“There you are,” he answered then.
I had the impression that he was a bit lower than I was, because the sound was so remote, so muffled, but maybe I was wrong. What would I say to him now?
But it was he who spoke: “You came in time. I knew you would make it. For me not to hear your voice again was unthinkable.”
“Why don’t you come out, Bern? Come back out of there, please.”
The cold took my breath away. The air inside the cave was dense, laborious to inhale.
“Oh, Teresa, how I wish I could. But I’m afraid it’s too late for that. I’m no longer able to. I must have fractured something when I fell down here. The tibia, I think. And a rib maybe, although the pain in my side comes and goes. I haven’t felt it for a few hours now.”
“Someone will come to get you. Someone can come down and get you.”
Jónas was somewhere in the dark. He had turned the lamp on his helmet off, perhaps to allow us an illusion of intimacy.
Bern seemed not to have heard me.
“There’s a high, smooth wall on this side, like a plate of silver. A fine veil of water is trickling over it. It’s almost like a mirror, I can make out the shape of my head when I project the light in a certain way, though the battery won’t last much longer. How I wish you could see this wonder, Teresa. You know what I’ll do? I’ll pretend that the face I glimpse is yours and not mine. Would you do something for me?”
“Of course,” I murmured, but he couldn’t hear me like that, so I shouted it.
The strangest goodbye in the history of the world, forced to yell what we would otherwise have whispered.
“Look around you. Choose a shape, a rock that looks like a face, that looks like me.”
I aimed the lamp’s beam along the wall of the cave, frantically, not recognizing anything but edges and projections and bulges in that chilling place.
Bern remained quiet, giving me time, then he said: “Did you find one?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Good, so now you can look at me. Can you hear the sound of the drops? You’ll hear it if we remain silent for a moment. They’re like notes, the notes of a xylophone being faintly struck. But you have to turn off the light, so the mind won’t be distracted by what the eye sees. Sight always seizes all of our attention, Teresa. Shh, listen now.”
I did as he said. I fumbled with the lamp’s switch until it went out. The cave plunged into total darkness, the most absolute darkness I had ever experienced.
After a few moments I heard the plink-plopping of the drops. Some produced sharp clicks, like wooden sticks, and others emitted notes at regular intervals. New ones were constantly being added, as if my brain were slowly becoming accustomed to capturing them, as if my ears were picking them out of the silence. In the end the sound became full to bursting, a concert of hundreds of tiny instruments, and I felt as if I could see again, but with a faculty that I had never used before.
“Did you hear it?” Bern asked, his voice now a roar compared to the drip drip drip. “Such a thing can only have been created by God.”
“Do you believe in God again, Bern?”
“With all my heart and soul. I never really stopped believing. Although now it’s something different. It’s throughout my entire body, inside and out. I no longer have to make any effort. Do you know the saying, Teresa? ‘I fled from your hand to your hand.’ Do you know it?”
“No. I don’t know it,” I said brokenheartedly.
“It was one of Cesare’s favorites, when we disappointed him. Sometimes we did it on purpose. He’d pretend not to notice, he knew we’d come looking for him again. And when we did, he would whisper those words in our ears: ‘I fled from your hand to your hand.’”
He took long pauses between one word and another, as if he found it hard to breathe.
“Tell me about the masseria, Teresa. Please. I miss it more than you could ever imagine. There’s not much that I regret in this cave, apart from not seeing you. And the masseria. Tell me how it was when you left.”
“The figs were ripe.”
“The figs. And did you pick them?”
“As many as I could.”
“And the holly oak? Were you able to make it recover?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good to hear. I was very worried. What else? Tell me something more.”
But tears kept me from saying more, my throat was strangled.
“Even the pomegranate produced a lot of fruit,” I shouted toward the fissure.
“The pomegranate,” he repeated. “We’ll have to wait and see, though, at least until November. You know how that tree is. It always promises glorious fruits and a week before ripening they split open. Cesare used to say that. He said there was something wrong with the roots. Maybe it’s the proximity to the pepper tree, but I’m not sure that’s it. You have to cover it when the first cold spell arrives.”
“I will.”
“Do you know what my favorite moment was? Our walks. Around sunset, when we had finished our chores. You always dawdled a little while I waited on the bench. Then we walked together on the dirt track. Past the iron bar, we usually turned right, though not always, sometimes we went left. But we never hesitated. We always knew which way to go, as if we’d made up our minds beforehand. And if the figs were ripe, we’d pick them even from the trees that didn’t belong to us. Because in reality it all belonged to us. Right, Teresa?”
“Yes, Bern.”
“It all belonged to us. The trees and the stone walls. The heavens. Even the heavens belonged to us, Teresa.”
“Yes, Bern.”
All I could manage to repeat was, “Yes, Bern,” because my mind was racing ahead, to the moment when I would no longer be able to hear him.
From the darkness where he was watching over me, Jónas said it was time to go. But how could you decide when to end a time like that? How could we break off that conversation and leave Bern alone? I knew I couldn’t hold up much longer, though, my feet were frozen stiff inside my boots. I couldn’t move my fingers anymore.
“I need to ask you something, Bern. About Nicola.”
He was silent for a while, then he answered very evenly: “You have to speak louder. I can’t hear you that way.”
Had he really not heard me, or did he just want to make me repeat it? Maybe he knew that my courage was already petering out; he still knew me better than anyone else.
But I was able to say it a second time, to shout it so he couldn’t pretend not to hear me, and the re-echoing in the cave slammed my doubt against every boulder and hurled it back at me, multiplied. “I need to know about Nicola. Was it you, Bern?”
I pictured his close-set eyes open in the darkness, his expression. I had no need to find a rock that looked like him, he was imprinted inside me.
“I’d like to tell you a lie and swear it wasn’t me. But there will be no more lies, I promised myself.”
“But why did you do it, Bern, why?”
“Something compelled my foot. Something powerful. Nicola’s head was on the rock and that force raised my foot and drove it down. The Lord stopped the hand of Abraham, but out there, in the olive grove, He did not stop me. There was no God at that moment, there was His opposite there with me, and he rammed my foot into Nicola’s head. I’d like to tell you that none of this is true, Teresa. It’s what I wish more than anything in the world.”
“He was your brother. I don’t understand.”
“He . . . The two of you . . .”
“But that’s not true, Bern! It’s not true! You were the only one.”
“And he’d said those words.”
“What words?”
But he was silent again now.
“What words, Bern?”
“He was the one who gave her the leaves. He picked the oleander leaves and
put them in her hands. He did it to protect himself.”
“Which leaves? What are you talking about, Bern?”
“Sometimes we lose who we are, Teresa.”
Jónas’s light went on at the back of the cave, he came toward me. “We have to leave now,” he said.
“No.”
“We have to leave!”
Somehow he dragged me out of there. Getting out proved to be more difficult. I had no strength left, the result of the cold and my grief. I tried putting my foot in the toehold that Jónas showed me, but the boot lost its purchase; I no longer had any sensation. I slid back until he stopped me with his hands. He said we had to hurry, I was in danger of hypothermia.
Bern’s voice filled the chamber once again:
“Will you come back?”
I promised him I would. We made our way through the cave, among the fragile stalagmites of ice, crawling up the slope on our bellies, stooped over our knees in the tunnel, and this time Jónas did not let go of my jacket sleeve the whole time, as if he were afraid of losing me.
After that there’s a gap in my memory, until the moment when I found myself lying on one of the huge rocks in the lava field, under two layers of blankets, the sky once again above me, and that strange night that was too light. Giuliana stood over me, studying me. She said I had lost consciousness climbing up the metal ladder, and had very nearly tumbled down.
When I managed to sit up, they made me drink small sips of coffee. Half an hour had passed, maybe less.
“He’ll die,” I said.
Giuliana looked away. She poured more coffee into the thermos cap. “Drink some more.”
“How has he been able to survive all these days?”
“He has good equipment. Food. Water. He was prepared to stay in there a week. And his endurance is incredible.”
“But why don’t they get him out?”
“Nobody is able to get in there. And even if someone managed to, they wouldn’t be able to help him.”
“They can drill through the rock. Make an opening.”
Her eyes blazed. “The cave is a protected place!”
“But Bern is in there!”
Giuliana put a hand on my cheek, a cold, dry hand. “You’ll never understand, will you?”
* * *
—
WE RETURNED to the lake in that slowly declining twilight. The two other young men came with us. The way back seemed shorter to me than the trip out had been.
There was a room for me in the apartment where the guides lived. It was as spartan as a hospital, the quilt folded on top of the bed. The dinner hour had passed; Giuliana said we wouldn’t find anything open, but there were snack machines on the ground floor if I was hungry.
I stood under the shower for a long time to drive out the cold that seemed to have penetrated my bones. When I stepped out, the whole room was full of white steam. I didn’t even have the energy to take clean underwear out of my bag; I wrapped myself in the quilt, naked, and fell asleep.
That night I dreamed about the masseria. I couldn’t get in the house because the door was locked, but I knew Bern was in our room, lying on the bed. I called him from the yard, but he didn’t answer. At one point a pebble was thrown out of the open window. I picked it up from the ground and threw it back. Maybe Bern had chosen that way to communicate with me. Then more pebbles began shooting out from the window, fistfuls of them. In the end they rained down from the sky as well, a black, hammering hail that in seconds buried the house and covered the countryside, leaving me in the middle of an endless desert.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING we returned to Lofthellir. Only one of the young men who had been watching the cave entrance the day before came with us. He sat in front and talked to Jónas the whole time, shreds of conversation in that guttural, primitive, hateful language. Sometimes they laughed, but they seemed to quickly restrain themselves, as if aware that it seemed insensitive toward me.
At breakfast Giuliana had approached my table. Before setting down the skimpy dish she’d prepared for herself, she’d asked me if I would prefer to be alone. I told her to sit down, though not too politely. We exchanged a few words about nothing, about how unthinkable it was for Italians to eat smoked herring at that hour, even after one had lived there for months.
In the jeep, however, we managed to talk again. I asked her why Iceland, why that cave, why the inaccessible fissure in that cave.
“It’s because of something that Carlos said.”
“Who is Carlos?”
Giuliana tugged her sleeves down until her fingers disappeared.
“A guy from Barcelona. After Freiberg we went there. We had made contact with a group.”
“What kind of group?”
“A little of everything. Independents, black bloc activists waiting for a pretext to riot. We drove there in a rented car. We thought we were being pursued, so we did it nonstop. By some miracle we didn’t encounter any roadblocks. But we didn’t stay long, I didn’t like the situation there, and Bern in particular worried me.”
She stretched her legs under the seat. She stared at them for a few seconds.
“He refused to leave the apartment. ‘It’s all so sick out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see it? Don’t you see how by now we’ve ruined everything?’ They were things we’d discussed a million times, but now he meant something different, something I couldn’t fully grasp. One day he began talking about how he had slept in a tree with his brothers. He had persuaded them to stay outside to see the shooting stars. Staring at the dark sky, he’d felt he was part of something that surpassed him. It was a very detailed account. At that moment I felt the frightening immensity of the love he had inside. It wasn’t just about the trees, it was about everything and everyone, and it didn’t let him breathe, it was suffocating him. Does that seem crazy to you?”
It didn’t seem crazy to me. It was the most accurate description of Bern that I had ever heard. So Giuliana genuinely loved him. But that thought no longer upset me. Now, I simply accepted it.
“Anyway, one of the leaders of this Catalan group came to see us and that was the breaking point. This man, Carlos, had worked on Greenpeace ships in the Arctic. They talked for a long time. Bern was captivated. It was Carlos who first mentioned the Anthropocene to him.”
“The Anthropocene?”
“The geological era we live in, in which everything on the planet, every place, every ecosystem, has been altered by man’s presence. A concept that I had already heard talked about elsewhere, though Bern hadn’t, and for him it was like a revelation. In the days that followed he spoke of nothing else. The desire to find at least one exception began to grow in him. Something that had not yet been seen, ruined. Something pure.”
“Is that why you came here?”
Giuliana gave me a patronizing look.
“Iceland is the exact opposite of purity. The Vikings cut down all the trees on the island centuries ago. From a certain standpoint, Iceland is the ultimate realization of the Anthropocene, even though people come here to look for uncontaminated spaces. That’s why Carlos mentioned it. He said ‘Iceland,’ but he could equally have said ‘Amazon rainforest.’ Bern took it as a dictum. So we came here to look for an exception. Our money ran out quickly; in less than two weeks we were broke. For a few months we worked on a farm by a fjord. A terribly isolated place.”
Jealousy flared up again for a moment: Bern and Giuliana in one of the painted sheet-metal houses, shrouded in fog, warm inside and frigid outside. The sex between them. I suppressed that image as best I could.
“After the winter we moved to the lake. We met Jónas and the others there. They needed more staff for the high season, people willing to do a little of everything. Sometimes the tours they organized were dangerous. But Bern still had his plan in mind. Together with Jónas we visited
the island’s most remote spots, and they were never good enough. The mere fact of being able to reach them was proof of it. Until we discovered the cave.”
“But you can get into the cave too, there’s even a metal gate.”
“Only as far as you went. No one has ever been in the next chamber. Its existence was known, but access to it was too dangerous and difficult.”
“So Bern decided to be the first.”
“And probably also the last, considering the outcome.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?”
Giuliana looked quickly at me, then away again.
“Every one of those guys would love to do what he did. They wanted to find out what was in there, and that way they would at least have been part of the discovery. Having studied the air currents within Lofthellir, they’re convinced that there is a way out. At some location in the lava field.”
“So could Bern find a way out of there?”
“If he hadn’t fractured a leg, maybe. Now it’s out of the question.” We rode in silence for a while. We were on the worst stretch of the road, the jeep lurching on the shock absorbers, but this time the violence of the jolting did not surprise me.
Maybe to dispel the agonizing foreboding that had come over us, Giuliana said: “The tourists have a lot of fun on this road. Some start screaming as if they were on a ride at the amusement park. Bern liked it, too. He was enthusiastic about everything he saw on the island. When he entered the cave for the last time, he was smiling. Even though he knew it could end badly, even though by then he was just a bundle of nerves and determination. I’d never seen him so content. Maybe only at your wedding.”
To this day I don’t know if Giuliana said that to make me happy, but at that moment I chose to believe her. “A bundle of nerves?”
“He’d lost more than forty pounds. A child couldn’t have fit through there, let alone an adult like him. But he was sure he’d make it, and he was right. For months he’d studied the sequence of movements, the necessary contortions. We took measurements of the cleft, of every projection and irregularity as far as we could see with the flashlight, and he built a plaster cast exactly the same. He kept it in the yard. It’s still there. It weighs a ton. From the room I would see him practicing.”
Heaven and Earth Page 36