Guesswork

by Martha Cooley

  Poor guy, my mother says. I know she means it, but it’s evident, too, that the story amuses her: she’s half-smiling. Which gives my husband a reason to grin. Thankfully, my father doesn’t notice; he’s intent on wrangling a final piece of pineapple onto his spoon.

  Who knows, Antonio says after we’ve seen my parents off to their afternoon naps. I mean, maybe the guy just enjoys the suspense. Like, will they catch me this time?

  Ah, he must be so desperate, I say.

  Or totally bored, says Antonio. Or really sad. Probably a mix. At least doing this thing he does, going from cabinet to cabinet—at least he stays alert . . .

  True, I think. It could be worse: he could be sitting by himself in his apartment, swilling his own booze all day. Still, the image of him tippling his way down the hall unnerves me. I wonder how many other residents are more or less like this guy, superficially fine yet fundamentally desperate. And I picture Antonio and myself in fifteen or twenty years, assuming we stick around that long. An older couple, really truly older, and perhaps mismatched in health.

  Mi strozzerebbe—Antonio would throttle you, I tell myself. He would, if he knew you were thinking this. So change the picture. Quick, revise!

  I make myself imagine the two of us (old, yes, we’re old) sitting on the wall of the church piazza in Castiglione. Legs dangling over; hands in our laps. A thick, bright blanket is wrapped around our shoulders. We’re staring across the Magra Valley toward Aulla and the sea beyond. We don’t talk, we gaze. Our minds are empty. The air in the piazza is never completely still; gentle now, the wind will pick up in a bit, we know. And when it does, it could tip us over. Sooner or later, in fact, we’ll fall off the wall. But we’re swaddled, so nothing will break.

  Love-blanketed. Safe as a pair of babies.

  After discussing whether to tell the staff about the incident with the liquor thief, we decide to leave it, and the drinker, alone.

  The morning of our departure, Dad comes to us with news.

  I’ve found a buyer for the Lincoln! he says. The head of maintenance here is a really good man, and he’s got a college-age girl who needs a car. He’ll take the Lincoln off my hands for a thousand bucks, which isn’t bad, considering how many miles it’s got! I’ve kept it in excellent shape, I have to say. That girl’s gonna get a nice car from her dad.

  He begins detailing his annual visits to the local mechanic. We’ve heard all this several times before, but we nod anyway.

  So about the daughter of the maintenance fellow, I finally prompt my father. When will she take the car?

  Oh, right. Next week, answers Dad. But you know, before I hand over the keys, I want to go to the car wash. Come on, he says, reaching for his coat. I’ll show you how nice it looks!

  We follow him to the parking lot. As he walks, my father lists slightly starboard; not like the Concordia, but he’s not upright, either. At least he’s still moving, unlike Mom, for whom each unsteady walk from chair to bathroom is a challenge.

  There in front of the building sits Dad’s beauty—black, long, and wide, a classic late-twentieth-century gas-guzzler. My father opens the driver’s-side door, lowers himself in, and points out all the marvels: leather seats, a gleaming wood dashboard, electric windows, a radio that also plays tape cassettes. (Cars with CD players are well beyond his ken.)

  A really great automobile, Antonio says as my father wraps up his tour of the car’s interior. So well kept, too! We don’t have anything like this in Italy. What a hit this car would be in our village . . .

  Hearing this, my father breaks into his Italian-mafioso routine, Brooklyn accent and all. We’ve been treated to this performance of his before, on multiple occasions. He likes impersonating Lucky Luciano.

  Today, though, Dad surprises us with a new variation. He pushes a button below the dashboard, and the car’s trunk opens. Levering himself out of the driver’s seat, he leads Antonio to the back and points at the opening.

  Get in, he orders.

  Antonio stares at him, unsure he’s understood.

  Turning to me, my father asks: Do you have your phone with you? It takes photos, right? I want you to document this! Okay now, Antonio—come on, hop in.

  Dad, I say, are you serious?

  Absolutely, he answers, grinning, and in that moment he reminds me of no one more than Antonio’s grandson Milo, who at age three likes staging tableaux for us, with props of his own choosing.

  My husband obliges.

  He’s not a basketball player, but he’s not short, either. Yet remarkably, Antonio’s lean frame fits into the trunk without much contorting. He lifts one leg up and into the trunk, plants his butt on the edge of it, and with a quick hop and roll, he’s in. A bit of adjustment and he’s prone in the clean, gray-carpeted space, hands folded behind his head and feet propped up. I’m seeing, as I do multiple times each day, what I so love about this man—his lightness of being, his lithe body, his grin.

  Comodissimo, he says, settling in. Really! Good as a bed!

  My father, miming the smoking of a fat cigar, launches into his “I’m-a-gonna-leave-you-in-cement-overshoes-in-the-river” monologue as I click away with my phone’s camera. I’m happy: for a few moments my father and my husband have lost themselves in the drama of the Lincoln. Then Antonio, still smiling, climbs gracefully out of the trunk, and as Dad closes it, I feel my inner weather shift. Though the game we three have just played is as benign as a kindergartener’s, I can’t entirely set aside the sense that my husband was placed, if only for few minutes, in a kind of grave. He’s fine, of course; it’s the context that’s spooking me. It’s the bulletin board outside the dining hall with its list of recently deceased residents; it’s the morbid odor permeating the Lodge; it’s the booze-guzzler; it’s the food no one really cares about, and why should they? It’s all those hard-as-stone realities that people here confront daily.

  They—we—all know what’s coming. And yet we row for years, writes Donald Hall in his poem “Affirmation,” on the midsummer / pond, ignorant and content—until upheavals large and small force us to affirm that it is fitting / and delicious to lose everything.

  Delicious—really? Yes, because fitting. Because nobody gets to stay. Because, having affirmed this, we can still hop in a car trunk, take photos, and laugh. Because Mom will laugh at the scene, too, when I tell her about it. And I will make myself not think about her not seeing it.

  Come on, love, says Antonio. Let’s go with your dad to the car wash. Get in, Papá—no, in the passenger seat! I want to drive!

  10. The Pass

  This evening after dinner, a phone call about one of Antonio’s Cremonese relatives: an unanticipated, not-good medical diagnosis.

  This afternoon, a lovely nap. In all innocence, as it were.

  This morning, a three-hour drive up into the Appennini, the road often overhung by branches. Occasionally we crept past frane, little rockslides. As we crossed several narrow stone bridges over lush gorges—the bridges’ parapets low and irregular, at points broken—I held my breath. The final bridge, just before the pass, was partially collapsed. Orange tape marked its usable lane. We crossed slowly, parked the car, and walked the length of the bridge’s still-extant roadway, gazing down at a boulder-filled stream several hundred feet below.

  Why, I wondered, wasn’t the “safe” bit falling, too? Had the worst already happened, and we’d missed it this time?

  Something else to guess at.

  * * *

  Earlier in the evening, before sunset, a walk up the hill from our village.

  And a look back upon it, viewed from a neighbor’s vineyard: the village’s castle to the left, its square tower dominant; old stone houses spread along the main ridge of the borgo; and our little house-for-a-year, its terrace visible from “across the way,” as my grandmother used to put it. Any stretch of space like this, over a leafy dell, was across the way to her.

  Though no obvious bad illnesses dogged my grandmother
, I’ve always believed she was an undiagnosed manic-depressive. There are days like today—sunshine brilliant, wind gentle—when I wish I had a soft version of Nell’s illness instead of the one I’ve pegged myself as “suffering” (the word’s not apt; “laboring under” is more like it): anxiety, the mind’s habitual groove of disquiet. I awoke to it this morning, as I tend to do. Could feel it in my hand muscles’ inadvertent twitching as the usual doubts about my work—my novel-in-progress—cycled through my mind and body. Today, could I not keep stopping to revise? Just keep going, simply be a writer and write? Saying goodbye to me a fortnight earlier, my mother urged me to finish my book. I could hear now the command beneath her encouragement: get it done!

  Then Antonio rose, yanked the sheet playfully off me, and said, c’mon, up! Let’s go to the Lagastrello Pass! We keep talking about doing that, and we still haven’t . . .

  Thus anxiety was transmuted into excitement as we ate breakfast, drove to nearby Monti, purchased two bottles of water, and began our ascent.

  At first there was the town of Licciana Nardi. Then a handful of villages above it, sparsely populated. Then a few houses on their own, then fewer, then none—just hills—as the switchbacks commenced.

  The roadbed got worse, the steepness serious. Around us were chestnut and hazelnut trees, intermittent stands of pine, and hardy wildflowers of all hues. The air was decidedly chilly. Above was a wide azure sky and multiform clusters of clouds. As we rounded one long curve, swerving midway for a frana’s deposit of crumbled rock, a dense swath of white materialized in the sky. It looked as though it’d been poured from a bucket—some painter’s experiment in stippling gone extravagantly wrong.

  More bridges, more curves. Then the bridge with the orange tape. Soon after, a sign announcing the summit of the pass. We were at two thousand feet or so, and decided to turn back rather than cresting the pass and descending to its other side, the Pianura Padana, Italy’s flat agricultural “breadbasket” in the Po River valley.

  Antonio patted our elderly car’s dashboard in praise: what a climb you’ve just made! Complimenti! I, too, felt a giddy sense of achievement. We’d descended only a bit when, after a tight curve, the entire valley opened before us. Directly ahead, on a sloped field—gray upon green—lay some ruins, sun-drenched. We pulled over.

  * * *

  An old hospice, originally: so said the weathered sign.

  Nearly a millennium had passed since the original structure, a stopping-off point for wayfarers and pilgrims, had first been constructed. Over the course of centuries, all manner of humans—traders and merchants, monks and adventurers, armies and partisans—had made their way to this edifice we were now reconstructing in our imaginations.

  A safe haven, I said to Antonio. That’s what we’d call a place like this, in English.

  We stood gazing at broken walls dating from a couple of hundred years ago, not more. Stones from the older ruins were long buried, or had been carted away piece by piece. There was even an iron beam, evidence of a fairly modern attempt (and failure) at renovation. We saw a few lizards, some yellow buttercups in the grass. Listened to breeze and birdsong. The air smelled of nothing but itself.

  I took a small triangular slab of rock from the site, prying it from the soil in which half of it was buried. Using my water bottle, I gave it a bath; it dried quickly. The slab would make a nice flat perch for something—a candle, maybe. And would remind us, I said to Antonio, of our day here. Of driving up-up-up to the pass.

  As if I’d forget? I wouldn’t. Still, I wanted the object, a tangible reminder. Just as, after her death, I’d wanted Nell’s books, her watch, a few of her table linens. One Sunday back in the Seventies, setting the table for an Easter dinner at my grandmother’s, I noted my mother, already seated, impatiently fingering a needlepoint ring that encircled her napkin. I figured Mom was distracting herself with something tactile—the better to tune out Nell’s boasting, not for the first time, about her English family’s sole link with royalty, some great-uncle who’d been a court photographer. Those same napkin rings, well over a century old, are with me now in Castiglione, a visual reminder of what I call FFFRs: fraught female familial relationships.

  Antonio smiled at my little rock, then returned his gaze to the sloped fields before us. He had, as usual, no interest in hunting for mementos. He just wanted to take in the view.

  I don’t compulsively collect anything, mementos included. Yet in that instant I wished to be able to recall—always and readily, aided by the object in my hand—this nippy, bright, clean-aired day spent with my husband, both of us in good health. Glancing at him, I felt time split open: there stood Antonio in the here and now, and there he stood with Valeria many years earlier, one arm slung over her shoulder with that careless ease I could still easily conjure—their intimacy at once present and gone, real and over. And there stood Antonio and myself in Brooklyn, the autumn after Valeria’s death, arms wrapped around each other, both of us astonished by a love so visceral and unexpected. By the renewal of body and heart, this fierce unstoppable flourishing. By its adjacency to loss.

  A few years from now—five, ten, fifteen—would Antonio and I both be standing in Castiglione, basically fine? Or would he be taking care of me, as he’d taken care of Valeria during not one but two bouts of cancer? Or I of him? What new lessons in grief, what fresh trainings in loss would we have assimilated?

  I felt my heart quietly spasm. There it was: the torment of love unsatisfied, as “Ash Wednesday” names it. And the greater torment / of love satisfied.

  Do not resist, I told myself. Just let this be a wave, let it wash over you. Even among these rocks. Do not be afraid.

  A few yards away from me, Antonio inclined his head back, relishing the sun. All I’d have to do, I knew, was turn to my husband and say siamo fortunati, and he’d look at me and guess what I was thinking. But I didn’t want to break into his reverie; I could always tell him later, or keep it to myself. It didn’t matter. Or did it? If I were to speak my fear, give it words, perhaps I’d corral it. Yet in doing so, I’d risk tugging Antonio from peacefulness to pain—and to what end?

  My gaze returned to the small slab in my hand. I stared at it for a moment, then closed my eyes, pretending to be my blind mother: an old game played with myself. How would this thing feel to her?

  Quite smooth, for a rock. Cool. Roughly triangular in shape.

  The slab was part of this rocky redoubt, a place to which countless people before me had climbed. Travelers who’d seen the same green banquet spread before them; who’d forded the same streams wending down to the Magra and Taverone rivers; who’d had somewhere to get to, or someplace they needed to leave, or simply a sudden desire to explore the Lagastrello Pass . . . Why, I asked myself, was I retrieving from these ruins a piece of dove-gray rock rather than some other souvenir? A few wildflowers, say, to press between a book’s pages? Or an elegant pinecone, a piece of arty driftwood?

  I couldn’t say why. I simply sensed the little slab would call to mind the day’s vibrancy. Would conjure that sense of possibility, of don’t be afraid, be glad, that Antonio and I had felt as we crossed narrow bridges and skirted the frane in order to ascend and descend.

  And, too, perhaps the slab would act like a poem, and offer a different reading of loss. I’d dug up this bit of rock for a reason, obscure though it might be; why not trust my impulse to unearth it? We humans are dog-like, after all; we excavate memories like bones, digging till we hit upon solace or something close: a recognition that the dead don’t wish it for us, this downward thrust of feeling. Want our faces upturned instead.

  Antonio walked over to me, his expression calm and happy.

  Pronti, amore? he asked quietly, taking my hand. You ready to return?

  He kissed me, his lips warm. I reached up and stroked his head. We got back in the car and began wending our way downward, homeward. At Tavernelle, we deviated off the main road, then halted for a few minutes beyond Apella t
o give some donkeys the reign of the road. We stopped at last—thirsty, hungry—for lunch in Bagnone, a village a few bends of the road from ours. Nearly across the way.

  * * *

  Midday: a plate of simple pasta, a salad, and an espresso afterward, its almost-bitterness delicious.

  Nighttime: an owl, its call reproving. Death, is it death you’re dwelling on? Hooo, hooo—why, why? And Mia up at the castle, answering with her buoyant bark as if to say, oh, what do you know?

  The small slab of rock sits now on a wooden chest in our living room. Where the slab comes from: a haven now in ruins. How it got there: carried by human hands. What it is: vestigial, a shard from a vanished whole. Which of my senses it most appeals to: touch, for its surface is nearly as smooth and cool as that of marble. How it serves, despite its indifference to time: as a base for a brass hourglass (whose, we’ll never know) discovered at the bottom of a drawer.

  11. Libri

  We’re in Carrara, having just visited the near-lunar landscape in the mountains above the city, where world-famous marble is excavated. Chilled to the bone, I’m willing the wee cup of espresso cradled in my hands to transmit its rich warmth quickly.

  Up the street is the hospital where il professore died, several months ago.

  I remember sitting by Bononi’s bedside two days before his passing. He ranted a bit, then grew pensive and beautifully articulate, almost sweet. Then made a crude joke. Then ranted some more. The female nurses were alternately charmed and distressed by him. Perhaps he mistook them for past lovers.

  Antonio and I held his hands. The skin of his chest was as smooth as a baby’s. He was very pale, which made his light-blue-eyed gaze all the more intense. He spoke of going home, back to Castiglione, but we all knew—he did, too—that he wasn’t.

  * * *