by Nino Ricci
I continued along the path that led behind the church and up Colle di Papa. Behind me, the village had disappeared in the fog; but up ahead, the light continued to beckon. I passed the hollow that Fabrizio and I had frequented as children, but afterwards lost my way, no longer certain in the fog what direction I was headed in. For a long time I continued to climb, coming out finally to a summit I didn’t recognize. A crumbling farmhouse in faded crimson stucco sat solitary there, parts of the roof caved in and its doors and shutters rotting away from their hinges.
I wandered inside. Toward the back was a crude kitchen that still showed signs of use, fresh ashes piled in the fireplace and a few utensils and blackened pots sitting on an old wooden counter; it probably served some local farmer to prepare his midday meals while he was out in the fields. Off the kitchen was a room where various bits of junk had been piled: rotting old trunks, a few battered suitcases, an old armoire. The room looked as if it had been pillaged at some point or perhaps used by children as a secret hideout, the ground littered with all manner of refuse, bits of ragged clothing and sheafs of mildewed letters and papers but also candy wrappers, cigarette butts, old grade-school textbooks. Tacked on the wall beside the doorway was an old calendar, 1963. It took me an instant to realize what was so familiar about it: it was from the Roma Grocery in Mersea, the small specialty store where we had bought Italian foodstuffs when I was a child. A faded colour photo showed the storefront on Talbot Street, in all its early-sixties innocence and charm, great salamis and cheeses hanging in the window and a man in a white shirt and dark, slicked-back hair standing smiling out front next to the tailfinned back end of a chrome-studded Chevrolet. The photo called up a whole vision of what America was, of the entire civilized outer world, of what it must have seemed like from here in this crude peasant farmhouse at the edge of nowhere.
I looked through the papers on the floor. There was a series of letters still in their envelopes, from a Gelsomino Mastro-antonio on Orange Street in Mersea to a signor Domenico Ingratta. The letters were mainly litanies of greetings to and from other relations, with the occasional mention of some special event, a wedding, a festival, a death; though within them there seemed expressed an intricate subtext of longing and loss. It eventually dawned on me that the letters were to in-laws, that the Rosina they passed on greetings to, and whom I’d taken at first for a cousin or sister, was a wife. It was only in the later letters that Rosina was addressed directly, usually in an appended final paragraph and usually with polite, formal wishes for an imminent reunion. But in one of the final ones, Gelsomino dropped his restraint. “All these years I have missed you with all my heart,” he wrote, “and lived only to see you again.”
I wondered what had become of them, these two. Perhaps I had seen them at the weddings and festivals of Mersea, not remarkable in any way, never quite living up again, in their mountain reserve, to the bald emotion of that single line, one that perhaps Rosina herself, shielded from its heated urgency by watchful parents, had never seen. It seemed amazing that a hundred, a thousand times this same story had been repeated here: the husbands had gone, the wives had bided their time. Whatever had been individual in this seemed almost irrelevant now, just as we remembered of those ancient half-humans who had come up from Africa along the animal roads only the broadest strokes of what they had suffered or known. And yet everything that mattered was lived in the spaces in between, in the tiny details, whether Rosina had been robbed of the pleasure of that profession of love or had cherished it all her life, how she’d imagined her husband without her in America with his own slicked-back black hair and American car. I remembered the letters that had come from my own father when I’d been a child here, all the mystery that had seemed tied up in their indecipherable loops and swirls, how my mother had seemed briefly lost to me when they came as if even she and my father had had their own private life, had been bound in some way I could never know. Perhaps it had been her realizing how time erased things that had kept her from being true to that bond, her not wanting to fade into the ranks of the unremarkable, though that seemed what those of us she’d left behind had spent our lifetimes trying to get back to.
The fog hadn’t lifted yet when I came out of the farmhouse, only kept up its eerie glow. I set out along the ridge I was on but utterly lost now, with no way to get my bearings. For a while I had the sense of a presence dogging me, of something or someone hovering just outside my field of vision. But it was only the weight of the fog, perhaps, being cut off like that by its soft walls, not knowing where I was headed. I remembered how when I was a child here the world had seemed peopled by spirits, how every cranny and field had had its ghosts, how the dead had not so much gone from us as simply crossed over, always beckoning from the other side. Perhaps my own dead were calling to me now, had some message to pass on or would lift some weight from me, restore an old innocence like in those childhood stories of saints, the blinding light that brought you to your knees and then the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting.
The path dipped suddenly and I stumbled and fell. For a few minutes I simply sat there on the stony ground, feeling a vertigo overtake me from the disorientation of walking so long in the featurelessness of the fog. It was only now that I noticed how winded I was – I had probably been climbing for some time and not walking level as I had imagined. Then, as I sat there, the fog thinned a bit and the landscape grew suddenly familiar: I was near Fabrizio’s farm. A few minutes’ walk and I made out his shack in the mist, a line of smoke rising from its little chimney.
“Oh, Vittò!” Fabrizio was at his door; he must have seen me approaching. I felt a swell of emotion at finding him here, as if I’d been wandering lost for hours, for days.
“You’re just in time for lunch,” he said.
He led me into the shack. There was a fire burning in the tiny fireplace there, and a pot of stew cooking on his little propane stove. Without a word he went about preparing a place for me, moving a small card table up near the fire and setting out bread and wine, a bowl of stew, and then taking a seat across from me, our knees bumping beneath the table. The smell of the stew filled the shack, a steamy cooking smell that put me in mind of our Sunday meals with Aunt Lucia when I was a child, the crowded kitchen, the burning fire.
“So how are your friends?” Fabrizio said.
“They’ve gone. They left this morning.”
“Ah.”
I could hear the same small note of hurt in his voice as there had been in Luisa’s at my never having brought them around to see him. It hadn’t been that kind of a visit, I wanted to say, and yet what seemed truer was that at some level I had purposely kept them away from my old life here, had wanted to protect it somehow from them, from the present.
“You must know what people were saying about the woman,” I said. “That she’s my sister.”
“I won’t say I didn’t hear that.”
“I thought you should know that it’s true.”
“Well. It’s none of my business. But I’m glad you told me. As a friend.”
We ate a moment in silence. The stew had great chunks of sausage in it, spicy and coarse like the sausage my grandfather used to make after we’d slaughtered one of our pigs.
“She seemed very pretty, your sister,” Fabrizio said. “Like her mother.”
“You saw her?”
“Once or twice. In the street like that.”
He mopped up a bit of stew with his bread.
“People say that they took her away from your father there,” he said. “That she grew up with an English family.”
“It wasn’t quite like that.” Though that was what it came down to: we had failed her, she’d been taken away. “It was a sort of agreement.”
“All the same. It must have been hard for you. Her being your sister and everything.”
But what I remembered now was the small relief I had felt when it had been clear that she was gone, the small hope that it might be possible then to be a normal family.<
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Fabrizio replenished our wine and dished out what remained of the stew.
“That German fellow,” he said. “People told me he spoke Italian.”
“Yes. A bit.”
“I was wondering about him. If he was her father.”
He said this so matter-of-factly that I wasn’t sure at first if I’d understood.
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Just what you were saying before. That you thought the father was German.”
“Yes. That’s right. I thought – I don’t know. I might have been wrong, like you said.”
“It’s funny though, him speaking Italian like that. Even a little dialect, people said.”
“Yes.”
“Me, if I was the father, I would just say. But maybe he has his reasons.”
“So do you think it was him?”
“I don’t know. No one remembers him. But then maybe your mother was better at secrets than people thought.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. It still seemed important somehow, not so much for Rita’s or John’s sake as for my mother’s, that the secret be kept intact, that there remain this bit of mystery about her.
“Anyway,” Fabrizio said, “maybe sometimes it’s better not to know. There was that guy in Bagnoli people talk about – it turned out his father wasn’t his father at all but some uncle was or something. He went a little crazy when he found that out.”
“This isn’t the same,” I said.
“Maybe it is. Maybe this guy, this German, did some bad thing in the past and your sister would have to live with that. As it is he’s just another stranger. What he did is his own business.”
It seemed that in his uncanny way he had seen through to the truth and was trying to reassure me, to let me know the secret was safe, that I’d done nothing wrong. But I had the sense in that instant that the opposite was true, that it had been wrong to let John go without confronting him, that somehow both Rita and I had been coerced, had merely traded our own moral ambiguities for his.
The wine had begun to go to my head, warming after the fog and wet but also clouding my thoughts, setting off small explosions in me of confused emotion.
“I should have brought my sister around to meet you,” I said.
“It’s all right. Next time. I’ll come and visit you in Canada some time, like I always said I would.”
“We were very close, you know. Are.”
“It’s normal.” But he seemed to sense there was something more to what I was saying. “She’s your sister.”
“Yes. Maybe not so normal.”
I had to stop myself from going on. In a moment I would tell him everything.
There was an instant’s awkwardness. Fabrizio got up to clear our dishes away, then set about making a pot of coffee.
“Do you remember that day up on Colle di Papa?” I said. “When we were kids? When you saved me from some of the other boys?”
“Sure I do. It was Alfredo Girasole and his gang.”
“Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t remember his name.”
“He’s up in Rome now, he works for a bank. You’d never know what a bandit he used to be.”
“Do you remember what happened? The way I ran out on you?”
“What are you saying?”
“You came to help me and I deserted you. The boys ganged up on you and I ran away.”
“What are you saying? We fought them together, don’t you remember that?”
“No. That’s not how it happened.”
“But it was so many years ago now, how can you know? Maybe you just don’t remember it right.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s just – I always remembered that, after I left here. It was one of those things that stuck out, that made me feel that maybe I wasn’t any good. Not like other people, not like you. And then with my sister, you know. I used to think that maybe God had given her to me as a sort of test, that she was my chance to be good. If I could find the way to do it.”
“But you must have done that. If she turned out all right the way people say she has.”
It looked like the rain might begin again soon. Through the window of the shack I saw that the fog had thinned but not lifted, its glow of light given way to grey again as if whatever better weather had been going on above us had passed.
“Anyway you can’t go thinking about these old stories all the time,” Fabrizio said. “Everyone has things they regret.”
The coffee came up, a slow bubbling stream and then a final cough and sputter of boiled air. Fabrizio lifted the pot from the burner onto a little counter, careful to avoid spillage, then set out two little cups and carefully poured the coffee into each. I remembered now that he had worked in a restaurant in Rome. But he had probably been hopeless there, to judge by this caring, careful intensity of his, his treatment of every object as if it were sentient.
He set the cups on the table and took his place again. From his seat he reached over with a poker to stir up a bit of flame in the fireplace.
“There was something else,” I said. “When I left here. There was something I should have given you.”
I pulled out my one-lire coin. The whole time I had been in the country I had carried it in my pocket as if still in some boyish hope of its powers.
“I’ve seen this type before,” Fabrizio said, taking it from me. “With the mark like that.”
“My mother’s friend gave me one like it when I was small. As a good-luck charm. I had it in my pocket that time you gave me your jack-knife. I ought to have given it to you then.”
He eyed the coin.
“And did it work? Did it bring you good luck?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then maybe if you give me this one now that will make things right for you.”
He made it sound as if it was actually possible to correct things like that, across the years.
“I’d like that,” I said.
He fingered the coin a moment before setting it next to his coffee cup on the table. There was an odd sense of deflation between us suddenly, as if we had come to some threshold but weren’t quite certain how to move beyond it.
“Will you be leaving soon?” he said. “Now that the others have gone?”
“In a while, I suppose. Though I’m not exactly sure where to go.”
He poked at the fire again, but most of the wood had burnt down to ember. I got up to leave, afraid of remaining with him, of what more I might tell him.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“It’s all right, I can find my own way.”
Partway home the rain started again; by the time I got to the house, I was drenched to the skin. The house had the cold, empty feel of recent abandonment: I seemed to realize for the first time that Rita had gone, that something was over. No looking back. I changed out of my clothes and hung them over a kitchen chair to dry, then set about building a fire, huddling up to its first licks of flame while outside the twilight came on and the rain continued to fall.
XXXII
Shortly after Rita and John’s departure Valle del Sole began to fill with former villagers returning from the city for their August vacation. Houses that had been shuttered and dark were opened up again; women in skirts and high heels and children who spoke what seemed, after weeks of dialect, a precocious textbook Italian began to appear in the streets. There was something utterly foreign about this returning group, even in the people I remembered vaguely from childhood – they were citified in what seemed a peculiarly Italian way, with a certain sheen of instinctive elegance but also a certain parochialism, an immediate distancing from the unfamiliar as if all they could need, all they could want, had already been defined by their city lives.
The arrival of this group seemed to take the village away from me in some way. It was as if an era had passed, as if the village had briefly resided in a sort of timelessness, a space where it might have been possible to go back, to step through a doorway to
the past, and now had suddenly been brought into the mundane present, just a quaint back-country village which people returned to for their summer vacations. I began to fall in with Luisa again, who seemed as put out by these new arrivals as I was, reduced by them from someone in her element to a simple country urchin, not quite to be taken seriously. Her own house was full of returning siblings now, brothers and sisters and their families back from Turin and Rome. They treated her with the unthinking imperiousness of older siblings, expecting to be catered to, looked after, perhaps feeling at some level that they had abandoned her here and for that reason not able to let themselves see her as an equal.
None of the siblings appeared very approving of Luisa’s attentions to me, the earlier acceptance I had felt in her house when it had been just her and her parents giving way to a slight undercurrent of mocking condescension as if to say it was not so much after all, to have gone off to America, they had done as well or better here at home. Luisa showed a stubborn loyalty to me in the face of this, coming by alone to the house, walking with me in the street and sometimes taking my arm even though the old villagers, the younger returnees, would stare after us burgeoning with speculation. I could see the direction all this was moving in and yet lacked the desire or will to try to put a different complexion on things. But the first flirtatiousness that there had been between us had been replaced by a kind of solemnity now, as if we could no longer ignore the fact that we were young, that we were attracted to one another, that there seemed nothing in our lives to impede a natural coming together.
We drove out one day to see the Samnite ruins at Pietrabbondante, an old fortress town perched on a stony summit that formed a lookout over the entire valley. The road up followed hairpin switchbacks and passed through villages that were replicas of Valle del Sole but without the veil of familiarity to obscure their actual strangeness, the sun-baked, prehistoric stillness and silence, the mangy dogs in the square and the children who stared at the sight of our passing car. At the end of the road, Pietrabbondante sat high and remote on its great heave of rock like some lost Andean hill town. Up that high, the wind came down with an elemental purity and force, bits of the sky itself seeming caught in it, small wisps of its cool, unearthly blue.