I was twenty-three when my grandmother died. After the summer of my senior year of high school I had seen her only once: she had come to Turin for a medical exam, her throat, or maybe her ear, and had stayed two nights in a hotel. But one evening she had dinner with us, and she and my mother talked about this and that with the utmost cordiality. As she was leaving, she asked me if I’d enjoyed the book that she had sent me with my father. I barely remembered it, but I said yes so as not to offend her.
“Then I’ll send you some others,” she promised, though afterward she must have forgotten.
Nobody knew when she’d gotten into the habit of going to the beach in the morning.
“In February! Swimming in February!” my father ranted. “Do you have any idea how cold the water is in February?”
My mother stroked the sleeve of his jacket; he was shivering uncontrollably.
A fisherman had spotted the corpse slamming against the rocky shore at Cala dei Ginepri. I knew that cove, and all afternoon I kept seeing my grandmother’s body knocking brutally against the rocks. When they’d pulled her out, she had been soaking for hours, the skin of her face and fingers was all wrinkled, the knees she was so ashamed of nibbled by the bottom fish.
My father decided to leave that same day. In the car no one spoke, so I dozed in the backseat. When we arrived in Speziale it was dawn and a layer of fog hung over the countryside.
I wandered, dazed, through the courtyard of the villa with an awful taste in my mouth. I approached the pool, which was covered by a canvas tarp: a calcareous ring gleamed in the center. I stepped on one of the waterlogged cushions surrounding the tile edge. Everything spoke of neglect.
The coming and going continued until suppertime. I recognized some of my grandmother’s pupils, now teenagers yet escorted by their mothers. They spoke of her as “the teacher,” and took turns sitting on the couch that had been her sanctuary as they offered their whispered condolences to my father.
The windows were wide open and gusts of cold air chilled the room. I didn’t go near the open coffin in the middle of the room. Rosa offered the visitors small glasses of liqueur and marzipan confections. Cosimo was leaning against the wall with his hands clasped and a beaten look, as my mother spoke to him up close.
Suddenly she left him standing there and headed toward me.
“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm.
She led me to my room, where nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed since the last summer I’d been there.
“Did you know there was a will?”
“What will?”
“Don’t lie to me, Teresa. Don’t even try. I know you had a special bond, you and she.”
“But I never even phoned her.”
“She left it all to you. The house. Along with the furniture and the land. Even the lodge where Cosimo and that insufferable wife of his live.”
I didn’t immediately understand the significance of what she was telling me. The will, Cosimo, the furniture. I was overcome by the unexpected emotion that the made-up bed had stirred in me.
“Listen to me, Teresa. You will sell this house right away, you will not listen to what your father tells you. It’s nothing but a decrepit villa, full of leaks. Cosimo is prepared to buy it. Let me take care of it.”
THE FUNERAL WAS HELD the following day. The church in Speziale was too small to hold everyone, and many people gathered in the doorway, blocking the light. At the end of the service the priest approached our pew and shook my hands.
“You must be Teresa. Your grandmother spoke a lot about you.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised?” he asked, smiling at me. Then he patted me on the shoulder.
We followed the coffin to the cemetery. A niche had been opened next to that of my grandfather and certain ancestors whom I knew nothing about. When the undertaker started fumbling with the trowel and the casket was lifted by the hoist, my father started sobbing. I looked away, and it was then that I saw him.
He stood a distance away, hidden behind a column. Bern. His clothes struck me as the most noticeable sign of how grown up we’d become. He wore a dark coat and, under it, a knotted tie. Meeting my gaze, he ran a forefinger over his eyebrow, and I didn’t know if it was just an awkward gesture or a secret code that I no longer knew how to decipher. Then he moved quickly toward one of the family chapels and disappeared inside. When I looked back at the coffin, which was now being pushed into the niche, rasping and creaking, I was so confused, so distracted, that I didn’t give my grandmother even one last thought.
As the crowd began to disperse, I murmured to my mother that I would join her later at the house, there were some people I wanted to greet. I walked around the churchyard, very slowly. By the time I reached the gate again, everyone had left. I went back into the cemetery. The undertaker, left to himself, was finishing the job of sealing up the marble slab. I looked in the chapel, but Bern wasn’t there.
I returned to town, almost running. Instead of turning in to my grandmother’s villa, I continued on to the masseria. The iron bar across the entrance was open. Going back down the dirt track to the house again was like sinking bodily into a childhood memory, a memory that had lingered there, intact, waiting for me. I recognized every single thing, every tree, every cleft of every single stone.
I spotted Bern sitting under the pergola, along with some others. I had a moment’s hesitation, because not even then, seeing me, did he encourage me to join him. But soon enough, there I was among them. Bern, Tommaso, Corinne, Danco, Giuliana: the people with whom I would share the next few years of my life—by far the best years, and the unsuspected prelude to the worst.
Bern introduced me in a neutral tone, saying that I was the teacher’s granddaughter, that I lived in Turin, and that I used to spend vacations there at one time. Nothing more. Nothing that would let anyone think we had once been intimate, he and I. However, he stood up to get me a chair. Tommaso murmured his condolences for my grandmother without looking at me directly. A wool hat covered his fair hair, and his cheeks were reddened by the cold; seeing him nervously jiggling his leg, I had the old feeling that he didn’t want me there.
Beers appeared on the table and Giuliana poured pistachios out of a plastic bag. Everyone scooped up a handful.
“I’d heard that the masseria was for sale,” I said to break the silence, “but not that you’d bought it.”
“Bought? Is that what you told her, Bern?” Danco asked.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Teresa. We didn’t buy it. None of us would have the money.”
“Corinne would,” Giuliana objected. “All it would take is a phone call to her daddy, right?”
Corinne raised her middle finger.
“So you’re renting, then?”
This time they laughed heartily. Only Tommaso remained serious.
“I see you have a rather canonical idea of private property,” Danco said.
Bern gave me a brief glance. He was sprawled in his chair, his hands in his coat pockets.
“I think you could call us squatters,” he explained briefly, “even though Cesare probably knows we’re here. But this place no longer interests him. He lives in Monopoli now.”
“We’re squatters, so we don’t have electricity,” Corinne said. “A real pain in the ass.”
“We have the generator,” Danco countered.
“Sure, we keep it on for an hour a day!”
“Thoreau lived beside a frozen lake with no electricity,” he persisted. “Here the temperature never drops below freezing.”
“Too bad Thoreau didn’t have long hair down to his ass like me.”
Corinne stood up to move closer to Tommaso; he pushed his chair back and made her sit on his lap. “I’m still chilly. Rub me hard,” she told him, snuggling against his chest. “Not like a fucking kitten, vigorously!”
Scratching something off her sweater, Giuliana said: “Anyhow, a long cable is all we’d need to tap into Enel’s power line.”
“We’ve already discussed this,” Danco replied, “and we voted, I believe. If they found out we’re stealing electricity, they’d make us clear out. And after a while, they’d be sure to notice.”
Corinne looked at him coldly. “Will you stop throwing the shells on the ground?”
“They’re bio-de-gra-da-ble,” Danco said with a defiant smile, as he tossed another pistachio shell over his shoulder.
I felt Giuliana staring at me, but I didn’t dare turn around to face her. I slowly brought the bottle of beer to my lips, trying to overcome my uneasiness.
“So, what do you do in Turin?” she asked.
“I’m studying. At the university.”
“And what are you studying?”
“Natural science. I hope to become a marine biologist.”
Danco started sniggering. Corinne punched him in the chest with a fist hidden in the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Teresa, who once lived underwater,” Tommaso remarked faintly.
Corinne rolled her eyes. “Oh, boy! Not that game again!”
“Do you like horses, too?” Danco asked. He was serious now.
“I like all animals.”
I noticed an exchange of glances among them, but no one spoke. Then Danco said, “Excellent,” as if I had just passed a test.
After a few minutes spent drinking in silence, with Corinne tormenting Tommaso, tickling him behind his ear, I asked: “And Nicola?”
Bern finished his beer in one swig and slammed the bottle on the table. “Living the good life in Bari.”
“By now he must have graduated.”
“He dropped out of university,” he said, more and more sullenly. “He preferred to join the guards. They reflect his personality better, apparently.”
“What guards?”
“The police.” Giuliana stepped in. “What do you call the guards in Turin?”
Tommaso said, “It’s been two years now.”
“Left! Right! Left! Right!” Danco barked, swinging his arms rigidly.
“I don’t think the police march,” Corinne said.
Giuliana lit a cigarette and tossed the pack on the table.
“Another one?” Danco asked angrily.
“It’s only the second one.”
“Great. So it’s only another ten years of synthetic waste,” he kept on.
Giuliana took a long drag and blew the smoke toward him spitefully. Danco held her look impassively.
Then he turned to me. “Do you know how long it takes a cigarette to decompose? Something like ten years. The problem is the filter. Even if you crush it in the end, as Giuliana does, it doesn’t change anything.”
I asked her if I could take one.
“The first rule of the masseria,” she said, pushing the pack toward the center of the table. “You never have to ask permission here.”
“Forget your concept of ownership,” Danco added.
“If you can,” she finished.
Corinne said, “I’m hungry. And I warn you, I’m not going to lunch on pistachios again. Today it’s your turn, Danco, get a move on.”
Instead they started talking among themselves, as if they’d forgotten that I was there. I leaned toward Bern and in a low voice asked him if he wanted to walk me home. He thought about it for a moment before getting up. The others paid no attention to us as we walked away.
AND SO there we were, retracing the same route we’d walked as kids. The countryside in winter was different, more melancholy, I wasn’t used to it. The soil, a dusty red in August, was covered with a mantle of tall, gleaming grass. Bern didn’t speak, so I said: “Those clothes look good on you.”
“They’re Danco’s. They’re too big, though. See?”
He turned the cuff over: it had been folded inside and held with a safety pin to make the sleeve look shorter. I smiled.
“Why didn’t you wait for me after the funeral?”
“It was better that they not see me.”
“Who?”
But he didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the ground.
“There were so many people,” I said. “I wouldn’t have imagined it. Nonna was always alone.”
“She was a generous person.”
“And how would you know?”
Bern raised his collar, then lowered it again. Wearing that coat seemed to take up a lot of his energy.
“For a while she helped me study.”
“My grandmother?”
He nodded, still looking down at the path.
“I don’t understand.”
“I wanted to take the exam to get into the fourth year, but in the end I dropped the idea.”
He had quickened his step. He sighed. “In exchange for lessons, I helped Cosimo in the fields.”
“And where did you live?”
“Here.”
“Here?”
I felt light-headed, but Bern didn’t notice.
“When I heard that Cesare and Floriana had gone, I decided to come back. I’d been staying at the Scalo for a while, in the tower. I brought you there once.”
He’d been living there, at the masseria, exactly where I’d imagined him all that time, with Violalibera and their child. I must have been thinking something like that and no doubt I wondered where they were at that moment—“It seems that Bern got into some trouble . . .”—but I couldn’t speak.
“I didn’t know,” I murmured instead. “Nonna didn’t tell me.”
Bern looked at me for a moment. “Really?”
I nodded. I felt weak.
“That’s odd. I was sure you knew. I thought you weren’t interested in coming anymore.”
After a pause he added: “Maybe it was for the best. Better for you.”
“Why the hell didn’t she tell me!”
“Calm down.”
But I couldn’t, I became hysterical, I kept repeating why why why, until Bern gripped my shoulder.
“Calm down, Teresa. Sit here a second.”
I sat down on a stone wall; I was breathing heavily. He waited patiently at my side. Then he bent down and broke off a leaf, rubbed it in his hands until it was crushed, and held it to my nose. “Smell this.”
I inhaled deeply, but the scent I recognized wasn’t the plant’s, it was his skin.
“Mallow,” he said, sniffing in turn. “It helps relax the nerves.”
Sitting on the wall, we gazed at the green, hushed countryside for a while. I was calmer, but with the calmness had come an overwhelming weariness, together with a kind of regret.
“Did she go swimming even then?” I asked.
“I went with her sometimes. I sat on the sand. She would swim way out to sea, on her back; all I could see was the pink dot of her bathing cap. When she returned to shore I’d be waiting for her with an open towel and she would tell me, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ She always said that.”
I was suddenly hungry to look at him, to touch him, the desire that stirred in me was frightening. I slipped my arm under his and pressed against him.
“You’re crushing me,” he said.
I quickly drew my hands back into my jacket pockets. What right did I have to grab him that way?
“I didn’t say stop. Only to loosen your grip.”
But I kept my hands in my pockets. I stood up and started walking faster than before, as if fleeing from that moment of weakness. The landscape suddenly changed before us. We were at the edge of a grove of trees that were shorter than the olive trees and had white blossoms on their leafless branches.
“Here we are,” Bern announced, as if his intention from the beginning had been to take me there.
“What are they?”
“Almond trees. I figured you’d never seen them like this. This year they bloomed early. And now the cold is threatening to ruin everything.”
We walked into the orchard, the heels of my shoes sinking into the soft clods.
“I’ll break off a branch for you if you want.”
“No. They’re best seen from here.”
“Remember when you left me the Walkman among the almond shells? Sometimes in the tower I felt lonely, so I listened to your tape. I always listened to it from beginning to end, until it wore out.”
“It was awful music.”
Bern looked at me as if he didn’t understand. “It was beautiful music.”
After a few minutes, to my surprise, we found ourselves in front of the gate to the villa.
“When do you leave?”
“Today. Soon.”
He nodded. I thought six hundred miles of highway would be enough. There was so much waiting for me in Turin: my university courses, the exams, more courses, and a thesis to choose. Everything would fall back in place. But just then Bern looked up and his close-set eyes had the same effect on me as when I was a girl, the first time our eyes met as we stood on opposite sides of the doorway to my grandmother’s house. I’m almost certain it was I who leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
“Why?” he asked me candidly, after having kissed me back. He had a melancholy smile, which disturbed me even more. Why? Because I’d wanted nothing other since the day I went to look for him at the masseria and hadn’t found him there, as if everything had been left on hold since then. The fact that at some point I had forgotten that desire didn’t mean that it wasn’t still there, vivid, unchanged.
But instead of confessing it to him I asked: “Do you have a child, Bern?”
He pulled back a little. He glanced away for a moment.
“No. I don’t have a child.”
“And that girl?”
I lacked the breath to say her name.
“There is no girl, Teresa.”
I believed him. Every fiber in my body wanted to believe him. We would never talk about it again.
“WHERE WERE YOU?” my mother asked when I entered the house. “Your father wants to leave right away. He wasn’t able to sleep, poor thing. I’ll have to drive. Rosa made us some sandwiches, we’ll eat in the car.”
A number of objects had disappeared from the living room: the silver frames with the photographs inside, a vase, the clock supported by the trunks of two elephants. In an open bag beside the door I saw brass gleaming. My mother intercepted that look.
“Check if there’s anything else you want to take.”
I filled the overnight bag with the few clothes I had brought. From the window of the bedroom I watched my parents in the yard with Cosimo and Rosa, the car doors already open. My father raised his eyes in my direction, probably without seeing me. I was having a little trouble breathing. I sat on the bed, next to the already closed suitcase, and stayed there motionless for a few minutes. In that very short time, I made up my mind without really deciding. Descending the stairs, I felt weightless, as though my feet were barely touching the steps.
“Your things?” my mother asked.
“They’re upstairs.”
“And you didn’t bring them down? Wake up!”
“I’m staying here.”
My father whirled around, but it was she who spoke again: “What are you talking about? Move, hurry up!”
“I’m staying. For a couple of nights. Rosa and Cosimo can look after me, can’t you?” The caretakers nodded, somewhat incredulous.
“And what do you intend to do here, if I may ask?” My mother kept at it. “Cosimo has already turned off the heating.”
Then my father said, “You saw him.”
There was no trace of irritation in his voice, only an extraordinary weariness. My grandmother was dead and he hadn’t slept for all those hours.
“Who are you talking about?” my mother persisted. “You’re driving me crazy, Teresa. I’m warning you.”
But I was no longer listening to her. She knew nothing about that place, she didn’t understand and would never understand. My father did, however. Because the two of us had been infected with Speziale in the same way.
“Did you see him?”
I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Get in the car, Teresa.”
“Just a couple of nights. I’ll take the train back to Turin.”
“We’re leaving now!”
The caretakers watched us. My father put his hand on the car door. His eyelids were purplish.
“You knew,” I said, almost in a whisper.
He turned to me. For a moment his eyes widened.
“You knew he was here and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know a thing,” he snapped, but there was a slight uncertainty in his voice.
“How could you?”
“Let’s go, Mavi,” he said then to my mother.
“You want to leave her here? Are you crazy?”
“Get in the car, I told you.”
He shook hands with Rosa and Cosimo, murmured some instructions, then sat down in the driver’s seat.
“I’ll expect you at home. Two days at the most.”
He started the car, then seemed to have an afterthought. He twisted in the seat to wrest his wallet out of his pants pocket, took out a few bills, and handed them to me without counting them.
A few seconds later they were gone and I was standing in the yard with the caretakers, surrounded by the silence of the countryside.
BETTER TO WAIT until tomorrow, I told myself, not go back right away, otherwise he’ll think I postponed my departure because of him. But there was nothing in my grandmother’s house that could detain me, only impatience, so two hours later I was back at the masseria.
They were all outside, gathered around a strange object, a kind of overturned umbrella clad in aluminum.
“Let’s see if she at least can guess what it is,” Danco said, not showing the slightest surprise at seeing me back there.
“A satellite dish?” I suggested.
“I told you so!” Corinne exclaimed. “It’s impossible.”
“Try again, come on,” Danco prodded me.
“A giant frying pan?”
Giuliana made a scornful face.
“Getting warmer,” Tommaso said.
Corinne lost her patience. “So tell her!”
“This is progress, Teresa. Innovation combined with respect for the environment. It’s a parabolic solar concentrator. If you put an egg here in the middle, you can cook it using only sunlight. In the summer, of course.”
“Too bad it’s February,” Corinne retorted.
Then she took advantage of my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to needle him some more: “You see? She thinks it’s a load of crap. Danco bought it with our communal kitty without even asking us.”
“I don’t think it’s a load of crap,” I said uncertainly.
“Maybe we can still return it,” Tommaso suggested.
“Just you try it!” Danco threatened.
Bern was watching me, but differently from the way he had that morning, as if he had suddenly remembered something.
“So you stayed,” he said softly.
Danco announced that it was time to get back to work. He waved his arms to scatter us.
“Come and help me in the food forest?” Bern asked me, and I said yes, even though I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Weren’t there oleanders here?” I asked as we walked off from the house.
“We let them dry up two summers ago,” he said. “They took too much water. Cesare was incredibly irresponsible about these things. He thought not killing anything was enough to save us.”
“Save us from what?”
Bern gave me a steady look. “By now the water supply is about to run out. Do you know what happens when you pump water from all the artesian wells there are here?” I didn’t know, of course. “The aquifer is drained and filled by seawater. If we go on like this our land will become a desert. What we have to do is regenerate,” he said, emphasizing that word “regenerate.”
It occurred to me that without electricity they couldn’t use the well anyway. Whenever the power failed at my grandmother’s, nothing came out of the taps.
I asked him how they managed, and he turned around to face me, though he didn’t stop walking.
“If you can’t steal water from the ground, where do you get it?” he said, pointing up.
“You mean you do everything with rainwater?”
He nodded.
“And you drink it too? But isn’t it full of germs?”
“We filter it with hemp. I’ll show you later, if you want.”
In the meantime, we had reached the mulberry tree. I found it hard to recognize it that way, completely bare. Vegetation had grown up all around it, which at first glance seemed out of control: saplings; artichoke, pumpkin, and cauliflower plants; and all kinds of weeds.
“It’s better to work with our hands,” Bern said, bending to the ground. “We have to clear all these away.”
He grabbed a mushy handful of rotten leaves and tossed them behind him. “We’ll pile them here. Then I’ll come back with the wheelbarrow.”
“Why did you let it go like this?” I asked, kneeling beside him a little reluctantly because those were the only jeans I had with me.
“Let what go?”
“The vegetable garden. It’s a mess.”
“You’re wrong, everything is exactly in its place. Danco spent months planning the food forest.”
“You mean you chose to plant the trees and everything else this way?”
“Don’t stop clearing the leaves while you’re talking,” Bern said, glancing at my hands. He took a deep breath. “The mulberry ensures shade in summer. And we pruned it to make it expand as much as possible. Around it are fruit trees and under them the legumes, which serve to fix the nitrogen.”
“You talk like an expert.”
He shrugged. “It’s all thanks to Danco.”
The soil beneath the decaying leaves was warm. By then the knees of my jeans were stained, so I figured I might as well get comfortable. I scooped up ever bigger armfuls and threw them onto the pile.
“We’re just about self-sufficient,” Bern said, “and soon we’ll be able to sell part of the harvest. Now everything you see is bare, but in summer the production is copious.”
“Copious,” I repeated slowly.
“Copious, yes. Why?”
“Nothing. I had just forgotten about the words you use sometimes.”
He nodded, but as if he didn’t fully understand.
“And why are we clearing away these leaves now?” I asked. I felt like laughing, I didn’t know why.
“It’s better to remove the mulch before spring arrives. So the warmth can penetrate the soil.”
“Danco says so, I imagine.”
I meant to provoke him with a joke, but he answered me with the utmost seriousness: “Yes. Danco says so.”
We spent another half hour in almost complete silence. I was beginning to sense that Bern would not ask me anything about my life in the years we’d been apart, just as he didn’t when he was a boy. As if what happened a distance away from him, far from the trunk of that mulberry tree, didn’t exist at all, or in any case had no importance. But it was fine just the same. It was enough for me to be near him, to grope among the plants and breathe that moisture-laden air together.
I LINGERED at the masseria until sunset, then until supper, each time telling myself that I would leave right afterward. We ate a mishmash of eggs and zucchini cooked by Corinne, completely unsalted, though I didn’t dare say anything because everyone seemed to like it. I was still hungry, but there was nothing else, so I kept nibbling on the bread; I had the impression that Giuliana was counting every mouthful.
The sole hour of electricity for the day ended with the meal, and we moved in front of the lit fireplace. In addition to that, there were only a few candles to illuminate the room, some half melted on the floor. Although we huddled as close as possible to one another and draped blankets over our shoulders, it was cold. Yet even then I didn’t really consider the idea of going home, of leaving Bern and the others and the fire that gleamed in their eyes.
Around eight o’clock Danco shrugged off his blanket and said it was time to move. They all jumped up and for a few seconds I was the only one still sitting on the floor. Looking down at me, Danco said, “Are you coming with us?”
Before I had time to ask where, Giuliana started protesting that there wasn’t enough room in the jeep. But he ignored her.
“You came on a special week, Teresa,” he went on. “We have an action planned for tonight.”
“What action?”
“We’ll explain it to you in the car. You need black clothes.”
Until a moment ago they were all numb, about to fall asleep, but now a wild excitement electrified them.
“All I have is my funeral outfit,” I said, becoming more confused, “but it’s at the villa.”
“That’s all we’d need, for you to come in that!” Giuliana exclaimed. “Stay here, Teresa. Believe me, you’re better off.”
She patted my cheek, but Danco silenced her once and for all: “Stop it, Giuli. We already talked about it.”
Corinne took me by the arm. “Come on. We have a full closet upstairs.”
We went up, we three girls, and Corinne began rummaging through a pile of garments scrunched up like rags, while Giuliana undressed.
“Whose are they?” I asked.
“Ours. I mean, everyone’s. This is the girls’ side.”
“You keep your clothes mixed together?”
Giuliana laughed and said caustically, “Yeah, that’s right, mixed together. But don’t worry, they’re clean.”
Meanwhile, Corinne had extracted some black leggings. “Try these,” she said, throwing them at me. “And this,” she added, digging out a sweatshirt similar to her own.
She didn’t look away as I took off my sweater.
“You have fabulous tits. See them, Giuli? You’d only need a fourth of hers not to look like a man.”
I didn’t dare object that the leggings didn’t fit me well, that according to my mother I didn’t have the right body to wear anything close-fitting, or that I would probably freeze to death.
“Stop looking at yourself,” Giuliana said, “we’re not going to a fashion show.”
Four of us were squeezed into the backseat of the jeep: we girls and Tommaso, who stared obstinately at the dark fields beyond the edge of the highway.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Foggia,” Danco replied.
“But it will take at least three hours!”
“Roughly,” he said, his tone expressionless. “You should get some sleep.”
But I didn’t feel like sleeping. I persisted with my questions, and finally Danco decided to explain to me what the “action,” as they called it, consisted of. He spoke in a low voice, forcing me to stay focused. He said there was a slaughterhouse in San Severo, that horses were brought there from all over Europe after being made to trudge thousands of miles without food or water. And that the methods used to slaughter them were brutal.
“A gunshot to the neck before butchering them,” he spelled out. “It might seem like a quick death, but those awaiting their turn see everything that’s happening and they start struggling, so they beat them with clubs to stun them. That’s where we’re going, Teresa. To a nightmare.”
“And once we get there, what do we do?”
Danco smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “We free the horses, right?”
WE REACHED the slaughterhouse late at night. Tension had kept me awake listening to the jazz music that drifted from the car radio. I was no longer so sure that following them there was a good idea.
We left the jeep in a place sheltered by trees, then continued on foot along the edge of a field. There was a little bit of moonlight, just enough not to stumble.
“What if they spot us?” I asked Bern in a whisper.
“It’s never happened.”
“But what if it happens?”
“It won’t happen.”
The barn stood out in the distance; a floodlight illuminated the yard in front.
“They’re in there.” Danco pointed. Surprisingly, Bern put a hand on my neck. “You’re shivering,” he said.
Forcing the padlock on the gate was easy. We inched forward, hugging the surrounding wall. I could feel the night’s dampness through the thin fabric of the leggings. For a moment I saw myself through the eyes of those who knew me in Turin. What the hell was I doing there? But the hesitation gave way to unbridled glee.
Giuliana and I were ordered to keep an eye on the owners’ house. The windows were all dark.
“So you and Bern were together?” she asked me as soon as we were alone.
“Yes,” I replied, even though I wasn’t sure it was true.
“And how long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“A long time.”
We could hear the others struggling with the cutters behind us, cursing because the lock was more resistant than the one at the gate.
“Are you and Danco together?”
Giuliana raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes.”
Then a different, sharp clack was heard, followed by the sound of a chain dropping onto the concrete. We turned at the exact moment the door opened and an alarm began to shriek.
Lights immediately went on in the house, one, two, three of them. Bern and the others had disappeared.
“Come on, fuck!” Giuliana yelled, pulling me by the arm.
I found myself inside the barn, in semidarkness. Danco and Bern and Tommaso and Corinne were opening the doors of the stalls and shouting at the horses to get out, slapping their flanks. As if roused, I started doing it too, but the horses wouldn’t move, they just stamped their hoofs, agitated by the sound of the siren.
“They’re coming!” Corinne hollered.
Then Tommaso did something. “I nipped a horse with the cutters,” he would explain to us later, in the car, as we drove back, careening along the highway, charged with adrenaline, everyone talking over one another.
The horse that was nipped started galloping toward the way out and all hell broke loose. The others followed him, hurtling into one another. I stood flattened against a column so I wouldn’t get crushed, until Bern appeared beside me, out of nowhere, emerging from the dynamic throng of manes and hoofs.
We ran out behind the last of the animals. There were men in the yard, but they couldn’t decide whether to stop the horses or us, so we gained an advantage. We fled through the field. I could see Danco ahead of everyone, and Corinne.
There were shots. The horses got even more frantic, but they were running around in circles. They had scattered in front of the barn, because there hadn’t been time to push them outside the wall; only a few of them had gotten the idea.
The men had given up pursuing us, one of them was closing the gate, another was chasing after the runaway animals. We enjoyed that sight of freedom for a few seconds.
“We did it, shit!” Tommaso shouted. I had never seen him like that before.
On the way back, when the enthusiasm had partially subsided, some of us closed our eyes, and sweaty heads slumped onto the shoulder of whoever was beside them; mine on Bern’s shoulder, and he didn’t move a muscle after that so as not to wake me up.
I dreamed that the liberated horses were a whole herd, running through a barren clearing, raising a cloud of dust so thick that they seemed to be floating in air. They were all black. I didn’t merely watch them, and I wasn’t one of them, I was more than that: I was that entire multitude.
IN THE MORNING I was awakened by a hand caressing my face. A residue of the night’s electric charge still lingered in the air. I had a rather confused memory of when we had all been together, drinking wine in the kitchen. Tommaso and Corinne had been the first to go, then Danco and Giuliana, or maybe the other way around. In any case, Bern and I had found ourselves alone, and our dazed state had driven us up the stairs, to his room, into his icy bed.
But I remembered exactly what had happened next, what he’d done to me and I to him, the passion with which he’d taken me and the excitement, so intense that I hurt all over. And then when he’d reached for me a second time, but slowly, almost methodically. We’d repeated every one of the secret gestures from the reed bed; the memory of our bodies was breathtaking.
Now he smoothed the hair from my forehead, parting it in the middle as if trying to re-create the style I’d worn during our last summer together.
“The others are already downstairs,” he said.
I was so sleepy I could barely talk. And the strange taste I had in my mouth embarrassed me, maybe he tasted it too.
“What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock. We get started as soon as it’s light here,” he said, tucking a strand behind my ear and smiling, as if he had finally found what he wanted. “The water to wash up is cold, I’m sorry. I can boil some in a pot.”
I studied him intently. It was heart-wrenching to have him so close.
“I have to leave,” I said.
Bern slipped out of the covers and, naked as he was, stood in front of the window, his back to me. He was still worrisomely thin.
“What are you waiting for, then? Get dressed.”
“You’ll catch cold. Come back under the covers.”
“I hope you enjoyed the diversion.” He grabbed his clothes piled on the floor and left the room carrying them under his arm.
A few minutes later I heard his voice alternating with that of Giuliana. I groped around for the phone on the nightstand. I had turned it off the afternoon before to conserve the battery. The signal was weak, but it was enough to enable the screen to fill with notices, about a dozen messages, all from my father. In the first he simply asked where I was, then he became more and more worried and finally furious.
Panicked, I typed in a response: “Sorry, battery was dead, I’ll stay here until tomorrow, then I’ll come home, promise.” I sent it and a moment later the phone went dead.
Again I was greeted by the others with no surprise, as if I now lived there. The house was even colder than it was the night before, though the fireplace was lit. Corinne handed me a cup of coffee. I recognized Floriana’s dishware.
“Well, Teresa has finally appeared, maybe she can serve as arbiter,” Danco said.
“I doubt it,” Tommaso said through clenched teeth.
“Tommi claims that today is not a good day to plant the chicory because, he says, we’re in a waxing moon. I tried to explain to him that there isn’t a single scientific reason why the moon should have anything to do with agriculture.”
“For millennia farmers have waited for the waning moon to sow chicory,” Tommaso broke in, “millennia. And you think you know better?”
“There it is! I knew it! I was sure it would come out sooner or later. Tradition.” Danco stood up, all excited. “Until a few decades ago, people around here poured oil over their heads in the name of tradition, to ward off the evil eye. In the name of tradition, men have done nothing but slaughter one another.”
He looked at Tommaso and me in turn.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said to me. “I’d laugh too, if it weren’t the tenth time at least that we’re having this discussion.”
“Call it ‘practice,’ if you like that better than ‘tradition,’” Tommaso shot back.
“Listen to me. First of all, none of the well-intentioned farmers you mention has a degree in physics like myself.”
“You don’t have a degree!” Corinne put in.
“All I’m lacking is the thesis.”
“I know quite a few people who only lack the thesis.”
“Secondly,” Danco went on, raising his voice, “I’m still waiting for you to bring me a shred of scientific grounds. But fortunately, we now have Teresa, right? Maybe in the natural sciences they taught her something about the moon that they forgot to explain to me.”
I shrugged. I didn’t think he really expected an answer; it seemed like just a game they wanted to include me in. I held the coffee’s steaming vapor under my chin.
“Well?” he pressed me.
Tommaso was staring at me, as if he were remembering something.
“If I’m not mistaken, they say that moonlight’s power to penetrate the soil is greater than that of the sun,” I said. “And that helps germination. But I’m not sure.”
“Aha!” Tommaso leaped to his feet, pointing a finger at his opponent.
Danco started writhing in his chair, as though having a convulsion.
“A greater power to penetrate? And what the hell would that power of penetration be? I feel like I’ve landed in a coven of witch doctors, fuck! If we go on like this, we’ll start doing a rain dance. Teresa, I had faith in your coming here. Finally an ally, I told myself. And now you’re defending the phases of the moon. Power of penetration!”
“That seems to be just what interests her,” Giuliana commented, causing a sudden silence.
I thought I’d die of embarrassment; I didn’t dare look at Bern or anyone else. Then she herself said: “What? Can’t we even joke?”
After breakfast we helped Tommaso plant the chicory seeds in the greenhouse. The technique seemed strange and ineffective to me: we formed little balls of clay with our fingers, then dropped them somewhat randomly into the pots.
“To imitate the wind,” Bern explained gravely.
He no longer seemed angry, only sad.
Finally Tommaso slapped his hands on his pants and said: “It won’t grow. Next time you’ll listen to me.”
HE WAS WRONG. The chicory grew and I was still at the masseria when it was ready to be transplanted to the food forest; and I was still there when it exploded in big, plump heads in early summer. At our last phone call, my father had sworn not to speak to me again until I returned home.
Except for him, I didn’t miss anything from my life in Turin, but I didn’t try to explain it to my mother or to anyone else who called to ask the reason for my disappearance: they wouldn’t have understood. All that mattered was going to bed with Bern in the evening, finding him beside me in the morning, watching his eyelids still heavy with sleep, in a room that was only his and mine, from which all you could see were trees and sky. And the sex, especially the sex, blind, dizzying: in the first few months it gripped us like a fever.
But there was also the euphoria of finally having some real friends—no, more than that, brothers and sisters. It must have taken me some time, of course, to get used to the no-flush outdoor toilet, to the lack of privacy that it involved, as well as to the rationed electrical power, the rotten-tasting water, and the assigned work shifts: for cleaning, cooking, burning the garbage. But I can’t remember those troublesome aspects. What I remember instead are the long interludes when we sat under the pergola, drinking beer and playing cards.
In any case, ours was “do nothing” farming: not doing what nature could do for itself. We wanted to understand nature’s intelligence and take full advantage of it. And we wanted to regenerate—to regenerate everything that had been brutally consumed on that land.
Danco guided us and in the meantime he studied us one by one. Once he made a very complicated analysis of Tommaso’s personality, starting from the habit he had of always opening a new jar of jam before the old one was finished. I understood little or nothing of it, but I saw that Tommaso was upset. Corinne interceded to defend him: “Now you’re even watching what we do with the jars? You’re really twisted.”
Putting together the fragments of the story, I reconstructed how Danco had come to the masseria along with Giuliana.
Bern had lived there by himself for about a year, the period when he had occasionally worked for my grandmother in exchange for her private lessons. Then Tommaso had decided to join him, and Corinne was already with him.
“It was hard,” they said of those months. “Fortunately, Danco and Giuli arrived.”
Bern and the others had met them at the market center in Brindisi, where they went to do the shopping because things cost less in the discount stores. There were several different versions of that afternoon, each of them had one, and during the first months at the masseria I heard all of them. The meeting in the parking lot of the supermarket had become legendary, and to some degree it became so for me as well.
“Love at first sight” was how Giuliana described it.
She, Danco, and some other people they named in passing were picketing at the entrance to the supermarket. They had stopped Bern at the exit. “Can I see what you’ve got there?” Danco had asked him.
Tommaso and Corinne were ready to leave, but Bern had already let him come over and obediently opened his bag. Rummaging through it, Danco had asked him, “Why do you buy this stuff? You seem like a decent guy. May I ask what you do?”
“I work on myself,” Bern replied.
“And besides that?”
“Myself, period.”
That answer had astonished Danco. He’d started explaining to Bern why the cheese he had in his plastic bag was poison, why the bag itself was an abomination, and how those tomatoes grown in Morocco, thousands of miles away, would bring the whole planet to ruin.
“They were just some fucking tomatoes!” Corinne always intruded at that point, a little worked up.
“I have a proposal,” Danco had said to Bern. “If I’ve piqued your curiosity, come by here tomorrow, even if it’s just to tell me that I’m talking bullshit and that you’d rather go on working only on yourself. If you come, I’ll bring you something.”
That evening, at the masseria, Bern hadn’t touched any of the food. When he returned to Brindisi, Danco was waiting for him alone in the parking lot. He had brought him a copy of The One-Straw Revolution; not his own copy, one he’d purposely bought that morning.
Later they’d met again and Bern had invited Danco to the masseria. Danco still didn’t have a specific project in mind, but he was looking for one. He was in touch with people who’d devoted themselves to new forms of agriculture, mostly other university dropouts like himself. When he’d seen Tommaso’s little vegetable garden, he’d had a vision. That’s how it began.
Much later, I too arrived.
And now, almost every evening, Danco still read that same book to us: “This straw appears small and light, and . . . could become powerful enough to move the country and the world.”
When the book ended, we implored him to start over again. We especially liked the first few chapters, where Fukuoka discovers his mission after a night of sudden illumination, but we wanted Danco to skip the boring part about cultivating rice, because who would ever cultivate rice in Puglia? But not Danco, he insisted on reading everything, claiming we’d miss some important insights otherwise. Actually, he just wanted to test how faithful we were to the cause.
When we got to the part about the Four Principles, we recited them in chorus, joking about our dedication, yet believing in it with all our hearts: “No cultivation! No chemical fertilizer! No weedkilling! No dependence on artificial substances!”
We felt as if we were the start of something, the start of change. Every moment had the lucidity of an awakening.
We carried out two other “actions.” For the first we stationed ourselves at one of the many illegal dumps, at night, cloaked in dark sheets, scaring to death anyone who approached with their garbage. But what aroused our outrage the most were the lawns: those well-groomed lawns in front of vacation rental homes, so perfect, so incongruous. At the masseria we saved every drop of water; even in the torrid days of June our vegetables had to grow with only the soil’s moisture. We let them wither and sometimes die of thirst because that was the right thing to do, whereas that ornamental grass was abundantly irrigated with groundwater.
We’d kept an eye on a time-share in Carovigno for days and we knew that there were no longer any renters, only a farmer who came by a couple times a week to make sure everything was in order. The utility room wasn’t even locked. Destroying the irrigation system’s control unit seemed too violent, even though Giuliana insisted, so Danco started meticulously taking it apart with a screwdriver. We removed the motherboard and only smashed that, then we put the lid back on. In the end the unit looked identical to the way it had when we’d arrived.
Two days later we returned to check. The lawn had yellowed; in another forty-eight hours it would have withered completely. But the farmer must have noticed the problem and fixed it promptly, because the next time we went by the sprinklers were going full blast. The grass had already regained its color.
As the weeks passed, however, the actions became less frequent. Maybe because we hadn’t racked up any great successes, or maybe because we were more and more involved in our project at the masseria, and less and less interested in what happened outside.
Giuliana obtained some Super Skunk seeds and Tommaso planted them behind the house, surrounded by citronella bushes. It grew extraordinarily well, bulging with sticky flowers that we let dry in the shade before mixing them with tobacco. Giuliana managed to raise a little money, selling it to an acquaintance in Brindisi. But we never went overboard; getting rich was not our plan.
“We don’t need more money, we need more knowledge,” Danco used to say.
Still, money was a nagging worry. The more we scorned it, the more time we spent talking about it. Just when we reduced our needs even further by voting on a more inferior brand of beer, the jeep’s battery failed for the second time in a few months.
“Because it’s an old piece of crap!” Corinne said.
“Watch what you say,” Danco shot back, “this Willy’s made it through World War Two.”
Then, just a week after replacing the battery, the bridgework on Giuliana’s bicuspids cracked and she had to find a dentist willing to be paid in installments.
The only one who had a steady job was Tommaso. Every morning he left for the Relais dei Saraceni on his motorbike, often returning late in the evening. There were times when he was so exhausted that he preferred to stay there to sleep. He made his entire salary available to us, handing it to Danco the same day he got paid. I never heard him complain.
AUGUST. Mounds of dried seaweed littered the beach of Torre Guaceto, tiny crabs popped out of the sand and then vanished. We had snuck into one of the little coves prohibited to tourists, because we weren’t at all tourists, and because we didn’t like restrictions.
Danco suggested an exercise: “We’ll take turns undressing in front of the others. Not all together, though, that would be too easy. One at a time.”
“If you think I’m going to undress in front of you, you can forget it!” Corinne exclaimed.
Danco replied patiently, “What do you think your bathing suit is hiding? Something mysterious? We can all imagine what’s underneath. Anatomy, that’s all.”
“Good for you, keep on imagining it, then.”
“It’s just the perception you have of your body, Corinne. They taught you to think that there is something absolutely private under those square inches of synthetic fabric. It’s a sign of your mental limitation. But there is nothing absolutely private.”
“Cut it out, Danco! You just want to see my tits.”
“No. What I’d like is for you to be free from prejudices. For all of you to be,” he said, as he slid his own swim shorts down to his ankles. He stood naked in front of us, his back to the light, long enough for us to become familiar with the reddish hairs around his sex.
“Look at me, Corinne,” he urged, “all of you, look at me, go on. I have nothing to hide from you. If I could slit open my stomach and show you my guts, I’d do it.”
So we imitated him, one at a time, the males first, then us girls. My fingers were trembling as I fumbled for the hook behind my back; Bern came to my rescue. Finally, our bathing suits lay scattered over the mantle of seaweed, like scraps of an old skin.
But instead of disappearing, our embarrassment grew greater and greater as the minutes passed. Finally we dived into the turquoise water.
“Let’s run naked on the big beach!” Giuliana said, exhilarated.
“They’ll call the police.”
“If we run, nothing will happen to us,” Danco said.
“Together, though—don’t leave anyone behind.”
We grabbed our swimsuits and scrambled up the slope, then, like a bunch of wild natives, descended on the long stretch of beach dotted with umbrellas. I didn’t think I’d have enough breath in me to make it to the far end.
The beachgoers raised up on their elbows to get a better look at us, the kids giggled, shocked, and there were even some approving whistles. Everyone ran so fast, Corinne and Giuliana in the lead, graceful as ostriches. When I fell behind the others, I heard a man comment as I passed, not seeing his face. His words would return to me many months later, when everything was falling apart: “Fools,” he said. “Who knows what they think they’re proving.”
IN SEPTEMBER Cosimo showed up at the masseria. From the tractor he unloaded two jerry cans filled with a clear liquid. Bern invited him to sit down, offered him some wine, which Cosimo refused with a wave of his hand. “I brought you some dimethoate,” he said. “With a summer like this the flies will come in droves. Your olives next to the fence already have holes in them.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Danco said, getting up, “but you can take the cans back. We don’t need them.”
Cosimo looked bewildered. “You’ve already treated them?”
Danco crossed his arms. “No, sir. We haven’t sprayed our olive trees with dimethoate. We prefer to avoid insecticides here. As well as herbicides and phytopharmaceuticals of any kind.”
“But if you don’t use dimethoate the flies will ruin all the olives. And then it will come to my place, too. You can’t taste it in the oil.”
Unable to completely hide his timidity, he added: “Everyone uses it.”
Bern must have sensed my discomfort, because he hurried over to Cosimo, lifted the cans by the handles, and said, “It was considerate of you, thank you.”
But in a flash Danco’s order came from behind him: “Leave them where they are, Bern. I don’t want that nasty stuff coming into our house.”
Bern sought his friend’s eyes as if to say, It’s just to be polite, it doesn’t cost us anything, we’ll bring them in and then we won’t use them, but Danco was adamant. So Bern backed away, murmuring: “Thank you anyway.”
We had mortified the man. Cosimo, a white-haired, thick-skinned farmer, humiliated by a group of presumptuous kids. Corinne was studiously removing something from under her fingernails. Giuliana jiggled the flint of her lighter, sending tiny sparks spilling out of her clenched fist.
“Wait, I’ll help you,” Bern said, bending down to the cans again. But this time it was Cosimo who stopped him brusquely.
“I can do it on my own.”
After replacing the cans on the tractor, he put it into reverse and, kicking up a little mud from under the wheels, drove back down the dirt track. But not before throwing me a look full of reproach.
“There was no need to treat him like that,” I said when he had driven off. We could still hear the jolting rumble of the tractor.
“Do you really want to season your salad with that stuff?” Danco asked. “The best organological quality it has is being carcinogenic. Let him pour the dimethoate down his well! Let him and his wife drink it!”
“He was just trying to help us.”
“So try again, Cosimo, and maybe you’ll have better luck,” Danco said cheerfully.
He expected us to go along with him, but Giuliana was the only one who did. Danco turned serious again: “They’d use DDT if they could still find it at the supermarket. They spread their chemical crap all over the place. And they don’t even know what the hell is in it. Did you see his face when I said ‘phytopharmaceuticals’? He didn’t even know the word!”
“What do we do about the flies?” Tommaso asked. He had walked to the nearest olive tree, picked a bunch of olives that were still small, and spilled them onto the table. “The larva is inside.”
Danco fingered the olives. “Honey and vinegar in solution, ratio one to ten. It’s been done for years in organic farming. The flies are attracted by the honey and the vinegar kills them. In a word, traps.”
We got to work that afternoon. We filled about fifty plastic bottles, and hung them at different heights at the ends of the branches. When the work was done, the slanting light of sunset lit up the cylinders, making them seem like so many lanterns.
After supper Danco made us hurry and clear the table. On it he placed a square of cardboard and a can of paint left over from our recent projects.
“You write it,” he said, offering me a brush: “‘The Masseria. A Toxin-Free Zone.’”
The sign was affixed with wire to the center of the iron bar that marked the entrance to the dirt track, replacing the one that read FOR SALE. It would remain there for years, slowly faded by the sun and rain, a little less legible with each passing season, a little more discordant, a little more false.
THE TRAPS FILLED with flies. We emptied the bottles and refilled them several times during the autumn. The oil was abundant. Once we were finished on our own land, we worked for others to harvest their olives. We stationed ourselves in the piazza and beat the competition from professional cooperatives by offering rock-bottom rates, half of what they asked for. We drove as far north as Monopoli and south past Mesagne. Danco got hold of a tow truck from some old friends, and Tommaso was able to get Cesare’s mechanical defoliator working again. We must have looked bizarre and scruffy when we showed up at a place, at seven o’clock in the morning. You could read the same thought in the landowners’ eyes: Where the hell did these people come from? But we were young and extraordinarily energetic, and we worked well together; at the end of the day they often gave us an extra tip.
If it wasn’t raining, at lunch we would sit under one of the trees to eat sandwiches brought from home. If the owner wasn’t around, Giuliana would pull out a joint, and when it was time to get back to work we felt light-headed and stupid, we couldn’t stop laughing. Danco calculated that by the end of the season we would have picked at least a hundred tons of olives.
With the money we earned (not as much as we’d hoped for, all in all), we bought used hives and bees to populate them. After exhausting discussions, we decided to situate them near the reed bed, because that spot was far enough away from the house, protected from the tramontana, and because we could take advantage of the natural spring to grow flowers. But the first generation of bees died after less than a week. Driven by an old reflex, Tommaso and Bern dug a grave and poured the striped cadavers into it, under Danco’s icy stare. No prayer was said, however, there were only more debates, even more heated, on what we had done wrong.
Finally, Bern obtained a manual of sustainable beekeeping from the library in Ostuni. I was assigned to study it and then instruct the others on how to manage the breeding. It worked. Danco did not fail to remark on it every single day, when he happily sank his spoon into the jar of dark honey. For a while Giuliana sarcastically called me the bees’ “fairy godmother.”
In February we celebrated the anniversary of my arrival. The day I’d moved there, scraping the plastic wheels of the suitcase along the dirt track, had been designated as founding day. While Danco made a heartfelt speech, I could hardly believe it had already been a year.
That evening we drank a lot and at one point Bern allowed himself to reveal a secret. He told about when he slept alone in the tower at the Scalo, how on certain nights the sea was so thunderous that it kept him awake. So he would put on the headphones of the Walkman I had given him, the volume turned up to maximum, and he’d feel safe again.
Don’t tell them about it, I begged him silently as he spoke, keep at least this secret just for us. But he didn’t stop, since even private ownership of memories was abolished at the masseria.
“I wore out every millimeter of that tape,” he said, his words slurred and his lips stained dark by the wine.
“What tape?” Danco asked, somewhat uncertain. He didn’t like it when someone else drew attention to himself for so long.
“A cassette with a lot of different singers. I never knew what it was called. What was the name of it, Teresa?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, “it was just a mixtape.”
Bern didn’t give up, he was flooded with emotion: “There was one I liked more than the others. I would listen to it, then rewind the tape to the beginning and listen to it again. I got to know the exact number of seconds I needed to hold the key down to rewind it.”
With his eyes half closed, and an unguarded bliss on his face, he began singing the melody. I hadn’t heard him sing since the early summers at the masseria and I wished he would go on, but Corinne jumped up: “I know it! It’s by that girl. What’s her name? Come on, Teresa, help me out!”
“I don’t remember.”
Danco burst into one of his vicious laughs. “Sure, of course, the redhead on the piano!”
I felt Tommaso watching me as I looked at Bern, still silently begging him, but now hoping for him to say something, to make them stop before they ruined everything.
But he remained silent, unable to even return my look. And when Danco said, “What a pathetic story!” I saw Bern swallow, then give his new brother, his new supreme guide, an embarrassed smile full of submissiveness.
IN THE SPRING I returned to Turin; it was the only time I did. Bern was opposed to the trip, but I had to go, I hadn’t seen my parents in far too long. When he realized that he would not stop me, he cautioned me: “Don’t let them persuade you to stay. I’ll be counting the hours and minutes.”
On the train, my fear grew. I arrived in Turin certain that my father would use force, that he would beat me up, then lock me in the house, segregated like an addict, the same brutal methods that Corinne’s parents had employed with her. So unaccustomed to people by then, I proceeded down the platform and through the echoing halls of Porta Nuova station; my legs gave way at the thought of meeting him.
But instead he wasn’t there. He simply hadn’t come. My mother said he’d preferred not to.
“What did you expect, Teresa, a welcome-home party?”
We had lunch, the two of us by ourselves; it felt very strange. I looked at the cookie tin behind her, which had been on that shelf forever, and which most likely still held the Doria Bucaneve, the flower-shaped cookies with the hole in the middle. My father used to stack them on his pinkie fingers, three on each side, and then nibble them with a twisted face that made me laugh as a child.
A couple of times I tried to start a conversation about the masseria. I would have liked to tell my mother that we had bought some chickens and that now there were fresh eggs every morning. The next time, maybe, I would bring her a few, and with them some of our mulberry jam. I wanted her to know that we had saved enough money to buy solar panels: starting next week we would have electricity at all hours of the day, clean, free energy, as much as we wanted. I really wished I could tell her about it, just as I wished I could confide in her how discouraged Danco’s words sometimes made me feel, as if I were shallow and had no opinions.
And I wanted to tell her about Bern, especially about him; she would fall in love with him if she listened to me attentively for once, and then she would convince my father to stop his absurd retaliation of silence. The entire situation that now appeared so weird to him would come to seem natural, as it was natural to me. But none of this came out of my mouth. I ate quickly, then retreated to my room.
My room: cozy and so childlike. Photographs on the wall that no longer spoke to me, my university books still piled on the desk. Could I have left them like that? Or was it just another of my parents’ tacit messages? The whole house was strewn with emotional traps: honey to attract flies, vinegar to kill them.
I allowed myself a long bath, even though I was bothered by Danco’s voice accusing me of wasting water. He spoke more and more often in my head, like a new conscience, severe and implacable. But the water was inviting and scented with lavender, and my body melted softly in its warmth. I surrendered to it.
Still barefoot and with my hair wrapped in a towel, I took a book from the shelf: the one by Martha Grimes that my grandmother had sent me years ago through my father. I sat on the floor, my back against the clothes closet, and riffled through the pages, forward and backward. In the middle, I found a Post-it. I recognized my grandmother’s handwriting, the same script used to pen comments in the margins of her pupils’ exercises:
Dear Teresa, I’ve thought about it a lot. You were right that day. When I was speaking with you by the pool, I confused the word “unhappiness” with its opposite.
The message continued on the back:
In my life I have seen so many people make the same mistake. And I don’t want it to happen to you too, not through any fault of mine, at least. I saw your Bern at the masseria. I thought you should know it. My lips are sealed, though. Affectionately, Nonna.
I cried a little after reading it, mostly out of anger. Why hadn’t she chosen a simpler way to communicate with me? Had she read so many of her thrillers that she thought she was one of those characters? But I also cried out of unexpected, overwhelming relief, because my grandmother had not betrayed me, and because those words, though discovered so late, were her blessing for the life that I had chosen.
At that moment it seemed absurd for me to be at home, I was a different person from the one who had grown up there. I had to go back to the masseria as soon as possible.
I asked my mother for the biggest suitcase she had, promising to get it back to her. “I’ll ship it,” I added, so she wouldn’t delude herself about my returning.
I filled it with clothes that wouldn’t humiliate me in front of Corinne and the others. The next day I was back on the train, with new confidence. By then I was part of Speziale. Only my phantom self had left the masseria to travel north. And it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen my father; he had wanted it that way. I tried to distract myself by reading Nonna’s novel, but I was too preoccupied. In the end I gave up and just gazed out the window, until it got dark.
FINALLY WE HAD ELECTRICITY. We had a chicken coop on wheels to move the hens to where they would fertilize the soil. We had vegetables all year round. We had a solar skillet to cook scrambled eggs and even tiny ceramic cylinders to purify rainwater better, a Japanese invention that Danco turned up.
Yet something was wrong below the surface. Giuliana and I barely spoke to each other. After more than a year, she still treated me like an intruder. And many of us—that is, all of us except Bern—were starting to question Danco’s role of group leader.
But the ones who showed the most disturbing signs were Corinne and Tommaso. They lived in an alternating state between anger and morbid devotion. More and more frequently Tommaso would spend the night at the Relais dei Saraceni and Corinne would refuse to join us for supper. She’d lock herself in their room until morning, alone, without eating.
One day, when it was already late August, she took me by surprise. We were washing the cups from breakfast.
“How many times do you do it, you and Bern?” she asked out of the blue. I understood, but I bought some time.
“What?”
“More than once a week? Or less?” She stubbornly kept her eyes down, looking at the stacked-up cups.
“About that,” I said.
“About what? Once a week?”
Much more often, I was about to reply, but I sensed that would have upset her.
“Yeah.”
Corinne turned abruptly, grabbed the teaspoons from the table in a single bunch, and slammed them onto the cups.
So I offered: “Tommaso works a lot.”
“What, are you trying to console me? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
She was gripping the edge of the sink with both hands.
“Anyway, you could make less noise, you two. It’s disgusting!”
She opened the tap all the way, but quickly turned it off.
“That bitch Giuliana! Let her wash her own cup. I’ve told her over and over again not to stub out her cigarettes in them. They all suck in this place!”
ANOTHER TIME we were gathered under the pergola for breakfast; only Tommaso was missing. We heard the screams, three of them, close together.
Bern was the first to leap to his feet. He ran behind the house, through the olive grove, like a fury. He had a precise destination in mind, as if he knew exactly what had happened, as if he had seen it. Danco had immediately rushed after him, with me behind him. For an instant Corinne was paralyzed, then she too got up and ran after us.
Giuliana, however, didn’t move until we reappeared carrying Tommaso’s disfigured body. Corinne was weeping hysterically, Bern was still wearing the beekeeper’s paper coverall, white from head to toe.
We had found Tommaso on his knees, with swarms of bees around his head, swirling and buzzing; he was trying to drive them off, waving his arms, before he collapsed to the ground, unconscious. He was wearing a short-sleeved red-and-blue-checked shirt, unbuttoned to the navel. The bees wouldn’t let him alone, they were disoriented, as if incredulous at having brought down such an enormous animal.
Bern had kept us from getting close. He’d gone to the tool shed, still running, and when he came back he was wearing the paper coverall. With his hands he swept away the bees glued to Tommaso’s hair, his clothes, and the rest of his body. Corinne was screaming so loud, I wanted to cover her mouth to stop her.
Bern dragged Tommaso toward us by his armpits. His skin had swollen visibly, as if the bees had penetrated and were shoving from inside to free themselves. He had a double nose, a dozen eyelids, deformed lips, and an unrecognizable nipple among the red welts. When Giuliana, who had stayed where she was, saw him in front of her, her expression reflected back to each of us the horror that we hadn’t fully realized.
I was the one to drive us to the hospital in Ostuni, ignoring traffic lights or right-of-way. Next to me Corinne stared straight ahead, more and more wide-eyed. She was no longer crying, but she didn’t say a word. Bern and Danco had put Tommaso between them in the backseat, and Giuliana, before watching us speed away, had been quick to give them the knife we’d used to cut the bread. “Garlic! Bring us some garlic!” Bern had ordered, and after running around in circles, she had managed to get that, too. Now Bern was scraping Tommaso’s skin with the blunt part of the blade, to extract the stingers. Danco, after peeling a clove of garlic, said, “Are you sure? It seems like a stupid peasant custom.”
“Just rub it in!”
How many stings in all? Twenty? Thirty? “Fifty-eight,” they told us at the hospital. The bees had even stung him on his scalp and inside an ear. There were bees trapped in his briefs; when they undressed him on the stretcher they rose up in flight. But we’d hear all this later from Bern, because he was the only one who followed the stretcher through the swinging doors to the emergency room. He was still wearing the paper coverall.
In the meantime, we were busy lying about the accident. No, we weren’t raising bees, that required a permit, of course we knew it . . . Tommaso had stumbled upon a nest while cleaning the gutters . . . A very big nest, yes indeed, we had never seen one like that either . . .
Several hours passed before they told us that he was out of danger but sedated, and that they would keep him under observation. We spent all day and most of the night in the waiting room, sitting on plastic chairs bolted to the floor, under the fluorescent lights.
When it was all over and we were together again beneath the pergola, Danco lit into Tommaso: “Do you mind telling us what the fuck you were trying to do?”
“They came out suddenly.”
“The fuck they did! Don’t try to take us for a ride, Tommi. Did you put your hands inside the hives? What did you intend to do, huh?”
“I didn’t put my hands inside the hives.”
“Your shirt was unbuttoned!”
“That’s enough now, Danco. Leave him alone,” Bern intervened. For once, Danco obeyed him.
THAT YEAR the traps failed. Maybe the flies had spread the word around. After a furious argument we voted to buy the dimethoate, but it was too late for that too. The yield was miserable, the quality of the oil inferior. We didn’t sell more than thirty bottles.
One morning we woke up without electricity. When Danco went to check the unit, he found the plates smeared with a mixture of glue and dirt. For hours we tried to figure out who could have decided to sabotage us. We had surrounded ourselves with enemies by taking field labor away from others.
The old power generator would no longer start, and we didn’t make much of an effort to get it working again. For the first time we were seized by overwhelming dejection.
Corinne had an emotional meltdown. It took Tommaso almost an hour to quiet her down, as she kept on saying, “Are you taking responsibility for this? Making me stay in this cold with wet hair, now of all times?”
That evening Bern took me to our room and told me: “We have to ask Cosimo for help. Go talk to him. Ask him if we can tap into his power grid until we resolve this problem. We’ll pay him for the extra consumption.”
“He’ll never agree. Remember how we treated him?”
“He won’t be able to refuse a favor to you. He was so attached to your grandmother.”
I decided to go alone. A fire must have been lit somewhere, the air smelled of woodsmoke.
I knocked at the door of the lodge and Rosa came to open it. She held the flaps of her robe closed and peered behind me, then let me in. Cosimo was watching television. When he saw me he tried to straighten his thinning hair that had been mussed up by leaning back in the chair.
I explained the incident regarding the solar panels, without admitting that someone had damaged them on purpose. Would he allow us to use his electricity for a while? Only for as long as it took to find a solution.
“Everything here is yours,” he said gravely. “But you’ll need an extension cord hundreds of feet long.”
“The cables for the panels should be enough. If not, we’ll connect them to other ones.”
He looked up at me with a kindliness that I did not expect.
“You’ve become a capable young woman,” he said. “There should be several feet of cable in the cellar.”
“Thank you. We’ll pay you.”
I was ready to leave, but Cosimo took my hand.
“It’s time to decide what to do with the villa, Teresa. Rosa and I continue keeping it in order, but it will deteriorate if no one lives there. And we can’t go on doing it for free.”
“I understand,” I said, but only because I wanted to get back to the others.
Meanwhile, Rosa had prepared a basket with jars of preserves. “They’re made my own way,” she said. “I hope you and the others like them too.”
Cosimo walked me to the gate.
“Those people,” he said when we reached the boundary, “especially the curly-headed one . . .”
“Danco.”
“It’s none of my business. But you’re a young lady who was brought up properly, Teresa. Those people are different. They grew up with roots that are too short. Sooner or later a gust of wind will pull them up and sweep them away.”
But Cosimo didn’t know what we knew: that plants grown in the safety of pots, with long roots that spiral tightly around, don’t adapt to the soil. Only those whose roots are free, uprooted while young in winter, will make it. Like us.
“Tomorrow morning we’ll come with the cable,” I said. “You mustn’t worry about anything.” He nodded. In the dim light, he looked older.
A FEW DAYS LATER I confessed to the others that I was the owner of the villa. They were not angry as I’d expected, but strangely incredulous. They were silent for a few moments, then Danco asked: “How much is Cosimo offering?”
“One hundred and fifty thousand euros.”
“That house is worth a lot more.”
“I think that’s all he has.”
“That’s his problem.”
“What do you mean?”
But Giuliana ignored my question: “How much more, Danco?”
“At least double that, if I had to guess.”
“So now you’re also a real estate expert?” Corinne needled him.
He paid no attention to her. “It’s falling down but it’s vintage. And it comes with, what, seven or eight acres?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“He gave us the electricity,” I said. By now I saw what he was driving at.
“We paid him for the electricity.”
“But I promised him.”
“And does this seem like the kind of situation in which promises are worth anything?”
I looked at Bern for support, but he said, “If your grandmother had wanted to leave him the house, she would have.”
“What about all our talk about abolishing property?”
Danco gave me a sympathetic smile. “Perhaps you misunderstood certain aspects, Teresa. There is a radical difference between living equitably and acting like fools. We’re not simpletons to be taken advantage of.”
An excitement was spreading through the group, I sensed it.
“Teresa was keeping her treasure to herself,” Giuliana muttered under her breath.
WE GOT in touch with an agency in Ostuni and a few weeks later I met the buyer, an architect from Milan, in the notary’s office. Handing me the contract to be countersigned, he said: “Your grandmother’s villa is magnificent, it must be costing you a lot to let it go. I promise you that I will fix it up so that it’s good as new again, respecting its spirit.”
“Thank you,” I murmured.
Bern had accompanied me to the appointment, but he hadn’t wanted to come in.
“This land is touched by grace,” the architect said. Then, looking up from the contract, he added: “What can you tell me about the two custodians? Are they reliable people? I was thinking of keeping them.”
A few days later Cosimo and Rosa left. And a week later the police came to the masseria. I wasn’t really surprised when the officer, a young woman not much older than us, with a ponytail sticking out of her cap, told us that a report had been made regarding our unlawful presence there. What did we expect?
Tommaso and I watched her take a notebook out of her inside jacket pocket and flip through the pages.
“I understand there are six of you, is that right? I’d be grateful if you could call the others out.”
When we were all gathered under the pergola, she asked us to provide our ID papers.
“And if we refuse?” Giuliana challenged her.
“You would have to follow us to the police station for further checking.”
So we all went up to our rooms to dig up documents that attested to our being members of society after all.
“Will they arrest us?” I asked Bern in the few moments we were alone.
He kissed me on the temple. “Don’t be silly.”
The policewoman wrote down each one’s details. In the meantime, her partner wandered around.
Giuliana tailed him, looking for any excuse to keep him away from the corner where the Super Skunk was planted. Just to distract him, she offered him a raw turnip that she tore from the ground; she eventually ate it herself, maybe to show that there was really nothing ridiculous about her overture.
Even worse than the waiting was my realization that this place, a place that for us was miraculous, aroused absolutely no sense of awe in the two strangers.
When the officer asked if anyone could claim a right to occupy the property, Bern spoke up. “The owner gave us permission to stay,” he said.
She flipped through the notebook again. “You mean Mr. Belpanno?”
“He’s my uncle.”
Since I’d been there, that was the first time I’d heard him reaffirm his blood tie to Cesare.
“I spoke with Mr. Belpanno just this morning by phone. He wasn’t aware that anyone was living here. The property is for sale and is supposed to be vacant, he said. Were you the ones who replaced the sign?”
“There was never any sign,” Danco lied.
The policewoman noted his statement in her notebook. For the report she would write up against us, I thought. In a flash I could feel my parents’ disapproval descend on me all the way from Turin.
“Do you have a warrant at least?” Giuliana asked sternly.
“We’re not conducting a search, miss,” the policewoman replied calmly. “In any case, if we did have a warrant we would be under no obligation to present it to you, given the look of things.”
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Bern interrupted in a firm voice. “Let me talk to my uncle and I’ll prove it to you.”
“Mr. Belpanno asked that the property be vacated within a week. Otherwise he will press charges.”
She put the notebook on the table. Her tone when she continued was softer, as if she would like to be on our side, if she could: “Look, we have photographs. There is evidence of an illegal diversion of electricity from the power lines, a similarly unlawful installation of solar panels—which I would probably find myself if I were to walk in that direction,” she said, pointing to the correct location, “and undeclared beehives, not to mention the marijuana plantation.”
“‘Plantation’ is actually an exaggeration,” Tommaso carelessly corrected her. We all turned to look at him. She pretended not to register that admission of guilt.
“My advice is that when we come back in a week, we find nobody here.”
Corinne had slipped away into the house. She came back with two jars of honey and set them on the table in front of the police officers.
“Since you already know about it. It’s a millefiori honey we produce ourselves.”
“Now you’re trying to bribe them with honey?” Danco asked angrily. “You’re really an idiot.”
The policewoman said: “I’m sure it’s excellent, but we can’t accept it.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER we were alone again, the six of us, beneath our pergola, near the walls of our house, surrounded by our land, by everything that was ours and that suddenly no longer belonged to us.
Bern placed six beers on the table, but nobody reached out to take one.
“Stop acting like that, all of you.”
Danco jumped on him. “It looks like you don’t give a shit.”
“We have the money that Teresa got from the sale of the villa. We can buy Cesare’s masseria. It’s for sale, isn’t it? No more sneaking around.”
“And how much would this Cesare want?” Danco asked skeptically.
“He’ll accept whatever we offer him. Especially if it’s us.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that your dear little uncle cares all that much about you.”
Bern proposed putting the purchase of the masseria to a vote: “All in favor of making this property truly ours—forever—raise your hand.”
I raised my hand, but I was the only one besides Bern.
“Well?” he persisted. “What’s going on?”
At that point Corinne decided to grab a beer, uncapped it nervously with the bottom of her lighter, took a sip, then squeezed it between her hands.
“There’s something we have to tell you,” she started. “We thought we’d do it at another time, but given the circumstances, we might as well. Tommi and I are leaving. I’m pregnant.”
She raised the bottle, as if to propose a sad toast. Tommaso was ashen.
“What do you mean, pregnant?” Bern asked, dumbfounded.
“Do you need me to explain it to you?”
But Bern didn’t catch the sarcasm, because he was overcome by a surge of tenderness.
“Pregnant! That’s great news! Don’t you realize? It’s the start of a new era. We’ll have children. Teresa, Danco, Giuliana . . . don’t you see? We’ll have to get busy too. They’ll all grow up together, here!”
The idyll that he had instantly imagined left his whole body quivering. He went behind Tommaso and Corinne and hugged them, then kissed each of them on the cheek.
“Pregnant!” he said again, not noticing that Tommaso seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“How many months?” Danco asked.
“Five,” Corinne answered, looking at each of us in turn.
Bern wouldn’t stop. “So what were you waiting for to tell us, huh? We don’t need to vote now. We’ll buy the masseria, we’ll make it the perfect place for the kids. They’ll have plenty of aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.”
That’s when Corinne shook him off.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said we’re leaving, Bern. Going. Do you think I can let my child grow up in this place? For what, so he can get tuberculosis?”
It took Bern a few seconds to absorb the information.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
Corinne began toying with an earring. “My parents found us an apartment in Taranto. That way we’re close and they can help us out. It’s not very big, but it’s right in the center.”
“And what about us?” Bern asked.
Corinne lost her patience. “Holy Christ, Bern! You’re really missing a few marbles, you know?”
But he wasn’t looking at her anymore, he was staring at his brother instead, waiting for him to meet his eyes. Yet when he spoke his name in a whisper, then slightly louder, Tommaso didn’t move.
So he came back and sat down next to me. He finished his beer in silence, then turned to Danco. “It’s up to us four, apparently.”
Danco puffed out his cheeks. “It would be mad to buy this place. Don’t you see how run-down it is? The soil is poor. We have to work like hell here.”
“What are you saying? It looks like you’ve all lost your minds today. We have the food forest here. We have the hens, the bees, everything.”
Danco shook his head, as if he were inwardly fighting something.
“The police, Bern. I don’t want to mess with them. And then, did you see what happened to the solar panels? And how things turned out with that shitty bastard Cosimo? We’re not welcome here.”
“None of us ever thought we were,” Bern said.
I took his hand. It was cold and his fingers were trembling a little. I squeezed them. Danco rubbed his palms on his jeans. “What do you say, Giuli?” he asked. “I think it’s time to clear out.”
She snapped her fingers in reply, clearly conveying the idea that she hadn’t expected anything else. Bern sat motionless, faced with that mutiny.
But Danco had something more to add: “I don’t think it’s fair to divide the money from the villa equally. After all, it was Teresa’s. But each of us should get something, right? Kind of like a golden handshake. We all worked here, we all invested in it. What do you think, Teresa? You were the one who suggested putting the money in the communal kitty. Of course, now that things have changed, you can take back what you said, but . . . well . . . we all contributed.”
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t maintain his usual clarity, the objectivity that his scientific studies had taught him.
“I propose that those who leave receive twenty thousand euros and not lay claim to anything else. Twenty thousand each,” he hastened to specify. “The rest will be left to Bern and Teresa. About one hundred thousand. That should be enough to purchase the masseria.”
“And you just thought of this now?” Bern asked in a hard tone that he’d never used with Danco before.
“Does it make a difference?”
“Did you think of it just now or did you already do the calculation, Danco?”
Danco sighed. “Bern, people aren’t property either.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me on morals.”
Danco grumbled. “Whatever you say. So, Teresa, do you agree or not?”
“Teresa agrees,” Bern answered for me. I squeezed his hand again.
“Good. So, what do you say, shall we make a toast to increasing the world’s population? With decent wine, though.”
Bern contained himself for the remaining time. He clinked glasses with everyone, even Danco. We pretended we were celebrating a new beginning, the birth and who knows what else, yet deep inside, each of us knew that the toast was mainly a confirmation of the end: the end of nights spent together under the pergola, the end of friendship itself maybe; the end of a cloudy dream that none of us, with the sole exception of Bern, had ever seriously believed could last.
THOSE FINAL DAYS. A virulent restlessness stirred in Bern. He spent a lot of time with Tommaso, the anguish of the new separation identical to that of the evening many years earlier at the Scalo. But this time their behavior was different. What they did was take walks together. Only once did I catch them hugging each other among the giant buds of cabbage scattered in the food forest: I didn’t feel jealous as I had in the past, though, only deeply sorry for both of them.
The first to leave were Danco and Giuliana. They were headed south, they didn’t know where exactly. In front of the jam-packed jeep, Danco suggested one last time that Bern follow him. I held my breath before he answered, worried that the painfulness of that moment would lead him to agree. Instead he shook Danco’s hand and said, “If I move away from this place, I’ll die. I know that now.”
With two days left before the deadline issued by the police, Bern and I remained alone. We sat on the bench under the holly oak. It hadn’t been used in quite a while, because it could accommodate only two people at a time. Bern held me close to him. The countryside was so silent and still that we felt like the last human beings on earth, or the first ones. Bern must have had a similar thought, because he said: “Adam and Eve.”
“The apple tree is missing.”
“Cesare claimed that it was actually a pomegranate tree.”
“Then we have one.”
His chest rose and fell. Then his fingers slid over mine, gently, looking for a way under the sleeve.
“We’ll go to him tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll make him an offer for the masseria.”
“There won’t be any money left, afterward.”
“Who cares?”
I looked at the land around us. The realization of the work that from then on would fall on just the two of us was daunting. If in some recess of my mind I still imagined resuming my studies, connecting my earlier life to the present one as though grafting two cuttings, that was the moment I realized that it would never happen. It was Bern and me and the masseria and nothing else. I was twenty-five years old and I didn’t know if that was too old or too young to live like this, nor did I care to know. I loved Bern more than ever at that moment, as if our sudden solitude had allowed that feeling to finally expand and occupy everything.
So when he said, “We must have a child, like Tommaso and Corinne”—not “I’d like” or “We could,” but “We must,” as if there were no other way—when he said that I was sure he was right, and I replied: “We will.”
“Tonight?”
“Right now.”
But several more minutes passed before we made up our minds to move, to walk into the house and go upstairs. And in that silent interlude under the holly oak, we envisioned the image of a little girl, our little girl—who knows why a girl—dancing a few steps away from us, picking a dandelion from the ephemeral grass and offering it to us. It was nothing but a fantasy and we didn’t admit it to each other, not even later, but I was certain then, as I am certain today, that we saw her vividly before us, and that our visions were identical. Because at that time that kind of thing happened between Bern and me: we used fewer and fewer words, but we were still able to recognize the visible and, as if by tacit accord, even conceive of the invisible.