“I met her only a few times, because I was always in Bari. She had money issues and . . . I don’t know, maybe drug problems too. When she became pregnant, Cesare agreed to take her in at the masseria. She had no place else to stay.”
He looked at me. “She had a strange name. Violalibera.”
I had the feeling I was falling backward, and I clung to the bench.
“Violalibera,” I repeated.
“She’s . . .” But he left the sentence unfinished.
“She’s what?”
Nicola reached toward my face, his huge hand brushed my hair off my forehead and stroked my cheek with a gentleness I wouldn’t have imagined. “I’m very sorry for you,” he said.
“I want to go home.”
“Right now?”
“Right now, yes.”
“Whatever you like.”
But more minutes passed before we moved. The Scalo was slow to fill up. The girl who served the drinks was leaning on the windowsill of the trailer looking bored. For a long time we studied each other over Nicola’s shoulder, until she widened her eyes as if to ask what the hell I was staring at.
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I told my father that I was going back to Turin. He asked me why, as if he didn’t have the slightest idea, and I, as if I believed him, made up a story about wanting to prepare for the start of school. He said that traveling by train alone for all those hours was out of the question, but my grandmother must have convinced him otherwise, because after lunch we went to the station together and bought a ticket for the Intercity departing the next evening.
I packed my bags. From time to time nausea forced me to sit down and breathe deeply. I got angry with Rosa because she’d put a pair of my jeans in the washing machine. Less than an hour later they were pressed and folded on the bed, next to the suitcase.
In the morning I saw her and Cosimo driving away. I don’t remember if I thought about it just then or if I had concocted the strange plan during my troubled night, but I took the spare keys to the lodge, went in, and grabbed the jar with the red weevil from the tool shelf. Then I climbed on my bike and pedaled to the masseria at breakneck speed.
I found Cesare kneeling on the ground, fiddling with the septic pit. He wore a pair of high boots and rubber gloves. Yoan stood next to him, leaning on a shovel. A revolting stench came from the trench.
I shoved the jar with the parasite under Cesare’s nose and said, “This too? Should we have a funeral for this too?”
He looked at me, dumbfounded.
“Well?” I pressed him. “There must be a soul here too, right? We have to bury it.”
He stood up slowly, took off his gloves. “Of course, Teresa,” he said softly.
I demanded that they all be called to join in, even Floriana and Nicola. Cesare dug a tiny hole with his forefinger and put the red weevil in it. He read aloud a psalm, “All our days ebb away because of your wrath, we consume the years like a sigh,” then Floriana sang without the guitar, and her unguarded voice brought tears to my eyes.
The hole was covered up and I swore that it was over: I would no longer let thoughts of Bern consume me from within.
Afterward I walked through the countryside with Nicola, both of us silent for a long time.
“I’m leaving,” I told him. “I don’t think I’ll come back to Speziale again.” I considered whether it would be too cruel to add anything more, then I did it anyway: “I have no reason to come back here.”
We skirted a crumbling dry-stone wall. I stopped near a caper flower that had blossomed in the cracks, picked it, turned it between my fingers a few times, then tossed it away.
Topping a rise, we found ourselves unexpectedly in front of the reed bed.
“Why did we come here?” I asked.
Nicola placed a hand on the trunk of an olive tree. He was looking at the ground, not the exact spot where Bern and I used to lie, just to the right of it.
“I asked you why we came here,” I repeated. Agitation tightened my throat.
“Bern and Tommaso were brothers to me. They may have been joined at the hip, but I was still their brother.”
“So?”
“The three of us shared everything.” His eyes bored into mine. “Everything. But Bern never wanted to share you. He said you were his, period.”
He ran a hand through his hair. The water of the brook coursed along with a low gurgle. “I have to catch the train,” I said. Then I turned and started walking back toward the masseria. Nicola did not move to follow me.
When I was already a distance away, I saw him standing in the same position, facing the reed bed, one arm hanging by his side and the other stretched out to the tree, still spying on the ghosts of Bern and me embracing, or maybe those of Bern and Violalibera, of whoever may have lain on that ground that I, like a fool, had considered mine alone.
From the train I watched the streetlamps streak past the window with its smeared fingermarks, then the long stretches of dark countryside and signs announcing stations of towns I’d never heard of. We must have been in Abruzzo or maybe already in the Marches when a downpour began that in a few seconds fogged up the window and caused the humidity in the compartment to rise oppressively. I had to pee, but I didn’t get up, gripped by a kind of paralysis. I had never experienced such invasive pain. The image of Bern and Violalibera together was always there, I kept picturing them over and over again and didn’t stop until morning, when a dull sun rose over the plain, finding me awake, still awake.
* * *
—
THE LAST YEAR of high school I studied unstintingly because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. It was the only way to prevent my mind from instantly covering the distance that separated me from Speziale. I exchanged a couple of letters with Nicola, but they were dreary and boring, his as much as mine. I stopped answering him.
Even when I was sleeping, the same images played on and on in my head. The boys in the pool. The four of us together in Ostuni, in the center of the piazza, among all those lights. The reed bed and the grueling drives back with my father, he wanting to listen to “Stella Stai” for a second time and I not knowing how to conceal my dejection. In the morning my mother would find me facedown on the desk; she woke me stroking my forehead, then it took hours for my stiff neck to go away.
Every other evening I’d go to the communal swimming pool to wear myself out. The first cigarette I smoked when I came out of there had a funny taste, like burnt plastic; it surprised me every time.
I got the highest grade on the final exams. No one would ever take me for who I really was: a drudge who was trying to forget the guy she’d had an affair with two years earlier, the guy who had gotten another girl pregnant and then disappeared.
In August my father left for Speziale by himself. The morning he left I did not get up to say goodbye. In the days that followed, I didn’t call him once.
I was determined not to ask him anything when he returned, but it was he who came into my room, trailing a cloud of perspiration after all those hours of driving. I was watching MTV, a video clip of the Skunk Anansie song “Secretly.”
“This year it was hotter than usual,” he said.
“So I heard.”
“There’s a drought so bad, even the old-timers can’t remember one like it. It will be good for the olives,” he said, sitting on the bed. “But I went to the shore a few times. The sea was perfect.”
I turned to the TV. The three characters in the video were turning a motel room inside out.
“Could you turn it off a moment?” he said then.
I looked for the remote control. Instead of turning it off, I muted the volume.
“I was saying that the masseria is completely deserted. There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign.”
I asked about Cesare, in a low voice.
<
br /> “He’s gone. I asked around in town as well, but no one knew much about it. They more or less kept to themselves, those people.”
He said “those people” strangely, as if he were talking about a group of aliens.
“It won’t be easy for him to sell that place. The house would have to be demolished and rebuilt. Actually, I don’t know if anyone would even be allowed to rebuild. I’m pretty sure that much of what there is was built without permits. Anyway, who would want that land? Your grandmother says they’ve been clearing away stones for years.”
Finally he stood up, slapping his pants to remove the dust.
“I’d better go take a shower. I forgot, your grandmother sends you this.”
He handed me a wrapped package, which felt like a book.
“She was very sorry not to have you there this year.”
I tried to picture the masseria deserted, the doors and windows barred, the FOR SALE sign. I watched my father leave.
The images of “Secretly” continued to stream without sound; it was the final scene. I turned off the TV, then unwrapped my grandmother’s package. Inside was one of her mystery novels, Martha Grimes’s The Anodyne Necklace. What drivel, I thought. I put it on a shelf without even opening it.
2.
Many years later Tommaso and I would be the only two left to remember those summers. We were adults by then, past thirty, and I still couldn’t say if we considered ourselves friends or the exact opposite. But we had spent a good period of our lives together, the most important time perhaps, and the number of memories we shared made us more alike and closer than we would have been willing to admit.
I hadn’t seen him for quite some time, with the sole exception of an evening when I had shown up at his house unannounced and he had chased me away; and I, for spite, had blurted out what had happened to Bern. But on Christmas Eve in 2012 I found myself in his apartment in Taranto, sitting next to the bed he was lying in, so drunk that his arms were trembling a little. He was in such bad shape that he couldn’t look after his daughter, Ada, so he’d called me, the last person he’d have liked to ask for help, but the only one he knew would be alone as he was that night.
Around eleven o’clock Ada had fallen asleep on the sofa and I had returned to the room where Tommaso lay. He was awake, staring at the turned-down sheet. Medea, his dog, was dozing, curled up at the foot of the bed. Only one of the bedside lamps was on, the one across from us, and the light would remain on until dawn, until I woke up with the buzz of all the things I hadn’t known before.
“The institution,” Tommaso began after a long silence, “was a horrible place.”
He hissed the words through his teeth, painfully. His skin was grayish, because of all he had drunk.
“Which institution?”
“The one they put me in after my father was arrested.”
“What does that have to do with anything now?”
I wasn’t there to hear about the institution. Something much more important had been left unfinished between us, something that concerned Bern and Nicola and Cesare, our first summers at the masseria, and Violalibera, that name that from time to time came back into my life.
“For me everything starts there.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to control my impatience. “Go on.”
“There was always a revolting smell, especially in the hall. Soup, piss, or disinfectant, depending on the time of day. So while I sat on the bench, waiting, I breathed in the hollow at my elbow.”
His voice became a little clearer with each sentence, as if his lungs and throat were also waking up from his drunken stupor.
“My mother used to say that I’m very sensitive to odors because I’m an albino. She always had the same justification for everything: ‘You’re albino.’ But by then she could no longer say it because she was dead.”
He glanced at me, briefly, to see my reaction, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. I may have, once, but it had been a long time ago. I just wanted him to continue.
“I sensed them coming even before I saw them, from the smell. Cesare and Floriana, I mean. Soap, mint candy, and the residue of a fart. I was shaking a little, I think. It all seems completely normal now: you’re ten years old and you’re waiting for strangers to take you away. Floriana sat down and stroked my hand without taking it, while Cesare remained standing. I didn’t take my nose out of my elbow and didn’t look at them directly; all I saw was his shadow that stretched across the floor to the wall. He touched my chin, forcing me to raise my head. He still had a beard, and when he was upset he combed it with his fingers. He did so after telling me his name. But I already knew it, the social workers had told me about Floriana and Cesare, and had shown me a photograph in which they were hugging each other in front of a yellow wall. ‘Two devoted people,’ one of the caseworkers had said.
“‘Look at him,’ Cesare said to Floriana, ‘doesn’t he remind you of the archangel Michael? In that painting by Guido Reni.’ Then he whispered to me: ‘The archangel Michael defeated a terrible dragon. I’d like to tell you his whole story, Tommaso. But we’ll have time in the car. Gather your things now.’
“In the car, however, he did not continue the story. He only added that their house was on the archangel’s line, a line that went from Jerusalem to Mont Saint-Michel. Maybe that was the whole story.
“I tried to memorize the way, the direction from where my father was, but I soon lost my bearings.
“‘I’ll take care of the bags,’ Cesare said when we got out of the car. ‘You go look for your brothers.’
“‘I have no brothers, sir.’
“‘You’re right. I spoke hastily, I’m sorry. You will decide what to call them. But hurry up now, they must be around here. Past the oleanders.’
“I went through the shrubs and wandered awhile in the olive grove, at first not venturing too far from the house. I still had the foolish hope of being able to run away, of finding the institution not far off. I wasn’t used to being in the country. I was about to turn back when I heard a voice calling to me: ‘Over here!’
“I whirled around, but I didn’t see anyone, only the trees set apart from one another.
“‘In the mulberry tree,’ the voice said.
“‘I don’t know which one is the mulberry tree.’
“There was a silence, then I heard footsteps. Bern popped out of the shadows.
“‘This is the mulberry tree,’ he said. ‘See?’
“I went over; it was dark and cool under there. A ladder led to a small treehouse built up among the branches. Bern studied me. He touched my cheek and then he said: ‘You’re so white, you look very delicate.’ I replied that I wasn’t at all delicate. He climbed up the ladder and I followed him.
“Inside the little house, sitting cross-legged, was Nicola.
“‘See how he looks?’ Bern asked him, but he barely glanced at me.
“‘At least this one is brave enough to come up.’
“As a matter of fact, the treehouse didn’t give the impression of being very stable. I asked if they had built it themselves, but they ignored me.
“‘Can you play skat?’ Nicola asked.
“‘I can play poker.’
“‘What’s that? Sit down, we’ll teach you skat. We were missing a third.’
“They listed the rules in confusion, talking over one another. For the rest of the afternoon we didn’t say another word except for those related to the game. Then they said it was time for prayer. I prayed at the institution too, so it didn’t surprise me. I couldn’t imagine how different it would be. We went down the ladder one at a time. Once past the oleanders, the naked bulb shining under the pergola appeared. Bern put an arm around my neck, and I let him do it. I had never had brothers, and before that day I didn’t even know how much I wanted them.”
* * *
—
“Cesare’s eyes illuminated everything,” Tommaso went on, “the masseria and the surrounding land, but especially us boys. All you had to do was let a sigh escape you during lessons and he would grab you by the arm and say, ‘Come with me, let’s talk a little.’
“Under the holly oak he was prepared to wait as long as half an hour to get a word or a sign out of you. I didn’t know what Cesare wanted from me. But he waited some more, and even longer, his eyelids half closed, perhaps dozing. Then, suddenly, a word would pop out of my mouth like a saliva bubble. Cesare would nod to encourage me. Another word would follow and eventually everything came pouring out. Then it was his turn. He commented at length, as if he’d known from the beginning what I would confess to him. We’d pray together to beg for mercy and wisdom, then we’d rejoin the others, and for a few hours I felt light and clean.
“The only place we were safe was in the little house in the mulberry tree. The foliage was so dense that Cesare couldn’t see us when we were up there. He would come to the base of the trunk and call up from below: ‘Everything okay?’ He’d peer through the planks, but we had covered the bottom with a tarp we’d found in the tool shed. Then he’d lose his patience and walk away. Sometimes I think I was the one who brought perversion to the treehouse. For sure I was the one who taught Bern and Nicola the swear words I’d heard in the institution’s mess hall. They took turns repeating them, to savor their tang. A video game had passed the inspection of my bags unscathed and they used it avidly as long as the batteries lasted. I remember that for a time we dared one another to taste all the leaves, roots, berries, seeds, and flowers on the masseria. The thought of who would be first to stumble upon something poisonous excited us.
Heaven and Earth Page 6