Guesswork

by Martha Cooley

  I’m four thousand miles from her now, in any case. She’s delighted I’m on sabbatical, thinks it’s marvelous for me—as indeed it is. Like my father, my mother has always encouraged travel abroad, and long separations from her children don’t distress her. This lack of worry is a gift; I repay it by not focusing on the labored rasp I sometimes hear in her breathing when we speak by phone. She’d be vexed if she thought I was noticing. It’s nothing, she’d say, I’m old, have you forgotten that? I reckon, too, that I can be at her side in less than a day, if need be. That’s a calculation she’s undoubtedly made as well, though she’d never mention it.

  It’s a good thing, this leave of absence: endorsed by parents, husband, friends, colleagues. And I tell myself I’m ready and able to take full advantage of it.

  Yet I’m aware that’s not entirely true, for my accumulated losses have upended me. The sand in my hourglass keeps dribbling, it doesn’t reverse direction. But I’ve come through what’s felt like a strage, a massacre; and while death appears to be taking a break (for the moment, anyway) from rat-tat-tatting my circle of family and friends, I’m still down in an emotional crouch, hands over head.

  Admitting this makes me wince. After all, I haven’t been gunned down; what am I complaining about? Yet despite the privileges of health, a happy marriage, and a gratifying job in academia, for the past ten years my life-work—my writing—has felt invalid, in both senses of that word: weak and spurious, feeble and unconvincing. The urge to just do it that used to counteract self-doubt won’t buoy me. Each day, shame indicts me. Prior to their departures, none of my deceased friends ever made death the fall guy, nor did they whine about whatever they weren’t accomplishing. I picture them conferring and agreeing: too bad she can’t wake up.

  Lunigiana is formally Tuscan, though its residents ignore the label. It’s not Ligurian or Emilian, either; it belongs neither to the coast nor to the plain. An in-between place without its own dialect, Lunigiana is frequently traversed by Italians and tourists en route elsewhere, yet isn’t often thought of as a destination in its own right.

  We’ve landed here by chance. Antonio hails from Lombardy, in northern Italy; to him, Lunigiana was merely a name before we fixed upon it while seeking a vacation spot last summer. Our aim was to find a cheap rural rental about an hour from Parma, where Antonio’s daughter, Paola, lives. A desultory search of Italian websites led to a mention of a medieval village in the Lunigianese hills—and thus, after a phone call, we found ourselves lodged in a one-bedroom apartment over the arched entrance to Castiglione del Terziere. The apartment’s proprietors (I can still recall Antonio’s bemused smile when, after getting off the phone, he informed me of this) were the inhabitants of the village’s castle: Loris Jacopo Bononi and Raffaella Paoletti.

  Our week-long stay in the borgo was memorably spiced by an impromptu tour of the castle and several long dialogues—monologues, actually—with il professore Bononi, whose unconventional background as a doctor-pharmacologist and poet fascinated us. When it came time, a half-year or so later, to choose a sabbatical roost, Antonio and I found ourselves in immediate if startled agreement: Hey, let’s go back there . . .

  Wedged between the Mediterranean coast to the west, central Tuscany to the south, and the Emilian plains to the north, Lunigiana is scored by mountains—the Appennini and Alpi Apuane—and their foothills. The Magra River’s countless tributaries lace a landscape studded with medieval castles atop high hills; towers, walls, and parapets emerge, hide, then emerge again, veiled and revealed by copses of trees. An ancient pilgrims’ route, the Via Francigena, meanders through Lunigiana—it’s the medieval road from France to Rome, walked by the faithful for centuries. All year long, backpackers hike this trail, water bottles bobbing at their sides.

  Lunigiana’s loose web of actual and imaginative trails reflects my inner topography, now that I’m not home in Brooklyn, not around English-speaking people, and not on vacation. For a stretch of time, my days will be uncharted; mentally and physically, I’ll wander as and where I wish. The prospect is at once tonic and terrifying.

  The heavy iron door of our house opens with a long, old-fashioned iron key that rotates twice, loudly, just as we were told it would. When we first moved in, we chuckled each time we used it: heavy and ornate, it’s right out of The Addams Family. Now the big key seems normal, and our American one flimsy.

  We heard about this rental not from the house’s owner, who spends most of his time abroad, but from il professore. With three floors (the third a drafty mansard), the house is livable in a slapdash way. Now and then the plumbing wreaks havoc with our neighbor’s cellar, dumping wastewater there. The kitchen is sparely outfitted; we make do with four smallish burners and a large toaster oven. The steep staircases of the house—open-planked, without risers or decent handrails—aren’t exactly up to code, as we’d say in English. Yet the interior space is ample for our needs, and the terrace a pleasure: it gives onto a tree-filled valley, serene at all hours.

  The day we moved in, I let Antonio enter our new home on his own; I was too nervous.

  Wait, I told myself. Have a quick look around outside, get your bearings.

  Scanning the alley, I saw that our house was flanked by several others, all of whose foundations dated from the Middle Ages. At the corner of the alley stood a once-grand villa. Its windows lacked panes; its second- and third-floor balconies were rusted. Someone had nailed slats of wood across its open entryway, which emitted a strong odor of cat pee.

  As I would soon discover, the owners of this villa—numerous members of a large family—had failed for years to reach any accord on its future. It wasn’t the only neglected or abandoned property in the village. Like most of the region’s medieval borghi, Castiglione had emptied out after World War II; nearly all of its residents left to seek jobs. Many of the village’s houses underwent their own journeys as well, from seldom used to decrepit to uninhabitable.

  Eccoci, I thought, gazing at the shuttered houses adjacent to ours. Here we are . . . Though they weren’t falling down, these places clearly hadn’t been occupied for quite a while. How had we managed not to notice how deserted Castiglione was?

  Come up, amore, called Antonio from inside. Look at the marvelous view from our bedroom!

  Nearly two months have gone by since our arrival here. The sand in the hourglass seems to dribble unevenly: some days fast, other days scarcely at all.

  I’ve given myself permission, for the first time in several decades, to spurn my ordinary routines. For the next twelve months I’m improvising, making up each day as it goes along. And since English isn’t spoken much in Lunigiana, I’m relying on my Italian, which is decent but not fluent. The in-between-ness I feel is due in no small part to my straddling of languages. Talking with Italians other than my husband is the equivalent of riding a roller coaster. Whenever possible, I avoid phone conversations, which dilute both the pleasure and the meanings of speech. Non ho capito, I’m frequently forced to confess: I don’t get what you’ve just said, I can’t follow you . . . When linguistic inadequacy frustrates me, I remind myself that no one, not even a native speaker, achieves full fluency in any tongue. That prize can’t be awarded: the only winner is language itself.

  Face-to-face makes things easier. A great deal can be gleaned from gestures, expressions, tones. And from touch, of course; a hand on a forearm, say. When I want to get my mother’s attention, or she mine, that’s how we’ve always done it. Not with a shake or a tug; simply a hand alighting, perched as if on a bough, fingers tickling like feathers. In place of glances, we trade touches. A secret language, this one, and different from what I imagine “normal” mother-daughter speech to be.

  It’s been thus for decades. All my adult life, I’ve noted the veiled looks and heard the soft grunts and giggles, fraught with meaning, exchanged by my female friends and their mothers. Because my mother is sightless, we do it differently: we always begin with a name. Mom, I’ll say, or Mimi, she’ll
start, and we’ll each know we’re in dialogue. Our conversations are peppered with exclamations and laughs, but they’re mainly conducted with words. Clarity’s our goal; we’ve trained ourselves to avoid misunderstandings. They happen, of course: we’re a mother and a daughter, we misconstrue each other. That’s built into the software. But we don’t get into trouble by starting off on the wrong nonverbal foot. Ours is a different challenge. Non ho capito: I have certainly felt, countless times, that I don’t understand my mother. I don’t get how you manage this blindness every day; I don’t understand why we didn’t talk about what it was like for you to go blind; I don’t see how we might speak of it now.

  A few hundred feet further down the road to Villafranca, a half-dozen swallows career giddily across the sky. Antonio downshifts; our old car grunts in response.

  So playful, Antonio says, pointing. And totally different from those other birds, the weird dancers we just saw . . . I guess swallows use another language.

  Wing-speak, I say. Not beak-speak.

  We are driving to town for bread, fruit, fish, and wine. It’s near-evening; pale sunlight dapples a field to our right. Everything around us is readying for nightfall. I imagine hitching our groceries to the swallows’ wings and having the bags flown up to our house, to be dropped off at dusk.

  Our house—which isn’t “ours” yet but has come to seem so, despite being as unlike our Brooklyn apartment as swallows are unlike blackbirds—sits midway along an alley that runs parallel to an extremely steep cobbled lane.

  This lane ascends all the way to the arched entrance to the upper borgo and the gates of Castiglione’s castle. Despite the fact that it serves as the village’s main street, the lane is barely wide enough for the smallest Fiat. Most people walk up the hill to avoid scraping their cars’ sides. Going up and especially down the lane by car scares me; I picture our old VW’s brakes failing and the vehicle gaining speed, aimed headlong at stone. We usually forgo the drive and haul things in our arms or upon our backs. Our car stays down in la colla—the piazza at the foot of the lane, where the provincial road dead-ends.

  “Going home” is thus a matter of climbing. In Brooklyn, too, we must ascend: our place is on the third floor of a brownstone, and there’s no elevator. But since arriving here and hiking uphill daily, I’ve become a connoisseur of the natural and man-made materials underfoot or at hand. There are knobbly cobblestones; patches of lichen that turn slippery when wet; large flat slabs of stone covered by cement, whose color varies from grayish to puttyish; and retaining walls, particularly the mossy one of the castle’s garden. Rising across the alley from our front door, it restrains the unkempt terraces looming above us.

  The garden wall isn’t straight, and it bulges outward here and there. It lies mostly in shade, its mottled surface mixing tones of gray, brown, and green. A rough staircase of sorts, with uneven risers and narrow steps, is hewn into one end of the wall; apart from that precarious entryway, the hillside garden can be accessed only from the castle’s lower terrace. Untended for at least a decade, the garden is choked by undergrowth and weeds. Scraggly olive and fig trees stick out at weird angles from their steeply pitched perches; large stones dislodged from the terraces mar the rows’ symmetry, like bowling balls gone astray. The woodshed’s roof has caved in, hiding desiccated heaps of logs.

  The garden violates my sense—acquired, no doubt, via childhood picture books—that a castle ought to boast a stylish, well-maintained theater for displaying its horticultural and arboreal holdings. Yet this giardino is beautiful in its own decrepit way, and full of sounds. After rainfall, its misshapen trees release exuberant tinklings of water onto our alley whenever birds settle on crooked branches. In the evening, returning from a trip to la colla with the trash, I can hear small animals (not urban rats, thankfully, but martens or squirrels) scuttling in the underbrush. And on certain moonless nights—especially if there’s a bit of mist—an owl’s eerie call from somewhere deep in the garden is an aural magic wand, able to freeze me in place.

  * * *

  In the lower part of the borgo, a cat has recently given birth. One of the two kittens (perhaps there were more, gone now) has infected eyes. Antonio and I pass it as we walk up the lane, grocery bags in hand.

  The mother of the kitten with infected eyes stays near her offspring, though I’ve noticed she vanishes from time to time, leaving the vision-impaired kitten to lurch and mewl. It’s as though the mother has begun a process of disengagement, accepting the fact that one of her brood is likely to go blind. I find this quietly hair-raising, no doubt because it’s the obverse of the situation in which I grew up: with my mother slowly losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa, a rare, untreatable eye disease, and myself gradually realizing what was going to happen. In my prepubescent narcissism, I sometimes felt more upset by the knowledge that sooner or later I’d never again be seen by my mother than by the fact that she’d no longer be seeing anyone or anything. For her the curtain was dropping, the lights dimming, and how would (no, could) the dramas of our lives play out if she wasn’t watching, seeing?

  The kitten reacts with fear as I pass. I can’t tell if that’s because for the kitten my image is distorted, or because I’m near its mother and the kitten doesn’t want anyone too close to her. I must’ve sometimes felt that way, too, about my own mother, though I don’t remember. I do recall days when I felt I was walking a tightrope. There was “normal” on one side and a Munch-scream world on the other, and I was balancing—or trying to—on the rope.

  Antonio and I turn off the lane onto the alley, and hike up to the house. I enter first, grateful for the coolness conferred by stone. The walls of the house are a foot thick—a blessing in summer.

  In the kitchen we put away the groceries as twilight fades to dark. Antonio switches on the outdoor light; moths dart upward. Stepping onto our terrace, I gaze at the hamlet of Croce, its few lights twinkling across the vale between us.

  Oh, says Antonio, the wine, we forgot the white wine . . .

  Tomorrow, I say. We’ll make another run to Villafranca.

  At least, says Antonio, we needn’t go on donkey-back. Can you say that—donkey-back, like horseback?

  He gives a little bray remarkably like that of one of the donkeys over in Croce. Then follows it with a light chuckle, purely his own.

  I guess so, I say. Though I’ve never heard someone use that word, so I’m not sure it exists . . .

  Once more I’m caught between languages, clumsy in one and uncertain about the other. As with the garden’s trees, so with myself: no secure perch. Antonio’s been let off the hook for a year; he’s back on his own linguistic terra firma. Oh, he moaned recently, but what’ll I do when I return to Brooklyn and find that my English has . . . what’s the word? Back-something?

  Backslid, I say.

  Yeah. When that happens, I guess I’ll just have to be like Sisyphus, and push the rock up the hill again.

  Yep, I respond. Esattamente.

  And then I wonder how to deal with the other conflict that occupies my mind. On some days I’m lured mesmerically to the rabbit hole of loss, and am forced to thrash around down there like trapped prey. On other days all the losses seem to recede like any object in a rearview mirror once the accelerator’s been pressed, and I’ve no trouble keeping my foot on the pedal of the present. And no desire to stop and look back.

  In Villafranca, cars routinely nudge halfway out of driveways or parking lots, then pause. It’s hard to gauge the drivers’ intentions. Approaching a partly launched car, I wonder whether I’ve been noted.

  This, too, is a replay of earlier challenges, those of my youth and adolescence. I recall silently dodging my mother when, making her way across a room—hands outstretched, fingers alert for furniture—she’d unwittingly aim not for the door but at me. To prevent bumps and collisions, my siblings and father and I learned to accelerate and decelerate around her, and to call out soft warnings: To your left, the armchair. Careful of t
he floor lamp.

  Since arriving here, I’ve learned to curse softly in Italian at indecisive or careless vehicles. Reacting to an especially bad instance, however—some driver pulling out fast while looking the other way, or blocking a crosswalk—I mouth off to myself in foul English. Saying the same things in Italian, silently or aloud, would seem a pale translation of my anger.

  Which isn’t really anger, I realize, so much as fear. Not terror, not panic; a low-grade fear, a chronic anxiety. I’m afraid of having to steer amidst obstacles, or between languages. Scared I’ll fail to grasp what’s really happening around or inside me—to pick up on truths spoken by others, or somehow shaken loose within me—and by the time I do, it’ll be too late; I’ll have missed something important.

  Whenever I mention my linguistic distress to Antonio, he smiles and shrugs. What do you think I’ve been dealing with since I moved to the States to be with you? he asks me one morning. Welcome to the sort-of-bilingual club!

  Oh, come on, your English is way better than my Italian, I say.

  No it isn’t, he responds. And in any case, the feeling you’re talking about won’t go away. It comes with the territory, isn’t that how you put it?

  Yep. Just have to grin and bear it, I suppose . . .

  Now that’s a nice expression, Antonio says. English is so economical—look what you can do with a few monosyllables!

  He pronounces that last word the Italian way, mono-SIL-a-be, which charms me. Then he wraps his arms around me and squeezes hard.

  Siamo fortunati, he murmurs, we’re lucky, and I know what he’s talking about; he needn’t say another syllable. We’ve been married for only a few years, though we’ve known each other nearly a dozen. A death, that of his wife, Valeria—my close friend, one of my keenest losses during the strage—brought us unexpectedly together. She was my age, fifty-seven, when back pain turned into rampant cancer. How did the inexplicable happen: her leaving us, loss uniting us? Within us is Valeria, always. What I can do now, Antonio adds, his face contorting in pain, I’m able to do because I’ve been granted a second life. But she . . .