Where She Has Gone

by Nino Ricci

  “But is it your fiancée, this one?” she said.

  “No, no. Just a friend.”

  It wasn’t long before other women had begun to appear at Maria’s door, passing the same appraising eye over Rita and John as if Maria had set them on display here. In the end there were more than half a dozen of them crowded into Maria’s kitchen, large and small, ancient and middle-aged.

  “They’re just friends,” Maria explained, to each new arrival. “From Canada. Though the man, he looks like a German to me.”

  “Tedesco?” one of the women said to John. “Deutschmann?”

  John reddened.

  “Sì, sì, Deutschmann,” he said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the Germans,” one of the others threw in. “People said, because of the war, but I’ll tell you the Germans always respected us. You know who were the worst, the Canadians! It’s true, they were the worst!”

  It came out in all this that John spoke a few words of Italian, some of the women trying to draw him out in conversation. But the attention to him was only in passing, it seemed, a diversion. Rita was where the real interest lay, barely veiled and strangely intense, the women’s eyes always coming back to her. They asked me questions about her, where she came from, what she was to me, seeming to know that I would lie and yet still somehow taking pleasure in my responses, as if all that mattered was that she remain in their sphere.

  “She’s so pretty,” one of them said. “With those eyes.”

  And there was a mood in the air of almost reverential deference, as if Rita had come with some secret, some arcane knowledge, that they wished to be privy to.

  “They must have guessed who you are,” I said, when we were outside again. It was the only thing that explained their fascination: they were searching for our mother in her, what spark or power she had passed on to her.

  “It was very strange,” Rita said. “The way they were looking at me.”

  “I think they’re a little afraid of you.”

  The women’s attention seemed to have changed her in some way: she looked suddenly less foreign here, in her long-sleeved dress and black hair, seemed to have taken into herself some of the stone and shadow of this place.

  “I thought I understood a bit what it was like for her,” she said. “For our mother. To be in a place like this. To be watched.”

  John had hardly spoken. The whole time we had been at Maria’s he had seemed to want to will himself into invisibility, putting the women off with a reticence that came close to rudeness.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Italian,” I said.

  “A few words, only. From when I was young.”

  “You studied it?”

  “No. No. I picked it up here and there. But it was many years ago now.”

  The two of them spent the rest of the day in retreat at my house, John sitting reading on the balcony off his room and Rita doing some laundry out back in a big copper tub I sometimes used for my baths, spreading clothing to dry over branches and posts like bits of decoration. From the kitchen balcony I saw Luisa come out to offer her a washboard.

  “Thank you. Grazie.”

  “I have machine,” Luisa said, in stumbling English. “Is better.”

  “No, no, it’s all right. It’s nice to be in the sun like this.”

  “Yes.”

  Later, that night, taking a walk through the village after Rita and John had gone to bed, I ran into Luisa near the square.

  “So it’s your sister who’s come, then,” she said.

  “So people know.”

  “You were right not to say. It’s nobody business.”

  “But everyone knew just the same.”

  “You know how they are. They said it was the eyes that gave her away. Because they were blue.”

  “But how would they have known that?”

  “It’s not that they knew. It’s just what people are saying, that it’s because of the washing blue your mother took when she was pregnant. Silly things like that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They used to believe that before. That you could get rid of a baby by swallowing washing blue.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m just saying what they thought.”

  “But it’s not something my mother would have done. It doesn’t sound like her.”

  “It’s what people say. You were small then, how could you know?”

  We were walking back along the village’s main street toward home. Here and there a light was on in a window, in the background the dance and flit of the ghost that televisions cast up, the fire that people gathered around now.

  “And the man?” I said. “What are people saying about him?”

  “I don’t know. They were making fun of him a bit, because he’s a German.”

  “Just that?”

  “One of them said he looked like someone she’d seen on the TV. In one of those war films.”

  We’d come to the door of her house.

  “So you and your sister are close,” she said.

  “Fairly. Yes.”

  “I could see that. I thought she was your girlfriend at first. I was even a little jealous.”

  “Ah.”

  She laughed.

  “Povero Vittorio. You think I’m going to try to trap you and make you stay here the rest of your life.”

  But I didn’t know how to answer her, how to make light of things the way she did.

  The light was still on in Rita’s room when I went in. For a moment I stood at her closed door, heard the page of a book turn, the creak of bedsprings. I could go in to her now and she would be there on her narrow bed, her body a slender swell in the bedsheets. Then as I stood I heard her rise, heard her feet pad across the stone floor till she was just a door-width away, till I could hear the sound of her breathing. She seemed to hesitate there at the threshold as if she knew that someone waited on the other side, that some decision could be made. But then came the click of her light switch, and the sound of her padding back to her bed in the dark.

  XXVII

  It rained through much of the night, a hard, driving rain that hit like a scattering of pebbles against the glass of my balcony doors. At one point I awoke with a start at the thought of Rita’s clothes outside, then remembered she’d brought them in after supper. But through the rest of the night I couldn’t get the image of them out of my dreams, those coloured bits of her spread through the garden, saw them picked up by the wind and scattered all over the valley and beyond. It would be hours’, days’ work to collect them, a hopeless trek through the muck and cold. Rita waited behind at the house while John and I set out; but it was impossible, the rain was too hard, the road too long.

  In the morning Rita was at the kitchen table, alone, when I went down.

  “John’s gone out walking,” she said.

  Sunlight was pouring in through the balcony doorway, just a few drifting wafers of cloud left behind from the night’s rain.

  “Will he be long?”

  “I don’t know. He gets pretty far sometimes. He said not to wait around for him, if we wanted to go out or anything.”

  It was the first time we’d really been alone together. We both seemed awkward at the prospect of this time stretching out before us.

  “So you and John have been getting along?” I said.

  “It’s been okay.”

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ought to be cautioning her in some way, but I wasn’t sure against what.

  “I don’t want to pry. It’s just that you’ve never really talked much about him.”

  “We’re just friends, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, her cheeks colouring a bit. “Like I told you.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I was just wondering about his past and so on, that’s all.”

  None of this was going quite right, the subject seeming more fraught for her than I’d expected.

  “It doesn’t really come up much,” s
he said. “I guess he holds a lot back, coming from Germany and everything. The war and all that.”

  “Did you go there at all? To Germany?”

  “A bit.” She seemed hesitant about going on. “He took me to his home town, near Munich. I thought it would be this pretty little village, from how he talked about it once. But it was just a new-looking suburb, it could have been anywhere. I guess a lot of it was destroyed in the war. And then it was like he was just a tourist there – there wasn’t anyone he wanted to see or anything. It’s almost as if we went there for my sake, not his. So he could show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  “I don’t know. What he was. How little he had.”

  She seemed to have understood something about him that she wasn’t quite able or willing to put into words but that she was setting up almost as an admonition to me, a warning not to tamper with whatever it was that they had between them.

  “Well he seems nice enough,” I said stupidly.

  We’d grown awkward again. I found myself wishing once more that she hadn’t come here: what was the point of all this weight we had to bear around each other, of everything that couldn’t be discussed, resolved, of this stricture in my throat as if I were gazing at water, near at hand, unreachable, while dying of thirst?

  There was still the whole morning before us to fill, and then beyond that the days, the weeks, the years.

  “We could go for a walk,” she said.

  But I couldn’t bear the thought of passing through the village again, of those eyes on us.

  “Maybe in the countryside.”

  We ended up following a path that wound gently down toward the valley from just beyond the edge of town. The air felt scoured after the night’s rain, the grass and weeds along the path still dappled with wet. We passed an old man I didn’t recognize at work at his little plot; he nodded darkly in greeting, then stared on at us as we went past before bending back to his work.

  A couple of miles out Castilucci appeared in the distance, spread out along a narrow promontory that jutted out into the valley.

  “Is that the town your father was from?” Rita said.

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s how Aunt Taormina described it. She used to tell me stories about it.”

  I always felt a twinge of shame at the memory of Aunt Taormina, because of how as a child I’d thought of her as hopelessly plodding and slow-witted. But during the years that her and Uncle Umberto’s family had lived with us she had been a sort of surrogate mother to Rita.

  “What sorts of stories?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ghost stories, mostly. There was one about a woman who people said was a witch. How they dug up her grave after she died but it was empty.”

  There was something in this I couldn’t quite make sense of, perhaps simply that she had memories of her time with us that were separate from my own, or that she had fit in in this way, hadn’t always been hopelessly outside of things. I had the instant’s sense that all the while that she’d lived with us, that I’d imagined her as impossibly alien, this other person had existed, someone who had truly been part of the family, who had talked like us and remembered what we remembered and had heard stories like we had at her aunt’s knee.

  “You must have spoken Italian fairly well then,” I said. “To have understood her.”

  “I guess it’s true. I never really thought about it.”

  “But you don’t remember it now.”

  “Sometimes I think I can almost understand. With those women yesterday, it was so familiar. But it’s like in a dream. It’s like the words get garbled somehow just before they get to me.”

  We had come fairly far by now. Behind us, Valle del Sole was just a smudge of mossy tile and whitewash in the hillside.

  “This whole place,” Rita said. “That’s how it feels to me. Like it would make sense except for some little thing I can’t put my finger on. It’s almost as if I thought I’d come here and the past would just be here, that I’d pick it up and then I’d understand, I’d be someone else, maybe that little girl who knew how to speak Italian or whoever I would have been if things had been different. But I guess it doesn’t work that way.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “It’s not that. I suppose it’s freeing, in a way. To know there isn’t this other identity out there I have to keep looking for as if there were some kind of curse over me.”

  We were getting close to the river. The vista here was much different from where Luisa and I had come out when we’d gone to the hot spring, the river stretching out bucolic and wide and wheat fields rolling gently down to sandy shorelines on either side, with no sign of the cliff face that Luisa and I had walked along.

  “There was a place along here where our mother used to go,” I said. “A hot spring.”

  “Should we look for it?”

  But now that I’d mentioned the place it suddenly seemed too intimate a thing to speak about.

  “It’s a bit far, I think. Maybe another time.”

  We came to the shore. There was no crossing where we were, just a uniform stream of silver-blue, eerily silent though moving swiftly after the night’s rain. Rita took her shoes off and waded into the shallows. Far up along the shore, past the gorge formed by the promontory Castilucci sat on, a tiny figure was moving, a knapsack over one shoulder. As I watched he came to some sort of footbridge and began to make his way across to the other side, from the distance looking as if he were floating across the surface of the water.

  Rita and I walked along the shoreline to an outcropping of rock at the river’s edge and sat, a little apart from each other, Rita still in her bare feet. Here in the valley the air was almost completely windless and still, the sun shining down on us like the essence of itself, a dry, bone-soothing filament of heat.

  There was a sudden calmness between us as if we had come to a crossroad and had paused there an instant in the quietness of decision.

  “I remember how you used to visit me when I was small,” Rita said. “Me and Elena. Those Sunday afternoons. It’s funny how something sticks out like that, as if everything else was just time passing and then there were these moments where you were already thinking, This is what I’ll remember. This is what the past will seem like, when it becomes something you can’t ever get back to.”

  “I never thought you cared much back then whether I came or went,” I said.

  “I used to go crazy when you didn’t come. I must have thought you’d abandoned me or something. It’s hard to describe now – it’s like you were inside me somehow, like you were a lung or a heart, something I couldn’t do without. I never thought of it as love or anything like that. It was more – crazy than that. Like not knowing where my own body ended. Just crazy.”

  “If I’d known,” I said.

  But I knew it wouldn’t have made any difference. Everything had been so wordless then, so outside the realm of what words could give shape to.

  “Elena said something once,” she said. “It was after Dad died. She was so angry then, like you told me. She said people like us – she meant you too – people without a real family, were pathetic. That the whole world was connected that way, and if you didn’t fit in, if you didn’t have something that was yours, then you were nothing.”

  “There’s the two of us,” I said. “There’s that.”

  “Yes.”

  She traced a line in the sand with her toe and then with a slow pass of her foot erased it.

  “It makes my head scream sometimes,” she said. “Just thinking of it all. Everything that doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  But it was true, the way some things could be simply impossible, could never be reasoned through. There was only the searing line they made through the brain, the devastation they left behind.

  “Elena said some things about you that worried me,” I said. “About school and so on.”

  “Oh, well. You know
her. She has a tendency to overreact.”

  “She said you were flunking out.”

  “She said that?”

  “It’s not true?”

  “I dropped a couple of courses, that’s all. After Dad got sick. It was all a bit much.”

  “She made it sound like you were a little messed up.”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe that’s the problem.”

  But sitting here beside me she seemed entirely sane, clearheaded, strong.

  “When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to think there were two of me. The real one, the ugly one, that I was on the inside, a kind of freak but also special in some strange way, and then this other one who wasn’t special at all, who was just completely normal and average and ordinary, who got average grades and wasn’t especially kind or mean and who had average friends and did average things. Then I found out I could fool people, that I could pretend I was just the average one and people would believe me. For the longest time I thought that that was what I was doing, just pretending. But suddenly it was like I didn’t know any more which was the real one. It was like I had to choose: this is who I’m going to be.”

  “And which one did you choose?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She kicked at the sand.

  “Maybe it’s just that I can’t face that,” she said. “Being ordinary. Maybe because I think other people would be disappointed in me. That you would.”

  She was asking me to set her free, was laying out two paths for herself, one of which could not quite include me.

  “Maybe I would,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you should choose that. It’s not as if it’s such a bad thing, being ordinary.”

  A small breeze blew up and Rita’s hair fluttered, a nimbus of reddish black in the sun. It was almost unbearable to look at her, to feel this sense that all my life had prepared me for only this one thing, to love her.

  “I suppose we should go,” she said.

  But we simply sat where we were without speaking. I wanted to move in and hold her to me, to feel her body against mine one last time, the way it fit against me like a natural extension of my own. There were just those few inches between us, that bit of air, it could not make any difference; except the longing in me would only grow stronger then, my arms would only remember more surely the lost feel of her within them.