As the weeks passed, however, the actions became less frequent. Maybe because we hadn’t racked up any great successes, or maybe because we were more and more involved in our project at the masseria, and less and less interested in what happened outside.
Giuliana obtained some Super Skunk seeds and Tommaso planted them behind the house, surrounded by citronella bushes. It grew extraordinarily well, bulging with sticky flowers that we let dry in the shade before mixing them with tobacco. Giuliana managed to raise a little money, selling it to an acquaintance in Brindisi. But we never went overboard; getting rich was not our plan.
“We don’t need more money, we need more knowledge,” Danco used to say.
Still, money was a nagging worry. The more we scorned it, the more time we spent talking about it. Just when we reduced our needs even further by voting on a more inferior brand of beer, the jeep’s battery failed for the second time in a few months.
“Because it’s an old piece of crap!” Corinne said.
“Watch what you say,” Danco shot back, “this Willy’s made it through World War Two.”
Then, just a week after replacing the battery, the bridgework on Giuliana’s bicuspids cracked and she had to find a dentist willing to be paid in installments.
The only one who had a steady job was Tommaso. Every morning he left for the Relais dei Saraceni on his motorbike, often returning late in the evening. There were times when he was so exhausted that he preferred to stay there to sleep. He made his entire salary available to us, handing it to Danco the same day he got paid. I never heard him complain.
* * *
—
AUGUST. Mounds of dried seaweed littered the beach of Torre Guaceto, tiny crabs popped out of the sand and then vanished. We had snuck into one of the little coves prohibited to tourists, because we weren’t at all tourists, and because we didn’t like restrictions.
Danco suggested an exercise: “We’ll take turns undressing in front of the others. Not all together, though, that would be too easy. One at a time.”
“If you think I’m going to undress in front of you, you can forget it!” Corinne exclaimed.
Danco replied patiently, “What do you think your bathing suit is hiding? Something mysterious? We can all imagine what’s underneath. Anatomy, that’s all.”
“Good for you, keep on imagining it, then.”
“It’s just the perception you have of your body, Corinne. They taught you to think that there is something absolutely private under those square inches of synthetic fabric. It’s a sign of your mental limitation. But there is nothing absolutely private.”
“Cut it out, Danco! You just want to see my tits.”
“No. What I’d like is for you to be free from prejudices. For all of you to be,” he said, as he slid his own swim shorts down to his ankles. He stood naked in front of us, his back to the light, long enough for us to become familiar with the reddish hairs around his sex.
“Look at me, Corinne,” he urged, “all of you, look at me, go on. I have nothing to hide from you. If I could slit open my stomach and show you my guts, I’d do it.”
So we imitated him, one at a time, the males first, then us girls. My fingers were trembling as I fumbled for the hook behind my back; Bern came to my rescue. Finally, our bathing suits lay scattered over the mantle of seaweed, like scraps of an old skin.
But instead of disappearing, our embarrassment grew greater and greater as the minutes passed. Finally we dived into the turquoise water.
“Let’s run naked on the big beach!” Giuliana said, exhilarated.
“They’ll call the police.”
“If we run, nothing will happen to us,” Danco said.
“Together, though—don’t leave anyone behind.”
We grabbed our swimsuits and scrambled up the slope, then, like a bunch of wild natives, descended on the long stretch of beach dotted with umbrellas. I didn’t think I’d have enough breath in me to make it to the far end.
The beachgoers raised up on their elbows to get a better look at us, the kids giggled, shocked, and there were even some approving whistles. Everyone ran so fast, Corinne and Giuliana in the lead, graceful as ostriches. When I fell behind the others, I heard a man comment as I passed, not seeing his face. His words would return to me many months later, when everything was falling apart: “Fools,” he said. “Who knows what they think they’re proving.”
* * *
—
IN SEPTEMBER Cosimo showed up at the masseria. From the tractor he unloaded two jerry cans filled with a clear liquid. Bern invited him to sit down, offered him some wine, which Cosimo refused with a wave of his hand. “I brought you some dimethoate,” he said. “With a summer like this the flies will come in droves. Your olives next to the fence already have holes in them.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Danco said, getting up, “but you can take the cans back. We don’t need them.”
Cosimo looked bewildered. “You’ve already treated them?”
Danco crossed his arms. “No, sir. We haven’t sprayed our olive trees with dimethoate. We prefer to avoid insecticides here. As well as herbicides and phytopharmaceuticals of any kind.”
“But if you don’t use dimethoate the flies will ruin all the olives. And then it will come to my place, too. You can’t taste it in the oil.”
Unable to completely hide his timidity, he added: “Everyone uses it.”
Bern must have sensed my discomfort, because he hurried over to Cosimo, lifted the cans by the handles, and said, “It was considerate of you, thank you.”
But in a flash Danco’s order came from behind him: “Leave them where they are, Bern. I don’t want that nasty stuff coming into our house.”
Bern sought his friend’s eyes as if to say, It’s just to be polite, it doesn’t cost us anything, we’ll bring them in and then we won’t use them, but Danco was adamant. So Bern backed away, murmuring: “Thank you anyway.”
We had mortified the man. Cosimo, a white-haired, thick-skinned farmer, humiliated by a group of presumptuous kids. Corinne was studiously removing something from under her fingernails. Giuliana jiggled the flint of her lighter, sending tiny sparks spilling out of her clenched fist.
“Wait, I’ll help you,” Bern said, bending down to the cans again. But this time it was Cosimo who stopped him brusquely.
“I can do it on my own.”
After replacing the cans on the tractor, he put it into reverse and, kicking up a little mud from under the wheels, drove back down the dirt track. But not before throwing me a look full of reproach.
“There was no need to treat him like that,” I said when he had driven off. We could still hear the jolting rumble of the tractor.
“Do you really want to season your salad with that stuff?” Danco asked. “The best organological quality it has is being carcinogenic. Let him pour the dimethoate down his well! Let him and his wife drink it!”
“He was just trying to help us.”
“So try again, Cosimo, and maybe you’ll have better luck,” Danco said cheerfully.
He expected us to go along with him, but Giuliana was the only one who did. Danco turned serious again: “They’d use DDT if they could still find it at the supermarket. They spread their chemical crap all over the place. And they don’t even know what the hell is in it. Did you see his face when I said ‘phytopharmaceuticals’? He didn’t even know the word!”
“What do we do about the flies?” Tommaso asked. He had walked to the nearest olive tree, picked a bunch of olives that were still small, and spilled them onto the table. “The larva is inside.”
Danco fingered the olives. “Honey and vinegar in solution, ratio one to ten. It’s been done for years in organic farming. The flies are attracted by the honey and the vinegar kills them. In a word, traps.”
We got to work that afternoon. We fille
d about fifty plastic bottles, and hung them at different heights at the ends of the branches. When the work was done, the slanting light of sunset lit up the cylinders, making them seem like so many lanterns.
After supper Danco made us hurry and clear the table. On it he placed a square of cardboard and a can of paint left over from our recent projects.
“You write it,” he said, offering me a brush: “‘The Masseria. A Toxin-Free Zone.’”
The sign was affixed with wire to the center of the iron bar that marked the entrance to the dirt track, replacing the one that read FOR SALE. It would remain there for years, slowly faded by the sun and rain, a little less legible with each passing season, a little more discordant, a little more false.
* * *
—
THE TRAPS FILLED with flies. We emptied the bottles and refilled them several times during the autumn. The oil was abundant. Once we were finished on our own land, we worked for others to harvest their olives. We stationed ourselves in the piazza and beat the competition from professional cooperatives by offering rock-bottom rates, half of what they asked for. We drove as far north as Monopoli and south past Mesagne. Danco got hold of a tow truck from some old friends, and Tommaso was able to get Cesare’s mechanical defoliator working again. We must have looked bizarre and scruffy when we showed up at a place, at seven o’clock in the morning. You could read the same thought in the landowners’ eyes: Where the hell did these people come from? But we were young and extraordinarily energetic, and we worked well together; at the end of the day they often gave us an extra tip.
If it wasn’t raining, at lunch we would sit under one of the trees to eat sandwiches brought from home. If the owner wasn’t around, Giuliana would pull out a joint, and when it was time to get back to work we felt light-headed and stupid, we couldn’t stop laughing. Danco calculated that by the end of the season we would have picked at least a hundred tons of olives.
With the money we earned (not as much as we’d hoped for, all in all), we bought used hives and bees to populate them. After exhausting discussions, we decided to situate them near the reed bed, because that spot was far enough away from the house, protected from the tramontana, and because we could take advantage of the natural spring to grow flowers. But the first generation of bees died after less than a week. Driven by an old reflex, Tommaso and Bern dug a grave and poured the striped cadavers into it, under Danco’s icy stare. No prayer was said, however, there were only more debates, even more heated, on what we had done wrong.
Finally, Bern obtained a manual of sustainable beekeeping from the library in Ostuni. I was assigned to study it and then instruct the others on how to manage the breeding. It worked. Danco did not fail to remark on it every single day, when he happily sank his spoon into the jar of dark honey. For a while Giuliana sarcastically called me the bees’ “fairy godmother.”
In February we celebrated the anniversary of my arrival. The day I’d moved there, scraping the plastic wheels of the suitcase along the dirt track, had been designated as founding day. While Danco made a heartfelt speech, I could hardly believe it had already been a year.
That evening we drank a lot and at one point Bern allowed himself to reveal a secret. He told about when he slept alone in the tower at the Scalo, how on certain nights the sea was so thunderous that it kept him awake. So he would put on the headphones of the Walkman I had given him, the volume turned up to maximum, and he’d feel safe again.
Don’t tell them about it, I begged him silently as he spoke, keep at least this secret just for us. But he didn’t stop, since even private ownership of memories was abolished at the masseria.
“I wore out every millimeter of that tape,” he said, his words slurred and his lips stained dark by the wine.
“What tape?” Danco asked, somewhat uncertain. He didn’t like it when someone else drew attention to himself for so long.
“A cassette with a lot of different singers. I never knew what it was called. What was the name of it, Teresa?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, “it was just a mixtape.”
Bern didn’t give up, he was flooded with emotion: “There was one I liked more than the others. I would listen to it, then rewind the tape to the beginning and listen to it again. I got to know the exact number of seconds I needed to hold the key down to rewind it.”
With his eyes half closed, and an unguarded bliss on his face, he began singing the melody. I hadn’t heard him sing since the early summers at the masseria and I wished he would go on, but Corinne jumped up: “I know it! It’s by that girl. What’s her name? Come on, Teresa, help me out!”
“I don’t remember.”
Danco burst into one of his vicious laughs. “Sure, of course, the redhead on the piano!”
I felt Tommaso watching me as I looked at Bern, still silently begging him, but now hoping for him to say something, to make them stop before they ruined everything.
But he remained silent, unable to even return my look. And when Danco said, “What a pathetic story!” I saw Bern swallow, then give his new brother, his new supreme guide, an embarrassed smile full of submissiveness.
* * *
—
IN THE SPRING I returned to Turin; it was the only time I did. Bern was opposed to the trip, but I had to go, I hadn’t seen my parents in far too long. When he realized that he would not stop me, he cautioned me: “Don’t let them persuade you to stay. I’ll be counting the hours and minutes.”
On the train, my fear grew. I arrived in Turin certain that my father would use force, that he would beat me up, then lock me in the house, segregated like an addict, the same brutal methods that Corinne’s parents had employed with her. So unaccustomed to people by then, I proceeded down the platform and through the echoing halls of Porta Nuova station; my legs gave way at the thought of meeting him.
But instead he wasn’t there. He simply hadn’t come. My mother said he’d preferred not to.
“What did you expect, Teresa, a welcome-home party?”
We had lunch, the two of us by ourselves; it felt very strange. I looked at the cookie tin behind her, which had been on that shelf forever, and which most likely still held the Doria Bucaneve, the flower-shaped cookies with the hole in the middle. My father used to stack them on his pinkie fingers, three on each side, and then nibble them with a twisted face that made me laugh as a child.
A couple of times I tried to start a conversation about the masseria. I would have liked to tell my mother that we had bought some chickens and that now there were fresh eggs every morning. The next time, maybe, I would bring her a few, and with them some of our mulberry jam. I wanted her to know that we had saved enough money to buy solar panels: starting next week we would have electricity at all hours of the day, clean, free energy, as much as we wanted. I really wished I could tell her about it, just as I wished I could confide in her how discouraged Danco’s words sometimes made me feel, as if I were shallow and had no opinions.
And I wanted to tell her about Bern, especially about him; she would fall in love with him if she listened to me attentively for once, and then she would convince my father to stop his absurd retaliation of silence. The entire situation that now appeared so weird to him would come to seem natural, as it was natural to me. But none of this came out of my mouth. I ate quickly, then retreated to my room.
My room: cozy and so childlike. Photographs on the wall that no longer spoke to me, my university books still piled on the desk. Could I have left them like that? Or was it just another of my parents’ tacit messages? The whole house was strewn with emotional traps: honey to attract flies, vinegar to kill them.
I allowed myself a long bath, even though I was bothered by Danco’s voice accusing me of wasting water. He spoke more and more often in my head, like a new conscience, severe and implacable. But the water was inviting and scented with lavender, and my body melted softly in its warmth. I surre
ndered to it.
Still barefoot and with my hair wrapped in a towel, I took a book from the shelf: the one by Martha Grimes that my grandmother had sent me years ago through my father. I sat on the floor, my back against the clothes closet, and riffled through the pages, forward and backward. In the middle, I found a Post-it. I recognized my grandmother’s handwriting, the same script used to pen comments in the margins of her pupils’ exercises:
Dear Teresa, I’ve thought about it a lot. You were right that day. When I was speaking with you by the pool, I confused the word “unhappiness” with its opposite.
The message continued on the back:
In my life I have seen so many people make the same mistake. And I don’t want it to happen to you too, not through any fault of mine, at least. I saw your Bern at the masseria. I thought you should know it. My lips are sealed, though. Affectionately, Nonna.
I cried a little after reading it, mostly out of anger. Why hadn’t she chosen a simpler way to communicate with me? Had she read so many of her thrillers that she thought she was one of those characters? But I also cried out of unexpected, overwhelming relief, because my grandmother had not betrayed me, and because those words, though discovered so late, were her blessing for the life that I had chosen.
At that moment it seemed absurd for me to be at home, I was a different person from the one who had grown up there. I had to go back to the masseria as soon as possible.
I asked my mother for the biggest suitcase she had, promising to get it back to her. “I’ll ship it,” I added, so she wouldn’t delude herself about my returning.
I filled it with clothes that wouldn’t humiliate me in front of Corinne and the others. The next day I was back on the train, with new confidence. By then I was part of Speziale. Only my phantom self had left the masseria to travel north. And it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen my father; he had wanted it that way. I tried to distract myself by reading Nonna’s novel, but I was too preoccupied. In the end I gave up and just gazed out the window, until it got dark.
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