“And what did you say?” I asked.
Tommaso turned toward the window.
“Didn’t you say anything to him? You had already talked to Nicola at that point. You knew that he came to the masseria to spy. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Tommaso lay still, as if by not moving, my voice would pass over him without touching him. I grabbed him by the arm, but he pulled away brusquely.
“Look at me, Tommaso!”
His eyes had changed, they were open wider now, full of rage, or terror.
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
“I couldn’t be sure,” he replied in a faint voice.
I took a deep breath before hurling my accusation: “No. You didn’t tell him what you knew about Nicola because you wanted to keep him there with you. You kept quiet and let him go on believing what he already thought.”
Tommaso’s eyes were still wide open, his gaze riveted on me.
“Isn’t that right?”
“I guess so.”
I stood up, went to the kitchen, and got two clean glasses. I poured some wine for both of us. I wanted to put on my coat and leave, not listen to anything more. But not this time. I would hear him out, to the very end. I went back to the room and gave Tommaso the wine. He sipped it slowly.
“And then?”
“Nothing. At least not for a while. In a couple of weeks the apartment was ready to welcome Ada. Corinne’s mother came to check. She stood aside and watched as Bern, ‘Uncle Bern,’ twirled Ada around. Bern doted on Ada, and she on him. Anyone else would have made me jealous, but not him. They were happy months. The best, maybe.”
“It sounds like a dream come true,” I said spitefully.
Just then Tommaso started crying. Trapped in the bed as he was, he covered his eyes with one hand, sobbing. I watched him for a while.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
He wept almost soundlessly. I waited for him to take his hand away from his face.
Then he took a sip of wine. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Bern took me to the encampment. The infected trees were marked with a red cross painted halfway up the trunk, waiting to be chopped down. Danco and his group swore they wouldn’t let anyone get near them.
“In the evening we cooked hamburgers outdoors on a greasy black grill. There wasn’t much to do, to tell the truth. No immediate threat to counteract, no plan. Many of the young people were university students and they lay sprawled out with open books on their stomachs. When it got dark, they lit a bonfire. Danco gave one of his speeches. A somewhat disjointed speech, in fact. But they were all younger than him, attracted by his citations. I wanted to go home, but Bern insisted on sleeping there. He went to Danco and Giuliana’s tent. I found myself with two guys, inside a sleeping bag that smelled like sweat.
“The next day, Bern and I left very early, everyone was still asleep. We drank some cold leftover coffee from a thermos.
“‘Did you like it?’ he asked me in the car.
“‘It’s a shame about those olive trees.’
“‘It’s not a shame. It’s a crime,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“So now I spent some nights at home with Bern and the child. I spent some nights at the encampment. And I spent those wild nights with Nicola and his buddies. Separate lives, which had nothing to do with one another: my specialty.
“I was at the encampment when a couple of reporters came to interview Danco. The Xylella had spread farther north. The protocol called for cutting down olive trees within a hundred yards of every infected specimen, but this would have meant deforesting the entire region. Danco blew his top, shouting at the journalists that it was all a pack of lies; he spoke about multinationals and lobbies. To all of us it seemed effective.
“That evening we gathered in the farmer’s house. The clip was one of the last items on the news. Danco’s interview had been cut to a few seconds, in which he claimed that Xylella was a media invention. In the video he appeared outraged and maniacal. After him a ministerial official was questioned, who provided precise data on the extent of the disaster.
“We returned to the tents with a sense of defeat and frustration. Bern went to sit under one of the olive trees. He remained there, staring wide-eyed, until late at night.
“In June, Ada turned three. She celebrated it with Corinne and her grandparents, then with me and Bern. We made a cake and got all dressed up. We acted a bit ridiculous. At the end of dinner, I turned off the lights and brought in the cake. We sang shamelessly and Ada was radiant. Bern had bought her wooden blocks carved with letters and numbers on them. Ada didn’t pay much attention to them, and he was disappointed. He darkened even more when he saw her so excited by my gift, a doll. ‘It’s all plastic,’ he said angrily.
“Then he stormed out of the apartment, leaving us there. He returned a few days later and we didn’t say a word about the birthday. It went on like that all summer long and throughout the fall. Bern was spending more and more time at the encampment, but every so often he came over. He no longer talked to me about what was happening over there and I wasn’t very interested. Even when he showed up with his shoulder bandaged, he was vague, but that time he stayed longer. In retrospect it all seems so obvious, I should have realized what was coming.
“In December the bacterium reached the Relais dei Saraceni. Actually, Nacci never had the trees analyzed, he merely studied them and showed me the yellowed branches. They could have been that way because of the sun, the drought, but he had decided that part of the olive-tree reserve had to be cleared out. He had already made arrangements.
“‘The special regulations on Xylella allow him to,’ I told Bern and Danco one evening.
“‘But why?’ Danco said, worked up. ‘It makes no sense, it’s a loss for him too.’ He made some mental calculations that didn’t add up, and he couldn’t see what Nacci got out of it. So I added, ‘He’s cutting down the olive trees because he wants to put in a golf course.’
“Silence fell. Danco and Bern looked at each other. This was the action they’d been waiting for. A grand, momentous, concrete move. They’d had enough of removing the red crosses painted on the tree trunks and drinking second-rate beer with an illiterate farmer, waiting for who knows what.
“After that evening Bern didn’t show up again. A couple of months went by without hearing from him. A couple of months, yes, because when I found him at my house, by surprise as always, it was already February. I immediately noticed the big box next to the sofa, and asked him what was in it.
“‘Some stuff,’ he replied evasively. ‘Don’t touch it, please, I’ll get it out of here right away.’
“Naturally I looked inside as soon as I was alone. I peeled off the scotch tape slowly, so I could put it back exactly as it had been. There were bags of ammonium nitrate, which I was familiar with because we used it as a fertilizer at the Relais.
“I was at home with Ada when Bern came back a couple of weeks later. He didn’t even take off his jacket when he came in but went straight to the carton. The next day the bulldozers would be at the Relais.
“‘Will you be with us?’ he asked.
“‘You know I can’t. I have a job there.’
“At that moment I realized that I should have thrown everything away while he was gone.
“‘Leave it here,’ I said.
“‘Will you be one of us or not?’
“‘Leave it, Bern. It’s a stupid idea.’
“He lowered his head. ‘From now on it no longer concerns you, Tommi.’
“I sat on the box, like a child.
“‘Get off,’ Bern said.
“His voice changed. The severe tone had been replaced with the same emotional, regretful voice with which he’d begged me not to read the Gospel of Matthew under the holly oak,
the same one with which he’d asked me to steal from the cash drawer at the Relais.
“He took my hands and made me get up. Then he bent over the box. ‘You can come with me, we can be together this time too. It’s our most important mission.’
“But it wasn’t like that. That wasn’t my most important mission. Ada was sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the cartoons.
“‘No,’ I said.
“Bern nodded, the box poised in his arms, the door already open.
“‘Call the elevator, would you?’
“I stepped beside him. I pressed the button. In the time it took for the elevator to arrive, we didn’t say another word. The doors opened, Bern got in, the doors closed behind him. After that, I never saw him again.”
* * *
—
TOMMASO SUDDENLY pushed the sheet aside, uncovering his pale legs. He stood up.
“Be careful,” I said.
He seemed to have suddenly gotten a grip on himself. He padded out of the room barefoot and went into the bathroom. I heard the stream in the toilet bowl, then flushing and water running, for a long time. There was no need for him to add anything else. I knew the rest from his deposition at the proceedings against Bern and Danco. I knew it from the testimony of all the witnesses and from the newspapers’ reconstructions.
That night Tommaso had called Nicola. He had panicked and didn’t know who else to call. Maybe Nicola would be able to talk some sense into Bern and the others without resorting to arrests. Like a friend. Like the brother he was.
Nicola went to the Relais with his colleague, Fabrizio, both of them off duty, both of them armed. The bulldozers were already there, ready to move into action, and the guys from the encampment had formed a human cordon, holding hands, with caps lowered over their eyes and scarves in front of their mouths against the cold.
Nicola and Fabrizio arrived just when Nacci was putting his hands on Danco, him first of all, of course, reaching for his face to pull the scarf down from his mouth. Danco reacted by shoving him and Nicola separated them. He said he was from the police and grabbed Danco’s arms to handcuff him. Then Bern leaped at his brother to free his friend, and Nicola’s colleague, Fabrizio, lunged at him. Nacci ran back toward the Relais.
The chain of activists had broken at several points. The two men in the vehicles started up and proceeded through the breach that had opened. One guy panicked—although during the trial it was never clear who he was—and set off one of the bombs. The explosion wasn’t very powerful, but it sent the activists scattering among the olive trees.
Nicola and his colleague pulled out the guns. Fabrizio ran after the group and Nicola found himself facing Bern and Danco, the three of them alone.
Only the man on the bulldozer saw any of what happened later, confusedly, through a pall of dust and smoke that had not yet dissipated.
He saw Bern on the ground and Nicola kneeling on top of him, with his gun aimed. Then he heard a thud, not a gunshot, a muffled clunk. Nicola lay stretched out and Danco stood beside him, still holding the spade in his hand; he gripped it tightly for a few seconds before tossing it away.
At that point the man got out of the bulldozer to help Nicola. By the time he reached him, Danco was already on the run, while Bern stared down at his brother’s body, incredulous, stunned. The man tried to hold on to him at least, but Bern also started running, down through the sloping grove of olive trees that would soon no longer exist, transformed into a golf course with spongy bright grass beneath the sky.
* * *
—
TOMMASO CAME OUT of the bathroom, but lingered in the living room for a few moments. Watching Ada sleep, I thought. When he returned to the room he smelled vaguely of toothpaste.
“We can sleep a little,” he said.
“I’ll go now.”
“It’s too late to go. Stay here. That side of the bed isn’t as filthy as you think. Get down, Medea, move.”
I was tired. If I got in the car, I would have to struggle to keep my eyes open all the way home. And maybe I didn’t feel like waking up in a few hours, Christmas morning, alone again, after all I had heard.
Meanwhile, Tommaso was on his hands and knees on the mattress, completing the job of brushing Medea’s hair off the sheets.
“That’s it, done,” he said. “And it’s been at least a week since I’ve seen a bedbug.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding. Relax.”
He grabbed the pillow that he’d kept crushed beneath the one under his head most of the night. He tried to plump it back up to a respectable shape, to no avail.
“It’s fine like that,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it.”
He lay down on his side of the bed, very close to the edge to leave me as much room as he could. I took off my shoes, keeping my shirt and jeans on, and slid under the covers.
Tommaso had his back turned to me. He was still, as if he were already asleep, but he wasn’t sleeping. My rival from the beginning. I put a hand on his shoulder; I had no right to do it and it wasn’t something I would ever have thought I’d do with him, but I did it. He left it there for a few moments, then he put his own hand over it. Then we managed to sleep a little, just a few hours, but a deep sleep, as I hadn’t had in years. The lamp was still on next to me. Outside, dawn broke, but I didn’t see it.
PART THREE
Lofthellir
6.
What I remember most about the morning the police arrived is the silence. A silence different from usual, as if even the birds were struck dumb and the lizards frozen in the grass at hearing those words that changed everything: It appears your husband is involved in a murder . . . A police officer. His name was Nicola Belpanno.
The policeman asked my permission to enter the house. I didn’t see any reason to prevent him, yet I didn’t immediately move to let him pass, he had to ask a second time and then slip sideways through the space between my shoulder and the doorjamb. His partner came in after him, embarrassed, his head lowered.
I looked at the room as it must have appeared to them: the table in disarray from the night before, set for one, my muddy boots tossed on the carpet, the blanket crumpled up on the sofa. All signs of neglect on the part of someone who never expects visitors.
“Can we go up?”
“I haven’t made the bed yet,” I replied stupidly.
I leaned against the fireplace wall. I wanted to say that there were no secrets up there, nothing they were looking for: Bern hadn’t been in those rooms for a long time, even though I had imagined him practically every night before falling asleep alone. I’d pictured him crossing the space with his long strides, and I’d talked to him, talked to him out loud. But I stood there watching the policemen move silently about and then take the stairs.
It appears your husband . . . His name was Nicola Belpanno.
I could almost understand the sentences separately, but the connection continued to elude me.
I did not offer the cops a cup of coffee or a glass of water. It didn’t occur to me.
When we were at the door again, the only one of the two who seemed authorized to speak said: “I believe we’ll be back for a more thorough inspection. Maybe even today. I’d be grateful if you would avoid going anywhere in the next few hours.”
Then they left.
I sat in the swing-chair. Its shaky frame creaked, even though I didn’t feel I was moving. A strange form of shock, entirely new, was taking hold of me.
. . . involved in a murder.
Around nine o’clock the telephone in the house began to ring. Here we go, I told myself, now it’s starting.
It was a girl from a sales call center. I let her finish, registering everything she said, every unessential bit of information about a discount on sports channels and a leased decoder. Then I told her that I didn’t own a TV and something in
my voice must have frightened her because she cut it short.
I stared at the silent phone for a while, as if waiting for the right call. Then I went back to sit under the pergola. The policeman had advised me not to leave, and I wouldn’t. I would stay right there, until the ridiculous version of events I’d heard at dawn proved to be a hoax.
His name was Nicola Belpanno.
* * *
—
THEY RETURNED in the early afternoon, three cars, tires squealing unnecessarily before they parked. They had a search warrant and a different attitude from what they’d had that morning. Now they were more determined, aggressive.
I went to sit under the holly oak. I stayed outside while each object was touched, turned over, opened, emptied. From the bench I noticed that some of the leaves were dotted with yellow. I picked one off and examined it against the light.
The same officer with whom I’d spoken in the morning joined me and sat down next to me. “Let’s start again from the beginning, all right?”
“Whatever you say.”
“This morning you stated that your husband hadn’t been in this house for a long time.”
“Three hundred and ninety-five days.”
He looked surprised. Obviously he was surprised. On the night of our wedding, I thought, Bern was standing where he was now sitting.
“Should I conclude from this that you and your husband are no longer together?”
“I suppose you could conclude that.”
“Yet at the registry office he is still listed as residing here. You did not initiate separation proceedings.”
At that point I should have explained to him that the separation from Bern had in fact been announced. Announced by his burning a woodpile in the middle of the night. If he looked closely, he would still make out the scorched spot on the ground. And I should have explained to him that Bern could not change his residence for any other place in the world, because his soul was lodged here, among these trees, among these stones. Instead I was silent. The policeman tapped his pen on his notebook.
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