“Since the lawn mowing awaited me at the Relais dei Saraceni in a few hours, I said goodbye. In the Atala’s rearview mirror, the masseria became an ever-tinier spot, then it disappeared altogether.”
* * *
—
TOMMASO’S VOICE was strained by exhaustion or maybe by those memories.
Throughout that long night in which he’d talked and I’d listened, in which he occupied half of the double bed and I a chair that felt more and more uncomfortable, during all that time our eyes had met only a few times. We chose to stare in turn at a piece of the bedspread, at the clothes spilling out of the open closet, at Medea’s moist snout. But now I couldn’t take my eyes off him, I couldn’t stop wondering how he had managed to conceal it all behind that pallor of his, and for so long. And how had Bern been able to? But the words remained stuck in my throat. I drank the last sip of water in his glass to swallow them, along with the image of Bern’s and Violalibera’s feet side by side in the basin and his silent consent to be the father of that baby. Their baby.
“It was Nicola who told me what happened next, by phone,” Tommaso resumed. “One of the waitresses came to call me while I was picking string beans.”
He sighed. “Violalibera had probably thought that a dozen leaves would be an adequate number, lethal for the baby but not for her. Nicola explained that she had sweetened the oleander tea before drinking it. Then she went out and walked as far as the reed bed. They’d found her several hours later, Yoan did. When the medics arrived, she was still breathing, she was still breathing in the hospital too, but by evening she was dead. When he heard, Bern fled to the tower, but Cesare and Floriana didn’t go looking for him again.
“You arrived a few weeks later. The night Nicola took you to the Scalo, I was there with Bern. We were standing near the tower, at the darkest spot. You had your back to us, but there was a moment when you turned around. It felt as if you were looking right in our direction, right at us. I remember thinking: It’s as if she caught the scent of something in the air. At that moment if we had simply moved a hand, you’d have noticed us. In fact, Bern took a step forward, toward the light, but I held him back. Hadn’t we had enough troubles already? And when that moment had passed, you turned back to Nicola.
“In the fall, Cesare and Floriana also left the masseria. They went off without seeing to a thing; they packed the Ford’s trunk and left. They didn’t even secure the iron bar across the dirt track. As if that death had cursed the land forever, as if all the prayer Cesare was capable of could not suffice to purify it.”
* * *
—
TOMMASO REMAINED SILENT for a few seconds, as if to allow me time to fully absorb that information as well.
Then he added: “She had tied her wrists with a rope. The same one that Bern and I had used to drag the trunk of the palm tree. So she wouldn’t instinctively try to run away and call for help before the abortion was complete. I don’t know where she had learned to make a knot like that, not everyone can. She had vomited on herself, bound like that. It seems that after drinking an extract of oleander cramping occurs right away, but the poison takes several hours to reach the heart. The heartbeat slows almost to a stop, then wildly accelerates again. Yoan told Nicola, and Nicola told me, that Violalibera’s body was so light that the boy had picked her up effortlessly. He ran to the house, carrying her in his arms, and placed her on the swing-chair. When Floriana opened her eyelids, her eyes were all white. Bern was there, watching.”
Tommaso took Stirner’s book from the nightstand. He opened it.
“I read it just a short time ago. It’s a terribly boring book. Boring and confused. Or maybe I’m not intelligent enough to understand it. Anyway, I found the words Bern had recited from memory in the olive grove, before we threw the stones.”
He leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
“‘The truth is dead, it’s a letter, a word, a material that I can use up.’ That’s what Bern said.”
“It’s just a phrase, like any other,” I replied, but I struggled with it. I had a hard time speaking.
He put the book back on the bedside table, stared at it for another moment.
“All three of us kept the promise. We never spoke about Violalibera again, not with others or among ourselves. At least not until tonight.”
PART TWO
The Encampment
3.
I was twenty-three when my grandmother died. After the summer of my senior year of high school I had seen her only once: she had come to Turin for a medical exam, her throat, or maybe her ear, and had stayed two nights in a hotel. But one evening she had dinner with us, and she and my mother talked about this and that with the utmost cordiality. As she was leaving, she asked me if I’d enjoyed the book that she had sent me with my father. I barely remembered it, but I said yes so as not to offend her.
“Then I’ll send you some others,” she promised, though afterward she must have forgotten.
Nobody knew when she’d gotten into the habit of going to the beach in the morning.
“In February! Swimming in February!” my father ranted. “Do you have any idea how cold the water is in February?”
My mother stroked the sleeve of his jacket; he was shivering uncontrollably.
A fisherman had spotted the corpse slamming against the rocky shore at Cala dei Ginepri. I knew that cove, and all afternoon I kept seeing my grandmother’s body knocking brutally against the rocks. When they’d pulled her out, she had been soaking for hours, the skin of her face and fingers was all wrinkled, the knees she was so ashamed of nibbled by the bottom fish.
My father decided to leave that same day. In the car no one spoke, so I dozed in the backseat. When we arrived in Speziale it was dawn and a layer of fog hung over the countryside.
I wandered, dazed, through the courtyard of the villa with an awful taste in my mouth. I approached the pool, which was covered by a canvas tarp: a calcareous ring gleamed in the center. I stepped on one of the waterlogged cushions surrounding the tile edge. Everything spoke of neglect.
The coming and going continued until suppertime. I recognized some of my grandmother’s pupils, now teenagers yet escorted by their mothers. They spoke of her as “the teacher,” and took turns sitting on the couch that had been her sanctuary as they offered their whispered condolences to my father.
The windows were wide open and gusts of cold air chilled the room. I didn’t go near the open coffin in the middle of the room. Rosa offered the visitors small glasses of liqueur and marzipan confections. Cosimo was leaning against the wall with his hands clasped and a beaten look, as my mother spoke to him up close.
Suddenly she left him standing there and headed toward me.
“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm.
She led me to my room, where nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed since the last summer I’d been there.
“Did you know there was a will?”
“What will?”
“Don’t lie to me, Teresa. Don’t even try. I know you had a special bond, you and she.”
“But I never even phoned her.”
“She left it all to you. The house. Along with the furniture and the land. Even the lodge where Cosimo and that insufferable wife of his live.”
I didn’t immediately understand the significance of what she was telling me. The will, Cosimo, the furniture. I was overcome by the unexpected emotion that the made-up bed had stirred in me.
“Listen to me, Teresa. You will sell this house right away, you will not listen to what your father tells you. It’s nothing but a decrepit villa, full of leaks. Cosimo is prepared to buy it. Let me take care of it.”
* * *
—
THE FUNERAL WAS HELD the following day. The church in Speziale was too small to hold everyone, and many people gathered in the doorway, blocking
the light. At the end of the service the priest approached our pew and shook my hands.
“You must be Teresa. Your grandmother spoke a lot about you.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised?” he asked, smiling at me. Then he patted me on the shoulder.
We followed the coffin to the cemetery. A niche had been opened next to that of my grandfather and certain ancestors whom I knew nothing about. When the undertaker started fumbling with the trowel and the casket was lifted by the hoist, my father started sobbing. I looked away, and it was then that I saw him.
He stood a distance away, hidden behind a column. Bern. His clothes struck me as the most noticeable sign of how grown up we’d become. He wore a dark coat and, under it, a knotted tie. Meeting my gaze, he ran a forefinger over his eyebrow, and I didn’t know if it was just an awkward gesture or a secret code that I no longer knew how to decipher. Then he moved quickly toward one of the family chapels and disappeared inside. When I looked back at the coffin, which was now being pushed into the niche, rasping and creaking, I was so confused, so distracted, that I didn’t give my grandmother even one last thought.
As the crowd began to disperse, I murmured to my mother that I would join her later at the house, there were some people I wanted to greet. I walked around the churchyard, very slowly. By the time I reached the gate again, everyone had left. I went back into the cemetery. The undertaker, left to himself, was finishing the job of sealing up the marble slab. I looked in the chapel, but Bern wasn’t there.
I returned to town, almost running. Instead of turning in to my grandmother’s villa, I continued on to the masseria. The iron bar across the entrance was open. Going back down the dirt track to the house again was like sinking bodily into a childhood memory, a memory that had lingered there, intact, waiting for me. I recognized every single thing, every tree, every cleft of every single stone.
I spotted Bern sitting under the pergola, along with some others. I had a moment’s hesitation, because not even then, seeing me, did he encourage me to join him. But soon enough, there I was among them. Bern, Tommaso, Corinne, Danco, Giuliana: the people with whom I would share the next few years of my life—by far the best years, and the unsuspected prelude to the worst.
Bern introduced me in a neutral tone, saying that I was the teacher’s granddaughter, that I lived in Turin, and that I used to spend vacations there at one time. Nothing more. Nothing that would let anyone think we had once been intimate, he and I. However, he stood up to get me a chair. Tommaso murmured his condolences for my grandmother without looking at me directly. A wool hat covered his fair hair, and his cheeks were reddened by the cold; seeing him nervously jiggling his leg, I had the old feeling that he didn’t want me there.
Beers appeared on the table and Giuliana poured pistachios out of a plastic bag. Everyone scooped up a handful.
“I’d heard that the masseria was for sale,” I said to break the silence, “but not that you’d bought it.”
“Bought? Is that what you told her, Bern?” Danco asked.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Teresa. We didn’t buy it. None of us would have the money.”
“Corinne would,” Giuliana objected. “All it would take is a phone call to her daddy, right?”
Corinne raised her middle finger.
“So you’re renting, then?”
This time they laughed heartily. Only Tommaso remained serious.
“I see you have a rather canonical idea of private property,” Danco said.
Bern gave me a brief glance. He was sprawled in his chair, his hands in his coat pockets.
“I think you could call us squatters,” he explained briefly, “even though Cesare probably knows we’re here. But this place no longer interests him. He lives in Monopoli now.”
“We’re squatters, so we don’t have electricity,” Corinne said. “A real pain in the ass.”
“We have the generator,” Danco countered.
“Sure, we keep it on for an hour a day!”
“Thoreau lived beside a frozen lake with no electricity,” he persisted. “Here the temperature never drops below freezing.”
“Too bad Thoreau didn’t have long hair down to his ass like me.”
Corinne stood up to move closer to Tommaso; he pushed his chair back and made her sit on his lap. “I’m still chilly. Rub me hard,” she told him, snuggling against his chest. “Not like a fucking kitten, vigorously!”
Scratching something off her sweater, Giuliana said: “Anyhow, a long cable is all we’d need to tap into Enel’s power line.”
“We’ve already discussed this,” Danco replied, “and we voted, I believe. If they found out we’re stealing electricity, they’d make us clear out. And after a while, they’d be sure to notice.”
Corinne looked at him coldly. “Will you stop throwing the shells on the ground?”
“They’re bio-de-gra-da-ble,” Danco said with a defiant smile, as he tossed another pistachio shell over his shoulder.
I felt Giuliana staring at me, but I didn’t dare turn around to face her. I slowly brought the bottle of beer to my lips, trying to overcome my uneasiness.
“So, what do you do in Turin?” she asked.
“I’m studying. At the university.”
“And what are you studying?”
“Natural science. I hope to become a marine biologist.”
Danco started sniggering. Corinne punched him in the chest with a fist hidden in the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Teresa, who once lived underwater,” Tommaso remarked faintly.
Corinne rolled her eyes. “Oh, boy! Not that game again!”
“Do you like horses, too?” Danco asked. He was serious now.
“I like all animals.”
I noticed an exchange of glances among them, but no one spoke. Then Danco said, “Excellent,” as if I had just passed a test.
After a few minutes spent drinking in silence, with Corinne tormenting Tommaso, tickling him behind his ear, I asked: “And Nicola?”
Bern finished his beer in one swig and slammed the bottle on the table. “Living the good life in Bari.”
“By now he must have graduated.”
“He dropped out of university,” he said, more and more sullenly. “He preferred to join the guards. They reflect his personality better, apparently.”
“What guards?”
“The police.” Giuliana stepped in. “What do you call the guards in Turin?”
Tommaso said, “It’s been two years now.”
“Left! Right! Left! Right!” Danco barked, swinging his arms rigidly.
“I don’t think the police march,” Corinne said.
Giuliana lit a cigarette and tossed the pack on the table.
“Another one?” Danco asked angrily.
“It’s only the second one.”
“Great. So it’s only another ten years of synthetic waste,” he kept on.
Giuliana took a long drag and blew the smoke toward him spitefully. Danco held her look impassively.
Then he turned to me. “Do you know how long it takes a cigarette to decompose? Something like ten years. The problem is the filter. Even if you crush it in the end, as Giuliana does, it doesn’t change anything.”
I asked her if I could take one.
“The first rule of the masseria,” she said, pushing the pack toward the center of the table. “You never have to ask permission here.”
“Forget your concept of ownership,” Danco added.
“If you can,” she finished.
Corinne said, “I’m hungry. And I warn you, I’m not going to lunch on pistachios again. Today it’s your turn, Danco, get a move on.”
Instead they started talking among themselves, as if they’d forgotten that I wa
s there. I leaned toward Bern and in a low voice asked him if he wanted to walk me home. He thought about it for a moment before getting up. The others paid no attention to us as we walked away.
* * *
—
AND SO there we were, retracing the same route we’d walked as kids. The countryside in winter was different, more melancholy, I wasn’t used to it. The soil, a dusty red in August, was covered with a mantle of tall, gleaming grass. Bern didn’t speak, so I said: “Those clothes look good on you.”
“They’re Danco’s. They’re too big, though. See?”
He turned the cuff over: it had been folded inside and held with a safety pin to make the sleeve look shorter. I smiled.
“Why didn’t you wait for me after the funeral?”
“It was better that they not see me.”
“Who?”
But he didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the ground.
“There were so many people,” I said. “I wouldn’t have imagined it. Nonna was always alone.”
“She was a generous person.”
“And how would you know?”
Bern raised his collar, then lowered it again. Wearing that coat seemed to take up a lot of his energy.
“For a while she helped me study.”
“My grandmother?”
He nodded, still looking down at the path.
“I don’t understand.”
“I wanted to take the exam to get into the fourth year, but in the end I dropped the idea.”
He had quickened his step. He sighed. “In exchange for lessons, I helped Cosimo in the fields.”
“And where did you live?”
“Here.”
“Here?”
I felt light-headed, but Bern didn’t notice.
“When I heard that Cesare and Floriana had gone, I decided to come back. I’d been staying at the Scalo for a while, in the tower. I brought you there once.”
He’d been living there, at the masseria, exactly where I’d imagined him all that time, with Violalibera and their child. I must have been thinking something like that and no doubt I wondered where they were at that moment—“It seems that Bern got into some trouble . . .”—but I couldn’t speak.
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