The Detour

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “It is an unusual assignment,” he admitted, digging into a pack of cigarettes. “But too many times before, I told Enzo what to do. So this time, I try to be a good brother. But being good is not being blind.” He pressed a fingertip to the skin just under his eye for emphasis. “I keep my eyes open, and then my job is done.”

  Cosimo was on his third cigarette when Enzo emerged, grinning with an armload of food and a bottle of wine. He set everything down on the front seat, then turned toward the store again and went to the doorway, where we could just barely make out a young woman wiping her hands on a small white towel and following him out as they extended their good-byes. Remembering something, she darted inside and came out again, handing him some biscotti wrapped in paper.

  “What?” Enzo said back at the truck, returning Cosimo’s indignant expression. “What?”

  “One stop. Thirty minutes.” Cosimo tapped the gas.

  “Now we have food enough for more than a day.”

  “One girl. Thirty minutes.” Cosimo engaged the gear roughly, making the truck lurch. “And was she as pretty as Farfalla?”

  Enzo smiled innocently. “Just as pretty, but so many girls are pretty. Why pretend it’s not true? Mr. Vogler, don’t you think?”

  Cosimo grunted, “Never mind.”

  Tension lingered in the truck. But it couldn’t compete with the smells of meat, cheese, and fresh-baked bread—all wafting up from the bags in Enzo’s lap.

  We passed around the long, hard stick of fatty salami, the grease coating our fingers and the black steering wheel. We passed around crusty bread, crumbling cheese, olives, and a glass jar of what seemed to be dark brown mushrooms soaked in olive oil. We were too impatient to make sandwiches; we just bit and ripped and spread the food around—and yes, it was all better than I had expected. My appetite had returned, and each swallow was satisfying. Eight hours had passed since I’d last eaten, and everything tasted delicious, even while Enzo kept apologizing, “This is not a meal. This is nothing,” while he watched me from the corner of his eye, basking in my pleasure.

  “More bread?” Cosimo asked Enzo.

  “Here, I give you the heel.”

  “Any piece.”

  “No. My brother likes the heel. You want me to put on it the crema di olive or you want just the olio?”

  Cosimo asked, “Mr. Vogler, you ate a good dinner in Rome last night?”

  “I arrived late. But I had a sandwich I’d brought with me on the train, from home.”

  Still chewing, he let his mouth fall open. “You brought German food all the way to Rome? All the way to Italy, and now you are going home, and you have not had one good prepared meal?”

  “This is good enough. I’m not just being polite. It is excellent. Thank you.”

  A dark, oily mushroom had fallen onto Cosimo’s lap. “I can steer for you,” I said, reaching across to grab the slippery wheel while he extracted a handkerchief from his pocket.

  “Yes,” he laughed. “I’m not letting this little fish get away.”

  Fish? A mistranslation, perhaps. But it looked like a fish, with its little damp fungal gills.

  And it was while my hands were on the wheel and Cosimo’s attention was focused on the oily item on his lap that Enzo broke out in a shrill frenzy of cursing—“Maledizione! Al diavolo!”—as if he’d just been stung by a wasp. I startled at his unexpected outburst, tugging the wheel so that we veered nearly off the road, and then everything was shaking. Two of our four wheels were on the grassy, overgrown shoulder.

  Cosimo reacted quickly, grabbing the wheel from me in a confusing, slippery motion of four colliding, greasy hands. We were bumping along and swerving, the view through the windshield blurry and confused. Cosimo overcorrected, and we were back on the road but almost to the other side now—“Too far, too far!”—Enzo still cursing at who knows what, and Cosimo cursing back even more loudly. The truck swerved briefly through a thicket of corn growing close to the road. Green stalks filled our field of vision.

  In the anticipation of what would come next—a rollover? a collision with a low stone wall?—everything slowed, became taut and somehow fine, stripped of irrelevance. I never got to see it, I realized at that moment. I screwed up, and I missed my chance to see it. Yes, to save my own hide, I needed to deliver the Discobolus, but what I had wanted most, what I thought would deliver me, was just to see and to know what perfection looks like. Whether it made imperfection more or less sufferable. That’s what made it worth so much—not to him, Der Kunstsammler. Not to anyone else. But to me.

  My heart thumped wildly: twice, three times. Followed by a loud thump that wasn’t my heart. It was the answering cry, the centrifugal response, from behind us, as the crate slammed once against the inside wall of the truck. This boom was answered by a softer slide and thump as the heavy wooden object shifted again, hitting the other side of the truck’s interior before settling.

  “Scheisse.”

  Cosimo cursed as he braked gently. “Maybe it was just the scooter falling against the crate. But the crate is well built. It should be all right.”

  “Scheisse!” I repeated again, trying not to imagine the fracturing of marble fingers and toes, the split of ancient stone.

  “No, no,” Cosimo tried to reassure me. “It’s all right. Give me one minute and I will find a good place to pull over, slowly.”

  “Cosimo,” I said, taking deep breaths now, “I apologize for losing the wheel.”

  “Everything will be fine.”

  But Enzo’s face was in his greasy hands, distraught. He’d said nothing until now, but suddenly a whimper broke through, like a popping bubble rising from the pursed lips of a baby on the verge of sobbing: “You have to go back. I lost it.”

  “Something at the food shop?”

  He moaned, shaking his head.

  When Cosimo interrogated him in Italian, I could make out only “lago,” which I understood, and “anello,” which I didn’t. At the mention of this last word, Cosimo stepped on the brake. He yanked the door open, stepped down, and stood at the front of the truck, glowering through the windshield. Enzo followed reluctantly.

  Outside the truck, they resumed their argument. Enzo stood with hands in his pockets. Cosimo paced back and forth on the road, waving his arms, gesturing up to the sky, no longer able to keep it all inside.

  I got out slowly, stepped around to the back of the truck and crawled inside. The crate was there, with no visible sign of damage from the outside, not a dented board, not even a splinter. The marble was surely harder than the wood, and it was packed well, one hoped—I hoped. Yes. Of course it was. The slamming sound hadn’t even been that loud, more of a soft bump, really. And the statue itself had survived worse insults than this. The scooter, tipped to one side, was now wedging the crate more firmly within the truck—a good arrangement, which I dared not disrupt.

  My stomach settled; my breath deepened. If anything, I felt a giddy sense of relief: the worst had happened now, the fulfillment of a nagging premonition. A near accident, averted. As if we had made a small offering to the gods—a little sweat, a little terror. All could proceed without incident now. Ohne Zwischenfall. At the border, at the end of day three, the crate would be opened and I would see it then, I would have my unhurried moment in good light, before the Discus Thrower took its role as an object for other people, for other purposes. All day I’d been letting my mind wander through time, indulging memories, when perhaps I should have been concentrating on just that glorious moment. The near accident snapped me back into focus. I was here to do one thing only, and to do it dutifully.

  Our jackets, near the truck’s back door, had shifted and come unfolded. As I pushed Enzo’s jacket back into place, something slid out of the front pocket: his folded blue tie, and with it, the picture of Farfalla.

  A moment later, I approached him to ask, “Is this what you think you lost?”

  The argument paused. Cosimo was still trembling with anger, his face tinged grayish purpl
e with a cloud of capillaries ready to explode, in contrast with Enzo’s face, merely flushed pink and more healthy looking than ever.

  Enzo sighed, taking the photo from my hand. “No. But grazie mille.”

  He studied the photo, rubbing the corner gently, as if he could feel the girl’s cheek beneath his thumb. “Che bella.” And then, emboldened despite his brother’s anger: “We go back to get the ring. It is simple.”

  “A ring?”

  “An engagement ring,” Cosimo explained to me. He turned to his brother again. “How could you lose Mamma’s ring?”

  “It falls out of my pocket when I run to the lake. It is my fault. But we must go back.”

  “We can’t go back,” I interjected. “Cosimo, it is impossible. We don’t have extra time, and we don’t want any unexpected encounters or additional difficulties. We cannot go back.”

  He nodded once, eyes on his feet. Then he gestured back to the truck. “Andiamo.” End of discussion.

  More food was distributed, but it was eaten with less praise and less abandon. Enzo brought out the wine bottle and passed it around—a sip for Cosimo, a few sips for me, and most of it for himself as he wallowed in the corner of the cab. Wanting to avoid eye contact at any cost, I stared out the windshield as if I were studying the landscape, memorizing it for some future sketch, though I hadn’t sketched a landscape in some time.

  “A little more wine?” Enzo asked after he had polished off more than half of it.

  “Grazie.” I reached for it casually, still avoiding eye contact. The wine warmed my stomach. It didn’t take much for me to feel a little tipsy, and the tipsiness felt good, especially after the bit of excitement we had endured.

  Ohne Zwischenfall. Without incident. Well, perhaps that wasn’t accurate. The day had been at least a little eventful. But everything would be fine. It sounded better in Italian, more melodious and certain: Tutto va bene.

  The sun’s slow descent had painted the rusty hills. Bowls of purple separated fields of red soil. Night was collecting; everything was becoming softer. Just when you thought the canvas was done, that the light had finished playing its games and now darkness would fall, there would be another ridge highlighted with sun, another valley cast into even deeper shadow. This countryside appealed to me much more than the countryside around Rome, but maybe it was my state of mind. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the fading, changing light and the natural colors that begged for artistic representation.

  I had tried watercolor painting for a year or so, on my own without a teacher, but I’d had no talent for it. I fought the flow of water against the page, the drip of changing hue obscuring my pencil guidelines. Any watercolors I attempted seemed to have their own ideas. I couldn’t relax and find inspiration from them. Worst of all was being pleased with some minor painting at the midpoint of its execution and then seeing it fully dry—there, changed again. Unsettling.

  I drank a little more wine, then I finished the bottle. Why not? Enzo had already had his share; Cosimo needed to be alert. There was nothing else to do but sip and watch the sun go down, appreciating our recent brush with disaster.

  Outside the window, there was an entire landscape with its own ideas, changing with every moment, so different from the statue we were transporting, a model of ideals that never changed, in a medium of reassuring solidity. A sculpture was what it was, not only mid-process, but before the chiseling had even begun. Michelangelo had believed that a statue’s shape was hidden within the stone, to be revealed rather than created. Much as a person’s true health, inner strength, character—call it what you will—is revealed.

  And yet, this ephemeral moment was beautiful, too; one could argue it was even more so, for its lack of permanence. There was more to see at this sunset hour, and more to imagine: that soft hill there could be the rounded hip of a woman lying on her side, with that shadow obscuring her sleeping face. Bella. Schön.

  There had been moments with Leonie, but no—we were looking only for reassurance from each other, for dull physical comfort, and the lack of chemistry was clear from the start. It had been best to discover that sooner rather than later. But why hadn’t I tried to find my better half, the person whose honesty and beauty would help me feel more open to moments like these? Why hadn’t I found someone to help me face what was not pleasant or beautiful in our lives? And how could I begrudge another man his eyes and heart for being more open than mine?

  When I set down the empty bottle safely near my feet, a guttural sound escaped from Enzo’s chest, and I peeked at his left hand on his left knee, flexing and tightening like a beating heart. Of course the hills reminded him of his girlfriend. They were all women, a nation of women—sleeping, dreaming, beckoning—out here beyond the noise and confusion, the scheming and ambition of cities, the stupid plans of men. And men did have such grand, ambitious plans: the acquiring, collecting impulse that could, unchecked, become something entirely different—a rapacious appetite for controlling things and ideas and posterity itself. And no matter how good it sounded—an “expanded homeland” or even an entire “city of art”—it somehow became the opposite of those things. The opposite of home and security, the opposite of culture and art. The opposite, too, of truth and beauty and love …

  “Perhaps—” I said, clearing my throat, “perhaps we have made good time. The stop for food was quick. We carry our own fuel. I don’t see how we could be far from Florence. We might even be ahead of schedule.”

  The justification, I thought, was sound: as long as the decision was mine, as long as the backward detour was a short one, I would be repaid in loyalty and efficiency. We would drive further into nightfall, and tomorrow there would be fewer unnecessary stops. Otherwise, I never would have compromised.

  The lake was at least sixty minutes behind us. Two hours round-trip, though Cosimo had made it clear he was going to cut the loss to one hour, give or take, by driving nearly twice our previous speed. The truck, which had been whining already on every uphill climb, responded unhappily to Cosimo’s increasing demands. Grinding the gears, he cursed under his breath. The whole truck was vibrating at this unwholesome speed—and that was not good at all. A constant vibration could do more damage to the statue than a single unfortunate bump.

  “An hour lost is really not so much,” I ventured, to an unresponsive audience. Clearing my throat, I made my point more plain: “We cannot drive so fast. You must slow down.”

  But Cosimo was barely in control of his own breathing. He inhaled, held it, and exhaled through his mouth in little bursts. His foot tapped the accelerator and we shimmied up the next hill, even faster than before.

  “Then again,” I said, feeling angrier now, the warm haze of the wine fading with every passing minute and every backward kilometer, “perhaps we should not have turned around for a ring, after all. Perhaps you should have gone searching for it on a subsequent journey.”

  “No, no,” Enzo reassured me. “Tonight. It must be tonight.” He glanced at his brother, speaking in German again for my benefit. “But yes, Cosimo, you must not go so fast.”

  When they resumed arguing in Italian, the dictionary was no help.

  “Cosimo, the truck,” Enzo said in German. “You are cooking the engine.” He turned to me, smiling weakly. “Yes, I lose the ring. But do not be angry with me if we have no truck tomorrow.”

  We passed the next hour silently, breathing in the smell of a hot engine, spilled olive oil, our appetites ruined. But then we saw the glimmer of the lake, the same shoulder where I’d run so hard to catch the man and his son, the place that already seemed to belong to a long-ago past. The vegetation seemed higher, wilder, impenetrable. The lake had darkened from silvery green to nearly black.

  Enzo hurried away from the truck and into the grass where he had first struggled free from his pants. He rummaged around in the dark, crawling on hands and knees. His lighter flicked on and off, on and off.

  “Of course, he wanted to take this route,” Cosimo muttered, watch
ing his brother flit along the lakefront like an undaunted firefly. “Of course, we take the road to Siena. Of course, we park the night at the turn-off to Monterosso, conveniently. Of course!”

  “I thought we planned to drive as far as we could. You didn’t tell me that you and Enzo had already planned where we’d park for the night.”

  Cosimo didn’t answer.

  “You and Enzo—?”

  “And Mister Keller,” he conceded.

  But why hadn’t I been informed? “Don’t tell me that Monterosso is near Farfalla’s village. I thought it was only a fanciful longing. I thought he realized we wouldn’t stand for it. Don’t tell me that Enzo is really thinking he’ll be proposing to Farfalla tonight.”

  “Let him have the nerve to try.”

  “I don’t care about nerve, Cosimo. I care about the statue. And about my own well-being—”

  “It doesn’t matter. He won’t find it,” Cosimo insisted.

  “Keller wouldn’t have agreed to that, given the importance—”

  But our conversation was interrupted. Enzo’s face appeared suddenly in the open passenger window, his entire face lit up with an ear-to-ear grin: “Lady Fortune!”

  He clambered back into the truck, shaking his head at his good luck. “Now I put it here. There she is. Good and safe.” And he made a grand display of pushing it deep into his front trouser pocket, patting the circlet affectionately.

  Cosimo grumbled, “Congratulazioni. È quasi un miracolo.”

  Then we were driving again, with an orange scar of sunset to our left, a deep purple sky overhead, and the hills to the north and east uniformly black. The air had gone from cool to cold. We rolled up our windows and Cosimo broke the silence with his brother. “You are coming with us all the way to the border, no excuses.”

  No answer.

  Cosimo dug deeper. “You are not leaving my sight.”

  A little shrug, lips turned down in distaste. Enzo lit a cigarette, failing to offer one to anyone else.

  We drove in silence. We passed the place where we had turned around two hours earlier. Our road took us through a valley, dark and quiet and oddly unpeopled, while up on the high ridges to the left and right, the dim lights of farmhouses were twinkling doubles of the stars overhead. But none of those lights were strong enough to puncture the gloom on the road we were traveling. It was a moonless night. A weathered sign loomed up, barely lit by our feeble headlamps: Siena, 30 KM.