Guesswork

by Martha Cooley

  Ah, says Roberto, a frown passing over his face. The kid’s doing fine, I suppose. But what a mess . . . Daniel’s parents came from Romania right before the birth, and then something happened; they left right after the baby came home from the hospital.

  Why, I ask.

  Oh, they must’ve had an argument. I don’t know. In any case, they got in their car and drove off the next morning, and that was that. All the way back to Romania!

  What did Daniel have to say about it, asks Antonio.

  Again Roberto frowns. Not much, he answers. Something about how people just don’t understand . . .

  He gazes off. Sono fatti suoi, he concludes, hands up and palms facing outward. It’s Daniel’s business.

  Antonio and I thank him for the fruit he’s given us, collect our groceries, and walk up the lane, both of us quiet. Think of Daniel’s wife, I say. Alone in that house all day with a new baby . . .

  Yes, says Antonio, it must often be lonely for her. And they must’ve been counting on help.

  The Madonna hasn’t been paying sufficient attention, has she, I think. Neither have the rest of us, though. We’re all occupied with fatti nostri—our own business, our own lives. The sacred gets pressed upon by realities as obdurate and unyielding as the stone wall of Daniel’s driveway. That pale-blue bow will soon come down, washed or blown off by rain or wind.

  Until the renovation, the Madonna had been looking rather disheveled—no surprise, since she’d been exposed to the elements for an awfully long time. Bits of her gown were chipped; her feet were smudged with dirt. Now she’s all spiffed up. But her expression remains the same: neither engaged nor detached.

  Who can speak for her, for what she feels? One can only guess. What the villagers would say: Tu sei benedetta fra le donne, e benedetto è il frutto del ventre tuo—blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. What I imagine Elide must’ve said, nursing her third child as the other kids sapped her energy and their father dealt with pigs and cows, fields and tractor: Don’t let this one keep wanting the breast! What Daniel’s wife must’ve said when her in-laws left: something in Romanian, expressive of outrage and exhaustion. What Rina might’ve said, hearing other women’s complaints: How is it possible I never married, never had a child?

  No one can translate for the Madonna. And perhaps she says nothing original, instead repeating by rote what she’s heard since the start of time: E il settimo giorno Dio terminò la sua opera. Which is fine—but her renovators want to rest, too, on the seventh day. And they must be thinking, you know, we worked really hard to clean you up. We gave you a nice new door, a fresh paint job, flowers. Now is it safe, your home? And ours? Can you promise us?

  I have no dog in this race, as we say in English; I don’t pray.

  Nonetheless I imagine the Madonna has had to train herself to not be distraught by so much human difficulty around her. To steel herself and dole out help as she can, recognizing that everyone’s got their own stuff, fatti loro, to attend to—hence the best and only thing she can do is be calm when people come to her with their tales of need or woe, heads bowed before her red-lit door. To listen without judgment, even without reaction.

  I was not raised Catholic, and have long ceased feeling the tug of my mildly Protestant upbringing. Yet each day when I pass the Madonna in her refurbished abode, I can’t help but note that my neighbors’ faith has transmuted doubt, fear, and awe into a tangible counterweight: a local habitation for a sympathetic listener who’s always at the ready. I recall, too, how my mother would sometimes ask my siblings and me to go to church with her when we were children. At the time I didn’t understand what she could possibly receive from droning Episcopalian sermons and dull hymns that she couldn’t get much more happily from the Bach and Mozart she’d ask us to put on the stereo, or the opera she’d tune into on the radio.

  My father, a strident nonbeliever, would drive us to church and stay in the car. My siblings and I would guide our mother inside the church and sit with her. Why did she insist upon this—she who didn’t do a lot of insisting? I think what she sought was not to affirm belief, but to be lodged momentarily in a physical space expressive of it. To be seated on one of belief’s hard benches and sing a few of its songs. To see nothing, yet hear the play of echoes in that high-windowed place, that haven whose ceilings were vaulted.

  Rather than words, wrote Philip Larkin, comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air . . .

  The holy girl gleams in the sun. I add a bit of water to the droopy flowers someone left in a vase at the side of the Madonna’s home.

  Then I remind myself to describe this scene to my mother, next time we speak on the phone. She’ll assume the Madonna is housed in the little church up by the castle; she’ll picture a regally gilded Mary near an altar. The actual residence—its humble dimensions and location in la colla, its droopy flowers—will startle my mother. But isn’t that where you park your car, she’ll ask. Yes, I’ll say, and the Madonna has to suck down exhaust fumes, poor thing! My mother will chuckle incredulously and then begin to cough, short of breath. She’s got congestive heart failure. I can pray all I like, but that cough of hers isn’t going away.

  After tidying up the flowers, I gaze at the Madonna for a moment. As always, she’s looking elsewhere, lost in thought, silent as the proverbial tomb. She and I are the only ones present; everyone else has gone inside for lunch.

  I close my eyes. What’s audible in la colla, if I listen for it when no one else is there, is the whispering of the Madonna to herself. It sounds like the murmur of the fruit trees in Roberto’s garden. And the incessant wheeze in my mother’s chest. Perhaps these sounds are essentially the same: l’aria della vita. Along with them I sometimes pick up a contrasting, vivifying echo—that of the brisk intake of air of the three men who, after packing up their tools, stood for a few minutes before the Madonna’s home, smoking their rough cigarettes, satisfied with their labor.

  5. Takeaway

  The other night—cool, damp, sound-muffling—a fox ate the two baby geese Raffaella recently purchased.

  Raffaella lives in Castiglione’s castle. For more than twenty-five years, she’s been the consort and helpmate of Loris Jacopo Bononi, the owner. These days, he’s rarely out and about. Bononi is ill with cancer; we don’t expect him to last long. Dying though he is, he remains the ruling presence in the borgo. All of Castiglione’s residents view him with a mix of affection, respect, and bewilderment. Slightly built and elegantly dressed, with a hawk’s profile and disconcertingly vivid blue eyes, Bononi gives an immediate impression, even in his weakened physical state, of someone living on the edge—of what, one isn’t quite sure.

  He’s shrewd and quick-witted; also short-fused, harshly judgmental, irrational. Given to grand gestures (when younger he threw legendary parties, and he still insists on flying the Florentine flag on his upper terrace), Bononi is capable of touchingly genuine acts of kindness. He likes to make people laugh; he’s sweet with children and animals; he cries easily, especially when reciting his own poetry. A showboater? Yes, but an undeniably gifted entertainer as well, whose use of Italian is marvelously idiosyncratic. La scrittura é il solo segno che superstita un uomo, Bononi said to us one day—using a nonexistent verb, superstita. He’d created it by tinkering with superstite, an adjective that means surviving. What did he intend by that? Writing is the only sign that outlasts a person—and when the sign is defamiliarized, it becomes all the more memorable.

  Bononi brought the borgo’s castle back to life. By the 1960s the edifice was in near-ruins; at the end of that decade, il professore undertook the self-imposed, onerous, and expensive task of restoration.

  Several years went into heavy structural work, and years more into gathering every object that would fill the renovated castello: books, art, musical instruments, and furnishings, all related in some manner to Lunigiana. This “castle idea,” as Bononi calls it�
�a nexus at once physical and conceptual—is the central reality of his life. It’s a gift to himself, of course, but also to his Lunigianese compatriots. His aim has been to restore not only the castle but also a local culture long overlooked.

  Without Raffaella’s help, however, Bononi couldn’t have pulled it off. A spirited woman who’s lived with il professore since her late twenties, she shares his love of Castiglione. Within a few years of her arrival, Raffaella oversaw the restoration of several houses in the borgo, putting her art-historical training to tasteful use. She made it her job to take care of the flowers in the village’s main piazza. As she’s done for decades, she maintains the castle’s interior, hoisting iron bars across its windows’ huge wooden shutters each evening and filling its vases with flowers every week. And she assists il professore when groups of students or visitors arrive, serving them excellent strong coffee at the end of the tour.

  Raffaella knows the history of the castle as no one else does, and her hopes for its future are fully aligned with her partner’s.

  Still, she’s much younger than Bononi—a beautiful woman with a thick mane of dark-chestnut hair, a high bright laugh, and a temper normally checked but occasionally eruptive—and I often wonder how she’s navigated her life with him. Though no pushover, she’s disinclined to preen; she holds back while he holds forth. Cohabitation must be a tricky balancing act for her, not a fairy tale; il professore is, after all, a mythomane.

  Raffaella responds strongly to animals, observing their habits as some humans notice others’ tics. Like il professore, she spends a lot of time alone, and Bononi’s death won’t be likely to alter that habit. Encounters with people matter to Raffaella, her phone rings a good deal—yet she seems happiest in the company of Mia, her enormous Central Asian sheepdog, who chews on big bones in the castle’s upper courtyard and likes to pad up and down the stone stairs to the lower terrace.

  Having watched plenty of animals get sick and die, Raffaella is unsentimental about their lives. The violence that often marks their interactions in the borgo is normal for her, can even make her chuckle. But their fates instruct her nonetheless.

  She bought the geese on a whim. They weren’t egg-suppliers, nor were they intended to end up on her table. I think Raffaella simply felt they’d enliven the scene.

  Fluffy white things—more blobs than birds—the geese used to flee their cage as soon as the door was opened for them each morning, then waddle and flap into the undergrowth opposite our house. I’d hear them now and then, scrabbling in the leaves. Ungainly though they were, they somehow managed not to tumble down the steeply sloped terraces, bounce off the high wall, and plunge splat onto our alley. They were the borgo’s newest survivors, or so we all figured.

  At the time of their deaths, Raffaella had owned the goslings about three weeks. She’d kept them in the garden because it seemed the logical spot—verdant, quiet, safe. Mia wasn’t a danger to them; she sniffed them a bit, then ignored them. Mia often romps during daylight along the garden’s perimeter, her footfall like a giant’s. Sometimes she disappears into the deepest brush, and we’ll hear Raffaella calling for her, often to no avail. Mia knows how to hunker down, stay still, mute her panting, and outwait her owner.

  The goslings were less adept at hiding. Though small, they couldn’t help but thrash and peep. With their high-pitched, oddly cadenced cries, the pair seemed always to be lobbing questions at the world: Where are we, how to get out of here, what is that dog up to, who will care for us? They lacked any talent for silence.

  For my own part, I have been practicing wordlessness.

  It is not a usual human art. Most people lack regular opportunities to try it. Yet wordlessness can be undertaken, I’ve discovered, as an exercise, with times and places designated for its performance if improvisation isn’t practicable. It’s quite doable in a mostly uninhabited medieval village that presents irregular, easily avoided opportunities for social interaction.

  Truth is, I’ve lately had little need for speech. Not even with Antonio, who, like me, spends much of each day at his desk. I’m at work on my third novel, and Antonio on fiction of his own. In addition, we’re under contract for a translation: the final short-story collection of Antonio Tabucchi, a recently deceased Italian writer we both love. The two of us toggle between our individual productions and the deadline for a book we’re making together.

  We brew tea several times daily, and speak if we have to. When translating, of course, we’ve no choice but to talk, argue, laugh, and look up words in several dictionaries. Otherwise, we mostly stay silent. This quiet of ours isn’t itself disquieting; in our shared life it’s an option, not a habit. We choose it so we can work in peace—Antonio on the second floor and myself in the third-floor garret, where raindrops drum softly on the roof. Our silence gets broken when we meet in the kitchen: meals are for eating and talking.

  Being wordless is not, of course, the same as being heedless or incurious. Animals show us this: they may not all be as inquisitive as cats, but they can’t survive without the instinct to question, silently or aloud. Before their demise, Raffaella’s goslings spent the better part of each day in an interrogatory mode. Unable to interpret what they might be asking while they waddled around the garden, I was struck nonetheless by how persistently the goslings launched their squeaky queries. To my ear, those solicitations sounded equal parts fearful and raucous. And in retrospect (once they’d ended for good) bravely relentless as well.

  As for my own questions these days: Who is it can tell me who I am seems less central than Can someone tell me what to do? I don’t mind that no single, clear answer is forthcoming. The usual responses provided by my routines at my university—classes, meetings—carry no weight now, nor do directives come in the form of social obligations here in Castiglione. There’s no caffé in the village to pull me from my lair. I don’t feel guilty if I stay home all day.

  Routines stripped of a social aspect become interior, the self’s negotiations with time’s passage.

  Shall I (my self asks itself, at least once a day) spend time staring at that tree over there, around which a hawk with an impressive wingspan is circling as if to land? Or (anxious now about wasting time) shall I at least wash the dishes and do the laundry while I’m puzzling over some problem with my writing? Or (expanding and complicating my choices) shall I attempt to verbalize the sensation accompanying a recent realization that my mother isn’t guaranteed to celebrate her ninetieth birthday? Not that she feels the need to live another couple of years. The realization is as much about myself as about my mother—which is to say, wouldn’t it be nice for me if she’d hang on till I get home? Can’t she wait two more years so we can cross the border together, she into her nineties and I, her firstborn, into my sixties?

  A related query arises. For my mother, isn’t the stale routine of birthdays—those annual markers of time, like colored stripes in the sand of the hourglass—less pleasing than the ritual of pushing the “run” button on her audiobook player, in hopes of hearing a narrative that can sustain attention?

  Which reminds me: I must go online and browse the Library for the Blind’s “Talking Book” audio catalogue. Time to send my mother some more titles.

  She’s just finished Anna Karenina. She never read it when she was young.

  Well, she told me on the phone the other day, now there’s a book.

  Our friend Benni has ALS, and has been wordless and motionless for years.

  He lives in Cremona, where he and Antonio were school friends; they’ve known one another since boyhood. His home, which has been in his family for generations, is an old villa next to a medieval church; it sits behind walls, beautifully private, invisible to passersby. Benni’s like that, too. The nephew of a well-known lawyer—and himself a prominent avvocato, trusted and admired—Benni lacked for nothing until he became ill. He knew plenty of people but grew close to very few. Now his mind is intact, but he can move none of his muscles, only his eyes, and
those only a little. The maintenance work for his body is done by both machines and humans. He has a breathing machine, a feeding tube, a catheter, and physical therapy to prevent muscular atrophy and alleviate bedsores.

  Until recently, Benni communicated with a laser-equipped computer trained to read his gaze and translate his eyes’ movements into letters and words. For a time, his special computer ensured he wasn’t completely cut off from the people he’s close to. Benni’s family lives with him, so in one sense he’s not alone. But of course he is: such an illness makes solipsism unavoidable.

  During our several visits with him in 2011, Benni was still able to “talk” with us.

  We’d enter his room and find him where he always is, in bed, motionless as a corpse but making his usual mechanical-breathing sounds. We’d kiss his cheek and touch his arms, smiling at him; then we’d recount our news, or update him on the doings of mutual friends. Benni’s eyes would gleam and blink (a year ago, blinking was easier for him), and despite the immobility of his face, his gaze would let us know he was glad we were there.

  Listening to our tales, Benni would write with his eyes. This would take time. A few minutes after, say, a joke about an old schoolmate or a comment about politics, Benni’s computer would interrupt the conversation (if it might be called that) to offer, in a tinny, artificially high male voice, Benni’s response to the joke or comment we’d already left behind. Those computer-voiced words of his were invariably trenchant, ironic, humorous. Benni’s mind and eyes were incessantly tracking and responding: he was working double-time, in the present and in delayed mode. Each time Antonio and I said goodbye to him, I’d feel my heart clench in awe of his capacity to communicate.

  The disease wasting his body has recently brought Benni’s computer usage to a halt. His sentences used to be cleanly typed; then they started to sputter across the screen, littered with typos, sometimes incomplete or incoherent. Now they’ve ceased. Fortunately, his wife knows exactly how his various caregiving machines function, and she can read Benni’s gaze in her own way—unlike the computer, which required Benni to blink intentionally. She is dedicated to him, rarely leaving the house for more than a few hours. I wonder what’s harder for her now: the mechanics of taking care of so profoundly hampered a body, or the frustration and sorrow of being cut off from dialogue with a mind so unfettered and expressive before illness jailed it.