Giuliana shook her head. She continued looking at the road. I may have leaned toward her.
“You lived in a garage for eight months, you slept in the same bed all that time, and you never talked about that night?”
“What’s done was done. Would talking about it change anything? We were all there at the Relais. We three and thirty others. It could have happened to anyone.”
“You’re joking!”
“You’re getting a little too worked up, Teresa.”
“A man is dead! A man I knew!”
“Yeah, Bern told us that. You had an affair, you and that cop.”
“Did you ask Danco how things went at the Relais or not? Did you ask Bern or not?”
Giuliana absently brushed her hair back, what was left of it. She seemed surprised that it wasn’t as long as it used to be.
“Let’s stop here,” she said, taking an exit off to the side. “We have to get gas. I hope you have some cash left.”
* * *
—
INSIDE THE SERVICE STATION we split up. There wasn’t a real bar, just a corner with tall coffee dispensers and a stack of paper cups next to them. The price, indicated on a sign, was to be paid at the cashier. If you drank the coffee and left without paying, no one would have noticed, but that probably didn’t happen on the island.
I wandered among the shelves awhile, the same souvenirs I would see again and again in the days that followed, but that at that moment were new: seal-shaped stuffed toys, thick wool sweaters with traditional designs, hats with Viking horns, and miniature trolls.
A large map of Iceland, slightly yellowed, hung on one wall. Framed pictures highlighted the tourist attractions: geysers, volcanoes, waterfalls, all names impossible to pronounce. In one photograph I thought I recognized the icebergs in the sea that the woman at the travel agency had told me about. For some reason I was sorry to miss them.
“We’re almost at Blönduós,” Giuliana said. She was holding two containers of coffee and handed me one. She pointed her finger at the map. “We’re traveling this road. It forms a ring around the island. We have to get here.”
A lake, located almost in the center, to the north.
“Mývatn,” I read.
Giuliana corrected my pronunciation, then explained something about the construction of words in Icelandic. All of a sudden I saw the absurdity of being in that shop, in that remote place on earth, with a person who by then was in all respects a stranger to me, surrounded by refrigerator magnets commemorating the volcanic eruption that a couple of years earlier had covered half of Europe with ashes. Yet being there with Giuliana, traveling to a destination that I couldn’t even pronounce correctly, was one of the first vital experiences I’d had in a long time.
“Why there?” I asked.
“We were looking for a place that hadn’t been corrupted by man. Something intact.”
“And did you find it?”
Giuliana turned away abruptly, her back to the map and me.
“He found it, yes. Let’s go.”
* * *
—
FOR A WHILE we rode in silence. I stared at a formation of clouds to my right, a high, puffy mass, like a nuclear explosion, motionless in the sky. Even the clouds seemed different here. No matter how far we drove, the cumulus did not move with respect to us: impossible to reach, impossible to go around, impossible to avoid. Then Giuliana said: “It was a delicate balance. You have to try to understand that. None of us had ever been in such a situation. No one had ever even imagined it.”
She took a deep breath. She accidentally turned the windshield wipers on, and they scraped against the dry glass, screeching. For a moment she seemed thrown into confusion.
“A week after we arrived, the German came to see us. I would have recognized him even if he hadn’t opened his mouth. He stood in front of Bern, and the resemblance was astonishing, with the exception of their coloring, because the German’s hair was mostly white and he had light eyes. He spread his arms, Bern went to him and let himself go completely. I don’t know why that gesture moved me, we were all still upset, a week had gone by and we’d never left the place, shut in there with no news, left in suspense, with only someone who brought us food and didn’t say a word. And now here was Bern’s father, and Bern letting him hug him like a child.
“The German shook hands with me and Danco. He asked us if we were getting bored. It had never even occurred to us to be bored. Then he asked us if we had used the computer, but that hadn’t occurred to us either. So he sat down at the desk and explained that we could surf the net securely. He had a firewall like that of the Pentagon, plus an untraceable IP address. He did not specify that all those exceptional precautions were due to the illegal trafficking in works of art; we realized it ourselves, or at least I did, and I think Danco did too, whereas Bern may have just been bewildered. The German sat at the computer, with me behind him, Bern behind me and Danco in back; he wanted to keep his distance even though he was intrigued. After days of stagnation, that was our first distraction.
“The German asked if any of us was familiar with Tor. I was, because at university many of us used that software, mostly to buy weed; those were the years when playing hacker guaranteed you a certain fame.
“‘So sit here in my place,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you kids will need a transformation, unless you want to stay in here forever. We can’t change your faces, but we can at least find you a new identity.’ He got up and I sat down at the computer. The procedure was simple enough. We just had to take photographs, upload them, and in a few weeks we would receive three brand-new passports. We could choose whatever nationality we preferred, but the German advised us that unless we spoke another language perfectly, it was better to stay with Italian. He had brought us a camera. The documents would be sent to a postal box where he received all his shipments. He conveyed an incredible calmness as he spoke, and seemed almost amused. He stayed with us a while longer, telling us about the system used to authenticate the works in the garage and sell them online. A complicated system in which he obviously took great pride. Then he promised to come back and see us as soon as possible. Before leaving, he ruffled Bern’s hair, as any father would do to a son.
“Bern suggested we all choose the same surname, as siblings. We discussed that possibility, but it didn’t seem advantageous to me; it would have added an element of risk. Then we talked about where we would go once we got the new documents. Not somewhere in Europe, that was obvious. Bern and I proposed destinations, explored them on Google Earth, and every night we convinced ourselves that we had found the ideal place: Cuba, Ecuador, Laos, Singapore. In the morning we questioned everything again. By then Danco refused to participate. He kept saying that the forged passports were dirty. Which criminal organizations were we implicitly asking for help? He adhered to his rigid, unassailable principles of morality. He couldn’t see what Bern and I were all too well aware of: that by then we had overstepped that ethic. From our standpoint, the morality that Danco defended was simply inadequate.”
* * *
—
GIULIANA REACHED OVER to the backseat, where her bag was. She fumbled inside, but couldn’t find what she was looking for, so she grabbed it and put it on her lap.
“Here,” she said, handing me a passport.
The face, under the shimmering reflections of the laminated paper, was hers, her hair already shaved. Next to it, her new name: Caterina Barresi.
“When we get there, please call me that,” she said somewhat gravely.
“What name did he choose?”
“Tomat. It’s Friulian, quite recognizable, and you can say what you want about Bern’s accent, except that it sounds Friulian.”
We were at the end of a fjord. In front of a rock cliff were two twin houses with sloping roofs, a distance away.
“Danco and Bern were barely speaki
ng to each other. Deep down, Danco held Bern responsible for what had happened. Actually, they were on bad terms even before the Relais. Danco did not accept the idea of using weapons. They were contrary to everything he had always believed in, he said, and that was true, I knew it was. But they were also contrary to everything I had believed in, or Bern for that matter, or all the others who were at the encampment with us. Could we help it if they had become necessary? Sometimes you have to go beyond what you think is right in order to achieve a higher goal. The new order must come about through disorder, that’s what Bern made us understand, but not Danco, no, he refused.”
I thought about the day Danco had showed up at the masseria with Bern’s list of things to take, about the determination in his eyes, a rancorous determination that I hadn’t understood.
“But one day, at the encampment in Oria, Bern took him on a walk through the felled olive trees and convinced him.”
Giuliana lowered the window, put an arm out to resist the cold air, then leaned over to offer her face to the wind as well.
“Or so it seemed at least,” she added in a bitter tone. “Can you drive a little?”
I really didn’t want to. The drowsiness was still there, mixed with the acidity of the sandwich and the horrible coffee I’d just drunk. And I knew I wouldn’t dare maintain Giuliana’s speed on that road, where every curve seemed about to eject us.
“I just need half an hour. To close my eyes,” she insisted. We traded places. Before getting back in the car, Giuliana bent down and grabbed her ankles, and stayed like that for about twenty seconds, her muscles taut under her jeans.
For the first few miles she kept her eyes closed and her head erect like a statue, but she wasn’t sleeping, I knew it. When she opened them again, she said, “I miss the olive trees. I miss just about everything. Especially the warmth. Summer didn’t even last a month here. It’s because of global warming. The ice that melted in Greenland has cooled the Gulf Stream. While the rest of the world is melting in the sun, we end up freezing, even in August.”
“I was at the encampment,” I said then, maybe to console her, or just the opposite, because I wanted to intensify her nostalgia.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Daniele told me.”
“You talked to Daniele?”
Giuliana glanced at me. “I talk to him almost every day. Why would he have gone to look for you otherwise?”
Her mood changed again. Suddenly more conciliatory, she added: “We resumed communication a couple of months after arriving in Freiberg. It wasn’t the least bit easy. If my computer skills were rusty, Daniele’s were pitiful. And there was the problem of sending him the first message without leaving a trace. I got the idea of using Amazon. Daniele was under house arrest, so it was entirely plausible that he would order things via the internet. So I had him buy an electric toothbrush, since it was an item that we had joked about together some time before. He’d told me that his mother made him bring one with him everywhere, even to the encampment. There he was, out in the countryside, wandering around with that buzzing gadget. It took me a while to get access to his computer and his credit card. But when he received the electric toothbrush he understood. I sent him the instructions in a series of emails that anyone would have mistaken for spam. And within a few days we had a protected network available so we could write to each other directly.”
She propped her foot on the dashboard and slid lower in her seat.
“I don’t know why I’m even telling you these things. You could go back to Italy and report everything to the police.”
“That’s what Bern did with me too,” I said. “He sent me a plant product and a book.”
“Bern and I sent you those things,” Giuliana clarified, giving me an ironic look. “Or, rather, as far as the fertilizer is concerned, me, Bern, and Danco. On his own, Bern wouldn’t even have been able to boot up the computer.”
“But why not let Daniele tell me where you were? If you were already in contact with him.”
“Damn, why didn’t I think of that!” she said, and started laughing.
“Why, then?”
“It was he, Daniele, who didn’t want to. He’d studied you for a while and in the end he decided you couldn’t be trusted.”
He’d studied me. He’d come to bed with me.
“Were you able to see me?” I asked, feeling more and more tense.
“When your monitor was on, yeah. If you ask me, you have a pair of my panties.”
She laughed again, a spiteful laugh, a little strained. I slowed down and stopped the SUV in a rock-strewn pull-out.
“What are you doing?”
I got out and started walking through the tract of heather. The island was barren, you couldn’t see anything in the direction in which I was going, absolute emptiness, I could have walked on endlessly without encountering a single obstacle. I heard the car door slam.
Giuliana shouted, “Hey, come back here! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Come on back!”
But I didn’t stop. The topsoil among the plants was dark, almost black. Giuliana must have started running. Soon she was in front of me, blocking my way.
“We still have a long way to go. If we lose time we’ll have to wait until tomorrow. And tomorrow may be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
I kept going, so she was forced to walk backward.
“You’ll see. Now let’s go.”
“Where is Bern? I won’t get back in the car until you tell me where he is.”
“I told you, you’ll see.”
I screamed at her: “Where the fuck is he?”
“He’s in a cave.”
“A cave?”
“He probably won’t be able to hold out for much longer.”
I stopped walking then. Giuliana stopped as well. The wind lashed us from the side, not in gusts like Speziale’s tramontana, this was a constant force.
I wasn’t all that surprised, actually. Bern inside a cave: I could imagine it. In all those years I had grown used to his bizarre quirks. He’d lived in a ruined tower, in a house without electricity, up in a tree. All I asked was “For how long?”
“Almost a week.”
“And he can’t come out?”
“No. He’s stuck in there.”
That stubborn, angry wind, the quivering tufts of heather clinging to the stones. Giuliana reached out to grab the edge of my jacket.
I let her lead me back to the car. She got back behind the wheel. I huddled at the far end of the seat, as far away from her as possible, but we didn’t drive for long. She parked in front of a building larger than the others, in a prominent position on a hill.
“We can get something decent to eat here,” she said. “I think we could use it.”
* * *
—
INSIDE, a fireplace was lit. Heads of cloth animals were mounted on the walls, as though that alpine decor were a parody, since no one would have dreamed of stuffing real animals. We sat down in a corner, my back to a window. I felt a weariness spread through my limbs. When they brought us the menus, I didn’t have the energy to look through mine. It seemed like too purposeful an act, too normal. An unspoken question, unutterable, held me frozen: if he can’t come out, what will happen to him?
Giuliana ordered for me. They seemed to know her. But they probably knew Caterina, not Giuliana. The girl serving the tables, her face and gestures so open, brought us two white cream soups. Dark pieces floated on the surface.
“It’s mushroom,” Giuliana said. “I hope you like it.”
I must have been very pale, or maybe there was something more serious than the pallor about me, something troubling, because such concern wasn’t like her. I don’t remember if it was she who guided my hand to the spoon or if I did it instinctively, but I ate the s
oup, spoonful after spoonful, the morsels of mushroom chewy under my teeth, tasteless, like bits of styrofoam.
I felt a little better afterward, but I didn’t taste even a bite of the salmon that came next. Just seeing it made me suddenly sick. I rushed to the bathroom and threw up.
I stood in front of the mirror for a long time, looking at a face I didn’t recognize, cheeks reddened by the restaurant’s heat or by the cold outside, or maybe by the shock. When I returned to Giuliana, the table had been cleared. She asked me if I felt better; I didn’t answer.
She signaled the girl, who appeared a few minutes later with the bill. As on all the other occasions, she waited for me to take out my wallet and pay for both our meals. When I was about to pick up the Icelandic crowns left as change in the small saucer, she stopped me with a wave of her hand.
“Leave it as a tip.”
* * *
—
IT HAD STARTED to rain, a light, very fine drizzle. Looking at my sleeve, I realized that it wasn’t really rain, but sleet. At the end of August. I remembered when Bern, in the parking lot in Kiev, had walked to a rotunda covered with icy snow and placed his hand on it, the wonder in his eyes.
“Why did you send me those things?” I asked. “The pesticide, the book. Why, if you didn’t trust me?”
“It was Bern who insisted on it. You looked so dejected, he was worried about you. And about the tree. On those forums where you asked how to treat it, the answers you got were just a load of crap. Obviously it was Danco who found the pesticide. It was one of the rare times when he went to the keyboard and interacted with us. By then he barely spoke to us. At night he had terrible nightmares, or he didn’t sleep at all. I had asked the German to bring me some sleeping pills and I would sometimes crumble them into his food. I’m a little ashamed when I think of it, but I did it for him. I was really afraid that he was losing his mind.”
“So Daniele knew where you were,” I said. I couldn’t let go of that thought.
Heaven and Earth Page 34
