Where She Has Gone

by Nino Ricci

  She rose, finally, as if to release me from the spell of her closeness, and waded into the shallows at the river’s edge. Then without looking back at me she began to move slowly away from the shore into the current. The water inched up to her calves, to the hem of her dress. At midstream she stood a moment facing the current like a naiad at the prow of a ship, letting her hands trail in the water’s grey. Then, as quietly as she’d gone out, she turned and came back to shore.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I think so. Yes.”

  We returned home along a different route, a narrow asphalt road that wound up through wheat fields and tiny, quiet villages that were just a smattering of ramshackle houses. The cool damp of morning had given way to a midday heat that seemed to have wrung the sound out of things, the fields preternaturally silent and still. The road gradually wound away from the route we’d taken on the way down until it was hard to tell any more what direction we were headed in. But then it ascended a slope and we came out suddenly onto the highway that led into the village.

  As we entered the outskirts of the village, Rita took my arm in hers as if something had been settled between us. We would walk this last stretch together, she seemed to say, brother and sister, and we nodded to the villagers we passed as we walked on arm in arm toward home.

  XXVIII

  John was preparing lunch when we came in, intent over a pot on the stove. His bedroom door was open, a small knapsack lying on his bed.

  It took me an instant me to realize it had been John in the distance along the riverbank.

  “We’ve been to the river,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “There was a hot spring down there. Where our mother used to go.”

  His eye caught mine, and I knew for certain that it had been him I’d seen. He had been looking for the hot spring.

  “Did you find it?” he said.

  “No.”

  All through lunch there was a palpable sense of the question hanging clearly between us now, that did not even quite need to be posed anymore. Something, I wasn’t clear what, had made the thing suddenly bone-sure – that look in his eyes, perhaps, a look that had seemed both an affirmation and an appeal, like a secret passed. I was acutely aware of his body suddenly, of his ruddy physical presence: if I reached over to him, if I put a hand against his skin, I’d be able to feel his flesh real against my own, that he existed, had not all these years been merely a figment of my imagination.

  I felt the anger rising up in me now at his deception, wanted only to get him alone, to put the thing to him directly. But then somehow an expedition was being planned, there was the afternoon to fill, and before I knew it we were on the road in my car, the three of us, with the same sense of barely restrained tensions as when we’d been to the zoo a few months before. John had suggested a visit to some kind of archaeological exhibit in a nearby town, giving terse directions from the back seat, a map spread over his knees, while I negotiated the town’s tangle of winding streets. I missed a turn and we ended up in a narrow cul-de-sac where I had barely room enough to wheel the car around, the back bumper scraping up against a low stone wall that edged the roadway.

  “Maybe we ought to just give this up,” I said.

  “We should be close now,” John said. “Just a ways back.”

  We came at last to the building we were searching for, a large, medieval-looking place at the edge of the town’s old quarters. Inside, a spry, grey-haired man who spoke fairly fluent English – the curator, it turned out – offered to take us around when he learned we had come from overseas, leading us into a cavernous hall where various display cases and information panels had been set out. We were the only visitors; the curator had to turn lights on, move a barrier aside, as if opening up some special, rarely used room of a house for relations who had come.

  A sign at the entrance to the exhibition hall read, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THE COMMUNITY OF THE FIRST EUROPEANS. I hadn’t quite taken in till now what it was we had come to see: findings of some sort, evidence of Homo erectus, that had been unearthed just outside the town during the construction of the Naples expressway. A photo on a display panel showed the site as it stood now, a fenced-off area of bulldozed earth with a few awkward constructions in fibreglass and corrugated steel housing the digs. Next to this was an artist’s rendering of how the site would have looked seven hundred thousand years before: it showed a watery meadow studded with willows and poplars, a herd of bison grazing in the background and a man or near-man, small and stoop-shouldered, stoking a fire in front of the opening of a tiny hut.

  The curator was giving a running commentary.

  “The first people who settled here probably followed the paths made by wild animals when they moved between the mountains and plains in spring and fall. Then over hundreds of thousands of years, those paths became the same ones that shepherds used to move their flocks, the ones you can still find now here and there. So you see how it’s all connected, how that little man in the picture there is our father.”

  John was sticking close to Rita. In the dim lighting and cave-like hollowness and damp of the exhibition hall it seemed we ourselves were reverting to a sort of half-humanness, to basic animal principles of aversion and threat. I remembered the sense I’d had of John that time I’d followed him home, how primal the connection between us had felt to me then. It was as if I’d been tracking him ever since, on his scent, was at the moment now where he was just that single leap from me, where my muscles twitched from his closeness.

  At one of the display cases John stood a moment elbow to elbow with Rita, pointing out some detail to her. Looking at them I felt a chill go through me: for the first time I saw the echo of him in her, a ghostly mirroring of him in her shoulders, the line of her back. It was there so clearly suddenly, like some lineament that marked a species.

  Almost in the same instant both Rita and John turned, sensing my eyes on them.

  “Is anything the matter?” Rita said.

  “No, no, it’s nothing.”

  The curator had moved on to a display of what he called the living-floor of a campsite that had been unearthed. It seemed merely a sort of prehistoric dumping ground, littered with broken bones and tusks and primitive bits of cut limestone and flint worked just barely enough to be distinguishable from the rocks they were scattered among. But the curator explained how much could be learned, deduced, across the millennia from these few shreds of things, as if everything of importance had left its indelible trace. I thought of my stumbling attempts to get at the truth of my own past: it seemed that more could be known for certain about these ancient ancestors, about events that had taken place at an unfathomable distance of years, than of what by comparison had happened hardly a moment ago.

  “It’s eerie to think of them moving around here back then,” Rita said. “What they could have wanted.”

  “They wanted what we do,” the curator said. “To eat. To sleep. To have a fire at night to keep them warm.”

  We came to the end of the exhibition. As we were walking back toward the exit there was a moment when Rita and the curator were in conversation and I was able to draw John aside. My heart was pounding.

  “I have to talk to you. It has to do with Rita.”

  He gave me a guarded look, as if not surprised by the request yet not quite willing to concede that it had been expected.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Tonight. After supper. We can go up to the bar.”

  Rita and the curator were talking near the exit. He had pointed out an old device built into the wall to one side of the door, a large wooden wheel with wedge-shaped compartments that let objects be passed through from outside.

  “The women used to put their babies there,” he was saying, “when they had one they couldn’t keep. Back when this building was a convent.”

  “How do you mean?” Rita said.

  “You put the baby in on one side, turned the wheel, and the nuns picked it
up on the other, no questions asked.”

  Rita ran a hand over the rough wood of one of the compartments. The space looked just large enough to nestle a baby in, wedged in between the narrowing sides.

  “It doesn’t seem like something the Church would do,” she said.

  “It was better than just letting the things rot in the fields. Every now and again even the Church showed a little compassion back then.”

  The sun outside was blinding after the darkness of the exhibition room. From the parking lot there was a view of the valley the town looked over, and of the town itself arching around the curving summit it rested on toward the long, impressive bridge that formed part of the Naples expressway. John stood a moment staring out, with that sea captain’s look he’d had when I’d seen him gazing from the window of his apartment months before, as if he were assessing some coming storm that only his eye could make out. But then seeming to grow suddenly aware of me and Rita waiting for him, he gave an apologetic bob of his head, and we climbed into the car and headed back to Valle del Sole.

  XXIX

  John managed to get the two of us out of the house after supper without seeming to arouse Rita’s suspicions, proposing a drink between us with little more than his usual awkwardness as if merely making an overture of friendship. Outside it was still light, the sky singed with the last golden glow the sun gave off as it sank behind the mountains. One of the village dogs, a spotted, mangy thing, trailed along to the far side of us in a sort of cringing beseechment as we walked toward the square.

  Now that the moment of revelation had come I’d begun to have doubts again.

  “Rita told me you visited your home town,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering about your family. What happened to them.”

  “The war took some of them,” he said. “Most of the rest are dead now, I suppose.”

  “You weren’t very close to them?”

  “The Germans are not the Italians.” He forced a smile as if to offset the sombre tone of his voice. “We tend to go our own way.”

  The bar was deserted except for the young man tending it, the grandson of the owner I had known, dead now, when I’d been a child here. We ordered a couple of beers and sat down on the terrace that fronted onto the square. The trees on the embankment above the bar were just catching the last rays of the sun, lit up orange and red with its dying light. Those same trees must have stood there when I was small, must have caught the evening light just so, as they did now. I couldn’t say why it hurt so much to think of them that way, if because they hadn’t changed in all these years or because they had changed so utterly.

  “So have you found what you’re looking for here?” John said.

  There was a sadness in his voice that seemed at once to be inviting me forward and warning me back.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I just thought. Coming home again. One always looks for something.”

  “Yes. I don’t know.”

  Our beer sat before us in its bottles like props we had set out to orient ourselves, give us context: we were two men on a terrace, sharing a drink.

  “Rita must have told you what happened with our mother,” I said.

  “A little bit.”

  “There were some things that were never clear to me. Some questions.”

  “You were small then. It’s natural. You couldn’t have understood things.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now perhaps you find that people don’t tell you what you want to hear, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  He poured some of his beer into his glass, slowly, letting the foam rise till it formed a small mound above the rim.

  “It has to do with Rita’s father also,” he said. “I think that must be one of the questions.”

  “Yes.”

  Light was slowly leaking away from the square as the sun sank more surely behind the mountains. At the far end of the street, already wrapped in shadows, an old farmer was just walking in from the fields.

  “I thought he might be a German,” I said. “The father, I mean.”

  John wouldn’t look at me.

  “Do people say that? That he was a German?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s what you think.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Things I remember.”

  “I see.”

  I had the feeling that the truth of my suspicions somehow depended on my proving them to John.

  “The Germans came through here in the war,” I said. “They stayed in our house.”

  “But that was years before Rita was born.”

  “I know that. Maybe one of them came back. For my mother.”

  “Ah. Over love, you think.”

  “Partly, yes.”

  “But so many years had passed.”

  “He could have been waylaid. Maybe he had a family at home that he went back to, then left behind again. I had the idea that someone was looking for him here, the authorities, I thought. But maybe it was his family.”

  His beer had sat untouched, the foam gradually dissipating.

  “What sort of a family?” he said.

  “I can’t say. A wife. A child.”

  We seemed on the verge of a painful intimacy.

  “And what happened to them?” he said.

  “Maybe there was some kind of tragedy. Something he was running from. Or maybe he just abandoned them.”

  “I see.”

  There was a defeated tone in his voice now. In the face of it I couldn’t bring myself to pose the question directly.

  “Could it have happened that way?” I said.

  “It’s possible, yes.”

  “But you’re not convinced.”

  “It’s not me who you have to convince.”

  “I suppose I don’t.”

  “But you would like to know the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe the truth wouldn’t be so interesting.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  The light was almost gone now, John slowly becoming just a shadow across from me. From inside the bar came the sound of a soccer game, the blue glow of a television.

  “And afterwards?” John said. “What became of this man?”

  “I don’t know. He went to Canada, hoping to meet my mother there. But she’d died.”

  “So that would be the end of it, then. The end of the story.”

  “Maybe.”

  He looked out into the square.

  “You would like to find him, this man,” he said. “Is that why you came here?”

  “I’m not sure. What would you want?”

  “Is it for you? Or for Rita?”

  “For both.”

  “But if you found him, what could he be to you now? Only a villain. Someone who ruined your mother. And to Rita, merely someone who abandoned her, who did nothing. If the things you say of him are true, then he’s twice a villain, someone who left one family and destroyed another, perhaps for no other reason than his own vanity or pleasure.”

  “That’s still not the point.”

  “So what is the point?”

  “Knowing the truth.”

  He was frowning now. He stared down at his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I don’t know how to advise you.”

  The boy inside the bar turned the exterior light on and a grainy yellow haze bathed the terrace. The light gave objects a sepia tone like things in an old photograph, as if this table, these chairs, were only memories of ones that had sat here years before. It had been on this terrace, at a table like this, in these chairs, that I’d found my grandfather and old Antonio Di Lucci the day a stranger had emerged, blue- or grey-eyed, who could say any more, from the door of our stable. What could it matter now, what had happened back then, what with the wash of years in between, the unutterable way in which things had shifted and swerved, and
moved on.

  “During the war,” John said, “things sometimes happened that afterwards it was very difficult to live with. My own town, for instance – it was on the rail line that led out to Dachau. Afterwards, people said that they’d seen nothing, that they didn’t know, though the truth, of course, was much more complicated. But how could people admit that, when to admit it was to be a monster? Sometimes there are truths like that that are too difficult to explain. It’s easier to say nothing.”

  “But not right,” I said.

  “Not right, perhaps, no. It was one of the things that made me leave Germany finally, that silence. But I often thought about the children who were born there after the war. Who were innocent. Maybe for them, the silence was better. Or maybe it would have been better not to have been born there at all, not to have been burdened with their parents, with what they had done or not done. So perhaps it’s like that for Rita and her father. That she’s best to be free of the burden of him, and he of whatever lies he might have to tell her.”

  He was asking me for my trust, even as he gave me reason not to grant it to him.

  “He could be anything, this man,” I said. “From how you talk about him. He could be evil.”

  “Yes. Perhaps. Or perhaps just a man. Not a hero. Someone with things he no longer has the will to explain. Every life has those things, things that others could never understand. Perhaps even your own.”

  He looked at me then and I was suddenly certain that he knew about me and Rita, perhaps not the details, the actual facts, but enough to know that something had happened, that a line had been crossed. I had the sense that he was not so much countering his secret with my own as trying to extend to me the trust, the suspension of judgement, that he in turn asked for.

  We sat silent. Two old men were walking up the street in the direction of the bar. They called out their greetings as they came up the terrace steps and then lingered a moment in conversation before going inside.

  “You never told me where you learned your Italian,” I said, when they’d gone.