Heaven and Earth

by Paolo Giordano

  “I spoke to Sanfelice,” he said. “You have to discontinue the treatment immediately.”

  He couldn’t look at me.

  “There are still six days left.”

  “You have to discontinue it,” he repeated.

  “I made too much of it last night. I’m sorry. But I’ll do better now, I’m sure of it.”

  Bern shook his head. His entire universe had come crashing down. I looked at him, his eyelids reddened by lack of sleep, his beard so long it curled, and the sense of defeat that seemed to weigh so heavily on him.

  All that remained of the night’s ordeal was a strange lucidity. Maybe I had dreamed something, though I could only dimly remember it. “You’re not the problem,” I said.

  He didn’t turn to look at me. But his shoulders stiffened for a moment.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “There’s another solution,” he interrupted me. “Sanfelice wants to explain it to us face-to-face. Get dressed, we’re going to see him.”

  * * *

  —

  “I HAVE COLLABORATED with this clinic for many years,” the doctor told us. “It’s in Kiev. Have you ever been there? A delightful city, where everything is very inexpensive.”

  He waited for us to shake our heads.

  Kiev.

  “I and my colleague there, Dr. Fedecko, who is very highly regarded in the fertility field, take on situations, how to put it . . . situations that traditional assisted fertilization cannot resolve. And at this point I would say that is the case here, despite your young age. It may be that the lady is afflicted with empty follicle syndrome. It is somewhat unusual, to be truthful, but not extremely rare. And in any case, we cannot ascertain it because she does not seem to tolerate the ovarian stimulation. Am I correct?”

  He looked at me intently, as if he were expecting a disavowal just then, an admission that the agony of the night before had been an exaggeration, an act.

  “Right,” he continued. “We cannot afford the risk of hyperstimulation. So the only remaining solution is egg donation.”

  “Meaning the child will not be mine,” I said softly.

  Bern didn’t understand. He looked at me, then at Sanfelice, then back to me. He had not read all the things that I had read in the past few weeks. The illusion persisted in him that this process was nothing but a way to hasten what would happen in any case. Innocuous, like his vitamins.

  “Such nonsense, Teresa,” Sanfelice said, joining his hands. “That’s what everyone thinks at first. Do you have any idea how many of the children you see around have been conceived that way? Go ask their mothers if they aren’t their children.”

  He leaned toward me.

  “Children belong to those who carry them in their wombs. To those who give birth to them and then raise them. Do you know what the most recent studies say? We’re talking about American studies, published in The Lancet. They say that the fetus assumes an unimaginable number of the pregnant woman’s traits, even if it does not share her genetic patrimony. Unimaginable.”

  “Why wouldn’t it share the genetic patrimony?” asked Bern, who was increasingly bewildered.

  But neither Sanfelice nor I answered him. I was still caught up in that word, “pregnant.”

  “Do you know what happens in fact? Women come back here years later just to tell me: Doctor, my son looks like me. He looks more like me than like his father. And I say: But why does that surprise you? Didn’t I promise you he would? For the donors we respect all the primary parameters: height, eye and hair color. The young woman will likely be a kind of dead ringer, even if you will never see each other. If instead you prefer a child with red hair or one who will be very tall, that’s fine too, we’ll look for a suitable donor. One of my patients insisted on having a mulatto baby and we satisfied her. If you could see the little girl, with that caffelatte complexion! She’s already going to school.”

  Selected as though from a catalog, I thought.

  Sanfelice spoke to Bern again. “Then too, the Ukrainian women are a treat for the eyes. Everyone thinks immediately ‘Russian,’ but it’s not so. They don’t have those Slavic traits, they’re much more similar to us.”

  He leaned back in his chair, waiting for our questions. But we were both too shaken to speak, so it was he who once again broke the silence: “There won’t be a religious problem, I hope. Because I have excellent reasons to present to you in that case as well. For one thing, Orthodox Jews from Israel come to Fedecko’s clinic. And many Muslims. You can’t imagine the fertility problems they have over there.”

  “Is it illegal?” I asked.

  Sanfelice pouted.

  “What can I say? It takes time to change people’s ideas, especially here. If you’re asking me what could happen once you have a beautiful, healthy embryo implanted in your uterus, whether someone could come and claim it, then the answer is no. Everything that grows in your belly is yours. And by that time the trip to Kiev will have been forgotten. Except when you feel like returning to me to have another one.”

  He turned from side to side in his swivel chair, his arms outspread.

  “Can you imagine when all this didn’t exist? We live in an age of infinite possibilities!”

  After that he began a detailed explanation of the procedure and timing, and the new hormonal regimen, much milder than the previous one, “a piece of cake.” The great advantage was that now I only had to prepare myself to be an “envelope.”

  An envelope.

  I again lost the thread of what he was saying. What did I know about Ukraine? Only the Chernobyl disaster, the stories from my mother, who had stopped buying fresh milk because people said the cows were radioactive. I imagined abandoned gray villages, annihilated grain fields under a leaden sky.

  Bern had squirmed forward in his chair to lean toward Sanfelice, drawn by the magnet of his knowledge. He soaked up the man’s words as if they were magic formulas.

  “We make every effort to keep costs to a minimum,” the doctor finally said. “Eight thousand euros is all-inclusive. Plus the cost of the flights and the hotel, of course.”

  But eight thousand euros was much more than we had set aside. Our last savings had gone in the failed attempt at insemination. Now we barely had a thousand.

  Bern and I looked at each other for the first time since the start of the visit. And from that moment on our anxiety was focused elsewhere, once again on how to get the money, almost as if the decision itself, whether to have the donor egg implanted or not, whether it was right or immoral and unprincipled, wasn’t really relevant. It wasn’t even worth thinking about. After all, what other choice did we have?

  Eight thousand euros. Adding the expense of airline tickets, hotel, and meals in Kiev, the cost would be close to ten thousand. There was no way to quickly scrape together such a sum. With the very thin margins of what we sold at the market it would take us two, maybe three years; and there were the contingencies to consider, everything that was constantly breaking down at the masseria, not to mention the crops that could be wiped out overnight by hail, frost, or moles.

  The doctor said that we were now in the twenty-first century, the age of infinite possibilities, when men and women with lab coats and sterile gloves in silent rooms, in Kiev, could take care of what we were not able to do. But Bern and I were still living in an era much further back; we were at the mercy of the sun and the rain and the seasons.

  We knew of a money lender in Pezze di Greco, but he had the reputation of being a shark. We dropped that idea.

  Without telling Bern, I phoned my father. I was always the one to call, though I did so rarely. We were speaking to each other again, but he still acted as if I were living in an inaccessible corner of the world. There was a flicker of surprise in his voice, though he soon reverted to his usual terseness.

  “If you could lend me some money,” I sa
id without beating around the bush, “I’ll be able to pay it all back after the olive harvest.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Ten thousand euros. We have to fix the roof.”

  I was surprised at how little it cost me to lie to him. He sighed into the phone.

  “There’s your college tuition to pay,” he said. “The bill was sent to the house.”

  “You don’t have to pay my college tuition.”

  I felt slightly breathless. My body hadn’t completely recovered from the hormonal treatment.

  “We need the money for the roof now, Dad.”

  “Your grandmother’s house had a nice solid roof.”

  “I’m sorry, I already told you.”

  “Don’t expect a cent from me. And don’t you dare ask your mother. I’d hear about it, in any case.”

  Then he hung up. I stood still for a few seconds, my hand holding the phone uselessly to my ear. I had the bizarre sensation that the land around the masseria had suddenly expanded hundreds of miles in every direction, leaving Bern and me alone in the middle of a deserted plain.

  It was my disappointment that made me confess what I had tried to do. We were in bed. Bern did not get angry as I’d feared; he didn’t say the unkind words about my father that I’d expected. Instead he was silent, his eyes narrowed to focus on an idea that became gradually more defined. Then he smiled tightly. In a way, I was the one who gave him the idea.

  “Your parents are respectable people,” he said. “They follow conventions. All we have to do is come up with a situation that they can’t turn away from, out of decency.”

  “Is there one?”

  “Of course there is. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “Marry me, Teresa.”

  And even in that absurd context, even in the preoccupied way Bern pronounced those vital words, as if he wasn’t considering their meaning at all but something much more important that would come from it, the effect on me was an intense tingling in my cheeks that quickly spread throughout my body.

  “We’ve always said that marriage is a social bond, Bern. We talked about it with Danco.”

  I was afraid the conventional girl in me would spring out from behind that show of composure, as if Danco were physically present in the room, analyzing the traces of foolish emotion that transformed my expression.

  Bern slid out from the sheets and knelt on the bed, half naked as he was, his hair disheveled.

  “If we get married, they’ll be forced to give us a present.”

  “You want to turn our wedding into a fundraiser?”

  “It will be a celebration, Teresa! Here. All the trees bedecked with white ribbons. And afterward we can go to Kiev. Up you go! Get up, quick!”

  I pushed the sheet aside and stood up on the mattress. Bern was on his knees in front of me. Looking down on him, his close-set eyes had an even greater effect on me; I thought they’d been purposely created that way so he could pronounce the words that followed: “Teresa Gasparro, will you be my wife?”

  I grabbed his head and pulled him to me, his ear pressed against my navel, so that he could hear the answer that had been lodged there for years, could hear it well up from the cavern where it had been waiting all that time: More than anything in the world, yes.

  * * *

  —

  THE FACT THAT it was just an expedient, a performance, a scam, didn’t matter. I believed in that wedding with every ounce of faith in me. The promise that we’d exchanged was enough to eclipse even the thought of the terrifying trip to Kiev waiting in the background. I didn’t dwell on it, I did everything I could to put it out of my mind. For the first time in months, I was happy again.

  The first list of invitees did not exceed fifty people. Not enough, even supposing an extraordinary generosity on their part. We began to extend it, first including relationships that had weakened, then those virtually forgotten. It still wasn’t enough. The list was expanded, mainly from my side. I’d rack my brains for a name and suggest it to Bern: “The Varettos.”

  “Who are . . . ?”

  “Friends of my parents’. They came to dinner every now and then. And one year I went to summer camp with the daughter. Ginevra. Or maybe Benedetta.”

  “Then let’s add her, too. Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “We’ll put ‘and guest.’”

  I doubted it would work, but Bern seemed sure of it: “Everyone loves parties. Weddings especially.”

  And just as he had predicted, the support was astounding. Of the nearly two hundred people who’d been invited, almost a hundred and fifty replied that they would come, even though the wedding would take place so far away, and even though it was such short notice. So soon, in September? Yes, we had acted on impulse. Occasionally they did not conceal their surprise, we hadn’t seen each other in so long . . . But I thought of you often over the years, and saying so, I almost convinced myself that it was true. They were moved. Will it be in a church? No, we decided on a civil ceremony, Bern and I are a little skeptical about religion.

  Then I touched on the most delicate topic: we chose to forgo gifts, we don’t really need anything, but we dream of taking a trip, far away, we haven’t yet made up our minds exactly where. There will be an amphora in which to leave whatever you’d like.

  We started extolling the appeal of the Apulian countryside, the light and the sea in the month of September. On that score at least we weren’t lying.

  Bern agreed to calling Cesare, Floriana, and Nicola as well, without protest, as if any resentment were suddenly forgotten.

  “There’s also our neighbor,” Bern said when we had exhausted all our ideas, “the guy who bought the villa.”

  “The architect? I never saw him again after that.”

  “Then go pay him a visit.”

  So I picked some vegetables, and with a full basket walked over to the entrance to the villa.

  The paved patio area had been enlarged and every tree was surrounded by a flower bed. The caretaker’s lodge was unrecognizable, enclosed by a long window that was dazzling in the afternoon sun. No more damp patches, no more peeling. I wondered if my grandmother would have liked it. A wall about six feet high had been erected around the courtyard, a kind of fortification, which enclosed the pool and kept out the fields.

  “It’s because in the evening I get a little scared,” the architect said, joining me out there. “I’m impressionable.”

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “On the contrary. I was hoping that sooner or later you would come and see what I’ve done here. Teresa, isn’t it? I’m Riccardo.”

  “I remember.”

  I handed him the basket of vegetables. The gift seemed foolish and inappropriate for someone who lived there, but Riccardo marveled at it. He set it down on a precise spot on the pavement, in the shade, and photographed it with his phone, searching awhile for the best angle.

  “It’s a perfect color composition,” he said, “I’ll use it for my blog.”

  “You can also eat them, afterward.”

  “You’re right. Of course.”

  He offered me a tour of the interior, and eventually the initial awkwardness wore off. The rooms were still the same, but whereas before there was an accumulation of old furniture and other objects, now the space was mostly empty. I was especially struck by the absence of the floral sofa from which Nonna imposed her stillness on all the rest.

  “I came to invite you to my wedding,” I said when we returned to where we’d started.

  “Your wedding? Really?”

  “You’re our neighbor, after all.”

  He said he would think about it, then corrected himself, adding that he was flattered and would certainly do his best to attend. I walked back through the courtyard. I hadn’t talked to him about the gift, about t
he trip to an undecided destination, or about the amphora. So, in a way, my mission had failed. But Riccardo seemed so sincere, so grateful for my visit, that I hadn’t felt like conning him.

  Outside the gate I broke off two blades of grass and on the way home to the masseria I tried to braid them into a small crown, recalling the sequence of moves that Floriana and the boys had taught me. But I lost interest before I was able to do it.

  * * *

  —

  BERN HAD ALSO correctly predicted the reaction of my parents. Though on the phone they hadn’t had the presence of mind to show they were happy, they must have realized soon afterward that, once again, they could not stand in my way. My mother called back half an hour after the first conversation and was even a little moved.

  “We’ll go and pick out the dress together,” she said, “don’t even try to refuse. And I have no intention of buying it down there. Your father has already gone out to buy you a plane ticket.”

  Those words did nothing but reaffirm her contempt for the life I had chosen, for the place that she had detested long before I went to live there, but at that moment her voice and her peremptory tone were comforting. I remained silent so she wouldn’t notice my weakness.

  She added: “He can come too, if he’d like. But obviously he won’t be able to see the dress. It’s bad luck.”

  Oh, Mom, if you only knew how unlucky we already are! How it’s bad luck that’s forcing us to do this! My heart was thumping, longing to tell her everything. But one of the first decisions that Bern and I had made regarding the trip to Kiev was absolute secrecy. If even one single person besides us and Sanfelice were to know the truth, our daughter would always be only partly ours.

  I didn’t ask Bern to come with me to Turin. I was afraid that, if he did, I wouldn’t be able to cope with his presence on top of that of my parents.

  The fabric of the dress was so fine and delicate that when I tried it on I was careful not to touch it with my fingers, for fear of leaving fingerprints. It had an elegant crisscrossed cummerbund in front, whose bands joined to form a bow behind. Without a wrap, my back would be essentially bare.