The Detour

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

“Rehearse?”

  “I sang in the opera there.”

  “You sang …,” I said, searching for the name of the opera, willing her not to push down the door handle, to stay just a moment longer, “you sang Hänsel und Gretel.”

  “So Cosimo did explain.”

  “No, he said nothing about it. He only whistled.”

  She looked momentarily confused, then uninterested. “No one likes to mention it. It’s the family scandal.”

  “Scandalous to sing opera?”

  “No, scandalous to become … involved in Munich.” She seemed to consider omitting further detail but then shrugged it off. Perhaps it was her natural brazenness; perhaps it was the disarming effect of the day’s events. I’d never know how she would have seemed if I’d met her in different circumstances. But then again, in different circumstances, I wouldn’t have met her at all.

  “I took a lover,” she explained. “A local resident, not an Italian. That was the most incomprehensible thing for them. Anyway, it didn’t last.”

  Rushing to fill the awkward silence, I said, “I’m sure your family was glad to have you back. Cosimo emphasized how close you all are.”

  Her chuckle was hollow. “Close—yes. My family accepted me once I moved back because I married quickly and conveniently.”

  She saw my eyes widen, looking around the makeshift accommodations for signs of a jealous husband who might lay hands on a snooping visitor.

  “No, he lives in the main house. The one with the fists up. Gianni. He helped my father and my uncle with the farm. With Papa gone and Zio Adamo getting old and Cosimo and Enzo working in town, we couldn’t manage without him.”

  Her hand was still on the door handle, but she was leaning away from it now, her weight shifted, off balance, one foot pulled out of the shoe, a toe playing with the exposed insole.

  “You live apart from your husband?”

  “Gianni remarried. He lives in the house with his wife and their daughter because my family needs him here. That is the second scandal.”

  “And you?”

  “I need only to be left alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “But they make you live out here?”

  “Make me? There’s something wrong with my little palazzo?” At least now she was teasing, though with Rosina, I was quickly becoming aware, a tease could quickly turn sour. “Because if you’d rather wash up at the main house—”

  “Is it that easy to end a marriage in this country?”

  “When you are physically defective, it is.”

  Our eyes met, and I was hoping she couldn’t read my mind and know that I had seen, and was recalling still, the very absence of her defects.

  “You’ve heard,” she added, “of the Battle for Births?”

  When I shook my head, she explained, “We are expected to reverse the population decline. A target of five children per family, but ten, thirteen—the more the better. I have not been a loyal soldier.”

  I must have looked uncertain about that last phrase, because she added in a bitter voice, “I can’t make babies. These days in Italy, it is almost a crime.”

  She opened the door. “There will be a lot to do. I’ll find Cosimo and let him know where you are. Anyway, what is your name?”

  “Vogler.”

  “That is your first name? Because I’ve already given you permission to use mine.”

  I hesitated. “It is … Ernst.”

  “You say that like you’re choking on it.”

  I could have told her that it was my father’s name, which even my mother’s gentle voice had never managed to make appealing, or that it always sounded like a brutish grunt to me.

  “It sounds … very serious,” I said.

  “And you’re not serious?”

  “It also means ‘to battle to the death.’ ”

  “I take it you have other plans.”

  “No plans, but no death wish, either.”

  She paused for a moment, thinking. “Perhaps it only needs an Italian variation, with more vowels. We give them away here, no charge. How about …” She pushed her loose foot more securely into the shoe, widened her stance, straightened her spine, inhaled, and announced: “Er-nes-to.”

  She delivered it with an operatic flourish, bringing each syllable up from a deep place in her body, as if all three of those syllables in that order had long been stored there, fully formed and waiting, and she had only to haul them up, out of the dark and into the light. And isn’t that how the important things should feel—beauty and honesty and love—as if they had always been there, only waiting to be expressed?

  “The meaning has not changed,” she said, stepping through the open doorway, pausing for one last moment on the threshold. “But now it has loosened its belt. Now it breathes.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Rosina, if only I could stop time there, at that moment where you showed me a different kind of woman’s beauty. (Even though I’d slept with several other women, you were the first real woman I’d ever seen entirely undressed, unhidden, unmarmoreal and in the flesh.) If only I could pause there, when you showed me a way of speaking the truth, a way of infusing breath and life into something as unpromising and unrefined as my own name.

  I could walk and keep walking through the Piedmont now, through all of Italy perhaps, imagining that you are still waiting, somewhere. It would be easier to find the café closed, to miss you, to take a wrong turn into the wrong town than to find out you have a child, are married, remember nothing of what I am recounting here or remember it all differently, or only in its most dismal form: that a difficult foreigner showed up, inviting chaos, leaving behind devastation.

  Walking past vineyards and up into Renaissance towns and down old Roman roads, I could keep reviewing those few moments, putting you on a pedestal, no pun intended.

  Should I?

  I recall that photo Cosimo used to carry: the look of impatience and irritation. No, you say, of course I shouldn’t. Better to choose life and the truth than settle for the false moment, the preserved image. So fine—no dishonesty, then.

  You probably don’t believe in love at first sight, anyway. But how about love at second or third sight? I would settle for that.

  “We need to make a coffin,” Cosimo said when he found me a short while later, clean but bone-weary and disoriented, sitting in the dark on the stone stoop outside Rosina’s barn. “There is a man down the road, but he needs to go to another town to get milled wood. One, two days at least.”

  “Days?”

  “That’s if he doesn’t get delayed.” Cosimo made a motion with his hand, lifting an imaginary bottle. “I tell him, we have wood. We have nails. We don’t need the coffin to be fancy. In fact, it should not be.”

  A pause. He was trying to put off saying it as long as possible. “The crate,” he finally admitted. “He must take wood from the crate.”

  “And the statue—?”

  “We will wrap it in blankets or mattresses. That is not a problem.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s not a problem. For you, very little is a problem.” That’s how it had seemed, once we had arrived at the Digiloramo cascina. Before, it was Cosimo and I on a mission together; but now that we had arrived, I had become a stranger again, unprotected from angry or confusingly attractive relatives. “Next you will tell me you need the marble for a grave marker—”

  His face closed down; his eyes flattened. “You have no idea of the problems I am facing to bury my brother, with no time, little assistance, not even a priest—”

  “I thought there were priests in every Italian backwater.”

  “The problem is that the local priest maintains very regular communications, of course, with Rome. And he is not the only one. You and I, this week, we do not need any outside attention, from Rome or anywhere else.” With each syllable he stabbed a finger toward the road, volume rising, until he just as suddenly paused, realizing that he was getting needlessly incensed. He dropped his hands and
his chin, directing his report to his feet. “I have discussed this with my family and they agree. For now, it’s better that no one know. Gianni will help me carry my brother from the truck into an upstairs bedroom, where the women will help clean him and dress him. Then I will get you something to eat, and you can sleep in a room with my uncle.”

  “And you?”

  “I will start digging the grave, with Gianni, as soon as we’ve finished eating.”

  “In the dark?”

  “It’s better. We have few neighbors as it is, but in the dark, no one will see us.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “We have only two shovels.”

  “There’s a tool in Rosina’s barn, near her dresser.” I’d spotted it as I bathed—a long-handled implement ending in a small, sharp-edged blade, halfway between a trowel and a hoe. It wouldn’t take much dirt with each scoop, but at least it would be something.

  Cosimo puzzled over my statement. “That won’t be any good for digging a grave. It’s only for pushing around leaves and a little dirt, for digging truffles. Forget that. If you want to help, eat something, then take apart the top of the crate. Stack the wood just outside the truck, and then go to the main house and try to get some sleep.”

  I had wanted to see it so desperately: in Munich, at mission’s end, and before that, in Rome, on that morning that now seemed like years ago, and in the back of the truck, trying to peer through a narrow gap in the slats. But now, facing the crate with a crowbar in my hand, I was no longer sure that I wanted to see the statue. I might notice a chip off a finger, a crack etched by the vibration of rural roads. I might be overcome by the beauty of the statue and feel again the immense failure of not delivering it on time, in a dignified manner, to its proper owner. Or I might feel nothing. That was the most terrifying possibility.

  The statue had remained essential in the face of tragedy, in the face of death. But here, on this farm, in the light of an accidental encounter and a single conversation and the simple movement of a family tending to essential obligations—in the face of life—the statue seemed, or might seem, like something less than it really was. We fall out of love, or we see behind a veil. A myth collapses. Purpose vanishes. That is what I feared most.

  But it did not matter what I feared or what I felt. I’d been assigned a chore and now I busied myself with it: prying off one slat of wood at a time, starting at the top and moving around to each side, leaving only the bottom of the crate as a low-walled pallet. I worked hard, prying and sweating and slipping, trying to keep each board whole and undamaged. In the middle of the work, Cosimo brought me a shallow bowl of oily polenta and I shoveled it into my mouth, hardly tasting it, because it was only fuel for this effort of which I did not quite approve. But I would worry about protecting the statue later, when there was hope of being on the road again. I set aside the bowl and the spoon and returned to work. And as I proceeded to loosen more slats—hardly even looking at the object my work was uncovering, so disillusioned and confused were my thoughts at that moment—my memories loosened as well, splintering unpredictably.

  Gerhard had been the only one of my colleagues to show up at my father’s funeral in December. He had stood next to me during the perfunctory service and had asked me how I was managing. Later, outside the church, after thanking him for coming, I had let it slip that I’d never understood my father, had never even felt like I’d known him.

  “Your father had different experiences,” Gerhard had said, expressing gentle understanding toward us both. “The war, a lot of struggle since, just getting by—it’s all hard.”

  “But you’ve been through all those things?”

  He considered carefully: “Yes.”

  “And none of it made you into a brute.”

  We were at the top of the steps, and two older men walked past and tipped their hats. They were drinking buddies of my father’s, paying their respects. His funeral hadn’t been well attended.

  “It could have, yes. It might have. But I had joy in my life, too. Things I loved doing and learning. People I loved.” This was one of the times—there were more to follow—when he had begun to talk about his memories of Italy. The girl in Perugia, or Pisa. The importance of mere days; the importance of hours. I had countered, argumentative young man that I was, with a point about the importance of the eternal. He had mentioned—before there was even talk of a government trip—that I should make a trip south.

  “To see art?”

  “Well, yes. But I don’t want you to go just to evaluate the art. I want you to go in order that you might experience the art. Photographs and sketches can’t do the sculptures justice—or the frescoes, or the cathedrals. I want you to stand there, in the light of Tuscany, in the noise and heat of Rome, and see the work of ages.”

  I started to answer him, but he put one arm around me and lowered his voice to a whisper: “And then, my friend, I want you to forget what you see and know, just for a moment. I want you to experience Italy as the sculptors themselves did. Live as they lived, feel as they felt, on those days when they looked at a block of marble and believed in the humanity that was imprinted even on that cold surface—even inside stone.”

  I stumbled into the Digirolamo house an hour or so later and found the uncle’s room at the top of the staircase where Cosimo said I would find it. There were splinters in my fingertips that I could feel but not see, and though Cosimo had left me a candle affixed with melted wax to an overturned jar lid, I was too tired to light it. I didn’t even take off my clothes. Zio Adamo was already asleep on his own twin bed across the room, snuffling quietly.

  When the door opened some time later, my eyelids popped open. My heart was beating fast, even before I remembered where I was. Gianni, framed by weak light, stood in the open doorway, legs apart and arms lifted off his side, ready to shoot or duel. He crossed the bedroom and sat down hard at my side, jabbing me in the arm.

  “Yes?”

  When he pointed to the floor and yanked the top of my sheet, I extracted myself from the warm pocket of bedclothes and stood, confused. He scooted into my place, drawing his long legs up and pushing them under the covers, before turning away from me, face to the wall. His room had been the one converted temporarily into a funeral parlor, so I didn’t blame him for leaving it. Ejecting me was understandable, but his dislike for me was so evident that I decided I’d rather be outside on the cold, hard ground than sleeping on the floor at his feet.

  I tiptoed down the stairs and downhill to the barn, where the truck was parked, and where at least I wouldn’t wake to an inhospitable stranger’s face. The next hour crept by as I tried to sleep with my head turned to one side, tightly wedged under the steering wheel, my legs bent, my stocking feet pushed up against the window. Impossible. I was shifting yet again, thinking of trying the back of the truck where there would be less padding but more space, when suddenly there was the sound of frantic clawing coming from the other side of the truck door. Sitting up, I banged my ear against the steering wheel and listened hard, trying to distinguish the scratch of a wild animal from that of a tame one. I tapped back three times.

  Tartufa heard me and barked once, then launched into a series of agonizing whines. I rapped at the door, opened it a crack, cursed—all to no avail. She couldn’t seem to make up her mind, alternating between a low, wet growl and a needy whimper. Now, the back of the truck wouldn’t work at all. With the retractable door open, she’d either jump inside or stand just below the threshold, barking. As for sleeping in there with the door closed, I’d had enough of that.

  I was sitting upright, head in my hands against the steering wheel, when a quick rap against the window startled me all over again. Rosina pressed her face against the glass, her hand cupped above her eyes, squinting. “Ernesto,” she whispered. “Come.”

  She clapped her hands once and cursed at the dog, who ran off, allowing me to exit the truck and follow, unmolested. In the barn, Rosina refused to hear my objections and pointed to a pile of bla
nkets in a corner, diagonal from her own sagging bed. She, too, was exhausted and tired of hearing Tartufa whining and growling outside.

  “Why isn’t Cosimo keeping her locked up?”

  “She makes a good watchdog. He’s anxious about unwanted visitors coming around the farm tonight.”

  “I can’t intrude upon your privacy like this.”

  “Stop,” she said, turning down the lantern next to her bed. “I’m too tired for all that.”

  But a moment later, she asked quietly, “Why was Enzo visiting Farfalla?”

  “Cosimo didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  So I explained to her about the failed proposal and about Cosimo’s revelation that he and Farfalla had been a couple, before Enzo came along.

  “Poor liebling,” she said. And a little later: “Speak to me. About anything. I like the sound of your voice.”

  “You like the sound of German?”

  “I miss it very much.”

  “But Italian is more passionate—isn’t that what people say?”

  “There is romance, and then there is urgency.” She paused, and I listened to the whisper of moving sheets and the creak of her bed as she shifted toward me. “The sound of German reminds me of—well, never mind.”

  “I think … I think you are thinking not of me, but of the man from your past.”

  “What if I am? Given your fascination with classical art, you are living in the past all the time. Who are you to judge?”

  The dark made it easier to speak without inhibitions. “It’s not very flattering, to have a woman sound interested because you remind her of someone else.”

  “Isn’t arousal usually about memory?”

  “I’m sorry?” It wasn’t the concept that had stopped me in my tracks; it was the provocative word, arousal—a bit more explicit, I was guessing, than she intended, but that is what happens when you are speaking in a second language. It is hard to soften the edges of things, and that is why, perhaps, things can sometimes progress more quickly than they otherwise might. To talk flirtatiously with a foreigner can be like riding in a truck with no brakes.