“Those stories were important to that little boy.”
“But they were just stories. And even if that little boy grew up and didn’t come back so often, I like to think I helped to keep his mother in his life awhile longer.”
Giulio feels an emotion that has been welling in him for a long time. Tears fill his eyes. He smiles and doesn’t try to hold them back.
“Are any of those stories about spirits?” he asks his aunt.
“All stories are about spirits.”
Amanda smiles. She stands up, wincing slightly. She looks out the window.
“Spring is coming, the hawthorne will blossom soon. Remember what your mother always said? The winter snow hides so much, but when hawthorne season comes, the snow disappears and everything resurfaces. I always think about that.” Her eyes are still moist. She wipes away her tears and turns to Giulio. She reaches into her pocket.
“I still have a few coins for that machine out there. It makes tea. I mean, not real tea. A ‘tea-flavored beverage,’ whatever that is. But it’s not bad if you like lemon and sugar. Only I refuse to drink out of those plastic cups that melt and leave a nasty aftertaste. If you want I can talk to the nurse, maybe they have other cups we can use.”
“Great idea,” Giulio says.
Amanda approaches the door. She opens it and then stops.
“Akan told me to say hello. He said something about a storm.” She closes her eyes so she can focus and remember. “He said you shouldn’t look back, because when you do, a part of you will stay stuck there. And you have to be willing to lose that part of you in order to survive. He said you’d understand.”
She smiles again. She also understands what he means.
“Does Akan know the truth?” Giulio asks.
“You can’t hide anything from that man. And then he went and told everyone I was the one who’d taught him how to make wild boar ragù, since it was the Gherarda’s signature dish. Fortunately your mother had a recipe book, because I don’t have the faintest idea how to make ragù.”
When Amanda closes the door behind her, Giulio opens the drawer in the nightstand and takes out the thing Grazia left him. His phone. Now that he’s no longer under arrest, he can use it. He puts on his headphones and opens WhatsApp. There’s a message waiting for him with a file attached. The number isn’t stored in his contacts, but he knows who it is. Viola.
It’s weird, you know? Remember what the gnome says? That the forest protects him? I think your little friend is right. I think that when you need it, the forest really does protect you. It will be hard to forget what happened, but some things aren’t meant to be forgotten. And I want to remember what happened during one of the worst moments of my life forever. He was there, less than a step away from me, I was right in front of his eyes, yet for some reason he couldn’t see me. It’s strange. At that moment, I thought about my friend. His name was Michele, and he died on Bridge Day. He plays the keyboard in the song. It’s a long story, an old recording I held on to for no reason, and now it’s as if that reason arrived. There’s also another track of something besides the instruments. I think it somehow has something to do with what happened, even though I still can’t explain why. It’s a sound, I think, but you can’t hear it. I can’t understand what it is, and yet it’s there. It sounds like a pulse, a whisper, or maybe it really is the breath of the woods. Or it might be the water running underground that no one knew about. The fact is that I somehow know the sound is there, even if I can’t hear it. A bit like your gnome, who no one ever sees. And maybe there’s something to be understood in all this. That we’re surrounded by so much more than what we can see and hear. Things that have been there forever and that we have to learn to recognize. Maybe someday I’ll pass by your window and we can talk about it in person, but in the meantime I wanted to share the song with you. It’s not done yet and we don’t have a title, but at least now you know what it’s about.
Giulio downloads the file and presses play.
A keyboard. That boy, Michele, is playing a slow blues in a minor key. A hypnotic music that carries him away. And after a few bars, Viola’s guitar enters. A dissonant arpeggio that reminds him of certain dark wave moods, a little psychedelic.
Giulio closes his eyes and listens.
Music, especially some music, has always had the power to carry him far away. The gnome approves, because he knows that travel is good for understanding the bigger picture and the meaning of going back.
“They say people who survive a tragedy usually feel guilty.” His first encounter with Patrizia. One of the first things she said to him. In her office, after Bridge Day. “It’s natural, and they suggest people process it with a psychologist.”
We all survive something, Patrizia. Every day. Now he’d be able to tell her. Now that the storm was over. Now that he’d always live his life from now on.
“Remember that photograph?” Patrizia asks. Now that day is unanchored in time, they’re in some place, in a before or after, it doesn’t matter anymore. “The one you gave me with the reflection of the two lovers kissing in the rearview mirror, with the sun near the horizon.”
“Yeah, I remember. You liked it, but you never cared if it was a sunrise or a sunset.”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. It doesn’t matter which one it is, Giulio. They’re two lovers. For them, sunrise and sunset are the same thing.”
THREE
“Did you give it to him?” Viola asks. She’s in the car in the passenger seat.
“Yeah, I gave it to him,” says Grazia, sitting beside her.
It’s raining. All around them, by the hospital, the gray of the cement blends with the gray of the sky. Viola checks her WhatsApp and sees the two check marks change color. From gray to blue. It means Giulio read her message. Now he’ll download the file.
“Did you remove Mussolini’s face from my contact?” her mother asks.
“Yeah, I took it off.”
“What do you have now?”
“Pinochet.”
“Look, Viola . . .”
And as she turns, Viola snaps a picture of her.
“I’ll put this instead. It flatters you, don’t you think?”
“I look pissed off . . .”
“You always look pissed off.”
Grazia turns the key in the ignition. The engine starts and the windshield wipers activate.
“I have an idea.”
“What?” says Viola, putting away her iPhone.
“Let’s go to McDonald’s for dinner, fill up on crap, and then go to the movie theater to watch a bunch of movies until it closes.”
“Okay, but no movies with people kissing.”
Grazia hits the turn signal, glances in the mirror, and puts the car in drive. “What do you have against people kissing?”
“It’s a great thing, but I don’t see why they have to make movies about it.”
“Well, because it’s a great thing . . .”
“It’s also a great thing to go to the bathroom when you need to, but I’m not going to make a movie about it.”
“Okay, no people kissing.”
The car slowly begins to make its way to the exit of the hospital parking lot. All around there are other parked cars, people running under their umbrellas, a bus stopping in front of a sheltered stop.
“And . . . one other thing,” says Viola.
“Mayo for your french fries?”
“I was thinking more like a little smoke.”
“A what? You don’t have weed on you, do you?”
The car becomes smaller and smaller, joining the other traffic that flows into the ring road. The lights along the avenues are already glowing in the unnatural darkness of the leaden sky that hangs over the entire city.
“Let me remind you, Mom, that I’m still in shock, and you can find more than one study online about how weed helps with relaxation and trauma management . . .”
“Viola, I’m a carabinieri marshal. You can’t tell me yo
u go around with weed in your pocket.”
“Well, I don’t have any . . .”
“Yeah, right.”
From here, the city is a puzzle made up of tiny, faded pieces. In their continuous motion, some join together for a moment, only to part and connect with others.
“I meant I don’t have any in my pocket. I usually keep it at home . . .”
“You keep weed at our house?”
“Only a little . . .”
“That’s the first thing every drug dealer says when I stop them.”
“Have you stopped a lot of dealers?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
And all those little puzzle pieces seem to be part of a movement that is both random and perfect.
“I love you, Marshal. But look, McDonald’s was back there.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“Seriously, Mom, you missed the turn. You’re going the wrong way.”
EPILOGUE
And that’s that. More or less. The fact is, in lending order to chaos, in looking for the right connections between facts, something always remains unexplained. Something escapes. There’s the feeling that something else lies in the folds of the story. A meaning that hasn’t been captured in full. Maybe it’s really like that guy says, that evil doesn’t always have an explanation. And in fact, when people lose something in their lives, when they can’t explain the things that happen, they always have this sense of emptiness, of absence, of loneliness, which they have to reconcile and learn to manage before the void fills up with the wrong things. Because when you lose something, you can’t just go back to being what you were before—you have to become something else, something that hasn’t existed yet. And if you don’t, you’re lost. Think about it, as someone who was spared this time around: What else would have killed these people?
As for us three, she put us here to defend the Gherarda and its inhabitants, and we did our job. We took and we gave, without saving anything for ourselves. So now we just want to have a good sit in front of the fireplace and lick our wounds, being the good house cats that we are, and wait for someone to offer us a nice treat to munch on.
Soon the snow will be gone. The whiteness will disappear and everything else will come back. Meadows, flowers. And the Gherarda will reopen. She always trusted it would. She never stopped believing that the Gherarda would reopen in the spring. That’s how it works. You have to believe in what you do, because if you don’t, how can you convince others? It’s one of those things that the gnome always says. And he’s right. He’s always right.
Oh yeah, the gnome.
He never stopped believing in them. Of course at first, they didn’t really look like the best candidates to accomplish such an important task. They were all so alone and scared. But he, the gnome, always knew they’d do it. That they would learn. He always knew they were the right people and that somehow they would find a way to save their old woods. So if things went as they did in the end, he deserves the credit. You don’t really think three cats and an old witch could have done it alone, do you?
There are places that aren’t like all the others.
The woods had to be saved, and so they were. The ones who had to be stopped were stopped, and the ones who were lost found their way home. If one day you ever decide to believe in these things, to believe in them for real, then you’ll understand that this was exactly what the gnome wanted. Think about it. Certain stories really only begin after they’re over.
Don’t go, please stay
The snow will stop tomorrow
And the love between us will return
In hawthorne season
Fabrizio De André, “Inverno”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Riccardo Bruni is an Italian journalist who writes for newspapers, magazines, webzines, and blogs. Two of his previous novels have been translated into English: The Night of the Moths and The Lion and the Rose. His other novels include La lunga notte dell’iguana, Nessun dolore, Zona d’ombra, and La notte delle falene, which was nominated for the Premio Strega 2016. For more information, please visit www.riccardobruni.com.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © James C. Taylor
A resident of New York City, Hillary Locke studied Spanish and Italian literature and translates from the Romance languages into English. When she’s not running along the East River or reading in Tompkins Square Park, she likes to travel the world and listen to beautiful languages she doesn’t understand.
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