touch of His embrace.”
I peered around at the faces of the guests with some apprehension, but only Danco had mockingly crossed his arms and was smiling scornfully. The others seemed truly captivated by Cesare, by his solemn pauses. I reached for Bern’s hand. He was calm.
“I’d like to tell you a story,” Cesare went on, “a story that you may not know. The story of the mutinous angels.”
And so he spoke about the guardian angels, about their mutiny, about how they came down to earth attracted by the beauty of the women, of how they coupled with them and how from that union monstrous giants were born. About how afterward the giants rebelled against men and the earth was filled with blood and suffering. And about how the guardian angels taught men to defend themselves against what they themselves had generated, and taught them about spells and plant properties and how to make weapons. He spoke about all that to our guests, who were there to have a good time and maybe take a peek at our strange life, and they listened to him, whether out of curiosity or politeness.
Then he said: “I see that some of you have grown gloomy. Why is he telling us such a macabre story, you’re wondering. Is he trying to ruin the party? What the heck is he trying to tell us?”
A few people chuckled and Cesare smiled too. He was full of passion now.
“That every glorious endeavor of man has its origins in transgression and sin, that’s what. That every union between human beings is a union of light and darkness, even this marriage. Don’t take offense, please. I’ve known our bride and groom since the
y were children, they are like a son and daughter to me. I know the transparency of their hearts. But the prophet Enoch would warn them against the darkness that exists within them as well, which perhaps they don’t yet know. Teresa, Bern, remember this always: We marry virtue and sin at the same time. If you don’t yet see it, dazzled as you are by passion, you will understand it later on. There always comes a time when it happens. And that is when you must remember your promise of tonight.”
He looked around for Floriana. He stared at her for a moment, as if he were talking about them too, restating something important. Then he turned his back to the guests again and regarded only us, Bern and me, still standing on the bench, now a bit ridiculous on that podium.
“You were little more than children when you met, but perhaps you were already in love. Floriana and I talked about it. Isn’t that so? Those two, we said, there’s more than meets the eye there. Tonight you promised to watch over one another. Don’t ever stop.”
He took a few steps back to move out of the center. A few people clapped, but without conviction, and the applause died quickly.
In the midst of that hesitation, Bern stepped down from the bench, slid around the table, went over to Cesare, and leaned his head on his chest. When Cesare motioned me to join them, I too got down cautiously, and we both found ourselves in his arms, embraced by his blessing that we had so deeply missed, even if we hadn’t known it until just then.
* * *
—
CORINNE AND TOMMASO were among the last to leave; he was so drunk and revved-up that they’d had to lead him to the car and put up with an angry outburst when he claimed the right to drive. When Bern and I were alone, we sat on the swing-chair, unconcerned that it might collapse under our weight. Husband and wife. Some of the ribbons that we had hung from the trees now lay on the ground, soiled.
Heaven and Earth Page 21
