He put it back. “Whatever you say.”
I waited for him to complete his mission. I sat there the whole time, filled with a grudging bitterness.
Before leaving, Danco waved to me. On the table under the pergola, I found the sheet with the list: written on the back was Tommaso’s new address.
* * *
—
I DIDN’T HEAR anything more about Bern for a year. Until the morning I was awakened by the crunch of tires on the dirt track; it was not long after daybreak.
I reached the door a fraction of a second after someone started knocking firmly. I didn’t ask who it was before opening; I grabbed my parka from the coat rack and put it on over my nightgown.
One of the policemen introduced himself, but I wouldn’t remember his name, maybe I didn’t even catch it. He said, “Are you Mrs. Corianò?”
“Yes.”
“The wife of Bernardo Corianò?”
I nodded again, though it was strange to hear Bern mentioned in the chill of dawn.
“Is your husband at home?”
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“You haven’t seen him today?”
“I told you, he doesn’t live here anymore.”
“And do you have any idea where he might be at this time?”
Something prompted me to say no, a vague protective instinct. Somewhere I still had the sheet with the address left by Danco, and in any case I had memorized it from looking at it so often. But I said no.
You promised to watch over one another . . . Don’t ever stop.
“Would you rather we came inside and sat down, ma’am?”
“No. I’d rather we remain standing. Right here.”
“As you prefer. I suppose you aren’t aware of what happened last night,” the policeman said, stroking his chin, as if embarrassed. “It appears your husband is involved in a murder.”
“You must be mistaken,” I said. A nervous laugh escaped me.
“There was a confrontation over cutting down some olive trees. He was among the protesters.”
The light on the countryside was whitish, opaque.
“What murder?” I asked.
“A police officer. His name was Nicola Belpanno.”
5.
Tommaso’s hands still rested on the bedspread. He looked at them without lowering his chin, moving only his eyes, as if he were seeing through them to complete the fabric’s geometric pattern of red and blue diamonds. The fingers were spread as if to say: That’s all, there’s nothing more to know, and this time I didn’t leave anything out.
So there was the story I knew and then there was another, secret one. In that secret one, a girl and her baby had died. But Bern had never spoken to me about any of this, he had kept the promise he’d made to the others until the end. Not one story, but two, I kept telling myself, both real, as real as me and Tommaso in the flesh, in this room where the radiators had been turned off for hours. Two versions like the opposite edges of a box, impossible to see together, except with the imagination. The imagination that I had stubbornly refused to use where Bern and Violalibera, their child, and the other boys were concerned. Blind and deaf, and something even more grave. Obstinate. Unshakable.
Yet I said nothing. I hadn’t even said: So that’s how it went. I’d been silent since Tommaso had described Violalibera tied to the olive tree. And now he was silent too. Five minutes had already gone by like that, maybe more.
Then he said, “Could you check on Ada?” and I was almost relieved to get up.
I approached the sofa, until I could make out the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of the blanket covering Ada’s chest. I gave it time to calm me down, then I returned to Tommaso, unsure whether to sit in that torture chair again or remain standing up.
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
He had moved his hands, those bloodless hands of an eternal child, and folded them on the turned-down sheet.
“I have another favor to ask,” he said. “Medea should be taken out.”
I looked at the dog curled up at the bottom of the bed, maybe on Tommaso’s feet.
“She seems to be snoozing blissfully.”
“I’ll go, I can do it.”
Flinging the blankets aside, he set one foot on the floor. He was wearing only white boxers under his T-shirt. The sudden sight of his naked legs threw me for a moment. He stood up but lost his balance almost immediately.
“Maybe I’d better not,” he said, lying down again. “As soon as I move, everything starts spinning again.”
Reluctantly, I took the leash that was hanging from the nightstand. Medea stood up at the faint clink of the snap hook. She jumped off the bed and barked twice before Tommaso commanded her to be quiet.
“If you see other dogs, hold on to her as tightly as you can. Even if they’re behind a fence. She can make impressive leaps.”
* * *
—
I HEADED toward the port. Medea moseyed around, sniffing every inch of the sidewalk for invisible traces of other dogs. It was the weirdest Christmas I had ever spent in my life.
What if Violalibera had wanted to keep the baby? If she hadn’t been alone that morning, if the first sip of the oleander tea had disgusted her to the point of pouring the rest in the sink? It was strange to think that your destiny depended on someone else’s decision, on that person’s moment of weakness. As disappointing as being deceived. “In thought, word, deed, or omission,” the catechism said, but nobody ever worried about the omissions. Bern and I hadn’t worried about them either.
And yet, that was the first time I hadn’t been lonely in months: as I walked to the port with Medea, without another human being around. As if now that I knew the facts, my life stretched backward and sideways, in every direction, crossing over into that of Violalibera and Bern and the other boys. As if I had finally dived into the pool with them, where they swam furtively that first night. Bern would have been able to express those thoughts better than me.
I looked at the dark blob that Medea had left in the middle of the sidewalk, then bent down and used one of the bags that were tied to the leash.
* * *
—
TOMMASO WAS DOZING sitting up. As he’d explained to me at the beginning of that night, it was the only position that didn’t cause the furniture in the room to crash down on him as soon as he closed his eyes. I touched his arm gently, but he didn’t wake up. So I shook him a little more forcefully.
“Wha-a-t?” he groaned.
“So you weren’t sure.”
“You know, even in Guantánamo they wouldn’t force someone in my condition to stay awake.”
“You weren’t sure whose it was.”
“Each of us was convinced that it was his and each of us was convinced that it wasn’t. I don’t think it can be explained any better than that.”
“And you decided to wager the paternity with stones.”
Tommaso didn’t move. These were things that had already been said; by repeating them I was merely being cruel.
“But Bern chose to lose on purpose,” I continued. “He wanted the baby for himself.”
Or her. But neither Tommaso nor I said so.
Medea was snuggling at the foot of the bed again, as if she’d never left there.
“And Violalibera didn’t say anything? Didn’t she have a right to express a preference?”
“Bern had talked to her earlier. I think. He must have.”
“Maybe any one of you would have been fine with her. What if it had been you?”
Tommaso turned his head to face me. He had never looked at me so deliberately as he spoke, it took me by surprise. Then he turned back to the bedspread, slowly, maybe because the sudden movement of his head had caused a stabbing pain.
“I imagine he had explained his intention to Vi
olalibera, that he had promised her he would make the shortest throw. They had started together and they would finish together. A pact between them, something like that. I don’t know, I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Now I think that Violalibera may have realized later that none of us was really fine with her, on the contrary. She was a very strange girl.”
Tommaso rubbed his face, then pressed his palms over his eyes.
“I want to know about the encampment, about that night,” I said.
“I wasn’t there.”
“But this is where Bern was living, right? Here with you. They came to look for him at the masseria, but he was here before he went to that place.”
“It’s two a.m., Teresa.”
But I didn’t budge and Tommaso saw that I would not let up. So after a somewhat longer silence, he surrendered: “Okay. Go get some wine, though. There should be an open bottle under the sink. Unless I’ve forgotten that I finished it.”
“Are you serious?”
“It will do me good. I’m a pro, I told you. And besides, is it or isn’t it Christmas Eve?”
I found the wine, poured him some, and went back to the bedroom.
“Remember the day of the bees?”
“What do bees have to do with anything?”
“Corinne had told me the night before. About the pregnancy. About Ada, I mean. It’s always been a habit of hers to let me in on a situation after the fact. Like the first day at the masseria, when she took my head and pressed her mouth against mine in front of the others. As if to say, Now I’m your girlfriend, they’ve all seen it.”
“I thought you were in love with Corinne.”
Tommaso took a deep breath.
“I suppose, for some, certain questions are more complicated than that. Anyway, Corinne decided to stop taking the pill. Without asking for my okay, with her usual blind, self-centered determination. But the baby, Ada, wasn’t her real objective. She had never dreamed of having children, she didn’t care about them. A pregnancy was simply the quickest way to drag me away from the masseria once and for all. I sound unfair, I know. She must have said horrible things to you about me in recent times.”
“I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“But she didn’t do it consciously. The truth is that she hated the masseria. She’d been okay with it as long as it meant spiting her father, but, once that was done, she had seen it for what it really was: harsh, squalid, grueling. I don’t mean to offend you.”
He’d begun talking somewhat guardedly, but now it seemed he wouldn’t stop.
“Then too, Corinne couldn’t stand Danco anymore: his arrogance, his tirades. But she knew I wouldn’t leave there just because she asked me to. Even though by then I considered her my fiancée for all intents and purposes and I never, or at least rarely, thought about how it had started, especially after you arrived.”
“Why me?”
With his thumbnail Tommaso followed the outline of one of the bedspread’s diamonds.
“We were all paired off at that point, right? But Corinne knew I wouldn’t agree if she asked me to leave. So she didn’t even try, she went off the pill instead, for one or two weeks, for months, who knows. As long as it took. And even when she was already five, then six days late, she didn’t say anything to me. This too I would reconstruct later on. She didn’t say a word even after the pregnancy test, when she was sure. She talked about it with her father and mother first and let them take her to the gynecologist: the three of them together, the family reunited. They also chose the apartment that would become ours. Then she announced to me that she was pregnant. She looked only slightly guilty, but otherwise ecstatic and triumphant. She said that we would leave the masseria as quickly as possible, that the apartment, on the top floor, would be ready in a few weeks, and that all we needed was some furniture, which she wanted to choose with me. Then she said: ‘You don’t have to worry, my father has taken care of everything,’ and with those words she obliged me to forget all the horrible things she had said to me about him. That night I thought I could already hear the breathing of the creature in Corinne’s belly. I kept telling myself: You have to fix everything in your memory, because this is the first of the final nights.”
Tommaso was more and more focused as he spoke, while I was thinking: This is how life chooses where to grow. It chooses without choosing, it germinates in one place and not in another, at random. Corinne and Tommaso and their dysfunctional love were fine. Bern and I weren’t.
“The following day was Sunday,” he continued. “Maybe leaving the masseria at dawn to go to work would hold off my despair, would keep me from staying in bed with Corinne and all those thoughts. The idea of sitting under the pergola, with all of you, aware of the short time I had left there, terrified me. So I jumped out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and went out. I wandered around for a while, before finding myself at the reed bed. The sun’s rays filtered through the leaves. I saw the beehives. Really I hadn’t thought about it beforehand. I didn’t seriously think about it even as I lifted one of the lids, hypnotized by the turmoil inside, by that sticky, teeming mass. The bees weren’t frightened, they just seemed a little agitated, as if startled by the shadow of a cloud. I put one hand in cautiously, then the other. They latched onto my fingers and wrists, searching for something. Abruptly I closed both fists. I don’t remember anything else, only Bern, sitting beside my bed, in the hospital, a little like you’re sitting there now, only on the other side, because I had to turn my head to the right to look at him. My whole body was throbbing, but there was no pain, and Bern’s image was out of focus because the flesh had swelled up on my cheekbones and eyelids. I tried to say something to him, but my tongue was numb and he ordered me to be still and not talk. He promised he wouldn’t leave while I slept. I didn’t want anyone else, only him. I hope my saying that doesn’t bother you.”
Did it bother me? Was I jealous as I listened to him talk? Maybe not. For the first time, maybe not. How silly, that rivalry between us. As if everyone’s heart had room for only one person, and no more. As if Bern’s heart hadn’t been a convoluted rabbit warren, full of tortuous burrows, one for each of us.
“Go on,” I said.
“The apartment had so many closets that Corinne’s and my clothes didn’t even fill half of them. For a month we did nothing but buy. She’d wait for me to come back from the Relais, then we’d walk downtown, exploring the shops. Items for the baby mostly, but also clothes for her and for me, and household appliances, because the kitchen was also half empty: a blender, a toaster, a yogurt machine, and even a popcorn maker. Corinne paid for everything, with a brand-new credit card. We were so different from how we were before, unrecognizable. And we never talked about the masseria, or about all of you. I wasn’t unhappy, not exactly. There was something liberating about being away from it, being rid of all of Danco’s restrictions. I liked seeing Corinne radiant, playful, in a way she was never able to be at the masseria.
“We chose the baby’s name and we got used to referring to her that way. Day by day she became more and more real . . . But no. That’s not entirely true,” Tommaso corrected himself. “Dismembered, that’s how I felt. Dismembered.”
It annoyed me that he kept losing himself in these digressions. It was exhaustion, that and all the alcohol.
“Because I belonged to Corinne and to Bern,” he added, then burst out laughing.
“You’ll wake Ada that way.”
“Or, rather, no,” he corrected himself again, still laughing loudly. “I belonged to Bern, period. That’s really what I mean. But I was very confused at the time. Does it upset you to hear me say it? You have every right to be upset.”
He rubbed his forehead, as if to make room for different thoughts.
“In the morning Corinne would be lying beside me, and I’d again tell myself: Stop thinking, follow the series of everyday movements that will begin i
n a moment, and you’ll see, it will be better. And on and on for the rest of your life, every day, from here on out. So that . . . well, I was counting the weeks, as I lay with my eyes wide open beside Corinne, who was pregnant. I counted the weeks remaining before the birth, and when there were five I told myself five more and then I’ll have to find another way. You see what I’m talking about? Sex, that’s what. It would all have gone well enough if it hadn’t been for that one little detail, sex. But it’s not such an insignificant detail for a couple, right? No, it isn’t. And you know something else? I spent a lot of time imagining how it was between you and Bern. It’s horrible, I know. But by now this is where we’re at. The whole truth and nothing but the truth, Teresa. I imagined how it was between you and Bern. No morbid details, that wasn’t it, even though I occasionally gave in to those as well. More than anything it was the feeling that I was missing, what it felt like to surrender to such a blissful, complete attraction. So I counted the weeks before that truce ended. Because I could love Corinne immensely, but I could only love her minus the sex. Assuming it means something. She knew it too, I think, even from our time at the masseria, but she was convinced she could change me, that she could correct me. And if she couldn’t, habitual practice at least would straighten me out. Generally Corinne was determined, there were no words or subjects that scared her, but about that, about sex, she never spoke.
“Five more weeks, I told myself, then four, then three, and at a certain point the truce would be over and one fine night we would find ourselves in that same bedroom, as before, with Corinne groping for me fearfully, saying, ‘What do you say, should we do it?’”
* * *
—
TOMMASO LOOKED AT ME. “I’m embarrassing you.”
“Not at all,” I lied.
He poured more wine, brought the glass to his lips, but didn’t drink; he held it poised for a moment, as if he were taking a breath to continue the story.
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