by Kai Meyer
She slowed down and glanced at him. “And I thought I was a pessimist.”
“We’re born into this life. Into the clans and their tradition. We didn’t ask for all that, did we?”
“I ought to have stayed in the States.” She reflected for a moment. “You too, come to think of it.”
“I don’t think those stories about Giuliana and the dam are true,” he said, unmoved. “But do I know for sure? And do I know what I may find out sometime, maybe just by chance, in some old file somewhere?”
She was still thinking about that when the horizon ahead suddenly got much closer. She swore quietly, took her foot off the gas, and braked. The car stopped less than twenty yards from the end of the world.
Alessandro got out. “Did I promise you too much?”
She was still staring ahead over the wheel, so he came around the car and opened the door for her, not with exaggerated gallantry but as a matter of course. “Take a look up close.”
“Up close?” she murmured. “But there’s nothing to see there. Nothing at all.”
“You just have to look hard. Then you’ll find what you’re after.”
It sounded almost as if he were trying to help her in her search for the unique, awkward magic of the place. And she realized he must have thought the same, the first time he ever drove along this road to nowhere, maybe every time he returned. Even today. Maybe everyone, in the face of this void, was searching for something to cling to. Alessandro perhaps even a little more than other people. In the last few minutes she’d discovered more thoughtfulness in him than she’d have thought possible, more desire for answers. Thinking this, it was difficult to look away from him and turn her eyes on what lay ahead of them again.
The trail, overgrown with weeds, ended in a jagged edge of splintered asphalt, as if a mighty mouth had bitten off the road. Beyond it yawned a deep abyss with a drop of three hundred feet or more—a wide rocky ravine with steep walls that had countless openings in them. At first Rosa thought they were a strange natural feature, a curious structure in the porous stone. Then she saw that they were caves.
“Tombs,” said Alessandro, “several hundred of them. About three thousand years old. They were made by the Siculians, one of the original peoples of Sicily. The Arabs exterminated them later. They left no trace behind but their necropolises, the cities of their dead. There are several more of them on the island, and this one isn’t even the largest. The Pantalica ravine down south is—”
“Do you ever keep your mouth shut just for a moment?” She didn’t mean to snap, and he didn’t seem offended. But she couldn’t listen anymore; she had to walk on for a little way and see the place alone, with her own eyes, before getting any explanations.
She walked up to the edge where the road broke off, impressed but not afraid of the height and the wind blowing up from below. At the bottom of the ravine lay large chunks of concrete rubble. The gorge was about a hundred and fifty feet wide, possibly more, and the opposite edge looked as abrupt and jagged as this one. Beyond were the humped backs of hills, and dusty valleys, and somewhere beyond the horizon no doubt traces of civilization again. At the moment, however, she and Alessandro seemed to be alone in the world.
“The bridge to the other side was the last part finished,” said Alessandro, breaking the silence. “But after the construction work stopped, the government said the bridge had to go. My father’s firms were commissioned to destroy what they’d only just built. But after that the provincial government in Enna didn’t have the money to take the rubble away, so it all stays there just as if it fell from heaven. Thousands of tons of concrete in the middle of the Siculians’ valley of death.”
There was a note of respect in his voice that startled her. He was always surprising her, and she had to admit that she liked that.
She sat down cross-legged on the hot asphalt, not caring that her minidress had ridden up. The edge of the gorge was only a foot and a half in front of her, and gusts of wind kept blowing up from below to try to drag her down into the depths. She was strong enough to resist the urge to let herself go with them.
Alessandro sat down beside her and splayed his fingers on the asphalt. It was as if he could sense something under it, the heart of this secret place. Suddenly she, too, felt it, beating like her own.
“You don’t really think it was a dream, do you?” he asked abruptly.
“The snake and the tiger?”
He nodded.
“So what? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I was in therapy for almost a year.” How easy it was to say that. Maybe for the very reason that she hardly knew him. “They’re always telling you that none of what you see and hear is real. Or none of the interesting things anyway. Never mind what you believe or don’t believe, they say, it’s all in your head. Because you’re crazy.”
“But you’re not crazy,” he said.
“I could be crazy as all get-out and you’d have no idea of it. I could be an ax murderess. Fucking Freddy Krueger from your worst nightmares.” She slowly turned her head and looked at him. At his attractive, open face that could turn dark and reserved within seconds. The curve of his lips. The green eyes that looked into her a little too far and that she couldn’t defend herself against.
It could have been so simple. But she was who she was, and simple, in her case, meant on the other side of the globe. Probably somewhere beyond Australia and down at the South Pole.
She had problems getting too close to anyone. And she couldn’t even trust herself anymore, let alone anyone else. She avoided meetings and conversations, without knowing why. Inside, she guessed she was as twisted as one of the wild olive trees on this island.
She was a nightmare, more particularly her own nightmare, and everything in her cried out to her to put up barriers and barricade the gates at once.
It would have been only fair to tell him so. To explain, right now, that she was the bloody Titanic whose wake would carry him under, if he didn’t jump into the lifeboat and head for the open sea.
Instead, he leaned over to kiss her.
She waited. Hesitated. Then withdrew her head before their lips could touch. For a split second he looked offended, but then he smiled, blinked at the sun, and said, “Well, when it gets to that point, I want to be there.”
“When what gets to what point?”
“When you’re not looking at everyone else as if they’d just declared war on you. And when you realize”—he pointed across the ravine—“that things may look like the end of the world but the world still goes on, over there on the other side. Maybe just one really large step would cross it.”
“Right now I’m glad of any small step I can take without stumbling.” She spoke softly, almost to herself. “That’s why I came to Sicily. I’d been standing still long enough.”
Alessandro looked at her and nodded thoughtfully. He knew when to keep quiet, that was something else she liked about him.
“Change the subject?” she suggested.
He’d probably seen it coming. “Iole?”
She nodded, jumped up, and reached her hand out to him. “We’ll do it ourselves. Just you and me. We’ll get her out of there.”
He clasped her fingers, not so she could pull him up but clearly because he wanted to touch them. She wanted it too, way too much, and then he stood there right in front of her, the abyss beside them, and she could smell his skin and his hair, and let go of his hand, even though she secretly wanted something quite different.
“Right away?” he asked.
She nodded.
RAIN SHADOWS
ISOLA LUNA ROSE FROM the sea, enveloped in gray-blue mist. The first stars were shining in the sky, and the two of them had been sitting in the bow of the yacht for a while doing nothing but searching for the next bright point in the darkness.
From time to time their eyes met, only briefly, before returning to the horizon.
After a while Ros
a had begun to talk again. About New York and the first storms of fall, and the leaves in the streets around the parks. About the mothers with their children by Turtle Pond, bundled in scarves and caps and lined hoods.
Then she said, “A year ago I killed my son.”
She wasn’t sure why she said that. To challenge him? To provoke one of the usual reactions: horror or pity or stammering uncertainty? So that she could check him off as one of them, one of the others?
He was looking at the rise of the hill to the north gradually getting larger. “What was his name?”
No one had ever asked her that. Most people assumed that aborted children didn’t have names.
“Nathaniel,” she said. “I wanted to give him something special. Something to make him different from all the others who … who have to stay there in the hospital.”
The Gaia’s engine was humming down in the depths of the hull. Spray flew up from the bow. There was something soothing about the monotonous sounds.
“They said it was my decision to make.” She scratched her thumbnail with her forefinger and then couldn’t stop. “They said: We’re sure you know what you’re doing.” Her voice was level. “But I didn’t know. I was afraid no one else would be glad when the baby was there. I thought then I’d be really alone, alone with him. But it isn’t other people who decide if you feel alone, it’s yourself. Only I didn’t know that yet. That’s why Nathaniel is dead now.”
Alessandro said nothing. The island was getting closer. So was the darkness.
“Giving him a name helped,” she said. “And imagining what he would have looked like later on. Because that way he turned into a person, and a person can forgive you for making a mistake. However bad it is—they can forgive you.”
The island lay like a black portal in the twilight, moving inexorably toward the yacht. Rosa turned her head until she couldn’t see Alessandro out of the corner of her eye anymore.
“But a time came when you did make a decision,” he said.
“There’s only red or black.”
“Red or black?”
“Like in roulette. One is no more right or wrong than the other. You can think as long as you like about which color’s more likely to win, but it doesn’t help you. You think it over, back and forth, but in the end you don’t have any influence over it.”
He hesitated for a moment. “But if you think only of yourself and not of him for once—are you sorry then?”
“Since then I’ve thought of nothing but myself.”
“And is that good or bad?”
“It’s just the way it is. You can’t evaluate it.”
On the edge of her field of vision she saw him give a tiny nod, and once again she had the feeling that she was letting him get far too close to her.
“How about the father?” he asked.
“No idea.”
He gave her time, waited until she finally continued of her own accord.
“I was at a party,” she said. “Someone spiked my drink. That’s all I know. Not at all spectacular, is it?”
For the first time he showed emotion openly, and it did her good to see that it was anger. Pure, seething anger very like her own. “He raped you.”
“One, several of them—anyway, it wasn’t any immaculate conception. They found traces in me from only one man. But I don’t remember anything about it. Someone found me lying on the sidewalk and called an ambulance. They told me that later. When I woke up I was lying in a bed and everything was clean and sterile, and my mother was holding my hand and crying her eyes out.” She smiled bitterly. “You know what my first thought was? I thought I must have been in a coma for years, like in a movie when people wake up after a long time, and while they were out of it, China has conquered America. My mother looked really, really old. But soon I realized it was only from crying so much, and nothing had changed at all. It was only a few hours later, and everything was back to what it had been. Except for that one tiny difference inside me.”
“Who told you to get rid of the baby? Your mother?”
“Her. And the women doctors, and the psychologist. It’s your decision, they said, and there was a big But after it, only none of them said it out loud. The only person who had a different suggestion was Zoe. Why don’t you just fly out here and take things as they come, she said. She’d been in Sicily for a year by then.”
“No one just takes a thing like that as it comes.”
“That’s Zoe all over. She’s like that. And I think it’s what she’d have done in my place: She’d have waited until the decision made itself and she had no choice but to have the baby.” She picked at the nail bed of her thumb, although it was already bleeding. “But I’m not Zoe. I did something, and it was the wrong thing to do.”
“I don’t think so.”
She thought it was brave of him to say that. She’d talked to far too few people like him, people who simply said what they thought, never mind whether it sounded uncivil or unfeeling. They all just wanted to soothe and comfort her. Wanted her to stay packed in cotton forever so that she’d have no reason to bang her fist on the table and scream and shout, and maybe become a bit unhinged.
Alessandro made a movement as if to put his hand over hers, but then he bent forward and took hold of the yacht’s rail. His knuckles were white. “I don’t think you did the wrong thing.”
She waited. Watched him. But he just looked over toward the island.
“Maybe none of us ought to bring children into the world,” he said. “None of our kind, anyway.”
It began to rain as they reached their destination. Storm clouds were gathering around the extinct volcano of Isola Luna, looking more menacing from minute to minute. The captain of the Gaia tried to persuade Rosa and Alessandro to stay onboard, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
The yacht had half rounded the island to come in to the north coast. Here it didn’t have to anchor at sea, as it did in the bay off the sandy bathing beach, but could put in at a gray concrete landing. Through the driving rain, and in the beam of the yacht’s lights, Rosa saw a solid, squat building with a flat roof, hunched among the rocks close to the landing. It looked like the foundations of a now-demolished lighthouse.
Rosa and Alessandro reached land from the Gaia over the landing. There were only three sailors onboard as well as the captain. At Alessandro’s wish they all stayed on the ship.
Rosa and he had put on dark Gore-Tex raincoats; drops of water ran off them like quicksilver. Two heavy flashlights had enough battery power for several hours. In addition, at the captain’s insistence, Alessandro had taken a flare pistol. He told Rosa that the man belonged to the half of the Carnevare clan that still supported him. Alessandro had fired his predecessor, one of Cesare’s men, and the new captain had been on the yacht only for the last week.
The end of the long landing to which the Gaia was moored was blocked by a high, barred gate. Alessandro tapped a numerical code into a keypad on the gate. The security lock snapped open.
In front of the squat building there was an asphalt courtyard, with a narrow road leading from it up into the volcanic rocks of the slope. Alessandro had told her about it on her first visit to the island. There was no view of the villa from here.
Thunder rolled in the distance. White lightning twitched over the underside of the clouds like wildfire. Seen against the sudden bright light, the peak of the volcano looked three times as high and inhospitable.
The beams of their flashlights moved over the front of the squat building by the shore. There was a broad doorway at ground level, its two halves wide-open in spite of the bad weather.
“We used to keep equipment for cleaning up the beach and the shoreline in there,” said Alessandro. Water was dripping from the peak of his hood. “There was a motorboat for excursions around the island, and diving and paragliding gear.”
Rosa shone her flashlight over the front courtyard and into the building. They were about thirty yards away from it. In the light of the beam she saw
a bare concrete wall, and a low opening in it leading down.
“Looks empty,” she murmured.
“It was a weapons emplacement against the Germans in the Second World War,” Alessandro explained. “My mother always wanted my father to demolish the building, but he thought it was still useful for sheltering machinery and vehicles. It’s completely stormproof, anyway.”
Now she knew what the structure had reminded her of—old wartime bunkers that she’d seen on TV. Or rather, it looked like the part of a bunker aboveground. The idea that there might be a network of rooms and corridors below the building sent a shiver down her spine.
“Do you think Iole’s in here?” she asked.
Alessandro shook his head. “She can’t leave the villa on her own. And I don’t see why they’d have brought her here.” He turned to her. “Listen, this is really important. You must keep as close to me as possible. Whatever you do, don’t go running around here on your own.”
“I thought there was no one here but Iole.”
“That’s how it should be. Most of the time the island’s left unguarded.”
“Isn’t that odd? I mean, they’re keeping a hostage here.”
“No one who knows the coast in these parts would dock here just like that.”
“Let’s go straight to the villa,” she suggested. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can leave again.”
The open door of the old weapons emplacement seemed to be weighing on his mind. But then he slowly nodded and set off with her. They crossed the front courtyard and followed the narrow road uphill.
Rosa had not forgotten what Iole had said about wild animals outside the villa windows at night. She could still see the eyes of the tiger in front of her. Human eyes. Tano’s eyes.
Again and again she shone the beam of her flashlight into the darkness on both sides of the gravel path. To the left, the slope fell away to the shore. The roar of the surf rose to their ears, as rain and darkness blurred their vision. The yacht down at the landing was visible only as pale dots of light at the portholes. And the bunker was sunk in the night as if the past had reclaimed it.
