I advanced another step and then lost heart. It wasn’t worth it. But just as I was turning to go, the mother took her own bold step forward, blocking me. The rolling pin was still on the table. Small mercies. But clearly she was comfortable with her small, dark-skinned fists. When she raised them, I pulled my own arms inward and crossed them, elbows over my ribs, like an Egyptian mummy. Let her do it—that was all right. Let her take out her frustrations on me. I wasn’t that fragile. And maybe I even deserved it. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting.
And then those soft, old arms were wrapped around my waist. Baggy flesh enveloped me, and my nose filled with the faint aroma of oregano. Her head was level with my chest, her wide bosom was barely at my navel, and she was pulling me toward her, gripping me, comforting me, dissolving my defenses as she nodded and wept in commiseration: Va bene. Va bene. Va bene.
A pummeling would have been easier.
I walked downhill back to the barn where I had last seen Cosimo’s sister, checking frequently over my shoulder to make sure that no one had been compelled to follow. I only needed a moment and the cooling evening air on my skin. There was no reason why a grown man should shed tears upon receipt of sympathy when he did not shed tears upon first sight of the thing itself, the real and ugly and inescapable thing. There was no reason a woman should be kind to a stranger and no reason why a stranger should break down within sight of a grieving mother. There was no reason. And so I kept walking until my gasping stopped, until I could breathe normally and put the moment behind me.
At the barn, I turned the corner, saw the open door, and reached for the iron handle, entering the semi-dark space incautiously, only to be stopped short. The center of the room was lit by a kerosene lantern. At the edge of the golden light, Rosina was seated nude on a stool with her legs in a steel tub, pouring water over the curtain of black hair obscuring her face. My lungs got the message quickly: not a sound, not a breath.
She didn’t hear me for a moment through the water, but then something alerted her. She tilted her head up. The glossy curtain parted, and now there was a smooth white stomach, and bare breasts heavier and more pendulous than a Greek virgin’s, and her eyes, blinking with effort through the soapy, parted hair.
My mind was in several places at once. It was seeing the first original Rembrandt I ever saw, face close to the thickly painted canvas, looking for the source of that Old Master’s light. It was with the first woman I knew half-intimately, before Leonie, and before I’d given up on finding a truly compatible girlfriend.
“Cosimo?” Rosina asked, bringing a forearm up to her breasts and twisting away slightly, still blind.
I should have backed away. I should have turned and run. There was still a moment, while the soap was still in her eyes, before she blinked me into clear view. But I was too slow.
She shrieked, held her breath for a moment, then broke into nervous laughter.
Heart racing, I turned away in confusion, quickly averting my gaze. “I didn’t know—I expected—I thought this was just a barn.”
“You startled me,” she said. “It’s all right. I have a towel. It was only—your face.”
She slipped away on wet, bare feet, leaving dark spots on the outbuilding’s rough plank floor, toward a screen-like partition decorated with a still life of pears and peaches and grapes—poorly drawn, I noticed, now that she wasn’t occupying my full attention. Then I noticed the large iron bed frame in the corner, the old mirror, the dresser, the glass bottles with flowers on the sill of the building’s only four-paned window, the phonograph balanced atop a small fruit crate.
“It was a barn,” she explained, her voice muffled behind whatever she was pulling over her head.
When she came back out, she was wearing a white blouse, with her wet black hair draped over each shoulder, making translucent damp spots just below her clavicle.
“Signorina,” I tried, reaching out a hand.
“I’m a decade older than you.”
“Signora . . .”
“It’s too late for that. ‘Rosina,’ please.” She waited for me to drop my hand. “I offered you a chance to clean up. The water isn’t very warm, but it’s all right and just a little soapy, if you don’t mind using the same tub.”
She misread my expression. “Or if that isn’t good enough for you, we can dump it. But then you’ll have to use cold water.”
“No,” I said, finding my voice. “Don’t go to any trouble. The water is fine.”
The warmth of her earlier laugh was cooling fast, retreating behind an armor of grief and understandable caution. I wanted to reach out a hand and catch it before it had disappeared entirely. But at the same time, I was still feeling an acute embarrassment that locked my feet in place. Furtively, I searched her face for any signs of the same unease, but she was moving purposefully, using her wet towel to mop up some extra water splashed from the galvanized tub, hanging the towel on a hook, rummaging on an open shelf. She looked up.
“Forget it.”
I nodded unconvincingly.
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” she insisted.
“I was more concerned—about your discomfort, I mean.”
“Ah, yes—my discomfort.”
“We haven’t gotten started on the right foot.”
“You mean, by meeting over my brother’s dead body?”
She was right, and there was no pardonable reason for me to be thinking of her hair or her figure, or of the water splashing down into the tub, or of the fact that even now her shirt was open at the throat and slightly wet.
“I’m very sorry.”
She swore softly—not at me, as I thought at first, but at herself. “Damn, I can’t wear this.” She disappeared behind the screen again and came back a minute later changed into a belted black dress, a little too loose in the waist and chest.
“It’s all I have in black.” She sounded angry and looking for a reason to be angrier yet, if only someone would engage her in argument. She patted the spot at the back of her neck where there was a single small button, just beyond her fingers’ reach. “Assist me.”
I fumbled until she grew impatient, pulling away, and tried to do it herself, grabbing the button with such force that it popped off and rolled onto the floor and under the bed, sparking a single German curse word that in turn ignited a torrent of Italian blasphemies.
Rosina sat down on the mattress with her face in her hands. The proper thing would have been to step back silently and leave her in peace.
She looked up, finally, scrubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “If you think I’m handling this well—”
“—well enough.”
“You would, too, if you had a brother like Enzo. It’s just that I’m not surprised. I am, and at the same time, I’m not. I spent too many years worrying.”
I nodded, encouraging her.
“Our mother always expected the best from him, but I guess I’m not the charitable, motherly type. I always expected the worst.”
When I still didn’t move or speak, she began to tell me a story which quickly became a flood of stories—Enzo’s gambling problem in Milan; Enzo’s bad judgment and a failed business deal involving a cousin in Naples; another time they had to urge Enzo to go abroad, and he did, but he didn’t have the sense to stay. But then she heard herself and stopped. “I’m still so furious, but it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
When I didn’t answer, she lifted her chin away from me, eyes wary. “You haven’t said very much. All this, and you’re still embarrassed about what happened before.”
“A little.”
“Forget it.”
“Yes, of course.”
She remembered suddenly. “You met the rest of the family?”
“They barely spoke to me.”
“Did you speak to them?”
“I tried.”
“They’re in shock. It’s understandable.”
“I wasn’t meaning to suggest otherwise. Your mother—” but I
couldn’t say it without my throat catching. “The old man—”
“My uncle. Zio Adamo.”
“He was crying.”
“That’s probably not about Enzo. It’s too soon. Any crisis reminds him of when my father died. How did Gianni handle it?”
“The younger man? He put his fists up and didn’t want to let me pass.”
She made a noise that was not quite a laugh, but I would take whatever I could get. The awkward silence that followed made the small interior of the low-ceilinged barn seem even smaller yet, the corners lost to the shadows beyond the lamp’s reach.
“I’ll leave,” she said, rising from the bed where she’d been sitting to push a coarse towel into my hands.
Near the door, she slipped her feet into open-backed leather shoes and put her hand on the old handle, black except for the bronzed spot at the top of the latch where a thumb had pressed a thousand times, coming and going.
“Wait. Please. How do you speak German so perfectly? You speak it even better than Cosimo.”
“I should. I lived in Munich for four years. They came and visited me. Enzo was suspended from work. Cosimo talked him into going north, and then, of course, Enzo spent every night finding new trouble while Cosimo spent his time studying German and watching me rehearse. It’s no wonder Cosimo picked up the language better.”
“Rehearse?”
“I sang in the opera there.”
“You sang . . . ,” I said, searching for the name of the opera, willing her not to push down the door handle, to stay just a moment longer, “you sang Hänsel und Gretel.”
“So Cosimo did explain.”
“No, he said nothing about it. He only whistled.”
She looked momentarily confused, then uninterested. “No one likes to mention it. It’s the family scandal.”
“Scandalous to sing opera?”
“No, scandalous to become . . . involved in Munich.” She seemed to consider omitting further detail but then shrugged it off. Perhaps it was her natural brazenness; perhaps it was the disarming effect of the day’s events. I’d never know how she would have seemed if I’d met her in different circumstances. But then again, in different circumstances, I wouldn’t have met her at all.
“I took a lover,” she explained. “A local resident, not an Italian. That was the most incomprehensible thing for them. Anyway, it didn’t last.”
Rushing to fill the awkward silence, I said, “I’m sure your family was glad to have you back. Cosimo emphasized how close you all are.”
Her chuckle was hollow. “Close—yes. My family accepted me once I moved back because I married quickly and conveniently.”
She saw my eyes widen, looking around the makeshift accommodations for signs of a jealous husband who might lay hands on a snooping visitor.
“No, he lives in the main house. The one with the fists up. Gianni. He helped my father and my uncle with the farm. With Papa gone and Zio Adamo getting old and Cosimo and Enzo working in town, we couldn’t manage without him.”
Her hand was still on the door handle, but she was leaning away from it now, her weight shifted, off balance, one foot pulled out of the shoe, a toe playing with the exposed insole.
“You live apart from your husband?”
“Gianni remarried. He lives in the house with his wife and their daughter because my family needs him here. That is the second scandal.”
“And you?”
“I need only to be left alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But they make you live out here?”
“Make me? There’s something wrong with my little palazzo?” At least now she was teasing, though with Rosina, I was quickly becoming aware, a tease could quickly turn sour. “Because if you’d rather wash up at the main house—”
“Is it that easy to end a marriage in this country?”
“When you are physically defective, it is.”
Our eyes met, and I was hoping she couldn’t read my mind and know that I had seen, and was recalling still, the very absence of her defects.
“You’ve heard,” she added, “of the Battle for Births?”
When I shook my head, she explained, “We are expected to reverse the population decline. A target of five children per family, but ten, thirteen—the more the better. I have not been a loyal soldier.”
I must have looked uncertain about that last phrase, because she added in a bitter voice, “I can’t make babies. These days in Italy, it is almost a crime.”
She opened the door. “There will be a lot to do. I’ll find Cosimo and let him know where you are. Anyway, what is your name?”
“Vogler.”
“That is your first name? Because I’ve already given you permission to use mine.”
I hesitated. “It is . . . Ernst.”
“You say that like you’re choking on it.”
I could have told her that it was my father’s name, which even my mother’s gentle voice had never managed to make appealing, or that it always sounded like a brutish grunt to me.
“It sounds . . . very serious,” I said.
“And you’re not serious?”
“It also means ‘to battle to the death.’”
“I take it you have other plans.”
“No plans, but no death wish, either.”
She paused for a moment, thinking. “Perhaps it only needs an Italian variation, with more vowels. We give them away here, no charge. How about . . .” She pushed her loose foot more securely into the shoe, widened her stance, straightened her spine, inhaled, and announced: “Er-nes-to.”
She delivered it with an operatic flourish, bringing each syllable up from a deep place in her body, as if all three of those syllables in that order had long been stored there, fully formed and waiting, and she had only to haul them up, out of the dark and into the light. And isn’t that how the important things should feel—beauty and honesty and love—as if they had always been there, only waiting to be expressed?
“The meaning has not changed,” she said, stepping through the open doorway, pausing for one last moment on the threshold. “But now it has loosened its belt. Now it breathes.”
CHAPTER 10
Rosina, if only I could stop time there, at that moment where you showed me a different kind of woman’s beauty. (Even though I’d slept with several other women, you were the first real woman I’d ever seen entirely undressed, unhidden, unmarmoreal and in the flesh.) If only I could pause there, when you showed me a way of speaking the truth, a way of infusing breath and life into something as unpromising and unrefined as my own name.
I could walk and keep walking through the Piedmont now, through all of Italy perhaps, imagining that you are still waiting, somewhere. It would be easier to find the café closed, to miss you, to take a wrong turn into the wrong town than to find out you have a child, are married, remember nothing of what I am recounting here or remember it all differently, or only in its most dismal form: that a difficult foreigner showed up, inviting chaos, leaving behind devastation.
Walking past vineyards and up into Renaissance towns and down old Roman roads, I could keep reviewing those few moments, putting you on a pedestal, no pun intended.
Should I?
I recall that photo Cosimo used to carry: the look of impatience and irritation. No, you say, of course I shouldn’t. Better to choose life and the truth than settle for the false moment, the preserved image. So fine—no dishonesty, then.
You probably don’t believe in love at first sight, anyway. But how about love at second or third sight? I would settle for that.
“We need to make a coffin,” Cosimo said when he found me a short while later, clean but bone-weary and disoriented, sitting in the dark on the stone stoop outside Rosina’s barn. “There is a man down the road, but he needs to go to another town to get milled wood. One, two days at least.”
“Days?”
“That’s if he doesn’t get delayed.” Cosimo made a motion with his hand, lifting a
n imaginary bottle. “I tell him, we have wood. We have nails. We don’t need the coffin to be fancy. In fact, it should not be.”
A pause. He was trying to put off saying it as long as possible. “The crate,” he finally admitted. “He must take wood from the crate.”
“And the statue—?”
“We will wrap it in blankets or mattresses. That is not a problem.”
“I’m glad you think it’s not a problem. For you, very little is a problem.” That’s how it had seemed, once we had arrived at the Digiloramo cascina. Before, it was Cosimo and I on a mission together; but now that we had arrived, I had become a stranger again, unprotected from angry or confusingly attractive relatives. “Next you will tell me you need the marble for a grave marker—”
His face closed down; his eyes flattened. “You have no idea of the problems I am facing to bury my brother, with no time, little assistance, not even a priest—”
“I thought there were priests in every Italian backwater.”
“The problem is that the local priest maintains very regular communications, of course, with Rome. And he is not the only one. You and I, this week, we do not need any outside attention, from Rome or anywhere else.” With each syllable he stabbed a finger toward the road, volume rising, until he just as suddenly paused, realizing that he was getting needlessly incensed. He dropped his hands and his chin, directing his report to his feet. “I have discussed this with my family and they agree. For now, it’s better that no one know. Gianni will help me carry my brother from the truck into an upstairs bedroom, where the women will help clean him and dress him. Then I will get you something to eat, and you can sleep in a room with my uncle.”
“And you?”
“I will start digging the grave, with Gianni, as soon as we’ve finished eating.”
“In the dark?”
“It’s better. We have few neighbors as it is, but in the dark, no one will see us.”
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