by Nino Ricci
There had been more than a dozen of us at lunch, ranged around a table that had been set out in the open of the courtyard. Uncle Nicola had taken on a boozy protectiveness toward me by then, as if he had projected his own bias against me onto the others.
“No one can hold it against you, what happened, or against your father either. It was your mother, she was the one. I’ve always said that.”
In the silence that had opened up I had seen Luisa’s eyes dip with embarrassment for me.
“Am I saying anything that isn’t true? Tell me that.”
The old homestead was nearly halfway down to the valley, nestled against the hollow of a hill so that it only appeared when we were upon it, trees and tangled growth masking its ruined forms like camouflage. Along the approach to it was a small outbuilding that seemed still to be in use by someone, its structure intact and its door padlocked shut. But the house itself was a ghostly wreckage of fallen rafters and walls, the front of it crumbled away to reveal its insides like a cutaway. On the ground floor there could still be made out the rudiments of a home, a fireplace, some crude shelving built into one wall; on what was left of the second, an empty window frame looked out onto the bushy slope of the hillside.
“I guess your grandmother just left the place to rot after your grandfather died,” Luisa said. “Since they had the place in town.”
Of the house in town I still had some memories I could call up, images of rooms, of fireside meals, of a view from a window; but of this place, nothing. It was as if there was a dark spot in my brain where those memories should have been, a place that was there but could not be got to.
We had come down to the little courtyard that opened out in front of the house, the weedy remnants of a stone terrace embedded there. Luisa wandered in among the house’s ruins. At the back of what must have been the kitchen was a sort of sideboard in raw, rain-bleached wood. Luisa tried one of the doors; it opened. Inside, sitting alone there on a shelf like a religious icon, was a plain clay bowl with a shard broken away, the missing shard still lying at the bottom of it as if all these years the bowl had sat there awaiting the hands that would come to mend it. Luisa set the bowl on top of the sideboard and fixed the shard in its place. It held.
She picked a sprig of wildflower from nearby and set it in the bowl.
“Like home,” she said.
We wandered up to a stone bench built into the side of the little outbuilding that flanked the house and took a seat there, beneath the shade of a towering oak. The bench gave a comfortable view of the courtyard at the front of the house. It was a place where a mother might have sat on a summer afternoon, to watch over a playing child.
“It must be strange to think you were born here,” Luisa said. “In one of these rooms.”
The wind and rain of the morning had given way to a crisp, spring-like clarity and warmth. From this tree-sheltered hollow, the slopes and the valley below, the ring of mountains in the distance, seemed like a cradle designed to hold just this place, this ruined home, this dappled light. A breeze rustled through the hollow and for an instant the life that had gone on here seemed suddenly possible, real, my father out in the fields, my mother preparing a midday meal.
Luisa picked up a stone and lobbed it idly at a lizard that had begun to scutter toward us.
“You must feel, I don’t know, like a stranger here after all those years in America. It must be so different there.”
“I suppose. Except now that I’m here, I’m not sure any more where I feel more like a stranger.”
“Maybe it’s not so different for those of us who stayed behind,” Luisa said.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the stories people tell of the past – it all feels so long ago, when people had to live like that. Even this house. It seems a thousand years since anyone lived here. Sometimes I feel like those of us who are left here are just playing at things – we still go out to the fields sometimes and have our few olives and grapes, but everything’s different. Things don’t matter the way they did then.”
We sat silent. For an instant we both seemed to feel the same small sense of insufficiency, as if there was some kernel of a thing we couldn’t quite get to.
“If you want,” Luisa said, “we could go down to the river. There’s a place there I could show you.”
“What sort of a place?”
“Just a place. A secret place.”
The path down was narrow and stony and steep, skirting the edges of orchards and craggy fields and bordered here and there by weedy stone walls that lizards scurried over as we approached. Luisa went ahead, the path too narrow for us to walk abreast. At one point she broke into a run, calling back to me to follow, though in a minute she was already far ahead of me, disappearing as the path wound around corners and then appearing again on some distant lower slope. Then for a long stretch I could not make her out at all. I felt a lurch of panic. I tried to quicken my pace, but the path had grown more treacherous now, gully-scarred and crumbling.
I rounded a corner and came upon her suddenly, sitting waiting for me on a rock.
“Look at you!” she said. “You’re as red as a beet!”
She had hiked her skirt up above her knees and was flapping the hem of it to cool herself. I felt a shiver pass through me, coming upon her like that. All this was familiar in some way, this path, this crisp warmth, the young woman sitting in wait.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Luisa said.
“I thought I’d lost you.”
She laughed.
“Come then, I’ll hold your hand.”
She passed an arm through mine and led me on, the land levelling now and the path starting to widen. When we reached the river finally, swollen and murky from the morning’s rain, it began to come back to me: I had made this trip before. We’d crossed over on these same rocks that Luisa now led me across, though they seemed so much smaller than I remembered them; we had followed this same brambled path along the far shore. Luisa continued to lead me on, along a track that was just a narrow ledge between the riverbank and a cliff face; and then we came finally to the cave. A tiny brook, just a stony exhalation of wetness, flowed out from it toward the river.
“It’s a hot spring,” Luisa said. “Maria and I used to come here when we were small.”
Inside, sunlight from the entrance cast looming shadows of us that merged with the blackness the cave receded into. A strong odour of fetid dampness breathed out from the walls. Toward the back was the spring, a small, bubbling pool dully glimmering in the dark.
“My mother used to come here,” I said.
“She brought you here?”
“Once. I think she brought her lover here.”
I had said this without thinking how intimate a thing it was to share with her. But Luisa showed no sign of embarrassment.
“What makes you say that?” she said.
“I don’t know.” I had an image of finding something here that time, behind a rock. But there was no rock here now, nor any of the toothy shapes the place had in my memory of it. “How she acted, maybe. Or something else, I don’t remember.”
“Anyway she wouldn’t have been the first. People have been bringing their lovers here for years. Centuries maybe.”
“Has anyone ever said anything to you about him?” I said. “About my mother’s lover?”
“I thought he was just a stranger. Someone passing through. That’s what my parents told me.”
“Did they say more than that?”
“No. Just that.”
“Maybe they know more than they said.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so. They’re simple people, they don’t ask too many questions.”
She had entered the cave and slipped a shoe off to dangle her foot in the pool.
“Is that why you came here?” she said. “To find out who he was?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure any more.”
“I wish I could help you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She moved a bit further in, bending to cup a few handfuls of water to her face, her neck. From where I stood at the cave’s entrance she was barely visible now, just a smudge of shadow and grey against the deeper grey of the cave.
“And your sister?” she said. “Does she want to know?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“They say it was strangers who took her in.”
“That’s true. When she was a bit older.”
“It must have been difficult for her. Without a mother or father like that.”
Her voice seemed strangely altered now, echoing disembodied off the damp stone. In the dark it was as if the cave itself was speaking, requiring an answer.
“I think she’s managed all right in the end.”
I could not make her out at all now. There was a silence, a rustle of clothing being removed, a pause, and then the suck and gulp of something submerging and at once the indefinable feeling of her being lost to me, in another element, like a spirit suddenly fled. I felt a sense of privation, as if something had come, been almost tangible before me, then vanished again. But a moment later she emerged: a sound of water on stone, of cloth again, and then she was coming out of the dark like an apparition, her hair dripping, her dress clinging to her skin. There was an instant in the grey when she was not quite herself again, when an image from the past seemed superimposed over the present as if two negatives had got crossed.
“You couldn’t see me, I hope,” she said, laughing. “But then you’ve probably seen lots of naked women.”
It was nearly dark by the time we’d finished the long climb back to the house. The air had turned chill; Aunt Caterina built a fire in her kitchen and Luisa and I pulled our chairs up to it to warm ourselves.
“So I suppose you went down to the hot spring,” my aunt said, casting a wry look at Luisa. Everyone seemed to be so openly encouraging of our coming together – I couldn’t gauge if this was something new, if things had changed so radically in the years I’d been away, or if there had always been, beneath the veneer of village puritanism, this acceptance, the tacit approval of the sensuality of the young.
My aunt made us stay for supper. Afterwards, before we left, Luisa took me to a little hillock above the house and pointed out by name all the villages and towns twinkling in the dark in the hills surrounding us. It was as if she were offering them to me, offering them back. Each name called up some echo for me from childhood, stories and images, the particular place each town had held in the local lore as if part of some grand drama that daily unfolded in the amphitheatre the mountains formed.
“Have you been happy in America?” Luisa said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You look so serious sometimes.”
“Would I have been happier if I’d stayed here?”
She laughed.
“Maybe.”
There was a low hum of conversation from the house, a flicker of orange light in my aunt’s window from the fire still burning in the fireplace. Around us the mountains stretched, grey shadows against the night, and then the villages, nestled into the slopes or strung out along ridge-lines like torchlight processions. The dark they fought back seemed ancient, unyielding, the same dark that for centuries, millennia, people had built their night-time fires against, that they’d struggled through to get home.
Luisa was close enough for me to feel the heat coming off her.
“It’s still in your blood, this place,” she said. “I can feel that.”
And the lights in the distance seemed to blink their greetings as if in assent.
XXV
Only a matter of days had passed but already I felt like a fixture in the village, taking my meals at Aunt Lucia’s, setting up my little household. It occurred to me that there was no place in the world now that was any more home than here: this was all I had left, my kitchen table, my stiff-linened bed, my balcony over the valley. Even the villagers seemed ready quietly to accommodate me, growing daily more friendly and more inscrutable, showing me a flawless country hospitality as if to say there was nothing out of the ordinary in my being here. Their kindnesses were like a forestalling: with each day that passed, each kitchen I sat in nibbling pastries or sipping liqueurs, it seemed more unlikely that I would do anything untoward, that I would ask any awkward questions or in any way disturb the quiet surface of things.
I had begun to forget things. Memories that had seemed clear when I’d first arrived were becoming more and more contaminated, overlaid by other people’s versions of the past or simply by mere reality, the different slope of a street or angle of a building that forever obscured whatever subtle truths might have been preserved by my own misremembering. I’d hear some new story or fact and at once all the careful architecture of the past that I’d carried around in my head seemed to shift to make a place for it, my brain producing images that might have been memories or pure inventions, just the mind’s attempt to connect things. There were those two women I’d met in Marta’s kitchen, Giuseppina and Maria – from just the shiver of recollection I’d felt then, whole scenes had since floated up in my mind’s eye that they might have been part of, whole histories had taken shape around them. It was as if I’d come here not to remember but merely to put together a plausible story: these were the elements, I was free to arrange them how I wished.
As the chance that Rita would turn up seemed to become more remote I began to feel a growing sense of futility. If only she would come, then things would make sense, might begin to fall into place. I drove into Rocca Secca one night and called Elena, but she hadn’t heard from her.
“You making out all right?” she said.
It had been only a couple of weeks since I’d seen her, but already she and the whole world I’d left behind with her seemed not quite real. I could barely picture what she looked like, the apartment she sat alone in, its treelined street.
“I suppose,” I said. “No big revelations or anything.”
We both seemed to be lonely for some version of the world that we might be able to confirm for each other.
“Do you think she’ll show up there?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“All this has something to do with John, doesn’t it?”
But all I had still were nothing more than my disputed inklings, my half-theories and fabrications.
“Not really. No.”
I settled in to wait. I’d see Luisa in the street and could feel the need to speak to her, the desire to, the wish that she’d take my arm in hers again. But a small reserve had come between us now. The very wholesomeness of her affection for me seemed to place it off limits: it was not something I deserved or could ever deserve, I had put myself forever beyond such things. Against the first pleasure I’d feel at the sight of her there was always this instinctive drawing back, this not knowing what I was allowed.
“You can come eat with us again some time if you want,” she said. “If you get tired of those old ladies.”
But the days passed and I didn’t go by.
Marta had continued to care for me with her unquestioning matter-of-factness. The strangeness of her household had grown almost comforting now. No one asked me questions there; no one required a reason for my presence. At meals I’d watch Aunt Lucia in her reptilian slowness and wonder what she could reveal to me if I could find some way of reaching her, perhaps the wisdom of the ages or mere banalities, the trite, predictable observations of a narrow life narrowly lived. She gave me the sense that she knew now, in some way, who I was, and yet she didn’t seem to attach any special significance to the fact, as if no great gap separated this young man who took meals in her kitchen from the boy who had begged five-lire coins from her years before. Perhaps that was the very insight I could glean from her, that time and change were not such momentous things.
I spent the afternoons with Fabrizio at his farm, where he retreated every day after he’d fini
shed his rounds. With him I seemed to enter a space like the innocent one of childhood, where everything that was pressing and large, that could hurt, was held back. That was his gift, now as when he was a boy, that child’s special power he had to hold the world off like a task endlessly deferred, a pain you averted the sting of. And yet it was heartbreaking somehow to watch his small, boyish ministrations to his little acreage, his careful suckering and winding and pruning, the attention he put into things in this corner of forgotten field as if staving off some great sadness or despair.
He still had the same penchant for arcane knowledge he’d had as a child. Much of it now went into his farming: he knew every possible variety and strain of his various crops, every disease that could afflict them, what things to plant in what soil and how to shift them to keep the soil from being depleted. The rest of his attention he had reserved for local lore, for stories of ancient feuds that he passed on to me, of the war, of the old aristocracy who had once ruled over the region. He knew the landscape of the area like the back of his hand: these were the hills which Samnite fortresses had stood on, these the sites of reputed miracles, these the still visible markings of where the old tratturi had passed, the grassy highways of old that shepherds had used since time immemorial for the seasonal movements of their flocks.
Often it was nearly dark by the time we returned to the village. Crossing the ridge-line where the new highway was being built, I’d see Valle del Sole in the distance, its houses just grey, ghostly shapes in the dusk, here and there the first twinkling lights coming on. I’d get a sense then of how the village would look once the new road was completed, just a detour again, cut off and forgotten, a flicker in the corner of your eye as you drove past. In a few years the abandoned houses would outnumber the inhabited ones; and then slowly the town would die out. I pictured Fabrizio thirty, forty years hence still working his little acreage, a final holdout against the newly burgeoning wild, reduced to what our ancestors had been hundreds or thousands of years before when they’d first staked a claim on this rocky hillside.
