Heaven and Earth

by Paolo Giordano

  As we went up the wide, tree-lined avenue, the car radio played a song I knew. I hummed a few bars in a low voice.

  “What is it?” Bern asked.

  “Roxette. ‘Joyride.’ I used to listen to it when I was a kid.”

  The driver caught something, because he said, “Roxette, yeah! You like music nineties?”

  I said yes, I liked it, but mainly not to dampen his enthusiasm.

  “I also,” he said, his limpid eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Listen.”

  For the rest of the drive, all the way back to Khreschatyk Street, he chose one song after another for me, each time looking for me to confirm that I liked it: “Don’t Speak,” then “Killing Me Softly,” then “Wonderwall.” I looked out the window; the sun had set quite a while ago, the areas of the sidewalk away from the streetlamps remained in the dark.

  In front of the hotel entrance, Nastja said, “Tomorrow money, remember. In euro cash.”

  * * *

  —

  A STORK PERCHED above the doors of the clinic. It was stone, but so well carved that at first I mistook it for a real one. Sanfelice had chosen to proceed in alphabetical order according to the surnames of the women, and we were the third couple.

  We found ourselves in a modern space, a taste of the future in the middle of a neighborhood where everything else looked old and worn. Nastja held me by the arm, as if I might escape. Before I stepped past the doormat, she handed me two plastic bags.

  “For shoes. You, too,” she told Bern who was following us in silence. She was treating him more brusquely than she had the day before, as if at that point he were only an impediment.

  I covered my shoes with the blue plastic. That sanitary precaution should have reassured me, but instead my tension mounted progressively as I went up the shiny polished stairs, as Bern was diverted to another corridor with no time for us to say goodbye, and as I filled out the preprinted forms, written in an English full of grammatical errors, requiring my consent for freezing the embryos and for disposing of them after ten years.

  Then I was lying in an operating room equipped with machinery and lamps, the walls covered with tiles up to the ceiling. On one side was Dr. Fedecko, extraordinarily tall, with a blond mustache, and on the other side Sanfelice, with his usual cheerful air, though more subdued than usual.

  “We have competitive-quality blastocysts,” he said, “all 3AA. Those of the lady before were only B, just for comparison.”

  In the meantime, Fedecko advanced with the cannula, looking for the least resistant path to enter me, more delicate than Sanfelice had been during the trial run. It was over in an instant. The doctors complimented me, though I wasn’t sure for what. I had simply lain still, nothing more, and everything that had ensued didn’t seem to really concern me, or it concerned me only indirectly.

  I was brought to another room, smaller, with a large window. I waited for what seemed like a very long time. I could see the snow-covered hill, and in the center of that whiteness the golden spires of Pecer’ska Lavra. We had visited it the day before, but it was more enthralling seen like this, from afar, like a mirage.

  I felt cold. And where was Bern? Suddenly I convinced myself that he was no longer in the building, maybe not even in the city, and everything became distant, unreachable, like the miniature of the Lavra on the hill.

  Then the door swung open. Sanfelice and Dr. Fedecko entered along with two nurses and, behind them, Bern. He didn’t dare approach the bed, except after we were left to ourselves. Then he helped me get up and put on the clothes that a supernatural hand had transferred from the room where I had taken them off to the closet in this room.

  With no one to escort us anymore, we made our way alone through a maze of corridors. We went down more stairs and found ourselves in the lobby. Nastja was there. She bent down to remove the nylon shoe covers I again had on my feet, and pointed to the car waiting for us outside.

  * * *

  —

  THE VEGETATION at the masseria was dozing thanks to winter. Bern and I were as suspended as the nature around us. He studied me silently, looking for any change in my body, in my metabolism, in my sleep. I quarreled with him about the littlest things—for example, over the fact that he hadn’t swept the pavement in the yard and the leaves had blocked the drain. Actually, I wanted to shout at him to stop following me around, stop asking me how I felt, stop boring into me with his eyes wherever I went! The truth was that I felt exactly as I had before, only more listless, more irritable.

  So I really wasn’t surprised when Sanfelice, after circling the intrauterine probe around and consulting the monitor full of jumbled shadows, announced that there was nothing, nothing that was moving.

  “What a shame. All those fantastic blastocysts. However, the next trip is in March.”

  Bern had not accompanied me to the visit. “Let’s act as if it’s a day like any other day,” he’d said.

  When I phoned him, he was at the farmers’ market in Martina Franca. He left me on hold while he finished serving a customer. I listened to the exchange between them, then I pictured him crouching down, hiding under the table to gain some privacy. Conspiring had become a habit for both of us.

  “Well?” he said in a low voice.

  I told him the results without preamble, almost brutally. Then, immediately remorseful, I added: “I’m very sorry for you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, but he was breathing hard.

  “I’m sorry for you,” I repeated.

  “Why are you saying that? Why do you feel sorry for me?”

  “I only just realized it. But it’s true. I feel sorrier for you than for myself.”

  “You don’t think that, Teresa. You’re just upset. You don’t really think that.”

  “You should find another woman, Bern. One who functions better.”

  It was during the ensuing interval of silence that I realized I was right. Before Bern could say it wasn’t true, that I shouldn’t talk that way, that I was only being silly. A very brief pause, no more than a split second’s hesitation, the time needed to take a slightly deeper breath. He was considering the possibility that I had offered him. For a moment he weighed and compared two impossible choices: his desire for me and his heart-wrenching yearning for a child. This too could happen. It could be that in life, irreconcilable desires develop in people. It wasn’t fair but it couldn’t be avoided, and it had happened to us.

  His uncertainty told me which of the two desires had prevailed, though he now denied it as forcefully as a telephone conversation in the middle of the market allowed him to. But I wasn’t angry with him. On the contrary, I felt calm, as lucid as I’d been the night of the cramps. In fact, I didn’t feel anything anymore.

  I said: “Maybe you don’t realize it now. But in five years, or ten or twenty, it doesn’t matter how long, sooner or later you’ll realize what I took from you and you will hate me for it. For having ruined your life.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Teresa. It’s the disappointment talking for you. Go home now. Go home and rest. We’ll make another trip, another attempt.”

  “No, Bern. There won’t be another trip. We’ve gone far enough. And it wouldn’t do any good. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.”

  I could see him, Bern, more and more huddled under the table, the din of the market around him.

  “We’re married, Teresa.”

  He affirmed it sternly, as if that were enough to put an end to the discussion. It wouldn’t have worked, not like this. Bern would have insisted, pleaded if necessary, then we would have gone home and he would have patched things up with his ready phrases, one by one. The gleam of his black eyes would have won me over in the end, and we would have started all over again. Another absurd hunt for money, another round of treatments, another trip in vain to the most inhospitable place on earth, then the disappo
intment and so on, ad infinitum, until it destroyed us both.

  I recalled the expressionless face of the woman in the armchair at the hotel in Kiev, the doggedness that had transformed her year after year. I did not want to end up that way. We were still young.

  I said: “We made a mistake.”

  “Stop that!”

  Strange, the reversal of roles between us, I hadn’t foreseen it. I hadn’t foreseen any of this. From the beginning I had been the one prepared to be abandoned; I had loved him from a distance, miles away, like a fool, while he had gotten someone else in trouble. And maybe it was because of the repressed memory of that summer, left unspoken, that I now knew what to do, how to halt the spiral into which we’d been driven, a spiral triggered the moment when Tommaso and Corinne had told us about their baby and we had begun to fantasize about ours. Yes, there was only one way to give Bern back his freedom and regain mine.

  “There’s someone else,” I said.

  “Someone else?” he repeated, practically whispering.

  I knew him well enough to know that this was the only way to go. I was lucid and self-possessed. I was worn out and full of rage and my heart was broken. I would not stop.

  “Yes. Another man. For me.”

  “You’re lying.”

  I stopped answering, because if I had, he would have known.

  Then his voice underwent a transformation. For a few seconds Bern became someone else, someone I had never known, someone furious.

  “It’s him, isn’t it? Is it him, Teresa? Tell me, is it him?” he shouted.

  “It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  Those were the last words we spoke to each other, for a long time. “It doesn’t matter who it is.” In fact, those were almost the final words of our brief, unfortunate, and nonetheless indelible marriage.

  * * *

  —

  I DID NOT go back to the masseria. I drove around aimlessly until after sunset. Later I would not be able to reconstruct my route through the outskirts of Francavilla, then through the maze of dirt country roads that sometimes ended abruptly at a gate, with guard dogs rushing to the fence, barking as though possessed.

  I went back to Speziale, but I could not go home. I had a feeling that Bern was there, waiting to see with his own eyes if what I had told him on the phone was true, waiting to interrogate my body instead of my voice.

  Only by spending the night away would the nonexistent betrayal that I had confessed assume solidity.

  It’s him, isn’t it?

  Before reaching the dirt track to the masseria, I turned into my grandmother’s villa. I rang and waited for the electric gate to swing open, the flashing light at the top intermittently revealing the countryside.

  Riccardo came toward me, wearing a tracksuit. I asked him if I could stay there for the night, in the lodge. It was a brazen, almost ridiculous request, but I must have looked so distraught that he said: “Of course, but it’s freezing cold in the lodge.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “The guest room is free. Come inside. I’ll go get you some sheets.”

  The guest room was my old room. After he handed me some sheets and towels, and after I refused his offer to eat something, Riccardo closed the door, wishing me good night, sensing that in another moment his presence would have been intolerable to me.

  And so, there I was back where I had started, in the room of my childhood, the villa dark for hours by now and me still awake, no sign of sleep, only exhaustion, that edgy exhaustion that has already ruled out any possibility of sleep. Lying in the bed where it had all begun.

  A glow filtered through the shutters. The rising moon, I thought. But it couldn’t be the moon, because it was a flickering light. I got out of bed and threw open the window, letting the cold air hit me, and I saw the blaze, the changing glimmers of the flames and the column of smoke rising straight up in the absence of wind before dissolving in the black sky, right where the masseria was. Neither the sound nor the smell of the fire reached me, there was only that slash of light among the treetops.

  My first instinct was to rush over there, but it took only a moment to realize that it was only a signal, an ultimate appeal launched by Bern against the night, so that I would run to where he was and take back what I had said on the phone. A pyre to say: As long as it burns, I will wait here, ready to believe whatever you say, ready to forget. But when the flames have died and the embers are cold, I won’t be here anymore, and what you said will be true forever.

  I wondered what he had set fire to, whether it was the tool shed, the greenhouse, or the house itself with everything that it contained, mine and his. The next day I would discover that he had burned the woodpile, the entire reserve of firewood. But in my old room at the villa I didn’t know it yet. At that moment I could only go on watching, my feet rooted to the icy stone floor; I did not reach for the blanket on the bed and wrap it around my shoulders, I just watched, until the flames diminished and finally, at dawn, died out completely.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS after our abrupt and shocking separation, I returned to Turin. I felt that my time at Speziale had ended. Now that I was too old, I would continue everything that I had abandoned when I was still too young.

  I didn’t even stick it out a month, however. The cold, efficient ways of the city, the rain followed by the luminous, heart-wrenching days of March, but above all my parents’ wary forbearance, their tacit satisfaction over the failure, left my nerves constantly on edge. By then my life was in Puglia, so I went back. Not with the trepidation I’d had when I was a girl or with the relief of the last few years, but with a tenuous resignation, as if by that time I had no alternative. I was certain that I would not find Bern there, and in fact I didn’t.

  At times I didn’t sleep because I was afraid. My head was filled with the macabre stories that I had heard about that countryside over time: a man had been attacked in his home, hands and feet tied, and tortured for hours with a red-hot iron. They were nothing more than old wives’ tales of course, but in the darkness and the silence I let myself imagine things. One night I heard something metallic slamming about outside, very close to the house. I opened the door, trembling. A dog had his snout in the overturned garbage pail and was rummaging through it; he stared at me for a few seconds before trotting away.

  But eventually I got used to it. After Danco and the others left, I felt it had all been a slow preparation for solitude, which was now complete. I accepted the simple comfort that nature was able to offer me. To lessen the feeling of loneliness at least a little, I bought a goat, which I let wander freely around the property. I started going to town more often and joined the parish choir and an amateur volleyball team at the recreational club. At the masseria, I had a phone line and an internet connection put in. The company’s technician, a young man with long hair tied back in a ponytail, walked around the grounds holding up a metal pole in an attempt to link to the best cell, as if it were a divining rod. He set up the antenna and was amazed at my utter incompetence where computers were concerned. He gave me the necessary instructions and his business card, just in case.

  One of my grandmother’s former students, who now taught at the elementary school, came up with the idea of arranging guided tours of the masseria. The project that we had initiated there was vital, she said, and I could convey a respect for tradition and for the land. I was skeptical at first, since I had no experience with classes and I did not feel authorized to talk about the principles that we applied at the masseria; they were Bern’s and Danco’s, I had merely imitated them. But it turned out to be easier than I thought. I found myself teaching how mulching enabled us to save as much as ninety percent of the water, and why it was therefore crucial. I explained to the children why a spiral vegetable garden was more efficient than the rectangular ones they were used to and made up contests in which they had to recogniz
e the aromatic herbs blindfolded, by touching or sniffing them. I let them sow seeds and water the plants, and when I wanted to stir them up, I showed them how the compost toilet worked, how it served to fertilize the soil.

  As for Bern, I knew that he had been drifting for a while, but that he was now living in an apartment in Taranto with Tommaso, after Tommaso and Corinne split up. It was Danco who told me. I didn’t hear from any of them anymore, but he showed up at the masseria one day, sent by Bern himself, with a list of things to take.

  “He could have come himself,” I blurted.

  “After what you did to him?”

  Perhaps he realized how tactless he’d been, because he added: “Anyway, it’s none of my business.”

  He moved brazenly through the rooms, as if the place still belonged to him. He consulted the sheet of paper with Bern’s handwriting.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He’s doing okay.”

  Knowing he was all right should have comforted me, but I wasn’t capable of such generosity. I sat down at the kitchen table, suddenly weary, watching Danco rummage through the drawers.

  “Bern is made for lofty ambitions,” he said at one point. “None of us has the right to restrict him.”

  “Is that what you think I did? Restrict him?”

  Danco shrugged. “I’m just saying that before you showed up at the masseria we had plans. And now we can resume them.”

  “And what plans would they be? I’m curious. Liberating the cows? The sheep?”

  He turned to look at me. “There is something more important than ourselves, Teresa. You’ve always been a slave to your idea of happiness.”

  But I wasn’t willing to put up with his lectures, not anymore.

  “And these plans of yours, do you realize them with the money from my grandmother’s house? Don’t touch that coffeepot, put it down! I was the one who bought it, it’s mine. If Bern put it on the list, he was mistaken.”