by Nino Ricci
“That way no one can tell you anything,” he said. “All those family fights, they happen all the time over here. But maybe it’s different in America.”
He had built a small shack in one corner of the field, a sturdy place in mortar and stone with a propane stove and a cot for sleeping. At the back of it, hardly noticeable from the outside because of the way the mountain swelled and fell around it, was a small garden fenced in by walls he had built from rocks he’d dredged up from his land. There were fruit trees, a grape bower, an abundance of roses. In a back corner, taking its source from a nearby spring Fabrizio had diverted, was a tiny waterfall, a trickle of mountain-clear water sliding over stone into a small, placid pool beneath.
“The Garden of Eden, I call it,” he said. “It’s my special place. Nobody bothers me here.”
The garden was like some secret folly or fantasy, rustic and secluded and lush. In the distance the mountaintops rose up, green and grey, encircling the place like a rim holding up the sky.
“We used to have our special places on Colle di Papa,” Fabrizio said. “Remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Back then I always thought I’d follow you to America some day. But I’m still here.”
“It’s not so bad here,” I said.
“I don’t mind it.”
He took me around his field to show me his crops. The blue of the sky here hurt my eyes, so pure was it: the air had a smell of clover and mown hay. For an instant we seemed children again, I tending the sheep in the high meadows near the village and Fabrizio coming out across the fields to keep me company.
“So I suppose people have been talking now that I am back,” I said. “About my mother and so on.”
He gave a dismissive shrug.
“You know how people are. All the foolish things they come out with.”
I pictured him on his rounds quietly collecting the town’s gossip.
“So it’s true, then. They’ve been saying things.”
“This and that. Just nonsense, really. Like the time your mother tore up that money your father sent back from Canada with Alfredo Pannunzio.”
It had been the night of the festa della Madonna. There had been an argument of some sort, and then my mother had shredded a bill of some fairly large denomination, fifty or a hundred dollars, in Zi’Alfredo’s face. In my memory of the event it had been an entirely private thing, unwitnessed.
“What do people say?” I asked.
“Nothing, really. Just gossip.”
He had grown awkward. I remembered how we had fought once as children when he had tried to explain to me, in a child’s simple animal terms, why my mother had become a pariah.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Oh, you know. How she made such a big deal about tearing the thing up and then someone saw her bring it into the bank in Rocca Secca the next day all taped together again.”
We fell silent. Fabrizio wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m not saying that’s how it happened,” he said finally. “That’s just what people say.”
It was plausible that things had happened that way, though there were a hundred other ways they might have happened that were just as plausible. Seen from this distance my mother could have been anyone, hero or hypocrite, sinner or saint.
“And the man,” I said. “The one she went with. Do people ever talk about him?”
“Everyone has some story. Some people said it was what’s-his-name, Giuseppe Cocciapelata, because he went a little crazy after she left.”
“People thought it was someone from the village?”
“Where else?”
“It’s just that I had the idea it was a soldier. A German.”
“But the war had been over for years by then.”
“I just thought. From something I heard once –”
“You were just a kid,” Fabrizio said. “Maybe you thought that because of all those stories about the war that your grandfather used to tell.”
“Maybe.”
I couldn’t bring myself to press him further. Every contradiction of how I remembered things was like having a part of me torn away.
“I can ask around if you want,” he said. “Quietly like that.”
“It’s all right.”
On our return to the village he brought me up along the spine of Colle di Papa to show me where the old high road had passed. Most of it had been dug up now to make way for a new road just under construction, part of the network of impressive straight-line highways that burrowed their way through the region now.
“They spent millions before to change the road so people had to pass through the village and now they’re spending millions so they can avoid it again,” Fabrizio said. “Anyway, it’s all corruption. One way or the other it doesn’t make any difference.”
He led me down the slopes of Colle di Papa, following a tangled maze of narrow footpaths through the scrubby woods that covered it. At a small hollow amidst a clump of pine trees, he stopped.
“We used to come here together, remember?” And he pointed out a slab of stone – I had no recollection of this – where we had carved our initials.
I felt strangely moved. So he had brought me here to show me this place. I remembered the cigarettes we’d shared that he filched from his father, the idle hours we had passed, two knock-kneed boys joined in their delinquency and loneliness. But something else: I had betrayed him here. He had come to rescue me once, from some scheme of the village bullies I’d fallen into, and I had abandoned him, ashamed of my humiliation, ashamed to have him as my only friend. There had always been that shadow between us afterwards, that knowledge of the small hatred I bore him.
“I suppose I wasn’t much of a friend to you back then,” I said.
But I saw at once, by how this seemed to hurt him, that he didn’t remember things as I did.
“What are you saying? We were tight, you and me, all the times we had. But I didn’t think you would remember.”
XXIII
Marta had set me up for the night in my house, had dressed my bed in stiff linens, brought in a night table and chair, had replaced the canister on the ancient propane stove in the kitchen and set out coffee and a small espresso pot for my breakfast. I still could not quite get my mind around the thought that the house was mine now in some way, that I possessed it, that somewhere a will existed that named me, a deed that had been signed over to me. Being in the house I felt a strange sense of dislocation, as if just beneath the surface of things something deeper was trying to urge itself on me: my body would suddenly remember the turn of a stair, the feel of a doorknob beneath my hand, with a Tightness the mind could never get back to; and then the feeling would be gone. That was the hard thing, this not-quite-presence of all my history here, what was everywhere hinted at but nowhere delivered up. And yet it was odd that what seemed to make the past most palpable, in the end, most real, was exactly this mute unreachability, the way it beckoned, and beckoned, and beckoned, and could not be touched.
In bed in my mother’s room, I remembered again the dream of soldiers I’d had as a child, the sound of their voices on the balcony as they smoked, the scrape of their rifle barrels against the balcony rail. My mind had made connections then, a child’s intuitive leaps, whose intricacies I could no longer trace. It was as if reality – the logical grid I saw things through as an adult, the where and the who and the how, what could be proved, remembered, deduced – had somehow come in the way of a lost, higher order of understanding I’d had then. My grandfather had shown me a mark on the bedroom wall where he’d said the soldiers who had passed through during the war had shot at a spider; but I couldn’t locate it now amongst the wall’s many fissures and scars. Perhaps the story had been just some amusement he’d made up, an old man’s exaggerations to feed the imaginings of a child.
In the morning, I drove into Rocca Secca with the hope of tracking down an old friend of my mother’s. A wide, welcoming avenue I had no memory of led into t
he town centre from the highway, with a treelined centre island and newish shops and low apartment houses ranged up along either side. It was only when I’d got past a bustling central square that the avenue ended suddenly and the landscape began to grow somewhat familiar: I had passed into the old town, the streets here winding and narrow and steep and the buildings leaning into one another precariously. The memories began to come back, of Saturday visits with my mother to the local market, of a trip we had made once to the crumbling Giardini estate on the town’s outskirts. Amidst the run-down buildings and abandoned shop-fronts I passed now, the old image we’d had of Rocca Secca seemed to hold, of a place that couldn’t be trusted, that hid its decrepitude behind a façade of attractive welcome.
Just off a square in the very heart of the old town I found what I was looking for: a restaurant whose window showed the small figure of a hunter with a rifle slung over his shoulder, the Hostaria del Cacciatore. The place looked so much more modest and plain than I remembered it, tucked away here off a square that seemed as if it might have been an important focal point once but now had the sleepy, forgotten air of a place that time had passed by. In the centre of the square was a large stone pedestal that must have once held a monument of some sort but stood empty now, a lone pigeon preening itself at the edge of it.
I parked the car. A couple of metal tables were set up in front of the restaurant on the cobblestones there, an older man with the slightly corpulent look of someone who had spent his life amidst food sitting at one of them, peering out through reading glasses at the pages of a newspaper.
I went over to him, not yet certain if he was the one.
“I’m looking for Luciano.”
He glanced up at me over the tops of his glasses, set down his paper. It was him, I thought, though older than I’d imagined, with the tired, distracted air of someone nursing some ancient worry or grievance.
“Then you’ve found him,” he said, looking me over.
I felt my heart race at having tracked him down so easily, sitting here in the sun as if he’d been waiting for me, biding his time these past twenty years till I returned.
From my pocket I took out the old one-lire coin I’d brought with me from home and set it in front of him.
“Do you recognize that?”
There was a small flash of panic in his eyes, an old man’s panic, as if some task he would once have been up to, but was no longer, might be required of him.
“What’s this about?” He picked up the coin and turned it over in his hand. “It’s an old one-lire. What’s it to do with me?”
I had hoped for some moment of recognition, some tiny epiphany.
“You gave me a coin like that once.”
He looked me over again, bringing a hand up to remove his glasses. I could sense his mind straining to figure out some connection to me.
“I’m sorry –”
“It was years ago. I was with my mother, Cristina. From Valle del Sole. The daughter of the podestà?”
“Cristina? But she died ages ago, what are you saying?”
“I’m her son. Vittorio.”
He was squinting up at me as if he could not quite make me out, a hand against his brow to block the sunlight.
“You mean to say you’re Cristina’s son? The woman who died, that’s the one you mean?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought – yes, yes, of course, you’ve come back, is that it?” Understanding slowly washed over him and he rose, extended a tentative hand. “But look at you, how could I have known? The little boy she had, of course, I remember now. I’m sorry, your name –”
“Vittorio.”
“Vittorio, yes. Please, please, sit down. You have to realize I’m an old man now, I don’t remember things.”
There was the small panic in him again. He pulled a chair out for me, fumbled to clear his paper away from the table.
“After so many years. Here, what am I thinking, I’ll get the boy to bring you a coffee.”
He went to the door of the restaurant and called in, waited an instant, but no one appeared.
“Dai, come inside, I’ll get it for you myself. It’s my grandson who’s helping out, Antonio – the father’s in Rome now but he sends the boy out here for the summers to keep him out of trouble.”
I followed him in. The interior of the restaurant was done up in a slightly overwrought rustic motif, with exposed rafters and wall beams in dark, varnished wood and undulating stucco work done up to resemble stone. It was well before noon and the place was deserted, the chairs still up on the tabletops. Luciano went to the bar and prepared two coffees at the machine, pouring a quick shot of brandy into his own.
He led me to a table near the window.
“After all these years,” he said again.
“Does your wife still do the cooking here?”
“My wife? You remember her?”
I had an image of a large, falsely friendly woman whose eyes had shot daggers at my mother when we’d had lunch here one day.
“I think I met her once.”
But Luciano’s eyes had gone wet.
“She died five years ago now,” he said.
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“These things happen. But I don’t have to tell you what it is to grieve for someone.”
We sat silent. Luciano took up his cup and drained it in a single draught, like someone taking medicine.
A young man in black-and-white waiter’s garb emerged from the kitchen door and began setting chairs down from the tables.
“Antonio, get us some more coffee here. And bring that bottle, the one on the counter.”
From up close it was clear that Antonio was little more than a boy, fifteen at most, looking stoic and earnest and innocent in his trim waiter’s outfit as he set out our coffees. He poured a bit of brandy into Luciano’s.
“No one was more upset with what happened to your mother than I was,” Luciano was saying. “I can tell you that.”
“It was so long ago now.”
“Yes, that’s how it happened back then. For every little sin. It’s not as if she was the only one, with all the men off in America like that. The orphanages were full in those days. Or sometimes you’d just find the thing frozen to death in the fields.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Anyone will tell you about it. Nowadays, of course, it’s different. If a girl wants the baby, she keeps it, and if she doesn’t, well, she just goes to the doctor and cuts it out.”
He drained his cup again and absently refilled it from the bottle of brandy Antonio had left behind.
“What about yourself?” he said. “Do you have a family?”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe that’s for the best. You find a woman now and you don’t know where’s she been before you. In my day, you saw a girl at a dance, she smiled at you, but then before you so much as asked her her name you had to go to the parents. I remember your own mother and father – I don’t know if you know this but I was the one who introduced them. It was terrible how it turned out with him in the end. People here say it was because of your mother, what he did, even after all those years. But nobody knows what’s in a man’s heart when he does a thing like that.”
“I didn’t realize you knew him.”
“He used to come in sometimes to sell us a bit of this or that from the farm. Your mother I knew from the market, just to talk to her like that. So once I see her across the square while your father was here and I go out and tell her there’s a young man I want her to meet.”
“My mother told me that they met at a festival in Castilucci.”
But Luciano was insistent.
“You’re wrong there, I remember it like yesterday. I can still see the expression on your father’s face when I brought her in. You know how it is, he wanted to act like it was nothing. But I could see right away that she was the one for him. After that they used to meet here sometimes when your mother came in to do the sho
pping. To get around their parents, you understand.”
So he had been my father’s friend. None of this fit with the memory I had of him, as a sort of confidant for my mother’s indiscretions.
“You know,” he said, “the funny thing is that what your father liked about your mother was that she was educated. All she had was grade eight, that’s nothing now, but back then anything more than grade five and you were a professor. That was the thing your father most regretted, that he never got an education. Before he met your mother he was even ready to go into the seminary just so he wouldn’t have to spend all his life farming his few hectares of stones for a living. But after they were married, he could never forgive her those couple of years of schooling she had over him. It was the very thing that brought them together that wrecked them in the end, that’s what I say. It’s funny how things work out like that.”
He stared into his cup.
“Ah, well,” he said. “All the things that could have been different.”
“I was wondering about the man,” I said. “The one my mother was involved with.”
“Eh? Yes, of course, there’s that.”
“Do you know who he was? Where he came from?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you there.”
“You mean you didn’t know him?”
“I don’t think anyone knew him, except your mother, of course. People knew about him, or at least they said they did. But you know how it is, what people don’t know they make up.”
“But you never actually met him?”
“No, no, I can’t say that I did.”
“But I heard you talking about him once. It was in the market – my mother and I had come in and you were buying your vegetables. The day you gave me the coin.”
“Yes, I was wondering about that. I’m not saying it’s not true, but for the life of me I can’t remember the thing.”
“You said the coin was a lucky charm. That it stopped a bullet from entering your heart during the war.”