Asimov's SF, February 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Lo conosce?” I heard myself say to her. “You know him?"

  "Si,” she answered, her eyes on Marco. “Lo conosco da sempre."

  Yes. I know him always.

  I'd never heard the expression before, and would never hear it again. To know someone always.

  What she said next, her eyes still on Marco, I would also never forget:

  "Grazie per il regalo di lui."

  Thank you for the gift he is.

  The chill did not go away. I walked quickly to the door, not looking back. I didn't want to see what was in her eyes, even if it looked like love.

  * * * *

  Afterward, the doctors said we'd done the right thing not letting Marco walk back to my house, but simply having him sit at the foot of the statue, keeping him awake, while I, since my Italian was better, ran to the nearest house on the path home and had them call my dad, who came in our car and drove Marco to the hospital in La Creccia.

  The doctors also complimented whoever had removed the arrow and given Marco antibiotics—an old-fashioned kind, sulfonamides (Marco had one in his pocket still). When we said a woman in the old German hospital had done it, they thought we were drunk, I'm sure. We insisted. A woman had been there. “Well,” they said, “she must have been a nurse. She knew what angle to remove it on, and the danger. The tip of the arrow was near the carotid artery. If she hadn't removed it and the boy had fallen on it...."

  * * * *

  A month later, when Marco's wound had healed, my parents said what I'd known they would say—that I had to go to the man in the villa, who indeed did own the old hospital and all the land up from the cove, and apologize in person. I was, after all, the son of a Naval officer and therefore an ambassador from America, though apparently not a very good one; and I needed to try to fix the damage. My dad would go with me, it was decided, and that was because Keith and his brother weren't going. They were back in school in Rome; and, rather than having them apologize in person to the owner, Commander Speer had paid the man three hundred dollars and returned the head of the statue, which Bobby had been keeping under his bed and Keith had decorated with some of his sister's lipstick. He was of course also paying for Marco's medical bills, since these would have been a hardship for any Vecchia Erici family.

  You could tell from my mother's look what she was thinking when she heard that Commander Speer wasn't making his boys apologize in person. Maybe this is how fathers from families like that behaved, but this was not going to be how we were going to behave.

  The owner told my parents that a face-to-face apology wasn't necessary, that he didn't need additional monetary compensation, that an apology on the phone was quite sufficient; but my father insisted. He and I would visit the owner the next weekend.

  The same day my dad spoke to the owner by phone, I ran into Marco at the wharf. He had his fishing pole and I had mine; and my real friends—the ones from the “right” families—weren't with me because they didn't like to fish. It was that simple. Stamp collecting, maybe, and playing war in the olive groves, and soccer; but not fishing, especially from the wharf or passeggiata rocks, where people could see you and think you were a technical-school kid. “You're an American,” Carlo said. “You can get away with it.” I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting away with, but I went ahead and fished, and that day Marco was there.

  When I told him what I had to do, that my dad would be accompanying me to apologize, he said, “If I go with you, maybe your father will not have to.” I could tell he felt bad about the windows, but I knew that wasn't the main reason he offered. We were still friends—even if friends usually don't get you shot in the neck with an arrow—and that meant something to him, as it did to me. He didn't ask whether Keith and Bobby would be going. He knew I'd have mentioned it if they were. He didn't even seem angry at Keith. Boys like Keith—and arrows falling from the sky—were to be expected, and you accepted them and went on with your life.

  He was right, it turned out. If he came, my parents agreed, my father wouldn't need to. “That's very kind of Marco,” my mother said. A part of me was of course thinking that if the victim of the shooting was with me, the owner might not be as angry, but I certainly wasn't going to admit it.

  * * * *

  When we reached the statue, it was still headless. The head hadn't been put back on yet. Could you even do it? Could you glue cement?. She might be headless forever, and Keith and Bobby would have gotten away with murder again.

  Instead of taking the gravel fork to the hospital, we took the one to the left, toward the villa, a much longer walk.

  * * * *

  It wasn't a grand villa, like the Perraris’ or the Carnevales’ in Romito, but it was fine enough. The man who answered the doorbell was businesslike, but not stern. He seemed young, maybe thirty—handsome, in good shape, with a wide-open shirt and a gold chain around his neck—but he was obviously the owner. He didn't have a butler or maid to answer the door, and he didn't seem to need one. He had money, but he was young, and that kept him from being stuffy, the way the old people in the bigger villas often were.

  He shook my hand first; and when I introduced Marco—"Voglio presentare a Lei mio amico, Matteotti Marco"—he shook Marco's hand and looked at him for a long time. “You are the one struck by the arrow?” he asked at last. The carabinieri, we knew, had told him what had happened—at least the major points. This was not a world where people sued if something happened to them—something that was their own fault—on someone else's property, so the owner had not retained a lawyer. A boy had been shot with an arrow, a dangerous wound, but had survived, and that was what mattered.

  "Si,” Marco answered.

  The man led us to the travertine-marble living room, where we all sat down, the man at ease, Marco and I nervous. The man didn't want us nervous. He smiled at us as we settled in, and soon we were feeling calmer.

  "Matteotti?” he began in Italian to Marco. “The Matteotti of Erici?"

  "Si,” Marco said again.

  The man looked at Marco awhile longer, and then said, “I think we are cousins."

  Marco smiled. To have a cousin this wealthy, and to have such a cousin admit he was a cousin—that had made the trip worth it already. Maybe not the arrow, but certainly the trip.

  Marco's Italian was better than mine, but I didn't want him to have to do the apologizing. My parents wouldn't have wanted it, and I didn't want it either. I was here to ask for the man's forgiveness and to offer to pay for my share (and Marco's, too) of the broken windows; and if I was going to go through this unpleasantness, I wanted some credit for it. That Marco had come along was his gift to me, and I didn't need any others.

  In the best Italian I could, I explained that we had come to apologize. The man, whose name was Paolo—Paolo Pastore—was gracious enough not to interrupt, but to let me speak, even if it was a tediously slow and halting speech. But even after one sentence—a simple “I am (which Marco graciously corrected to “We are—") here to apologize for breaking the windows of your hospital"—I got into trouble and Marco had to help with some of the words. The owner just listened.

  "We were very inconsiderate,” I said, “and hope you will forgive us, Signore."

  "I do,” he answered.

  "We would like to remunerate you—we would like to compensate you—for the windows; and not only for our share, but for any that might not be covered by the amount provided by the families of the other three boys."

  "That will not be necessary,” the man said, as if following his own script, too.

  "Are you certain, Signore, that—"

  "Yes,” he interrupted gently, “I am certain. I would have preferred that the windows remained intact, simply because buildings deserve respect, as do people; but I will not be spending money on replacing the glass. The hospital will probably be torn down when we eventually sell the land. We were more disturbed by the damage ... to the statue."

  At that moment—and as his “we” made me wonder whether he was m
arried or had a brother or had his parents living with him—a young woman appeared with orange sodas, real straw straws, and a plate of cookies. So he did have a maid, even if she hadn't answered the door. She wasn't dressed like a maid—she wore an ordinary dress—but she certainly acted like one. She wouldn't look at us, as if she were there only to deliver the drinks and cookies—the way a maid would. Maybe, I told myself, he didn't care about formalities like uniforms.

  "Thank you,” he said to her. “These are two of the boys from the hospital.” She nodded, but did not look up, and in a moment had returned to the kitchen.

  We drank from our bottles and we ate our cookies, and Paolo watched us, seemingly pleased.

  "I hear,” he said at last, “that someone helped you with the arrow. I'm very glad to hear that. Time is often of the essence."

  "Yes,” I answered. I thought Marco might say something then, too—about his famous arrow—but he didn't. He wanted the conversation to be mine.

  "The arrow was close to a—an artery,” I added, “so it had to be removed carefully."

  "The police did not give me many details. I don't believe they had many. Was it someone from the coast road who stopped and helped you?"

  I looked at Marco and Marco looked back. We'd assumed—everyone had—that he knew the woman in the hospital, or at least knew of her existence, and that by now he'd heard the entire story about the arrow. But if he didn't know the woman, and the carabinieri hadn't known the details....

  I didn't know where to begin.

  I said:

  "The woman was there in the hospital, and she was very helpful...."

  He frowned, and was silent, as if trying to decide something.

  "That must have been Gianna,” he said at last.

  Who was Gianna?

  "Gianna is my sister."

  We nodded. That certainly explained it. He had a crazy sister.

  "But she took the arrow out of him?” This seemed to puzzle him.

  "Si,” Marco said. The memory of the woman who'd touched him, the one whose perfume he'd smelled, who'd looked at him with what could have been love—the woman who, it now turned out, was this man's sister—made him suddenly talkative. “She was very good at it, the doctors said. She knew exactly the angle at which to remove it."

  The man was still frowning. “I—” he began, but then stopped. A door in the direction of the kitchen—a door to the outside, with a spring on it—slammed shut, and this seemed to set him free. The maid was gone. We could talk honestly now. He sighed again, and it was as if he were thinking: Why not? These boys—especially the one with the arrow—who might be my cousin—deserve to know it, do they not?

  "Yes, that would have been my sister, Gianna,” he was saying. “She goes to the hospital almost every day and sits there on a stool and listens for voices."

  It was just what I'd imagined.

  "She has emotional problems,” he was saying gently. “She receives medication for them, and going to the hospital every day makes her happy. That Gianna didn't mention her role in what happened does not surprise me. She doesn't tell me everything—and I am not sure her memory is always accurate—but I am very happy she was able to help. It must—it must have made her feel very good to be able to help...."

  He was, something told me, leaving things out. You could tell. He was speaking carefully, as if walking around a pond, trying not to step in the water.

  Then he sighed. Why not? he was telling himself again. He liked us. That was obvious, and, again, Marco was probably family. These are boys, he was thinking, and perhaps someday, when they are grown, this story will mean something to them, just as it has meant something to us.

  As he began to tell the rest of it, he gazed out the window that overlooked the hills and the cove; and except for once or twice, when Marco had to repeat or rephrase things for me, he did not look at us.

  His sister had done this—gone to the hospital every day—ever since their mother had died, he explained. Their mother had died five years ago, ten years after the war.

  His sister went to the hospital to think of their mother, whom she missed terribly and without whom, in many ways, she could not find life worth living. Which was why the doctors had her on medication, and why Paolo had to make sure she took it dutifully. Was he worried about her when she visited the hospital? No, it was safe there—we were the first people ever to discover her—and she always returned from it contented, in less despair.

  Their mother, who was from Erici, had felt and acted that way, too—in the years just after the war, in her final years of life. She too had started going to the abandoned German hospital soon after the war ended. As her daughter would after her death, she had set up a table and put medical supplies on it, as if waiting for wounded soldiers to come.

  She had been a nurse during the war, one to whom a terrible thing had happened. Toward the end of the war she had been conscripted by the Germans to work at that hospital, a hospital for German officers. Because it was at the end of the war and because Hitler held il Duce in such contempt, blaming the Italians for many of his problems, only Germans could be treated in that hospital. Italian soldiers—even officers—would have to fend for themselves in whatever local clinic they could find, or in the overcrowded, undersupplied hospital near La Creccia many kilometers to the north.

  Their mother was married, and had already given birth to both Paolo and his sister, who were fifteen and ten respectively. Her husband—their father—had been born in Sarzana, a town just inland from Erici, and they had met at a processionfor St. Erasmus, Erici's patron saint, when they were twenty.

  Their father was a foot soldier in the Italian army now, while their mother attended to German officers—and only German officers—at the hospital in this very cove. The children were being taken care of by their aunt, their mother's sister.

  One night their father, Emilio Pastore, appeared at the door of that hospital. He had been wounded—wounded in his stomach—on the road from Parma to Erici, where he hoped to see his wife. He had not been shot by an American or other Ally soldier. He had been shot by a German, a German officer, and he had been shot because he had refused to do what the German had ordered—namely, that he turn around and return to Parma. Emilio had escaped and, bleeding, had made his way to the clinic in Erici, only to discover that it had burned down four nights before. He had then caught a ride on an armored personnel carrier to Creccia, but his wound was severe and he knew that he would not make it that far, or that even if he did, he might not survive long enough to see his wife, who was, after all, right here at this hospital.

  When he appeared at the hospital's door, supported by two Italian soldiers—the infection in his stomach spreading like fire through dead grass—he barely recognized the world around him, but asked for Nurse Pastore. When she arrived, German guards would neither let her leave the building to help him nor let him enter to be ministered to, since the hospital was for German officers only.

  Their mother had pleaded with the guards, and even with the director of the hospital, who had arrived to find out what the commotion was about. But he refused her as well, making her return to her patients even though she cried and hit at the guards. Three hours later word reached her through another nurse that her husband had died in front of the hospital, on the earth, and that his body was still there because the two Italian soldiers with him had been arrested and taken away.

  Their mother never recovered. After the war, she lived in San Terenzo so that she might be closer to the hospital, which was soon stripped by thieves of its cots and tables and wiring and everything else of worth. When everything was gone, and no one cared about the building anymore, she began to visit it, to visit it every day, sitting at a little card table she hid in the shadows when she left, arranging her first-aid materials on it, waiting for her husband to come. Her sister continued to help her with the children, and when Paolo was twenty-five, he bought a shoe store for very little money, made a success of it, bought five mo
re and did so well that in the very year that their mother died he was able to buy the land in the cove, the villa and the abandoned hospital, because it had mattered to her so much—

  —just as it came to matter to his sister, who, not three months after their mother died, began to visit the hospital each day, too, using the same folding table and chair and what she brought with her for the table. She had always been an emotional child; but when their mother died, she seemed to disappear—to become, in her own mind, their mother—and if this was what God wanted from their lives, he as owner of the land and buildings and she the one who carried on their mother's vigil, how could he argue?

  At his sister's urging, he had commissioned a statue of their mother—an honest one, one that did not hide her sadness, and the damage to it mattered, he repeated in closing, much more to him than the windows.

  * * * *

  Marco and I were staring. We had stopped nodding long ago. Everything made sense now, and yet we had no idea what to say. “We're sorry.” “It must have been difficult.” “How hard war is.” Nothing would sound right.

  Paolo was looking at us, but I saw no regret—regret that he had shared such a story with two boys. Something had made him share it, and that something still made the sharing feel right.

  "Please thank your sister for helping me,” Marco said.

  "I certainly will,” the man answered, and then no one said a thing.

  When the silence had gone on too long—when all we could do, and all he could, too, was smile—we got up and thanked him. He said, “You're entirely welcome,” and we were heading toward the front door when we heard the kitchen door open and close again and footsteps approaching. We had reached the fireplace mantle—one with photographs on it—and of course wanted to see them, to see a picture of their mother and father, if they had them.

  "You will find a picture of our mother on that mantle,” Paolo said, as if reading my thoughts, “if you are interested."