Heaven and Earth

by Paolo Giordano

  “Please put the channel with the interview back on.”

  “Nobody’s interested in it.”

  “I am.”

  “For just coffee you can go watch television at home,” the barmaid snapped, then turned back to the man.

  He didn’t say anything. He brought the beer bottle to his lips and took a swig, still staring at me.

  “I’ll have a beer too,” I said. “It’s important, please.”

  She picked up the remote control from the counter and, instead of changing the channel, placed it on the shelf behind her, in front of the bottles.

  “The coffee is on the house. Now get out of here. We can tell you’re a friend of those people.”

  I left. Stunned, I wandered through the streets of San Vito, now deserted. I didn’t find another bar, just a kiosk selling watermelons, with a small TV set up top, but I took a look at the person sitting there and didn’t dare approach. I thought of ringing a doorbell at random, but I had done enough foolish things; I was tired, drained.

  I did not see the end of the interview. Only many months later did I learn how Floriana had answered the question: she said that she had never really believed in reincarnation, that for years she’d let her husband mislead her, but not anymore. She said that the Lord grants us only one life on earth, this one, and there won’t be another one afterward.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON in August I was keeping an eye on one of the intruders through the bedroom shutters. He had no camera. After knocking, he’d wandered around the yard for a while. I’d lost sight of him as he walked around the house, then he’d reappeared and looked purposefully at my window, as if he sensed my presence. He’d sat down at the table under the pergola, half hidden by the dense tangle of vines, and he hadn’t moved from there.

  Half an hour went by, maybe more, and he still showed no signs of leaving. Suddenly I was enraged. I went downstairs and opened the door like a fury.

  “Go away right now!” I shouted. “You can’t stay here!”

  The intruder leaped up. For a moment he seemed about to obey me, but then he stayed where he was.

  “Are you Teresa?”

  He was younger than me, overweight, and he looked harmless. He wore battered Birkenstock sandals and a sweat-stained T-shirt.

  “You have to leave immediately,” I repeated, “or I’ll call the police.”

  But instead of going away, he seemed to get up his nerve. He took a step toward me and bobbed his head in a kind of bow.

  “My name is Daniele. I’m a friend of his.”

  “A friend of whom?”

  “Of Bern. He—”

  I put a hand over his mouth and gestured for him to follow me to the olive grove. When we were a reasonable distance from the house, I inundated him with questions; Daniele answered me patiently, as if that outburst was just what he expected from me. He told me that he had met Bern at the encampment in Oria, more than a year ago, and from that moment on he had always been by his side. He was also with him on the night at the Relais dei Saraceni, but he hadn’t seen what happened. As he spoke, he avoided meeting my eyes. He addressed a spot somewhere to my right, from time to time wiping his flushed face with his hand.

  “Can we move out of the sun?” he asked at one point.

  I realized then that I had led him into the middle of a sunlit clearing, its soil scorched, as if even the trees were infested with microphones.

  We stepped under an olive tree. He was panting a little. I asked him why he had waited so long before coming to find me.

  “I was under house arrest. For four months. The police thought I was the one responsible for the arsenal, just because I’m studying chemistry. But they had no proof. And studying chemistry is not yet a crime.”

  “Was it true?”

  “What?”

  “Were you responsible for the arsenal?”

  Saying that word, “arsenal,” seemed a little ridiculous to me. Daniele shrugged.

  “Anyone would be able to make those explosives. On the internet there are thousands of tutorials.”

  He looked around, squinting in the direction of the house, as if looking for it over the barrier of trees, then he whirled around.

  “The food forest is that way, right?”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “He always talked about this place. About the masseria. He described every last detail to us. And over there is where the bees were kept. Where the reed bed is.”

  Hearing him mention the reed bed made me feel a little dizzy.

  “I’m saving up some money,” he went on, not noticing. “When I have enough I’m going to buy some land. In fact, to be honest, I already found it. There’s only a ruin there for now, but it can be fixed up. It will be like the masseria.”

  “Would you like to see the food forest?” I asked him.

  His eyes lit up. “Will you take me there?”

  But as we walked among the plants that were wilting in the sultry dog days, I got the impression that Daniele had already been there. Probably he had looked for it on his own, while he was waiting for me to come out of the house.

  “Do you really never give them water? Not even a drop?”

  “During this period, yes. A couple of times a week.”

  He bent down on his knees to examine the wall of branches on which the aromatic herbs grew. He touched it.

  “It’s just like he described it to us.”

  I asked him how old he was. “Twenty-one,” he replied.

  He stood up. “I had never met anyone like him. He was a great inspiration for me.”

  “Take me there,” I said.

  I hadn’t planned to ask him. I hadn’t even thought I’d want to. Daniele looked at me. “Where?”

  “Where it happened.” He shook his head. “I really shouldn’t be seen around there.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then he added, “If you want, we can go to the encampment. In Oria.”

  “The encampment was disbanded.”

  He looked around. “Do you have anything better to do?”

  * * *

  —

  “AND ANYWAY, the encampment can’t be disbanded,” he said once we were in the car. “They can drive us out, but we continue to exist. It’s Bern who taught us that. We already have a place near Tricase, an old limestone quarry. But we’re waiting for things to settle down.”

  You could barely see the road through the dirt-streaked windshield. Daniele was bent forward, clutching the steering wheel nervously. With his right hand he yanked the gear shift.

  “Many of us are still under surveillance. One guy even had a plainclothes cop come to the university. The organic chemistry professor asked the agent if he was new. Then he wrote a synthesis on the blackboard and asked him if he understood it. The cop turned purple with embarrassment, and practically fled the classroom. He had even brought a notebook to take notes.”

  The car jolted as he changed gear. He cleared his throat.

  “But we’re in the South, nothing works really efficiently for too long. Pretty soon even the plainclothes agents will give up and go away.”

  A heavy-metal piece blared from the car radio. From time to time Daniele began shaking his head in time to the beat, lip-synching the words. Then he asked me, “What do you know about Oria?”

  I looked out the window, a little embarrassed. Nothing, I didn’t know anything.

  “There were about forty of us,” he explained. “We made the rounds night and day, divided into groups, it was exhausting. But the area was still too big to patrol all of it. Hundreds of olive trees marked with a red X, can you imagine? Danco drew up very complicated work-shift schedules with times and routes. If a group ran into one of the cooperatives hired to fell the trees, someone would have to split off and run in sear
ch of reinforcements. The remaining ones were too few to protect the olive trees. Not to mention the fact that the tree cutters often showed up at several places at the same time. In a word, they were trouncing us.”

  “You talk about it as if it were a war.”

  Daniele turned around. “What else would you call it?”

  The roadside was littered with garbage; beyond it stretched tomato fields and olive groves, a line of purple haze on the horizon.

  “Danco’s strategy couldn’t work. He proposed solutions that were more and more far-fetched. He sent the younger guys around to measure the distances between the olive trees, saying that with precise mapping he would be able to monitor everything. And in the meantime the Xylella epidemic kept spreading. We had reached a dead end.”

  When Oria was already visible in the distance, we took a dirt road. Instinctively, I checked the phone: there was no signal. Daniele stomped heavily on the pedals with his sandals, again silently mouthing the words to the song. I had gotten into the car of a stranger, I had let him take me to a remote spot in the countryside from which I would not be able to call for help, solely because he had claimed to be a friend of Bern’s. I asked him if we were nearly there, and he nodded without turning his head.

  “Bern didn’t draw attention to himself much,” he resumed after a while. “He stayed in Danco’s shadow. I’d hardly noticed him. It seems impossible, but it’s true.”

  We got out of the car in the middle of nowhere, crossed a mowed wheat field, and found ourselves at the edge of what must once have been an olive grove. But all that remained of the trees were the flat stumps of their trunks, and piles of branches and dry leaves. There was no trace of the encampment anymore.

  Daniele went on talking: “One day we were all feeling very disheartened. We sat cross-legged, in silence. Bern stood up. He started walking around. He went from one olive tree to another, as if he were listening to an inner voice that told him now this way, turn around, another ten steps. Then I saw him grab on to the main limb of an old, majestic olive tree.”

  Daniele turned to look at me. He smiled. He pointed to a stump about twenty yards from us: “That one.”

  We went over to it. He touched the flat part of the stump, circled one of the rings with his finger. I felt like doing it too, but something about sharing his emotions about Bern embarrassed me.

  “Can you picture it?” he asked. “It was very tall. Bern climbed up. We watched him scale the upper branches, so high that he became invisible. He stayed there for the rest of the day. A number of people tried to persuade him to come down, but he didn’t pay any attention to them. I only approached the following morning. Nothing had changed much, in any case. Bern was still in the tree, just in a different spot, which to him had seemed a more comfortable place to spend the night. By then we had all moved over there. And that was maybe the first lesson that Bern wanted to teach us: that one single symbolic act is more powerful than a thousand obvious, recurrent actions. But I say that today. There are a lot of things that I only now understand.”

  Daniele was silent for a few seconds, as if he were doing so that very instant: understanding something that had previously escaped him.

  “After a couple of days, that was all we talked about. Bern would not come down from the tree and we had to devise a makeshift pulley to send up his meals and water, his toothbrush and toothpaste. One evening the temperature plunged; at dawn the tents were all soaked with dew. Bern asked for a sleeping bag and someone told him that he could very well come and get it himself. The situation had begun to get on people’s nerves. His stance seemed to ridicule the whole initiative. Even Danco kept away from the olive tree; for the most part he stayed in his tent, drawing up increasingly complicated shift schedules, strategies for patrolling and remote communication. But not me. I sensed the power of Bern’s act; I felt it in my bones. So I brought him a sleeping bag. I rolled it up, crammed it inside a backpack, and clambered up. ‘Not on this branch,’ he told me. I remember it perfectly: ‘Not on this branch, it won’t support us both,’ as if the olive tree were a grandiose extension of his body and he knew its strength, the way each of us knows the strength of his own arms and fingers. I left the sleeping bag where he’d indicated. For a while we stayed there, gazing at the expanse of olive trees that stretched out beneath us, not saying anything. To Bern I seemed no more relevant than the birds that perched and then flew off. There was something in his eyes. A determination. A flame. The others were making supper, and from up there their bustling about seemed so insignificant. Then Bern said, ‘Tomorrow I’d like a bucket and some soap.’ Not ‘Please,’ not ‘Do you think you can bring me?’ And to make it clear that he didn’t want me up there with him a second time, he specified: ‘You can use the pulley.’”

  Daniele had sat down on the stump. When he turned to smile at me again, I saw that he was moved. So I sat down next to him. The wood seemed to transmit a strange warmth.

  “I became his on-the-ground aide. His assistant, that’s right, the others acknowledge it today. That I was the first to put my trust in him. Without my dedication, Bern wouldn’t have made it. They would have starved him until they forced him to come down, or he would have let himself starve to death, who can say? In any event, we wouldn’t be who we are today. But I’m not sure I deserve all the credit. It may seem absurd, but I’m convinced that it was he who chose me. Every morning I loaded what he needed on the pulley and sent it up. When the rope was yanked twice I brought the basket back down. Inside was a list for the following day. He washed his clothes himself, in the bucket, and spread them out to dry on the more slender branches. During the day he sat motionless for many hours, and at night he disappeared inside the sleeping bag. Not even the rain was able to discourage him. At first he let it fall onto his head. Then he sent me a request for a ball of twine and some scissors. It was the only time he added ‘please.’ I couldn’t find any twine around, and I became agitated. By then I never even considered the idea that Bern could come down and take cover. It would have been a huge betrayal. It rained harder and harder. Finally I took the fasteners from my tent, letting it sag under the pelting torrents. I sent the cords up to Bern. I stayed and spied on him from under the dripping branches, the fat drops hitting me right in the eye. I saw him break off a few carefully selected branches and weave them together using a very complicated technique. Within an hour he had built a roof that at least partially covered the sleeping bag, a roof resistant enough so that the water was diverted to one side and fell into a single teeming cascade. He went underneath, crawled inside the sleeping bag, and did not send down any other requests.”

  We stood up and started walking again, a random zigzag course among the olive-tree stumps. Daniele was perspiring heavily, and by then so was I.

  “They came in the dead of night,” he went on. “It was the best way to catch us off guard. They surprised us from several directions at the same time. It was clear from the outset that the intention wasn’t only to chop down as many trees as possible, but to disband the encampment once and for all. The carabinieri were there; it was a full-scale ambush. We shot out of the tents. We knew what to do, Danco had instructed us, so we scattered into small groups, one per tree, in strategic positions. ‘The maximum possible coverage,’ Danco always said. It was freezing, the ground was damp, and we were barefoot, some in undershorts and T-shirts, yet we took our places according to plan, each group to its olive tree, our backs pressed against the trunk, holding hands. From one post to the other we shouted insults at them and words of encouragement for us, trying to be heard over the sirens and engines and the roar of the buzz saws that were then switched on, as if the tree cutters were ready to slash any obstacle in their way, us too, if necessary. The carabinieri managed to disperse the first groups. There were some very young boys, still minors, all it took was a threat to call their parents. I was paired with Emma, one of the first to form the encampment. Her hands were frozen, h
er lips purple, but she was so furious she paid no attention. I was afraid that if I loosened my grip, she would run up against one of the tractors and try to stop it by kicking and punching it. The truth is that we were impotent, so I held her hands and she struggled, because all we could do was protect that one single olive tree. Have you ever heard the crack that a centuries-old tree produces when it crashes to the ground? It’s not a crack, it’s an explosion. The ground shuddered. And suddenly I remembered Bern, Bern on top of the olive tree that I could glimpse on and off in the blue gleam of the flashing lights. I was sure he hadn’t moved from where he was. The trunk of his tree was assigned to Danco and Giuliana. I felt the urge to run to them and reinforce its defense, but I couldn’t abandon my post, it wasn’t in the plan. Then the tree cutters switched off the electric saws and backed away a few dozen yards. The carabinieri were wearing gas masks and they started hurling tear gas. As a result they managed to drive all of us away from the trunks. The order they had received must have been clear: no more wavering. They allowed us to get our blankets and clothes from the tents, and we searched for them blindly, our eyes burning. Those who struggled the most were handcuffed, Emma as well. It wasn’t necessary for me or for Danco, we knew it was useless to get worked up. We watched the tree cutters with their safety helmets and reflector coveralls attend to one olive tree at a time, very calmly now, with a kind of satisfaction.”

  Daniele spread his arms.

  “Imagine a grove,” he said. “Here. Trees everywhere. Now look at this. A few days later Bern told me how it had been to watch from above, to see the crowns of the trees crumple one by one. He said he’d cried at first, but at a certain point he’d stopped, and the sadness had been instantly replaced by rage. From up there, he said, you couldn’t see the men who were sawing the trunks. You could only see the crowns disappear, as if something invisible were swallowing them up. It took many hours, all night. In the end only one tree was left standing. The carabinieri had spotted Bern through the leafy branches, with his clothes spread out to dry, the roof to shelter him from the rain and the system of pulleys and buckets. They wanted to keep that tree for the grand finale. It was almost noon when they returned to him. They ordered him to come down, otherwise they would climb up and get him and they would arrest him. He didn’t answer. Not once did he answer, as if he didn’t speak their language. The carabinieri conferred about who should go up and finally two of them clambered up, led by a very agile tree cutter who acted as trailblazer. When they were fairly close to Bern, he moved. He climbed higher, very nimbly, like a spider. And when the three men had almost reached the limb on which he waited for them, he started moving toward the end of it, clinging to it with his hands and knees, gripping it between his legs as it got thinner and thinner. The wood bowed a little. The tip was so slight that it wouldn’t even support a child. Bern looked at his pursuers, still without a word, but what he was saying to them was very clear: one more step and this branch will crack. We were all standing there. Someone started applauding, and we repeated his name, ‘Bern, Bern, Bern.’