“Milk,” he repeated. “No, that isn’t it.”
He pushed a finger against his temple, massaging in hard circles. After a while, the same hand went to his nose, which he couldn’t stop rubbing. He tried unrolling the window and, weary of the clouds of hot midday road dust filling the truck, rolled it back again. Despite his attempt to be discreet, the compulsion built over time until I couldn’t stop watching and he couldn’t stop sniffing.
“Maybe a cigarette,” I suggested.
“In a few months, it will be truffling time again,” he said, ignoring me. “I have my best dog, Tartufa. Every autumn, we go …”
This was a good subject, neutral and safe, and I encouraged him for more details: the dog, the black and white truffles, the season, the sights and smells in the Piedmontese woods. And it seemed to work, for a few minutes at least, until Cosimo took what seemed at first to be a short detour but was really the path he was following all along, into a darker place.
“But Enzo never liked the woods,” he rambled. “And I think now—it makes sense—this is why he didn’t want to be a policeman. If it weren’t for a body we found one day in the woods—a corpse, you call it, yes?—he might not have been looking for other different jobs, he might not have worked for Keller …”
Scheisse, again. “That’s all right. You don’t have to talk about it.”
But he insisted. “It was already four days old, maybe five days. Flies lay their eggs, you know. Under the skin. Everywhere. When you find a body, you can tell when it died according to the insects. They teach us this in the training school.”
“You’re only smelling the milk, I’m sure of it,” I told him, making a face. “Don’t worry. If not a cigarette, maybe you could eat another piece of bread? Is your stomach bothering you?”
“They teach us about the little worms,” he continued. “I don’t know what you call them in German. They teach us about the stages, the problems you have, the third or fourth day.” He pressed on, trying to find the foreign words that eluded him for the tightening clothes and the collecting gas as the body became a dark and rotting balloon.
“Take it easy.”
“And when our mother, strong as she was, was ready to take the body—”
“Your mother?”
“I didn’t say my mother.”
“You did.”
He frowned. “An old, local woman. When she was ready to take the body and clean it and dress it for the funeral—because that’s what we do and what we’ve always done, we don’t leave it to others, no matter the difficulty—”
“All right, Cosimo.”
“So it was no wonder that Enzo did not want to be a policeman.”
“It’s only the milk smell that’s bothering you. The closed space and the heat and the milk. That’s all.”
We came to a fork in the road with a field to our right and a low, crumbling bluff to our left, and in a hollow of the bluff, a green and mossy spot, in which there seemed to be a sort of basin and a small white cross. I assumed Cosimo was going to say a prayer or empty his bladder, or perhaps vomit again. But then he walked slowly around the front, came to my side of the truck, opened the door, and gestured me to slide over into the driver’s seat.
“All right?” I asked him.
“Fine.”
I spent the next twenty minutes reacquainting myself with the shifting, the struggle to coordinate feet and hands and eyes. When Cosimo groaned, I assumed he was expressing anguish at the damage I was doing to the truck’s gears, until suddenly he called out and begged me to stop the truck. His door opened and I heard the retch and the splash, followed by a sighing moan.
He closed the door, wiping his mouth. “We should have wrapped the body.”
“Is it still the smell? Is that what’s getting to you?”
I started driving again, but he continued to press me about our need for a sheet or blanket, some kind of covering, especially with the sun nearing the horizon and the cold night coming soon. I stated the obvious: that Enzo wouldn’t feel the cold; that, in fact, the cold would be better for transporting him. But during all that talk, I kept my eyes glued to the road. It was only when I finally started feeling comfortable with the steering that I made myself look over at Cosimo and noticed he was shivering, his skin pale and clammy, the whites of his eyes gone yellow.
“Verdammt—the body isn’t too cold, you are.”
He whispered into his damp sleeve, “I have a terrible headache.”
“It’s more than that. You’re in shock.” In my flustered state, I let the truck veer off to one side where it rubbed against a low thicket of blackberry bushes until I corrected my course. The sudden scratching noise made Cosimo’s eyes flash open. “We need a doctor,” I insisted.
“I won’t talk to a doctor.”
“But you need help.”
“I only need a blanket.” He shifted uncomfortably. “My stomach hurts—and my head. I just need to lie down, somewhere, just a few minutes …”
“I’ll look for a town.”
“No town.” But after a minute, he relented. “A house. If you can find some farm, maybe …”
We passed alongside a field and, beyond it, a village of a dozen or so stone houses, huddled close, some of them with open animal stalls directly under human quarters. But as soon as we slowed down, dogs began to bark and a suspicious face glowered from an open doorway. There were too many people and too much life squeezed all together. Too much attention. Cosimo shook a dismissive, trembling hand and squeezed shut his eyes against the noise. We had to find someplace smaller. Someplace set apart.
“Don’t fall asleep,” I cautioned as I continued driving, my nose against the windshield now.
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure.” But I had a feeling he shouldn’t sleep yet, not without warmth and some food and a pair of eyes ready to watch over him better than I could manage while steering the truck down narrow roads.
“It’s not a tractor you’re driving there, friend,” he said, teeth chattering. “You can go a little faster.”
“I’m trying.”
Ten minutes later, I loosened the grip of one inexpert hand from the steering wheel and gave Cosimo a shake. He had been moaning again. “Talk to me.”
He opened one eye. “It’s not my brother’s fault that he was a romantic.”
“Open your eyes, please. I must be firm. Open your eyes.”
“You take everything so seriously, Mister Vogler. And I can tell you: I’ve seen worse than what I saw today. I’ve seen terrible things.”
“Ernst. I think it is better now for you to call me Ernst.” What was the point of convincing him he was in shock? What was the point in telling him that anyone would be shocked to see his own double in a state of imminent decay? He’d said himself that it was not the same as seeing another corpse, but Cosimo was intent in his professional self-regard, and blinded by his sense of duty. In that, we had something in common.
“Enzo would have wanted me to get you to a proper doctor,” I said. “What do you think about that?”
Cosimo shook his head, not so easily fooled. A moment later, he asked in a groggy voice, “You think I was too easy with him?”
“Certainly. You gave him everything, even …” I was about to say, “even your girl,” before realizing it was too strong a reminder. I finished: “… even your own jacket.”
“That wasn’t a favor to him. You might want a lifetime with a woman, but sometimes you settle for a night.”
“Enzo didn’t get even that,” I said, if only to remind him of what he had not yet lost. But it didn’t work.
He asked, “What do you think a night is worth?”
Nichts was my answer. Absolutely nothing. But I didn’t want to upset him. I only wanted to keep him talking. “I don’t know. Maybe one night can be pleasant.”
His eyes were looking glassier; his speech was thick. “I wanted at least one night, but I settled for wanting my jacket back, smelling of
her. He gets the girl; I get one smell. Her perfume—orange blossoms. Now you see?”
Cosimo tried to arrange his features in a grim smile, but the jostling over each deep rut pained him and he closed his eyes. We could take these bumps only slowly, and the little shack I’d spotted was high on the hill. Steering toward it with intense concentration, I told Cosimo that I thought he still had a chance with Farfalla. Now wasn’t the time to think about it, but someday, he’d see things differently. And as tempting as it might be to imagine that another person’s death required his own, the world didn’t really work that way: a banal lecture never fully understood by the one who hears it, or even by the one who speaks it, but so it was then, and so it remains.
An old man in an untucked shirt, baggy trousers and hanging suspenders came to the open doorway of the small shack. Thick gray brows obscured his dark eyes—until the brows lifted in surprise in reaction to Cosimo’s blue lips.
The shack was furnished with a cot, a table, and a kerosene lamp. One window framed a view of a larger villa, farther up the hill. Inside the modest dwelling, Cosimo managed only a few words, hard to understand through his clacking teeth. I pantomimed our need for a blanket and some kind of food, and I tried to explain about the pains in Cosimo’s head and stomach. The caretaker shrugged, waiting. Perhaps it was my fault for speaking and raising the suspicion of these contadini—these country folk. Cosimo alone might have garnered more immediate sympathy. I patted my empty pocket for money, thinking of the large stash in Enzo’s pockets—forget that—and tugged at my watch, unbuckling it. The man took it quickly in his rough palm.
Moments later, an old peasant woman appeared, pointing to the villa, but Cosimo shook his head. Too far; too many people. And now there was a flurry of activity, all of us crowded into this space not much larger than a gardening shed. The old man was wrapping Cosimo in a wool blanket, except for his feet, which stuck out at the bottom, uncovered. When I pointed to the oversight, the man waved me away. He brought out some strong-smelling salve and massaged Cosimo’s bare feet and calves, filling the tiny room with the smell of olive and herb and pine. The peasant woman pushed spoonfuls of a white bean soup into Cosimo’s mouth, and when he couldn’t hold it down, wiped his chin and started again. Yet another woman appeared, having been called down from the main house with more blankets in her arms, and when I tried to step back to make room, I tripped on a bucket near the doorway.
The second woman, also gray-haired, pantomimed to me: The man is cold. The man needs to sleep.
“Of course. But not for long. He can sleep in the truck.”
Overhearing, Cosimo shook his head at the next approaching spoonful of soup and pushed himself to a more upright position. “Leave me here. Va bene. Take the truck.”
“With Enzo?”
“Leave him here, also. He’ll be with me. This is a good place for us.”
There was a sound of morbid finality that I didn’t appreciate in that last remark. Just hours earlier, I had wanted to lock Cosimo in the back of the truck. I would have welcomed any chance to leave both him and Enzo along the road so that I might have had a fighting chance to change routes and make the border on time. But not now.
Cosimo pulled the diamond ring from his pocket and handed it over to the woman with the new load of blankets. Her eyes grew wide and she took it quickly. She and the old man wrapped Cosimo in more blankets, burying him behind the cocooning folds.
“He needs to breathe,” I said, stepping closer to the cot again, but their ranks closed. The three peasants continued patting and tucking, and though I was taller and able to see over their heads, I couldn’t seem to push past them. “Cosimo? Can you hear me?”
The response was a muffled but serene murmur.
“I’m not leaving you here!”
When I tried to push closer again, the older of the two women scowled at me over her shoulder and bumped me purposely with her hip, swathed in broad pleats of vulturous black. The man turned around and eased me backward, one shuffling step at a time, out the shack’s narrow door. Visiting hours were over. I was being escorted away from the patient.
“Dieci,” the old man said, holding up his narrow wrist, upon which my watch hung loosely.
“Ten minutes? Ten o’clock?” And the déjà vu of it made me laugh once—a half-crazed, unconvincing bark.
“Dieci,” the old man said, revealing a mostly toothless smile.
“I’m not leaving!” I called out one last time as the door squeaked shut. “I’m just checking on the truck! Va bene, Cosimo?”
Outside, the sun was hidden below the horizon and the sky was losing its peach blush, turning pale blue to the west, deep indigo to the east, the hills and farms and distant woods reduced to silhouetted black shapes. I followed a footpath back toward the white track where we had parked, between the flowers I’d ignored on our way up to the shack: the flowers on their thick green stalks, all bowed in the same direction. Out of habit, I turned my wrist to check the time, and finding it bare, dropped slowly down to my knees and began to whimper—tentatively at first, and then louder, until I was groaning and rubbing at my eyes, and then simply sobbing, while the dark faces of the sunflowers remained turned away, embarrassed by the outburst.
CHAPTER 9
Then and there, it must have been, my pretending came to an end. I knew there was no point in imagining that these Italian hours could stand apart from the rest of my life; no way to pretend any longer that the sun that rose and set there didn’t also rise and set on the Germany of my past and of my future. Watch or no watch, I could look at the flowers and see that even brainless creatures are aware of the time. Enzo’s death had, at last, penetrated; as had some other things—not all at once, and not completely, but like a rainstorm thrashing fields of bone-dry soil, soaking them well here and running off too quickly there. A wasted watering, where the ground was still too difficult and steep.
When the shack door opened early the next morning and Cosimo hobbled toward me on the path, red-eyed but pink-cheeked, I threw my arms around him. He returned my embrace but seemed perplexed by my effusive rambling about vultures and blankets, death and abandonment. The rest and warmth and food had done its work. He had simply needed some good contadini doctoring, he assured me, while pulling himself up and into the passenger side of the truck. He apologized for delaying us further and still did not seem to understand what his body had endured. But anyway, he asked me with undue tenderness: Was I feeling all right?
I was, I told him again and again. I was. He could sleep more and I would drive, as long as he provided the directions.
There was no argument about competing priorities, even when we came to a fork signed for Modena, a place-name I remembered from the old map. There was no discussion of the remaining day and a half it would take to get to the border from that juncture, or the day it would take to get to Cosimo’s family farm. Traveling to the farm first, and only then to the border, would take three more days total, but in light of all that had happened, this math no longer seemed logically connected to any choices we might make. The choice had been made outside that shack.
We were hopelessly late for my deadline by now, and yet, for a time at least, not late for anything. We were simply driving. The sky was just beginning to leak its black ink, and the gray dawn was beginning to reveal wooded valleys and small, grassy, overgrown vineyard plots, cloaked in mist, more lush and tangled than we’d seen in the dry, hilly lands farther south.
When Cosimo said a word under his breath—“Nebbiolo”—I asked him if it was the name of a town ahead.
“No, the local grapes. Named after the fog—nebbia. This is starting to look like home.”
We drove all day without any mention of the cargo we carried, or of much else that I would be able to recall ten years later. Cosimo took over at day’s end, when my own eyelids were closing, but for most of the morning and afternoon, I was the one behind the wheel. Probably the smartest thing he ever did was let me drive most of that t
hird day, so that with every rut and bump and slowly passing kilometer, I was sealing my own fate and there was no point in arguing about it anymore, as I would have if I’d been a hostage or even a mere passenger.
In the next moment I can remember, the undersides of my eyelids felt like they’d rubbed against ground glass. Needles had punctured the dark cloth of the night sky, letting in the first stars’ thin light. Everything had turned sharp: the coiled spring underneath my seat; the edge of the doorframe, hard and cold even through the sleeve of my wrinkled jacket.
Somehow, sleep did come—but only until an unfamiliar sound woke me. The engine had stopped. I rubbed my eyes and saw that Cosimo wasn’t behind the wheel. I heard again the dog’s low, testing growl. We were at the end of a road, near the top of a hill, surrounded by farmland, with two small orange squares of light blazing from a barely silhouetted house farther up the hill. The Digiloramo family cascina, deep in the Piedmont.
From behind the truck, Italian voices drifted—a man and a woman trying to contain their argument in frenzied whispers and the sound of the dog above them, working itself into a lather, whining and growling. Cosimo slapped his leg and shouted, “Tartufa!”—and the dog quieted immediately, following him as he departed. The footsteps faded.
I listened hard, with my hand on the door handle, trying to ascertain whether I was alone. But then I heard the grinding metal of someone trying to raise the truck’s back door, pushing hard against a blockage within. The door rattled but wouldn’t give. I heard more scraping metal, a high-pitched grunt of effort, a sliding sound, before I realized what was about to happen.
When I leapt out of the truck—shouting, “Don’t!”—it was already too late. Hurrying around to the back, I saw her standing with her hands on the door, the dark gap opening. She gasped and pulled one hand away from the door, covering her mouth. I had startled her, compounding the shock of the undignified lump threatening to fall out onto the drive.
I wedged my hip against the unsteady corpse, and in an awkward maneuver wriggled out of my jacket, letting it drop over Enzo’s shoulder and battered face, then resumed pushing the body back into the truck, over the lip of the doorframe.
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