Then again, perhaps she was not the kind to use brakes, wherever—or whatever—she was riding.
“Come on now,” she said, thinking I needed to be convinced. “You see something that excites you, and maybe it’s because it reminds you of when you were a boy and looking in a woman’s window, or some photograph you saw, or another lover, or all of it together. So what is wrong with that?”
“It leaves one feeling … rather left out.”
“But maybe later, you will be the memory.”
“When the woman is with someone else, you mean.”
“With someone else, or alone. Who knows?”
“You are an outspoken woman, Rosina.”
“And this bothers you?”
“Not at all. You are remarkable.”
“Don’t say that.” Her voice had turned cold. I was reminded of the woman in Cosimo’s picture, the woman who did not want to be photographed, who did not seem to desire adoration, who perhaps did not feel that she deserved it.
“I can’t say that you are exceptional?”
“No, you cannot. Gutenacht.”
At breakfast, though I followed her into the house and sat next to her through a tense family breakfast—only Cosimo was missing, off helping the coffin maker—she would not speak to me. I tried a question or two, in German, but she ignored me, and each time I opened my mouth, Gianni stifled me with his dark glare.
“The old jealousy has died hard. He does not like to hear German,” Rosina finally said under her breath, standing to remove her plate from the table. “None of them do.”
“So you won’t speak to me at all?” I followed her toward the counter where the dirty dishes were stacked.
“Basta.”
Mamma Digirolamo and Rosina were wearing black dresses, but Marzia, Gianni’s wife, seemed to have a special exemption and was wearing a loose, yellow, flower-spotted dress. All three were puffy-eyed, as if they’d been up for hours, tending to all the normal chores in addition to the new ones imposed by this day’s necessary rituals.
When Gianni left the room, Marzia carried the dishes just outside where there was an outdoor kitchen established around the paved terrazza with a water spigot and a washtub. The uncle sat quietly at the table, plaiting strands of straw into what would become, in the next hour, a woven cross. Mamma Digirolamo and Rosina began filling pots with water, rolling out dough, cutting up pieces of a long, bright-red sausage.
“Can I help with anything?”
Rosina broke her silence. “You’d better.”
“But what can I do?”
Gianni scowled.
“You can help with the coffin, I suppose,” Rosina said.
“I know nothing about carpentry.”
“And you know more about cooking?”
“Not really.”
“Then we’ll keep things simple. Go find us eggs. At least six, in the henhouse.”
After pantomiming with Marzia outside, I found my way around the cascina’s various outbuildings: a pigsty; a storage shed full of barrels and jars; the half-finished foundation of a small house—one Gianni was originally building for Marzia and himself before he lost steam and decided the main house would be more comfortable. Finally, I stumbled into the henhouse and fulfilled my mission, returning with a dirty armload of eggs, one of them cracked and dribbling. Back in the kitchen, I helped pound dough; I cut thin strips of dried tomatoes; I crossed the room to fetch plates or reach hanging pots whenever Rosina pointed wordlessly to them. I watched as a lump of risen dough became an elaborate picnic bread, with latticework pieces woven over hard-boiled eggs, still in their shells, and bits of sausage. This last small, sculptural masterpiece, baked in the outdoor oven, would be the afternoon meal eaten at the family cemetery—a shame that so few would get to see it.
Over the next two hours, I yearned to hear Rosina speak. There she was, sitting across the table, and there were so many things I wanted to ask—about her years singing opera, about her perceptions of Munich, about her life here on the farm—but she did not want to hear from me and this seemed the wrong time to make repeated overtures. We were living a relationship in reverse, from the intimacy of nudity to candid conversation, to terse communication, and now to silence. Another hour, and she would look up from the bread she was shaping and fail to recognize me.
At one point, Marzia’s eyes happened to meet mine and she offered a tentative smile. Throughout the silent afternoon, I had been struggling to piece together the little Italian I did know, and now I tried a sentence. “This is a big farm.”
Mamma Digiloramo looked my way, expression blank.
I tried again, aware that I sounded like a child or an idiot: “I see pigs and chickens. Many.”
Marzia giggled into a cupped hand.
“Good buildings,” I said. “Hills. Trees. Beautiful.” So what if they were single words? They were better than this cursed silence. I had relied on Cosimo and Enzo too much; I hadn’t even tried. And I realized now, as all travelers do, that speaking is not just about exchanging information or the essentials of getting by. It makes you feel like a different person.
“Bello,” I said again, because it was a word I was more confident about, and it felt good to say it. “You have … grapes?” There was a phrase I could use again, with infinite modifications. “You have … corn?”
Marzia laughed again, without answering.
I was exhausted from the effort, but Rosina smiled. That smile was more important than my dignity.
Just then, Gianni passed through the kitchen and delivered a message that I couldn’t understand, except to catch Enzo’s name. Mamma Digirolamo exhaled through pursed lips as he talked, head swinging side to side in a pendulum of maternal regret. She turned and put a hand on Gianni’s arm. He stood a little taller, ennobled by this bad news he’d brought. Rosina kept her eyes down, cutting a pile of black olives with much more force than the soft little garnishes required.
“Rosina …” I tried after Gianni left, when my latest cooking task was complete and there was nothing more for me to do.
She sighed, stood, and left the kitchen, exiting the house without explanation, and I followed, thinking this was a coded way for us to talk privately. My stomach felt queasy with anticipation—an intoxicating thrill I hadn’t felt in years. I pictured our moment alone: closing the barn door; or perhaps down in the woods, near some clear-running creek. I pictured reaching a hand out to her shoulder and running a finger across her clavicle toward the soft hollow at the base of her throat. But halfway down the hill, toward the barn, she turned on me, muttering in German.
“I can’t talk with you right now. I need some time, before the funeral.”
“Of course.”
But I followed her a few steps more.
“Cosimo says you didn’t want to bring Enzo here, for the funeral.”
“I didn’t at first. But we’re here, aren’t we?”
“He says you will leave soon and he’ll help get you to the border.”
“This afternoon, as soon as the burial is complete.”
“This afternoon?”
Cosimo had explained the missed deadline and the importance of delivering the statue. But not wanting to worry her, he hadn’t explained the full extent of Keller’s intrigues or the scale of the consequences facing us, which even in my acceptance of recent delays had never been far from my mind.
“You can’t be serious,” she said now. “These are unusual circumstances. What does it matter if you take another day or two? No one could fault you.”
“No,” I said a little too sharply. “You don’t understand. Things in Germany aren’t the same as they are in Italy. People have expectations.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “We don’t have expectations?”
“About getting things done. About things going according to plan.” But this was a wrong turn. I hadn’t meant to lecture.
“I may visit again, though. I hope to.”
“Is that so?”
/> “I’ve always wanted to visit Florence.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”
“It would be”—I could almost hear Enzo’s teasing voice—“very tempting.”
“Of course—you enjoy art,” she said flatly. “What did you see in Rome?”
“There wasn’t any time.”
“Did you see the Sistine Chapel?”
“No.”
“The Pantheon? The Trevi Fountain? Not in your priorities? Not in your plans, even though you are so devoted to history and to art?”
“No.”
I was being punished, not for the big choices—refusing to drive Enzo to Farfalla’s, to save him from that dangerous and unlit journey—but for the small ones.
“Did you sit, even once, with an espresso perhaps, and look around you?”
“That, I did try,” I said quickly. “But I could not get a seat.”
“All the way from Germany, and you did nothing, you saw nothing. Our country was wasted on you, don’t you think?”
“I had a job to do.”
“But you haven’t done the job.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t think your art office will send you back. And more than that, I don’t think you would want to come. Cosimo has already told me everything about you.”
“Cosimo knows little about me.”
“What doesn’t he know? Convince me.” When I didn’t respond immediately, she lifted her chin at me with a dismissive flick. “You are all business, he says. You have no interest in being here.”
“But I do,” I said under my breath. “I am very interested in being here, not in Rome or Florence, but here …”
“But you will leave today.”
“Yes. I must.”
“Then stop following me around like a dog.”
Gianni came banging out of the main house, hailing Rosina. He strolled up and pushed a wadded shirt into her hand. After he headed back, she inspected the collarless pin-striped shirt, fingering a rip in the sleeve and tallying its missing buttons.
The shirt Enzo had been wearing during the accident was unsalvageable, and this one, provided by Gianni, was only slightly better. All of Enzo’s other clothes were in town, in the apartment that he and Cosimo had shared, but Cosimo dared not go now, especially when his own superior thought he was hundreds of miles away, completing an official task for which he had been given time off. Mamma Digirolamo and Marzia were upstairs in the house, taking care of the day’s most difficult and tender duty—washing the body, preparing it, brushing out the hair, trimming the fingernails, and shaving the delicate skin. Sewing was nothing compared to all that. And they’d need another hand when it came to dressing him again.
Rosina frowned at the long sleeves with their frayed cuffs.
“It’s not a very nice shirt,” she conceded. “Gianni would never give away something he actually likes.”
The words couldn’t tumble out of my mouth quickly enough. “I have a better one in my suitcase. It’s much closer to Enzo’s size. He once mentioned that he liked it. There’s a small stain, but I haven’t tried washing it out. It will probably be fine …”
“I don’t want to go back into the house,” she said, touching my arm—a brief, electrical contact. “If I were you, I’d just get in that truck and drive away—alone, back to your home. Anywhere.”
“I burned my map.” I said it in all seriousness, but when she laughed and brought her arm up to wipe her eyes, I laughed too.
“And now look at the time you are losing here.”
I shook my empty wrist. “I can’t look at the time. I have no watch. I gave it to a stranger.”
Now her smile faded. She moved her face more closely to mine. We were alone but still within sight of the house, near an open window, never far from her family. “Did it ever occur to you that you don’t want to return to Germany at all? You burn your map. You give away your watch. Someone might think …”
She hesitated when I started shaking my head violently, but then she tried again. “The truth is, you can leave anytime. You can leave now. No one is stopping you.”
“Cosimo needs me.”
“He has all of us.”
The fact of that statement forced me to pause. “Then I need Cosimo.” Truly, I could not picture finding my way to the border without him. But there was that word—picture. With or without him, I had no pictures in my mind of the border anymore, or of Munich.
“Was he helping very much, that last day?” she asked. “He told me he slept most of the way. He said he was almost incoherent. He even gave you permission to leave him and Enzo at that farm.”
“But he wasn’t in his right mind.”
“How do you know you are in yours? How do you know that I’m in mine?”
I didn’t. And maybe I didn’t want her to be in her right mind. Maybe I wanted her to be so swayed with emotion that she would need an arm to lean on, something I wouldn’t have been asked to provide under normal circumstances.
There is balance, I had once believed, in everything that happens. There is symmetry. The thrower leans forward to balance the weight of the outstretched arm and, behind him, the heavy disc. In my life, again and again, something good had been followed by something bad. Wasn’t it time for something bad to be followed by something good?
“Go to your mother,” I told her. “I’ll bring you the shirt as soon as I have it ready.”
An hour later, Cosimo told me they were starting the vigil inside the house. Turning to go, he remembered to ask, “Do you have Enzo’s lighter?”
I patted my pocket with the last of the three postcards from Rome, and the lighter, which I surrendered.
Cosimo explained, “We put a few personal items into the coffin with him—whatever he might want, whatever he might need, whatever we can’t bear to see again. Do you want to come up?”
“I’ll wait outside, if that’s all right.”
My family was Catholic in heritage only. I hadn’t said a Rosary for my own parents. Now, I sat under the shade of a single broad-crowned tree downhill of the main house and drew out the third and final postcard I had purchased for my sister. I’d scratched out the message I’d written on the first one and left it at the bottom of my suitcase. I’d torn up the second and lefts its shreds littering the truck cab. I began again now, thinking of Greta and remembering how kind she had been to me during the difficult end of both our parents’ lives, eighteen months apart, and how little I had appreciated her kindness at the time, how I had judged her for creating a dull life for herself and Friedrich, the man she had married. But at least she had created a life. And she had always made it clear that I was welcome to share her refuge: a small island in a sea of uncontrollable events.
Now I wanted desperately to write something heartfelt and true to my sister. The third postcard showed a photo of the Colosseum. I had bought all three directly from the signora at the pensione upon check-in without even consulting their faces—the first had a famous bridge; the second, a crowded scene of some notable piazza. None of the postcards’ images had relevance to me or this trip or my Italy. My Italy: certain hours, certain changes of light over a landscape that reminded me, more than anything, of certain people, events, and emotions. Nothing that a postcard photograph could depict.
I spent a while under the tree, looking at the kitchen garden near the house, the tidy vineyards further on, and the woods down below, which didn’t seem nearly as thick or off-putting as they had seemed last night. I heard, through the open window, the low, repetitive chant of prayer. Rosina came to the half-open window and pushed hard against it until it gave way and she leaned over the sill, looking as if she would have been happy to fall out or fly away. She saw me and stopped for a moment, rosary still hanging from one wrist. She lifted her palm to me slowly, nodded and half smiled, then backed away into the dark, hot room back toward the sound of reverential murmurs.
I watched the empty window for a long while before putting pen to postcard. Then
I started writing and kept going until I’d run out of space, so important did it seem to tell at least one person.
CHAPTER 11
It was a funeral party of eight, including Marzia and Gianni’s two-year-old daughter. Leaving Mamma Digirolamo to walk holding the toddler’s hand, it took six of us to carry the coffin—an oversized, thin-planked rectangle, twice as wide as it should have been, with insecurely hammered corners that squeaked and shifted. Zio Adamo was in the middle right position, hampering more than helping, holding onto the rope handle like it was a hand strap on a trolley car. The two young women, Rosina and Marzia, shouldered the coffin’s front corners, proving themselves much more than mere decoration; Marzia’s biceps bulged from the loose folds of her flower-patterned dress as we walked.
We made our way from the house, down a path alongside the fields, and up a hill, atop which was some sort of small family burial plot. But just as we were beginning to crest the hill, Cosimo gave the order to set the coffin down. We all stopped and mopped our brows, then hoisted again at his command and found ourselves unexpectedly heading left and downhill, toward the copse of woods. Gianni grunted, reminding us all of the work he was doing. Rosina’s ankle turned and she cursed but kept going. The makeshift rope handle cut into my palm.
We crossed into the woods, where the thick green shade provided a sense of momentary relief, but only until the humidity enveloped us, and now we were trudging through green, wet heat. The path was less clear, with fallen branches and rocks underfoot. Near the house, we had been taking measured and dignified steps as best we could, trying to synchronize our gaits. But fatigue had set in. This was no parade, and there was no audience. We may as well have been carrying a big box of coal. Marzia begged for a break. We set the coffin down. Cosimo said something. We lifted it up again and took a hard right turn, and a little while later, another right.
“He isn’t lost, is he?” I whispered to Rosina, walking just ahead of me.
“Shhhh.”
The Detour Page 18