by Nino Ricci
On our way home once, Fabrizio pulled a small object from his pocket: a gold earring.
“I found it near your house,” he said. “You should have it.”
But I didn’t understand.
“Years ago. Not long after you left. It was probably your mother’s.”
It was just a small thing, a round hoop of dulled gold. I tried to picture what she might have looked like, wearing it, who that woman could have been.
“You kept it all this time?” I said.
“In case you came back.”
He was holding it out to me. It didn’t seem right somehow to be taking it from him after he’d so long been the guardian of it. He was always the one giving me things, even when we were small, though he’d had so little then, was always the one who’d worn his heart on his sleeve.
“I thought maybe you didn’t have anything of hers,” he said. “The way she died and everything.”
I remembered a slogan I’d seen once on some sentimental poster: Whatever is not given is lost. But I wasn’t sure how it applied here.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the thing from him. At the back of my mind was the thought that it was something tangible, at least, something to pass on.
We walked on a moment in silence.
“Do you ever think of marrying?” he said.
The question took me a bit by surprise.
“I don’t know. I suppose, if the right person –”
“So you don’t have a girl over there yet.”
“No, no. Not yet.”
He looked a bit awkward.
“Me, I’m happy enough on my own for now,” he said. “Do you think there’s anything wrong with that?”
“No. Not at all.”
We parted at the corner of his street. He had yet to invite me to the house where he lived with his parents, even now revealing the same quiet shame of his family he’d had as a child, though the newish-looking place they lived in now seemed a vast improvement over the crude, dirt-floored one I remembered them living in when he was small.
“You’ll come around again tomorrow?” he said. “I’ll bring some food out, we’ll have a little picnic in the garden.”
“I’d like that.”
As he was retreating down the darkness of his street, he turned and waved.
“Oh, Vittò!” he called out. “We’ll have some times again, you and me, wait and see.”
I wandered one afternoon along the path of an old tratturo that I remembered from childhood, now used as just a local footpath though apparently it had once connected up with a much wider one that came down from Abruzzo. My grandfather had told me stories of the great flocks that had passed in his day every autumn and spring, massive movements that stretched days long along the track and that had seen village-sized camps spring up every night when the shepherds and their families pitched their lean-tos and tents. He had described these movements as if they were great circuses or festivals, every night the sound of music and dancing around the fire, the drone of sheepskin bagpipes and the beat of drums.
The track I followed ran a mile or two along the spine of Colle di Papa before joining up with the old, now-abandoned highway that used to pass by Valle del Sole when I was small. I followed the highway for a distance, all cracked and weedy now, into gloomy woods I had always feared as a child because of the stories of the brigands and thieves who lurked in them. I kept expecting the road to join up at some point with the new one that led back to the village, but beyond each curve the darkness and woods continued. Then finally I came to the junction of an even more ruined road, just a steep, rutted path that led up through the woods toward the crest of a hill. There was an ancient signpost at the corner with a single arrow pointing up the path, its lettering too faded to be read. The whole scene seemed like something out of a ghost story: the dark woods, the ruined path, the single arrow pointing up.
I began to make my way up the path. There were the marks of what looked like recent tire tracks along it, skirting around the worst of the potholes and ruts. After a stretch, the crumbled asphalt gave way to cobblestones and the ruins of buildings began to appear amidst the tangled undergrowth and woods that flanked the road. It came back to me now: this was the old town of Belmonte. According to the story that people had told when I was a child, it had been destroyed by the Germans during their northward retreat, the story always standing as a sort of cautionary tale of how even a town as reputedly prosperous and blessed as Belmonte could nonetheless be reduced to mere ashes and dust. But seeing the village now, just a handful of broken-down hovels, most of them little more than rubble at this point, I wondered if the story had had any truth to it. The place had probably never held much more than a dozen families, hardly worth the bother of destruction; and it had the look now of a sort of afterthought, its cobblestoned street following along only a hundred yards or so before giving way again to cracked asphalt, the decaying houses lined up along it looking as if they had been felled not by bombs but by simple lack of purpose.
Beyond the village, the road wound up along the edge of a hillside. I remembered it led up to a summit where it was possible, because of the way the mountains swung around, to get a good view of Valle del Sole. It was getting toward dusk; already in the shadow of the hillside it was difficult to pick my way along the path. There were car tracks here as well; and then I rounded a curve and there was the car itself, a newish grey Scirocco with local plates. The driver’s door was still open, as if someone had merely stopped an instant en route to somewhere else to admire some curiosity or vista. But beyond where the car was parked the road looked impassable, a hopeless snarl of snaking fissures and gullies: this was the end of the line, there was nowhere further to go.
I reached the summit. The land here opened out to a rocky plateau spotted with yellow-flowered gorse. Toward one end of it, with their backs to me, stood two figures, a man and a woman. The man was gesturing out toward the valley as if to point out some landmark; the woman nodded, and then with a familiar gesture brought a hand up to pull back her hair.
They were standing a few inches from each other, a thin line of sunset lighting the distance between them. My first instinct was to turn, to make my way quietly back down the hill, to let this thing be. But then they seemed to sense my presence and almost in the same instant turned to face me. It was Rita and John.
XXVI
John handled the burden of greeting. I couldn’t see him now except through the veil of my suspicions: there would be some telltale marker or sign, some gesture or curve of muscle or bone, that would give him away.
“Well.” He extended a hand, awkward and yet seeming at some level genuinely pleased to see me. “Rita said we might find you here.”
Nothing in the look of him made the thing clear at once – there was the set of his brow, perhaps, but I no longer trusted myself, the tricks my mind played. He had grown a beard since I’d last seen him, tinged with grey like his hair; it seemed to mask him like camouflage, leaving only his eyes to know him by though they were what seemed to make the thing most unlikely, that I could look into them without any flash of recognition.
“How did you find this place?” I said.
“Ah, yes.” He looked embarrassed. “Just wandering and so.”
There was always something in his embarrassment that was like a plea sent out, that way he had of discouraging enquiry, of making every question seem as if it had touched some injury in him.
“Are you coming from Rome?”
“Actually,” he said, “we’ve been in Campobasso a couple of days.”
I was stung that they’d been so near without looking for me. I had no way of knowing now whether they’d planned to look for me at all.
“You should have come to the village.”
“Yes, of course.”
Rita stood to one side, the setting sun hidden behind her as if in eclipse, lighting a halo around the shadow it made of her.
“You were looking out at Valle del Sole
,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “We weren’t sure.”
We both seemed a bit stunned to be reunited here on this gorse-studded summit.
“I have a house. My grandfather’s old place. You can stay there if you want.”
Her eyes went to John as if to ask his permission.
“We still have our hotel for the night,” she said.
“You can come tomorrow, then.”
“If you think you have room for us.”
We stood a moment not certain what to do next.
“You came on foot?” John said.
“Yes.”
“We’ll drive you back.”
It was nearly dark by the time we arrived at the village. Rita, sitting in back, had her face up against the window to peer out. The streets were deserted, the village seeming peculiarly unwelcoming and bleak in the twilight hush. A dog ran out from an alley and chased alongside us a few yards, barking, then dropped away.
“Which house?” John said.
He would know the house, if he was the one. But already I felt wearied for us both by my suspicions, couldn’t bring myself to be always testing him. Now that he was here beside me in the flesh he seemed so harmless, my suspicions so tenuous.
“The one at the end.”
The house was shrouded in darkness, sitting just beyond the reach of the village’s last streetlight.
“This is where you grew up?” Rita said.
“Yes.”
We had barely spoken so far.
“You could stay for supper,” I said.
I couldn’t make out her face in the dark.
“We should probably get back.”
“But you’ll come tomorrow.”
“If you’re sure it’s all right.”
They arrived toward noon the following day. I had scrambled to make arrangements, scrounging cots and linen from Marta and Luisa. For friends from Canada, I had said, not having thought through how else I might introduce them. Then when their car pulled up outside the house, I felt a spasm of panic: all this was wrong, bringing them here; nothing of what we were could be made sense of here.
John was already unloading bags of groceries from the trunk.
“We brought some things,” he said, a bit doubtfully, as if he were asking some favour of me to accept them.
The house felt transformed with Rita and John in it, its air of preservation, of holding intact some ghost of the past, seeming to flee before their backpacks and bags, their travellers’ impermanence, as if some spell had been broken. I showed them to their rooms, John to one on the ground floor and Rita to the one next to mine upstairs. Rita and I stood a moment at her door, looking in.
“There’s no bath in the house,” I said. “You’ll have to use my aunt’s up the street.”
“That’s fine.”
The room was bare except for the cot I’d dug up for her and an old wicker chair and a small barrel that I’d set up as an end table. I’d set a glass on the barrel with a few wild-flowers in it.
“There’s a good view from the balcony,” I said.
She went to the balcony door and opened it to stare out. It was the first time I had really dared to look at her, as she stood across the room with her back to me.
“Has it been hard for you?” she said. “Returning here?”
“Not so hard. Not as hard as I thought.”
I tried to read her through the curve of her back, the fall of her hair on her shoulders, the way she held herself. That seemed to be how we spoke to one another now, faceless like that, unable to bear the direct gaze.
“And for you?” I said. “How have things been?”
“Oh, the same, I guess. Not so hard.”
We kept to our places, me at the door, her at the balcony, as if some force held us just there, at that precise distance. I could hear John downstairs, the rustle of grocery bags.
“I suppose I should get some lunch ready,” I said.
“Sure. I’ll be down in a minute.”
John had managed to find the couple of pots I’d borrowed from Marta and had set water to boil for pasta.
“Is there any problem?” he said.
“No. No problem.”
It was hard to gauge how much he knew of what had gone on between me and Rita – something, surely, if not from anything Rita had told him then simply from the strange energy between us. I had the sense that he held himself back from knowing more, almost as a gesture of trust, an offering against his own secrets.
“It’s not much of a kitchen,” I said.
“We can manage.”
We set about making a meal. They’d brought pasta and bottled sauce, some cheese, some lettuce and vegetables for salad. John worked with the no-nonsense competence of a man long used to preparing his own meals. I thought of his apartment, with its fusty not-quite-disorder, of his solitary life there.
“We haven’t talked about your trip,” I said.
“Perhaps we can wait for Rita. To have her view of things.”
“She’s been all right?”
I couldn’t keep the thickness out of my voice.
“Yes, of course.” He said this in a tone that sounded neither guiltless nor completely reassuring. “A little confused, perhaps.”
“Confused about what?”
“Oh, the future and so on. It’s normal for her age.”
When Rita came down she had changed from her jeans to a ruffled long-sleeved dress full of creases and folds as if it had lain unused at the bottom of her pack the whole trip. The dress seemed to change her, to rusticate her, made her look like some peasant girl dressed up in her Sunday best.
“I saw from the balcony that there’s an extra floor at the back,” she said.
“That’s the stable.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t remember ever telling her the exact details of her past, their exact architecture. And yet her question hadn’t seemed innocent.
“It’s empty now,” I said. “I can show it to you after lunch.”
John came with us when we went down. I almost thought that he was trying to tell me now, not Rita but me, that he was trying to find the right wordless way to say yes, he was the one. We stood, the three of us, at the bottom of the side steps and the air seemed ripe with suspense, as if at any instant the stable door must open and John’s younger self must appear there.
“Our mother used to work back here,” I said. “In the garden. Our cousin Marta keeps it now.”
I opened the stable door, to the dank smell of cold earth and rotting stone. Rita and I went inside. For a moment we stood alone in the stable’s murky light.
“There would have been animals here,” I said. “Some pigs, a few sheep. I used to take the sheep out to pasture after school.”
Somehow my mind was fixed on these simple, banal details, the things I could say for certain. Everything else, the open door, the two eyes peering out, that Rita could have been conceived here in this smelly grotto, seemed suddenly far-fetched.
“Do you remember what it was like for you back then?” Rita said. “I mean, really remember?”
“Sometimes. In a way.”
We came back out to the open. It was only now that I noticed Luisa staring at us from her balcony. It seemed from her stillness that she had been watching us for some time.
“So these are your friends,” she said, her gaze fixed on Rita.
“Yes. They’ve just arrived.”
“Do they speak Italian?”
“No.”
Her eye went to John, then back to Rita. She let the silence hang an instant.
“You should bring them around some time,” she said finally.
“Yes. Maybe tomorrow.”
We made our way up the stairs. Rita glanced back toward the balcony, but Luisa had gone.
“You sound different, in Italian,” she said.
“How, different?”
“I don’t know. As if you belonged here.”
I ha
d to take them around to Marta’s to let her know they’d be needing to use the bath there. Marta was just clearing away the remains of her own lunch, shooting a quick, appraising look at John and Rita and then continuing with her work as if she had already summed them up, slotted them into her order of things.
“They’re friends from Canada,” I said.
“Friends? If you say so.”
It seemed pointless to wait for her to extend any gesture of hospitality to them. Even Aunt Lucia, perched in front of the television, gave no sign of any interest in them.
“They’ll need to use the bathroom sometimes,” I said.
“So let them use it, then.”
I led them out. There had been no missing Marta’s animosity. It seemed an unfortunate way to introduce them to the village, not least because the apparent arbitrariness of Marta’s actions almost always ended up pointing toward some truth.
“Marta’s a bit strange,” I said. “Don’t mind her.”
But we all seemed to have been made ill at ease by her reception.
We continued up the street toward the square. The village had taken on its midday torpor, sun-deadened and still, the only sounds the buzz of flies and the rustle of lizards darting in the shadows of ruined buildings. We passed a couple of villagers, but they seemed shy at the sight of these new strangers, nodding and mumbling some neutral greeting and moving on. But then one of the women I’d met at Marta’s my first morning – Maria, the large one – spotted us from her stoop.
“Oh, americano! Who are these foreigners you’ve brought?”
Before I could think of a way to refuse her she had got us into her kitchen, with an almost predatory aggression, settling us at her table and keeping an assessing eye on us as she went about preparing coffee and setting out sweets.