by Nino Ricci
“The water’s off,” Marta said. “There’s a tap to turn it on in the stable but I’ll have to do it, you won’t find it.”
“Oh.”
There were details I couldn’t account for, a marble floor that I remembered as concrete, a side balcony overlooking the valley, the simple dimensions of things, their small unprepossessingness. And something else: I couldn’t put my finger on it at first but then it came to me – the light. There had been no electricity in the village when I’d left it, that was how I remembered things – I could call up a dozen memories that depended on the fact, that made no sense without it. Perhaps the lights had been put in after we’d gone. Yet the fixtures in the room, the worn switch by the door, the frayed wire the light bulb dangled from, looked as if they’d been there forever.
“I didn’t think there’d be electricity,” I said.
Marta shot me a guarded look.
“Electricity?”
“The lights, I mean. I thought no one had lived here since we left.”
“That’s right.”
“Ah.”
She led me through the rest of the house, opening doors into empty rooms. There was my grandfather’s room on the ground floor, and then upstairs my mother’s and my own. I kept expecting some surge of memory to take me over but felt only the same disjunction, the sense that my memory was being not so much stirred as stripped away, couldn’t bear being confronted like this with things as they were.
There was not a speck of dust on the ledges or floors, not a single cobweb on the ceilings. It was eerie, this pristine abandonment – it made me think of pictures I’d seen of Pompeii, of whole rooms, houses, streets held forever frozen at the moment of catastrophe.
“It’s very clean,” I said.
Marta grunted.
“I didn’t do any painting. You’ll have to do that yourself if you want.”
It was growing clear that she had kept the place up ever since it had been left empty, no doubt in some sort of perverse fidelity to the wishes of my grandfather, who had promised me at the time of my departure, though I was only a child then, that the house would be waiting for me should I ever return. It had been to Marta that my grandfather’s care had been entrusted when my mother and I had gone: he had still been bedridden then from a fall, and perhaps had remained so, for all I knew, until the end of his life. At the time, there had seemed a sort of gloating in Marta at this victory over my mother, at having wrested from her her father’s care.
When we had come back to the front door, Marta handed me a latchkey.
“You’ll have to decide what you want,” she said. “You can bring a bed over or you can stay up at our place, it’s the same to me.”
It seemed she was prepared simply to abandon me here, had fulfilled her obligations and was ready now to wash her hands of me.
“Well. I’m not sure. If there’s room at your place. For tonight, at least.”
“Suit yourself.”
And she started back up the street toward her house in her grim, purposeful way as though she’d just dispensed with some long-put-off errand.
I was left alone. The place seemed infected by Marta’s strangeness, by this weird sense of mission with which she’d maintained it. I wondered what it had taken to keep the house from crumbling as so many others had. Perhaps it had been simple force of will, as if it was only the realization that there was no one who cared any more whether they stood or fell that made houses crumble at all.
I stepped outside and followed the crooked stone steps that led down to the back of the house, where the stable opened out beneath the main floor. Someone, no doubt Marta, had kept up the back garden: there were neat rows of tomatoes and lettuce and fava beans, shored up between furrows cut deep into the earth to control the water flow along the slope. A little terrace of broken stone connected the side steps to the stable door, which was weathered and old but still intact. I pushed it open. Here, too, there was a light switch. I tried it and a bulb came on from an ancient outlet attached to a ceiling rafter.
The room had the look of a grotto or cave, the walls spongy with moisture and sediment, the floor of plain, beaten earth. There was no light except from the dim light bulb, no ventilation except through the cracks in the door. If anything had happened here, back when the place had been rife with the smell of animals and shit, it would have had to have been some crude, unromantic thing, dirty and quick. Apart from a few farm implements in a corner now, a hoe, a spade, a watering can, the space was empty – it looked as if someone had scoured it, cleaned it down to bare earth and stone, then left it to moulder.
I sat down on a stump that someone had placed outside the stable door. The sun was shining, in that way it had, that I remembered, with a dry, dreamy mountain heat. It would be possible, in this heat, to forget things, to walk out to some sunny corner of pasture, and fall asleep. The landscape itself, stretching lazily down to the valley, was busy forgetting: where I remembered an unbroken sweep of carefully tended fields the wild had begun to take over, great patches of gorse and tangled undergrowth hemming in the occasional still-tidy holdout of vineyard or vegetable plot. It was as if this place itself, the land with its wilderness, the village with its ruined houses, had grown senile and old, was gradually nodding toward some eternal sleep.
I felt eyes on me suddenly and looked up to the back of a neighbouring house to see a young woman standing on a balcony there, staring toward me. She kept her gaze on me though I had seen her, in a curious, questioning way as if my being here in her familiar view, her familiar world, meant I could pose no threat.
I nodded in greeting, awkwardly.
“Buongiorno,” I said.
She was dressed in a loose summer dress, legs bare but her feet in heavy-soled work shoes that looked bumpkinish against her bare legs.
“You’re the grandson of lu podestà,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she’d simply hazarded a guess or if the word had already somehow got around.
“Sì.”
“Bentornato.”
She was very pretty, I saw now. Her hair, wavy and dark and long, caught glints of red from the sun.
“You used to play with my older brothers and sisters,” she said. “They’ve all moved away now.”
“Ah.”
“Mi chiamo Luisa.”
“Vittorio. Mi chiamo Vittorio.”
“Yes. Maybe you’ll come by sometime for a coffee.”
“Sì.”
She smiled. This was the first normal conversation I’d had since I’d arrived here, the first sign of welcome.
“I’ll see you soon then.”
And she turned and went in.
I had supper at Marta’s. Somehow I had ended up simply turning myself over to her brusque ministrations: after a long walk in the countryside surrounding the village I’d found myself making my way back to her house with the tired, lonely sense that there was sanctuary there, that I’d be safe. The instant supper was set out, Aunt Lucia got up from her place in front of the television and made her way to the table, infinitely slow but with no other apparent sign of infirmity.
At the table she looked me over as if trying to place me.
“Is this the one?” she said. “But this is the boy from before, the mailman’s friend. Tell him to come closer.”
I brought my chair around next to hers and took one of her hands. It had the veined translucence I remembered from childhood, glossy and smooth like a water-smoothed stone.
“It’s Vittorio,” I said. “Your nephew. You used to give me five-lire coins.”
And she looked me up and down and nodded her approval before finally turning to her food.
Against one wall of the kitchen was an old curio cabinet with some framed photographs inside. There was one of my grandfather, in his reservist’s uniform, his war medals neatly lined up along his breast pocket; there was one of Aunt Lucia and a man I took to be her husband, though I’d never known him. Tucked away in a corner was one of a
young woman and child standing sombrely before the doorway of a house. The woman, it seemed, was pregnant.
“It was the day you left,” Marta said, seeing where my eye had gone.
The woman had a plain, peasant look, her hair long and dark and limp, her dress hanging formlessly over her belly. She was holding the hand of the boy beside her.
“I don’t remember this,” I said.
“If you remember it or you don’t, there it is.”
The doorway we were standing before was Aunt Lucia’s. I recognized the keystone, the plastic strips. But everything that might have made sense of the picture had been cut out of it, whatever was going on at its periphery, whoever this woman was that Marta seemed to claim was my mother. I could hardly fathom this image of her: it was not just her plainness that struck me, how far she fell from the ideal of her I had created, but that she stood so vulnerable, so grave, with such a look of the mountain peasant that I could hardly imagine I’d ever known her.
“You can have it if you want,” Marta said finally. “It was only you we kept it for.”
And in my room that night I hid it away in one of my suitcases as if it were a piece of evidence to be concealed.
XXII
The room Marta had given me was one that my mother and I had shared for a few nights before our departure, after our own house had been closed up. I remembered the crucifix over the bed, the old wooden armoire, the double doors to the balcony. It had been Marta’s room then, and possibly still was now, though there was little to show that it had ever been occupied again after our departure, none of the usual trinkets or adornments of human habitation. Even the bedspread looked unchanged, fusty and heavy and old, with silky embroidering in faded crimsons and reds. My mother had been well into her pregnancy at the time: I remembered the warm bulk of her, the drag of her belly against the sheets. It was odd to think that Rita had existed then, that she had been floating there in my mother’s womb just an enigma, a possibility, knowing nothing of what she was or would become.
In the morning, when I awoke, I heard muted voices from the kitchen. There was a small, kerchiefed woman at the kitchen table when I went down, another much larger one at the door. From the hush that fell over the room when I entered it I had the sense that the women had been expecting me.
“So who might this stranger be?” the one at the door said, with a sort of timid heartiness. I knew the voice, knew these women but couldn’t pull their images up out of my memory.
Marta was making coffee.
“You can see for yourself,” she said.
The woman gave me a look to show she was stringing Marta along.
“See what? All I see is a handsome stranger.”
“He came back for the house,” Marta said. “Like I said he would.”
Another look.
“And which house is that?”
Marta was growing impatient.
“Don’t be an idiot. How many houses are there? If it’s not this one, then it’s the other.”
“You don’t mean the old mayor’s house?”
There was an air of intrigue in the room that had begun to seem familiar: I could picture these women, or ones like them, in my mother’s kitchen when I was a child, passing innuendos and hints in this same probing, joking way, trying to get to the bottom of things.
“Dai, Maria, leave her be,” the woman at the table said now. “Anyway, I knew it the minute I saw him, you can tell by the eyes. Come, giovanotto, you must remember Maria and me. Giuseppina. We used to come by your house sometimes.”
“What does he remember, he was only a child,” Maria said.
“It’s true. How many years ago was it now?”
Maria had finally moved into the room to take a seat.
“It was exactly five years before his grandfather died, I remember that,” she said. “It was sad how that happened. He went a little crazy in the end.”
They went on like this, a mix of candour and circumspection and squabbling, like chattering birds not certain where it was safe to alight.
“It was Marta who kept up the house for you,” Giuseppina said. “After your grandfather left it for you in the will. It’s true that she always said you’d come back. She sees things like that sometimes.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Maria said. “He came back because he was born here.”
“All the same.”
“So you were my mother’s friends, then,” I said.
“Sì, sì,” Maria said quickly, and then, “You must remember my Vincenzo, the two of you used to play together. He’s in Rome now.”
“Ah.”
When they’d gone they seemed to leave a residue like the trace of some interloper who’d got into the house. It was as if they’d come to test me, what I remembered, how I might implicate them. Or perhaps they had simply come to get a look at me – this was the one, her son, this was what happened next. Time was different here, people had patience, twenty years wasn’t so long to wait for a story to reach its conclusion. In the village’s eyes, I might be like some soldier who had returned after years of war – everything that had happened to me during my absence was irrelevant, wasn’t part of the tale, didn’t take on any meaning until the moment I stepped back into the village, and was home.
Not long after the women had gone the village mailman stopped by the house, a pale, thin-limbed young man in a uniform of shorts and cap that gave him a slightly comical air.
“Postino,” he said, as if explaining his uniform to someone who had never seen such a thing. “How you say, post-man.”
He set his mail bag in a corner and then he and Marta disappeared mysteriously up the steps to the second floor. I heard a mumble of terse conversation, and a moment later he was in the kitchen again.
“I came to help with the bed,” he said. “I think we can manage it.”
“Sorry?”
“Marta said that you’re moving down to lu podestà’s old place.”
“Oh. Yes.”
So that was the plan, then. It seemed for Marta like a point of faith in the creed of some intricate private religion that I be installed there, that her years of tending the place reach this fruition.
The young man led me upstairs to a tiny spare room that held an old bed frame and flowered mattress.
“We’ll do the mattress first,” he said. “You take the front.”
When we’d reached my grandfather’s house it took a bit of manoeuvring to get the mattress up the narrow stairs that led to the second floor. We set it against the wall in the bedroom that had been my mother’s.
“You don’t remember me, admit it,” the young man said.
“We used to take walks together up on the mountain there. On Colle di Papa.”
It seemed I had been friends with everyone: Maria’s Vincenzo, the brothers and sisters of Luisa next door. But this was different.
“You’re Fabrizio,” I said.
“So you remember.”
“We used to smoke cigarettes together. Before I left, you gave me a jack-knife.”
“See, I was right, then. We must have been friends.”
I was thrown off by this possibility he was allowing that we might have forgotten one another. In my memory of him he was larger than life, as much a part of the landscape of my childhood as this house, these stone walls. But to him I might be simply some boy he’d known briefly who had gone, like dozens of others.
“So you stayed on, then,” I said. “In the village, I mean.”
“I was in Rome for a couple of years, I worked in a restaurant there. That was a lark. We Molisani, we pretty much run the restaurant business there now. But you can’t beat a government job. And the air here – in the city it’s not the same.”
He gave the same impression he had as a boy of being a sort of vast conduit for information which, however, always emerged from him slightly skewed, slightly tinged with an indefinable residue of him.
“Anyway, it’s good you remember m
e,” he said. “Some people come back and it’s like they’d never set eyes on the place before.”
When we were done with the bed, he left to finish his rounds.
“I’ll come by for you after,” he said. “We’ll have some laughs.”
He came around again at the tail end of lunch, changed out of his uniform now into jeans and an old flannel shirt. Without waiting for an invitation he made himself at home, seating himself at the table and wrapping a friendly arm around Aunt Lucia.
“Ciao, zia!” he shouted at her. “You’re a good girl, you always clean your plate!”
Marta set a dish in front of him and he began in a casual way to mop up our dregs.
“So things must look different from how you remember them,” he said. “They changed the road – remember it was just that old goat path before? It was like the end of the world here.”
“I was wondering about the electricity,” I said. “When it came in.”
“What are you saying? That was way back in Mussolini’s time, he did the whole country then. And before that there used to be an old waterwheel down by the river that made it.”
None of this accorded with how I remembered things.
“But there was that festival one year, when the band had to bring its own generator. They put lights up all over the square. You must remember that.”
Fabrizio shrugged.
“Maybe it’s something else you’re thinking of.”
After lunch he took me out to a patch of land he had in the contrada of Bellavigna, beyond the slopes of Colle di Papa. It was spread over the mountainside in a precarious series of dips and plateaus, two or three acres at most, hemmed in by the tangled growth of various abandoned plots that bordered it. There were a few olive trees, several rows of vines, some tomatoes and beans. He had bought the land with the money he’d saved while in Rome, though there were family plots, his parents too old to work them now and his siblings gone off to Switzerland, to Turin, to Rome, that had gone abandoned.