“The carabinieri were nervous now. Those below ordered the ones in the tree to make him go back, otherwise he’d kill himself. The two in the tree repeated the order to Bern, but without conviction, by then they were scared. They backed up very carefully, trying not to disturb a single leaf. Bern did not move from the very tenuous branch tip until the second carabiniere also set foot on the ground. He had won. We had won. Most people were distracted, hugging one another, but not me, I kept watching him, so I saw it when he released his hold to move his hand forward a little and the branch suddenly gave way, as if the tree itself had been resisting with him the whole time, but now had no strength left. Rather than let himself plunge into space, he managed to hang on, but he struck his shoulder against the trunk. Maybe it would have started all over again, the carabinieri would have climbed up and he would have fled to another branch, and maybe the third or fourth time he would have had a serious fall. But his shoulder hurt and in any case he couldn’t hold out forever. It was another thing he would later explain to us, as we waited for the X-ray report at the emergency room in Manduria. Still, when I saw him come down, I was disappointed.”
The sun was disappearing completely behind us. The wind died down abruptly. It seemed as if the entire countryside had fallen silent to hear the end of Daniele’s story.
“The tree was cut down. There was a hush. Danco went over to Bern and put an arm around his waist. Together they contemplated what had maybe been a defeat and what had maybe been a victory. We went to the hospital in Manduria and came back with Bern bandaged up and a supply of painkillers. He treated me as if he barely knew me, cordially, yes, but as if I hadn’t been the one attending him the whole time he was in the tree. It hurt a little. Then he decided to leave to spend a few days at a friend’s house in Taranto. When he returned here, to the camp that we still hadn’t had the resolution to move, he brought the news about the tree felling planned at the Relais dei Saraceni. He described a magnificent stand of olive trees. He knew they weren’t really infected. Then he said that this time it would be different.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“He said he had realized that resistance was no longer enough. ‘From now on we’ll talk about fighting,’ he said, ‘and every battle needs weapons, even if that offends you, even if it’s not what you envisioned. But look around you. Look what they did!’ And while we all tried to take in what for the moment were merely ideas, shocking, sure, but just ideas, Bern started singing. On the tree stump, in front of all of us.”
* * *
—
THE CLASS VISITS to the masseria did not resume with the beginning of the school year. I phoned the teacher, Elvira, but she didn’t return my call. I tried again a few hours later, then the following day and the day after that. When she finally took the call, I could not contain my irritation.
“I wanted to know the fall calendar,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Teresa. There are no visits scheduled.”
“I’m planning to build an aviary, to hold all the species in the area. Redstarts, black-throated wheatears, thrushes.”
The idea of the aviary had only come to me an hour earlier. I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had to build one. Was it conceivable that birds of different species might live in the same cage?
“I’m sure the children will like it,” I persisted.
“The teachers’ council decided not to include the masseria among this year’s extracurricular activities. I’m sorry.”
“The last visit was disappointing, I know. The masseria was a shambles.”
Would I have begged her? And would begging have changed anything? But Elvira did not give me time to find out. Her tone of voice suddenly changed: “How do you think I could justify it to the parents, visiting the house of a . . .” She stopped, she couldn’t manage to say the word.
Then, as if expressing a resentment she’d harbored all summer, she added: “You should have told me, Teresa.”
“Told you what?”
“I brought children there, for God’s sake! Children!”
After that phone call I saw the masseria with different eyes. The gutter had broken off during a storm several months before, the viburnums had died of thirst, and the food forest was a wreck. As for me, I looked like only a distant relation to the woman in overalls who on the website was smiling and holding a garland of flowers.
I counted the money left in the tea canister: forty-two euros. That figure made me burst out laughing.
Even the gardener lost patience with not being paid. He came for the last time. He confirmed that the holly oak was infected and showed me the streaks of resin along the trunk, like bleeding wounds. It would die slowly; it could take years. Did I want him to come back and chop it down? I said it was fine like that. I chose to have the holly oak stay where it was, dying slowly, day after day, with me.
I sold the hens first. Then the beehives. I sold some tools and finally I sold the goat to a cooperative in Latiano. They wouldn’t slaughter her because she was too old, but she could be impregnated and the kids would be born in time for Easter. They asked me if I wanted one, they would set it aside for me. I said no, thank you.
The drought of the last few months had caused an abundance of figs to ripen. I picked through the masseria’s trees, then collected the ones on my grandmother’s land as well. Riccardo had left a couple of weeks ago, he wouldn’t know. I arranged the best fruits neatly in boxes, I tried to make them look appealing, putting leaves underneath and on the sides. With the others I made some jams. The next day I loaded the car and drove to the traffic circle between Ostuni and Ceglie. I parked in the wayside, set the goods out on the lowered tailgate, and sat on the wall in the shade.
And so I’d become an itinerant vendor, like the bare-chested old men who peddled watermelons along rural roads. When I saw them, as a child, I wondered how they could make a living, and I often forced my father to pull over and buy something. He tried to explain to me that they were farmers, not paupers, but he couldn’t change my mind.
A number of people slowed down to take a look at the boxes of figs, but they rarely stopped. The whole countryside was full of figs, and the tourists, the only ones who would have been impressed, had already gone. One guy lowered the car window and from behind his sunglasses, in a perfectly cordial tone, made me an obscene proposal. I recognized a farmer from Speziale with his wife, in an Ape 50, and they recognized me. They owned land in the area where the masseria was. They drove on without a nod.
Nevertheless, before sunset I had sold all the boxes and most of the jams. I would have to come up with something else soon, but in the meantime, by keeping my needs to a minimum, I could get by for a few weeks.
One evening, from a distance, I saw the neighbor’s Ape 50 stop in front of the iron bar. He got out, deposited something on the ground, and drove off. I walked along the dirt track that was overgrown with weeds. I looked in the basket: fresh vegetables, two packets of pasta, a bottle of oil, and one of wine. Charity. I would never fully understand that place. I would never understand Speziale’s rules or its inhabitants, their constant vacillation between hatred and compassion, their angry ways and their equally brusque acts of kindness. I cooked the vegetables and set the table under the pergola. It was the first meal I’d sat down to eat for months.
* * *
—
THE CHANGES MADE to the masseria the year before had at least left me with an internet connection; it worked sporadically, but the speed was acceptable. In any case, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any faster than it was: the seconds spent waiting for a new page to load, watching a blank screen, were moments of pure absence, without pain.
I mostly watched YouTube videos. I started from any one of them, then I let myself be shuttled along from one connection to another, no more decisions, lulled by that ephemeral geography. Outside, the sun went down, and the house sank into
darkness, except for the bright rectangle of the screen where I was straining my eyes. I kept at it for quite a while, until very late. When I stopped, I’d be so groggy that I would drag myself to the couch to sleep.
One morning I was awakened by the rumble of wheels on the dirt track. I hadn’t yet opened the shutters, though it must have been late morning. I remained lying there, staring at the grid of light on the ceiling. I heard a knock, then another a few seconds later.
“Delivery!” a male voice called out.
I went over to the window and opened the shutters just enough to peer down below, my eyes squinting in the sunlight. The delivery boy waved a package in my direction. “Are you Mrs. Gasparro? You have to sign.”
I pulled on one of Bern’s old T-shirts and went downstairs.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I was awake. I have a touch of flu,” I lied.
“This district doesn’t have a name, does it? I had a hard time finding it.”
The package had the Amazon logo printed on it.
“What is it?”
“You should know, you ordered it,” the boy said, smiling.
“I didn’t order anything. I don’t even have an account with Amazon.”
He shrugged and held out a screen on which to sign.
“Use your finger. It doesn’t matter if the signature isn’t perfect,” he said. Putting the device back in a side pocket of his pants, he added, “It must be a gift, then. Usually there’s a card inside.”
When I was alone, I opened the package. It contained a bottle, with a picture of a plant and some kind of magnified bug on the label. It was clearly a gardening product, but the instructions were in German and other languages that I couldn’t even identify.
It had to be a mistake. In any case, I had nothing better to do, so I sat down at the computer and patiently typed the German words into Google Translate. The result was barely comprehensible, but it was enough to confirm that it was a natural pesticide. You were supposed to dilute a capful in ten quarts of water and use it to water the diseased plant every other night. In the end the gardener had felt sorry for me, or for the holly oak. More charity. I gave the tree its first dose of medicine and it was enough to make me feel better.
* * *
—
ONE DAY Daniele returned to the masseria. We sat under the pergola for a long time, sipping the carob liqueur he had brought. When we got up the bottle was empty.
Drunk as I was, I took him into the house, up the stairs, to my bedroom and Bern’s. He let himself be led. I watched him undress in front of the bed, barely able to balance on one leg and then the other to pull off his socks. He had a flabby belly, it made me giggle.
Afterward I don’t know what got into me. I licked his face and bit his shoulders until he begged me to stop because I was hurting him. Then I lost the will altogether, overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. I fell back on the bed, and in an instant I was far away from there. I let him do what he had to do, until it was over. The objects in the room expanded and contracted as they used to do when I was a young girl.
Only later did I remember the bugs. I wondered what the cops thought as they listened, how they judged the wife of the terrorist who, after having seduced a younger man, had talked to him for an hour about the husband who had disappeared, confessing how she missed his body, how she’d been missing him just before. And who knows how they judged the young man who had heard that confession without interrupting her, who’d never once stopped stroking her hair.
In the morning I woke up alone. Daniele was in the kitchen, where he’d made breakfast. The glasses we’d used the evening before were washed and turned upside down beside the sink. We ate in silence and right after that I told him to leave and not come back. He did not ask me to explain.
* * *
—
THE SECOND DELIVERY arrived a few weeks later, in October. The same van parked crookedly near the barren vegetable garden, the same delivery boy.
“So you finally signed up,” he said, handing me the package.
“Signed up?”
“With Amazon. Don’t tell me it’s another mistake, because I don’t believe it.”
“Nevertheless, I’m afraid it is.”
“The thing is that Amazon doesn’t make mistakes. Are you sure you didn’t order it?”
I signed the little screen with my finger.
“If I were you, I’d take a look at my credit card account,” he said, “just to be safe.”
This time I didn’t wait for him to leave before unwrapping the parcel.
“Is there a card?” he asked, as I stared, dumbfounded, at the cover of the book.
Then he must have left, surely he left at some point, though I can’t say exactly when because I don’t remember anything about those minutes, except that I was alone again, still under the pergola, still holding the book that was shaking in my hands. I couldn’t stop looking at it, yet I couldn’t so much as leaf through the pages.
It was a different edition from the one I knew, more vivid, glossier, yet it was the same book that I had unsuccessfully tried to read many years ago, the same author, the same title: Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees.
I sat down at the computer and went to the Amazon site. I typed in my email address, and kept getting it wrong because my fingers were trembling. I followed the procedure to reset my password, a password that I had never chosen. A code was sent to my email, which was clogged with unread messages, advertisements, discount offers, and grotesque sexual proposals.
I entered the code, then I had to choose a new password. I stared at the screen for quite some time, my mind a complete blank, unable to decide on a sequence of letters and numbers. When I finally did, I found myself in my Amazon account, an account that I had never opened.
I clicked on “Your Orders” and two items appeared: the organic pesticide and The Baron in the Trees. I selected the book and a new screen informed me that I had purchased it on October 16, 2010.
There had to be a section on payments, but it took me a while to find it. The registered credit card coincided with mine, I recognized the last four digits, which were visible.
Increasingly bewildered, I left the house and drove to the only ATM in Speziale. During the summer it had been uprooted with a tow hook, but they had now replaced it with a new one. My current account balance was no longer in the red, though I myself had not deposited anything. I printed out the bank statement. It showed a wire transfer of one thousand euros made a month earlier, then the two Amazon charges and the card fees. The wire transfer had been made by my father.
I went back to the masseria. The business card must still be somewhere on the shelf. In the state of neglect in which I’d sunk, I’d done nothing but let things pile up: receipts, advertising flyers, empty food containers, balled-up plastic bags. I rummaged through the disorder, haphazardly at first, rooting around with my fingers, then tossing everything that didn’t interest me on the floor. I found the card: “Alessandro Breglio—Computer Assistance.” I dialed the number but stopped before the last digit. Someone might be listening.
An hour later I entered the store in Brindisi, cluttered with monitors and keyboards waiting for repair. The young man looked at me, trying to place me in his memory, but I didn’t give him time.
“Is it possible that someone could have gotten into my computer and done things in my place? Such as buying things?”
His eyes lit up. “They hacked you? It’s possible, sure!”
“And where can they do it from?”
He smiled. “Even from the moon. I can come and take a look if you want. We have a very reasonable security app.”
“I need to track down the person who made the purchases.”
“I think that may be very difficult. You can try the police, but from experience I can tell you that they won’t pay an
y attention to you. Have a seat, let me explain how our app works.”
“I don’t want the app!” I may have screamed at him, because he shrank back in his chair, looking shocked.
After a moment he said, “I would think about it if I were you. These hackers are diabolical. If they want, they can also spy on you. Do you know about the webcam? The small lens above the screen? This. In theory, they can watch you from here if you leave your computer on.”
I tried to remember if the computer was on the night I’d brought Daniele to the bedroom.
“So do you want me to come and take a look at the computer or not?”
But I had already turned and was on my way out of the store.
On the way back I drove very slowly. For a long stretch I was behind a truck carrying straw; the stalks broke loose and fluttered through the air. A line of cars formed behind me, but I didn’t try to pass the truck. I wanted to savor the nostalgia that sight gave me as long as possible.
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