‘You’ve never given a damn about your family.’
‘This is about my father’s estate.’
‘You’ve never given a damn about your father’s estate, either. You’ve always boasted that you did it all by yourself.’
‘Now it’s our estate.’
‘Ciprini is quick and competent and, as you’re well aware, he has contacts and he knows how to use them. Who better to carry out the search?’
Roberto stared at her, hesitating, and then gave in.
‘I know Rosa Slat. I’ve known her all my life.’
While he was confessing this, a hitherto submerged tension filled his face with uncertainty. They were silent. Elena was frozen. She looked away from him, as though to evade any request for help. She got up to walk away, then whispered sadly: ‘You lied to me.’
Roberto, defensive, tried to say: ‘I didn’t want to have to deal with it, that’s all.’
But there was a disappointment in Elena’s eyes that left no room for excuses. ‘You always said that secrets poison our lives.’
Roberto sat down, unable to reply. Elena suddenly felt the magnitude of what was happening, and the fragility of the destiny awaiting them.
‘It’s all tremendously sad. And you know why?’
He stopped a moment, trying to regain lucidity, to catch his breath.
‘Because I’m your only true friend. There’s nobody else, Roberto. And now I think your closed little world is too solitary to bear.’
She turned and walked away but only a few seconds later Roberto went after her and embraced her from behind. She resisted, her body rigid.
‘I never really knew my father. That’s why I have to meet up with Rosa Slat. I also have to do it for my mother.’
Elena looked at him in anger, pulled him tightly towards her, but then pushed him aside almost at once.
‘If that’s what you want, let me come with you.’
Roberto slowly turned away.
‘Let me stay close to you.’
She went up to him and gently placed one hand on his back. It was her last appeal.
‘At least this once.’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I have to go alone.’
He moved away from her, without turning around.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.
Elena stared at him for the last time and he seemed suddenly defenceless. Shut up behind an expression of indifference untouched by arrogance, waiting for the chance to interrupt the conversation and escape.
‘I’m leaving for Zurich right now, Roberto. That way you’ll be free to do what you want and you won’t have to lie to me.’
An hour later, Terminal One was deserted.
The great northern airport seemed to her in that moment an enormous and useless coloured box.
She crossed the check-in area in search of her airline, but she still had more than an hour to wait until the flight, and the desk was not yet open. So she wandered around looking at the shops.
Now that she had calmed down, all her questions began to twist and turn around her in a spiral of hypotheses and details, a cloud of half-spoken words, confused emotions, moments of intimacy, all crashing into one another, blending together and coming apart in search of some kind of possible shape, like an indecisive swarm of insects.
Suddenly, the sound of her phone ringing caught her attention. She realised that she had been standing mesmerised in front of a shop window for several minutes.
‘Ada.’
‘Signora Elena, do you mind my asking where you are at the moment? I just got back to the villa and there’s nobody around.’
‘Isn’t Roberto there?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone out?’
‘I think he’s gone away. I took the liberty of glancing into your room and I saw that there was nothing there. Not even any suitcases.’
She approached one of the departure monitors and couldn’t help but bring a hesitant hand to her mouth: her flight had already started boarding.
‘So, where are you?’
‘I’m at the airport.’
With her phone in one hand, Elena went up to the check-in desk for the flight. The flight attendant looked at her oddly as she hurriedly searched in her bag for ID.
‘He’s gone to look for Rosa Slat. It’s fine. Don’t worry.’
She finally had the boarding pass in her hand but the attendant said with a certain urgent politeness: ‘Signora, please hurry, the plane is leaving in twenty minutes.’
She hastened towards security, threw her bag into the little blue tray and the tray onto the belt, followed by her suitcase.
‘I have to go now. I’ll call you later from Zurich.’
While she was making her way through the airport she began to wonder what all the rush was about. And why on his own? Why not let Ciprini do it?
She slowed down. Her departure gate was now only a few metres away. She took out her phone again. She selected the number. It rang for a few seconds.
‘Roberto.’
This name, so intimate and so distant, seemed like a discovery.
‘Where are you?’
‘On the highway.’
Roberto’s defensive tone was one that Elena knew very well, one that made her feel excluded, like there was a wall between them.
‘I decided not to waste any time. In an hour I’ll be in Rovereto. And I’ll start tomorrow.’
‘So everything’s under control. I can leave without worrying, is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘Everything’s under control. The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can come home.’
At the departure gate there were only two passengers left in the line. Elena took a couple of steps and stopped a metre away from them.
‘I’ll find Rosa, I’ll resolve this, and then with Ada and Ciprini’s help I’ll conclude the transfer of the inheritance. We’ll see each other in Zurich in a week.’
The flight attendant beckoned her to approach, but Elena gestured to tell her to wait a moment and then she blurted out, ‘Roberto, are you looking for Rosa or are you trying to hide something from your past?’
She could hear his breathing at the other end of the line. He did not reply.
The flight attendant came out from behind the desk, impatient. ‘Signora, please!’
Elena waved her away icily and stepped to one side.
‘I’ll finish what I have to do, and then everything will go back to how it was before.’ And he hung up. Elena approached the desk, stony-faced, and neither the first flight attendant nor her colleague dared say anything.
She turned and looked behind her, as though she could see something that was invisible to others.
Her thoughts echoed imperceptibly around the bland, empty waiting area, like a confused and omnipresent white noise.
PART THREE
THE HIKE UP THE MOUNTAIN, 2015
Mercilessly he saw his life as it must appear to another. Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. […] What did you expect? he asked himself.
JOHN WILLIAMS, Stoner
1
The sound inside the silver sedan—‘Comfort’ category, according to the online catalogue—was like the muffled buzz of a busy ants’ nest. He had been travelling in medium traffic for almost an hour and a half.
At the first service station, Roberto decided to stop. He stepped out and noticed the air was already colder than before. He took a deep breath. The air stank from the few cars in the parking lot, yet the mountains could not be far away.
The violent neon lights in the toilet added to his sense of squalor, even though the service station, one of the last family-run ones still in existence, really wasn’t all that bad. He was washing his hands when his phone started ringing. Not wanting to get it wet, he picked it up with two fingers.
It was Adrian.
He accepted the call and held the phone between his ear and his shoulder.
‘Hi.’
‘Where are you?’
He couldn’t find his handkerchief. So without thinking he put his hands under the electric hand dryer, which started making the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
‘At a service station.’
‘What are you doing at a service station? This whole business is getting complicated.’
Roberto didn’t comment. He went straight back outside with wet hands but realised that the noise levels were no better there. The passing cars, travelling by at the speed limit, assaulted him with a continuous roar.
‘I’m calling to tell you that you absolutely have to get home.’
‘There’s a problem I have to solve. Then I can come home.’
‘Your biggest problem is the press, Roberto. Some of the papers have started publishing articles from Italy about your father’s death. Some are saying it was suspicious.’
‘My father was dying.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to anybody. They’re saying your family is implicated in some kind of big scandal. And that you’re in Italy to hush it up. They say you’re staying away because you’re hiding something. For the moment, they don’t dare say anything more explicit, but you know how it works. Doubt. That’s all it takes.’
‘But I haven’t been back to Italy in years…’
‘That’s not all.’
‘Go on.’
‘The party leadership. They’re very worried. And naturally your internal opponents are starting to get themselves worked up.’
‘Do they want to choose a different candidate?’
‘They’re not saying that openly.’
‘I can’t come back until I’ve finished, Adrian. This is about my inheritance. In the meantime, just make some statements on my behalf. Isn’t that what we’ve always done?’
Roberto had reached his car. He could sense his friend straining to keep his irritation in check.
‘All right, so it was my idea. But I don’t recall you protesting when I got you the candidacy. Come home. I am asking you as a personal favour.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Roberto, I’m serious. I’ve never asked you for anything. But this time if you don’t come home, you’re messing with our friendship.’
‘Our friendship?’
This came out without irony, as though the word ‘friendship’ sounded new and grotesque. He slammed the car door and was silent a moment.
‘But we’ve never been friends, Adrian.’
His associate was left speechless. There followed a long silence, due to the two men’s inability to find a route for the words—across the impersonal distance of channel codes, radio transmitters, multiplexers, phone towers—that might manage to overcome the enormous obstacle that had suddenly appeared between them. To find even a temporary remedy for a phrase that had dissolved all possibility of connection, of affection.
Finally, Roberto said, ‘I’m sorry for the confusion.’
He ended the call and started the car. His phone rang again. Perhaps Adrian wanted to say something conciliatory, or to demand an explanation. He turned off the sound but the device continued to flash. And so, without thinking too much about it, he lowered his window and let the phone slide out, down the side of the car. It landed with a sharp thud and stayed there, on the ground of the parking lot, as Roberto continued his journey.
Approaching the mountains, the landscape began to breathe, the highway became tangled in a confusing network of small built-up areas that had inundated the valley, but higher up, the mountains withstood the assault.
In complete solitude, he began to wind his way around the bends. They were wider now and the road surface was perfect, but apart from that they seemed no different, and his memories returned to that summer.
Then, finally, the road flattened out.
Just like it always had, the plain appeared suddenly around a bend and through the tall trees that blocked the view beyond. Then the trees ended and the meadows began, then the houses and, right at the end, the Hotel Miravalle of his childhood holidays. Roberto squinted, as though it were a mirage and somewhere in the detail he would find the secret of that apparition.
And so, in fact, it was. The paintwork on the façade was a damp-chewed crust that had spread all over, even onto the shutters and the wooden balconies, which were now quite perilous. He already knew this, but seeing it was different.
He parked the car on the concrete area that many years ago had replaced the meadow, and contemplated what had been left by that demise. There was a kind of coherence to it, in that it had not abdicated to the present. This was, rather, a death accepted with dignity at the end of a long illness. He looked for information: stuck to the wall of the entrance was a notice inside a plastic sleeve, but the damp had effaced the words of some official agency. Nothing useful.
He thought about peeking through the shutters, but gave up on that idea at once. He turned and looked towards the other side of the valley, which up to that point he had stubbornly ignored.
The hamlet of Madonna del Bosco no longer existed.
The low houses had been swept away. The sawmill was gone. A series of buildings mimicked the place’s former lineaments, but they were different. The hamlet had been transformed into a single hotel, comprising a modern central section and a series of outbuildings that constituted the optional spa services. It took him a second to realise that this was the very hotel where he had made a booking a few hours earlier, blindly, just so that he would have somewhere to base himself.
As he drove up he tried to pick out Mattia’s house but wasn’t able to find it. He made his way at a crawl between the nicely designed buildings, each very similar to the last, so that he could have a better look: he felt like he was moving through a small ghost town, something out of a western.
Eventually he recognised the farmhouse. It had become a spa, with hot pools and massage rooms. In the icy silence of the car he sat for a few minutes contemplating what had once been a village, had once been a house.
It was May, and this little tourist resort was sad and deserted, and the sadness had nothing touching about it, nothing sincere. And yet it was a place of luxury, a refuge where all year round men and women who could afford it, couples or singles, worked their way through very precise objectives: self-discovery, revitalisation of mental energies, the power and pleasure of work, rejuvenation. That was what the pamphlet at reception said.
Once his keycard had unlocked the room, he put down his two bags and let the door close behind him. The light had not come on and now he regretted not having listened to the receptionist shortly before. With the shutters closed the darkness was total: he felt around for the slot beside the doorway and managed to insert the card. Light. Electric light. It was a nice room, spacious, with a double bed and a desk and a bathroom in dark stone.
Pressing a button to open the shutters, he could not help but wonder whether this expedition really made any sense. He sat down on the bed to think about his reasons for it. He didn’t even know where to begin.
He felt grotesque. And lonely.
Shortly afterwards, sitting at the hotel bar, he ordered a coffee.
The barman looked familiar. He was wiping down the steel bench insistently, almost without thinking, even though everything appeared perfectly clean. He had a strong body and the impassive face of a roughly carved statue, and seemed to have something else on his mind; a lot on his mind.
They were the only ones in the bar. They said hello and studied each other’s faces for a few moments. Suddenly Roberto said, ‘Can I ask, are you from here?’
‘Huh?’
‘Were you born around here?’
The man finally stopped wiping down the bench.
‘I’m from Vallarsa, it’s ten kilometres from here, in the next valley.’
‘Did you used to come here as a kid?’
‘Sometimes.’
Roberto sipped his rapidly cooling coffee, just to create a break between the questions. Then he starte
d right up again.
‘So how old are you? Around forty?’
‘Actually, I’m thirty-three.’
Roberto did a good job of hiding his slight embarrassment. The man looked at him, conceding nothing.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Nothing. I wondered whether we might have any mutual friends.’
The man rested his arms on the bar, leaning slightly towards Roberto, staring at him intently, as though trying to remember him.
‘Give me some names, then. Here in the valleys we all know each other.’
‘I’m looking for Rosa Slat. Rosa Slat, maiden name Lines, to be precise. But she never used that.’
The man looked down at the ground and then up to the heavens, on a journey that seemed to follow the curve of time, or of memory. A curve that hid objects from view, the same way the trees at the entrance to the valley did.
‘Yes, well, there are Slats around the valley.’
He nodded, thoughtful, seeking something in Roberto’s features that he couldn’t quite find.
‘But I’ve never heard of Rosa. Sorry.’
Roberto finished his coffee, cold by now, in a single mouthful so he could move on.
‘Why are you looking for her?’
Roberto poked around in his pockets as though he hadn’t heard. It was a habit that came out when he didn’t like the questions he was being asked.
‘An old acquaintance. It would be nice to see her again.’
‘I get it. Do you have any other names?’
He hesitated.
‘No, nobody else.’
The barman looked at him, nothing changing in his face, on which it appeared that emotions, although present, didn’t really lodge. He started wiping down the bench again. Roberto put down some coins and turned to leave.
‘Are you alone?’
Roberto nodded.
‘Maybe I can give you the number of another friend of mine. Slat is her surname. Maybe she can help you.’
‘Slat is her surname? Really?’
‘Yes, Slat.’
The man was no longer making eye contact, as though Roberto’s presence was now causing some unjustified annoyance.
‘That would be good. Thank you.’
The Mountain Page 22