by Nino Ricci
The sun had started to set. I walked to an exit and came out in an unfamiliar part of the city, the streets hectic with the twilight energy of end of day. Then suddenly I was on via Catania: it was the street on which my uncle had his restaurant. I walked up a few blocks and there it was on a corner across the street, a simple place with a few tables out front neatly arranged with checked tablecloths, and then arched windows looking into more tables inside. The only sign was a small backlit one above the door that read DA GIOVANNI.
It was coming on to the height of the supper hour, and the place was crowded. A couple had just claimed one of the last empty tables on the sidewalk; and then, while I watched, a young man in a black-and-white waiter’s outfit came out to serve them. I felt a tremor go through me: he looked like my double, like a Romanized, younger version of me, the same set of shoulder, the same jawline, the same eyes. A bit shorter, perhaps, a bit trimmer, more elegant, and with a body language – a certain way of holding himself, a bit slack and inattentive but also on top of things, in command – that was distinctly Italian; but as he moved away from the table to go back inside, doing a quick, instinctive scan of the street as if to make sure that everything was in order there, that there was nothing new to catch his interest, I felt the tremor pass through me again, the instant’s sense that I was staring into a mirror. For a split second his eyes rested on me and I thought he’d recognized me; but then he turned and went in.
My uncle’s son; he’d been just an infant when I’d left. Inside, there was probably a man who looked like my father, with some tone of voice, some expression or mannerism, that would make him seem my father’s ghost; and then all the trappings of this different destiny I might have had if a single decision had never been made, if my father had never packed his bags, and set out. I might have worked in a restaurant such as this, attended the university perhaps and lived in some cool, dingy, marble-floored flat in one of the old mustard-coloured palazzi in the student ghetto. I would have had friends who came by on motor-scooters, would have dressed well; in the summers I would have gone back to the village and perhaps met a girl there who would be my wife. All the slow disintegration that that first departure had set in motion would never have happened: I would simply have been at home, in my element, would have looked up into the street from time to time as I waited tables on weekends for my father and thought, This is my kingdom, where I belong.
The young man had come out again, bearing a tray of antipasti. He didn’t look quite so familiar this time, as if our lives had come together for an instant only, then grown alien again. I could see the boredom in his gait now, the youthful chafing against his work, the evidences that he too had had his own different fights, his lost opportunities, his sense of what he’d been denied. Perhaps he would speak of America in the same wistful tones as the concierge at the hotel, though I envied, in a way, even that, the innocence that could still imagine it a better, more perfect place. He cast a glance out at the street again and caught sight of me, this time holding my gaze an instant and giving a small, inquisitive tilt of his chin as if to ask what it was that I wanted of him. For a moment the question seemed to hang between us like a pause in the evening’s rhythm, the rush of traffic, the bustle of supper hour, a tiny rent that some message might be able to slip through. But then someone called to him, his gaze faltered, the question lapsed, and I turned away and walked on.
XXI
I had rented a car for the trip out to Valle del Sole, an old pastel-blue Opel I’d got a line on from the concierge at the hotel. The car had the same general stink as the city, the same exhalation of shadowy odours. It stalled a few times as I made my way through the city’s outskirts; but once I was on the expressway it seemed to get its wind. The man I’d rented it from, a thin-haired and unctuous used-car dealer in the Trastevere, had required only a month’s prepayment, in cash – no credit cards, no documents, no surety I wouldn’t simply drive off with it and never return.
Outside the confines of Rome, the heavy air of the city gave way to a sun-scoured clarity. The hills that cradled the expressway were dotted with craggy villages and towns, picturesque and quaint as if they’d been arranged for a travel brochure. The villages were probably not so different from the one I was travelling to, would have their winding main street, their bar, their church on a hill, their old people staring out from second-floor balconies; and yet there was nothing in them that struck me at once as familiar, as if their prettiness were a sort of scrim, something that held back their real natures. Seen from the expressway, they looked hopelessly inaccessible: there was no way to get there from here, no turn in the road that could cross from this gleaming asphalt into the mystery they seemed to hold in themselves.
I passed the monastery of Monte Cassino. The hill it stood on looked as if it was still recovering from the devastation of the war, scrubby and rubble-strewn and barren. Mr. Amherst had fought here with the Allies, he had told me once. It seemed an odd quirk of history, that he’d been a soldier here while my father was just a hundred miles away, still a boy in the fields, and while my mother, perhaps, heard the bombs fall from Valle del Sole and thought of those other young soldiers who had passed through our house once, and might be dying. At the top of the hill now, the monastery itself stood newly risen and whole, a white, glittery fortress, a tour bus just inching its way up the hill to reach it. All that had happened there would now be a matter of a paragraph or two in a guide book: this many had died, these walls were destroyed and repaired. Gone would be the single bulletholes, any evidence that such a one and another, their destinies perhaps connected in ways they couldn’t know, had faced each other across a divide and sought one another’s lives.
At the turn-off for Venafro I came onto a wide, newly paved highway that ran through a plain of green fields toward more mountains in the distance. This was the road that my mother and I would have travelled to get to Naples when we left the country two decades before. It didn’t seem recognizable now except in a vague, generic way, as if any landscape of mountain and fields could have served the purpose as well as this one. I stopped for gas at a sort of truck stop, with a small coffee bar and shop to one side, then the pumps, a garage in back. Except for the different dimensions of things, the little cars, the not-quite-definable aura of Europeanness, I might have been anywhere, on any windswept highway where gas was pumped and travellers stopped to drink coffee or have a pee. At the road, incongruous, swinging in the breeze, was a painted yellow sign in English that read CASH ’N CARRY.
Even as I entered the mountains the highway continued broad and unswerving and level, smoothed out by an impressive succession of bridges and mile-long tunnels. Up on the hilltops, sheep grazed and dreamy villages lay folded into the slopes; but the highway continued on its straight-line path as if it had nothing to do with these things, was only a way through, a way past. There was just the barest sprinkling of traffic, an occasional lonely vehicle speeding along in the other direction or glimpsed distantly across a divide, and then beyond that only the still silence of the mountains.
It was just after noon when I reached the turn-off for Rocca Secca. The road grew more narrow and serpentine now. A sign announced the town and I felt the first flutter of memory, a stirring in the brain as if something was struggling to come alive there. But the road passed through outskirts of apartment blocks, feed depots, garages, that bore no resemblance to the Rocca Secca I remembered, a place of cramped shops and thick-walled houses pressed up hard against the street. I drove by a huge, curving structure of grey concrete and had to stop to make sense of it: it was a church of some sort, built to resemble a ship, the walls bowed and the roof and façade angled out to form a prow. Looming out like that at the outskirts of the town it looked ominous, like some last chance for salvation or escape.
I reached a junction. One branch led to the town centre, the other led onwards. A weathered sign pointed the way: VALLE DEL SOLE 7. So the place still existed; I had this proof now. There was still time to turn
back, to forget everything, and yet everything, in a way, was already forgotten, this road I had travelled a hundred times, this valley I had stared into. I was searching for the turn-off that would lead me down to Valle del Sole from the high road when I rounded a curve and came suddenly on the outskirts of a village; and then in a minute I had passed through its straggle of stony houses to open country again. I stopped the car to check the sign I’d missed on the way in: VALLE DEL SOLE.
I got out of the car. From where I stood the village lay spread out before me, tiered up along the hillside a mix of earthy greys and mossy browns like a hundred others I’d passed along the way, as unremarkable. Everything about it was wrong: the road had never come in this way, the houses had not been cramped into so paltry a space, the church above the square had not looked so forgettable. And then the simple feel of the place, the unlikeliness that anything memorable or of import could ever have happened here, that all the history I’d carried crammed in my head could have had its seat in this half-ruined assortment of mountain-strung homes.
I left the car where I’d parked it and walked the short distance back to the edge of town. There was not a soul in the street, nor had I passed anyone on the way in. The houses were a mix of ruin and tidy repair, some newly stuccoed and painted, others with boards over their windows or with roofs and walls fallen in. Of those with the look of still being inhabited, most had flowers out front, potted geraniums and hibiscus and oleander or trellised rosebushes spilling bursts of pink and red. The flowers gave the street an air of poised expectancy, like a movie set sitting in wait: any minute the crews would come, bring cameras and men dressed as peasants, prod donkeys and goats to parade down the street for a take.
There was a stone bench built into the wall of the house that stood at the very edge of the village, just a narrow slab of grey with a worn spot in the middle. To one side was a scar, a small furrow, that some boy’s hand must have worried away at with a nail or a bit of wire. I could see him, his hand, could feel the hot July sun beating down on him; though it took an instant for this image to shape itself into a memory, for the boy’s hand to become my own, for the bit of wire to become a five-lire coin that someone, a neighbour or aunt, had given me. This was my grandfather’s house, the one he’d bequeathed to me, where I had lived, where everything had happened. This was the door, its worn threshold; these were the stairs that led down to the stable; this was the bench, though not as I remembered it, not some numinous, mythical thing, but merely this real, mean, inscrutable slab of stone. The place hadn’t crumbled as I’d expected: the roof still stood, the walls were intact, the front door was still on its hinges. There was a padlock on the door as if someone had tried to seal the place against change, had decided time would not enter here.
I heard a sound behind me: an old man was rounding the corner from the direction of the square, a hoe over one shoulder. For an instant I felt certain I knew him, could feel his name urging itself to my lips; but then nothing. He put a hand up against the sun to survey me as he approached, nodding curtly in greeting. There was a moment then when something had to be said, when some explanation for my presence had to be arrived at.
His eyes went to my car down the road, squinting to make out the plates to see where I had come from.
“Are you looking for something?” He spoke with the careful formality reserved for outsiders, the strain to put things in proper Italian.
It seemed precipitous simply to reveal myself.
“I was wondering about this house,” I said, stumbling.
“That’s the podestà’s old place.” That was the title my grandfather had always been known by, “lu podestà,” the mayor, after the post he had held from the time of the Fascists. “It’s been empty twenty years. Marta keeps it up, up the street there.”
He kept his eyes on me.
“Coming from Rome?” he said.
“Yes. Yes.”
He was still taking in the details of me, my accent, my clothes. Nothing fit, and yet he seemed willing to grant that this house might be important to me, in some foreign, citified way.
“You want to know more about the house, you speak to Marta,” he said. “Just up the street, like I told you. Number 12.”
And he turned and walked on.
The door at number 12 was open, the doorway barred only by a curtain of coloured plastic strips to keep out the flies. The curtain brought back a surge of memories: this was where my great-aunt Lucia had lived, and where my grandfather had moved when my mother and I had gone and his own house had been closed up. Sundays, when I was small, we’d sometimes had our meals here – I remembered pots over an open fire, the smell of cooking, the air of formality those meals had had not so different from my Sunday meals with the Amhersts in Mersea, with that same feeling of things held in abeyance.
I heard movement inside but couldn’t make anything out through the curtain.
“Permesso?” I called out.
“Chi è?”
The voice was hostile and sharp, as if I’d interrupted some important task. Before I could respond there was another shuffle of movement and a bony arm parted the curtain. The woman staring up at me came barely to my chest, wizened and gnarled like some stunted thing: my aunt’s daughter Marta.
My eye went instinctively to her leg, my unconscious mind remembering what my conscious one had forgotten, that she was club-footed. A crude brace sheathed one of her calves.
“Scusi,” I said. She stared up at me with a narrow-eyed, eremitic intensity that seemed to mirror me back distorted somehow, to make strange all the usual terms of reference. “I’m Vittorio. Your cousin. The grandson of lu podestà.”
There was that glint in her eye of the madness that had always seemed to threaten in her when I was a child.
“Well come in then,” she said finally, making grudging way for me as if I were a beggar who had come to the door.
Inside, without a word, she set about making coffee at a small gas stove in the corner. I stood hovering near the doorway, not sure how to proceed, if she’d understood who I was or had simply fit me into some arcane private order of things that had nothing to do with me. The room before me looked only dimly familiar: there was a kitchen counter along one wall; there was a blackened fireplace with the remnants of a fire still smouldering in it. To one side, in darkness, was a sitting area with an old couch and a few wicker chairs. A television was on there, tuned to what appeared to be an American western, the sound turned down to a barely audible hum.
All the windows in the room were shuttered over, the only light coming from the translucent strips over the doorway and the blue glow of the television.
“I don’t know if you remember me from when I was small,” I said.
She kept up with her preparations.
“You can sit down if you want,” she said, and motioned with her chin toward the kitchen table.
I sat. It was only now as my eyes adjusted to the light that I realized there was someone else in the room with us, an old woman sitting in a wicker armchair in front of the television. Even as I noticed her she began to turn toward me, shifting her hands on the arms of her chair with a vegetal slowness and scanning the room in my general direction as if trying to pick me out of a fog.
“Marta, chi è?”
But Marta ignored her. She poured a single cup of espresso and set it in front of me.
“You’ll have to put your own sugar in it. I don’t know how much you want.”
The old woman stared out a minute more, then finally turned slowly back to the television. I could only assume she was my Aunt Lucia: it seemed impossible that she was still alive, she who had always struck me as hopelessly ancient even when I was a child. Yet there she sat unchanged, as if the past twenty years had been merely the twinkling of an eye. I wasn’t sure how to acknowledge her, if she was lucid enough to realize who I was or was touched with the same half-madness as her daughter.
Marta was still standing at the counter.
&n
bsp; “I suppose you’ll want to see the house,” she said. “I kept it up for you, like your grandfather wanted.”
This was the first sign she’d given that she’d in fact understood who I was. With that established, the tone that I had taken for hostility began to seem a kind of timidness, like a child’s sullen evasion of some not-quite-familiar relation.
“Yes, I’d like to,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”
But she had already taken a keyring down from a nail in the door frame and stood waiting for me while I finished my coffee. It seemed wrong not to greet Aunt Lucia in some way before leaving the house; but the instant I had set down my cup Marta was out the door. I followed her. She moved swiftly, one hand guiding her bad leg over the street’s cobblestoned unevenness. At the door of my grandfather’s house, with the air of a ritual she had repeated many times, she turned a small key from her keyring in the padlock to remove it and then a larger one in the door itself to click back a deadbolt.
We stepped inside. Marta flicked on a light. I had expected dust and decay, but the room we looked on stood in pristine order. There was a scarred wooden table in the middle of the room, a counter against the back wall with some rough cupboards and a rust-stained porcelain sink, a fireplace to one side with a plain stone mantel above. Everything was as I remembered it and not, was familiar in some wordless, visceral way and yet utterly foreign and shrunken, too tangible somehow to be real. This was what it came down to, my past here, this barren room, these desolate objects, like a museum’s depiction of how things might have been.
