“What do you mean, pregnant?” Bern asked, dumbfounded.
“Do you need me to explain it to you?”
But Bern didn’t catch the sarcasm, because he was overcome by a surge of tenderness.
“Pregnant! That’s great news! Don’t you realize? It’s the start of a new era. We’ll have children. Teresa, Danco, Giuliana . . . don’t you see? We’ll have to get busy too. They’ll all grow up together, here!”
The idyll that he had instantly imagined left his whole body quivering. He went behind Tommaso and Corinne and hugged them, then kissed each of them on the cheek.
“Pregnant!” he said again, not noticing that Tommaso seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“How many months?” Danco asked.
“Five,” Corinne answered, looking at each of us in turn.
Bern wouldn’t stop. “So what were you waiting for to tell us, huh? We don’t need to vote now. We’ll buy the masseria, we’ll make it the perfect place for the kids. They’ll have plenty of aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.”
That’s when Corinne shook him off.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said we’re leaving, Bern. Going. Do you think I can let my child grow up in this place? For what, so he can get tuberculosis?”
It took Bern a few seconds to absorb the information.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
Corinne began toying with an earring. “My parents found us an apartment in Taranto. That way we’re close and they can help us out. It’s not very big, but it’s right in the center.”
“And what about us?” Bern asked.
Corinne lost her patience. “Holy Christ, Bern! You’re really missing a few marbles, you know?”
But he wasn’t looking at her anymore, he was staring at his brother instead, waiting for him to meet his eyes. Yet when he spoke his name in a whisper, then slightly louder, Tommaso didn’t move.
So he came back and sat down next to me. He finished his beer in silence, then turned to Danco. “It’s up to us four, apparently.”
Danco puffed out his cheeks. “It would be mad to buy this place. Don’t you see how run-down it is? The soil is poor. We have to work like hell here.”
“What are you saying? It looks like you’ve all lost your minds today. We have the food forest here. We have the hens, the bees, everything.”
Danco shook his head, as if he were inwardly fighting something.
“The police, Bern. I don’t want to mess with them. And then, did you see what happened to the solar panels? And how things turned out with that shitty bastard Cosimo? We’re not welcome here.”
“None of us ever thought we were,” Bern said.
I took his hand. It was cold and his fingers were trembling a little. I squeezed them. Danco rubbed his palms on his jeans. “What do you say, Giuli?” he asked. “I think it’s time to clear out.”
She snapped her fingers in reply, clearly conveying the idea that she hadn’t expected anything else. Bern sat motionless, faced with that mutiny.
But Danco had something more to add: “I don’t think it’s fair to divide the money from the villa equally. After all, it was Teresa’s. But each of us should get something, right? Kind of like a golden handshake. We all worked here, we all invested in it. What do you think, Teresa? You were the one who suggested putting the money in the communal kitty. Of course, now that things have changed, you can take back what you said, but . . . well . . . we all contributed.”
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t maintain his usual clarity, the objectivity that his scientific studies had taught him.
“I propose that those who leave receive twenty thousand euros and not lay claim to anything else. Twenty thousand each,” he hastened to specify. “The rest will be left to Bern and Teresa. About one hundred thousand. That should be enough to purchase the masseria.”
“And you just thought of this now?” Bern asked in a hard tone that he’d never used with Danco before.
“Does it make a difference?”
“Did you think of it just now or did you already do the calculation, Danco?”
Danco sighed. “Bern, people aren’t property either.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me on morals.”
Danco grumbled. “Whatever you say. So, Teresa, do you agree or not?”
“Teresa agrees,” Bern answered for me. I squeezed his hand again.
“Good. So, what do you say, shall we make a toast to increasing the world’s population? With decent wine, though.”
Bern contained himself for the remaining time. He clinked glasses with everyone, even Danco. We pretended we were celebrating a new beginning, the birth and who knows what else, yet deep inside, each of us knew that the toast was mainly a confirmation of the end: the end of nights spent together under the pergola, the end of friendship itself maybe; the end of a cloudy dream that none of us, with the sole exception of Bern, had ever seriously believed could last.
* * *
—
THOSE FINAL DAYS. A virulent restlessness stirred in Bern. He spent a lot of time with Tommaso, the anguish of the new separation identical to that of the evening many years earlier at the Scalo. But this time their behavior was different. What they did was take walks together. Only once did I catch them hugging each other among the giant buds of cabbage scattered in the food forest: I didn’t feel jealous as I had in the past, though, only deeply sorry for both of them.
The first to leave were Danco and Giuliana. They were headed south, they didn’t know where exactly. In front of the jam-packed jeep, Danco suggested one last time that Bern follow him. I held my breath before he answered, worried that the painfulness of that moment would lead him to agree. Instead he shook Danco’s hand and said, “If I move away from this place, I’ll die. I know that now.”
With two days left before the deadline issued by the police, Bern and I remained alone. We sat on the bench under the holly oak. It hadn’t been used in quite a while, because it could accommodate only two people at a time. Bern held me close to him. The countryside was so silent and still that we felt like the last human beings on earth, or the first ones. Bern must have had a similar thought, because he said: “Adam and Eve.”
“The apple tree is missing.”
“Cesare claimed that it was actually a pomegranate tree.”
“Then we have one.”
His chest rose and fell. Then his fingers slid over mine, gently, looking for a way under the sleeve.
“We’ll go to him tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll make him an offer for the masseria.”
“There won’t be any money left, afterward.”
“Who cares?”
I looked at the land around us. The realization of the work that from then on would fall on just the two of us was daunting. If in some recess of my mind I still imagined resuming my studies, connecting my earlier life to the present one as though grafting two cuttings, that was the moment I realized that it would never happen. It was Bern and me and the masseria and nothing else. I was twenty-five years old and I didn’t know if that was too old or too young to live like this, nor did I care to know. I loved Bern more than ever at that moment, as if our sudden solitude had allowed that feeling to finally expand and occupy everything.
So when he said, “We must have a child, like Tommaso and Corinne”—not “I’d like” or “We could,” but “We must,” as if there were no other way—when he said that I was sure he was right, and I replied: “We will.”
“Tonight?”
“Right now.”
But several more minutes passed before we made up our minds to move, to walk into the house and go upstairs. And in that silent interlude under the holly oak, we envisioned the image of a little girl, our little girl—who knows why a girl—dancing a few steps away from us, picking a dandelion from the ephemeral grass and
offering it to us. It was nothing but a fantasy and we didn’t admit it to each other, not even later, but I was certain then, as I am certain today, that we saw her vividly before us, and that our visions were identical. Because at that time that kind of thing happened between Bern and me: we used fewer and fewer words, but we were still able to recognize the visible and, as if by tacit accord, even conceive of the invisible.
4.
I found Bern painting a picture on one of the outer walls of the house, the one facing north. Dark brushstrokes in a glossy brown left over from restoring the doors; the paint stood out on the rough whitewashed surface. Mornings were already cold, with lots of dew. I pulled the collar of my sweater up over my chin.
“Yep, it’s a penis,” he confirmed without turning around.
“So it seems,” I said, trying not to look surprised. “A huge penis on the wall of the house. The neighbors will love it.”
“In Tibet it’s considered auspicious.”
Only then did I notice the illustrated book resting on the ground, no doubt borrowed from the Ostuni library, where Bern sometimes disappeared for entire afternoons. He was copying the image from there.
I went closer, to compare the photograph with the result. Bern’s version was too simplistic, it looked more like a kid’s vulgar vandalism than it did the original.
“So we’re back to magical thinking?” I asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.
He gave a lopsided smile. “I told myself it doesn’t hurt to try. We’ll attract some benevolent spirit. For our cause.”
Our cause: the phantom daughter who by then had taken over every conversation, every thought and desire. It had been almost two years since the afternoon when we’d first imagined her, when we’d pursued her like a hallucination, up the stairs and into our bed to make her real.
There was already a room prepared for her upstairs, the room that had once been Tommaso and Corinne’s, and before that, Cesare and Floriana’s. Bern had carved a cradle from the stump of an olive tree, but the cradle stood empty, in the center of a room just as bare.
“You could help me,” he said. “You’re better at drawing than I am.”
I took the can of paint and the brush and tried to correct the outlines. Bern looked on over my shoulder.
“That’s much better,” he said finally.
“Who knows what people will think.”
“What they think doesn’t matter. And besides, who? Nobody ever comes here.”
It was true. Not even Tommaso and Corinne came anymore. Since they’d had Ada, they lived barricaded in the attic financed by her father, exhausted by getting up at night but content as could be. We went to visit them often enough, but less and less willingly since our failure had become a chronic disorder. Even when we decided not to drive up to Taranto and endure the sting of envy, Ada’s accomplishments were reported to us by phone. Ada who stood up, holding on to the bars of her crib. Ada who waved her hand to say ciao. Ada who was getting her baby teeth.
Danco and Giuliana appeared less and less frequently as well. So there we were, Bern and I, property owners now, still young but extremely disheartened, worshipping a pagan totem.
I said: “Maybe it will work.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Or maybe it might be time to see a doctor, Bern.”
He whirled around to face me. “A doctor, what for?”
“Maybe there’s a problem. With me.”
“There is no problem. We just have to keep trying.”
He took me by the hand and we went into the house. I made us some breakfast. In November there were the starlings; they made raids on the olive trees. We heard the shot of a hunter in the distance. From the window, I saw the black formation of birds fan out for a few seconds, startled, then regroup as if nothing had happened.
* * *
—
THE PAINTING on the wall did not help. My periods kept coming with ruthless punctuality, and each time Bern was more disappointed and wrought up. I got to the point of hiding the tampons from him, but he found out anyway when he pressed his chest to my back at night to make another attempt. We can’t, I’d tell him without turning around; then he’d slump back on the mattress and begin calculating how many days it would be before we could try again.
Sex was the thing that changed the most. Before, we were wild savages, whereas now Bern’s thrusts had a martial regularity, as if he were searching for an exact spot inside me. Before, even after he came, his fingers didn’t stop until my stomach started jerking uncontrollably, whereas now he withdrew immediately, as if he didn’t want to disturb the biological process that was under way. Before, we’d lie beside each other, exhausted and drained, whereas now he made me keep my pelvis elevated for ten minutes. He timed them on the clock.
We did not know a specialist who could help us, so we went to the bar in Speziale to consult the telephone directory. We copied down the numbers of four or five gynecologists near Brindisi, glancing around as we did so, as if everyone there could tell what we were doing.
We went back to the masseria to make the call. Bern let me choose among the names. Walking in circles between the holly oak and the house, I explained our situation to the doctor, the months of failed attempts. Spoken aloud, the fears that until now had remained vague suddenly became concrete. The doctor asked me questions, questions that in the following weeks would become obvious, but that during that first conversation sounded like accusations: our ages (twenty-seven and twenty-eight), previous illnesses (none), the characteristics of my cycle (regular, heavy), the presence of abnormal bleeding (none), when we had stopped using contraception (about two years ago), and what strange reason had made us wait all that time to call.
In any case, the doctor said finally, he didn’t treat fertility; he had me take down the number of one of his colleagues, a Dr. Sanfelice, not in Brindisi, in Francavilla Fontana; we could say he recommended us.
So I repeated the call from the beginning, trying to sound more confident though I was slowly losing my courage to go through with this. The same questions and the same answers, in nearly the same order, as I kept walking between the holly oak and the house, pivoting around Bern, who registered every word, silently encouraging me.
The next day we were in Dr. Sanfelice’s waiting room, properly dressed, as if a good result depended on first impressions. On the wall hung a print of the female reproductive system, with black lines connecting the organs to their names. There were two other couples, only one with a big belly. Both women gave me empathetic smiles, maybe they could tell I was there for the first time.
Sanfelice had me lie down on the examining table, slipped on a latex glove, and told me to relax as he gave me a little slap on the buttock. As he moved the probe, he spoke incessantly. The only information about us that he’d noted, or maybe the only one that intrigued him, was that we lived in the country. He had a house outside the city himself, he said, then went on to talk about oil pressing.
When we were sitting in front of his desk again, he asked about the frequency of our relations. “You have no idea how many couples come here saying: Doctor, we’ve been trying for a year. And when I ask: How many times a year? They tell me: At least five or six!”
He laughed, as if at the punch line of a joke, but he composed himself almost immediately, maybe because we’d remained serious.
“I ask partly because, at first glance, everything seems to be in order with the lady.”
“Every day,” Bern said.
“Every day?” The doctor’s eyes widened. “For more than a year?”
“Yes.”
Sanfelice frowned. He toyed with a magnifying glass, then put it back in its place. He turned to me. “Then we should investigate more thoroughly.”
“What could it be?” Bern asked.
“Your sperm could be slow or meager, or even slow and meager. It
could be your wife’s ovaries, even if there are no fibroids. Endometriosis, at worst. But it’s not worth talking about until we’ve done a nice round of tests.”
He began filling out the authorizations, going on for quite some time. Bern stared at the doctor’s hands.
“Come back when you have everything,” he said, handing me the forms. “I haven’t written one for a spermiogram because that can be done here at our office. The collection is on Tuesday, here are the instructions,” he said, handing us another preprinted sheet. “It costs one hundred and twenty euros. Check around if you like, but you won’t find a better price elsewhere.”
“Can this be resolved, Doctor?” Bern asked when we were already standing.
“Of course it can be resolved. We’re in the twenty-first century. There’s almost nothing that medicine can’t do anymore!”
Along the brightly lit streets of Francavilla’s center, people were strolling in and out of shops, ducking into bars for the aperitivo hour. A stall was selling candied orange peels; I asked Bern to buy a bag, but he said: “Let’s go to a restaurant!”
We had never been to one by ourselves, he and I. A strange anxiety came over me, as if I weren’t ready.
“We have all those tests to pay for.”
“But didn’t you hear what Sanfelice said? There’s nothing that can’t be done. Soon we’ll have our baby girl. We have to celebrate! I should have listened to you and come here sooner. You pick a place.”
I spun around in the middle of the piazza, as amazed as a young girl seeing the city, the vivid streetlights, and the baroque buildings for the first time.
“That one.” I pointed.
I clung to his arm, ecstatic, as though we were on the first date we’d never had. I let him sweep me into the restaurant. We were just another couple in love, like any others, at least for that evening.
* * *
—
THE RESULT of all the expensive tests was: absolutely nothing. There was nothing wrong with his sperm count. And there was nothing wrong, at least so it appeared, with my levels of progesterone and prolactin and estradiol, with the LH, the TSH, the FSH, all those acronyms whose meanings were still unknown to me. Yet I did not get pregnant. As if something—which was what Dr. Sanfelice thought, though he didn’t dare suggest it—wasn’t working with Bern and me together.
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