I found Bern painting a picture on one of the outer walls of the house, the one facing north. Dark brushstrokes in a glossy brown left over from restoring the doors; the paint stood out on the rough whitewashed surface. Mornings were already cold, with lots of dew. I pulled the collar of my sweater up over my chin.
“Yep, it’s a penis,” he confirmed without turning around.
“So it seems,” I said, trying not to look surprised. “A huge penis on the wall of the house. The neighbors will love it.”
“In Tibet it’s considered auspicious.”
Only then did I notice the illustrated book resting on the ground, no doubt borrowed from the Ostuni library, where Bern sometimes disappeared for entire afternoons. He was copying the image from there.
I went closer, to compare the photograph with the result. Bern’s version was too simplistic, it looked more like a kid’s vulgar vandalism than it did the original.
“So we’re back to magical thinking?” I asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.
He gave a lopsided smile. “I told myself it doesn’t hurt to try. We’ll attract some benevolent spirit. For our cause.”
Our cause: the phantom daughter who by then had taken over every conversation, every thought and desire. It had been almost two years since the afternoon when we’d first imagined her, when we’d pursued her like a hallucination, up the stairs and into our bed to make her real.
There was already a room prepared for her upstairs, the room that had once been Tommaso and Corinne’s, and before that, Cesare and Floriana’s. Bern had carved a cradle from the stump of an olive tree, but the cradle stood empty, in the center of a room just as bare.
“You could help me,” he said. “You’re better at drawing than I am.”
I took the can of paint and the brush and tried to correct the outlines. Bern looked on over my shoulder.
“That’s much better,” he said finally.
“Who knows what people will think.”
“What they think doesn’t matter. And besides, who? Nobody ever comes here.”
It was true. Not even Tommaso and Corinne came anymore. Since they’d had Ada, they lived barricaded in the attic financed by her father, exhausted by getting up at night but content as could be. We went to visit them often enough, but less and less willingly since our failure had become a chronic disorder. Even when we decided not to drive up to Taranto and endure the sting of envy, Ada’s accomplishments were reported to us by phone. Ada who stood up, holding on to the bars of her crib. Ada who waved her hand to say ciao. Ada who was getting her baby teeth.
Danco and Giuliana appeared less and less frequently as well. So there we were, Bern and I, property owners now, still young but extremely disheartened, worshipping a pagan totem.
I said: “Maybe it will work.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Or maybe it might be time to see a doctor, Bern.”
He whirled around to face me. “A doctor, what for?”
“Maybe there’s a problem. With me.”
“There is no problem. We just have to keep trying.”
He took me by the hand and we went into the house. I made us some breakfast. In November there were the starlings; they made raids on the olive trees. We heard the shot of a hunter in the distance. From the window, I saw the black formation of birds fan out for a few seconds, startled, then regroup as if nothing had happened.
THE PAINTING on the wall did not help. My periods kept coming with ruthless punctuality, and each time Bern was more disappointed and wrought up. I got to the point of hiding the tampons from him, but he found out anyway when he pressed his chest to my back at night to make another attempt. We can’t, I’d tell him without turning around; then he’d slump back on the mattress and begin calculating how many days it would be before we could try again.
Sex was the thing that changed the most. Before, we were wild savages, whereas now Bern’s thrusts had a martial regularity, as if he were searching for an exact spot inside me. Before, even after he came, his fingers didn’t stop until my stomach started jerking uncontrollably, whereas now he withdrew immediately, as if he didn’t want to disturb the biological process that was under way. Before, we’d lie beside each other, exhausted and drained, whereas now he made me keep my pelvis elevated for ten minutes. He timed them on the clock.
We did not know a specialist who could help us, so we went to the bar in Speziale to consult the telephone directory. We copied down the numbers of four or five gynecologists near Brindisi, glancing around as we did so, as if everyone there could tell what we were doing.
We went back to the masseria to make the call. Bern let me choose among the names. Walking in circles between the holly oak and the house, I explained our situation to the doctor, the months of failed attempts. Spoken aloud, the fears that until now had remained vague suddenly became concrete. The doctor asked me questions, questions that in the following weeks would become obvious, but that during that first conversation sounded like accusations: our ages (twenty-seven and twenty-eight), previous illnesses (none), the characteristics of my cycle (regular, heavy), the presence of abnormal bleeding (none), when we had stopped using contraception (about two years ago), and what strange reason had made us wait all that time to call.
In any case, the doctor said finally, he didn’t treat fertility; he had me take down the number of one of his colleagues, a Dr. Sanfelice, not in Brindisi, in Francavilla Fontana; we could say he recommended us.
So I repeated the call from the beginning, trying to sound more confident though I was slowly losing my courage to go through with this. The same questions and the same answers, in nearly the same order, as I kept walking between the holly oak and the house, pivoting around Bern, who registered every word, silently encouraging me.
The next day we were in Dr. Sanfelice’s waiting room, properly dressed, as if a good result depended on first impressions. On the wall hung a print of the female reproductive system, with black lines connecting the organs to their names. There were two other couples, only one with a big belly. Both women gave me empathetic smiles, maybe they could tell I was there for the first time.
Sanfelice had me lie down on the examining table, slipped on a latex glove, and told me to relax as he gave me a little slap on the buttock. As he moved the probe, he spoke incessantly. The only information about us that he’d noted, or maybe the only one that intrigued him, was that we lived in the country. He had a house outside the city himself, he said, then went on to talk about oil pressing.
When we were sitting in front of his desk again, he asked about the frequency of our relations. “You have no idea how many couples come here saying: Doctor, we’ve been trying for a year. And when I ask: How many times a year? They tell me: At least five or six!”
He laughed, as if at the punch line of a joke, but he composed himself almost immediately, maybe because we’d remained serious.
“I ask partly because, at first glance, everything seems to be in order with the lady.”
“Every day,” Bern said.
“Every day?” The doctor’s eyes widened. “For more than a year?”
“Yes.”
Sanfelice frowned. He toyed with a magnifying glass, then put it back in its place. He turned to me. “Then we should investigate more thoroughly.”
“What could it be?” Bern asked.
“Your sperm could be slow or meager, or even slow and meager. It could be your wife’s ovaries, even if there are no fibroids. Endometriosis, at worst. But it’s not worth talking about until we’ve done a nice round of tests.”
He began filling out the authorizations, going on for quite some time. Bern stared at the doctor’s hands.
“Come back when you have everything,” he said, handing me the forms. “I haven’t written one for a spermiogram because that can be done here at our office. The collection is on Tuesday, here are the instructions,” he said, handing us another preprinted sheet. “It costs one hundred and twenty euros. Check around if you like, but you won’t find a better price elsewhere.”
“Can this be resolved, Doctor?” Bern asked when we were already standing.
“Of course it can be resolved. We’re in the twenty-first century. There’s almost nothing that medicine can’t do anymore!”
Along the brightly lit streets of Francavilla’s center, people were strolling in and out of shops, ducking into bars for the aperitivo hour. A stall was selling candied orange peels; I asked Bern to buy a bag, but he said: “Let’s go to a restaurant!”
We had never been to one by ourselves, he and I. A strange anxiety came over me, as if I weren’t ready.
“We have all those tests to pay for.”
“But didn’t you hear what Sanfelice said? There’s nothing that can’t be done. Soon we’ll have our baby girl. We have to celebrate! I should have listened to you and come here sooner. You pick a place.”
I spun around in the middle of the piazza, as amazed as a young girl seeing the city, the vivid streetlights, and the baroque buildings for the first time.
“That one.” I pointed.
I clung to his arm, ecstatic, as though we were on the first date we’d never had. I let him sweep me into the restaurant. We were just another couple in love, like any others, at least for that evening.
THE RESULT of all the expensive tests was: absolutely nothing. There was nothing wrong with his sperm count. And there was nothing wrong, at least so it appeared, with my levels of progesterone and prolactin and estradiol, with the LH, the TSH, the FSH, all those acronyms whose meanings were still unknown to me. Yet I did not get pregnant. As if something—which was what Dr. Sanfelice thought, though he didn’t dare suggest it—wasn’t working with Bern and me together.
“Let’s get this over with,” the doctor said, contemplating the conspicuous display of reports on his desk. “A round of insemination and the problem is solved.”
First, however, it was necessary to go through ovarian stimulation. A strict schedule of times and administrations: for that too, Sanfelice had a preprinted sheet ready, which he handed me with an encouraging smile.
During that same period, Bern decided to rebuild the treehouse in the mulberry, exactly where it had been before. Our little girl would like it, he said. He talked about the project as if it were a top priority. It was useless to try to make him see reason, to remind him that in the best of cases our daughter wouldn’t climb that tree until she was four or five years old. He would turn up at the masseria with a load of wood planks, then disappear into the fields for hours, looking for flexible branches with which to construct the roof.
In reality, he couldn’t stand being idle while I was urging my ovaries to produce more, and still more, until I reached the point of collapse. And while he soared up there in his dream of fatherhood, I was crushed to the ground by my fattened stomach, my hard breasts, the patches of cellulite that appeared overnight on my thighs.
“Don’t look at me,” I’d say when it was time to get undressed in the evening.
“Why shouldn’t I? I always look at you.”
And yet I knew he couldn’t prevent his gaze from analyzing me, from registering every one of those signs of deterioration.
“Just don’t look at me, that’s all.”
His solicitude got on my nerves at least as much as it supported me. It made me feel even more trapped, even less desirable.
“I wish it were me undergoing the treatment,” he said.
“But it isn’t.” Then, remorseful, I added: “Be satisfied with your vitamins.”
Sanfelice had prescribed them to improve the quality of his semen. I doubted they really did anything, but Bern took them scrupulously, as if our whole mission depended on them.
ONE DAY Nicola showed up at the masseria. We had lost touch some time ago. The only news I had of him came from the brief encounter I’d had with Floriana over the sale of the property, a couple of years back. She’d been laconic: he’s fine, she’d said, and I hadn’t dared insist.
He arrived on a bright Sunday morning in May. He got out of a shiny, smart-looking sports car, and he too was smartly dressed: he wore leather shoes and an immaculate white shirt, slightly open over his tanned chest. He had filled out since the last time I’d seen him, bulked up for the better, I thought. He looked more like Cesare, the same muscular good looks, even a trace of his glow.
Mentally, I listed how slovenly I must look to him: my hair tied back and a little dirty, Bern’s shorts that I wore for working in the garden, the film of sweat on my forehead, and the clearly visible stain under my armpits. My skin oozing gonadotropins.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said. “I was passing through the area.”
“I’m the only one here,” I replied, assuming he was there to see Bern.
Nicola looked around, hands on his hips and with a pleased expression. “Cesare said I’d find everything somewhat changed. But it doesn’t seem so different to me. Even the swing-chair is still there.”
“Don’t sit on it, it’s unsafe. We made some changes inside. And the vegetable garden, that part is all new. How about some lemonade? I’ll bring you some.”
When I came back out, Nicola was sitting at the table, typing a message on his phone. He put it away and finished the lemonade in one gulp. I poured him some more.
He pointed to something on the side of the house with an amused expression. The fertility mural had been there for so long that I didn’t even notice it anymore. We’d covered it with a coat of whitewash, but the dark outline had reemerged as soon as the paint had dried.
“A bet,” I explained, certainly turning crimson.
“A lost bet, I guess,” Nicola said.
I had never felt self-conscious in his presence. He had always been the awkward one. But in becoming adults there had been an imperceptible shift.
“Are you still with the police?” I asked.
“Special Agent Belpanno, at your service,” he said, showing me a tiny, gold-plated badge on his shirt. If Danco had been there, he would have laughed in his face.
Nicola revolved the glass a half turn, a gesture that reminded me of how he’d been as a boy.
“Cesare couldn’t accept it at the beginning. Because of the weapons, you know. But then he realized that weapons have little to do with it. It’s about having a certain kind of ideal.” He paused, as if reflecting on what he had just said. Then he shook his head. “I’m not cut out for the type of freedom that he preaches. And what about you? Do you like being here?”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“It’s hard. Maintaining the masseria and all the rest. Sometimes I feel like I’ve become part of the landscape. Like a plant or an animal.”
Why was I confiding all this to him?
“But I can’t imagine a different life,” I added.
“You and Bern should come to the city once in a while. I even have a guest room. I’d like to introduce you to Stella.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“For two years now. But we don’t live together.”
He waited for me to accept the invitation, or turn it down, something. Bern and I in Bari, visiting him at his house.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About Stella. That we’re together.”
I straightened my chair. “Why should I mind?”
“There wouldn’t be anything wrong with it. It bothered me when I heard about you and Bern.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “Would you like some cookies? I’m experimenting with almond flour. They aren’t great, but they’re edible.”
Nicola waited quietly for me to bring them outside. He took one from the plate, and when he took a bite it fell apart.
“They’re too crumbly, I know.”
He smiled. “You just need to know the technique.”
All that time apart and we had already run out of things to say. No, that wasn’t it. There was the past to talk about: when we played cards on that same table, the intricate tangle of attractions that bound us as kids, the time he’d given me a coral bracelet that I had never worn yet still had, why I stopped answering his letters. But it was too dangerous, we both sensed it.
“Bern and I want to have a child,” I said.
It popped out all of a sudden, the words followed by a backwash of shame.
“I’m undergoing treatment. I’m taking hormones.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said in a soft voice.
Everything pent up in me suddenly came rushing out. Tears filled my eyes. “The test results are fine, but nothing happens.”
I had embarrassed him. And saddened him. And irritated him, probably.
“A colleague of mine had a varicocele and for that—”
“Here comes Bern,” I interrupted him.
Nicola turned in his chair. He raised a hand to him, but Bern did not respond to the greeting. We watched him walk up the dirt track. The tears kept coming; I couldn’t stop them, and for some reason I didn’t even want to. I just wiped them on my wrist.
“What are you doing here? Teresa, did you invite him? Why did you come?”
I stood up and took Bern’s hand. “He stopped by to see us. We hadn’t seen him for so long. I offered him some lemonade.”
Nicola watched us with an unreadable expression.
Bern was extremely edgy. “Why are you crying? What did you talk about?”
His eyes went to Nicola. “What, huh?”
“Nothing,” Nicola replied, holding his gaze.
Bern would not have forgiven me for telling him about the treatment.
“You have to leave,” he threatened Nicola. “This isn’t your place anymore. We paid for it, understand? Go!”
Nicola got up slowly. He positioned the chair under the table, then took another look around, as if to take in the wonder of the masseria one last time.
“It was great to see you,” he said to me finally.
He took Bern by the shoulders in a kind of embrace and touched his cheek to his. He gently touched his beard, maybe because he’d never seen it so long. Bern remained motionless, offering no resistance. Then Nicola got in the car. He drove off, honking the horn twice as he reversed.
I picked up the lemonade pitcher, but I didn’t know what to do with it and I put it back where it was.
“Why did you treat him like that?”
“He has no right to come here,” said Bern, who had sat down, his eyes fixed on the empty table.
“You were like brothers. Now you and Tommaso act as if he’d never existed.”
His thumbnail dug into the plastic tablecloth.
“Cops like him should stay away from this place.”
“You chased him off as if he were a criminal. You were the one who acted like a cop!”
Bern bowed his head. “Don’t be mad at me. Please.”
His voice was so defenseless, so sweet. My anger was swept away in an instant, replaced ounce per ounce by the usual surge of devotion.
I sat down, put my arm on the table, and rested my head on it. Bern’s fingers were quick to find their way into my hair.
“We’re very tired,” he said, “but soon things will be different.”
His fingers massaged the roots, rhythmically. Eyes closed, the late May sun on my eyelids, the silence of the countryside: I let all those things envelop me, like a new promise.
IN MY SECOND YEAR of high school, the family doctor had cauterized a wart under my big toe. Before starting, he’d said, “Now we’ll do some welding on this little girl.” My father was squeezing my hand and telling me not to look down, to keep talking to him. It was the only clinical procedure I had ever been subjected to. So on the day of the oocyte retrieval, while I slowly took my clothes off behind the screen and put on the coarse, demeaning paper gown, hearing Bern’s and Sanfelice’s voices out there, my body was trembling, as if a sudden chill had entered the room.
The procedure was brief, however. The doctor commented step by step on his miraculous probing inside my anesthetized cavities. It was a way to reassure me, but I would have preferred him to be silent. I saw his assistant smile kindly behind her mask, a girl my age, who in all likelihood would never have to undergo such a treatment. For some time I’d been dividing women into two categories: those who could easily conceive and the others, like me.
“Nine!” exclaimed Sanfelice, handing her the probe.
“Nine what?” Bern asked him, mesmerized by the deftness with which Sanfelice slipped off his gloves, stretched his fingers, and scribbled something on the chart.
“Nine follicles. We’ll have so many oocytes that we can make a nestful. Excellent job, Teresa.”
Through the sheet he gave me the same little slap on the buttock as he had the first time. Before the pickup he had started calling me by my first name, because we were allies now, he and I, in the front line of that battle.
The next phase would take place in the laboratory, under the lens of a microscope. There, far removed from our eyes, in a silent coitus in the midst of a perfectly sterile environment, Bern’s fluid would be mingled with mine. Nature would take care of the rest, even if I no longer used that word “nature,” at least not in front of Sanfelice, after he’d gotten angry with me right in the middle of the dilation: “Natural?” he’d snapped. “What would be natural in your opinion, Teresa? Are the clothes you wear natural? Is the food you eat natural? Oh, of course, I know you grow your own vegetables, the ones you brought me last time were excellent. And you probably don’t use pesticides or products like that, but if you think your tomatoes are natural, then, forgive me for being frank, you’re naive. Nothing natural has existed on this earth for hundreds of years. Everything is the result of manipulation. Everything. And you know what I say? Praise be to God for this, even if he doesn’t exist. Because otherwise we would still be dying from smallpox, from malaria, and from bubonic plague, not to mention childbirth.”
Bern had not contested that outburst, not even afterward. I wondered if he remembered what Fukuoka had to say about medicine and doctors. But no, not even Fukuoka existed anymore, swept away by longing, and by an unconditional trust in Sanfelice and his techniques.
Outside the clinic, after the retrieval, I nearly collapsed. I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, not even the sugary tea the doctor had recommended. Bern held me up before I could fall.
“It’s all those drugs,” I whimpered.
He kissed me right there on the sidewalk, with people passing by who knew nothing about us.
“It’s over,” he promised.
That evening, in fact, I felt lighter, the local anesthesia was wearing off, my legs slowly began to feel like my own again, and the exhaustion of the previous days diminished, though I had not stopped the hormones. It was the thought of our baby that raised my spirits. Maybe she already existed under the microscope and would soon be inside me.
Sanfelice’s assistant called the next day to summon us to the office. She wouldn’t say why. On the way to Francavilla we were so distressed by what that phone call might portend that we did not exchange a single word.
Sanfelice was in a good mood, spirited, even, as he told us that the nine follicles, so promising, that he had congratulated us on less than twenty-four hours earlier were empty, not even one oocyte among them.
As always, my understanding struggled along behind his words. I asked, “How is that possible?” as I felt the emptiness Sanfelice had spoken of spread through my abdomen, through my chest and throat.
“Anything is possible.”
He had a nervous tic that made him blink his eyes and then reopen them in a kind of amazement. He did this twice in a row, before adding: “We are operating in the realm of statistics, Teresa. But I’m planning to change the treatment. In place of the Decapeptyl, which you told me you did not tolerate well, we’ll try the Gonal-F used in combination with Luveris. Had I already given you the Luveris? No, in fact. And we’ll increase the dosages a little.”
“Another stimulation?” I asked, already tearful. I wept with shameful ease in those weeks. The explanatory leaflet, which I had read and reread, said that could happen.
“Come, now, my dear!” the doctor urged me. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. “Sometimes it’s necessary to accept a little sacrifice for a good result, am I right?”
He repeated it. “Am I right?”
Bern nodded for me.
Then we were out on the street again, on that corner of Francavilla that would become the backdrop of all the memories related to those months. There was a fruit-and-vegetable store opposite the entrance to the clinic. The vendor always stood outside, leaning against the doorpost, watching those who went in and out. Who knows if he was aware of what was going on.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said to Bern.
“Of course you can do it.”
He was already leading me toward the pharmacy for the new medicines we needed, new ways to force nature, whatever it was, to do what it didn’t seem to have any intention of doing.
THE SECOND STIMULATION CYCLE was pure hell. My abdomen, my hips, my back, my legs—every single muscle hurt. I hardly crawled out of bed anymore. I stayed confined to our room, which had been turned into a field infirmary: old medicines and new ones were piled up everywhere, along with open packets of disposable syringes and glasses bearing the residue of a soluble powder that Sanfelice had prescribed by phone for headaches.
Bern was incapable of tackling that mess. During the day he managed to keep up with all the work in the fields by himself; I was afraid he’d get one of his back spasms, then we’d really be in trouble. Between one chore and another he poked his head into the room to ask me if I was any better. He never asked how I was, only if I was better, then he disappeared, afraid of the answer. In the evening, exhausted, he fell asleep on the edge of the bed to leave me as much room as possible.
One night the cramps were so strong that I woke him up. He didn’t know what to do. He went downstairs and came back with a pot of boiling water, as if I were about to give birth. I screamed at him, so he vanished again and reappeared with a basin of cold water. He dipped the corner of his T-shirt in it and rubbed my forehead.
“Don’t grind your teeth like that,” he pleaded.
I told him that maybe I was dying, and he started shaking his head, stricken with panic.
“You can’t,” he repeated, “you can’t.”
He wanted to call an ambulance, but he would have had to walk to the end of the dirt track and farther on to the intersection with the paved road, leaving me alone all that time. The ambulance would not have been able to find us otherwise.
He pounded his thigh with his fist, as if trying to transfer the pain to himself. I told him to stop it. A great calmness had suddenly come over me, along with a kind of pity, not for me, solely for him, for his fear-ravaged face.
Finally I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again the room was flooded with sunlight. Bern was still there beside me. He had picked some chervil flowers and put them in a jar with a sprig of bay laurel, which he’d set on the bedside table. He stroked my head and I slid closer to him.
“I spoke to Sanfelice,” he said. “You have to discontinue the treatment immediately.”
He couldn’t look at me.
“There are still six days left.”
“You have to discontinue it,” he repeated.
“I made too much of it last night. I’m sorry. But I’ll do better now, I’m sure of it.”
Bern shook his head. His entire universe had come crashing down. I looked at him, his eyelids reddened by lack of sleep, his beard so long it curled, and the sense of defeat that seemed to weigh so heavily on him.
All that remained of the night’s ordeal was a strange lucidity. Maybe I had dreamed something, though I could only dimly remember it. “You’re not the problem,” I said.
He didn’t turn to look at me. But his shoulders stiffened for a moment.
“You don’t have to—”
“There’s another solution,” he interrupted me. “Sanfelice wants to explain it to us face-to-face. Get dressed, we’re going to see him.”
“I HAVE COLLABORATED with this clinic for many years,” the doctor told us. “It’s in Kiev. Have you ever been there? A delightful city, where everything is very inexpensive.”
He waited for us to shake our heads.
Kiev.
“I and my colleague there, Dr. Fedecko, who is very highly regarded in the fertility field, take on situations, how to put it . . . situations that traditional assisted fertilization cannot resolve. And at this point I would say that is the case here, despite your young age. It may be that the lady is afflicted with empty follicle syndrome. It is somewhat unusual, to be truthful, but not extremely rare. And in any case, we cannot ascertain it because she does not seem to tolerate the ovarian stimulation. Am I correct?”
He looked at me intently, as if he were expecting a disavowal just then, an admission that the agony of the night before had been an exaggeration, an act.
“Right,” he continued. “We cannot afford the risk of hyperstimulation. So the only remaining solution is egg donation.”
“Meaning the child will not be mine,” I said softly.
Bern didn’t understand. He looked at me, then at Sanfelice, then back to me. He had not read all the things that I had read in the past few weeks. The illusion persisted in him that this process was nothing but a way to hasten what would happen in any case. Innocuous, like his vitamins.
“Such nonsense, Teresa,” Sanfelice said, joining his hands. “That’s what everyone thinks at first. Do you have any idea how many of the children you see around have been conceived that way? Go ask their mothers if they aren’t their children.”
He leaned toward me.
“Children belong to those who carry them in their wombs. To those who give birth to them and then raise them. Do you know what the most recent studies say? We’re talking about American studies, published in The Lancet. They say that the fetus assumes an unimaginable number of the pregnant woman’s traits, even if it does not share her genetic patrimony. Unimaginable.”
“Why wouldn’t it share the genetic patrimony?” asked Bern, who was increasingly bewildered.
But neither Sanfelice nor I answered him. I was still caught up in that word, “pregnant.”
“Do you know what happens in fact? Women come back here years later just to tell me: Doctor, my son looks like me. He looks more like me than like his father. And I say: But why does that surprise you? Didn’t I promise you he would? For the donors we respect all the primary parameters: height, eye and hair color. The young woman will likely be a kind of dead ringer, even if you will never see each other. If instead you prefer a child with red hair or one who will be very tall, that’s fine too, we’ll look for a suitable donor. One of my patients insisted on having a mulatto baby and we satisfied her. If you could see the little girl, with that caffelatte complexion! She’s already going to school.”
Selected as though from a catalog, I thought.
Sanfelice spoke to Bern again. “Then too, the Ukrainian women are a treat for the eyes. Everyone thinks immediately ‘Russian,’ but it’s not so. They don’t have those Slavic traits, they’re much more similar to us.”
He leaned back in his chair, waiting for our questions. But we were both too shaken to speak, so it was he who once again broke the silence: “There won’t be a religious problem, I hope. Because I have excellent reasons to present to you in that case as well. For one thing, Orthodox Jews from Israel come to Fedecko’s clinic. And many Muslims. You can’t imagine the fertility problems they have over there.”
“Is it illegal?” I asked.
Sanfelice pouted.
“What can I say? It takes time to change people’s ideas, especially here. If you’re asking me what could happen once you have a beautiful, healthy embryo implanted in your uterus, whether someone could come and claim it, then the answer is no. Everything that grows in your belly is yours. And by that time the trip to Kiev will have been forgotten. Except when you feel like returning to me to have another one.”
He turned from side to side in his swivel chair, his arms outspread.
“Can you imagine when all this didn’t exist? We live in an age of infinite possibilities!”
After that he began a detailed explanation of the procedure and timing, and the new hormonal regimen, much milder than the previous one, “a piece of cake.” The great advantage was that now I only had to prepare myself to be an “envelope.”
An envelope.
I again lost the thread of what he was saying. What did I know about Ukraine? Only the Chernobyl disaster, the stories from my mother, who had stopped buying fresh milk because people said the cows were radioactive. I imagined abandoned gray villages, annihilated grain fields under a leaden sky.
Bern had squirmed forward in his chair to lean toward Sanfelice, drawn by the magnet of his knowledge. He soaked up the man’s words as if they were magic formulas.
“We make every effort to keep costs to a minimum,” the doctor finally said. “Eight thousand euros is all-inclusive. Plus the cost of the flights and the hotel, of course.”
But eight thousand euros was much more than we had set aside. Our last savings had gone in the failed attempt at insemination. Now we barely had a thousand.
Bern and I looked at each other for the first time since the start of the visit. And from that moment on our anxiety was focused elsewhere, once again on how to get the money, almost as if the decision itself, whether to have the donor egg implanted or not, whether it was right or immoral and unprincipled, wasn’t really relevant. It wasn’t even worth thinking about. After all, what other choice did we have?
Eight thousand euros. Adding the expense of airline tickets, hotel, and meals in Kiev, the cost would be close to ten thousand. There was no way to quickly scrape together such a sum. With the very thin margins of what we sold at the market it would take us two, maybe three years; and there were the contingencies to consider, everything that was constantly breaking down at the masseria, not to mention the crops that could be wiped out overnight by hail, frost, or moles.
The doctor said that we were now in the twenty-first century, the age of infinite possibilities, when men and women with lab coats and sterile gloves in silent rooms, in Kiev, could take care of what we were not able to do. But Bern and I were still living in an era much further back; we were at the mercy of the sun and the rain and the seasons.
We knew of a money lender in Pezze di Greco, but he had the reputation of being a shark. We dropped that idea.
Without telling Bern, I phoned my father. I was always the one to call, though I did so rarely. We were speaking to each other again, but he still acted as if I were living in an inaccessible corner of the world. There was a flicker of surprise in his voice, though he soon reverted to his usual terseness.
“If you could lend me some money,” I said without beating around the bush, “I’ll be able to pay it all back after the olive harvest.”
“How much do you need?”
“Ten thousand euros. We have to fix the roof.”
I was surprised at how little it cost me to lie to him. He sighed into the phone.
“There’s your college tuition to pay,” he said. “The bill was sent to the house.”
“You don’t have to pay my college tuition.”
I felt slightly breathless. My body hadn’t completely recovered from the hormonal treatment.
“We need the money for the roof now, Dad.”
“Your grandmother’s house had a nice solid roof.”
“I’m sorry, I already told you.”
“Don’t expect a cent from me. And don’t you dare ask your mother. I’d hear about it, in any case.”
Then he hung up. I stood still for a few seconds, my hand holding the phone uselessly to my ear. I had the bizarre sensation that the land around the masseria had suddenly expanded hundreds of miles in every direction, leaving Bern and me alone in the middle of a deserted plain.
It was my disappointment that made me confess what I had tried to do. We were in bed. Bern did not get angry as I’d feared; he didn’t say the unkind words about my father that I’d expected. Instead he was silent, his eyes narrowed to focus on an idea that became gradually more defined. Then he smiled tightly. In a way, I was the one who gave him the idea.
“Your parents are respectable people,” he said. “They follow conventions. All we have to do is come up with a situation that they can’t turn away from, out of decency.”
“Is there one?”
“Of course there is. Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“Marry me, Teresa.”
And even in that absurd context, even in the preoccupied way Bern pronounced those vital words, as if he wasn’t considering their meaning at all but something much more important that would come from it, the effect on me was an intense tingling in my cheeks that quickly spread throughout my body.
“We’ve always said that marriage is a social bond, Bern. We talked about it with Danco.”
I was afraid the conventional girl in me would spring out from behind that show of composure, as if Danco were physically present in the room, analyzing the traces of foolish emotion that transformed my expression.
Bern slid out from the sheets and knelt on the bed, half naked as he was, his hair disheveled.
“If we get married, they’ll be forced to give us a present.”
“You want to turn our wedding into a fundraiser?”
“It will be a celebration, Teresa! Here. All the trees bedecked with white ribbons. And afterward we can go to Kiev. Up you go! Get up, quick!”
I pushed the sheet aside and stood up on the mattress. Bern was on his knees in front of me. Looking down on him, his close-set eyes had an even greater effect on me; I thought they’d been purposely created that way so he could pronounce the words that followed: “Teresa Gasparro, will you be my wife?”
I grabbed his head and pulled him to me, his ear pressed against my navel, so that he could hear the answer that had been lodged there for years, could hear it well up from the cavern where it had been waiting all that time: More than anything in the world, yes.
THE FACT THAT it was just an expedient, a performance, a scam, didn’t matter. I believed in that wedding with every ounce of faith in me. The promise that we’d exchanged was enough to eclipse even the thought of the terrifying trip to Kiev waiting in the background. I didn’t dwell on it, I did everything I could to put it out of my mind. For the first time in months, I was happy again.
The first list of invitees did not exceed fifty people. Not enough, even supposing an extraordinary generosity on their part. We began to extend it, first including relationships that had weakened, then those virtually forgotten. It still wasn’t enough. The list was expanded, mainly from my side. I’d rack my brains for a name and suggest it to Bern: “The Varettos.”
“Who are . . . ?”
“Friends of my parents’. They came to dinner every now and then. And one year I went to summer camp with the daughter. Ginevra. Or maybe Benedetta.”
“Then let’s add her, too. Does she have a boyfriend?”
“We’ll put ‘and guest.’”
I doubted it would work, but Bern seemed sure of it: “Everyone loves parties. Weddings especially.”
And just as he had predicted, the support was astounding. Of the nearly two hundred people who’d been invited, almost a hundred and fifty replied that they would come, even though the wedding would take place so far away, and even though it was such short notice. So soon, in September? Yes, we had acted on impulse. Occasionally they did not conceal their surprise, we hadn’t seen each other in so long . . . But I thought of you often over the years, and saying so, I almost convinced myself that it was true. They were moved. Will it be in a church? No, we decided on a civil ceremony, Bern and I are a little skeptical about religion.
Then I touched on the most delicate topic: we chose to forgo gifts, we don’t really need anything, but we dream of taking a trip, far away, we haven’t yet made up our minds exactly where. There will be an amphora in which to leave whatever you’d like.
We started extolling the appeal of the Apulian countryside, the light and the sea in the month of September. On that score at least we weren’t lying.
Bern agreed to calling Cesare, Floriana, and Nicola as well, without protest, as if any resentment were suddenly forgotten.
“There’s also our neighbor,” Bern said when we had exhausted all our ideas, “the guy who bought the villa.”
“The architect? I never saw him again after that.”
“Then go pay him a visit.”
So I picked some vegetables, and with a full basket walked over to the entrance to the villa.
The paved patio area had been enlarged and every tree was surrounded by a flower bed. The caretaker’s lodge was unrecognizable, enclosed by a long window that was dazzling in the afternoon sun. No more damp patches, no more peeling. I wondered if my grandmother would have liked it. A wall about six feet high had been erected around the courtyard, a kind of fortification, which enclosed the pool and kept out the fields.
“It’s because in the evening I get a little scared,” the architect said, joining me out there. “I’m impressionable.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“On the contrary. I was hoping that sooner or later you would come and see what I’ve done here. Teresa, isn’t it? I’m Riccardo.”
“I remember.”
I handed him the basket of vegetables. The gift seemed foolish and inappropriate for someone who lived there, but Riccardo marveled at it. He set it down on a precise spot on the pavement, in the shade, and photographed it with his phone, searching awhile for the best angle.
“It’s a perfect color composition,” he said, “I’ll use it for my blog.”
“You can also eat them, afterward.”
“You’re right. Of course.”
He offered me a tour of the interior, and eventually the initial awkwardness wore off. The rooms were still the same, but whereas before there was an accumulation of old furniture and other objects, now the space was mostly empty. I was especially struck by the absence of the floral sofa from which Nonna imposed her stillness on all the rest.
“I came to invite you to my wedding,” I said when we returned to where we’d started.
“Your wedding? Really?”
“You’re our neighbor, after all.”
He said he would think about it, then corrected himself, adding that he was flattered and would certainly do his best to attend. I walked back through the courtyard. I hadn’t talked to him about the gift, about the trip to an undecided destination, or about the amphora. So, in a way, my mission had failed. But Riccardo seemed so sincere, so grateful for my visit, that I hadn’t felt like conning him.
Outside the gate I broke off two blades of grass and on the way home to the masseria I tried to braid them into a small crown, recalling the sequence of moves that Floriana and the boys had taught me. But I lost interest before I was able to do it.
BERN HAD ALSO correctly predicted the reaction of my parents. Though on the phone they hadn’t had the presence of mind to show they were happy, they must have realized soon afterward that, once again, they could not stand in my way. My mother called back half an hour after the first conversation and was even a little moved.
“We’ll go and pick out the dress together,” she said, “don’t even try to refuse. And I have no intention of buying it down there. Your father has already gone out to buy you a plane ticket.”
Those words did nothing but reaffirm her contempt for the life I had chosen, for the place that she had detested long before I went to live there, but at that moment her voice and her peremptory tone were comforting. I remained silent so she wouldn’t notice my weakness.
She added: “He can come too, if he’d like. But obviously he won’t be able to see the dress. It’s bad luck.”
Oh, Mom, if you only knew how unlucky we already are! How it’s bad luck that’s forcing us to do this! My heart was thumping, longing to tell her everything. But one of the first decisions that Bern and I had made regarding the trip to Kiev was absolute secrecy. If even one single person besides us and Sanfelice were to know the truth, our daughter would always be only partly ours.
I didn’t ask Bern to come with me to Turin. I was afraid that, if he did, I wouldn’t be able to cope with his presence on top of that of my parents.
The fabric of the dress was so fine and delicate that when I tried it on I was careful not to touch it with my fingers, for fear of leaving fingerprints. It had an elegant crisscrossed cummerbund in front, whose bands joined to form a bow behind. Without a wrap, my back would be essentially bare.
The afternoon with my mother passed quickly, almost imperceptibly, as did supper back at home and the night spent in my childhood bed.
The dress would arrive in Speziale by mail within twenty days or so. If Bern were to ask how much it cost, I planned to say nothing and lie to him. The cost of the dress and shoes would have gotten us at least a thousand miles closer to Kiev.
A few weeks later I went with him to choose his suit. I’d had to convince him that he needed one; he insisted he could get by with what he had, Danco’s clothes that he’d worn at my grandmother’s funeral, possibly asking Tommaso if he could borrow something. I’d had to be as firm as I could, swearing that I would not marry him in a suit worn at a funeral, or in a waiter’s uniform.
Inside the store, in a shopping mall outside Mesagne surrounded by industrial warehouses, he was as recalcitrant as a child. He’d take a jacket from the salesclerk’s hands, scowl at the price tag, then shake his head and hand it back without trying it on. He went on like that until the young man ran out of options.
“You can’t spend less for a wedding suit,” I said, practically begging him.
“Two hundred euros!” he exploded, barely lowering his voice.
Suddenly I felt a great weariness. I slumped into a chair. Even with the air-conditioning, the heat was unbearable. The clerk brought me some water.
Seeing me like that, so pale, discouraged, and withdrawn, must have produced a reaction in Bern, because without saying a word he grabbed the two-hundred-euro blue suit from the rack, entered the dressing room, and came out a couple of minutes later with the pants dragging on the floor and the jacket open on his bare chest. When he spread his arms and twirled around, I could see his dark nipples.
He let the clerk bring him a white shirt, a pair of loafers, and a tie. The tie was garish, but I didn’t say anything so as not to break the spell. Bern paid for everything and we left the shop, then the mall, and walked out into the parking lot that stretched as far as the eye could see, melting in the July sun.
HE AND DANCO got hold of some village festival lights, three impressive white arches with intricate forms in them: hundreds of little round lightbulbs screwed in one after the other. It required ropes to hoist them and props to hold them up. When they were all turned on together, they lit up the night at the masseria.
I didn’t ask where they’d gotten them, just as I didn’t question where the wooden tables and benches came from, or the tablecloths and dozens of candles, also white, to be hung in glass jars from the tree branches. Certainly Danco deserved much of the credit. He knew people throughout Puglia, people whom he could ask for favors.
The preparations swept me along to the day of the wedding almost before I knew it. I found myself rushed down the steps of Town Hall in Ostuni, clinging to Bern’s arm, already his wife at that point, ducking between bursts of raw rice.
Afterward we walked down the dirt track to the masseria, as the sun faded slantwise and lengthened our fused shadows, Bern’s and mine, from behind, so that they nearly touched those of the first row of fruit trees. The countryside and we two, one thing at last.
The guests followed us, grouped in small clusters; from time to time someone moved ahead to photograph us. Tommaso was the only one who’d stayed behind at the masseria, in order to supervise the young people from an agricultural cooperative who were acting as chefs and waiters.
Then night swallowed up the last remnants of light and we all found ourselves under the hundreds of tiny lit bulbs.
“There have never been so many people here,” Cesare said, placing a hand on my cheek.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“And why should I?”
“You always imagined it as a place of peace.”
He slid his hand from my face to my neck, a touch so intimate that I would have drawn back with anyone else, but not with him. His presence on that day filled me with faith.
“I always imagined it as a sacred place,” he corrected me, “and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it.”
He smiled at me. He was searching for something hidden in my expression.
“Once I told you that in your previous incarnation you were an amphibian, do you remember?”
I remembered it, of course, but I was astonished that he did.
“Well, today I’m sure of it. You’re able to adapt to many worlds, Teresa. You can breathe underwater and on land.”
I was on the verge of confiding in him what was weighing on my heart even in the midst of that festivity.
We want to steal a baby. We want to steal our baby.
I sensed that he felt the presence of that secret. His eyes encouraged me, but I turned my head away.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“Don’t run off. I’d like to introduce you to someone.”
I followed him under the pergola. Cesare touched the shoulder of a woman with loose black hair in a blue dress that revealed her slender legs.
“This is my sister, Marina. Bern’s mother. I don’t believe you’ve ever met.”
But I had realized it before he said it, I could tell from her close-set eyes, identical to those of my husband. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have said she was his older sister. A child clung to her leg. Marina blushed.
“Bern told me not to bring him, but what could I do?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, though I couldn’t look at the little boy again, instantly reconstructing another portion of his life that Bern had kept hidden from me: the new family of the sister-mother whom he never mentioned, who had been added and then removed from the list of guests, and finally left there with a pen stroke that only partially crossed her out, present and absent at the same time. And a little half brother who would have been just a few years older than our daughter, if fate had been favorable to us from the beginning.
“Marina is very happy to meet you,” Cesare said.
But she had already lowered her head to the child and whispered that he should behave.
“Had you been here before?” I asked her, just to say something. I remembered the piles of almonds, Bern’s disappointed expectation, when his back had stiffened up from all the hulling.
Marina nodded. “I like the flowers you put in your hair,” she said.
I wanted her to compliment me again. I hadn’t known her until a few minutes ago and suddenly she was the most important guest at the party.
But she was finding it difficult, awkward. She said, “When are we leaving, Cesare?”
“After the cake,” he replied amiably.
Then the child darted away, running between the forest of legs, as if fleeing from that conversation. Marina went after him, hurriedly apologizing to me. Cesare responded to my look with a hint of a smile, then he too turned away.
I TOOK PART in snippets of conversations, I laughed even when I didn’t understand the jokes, I wandered around making sure that everyone was relaxed, that everyone had had enough to eat. From time to time I looked for Bern, and saw him surrounded by other guests, too far away. But I didn’t allow that distance to bother me. I was determined to enjoy it all, every second of it.
Corinne snatched me away from a group of high school classmates who were asking me some leading questions about my life at the masseria.
“Your father is making a scene,” she said, her face angry and tense. “He’s complaining that the wine is bad, and okay, so it’s not good, but he shouldn’t have attacked Tommaso. He accused him of serving it cold on purpose, to cover up the taste.”
We reached the drinks table, where my father stood facing Tommaso. He took me by the shoulders.
“Here you are, good. We need to get some other wine, Teresa. This one is poison. Tamponi spat it out into the flowers.”
Tamponi was his office manager. Even earlier, at Town Hall, my father’s attention had been focused mainly on him.
“Don’t we have anything else?” I asked Tommaso. He shook his head.
“But what were you thinking of, serving this stuff?”
“Maybe it’s the bottle, Dad.”
“I’ve already tried three. Three! And this guy keeps looking at me with that shitty smile!”
“You see?” Corinne burst out, as if it were my fault.
Tommaso said, “What do you want me to do, Mr. Gasparro? Oh, wait, I have an idea, bring me that amphora,” he said, pointing to the amphora for the trip money. “Maybe I can manage to turn water into good wine. And if I can’t, you can throw stones at me, like old times.”
The most vivid part of my imagination saw my father lunge across the table to grab him, but luckily the musicians had arrived. Friends of Danco, enlisted from who knows where and in exchange for who knows what, they were his personal wedding gift to us (though Bern and I hoped he would not forgo slipping a little money into the amphora). Together the guests all moved toward the players and someone dragged me along and pushed me into the center of the circle that had formed.
The young man with the tambourine bowed to me and soon afterward Bern materialized, just as disoriented. He was the first to respond to the urging that came to us from all sides, moving his arms and legs as he whirled around me. He was better than me at dancing the pizzica, but what did it matter? I looked at him: my husband. I put my trust in him.
“Take off the shoes!” someone shouted. He bent down and untied my shoelaces, and I stepped onto the ground with my bare feet. That may have been the green light that the guests had been waiting for, because the circle around us broke and everyone started dancing.
Bern whispered in my ear that he was the happiest man on earth. Then, as if it weren’t enough to confide it to me alone, he shouted: “I am the happiest man on earth!”
I lost sight of him and found myself dancing with other people, at one point even my father, whom someone had pushed into the fray. I danced for a long time, in a kind of daze. By the end my head was spinning. I was on the verge of stumbling, so I picked up my shoes, which everyone had carefully avoided, and made my way through the crowd to the pergola.
In the kitchen there were stacked pans, serving plates with leftovers, piles of dirty dishes. The young people from the cooperative were busily working amid that chaos, yet they smiled at me in turn, somewhat awed.
I went into the bathroom. The mirror returned the image of my loosened hairdo, the flower buds that Marina had complimented drooping to one side, my cheeks mottled. I was a little sorry to have lost my earlier composure, to see the unrefined farm woman I had become reemerge from beneath the makeup. I moistened a washcloth and used it to scrub my face.
At that moment the door swung open. In the mirror I saw Nicola towering there, he too disheveled, the knot of his tie undone. Instead of backing away, he closed the door behind him.
“I’ll be out of here right away,” I said, but he didn’t move.
He was breathing hard. He took another step forward, grabbed me by the elbows, and lowered his face to the back of my neck, as if to sink his teeth in it. Raising his head, he started kissing my neck passionately, moving up to my ear, before I could break free. I banged my wrist on the edge of the sink, pushing him away.
“Get out!” I said, but even then Nicola didn’t leave; wide-eyed, he was staring not at me, but at my image in the mirror.
“Get out, Nicola!”
He sat on the rim of the bathtub and looked around, as if making contact with the room again, with every single object. Then he covered his face with his hands.
I felt a little guilty now, seeing him so dejected, but I was afraid of what he might do if I got too close.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer.
“You had too much to drink. Why didn’t you come with Stella? You could have brought her.” He shook his head again. He got up, turned on the tap, and stood there blankly, watching the flow of water.
“Feelings are always so uncomplicated for you, aren’t they?” he said tightly. “So clear-cut. But you still haven’t understood a thing, Teresa. Not about me and not about this place. And not about the man you married, for sure.”
I placed the damp washcloth on the sink so he could use it.
“See you outside, Nicola.”
I opened the door. I glanced down the hall, in both directions, to make sure no one had seen us, that there were no witnesses to that betrayal that I had not taken part in.
THEN IT WAS TIME for the cake. I watched the creation pass by, carried by two young men; its rounded tiers were decorated with multicolored fruit, shimmering under a layer of aspic. The waiters took it to the holly oak, where a table had been set up. I didn’t know that Bern had planned to serve it there. Once again I felt myself being dragged along reluctantly, and once again a circle formed around me.
Bern climbed up on the bench and held out his hand for me to join him. There were whistles and applause. Danco called for us to give a speech, and others joined him. But I wouldn’t have been able to say a single word and Bern ducked his head behind my back. The guests quieted down, expecting one of us to say something.
That’s when Cesare stepped forward: “Since the bride and groom are a bit overwhelmed, I’d like to say something in their place. If they give me their permission, of course.”
I remember that moment very clearly, maybe better than any other: the trunk of the holly oak, Bern and I, the cake with the pieces of fruit arranged in circles, then Cesare, and farther on, the waiting crowd.
“Thank you, Cesare. Do save us,” I said, before it might occur to Bern to stop him.
Cesare took another moment to collect his thoughts.
“Teresa and Bern chose not to join in marriage under the guidance of the Lord,” he said finally. “This does not mean, however, that God is not looking down on us, on all of us, at this precise moment. Even though He hasn’t been invited, He holds us in His warm, strong embrace. Can you feel it?”
He turned to the guests, his forefinger held up as if pointing to something in the sky.
“Can you feel that gentle pressure in the air? I feel it. It’s the touch of His embrace.”
I peered around at the faces of the guests with some apprehension, but only Danco had mockingly crossed his arms and was smiling scornfully. The others seemed truly captivated by Cesare, by his solemn pauses. I reached for Bern’s hand. He was calm.
“I’d like to tell you a story,” Cesare went on, “a story that you may not know. The story of the mutinous angels.”
And so he spoke about the guardian angels, about their mutiny, about how they came down to earth attracted by the beauty of the women, of how they coupled with them and how from that union monstrous giants were born. About how afterward the giants rebelled against men and the earth was filled with blood and suffering. And about how the guardian angels taught men to defend themselves against what they themselves had generated, and taught them about spells and plant properties and how to make weapons. He spoke about all that to our guests, who were there to have a good time and maybe take a peek at our strange life, and they listened to him, whether out of curiosity or politeness.
Then he said: “I see that some of you have grown gloomy. Why is he telling us such a macabre story, you’re wondering. Is he trying to ruin the party? What the heck is he trying to tell us?”
A few people chuckled and Cesare smiled too. He was full of passion now.
“That every glorious endeavor of man has its origins in transgression and sin, that’s what. That every union between human beings is a union of light and darkness, even this marriage. Don’t take offense, please. I’ve known our bride and groom since they were children, they are like a son and daughter to me. I know the transparency of their hearts. But the prophet Enoch would warn them against the darkness that exists within them as well, which perhaps they don’t yet know. Teresa, Bern, remember this always: We marry virtue and sin at the same time. If you don’t yet see it, dazzled as you are by passion, you will understand it later on. There always comes a time when it happens. And that is when you must remember your promise of tonight.”
He looked around for Floriana. He stared at her for a moment, as if he were talking about them too, restating something important. Then he turned his back to the guests again and regarded only us, Bern and me, still standing on the bench, now a bit ridiculous on that podium.
“You were little more than children when you met, but perhaps you were already in love. Floriana and I talked about it. Isn’t that so? Those two, we said, there’s more than meets the eye there. Tonight you promised to watch over one another. Don’t ever stop.”
He took a few steps back to move out of the center. A few people clapped, but without conviction, and the applause died quickly.
In the midst of that hesitation, Bern stepped down from the bench, slid around the table, went over to Cesare, and leaned his head on his chest. When Cesare motioned me to join them, I too got down cautiously, and we both found ourselves in his arms, embraced by his blessing that we had so deeply missed, even if we hadn’t known it until just then.
CORINNE AND TOMMASO were among the last to leave; he was so drunk and revved-up that they’d had to lead him to the car and put up with an angry outburst when he claimed the right to drive. When Bern and I were alone, we sat on the swing-chair, unconcerned that it might collapse under our weight. Husband and wife. Some of the ribbons that we had hung from the trees now lay on the ground, soiled.
On the table were some leftover wedding favors. I got up to get one and went back to the swing. I bit a sugared almond in two and offered half to Bern, but at that moment he started sobbing. I asked him what was wrong, but he was crying so hard that he couldn’t answer. So I took his head in my hands.
“Stop it, please, you’re scaring me.”
His face was convulsed, splotched with red under his eyes, and he was short of breath.
“It was so beautiful . . . ,” he stammered, “the most beautiful day of my life . . . everyone was here . . . did you see? Everyone.”
He said it as if even then he had a premonition that nothing like that would happen again. And at that moment, for the first time, I understood the depth of his nostalgia, of how much he missed them all: his mother and his father, Cesare and Floriana, Tommaso and Danco, maybe even Nicola.
I stood up.
“Where are you going?” he asked, alarmed, as if I too might vanish.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“I don’t want any.”
“It will do you good.”
Inside the house, I leaned my hands on the table. My dress was stained in the front, and it felt tight. I went into the bedroom and took it off, pulling on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I was about to leave the dress there, on the floor, but I spread it out on the bed.
Bern had calmed down, and was swaying gently on the swing-chair, staring straight ahead. He took the cup of tea and blew on it. I sat down where I’d been before.
We stayed like that for a while. Not a word about my having taken off the dress; maybe he hadn’t noticed. He even seemed to have forgotten that he had cried nonstop for ten minutes, and about all the people who had flocked to the masseria, who, until a moment ago, he’d been sure he couldn’t live without. Finally he stood up, lifted the amphora with the money, and hurled it against the concrete patio.
On our knees we separated the bills from the congratulatory notes and cards, the checks from the shards, opening the envelopes without even reading the good wishes. In the end, the table was half buried in bills; a gust of wind made them rustle and blew some to the ground.
We started counting. Cesare had never wanted money to be handled at the masseria, and now here Bern and I were, greedily passing it back and forth. If our guests only knew how different our first night as man and wife was from what they imagined! Under the white cotton tablecloth, Floriana’s plastic one was still there, its map marred by ring-shaped burn marks, where piping-hot plates had been placed.
“Nine thousand three hundred and fifty,” Bern said, after I’d handed him the last bills. He leaned toward me and finally kissed me. “We did it.”
A hysterical joy grabbed us. All that money, and it was ours.
We went into the house. We took turns in the bathroom. Still damp from the shower, Bern climbed on top of me and entered me, clumsily shoving his way in, never taking his mouth off mine. Sex had become drained of meaning, ruined by the fear of failure and by the tons of hormones that had been injected, but not that September night. Although we moved more confidently than we had when we were seventeen, lying on the muddy ground of the reed bed, although there were no more surprises in the way Bern sucked my tongue, in the abruptness of my orgasm, or in the way he clenched his teeth surrendering to his, the unexpected frenzy of our bodies was a new revelation, and for a few seconds we didn’t think about the future. For those moments of the night, only we two existed. But it was the last time.
A FEW DAYS later we brought some sugared almonds to Sanfelice. He chewed them one after the other, greedily. With his fingers still sticky with sugar he flipped through the pages of the calendar and announced that we would have to wait until January for the trip. October was not compatible with my menstrual cycle, November was booked, and in December he would be taking his wife and children on a week’s skiing holiday.
He read the disappointment on our faces and to counter it he redoubled his enthusiasm. But January was perfect! There would be snow, mountains of snow over Kiev! Snow was auspicious, the success rate increased astonishingly. He left us sitting there, speechless, as he searched for statistics on the computer, then he turned the monitor toward us.
“Look here, February 2008. Pregnancies, one hundred percent.”
Neither Bern nor I dared ask him whether snow was lucky in general, or only for him. Was there a reason, some scientific evidence? We were too dazed by fear and hope in equal measure. An unqualified one hundred percent, the doctor promised; he said the snow brought him luck, and we believed him. Having reached that point, we were willing to believe anything.
“Have you already arranged with the secretary for the hotel? We have excellent agreements. I stay at the Premier Palace, but some find it expensive. There’s also a spa. A massage before the embryo transfer is good for you, it helps relax the tissues. For you, no,” he said to Bern, “no massage, just a little elbow grease. Come on, you can do it! And let’s hope it snows galore!”
I REMEMBER ALMOST nothing of the following months, only that I had another round of hormone therapy, somewhat different, less debilitating. The doctor’s secretary phoned us about purchasing the airline tickets, she would take care of everything. So we were choosing the other hotel? Were we really sure? The price difference wasn’t all that much and at the Premier Palace there would also be the doctor, which could be comforting. And would we be taking advantage of the guided tour of the city? From Tuesday (the day of the semen collection) to Saturday morning (the day of the embryo transfer) there wasn’t a whole lot to do. The doctor recommended the tour to everyone, his clients often underestimated Kiev’s attractions.
On New Year’s Eve we went to Corinne and Tommaso’s, but they weren’t themselves, preoccupied by their little daughter, who had recently been hospitalized. They listened intently for the crackling of the baby monitor and took turns jumping up to check on her in the other room.
Danco monopolized the conversation, and when he finally fell silent, no one was able to fill the void. Giuliana yawned shamelessly even before midnight, and her sleepiness was contagious.
Bern and I got in the car right after the toast, grim and envious. “They have a machine to chop the ice,” he said. “Can you imagine how much electricity that thing consumes?”
But the time to pack our suitcases finally came and then the day of departure. At the airport Bern wandered around full of wonder. Everything was new to him. I had to practically lead him by the hand to the check-in desk and then to the lines for the security check.
He observed our luggage being carried along by the conveyor belt and then swallowed up. When we reached the gate, he called my attention to a Boeing maneuvering outside the window. As he watched it accelerate down the runway and peel off from the ground, he smiled like a little boy. Who takes the first plane ride of his life at age twenty-nine? I wondered.
I left him the window seat. He watched the foamy blanket of clouds for almost the entire time. “Imagine walking on it,” he said, pointing out there.
To save money we had chosen a very inconvenient connection with a wait of almost nine hours in Frankfurt. Bern refused to set foot in one of the fast-food places because he was sure the meat came from intensive breeding, and the other restaurants were simply too expensive. We ate some chocolate first, then some bread miserably spread with mustard and pickles. By the time we finally got on the second plane, I was so hungry that I devoured the sandwich served by the stewardess, and immediately afterward the one she’d left on Bern’s table as well, since he was asleep.
I tormented myself thinking about the cannula. A few days before Sanfelice had tried to insert it, “a trial run” he’d called it. It didn’t hurt. It was just something that made you clutch the paper covering on which you were lying. “It’s like an obstacle course with this cervix in the way,” he had said. Then, victorious, he exclaimed, “There we are! We’ll plant the damn thing right here!”
Would he manage to succeed as easily again? We had chosen to transfer the maximum number of embryos: three at once. So much the better if we had twins.
I WOKE UP with a start before landing. The food was churning in my intestines and I could still taste the mustard in my mouth.
“Are you ready?” Bern asked. He looked serious, as if he’d been deep in thought after waking up.
I suppressed the discomfort of my stomachache.
“Sure, ready.”
Outside the Boryspil airport, the wind raised eddies of fine icy particles, sharp crystals that stuck to your face. My fingers were so numb that I could hardly put my gloves on. Our escort, Nastja, walked a few steps ahead of us, but unlike us, she did not bow her head to shield herself from the barrage.
“These are the warmest hours of the day,” she said, with a rather militaristic Italian pronunciation. Her hair was tinted an unnatural red and was very short, with a single long strand hanging on one side. She laughed raucously. “Yesterday minus twenty. First time in Ukraine, huh?”
As if hypnotized, Bern moved off toward a rotunda in the middle of the parking lot, where the snow was about a dozen inches thick. There were no drifts as Sanfelice had promised, only a hardened layer of ice. Bern laid his bare hand on it.
“I didn’t remember it,” he said.
But I didn’t feel like indulging his wonder at the snow, not while my legs and face were freezing, not while that woman was waiting for us at the car and my bowels felt like they were being twisted by a pair of forceps.
In the car, Nastja sat sideways in her seat to be able to talk to us. “You are worried,” she said.
“No.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You have fearful faces. Look here,” she said, rummaging in her purse and pulling out a phone. She showed us a photo of two children. “Both with Dr. Fedecko. My husband, Taras, has a drunken sperm.”
She puffed out her cheeks to mimic her husband’s sperm. The children in the picture, radiant, were holding a tray full of bills.
“Thirteen hundred dollars. Won at casino,” Nastja exclaimed. “Taras always wants boys, boys. Only boys. You have selected the sex?”
Outside the car window, a succession of gigantic buildings on the city’s outer edge began. Was it girls living inside those concrete monoliths who offered their eggs in exchange for money?
Bern lit up with excitement at the sight of the frozen Dnieper.
Then, touching my wrist, he said, “Look! Look at that.” On the hill was a group of golden spires.
“Pecer’ska Lavra,” Nastja told us, “we go to visit it tomorrow. And that up there is the steel lady. Last Soviet statue, ordered by Nikita Khrushchev. See what big tits? Russian woman tits,” she said, her hands making a vulgar gesture.
The pain in my belly had spread and now extended to my entire lower back. If I didn’t get to a bathroom soon, there would be a disaster.
“What’s wrong?” Bern asked.
“How much longer to the hotel?”
Nastja pointed vaguely ahead. “After bridge comes center.”
Then she said to herself: “Faces very, very fearful, yes.”
The columns in the hotel’s lobby were overlaid with a plastic coating that imitated veins of marble. The red carpeting ranged everywhere. The male staff, all in livery, were sitting in the corners with a drowsy air; their eyes followed us as we handed over our passports, filled out the registration forms, and got some final instructions from Nastja.
“Down here at five o’clock, with a nice jar of sperm. Nastja’s advice: a glass of vodka first, just one, and a slice of salo, lard. The lard makes the semen stronger. Secret of Taras.”
We rolled our suitcases toward the elevators. I had the impression that everyone knew why we were there.
The room on the second floor had a single window overlooking a parking lot full of debris. Across from it was a building gutted by a collapse or maybe never completed.
I locked myself in the bathroom while Bern sprawled out on the chenille bedspread. I filled the tub and remained soaking in it until I melted, even though the water coming out of the pipes seemed to be as contaminated as everything else. But at least it was piping-hot and helped relieve my chills.
Bern took Nastja at her word. I wanted to stay in the room, crawl under the covers, and wait, but he made me get dressed. We had to go look for the salo.
Outside, on Khreschatyk Street, columns of cold, harsh Siberian air advanced on us. We walked for more than half an hour, first along a park, then downhill on the avenue that led to the train station. The plaza in front was a huge, treacherous slab of ice, and the humanity that populated it, males only, with caps lowered over their eyes, made me beg Bern to leave there immediately.
We went back up the same street and ducked into a café that seemed stuck in another century: lace curtains on the windows, wood-paneled walls, blinking Christmas lights. Bern managed to order the lard. The woman brought it to him cut in thick strips, with pickles on the side.
“It looks disgusting,” I said.
“It’s for the cause,” he replied, amused, then he picked up a slice of fat between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it into his mouth. My bowels roiled again. Bern ate all the salo on his plate.
There was still time; he wanted to walk. It was the excitement of his first trip abroad, so far from Speziale, except for the mysterious year he’d spent with his father in Germany, too young then to remember it except in confused flashes, and which he never spoke about in any case. Even the clouds of condensation that came from our mouths seemed extraordinary to him. I decided to let his exuberance rub off on me. It was our honeymoon trip after all, bizarre, troubling, but still our honeymoon. As far as Danco and the others were concerned, at that moment we were in Budapest, being tourists. I could at least pretend it was so.
When we returned to the hotel the other couples were gathered around Nastja in the lobby lounge. The woman spread her arms out to us and in an embarrassingly loud voice exclaimed: “Here they are, the two missing ones. Jar, quickly!”
She asked Bern if he needed magazines or photographs, she had plenty in her bag. He refused, though fascinated by such boldness. He asked me to wait for him there.
Nastja led me to the armchairs, practically forcing me into the only vacant one. The lady beside me turned to me and said, “Yesterday my endometrial thickness was fourteen millimeters. Sanfelice says it’s perfect.”
She didn’t say her name, didn’t offer her hand, didn’t choose words generally used to start a conversation, she simply told me the thickness of her endometrium, then added: “It’s the seventh time we’ve come. But it was always thinner. Besides, did you see how much snow there is on the streets?”
I kept staring at the closed doors of the elevator at the end of the hall, until Bern reappeared. He crossed the empty lobby and handed the sample to Nastja, in front of everyone, without a trace of embarrassment.
“The latecomer,” she said, then studied the jar against the light. “Good, good, there is a lot. Do you know what they say here in Kiev? That you must always stock up for a dark day. Because sooner or later it comes. It always comes. Cherniy den’, the dark day.”
A BLIZZARD KEPT us confined to the room for two days. The gusts were so violent they made the windowpanes shudder. The wind was called buran, the driving snow was purga. Bern found it amusing and kept repeating it: buran, purga, purga, buran.
I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. I lay on the bed, staring at the damp stains on the wallpaper, trying to guess its original color. Lying next to me, Bern studied the travel guide. Occasionally he’d read something aloud, then he’d look for a pencil and underline the passage that interested him.
But on the third day, the day before the transfer, the sun was shining, dazzling because of the snow, though it provided no warmth. Nastja was waiting for us in the lobby, for the guided city tour. I didn’t want to go, but Bern couldn’t see why: we were there, we had the whole city at our disposal, and it was such a radiant day.
“Brave souls,” Nastja said, spotting us. “Let’s go.”
The city seemed hostile and frightening to me, just as at first: the underpasses with their stifling shops, the homeless prostrate from alcohol, then down into the subway, on escalators so long and steep they seemed to lead to the bowels of the earth, the names of the stops written in that incomprehensible alphabet. Bern and Nastja were always a few steps ahead of me, closely engaged in a conversation that I had neither the strength nor the desire to follow. A suffocating heat inside the buildings, a paralyzing cold outside; I tried to cover my mouth and my nose with my scarf.
On the Andriyivskyy Descent, I lost my balance twice. Bern turned to look at me with a strange indifference, almost as if he were annoyed. He was attracted by the stalls and insisted on buying a gas mask from the Cold War era, which Nastja helped him put on.
“Danco would like it,” he said. But we were short on money and we weren’t sure if anything like it could be found in Budapest, so he left it there.
I looked at the young women around us. They were as beautiful as Sanfelice had promised, tall and slender, with dark hair and very pale complexions. It could be her, I told myself, meeting the clear gaze of a passerby. What will her name be? Natalija? Solomija? Ljudmyla? And will she have other children? I couldn’t stop those thoughts and I didn’t dare confide them to Bern. He would have told me to stop being silly, he would have quoted Sanfelice’s words the way he used to quote the psalms.
I persuaded him to take a taxi to the hotel. Nastja backed me, I had to be rested for the following day.
As we went up the wide, tree-lined avenue, the car radio played a song I knew. I hummed a few bars in a low voice.
“What is it?” Bern asked.
“Roxette. ‘Joyride.’ I used to listen to it when I was a kid.”
The driver caught something, because he said, “Roxette, yeah! You like music nineties?”
I said yes, I liked it, but mainly not to dampen his enthusiasm.
“I also,” he said, his limpid eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Listen.”
For the rest of the drive, all the way back to Khreschatyk Street, he chose one song after another for me, each time looking for me to confirm that I liked it: “Don’t Speak,” then “Killing Me Softly,” then “Wonderwall.” I looked out the window; the sun had set quite a while ago, the areas of the sidewalk away from the streetlamps remained in the dark.
In front of the hotel entrance, Nastja said, “Tomorrow money, remember. In euro cash.”
A STORK PERCHED above the doors of the clinic. It was stone, but so well carved that at first I mistook it for a real one. Sanfelice had chosen to proceed in alphabetical order according to the surnames of the women, and we were the third couple.
We found ourselves in a modern space, a taste of the future in the middle of a neighborhood where everything else looked old and worn. Nastja held me by the arm, as if I might escape. Before I stepped past the doormat, she handed me two plastic bags.
“For shoes. You, too,” she told Bern who was following us in silence. She was treating him more brusquely than she had the day before, as if at that point he were only an impediment.
I covered my shoes with the blue plastic. That sanitary precaution should have reassured me, but instead my tension mounted progressively as I went up the shiny polished stairs, as Bern was diverted to another corridor with no time for us to say goodbye, and as I filled out the preprinted forms, written in an English full of grammatical errors, requiring my consent for freezing the embryos and for disposing of them after ten years.
Then I was lying in an operating room equipped with machinery and lamps, the walls covered with tiles up to the ceiling. On one side was Dr. Fedecko, extraordinarily tall, with a blond mustache, and on the other side Sanfelice, with his usual cheerful air, though more subdued than usual.
“We have competitive-quality blastocysts,” he said, “all 3AA. Those of the lady before were only B, just for comparison.”
In the meantime, Fedecko advanced with the cannula, looking for the least resistant path to enter me, more delicate than Sanfelice had been during the trial run. It was over in an instant. The doctors complimented me, though I wasn’t sure for what. I had simply lain still, nothing more, and everything that had ensued didn’t seem to really concern me, or it concerned me only indirectly.
I was brought to another room, smaller, with a large window. I waited for what seemed like a very long time. I could see the snow-covered hill, and in the center of that whiteness the golden spires of Pecer’ska Lavra. We had visited it the day before, but it was more enthralling seen like this, from afar, like a mirage.
I felt cold. And where was Bern? Suddenly I convinced myself that he was no longer in the building, maybe not even in the city, and everything became distant, unreachable, like the miniature of the Lavra on the hill.
Then the door swung open. Sanfelice and Dr. Fedecko entered along with two nurses and, behind them, Bern. He didn’t dare approach the bed, except after we were left to ourselves. Then he helped me get up and put on the clothes that a supernatural hand had transferred from the room where I had taken them off to the closet in this room.
With no one to escort us anymore, we made our way alone through a maze of corridors. We went down more stairs and found ourselves in the lobby. Nastja was there. She bent down to remove the nylon shoe covers I again had on my feet, and pointed to the car waiting for us outside.
THE VEGETATION at the masseria was dozing thanks to winter. Bern and I were as suspended as the nature around us. He studied me silently, looking for any change in my body, in my metabolism, in my sleep. I quarreled with him about the littlest things—for example, over the fact that he hadn’t swept the pavement in the yard and the leaves had blocked the drain. Actually, I wanted to shout at him to stop following me around, stop asking me how I felt, stop boring into me with his eyes wherever I went! The truth was that I felt exactly as I had before, only more listless, more irritable.
So I really wasn’t surprised when Sanfelice, after circling the intrauterine probe around and consulting the monitor full of jumbled shadows, announced that there was nothing, nothing that was moving.
“What a shame. All those fantastic blastocysts. However, the next trip is in March.”
Bern had not accompanied me to the visit. “Let’s act as if it’s a day like any other day,” he’d said.
When I phoned him, he was at the farmers’ market in Martina Franca. He left me on hold while he finished serving a customer. I listened to the exchange between them, then I pictured him crouching down, hiding under the table to gain some privacy. Conspiring had become a habit for both of us.
“Well?” he said in a low voice.
I told him the results without preamble, almost brutally. Then, immediately remorseful, I added: “I’m very sorry for you.”
“It’s all right,” he said, but he was breathing hard.
“I’m sorry for you,” I repeated.
“Why are you saying that? Why do you feel sorry for me?”
“I only just realized it. But it’s true. I feel sorrier for you than for myself.”
“You don’t think that, Teresa. You’re just upset. You don’t really think that.”
“You should find another woman, Bern. One who functions better.”
It was during the ensuing interval of silence that I realized I was right. Before Bern could say it wasn’t true, that I shouldn’t talk that way, that I was only being silly. A very brief pause, no more than a split second’s hesitation, the time needed to take a slightly deeper breath. He was considering the possibility that I had offered him. For a moment he weighed and compared two impossible choices: his desire for me and his heart-wrenching yearning for a child. This too could happen. It could be that in life, irreconcilable desires develop in people. It wasn’t fair but it couldn’t be avoided, and it had happened to us.
His uncertainty told me which of the two desires had prevailed, though he now denied it as forcefully as a telephone conversation in the middle of the market allowed him to. But I wasn’t angry with him. On the contrary, I felt calm, as lucid as I’d been the night of the cramps. In fact, I didn’t feel anything anymore.
I said: “Maybe you don’t realize it now. But in five years, or ten or twenty, it doesn’t matter how long, sooner or later you’ll realize what I took from you and you will hate me for it. For having ruined your life.”
“You’re talking nonsense, Teresa. It’s the disappointment talking for you. Go home now. Go home and rest. We’ll make another trip, another attempt.”
“No, Bern. There won’t be another trip. We’ve gone far enough. And it wouldn’t do any good. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.”
I could see him, Bern, more and more huddled under the table, the din of the market around him.
“We’re married, Teresa.”
He affirmed it sternly, as if that were enough to put an end to the discussion. It wouldn’t have worked, not like this. Bern would have insisted, pleaded if necessary, then we would have gone home and he would have patched things up with his ready phrases, one by one. The gleam of his black eyes would have won me over in the end, and we would have started all over again. Another absurd hunt for money, another round of treatments, another trip in vain to the most inhospitable place on earth, then the disappointment and so on, ad infinitum, until it destroyed us both.
I recalled the expressionless face of the woman in the armchair at the hotel in Kiev, the doggedness that had transformed her year after year. I did not want to end up that way. We were still young.
I said: “We made a mistake.”
“Stop that!”
Strange, the reversal of roles between us, I hadn’t foreseen it. I hadn’t foreseen any of this. From the beginning I had been the one prepared to be abandoned; I had loved him from a distance, miles away, like a fool, while he had gotten someone else in trouble. And maybe it was because of the repressed memory of that summer, left unspoken, that I now knew what to do, how to halt the spiral into which we’d been driven, a spiral triggered the moment when Tommaso and Corinne had told us about their baby and we had begun to fantasize about ours. Yes, there was only one way to give Bern back his freedom and regain mine.
“There’s someone else,” I said.
“Someone else?” he repeated, practically whispering.
I knew him well enough to know that this was the only way to go. I was lucid and self-possessed. I was worn out and full of rage and my heart was broken. I would not stop.
“Yes. Another man. For me.”
“You’re lying.”
I stopped answering, because if I had, he would have known.
Then his voice underwent a transformation. For a few seconds Bern became someone else, someone I had never known, someone furious.
“It’s him, isn’t it? Is it him, Teresa? Tell me, is it him?” he shouted.
“It doesn’t matter who it is.”
Those were the last words we spoke to each other, for a long time. “It doesn’t matter who it is.” In fact, those were almost the final words of our brief, unfortunate, and nonetheless indelible marriage.
I DID NOT go back to the masseria. I drove around aimlessly until after sunset. Later I would not be able to reconstruct my route through the outskirts of Francavilla, then through the maze of dirt country roads that sometimes ended abruptly at a gate, with guard dogs rushing to the fence, barking as though possessed.
I went back to Speziale, but I could not go home. I had a feeling that Bern was there, waiting to see with his own eyes if what I had told him on the phone was true, waiting to interrogate my body instead of my voice.
Only by spending the night away would the nonexistent betrayal that I had confessed assume solidity.
It’s him, isn’t it?
Before reaching the dirt track to the masseria, I turned into my grandmother’s villa. I rang and waited for the electric gate to swing open, the flashing light at the top intermittently revealing the countryside.
Riccardo came toward me, wearing a tracksuit. I asked him if I could stay there for the night, in the lodge. It was a brazen, almost ridiculous request, but I must have looked so distraught that he said: “Of course, but it’s freezing cold in the lodge.”
“That’s all right.”
“The guest room is free. Come inside. I’ll go get you some sheets.”
The guest room was my old room. After he handed me some sheets and towels, and after I refused his offer to eat something, Riccardo closed the door, wishing me good night, sensing that in another moment his presence would have been intolerable to me.
And so, there I was back where I had started, in the room of my childhood, the villa dark for hours by now and me still awake, no sign of sleep, only exhaustion, that edgy exhaustion that has already ruled out any possibility of sleep. Lying in the bed where it had all begun.
A glow filtered through the shutters. The rising moon, I thought. But it couldn’t be the moon, because it was a flickering light. I got out of bed and threw open the window, letting the cold air hit me, and I saw the blaze, the changing glimmers of the flames and the column of smoke rising straight up in the absence of wind before dissolving in the black sky, right where the masseria was. Neither the sound nor the smell of the fire reached me, there was only that slash of light among the treetops.
My first instinct was to rush over there, but it took only a moment to realize that it was only a signal, an ultimate appeal launched by Bern against the night, so that I would run to where he was and take back what I had said on the phone. A pyre to say: As long as it burns, I will wait here, ready to believe whatever you say, ready to forget. But when the flames have died and the embers are cold, I won’t be here anymore, and what you said will be true forever.
I wondered what he had set fire to, whether it was the tool shed, the greenhouse, or the house itself with everything that it contained, mine and his. The next day I would discover that he had burned the woodpile, the entire reserve of firewood. But in my old room at the villa I didn’t know it yet. At that moment I could only go on watching, my feet rooted to the icy stone floor; I did not reach for the blanket on the bed and wrap it around my shoulders, I just watched, until the flames diminished and finally, at dawn, died out completely.
TWO DAYS after our abrupt and shocking separation, I returned to Turin. I felt that my time at Speziale had ended. Now that I was too old, I would continue everything that I had abandoned when I was still too young.
I didn’t even stick it out a month, however. The cold, efficient ways of the city, the rain followed by the luminous, heart-wrenching days of March, but above all my parents’ wary forbearance, their tacit satisfaction over the failure, left my nerves constantly on edge. By then my life was in Puglia, so I went back. Not with the trepidation I’d had when I was a girl or with the relief of the last few years, but with a tenuous resignation, as if by that time I had no alternative. I was certain that I would not find Bern there, and in fact I didn’t.
At times I didn’t sleep because I was afraid. My head was filled with the macabre stories that I had heard about that countryside over time: a man had been attacked in his home, hands and feet tied, and tortured for hours with a red-hot iron. They were nothing more than old wives’ tales of course, but in the darkness and the silence I let myself imagine things. One night I heard something metallic slamming about outside, very close to the house. I opened the door, trembling. A dog had his snout in the overturned garbage pail and was rummaging through it; he stared at me for a few seconds before trotting away.
But eventually I got used to it. After Danco and the others left, I felt it had all been a slow preparation for solitude, which was now complete. I accepted the simple comfort that nature was able to offer me. To lessen the feeling of loneliness at least a little, I bought a goat, which I let wander freely around the property. I started going to town more often and joined the parish choir and an amateur volleyball team at the recreational club. At the masseria, I had a phone line and an internet connection put in. The company’s technician, a young man with long hair tied back in a ponytail, walked around the grounds holding up a metal pole in an attempt to link to the best cell, as if it were a divining rod. He set up the antenna and was amazed at my utter incompetence where computers were concerned. He gave me the necessary instructions and his business card, just in case.
One of my grandmother’s former students, who now taught at the elementary school, came up with the idea of arranging guided tours of the masseria. The project that we had initiated there was vital, she said, and I could convey a respect for tradition and for the land. I was skeptical at first, since I had no experience with classes and I did not feel authorized to talk about the principles that we applied at the masseria; they were Bern’s and Danco’s, I had merely imitated them. But it turned out to be easier than I thought. I found myself teaching how mulching enabled us to save as much as ninety percent of the water, and why it was therefore crucial. I explained to the children why a spiral vegetable garden was more efficient than the rectangular ones they were used to and made up contests in which they had to recognize the aromatic herbs blindfolded, by touching or sniffing them. I let them sow seeds and water the plants, and when I wanted to stir them up, I showed them how the compost toilet worked, how it served to fertilize the soil.
As for Bern, I knew that he had been drifting for a while, but that he was now living in an apartment in Taranto with Tommaso, after Tommaso and Corinne split up. It was Danco who told me. I didn’t hear from any of them anymore, but he showed up at the masseria one day, sent by Bern himself, with a list of things to take.
“He could have come himself,” I blurted.
“After what you did to him?”
Perhaps he realized how tactless he’d been, because he added: “Anyway, it’s none of my business.”
He moved brazenly through the rooms, as if the place still belonged to him. He consulted the sheet of paper with Bern’s handwriting.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s doing okay.”
Knowing he was all right should have comforted me, but I wasn’t capable of such generosity. I sat down at the kitchen table, suddenly weary, watching Danco rummage through the drawers.
“Bern is made for lofty ambitions,” he said at one point. “None of us has the right to restrict him.”
“Is that what you think I did? Restrict him?”
Danco shrugged. “I’m just saying that before you showed up at the masseria we had plans. And now we can resume them.”
“And what plans would they be? I’m curious. Liberating the cows? The sheep?”
He turned to look at me. “There is something more important than ourselves, Teresa. You’ve always been a slave to your idea of happiness.”
But I wasn’t willing to put up with his lectures, not anymore.
“And these plans of yours, do you realize them with the money from my grandmother’s house? Don’t touch that coffeepot, put it down! I was the one who bought it, it’s mine. If Bern put it on the list, he was mistaken.”
He put it back. “Whatever you say.”
I waited for him to complete his mission. I sat there the whole time, filled with a grudging bitterness.
Before leaving, Danco waved to me. On the table under the pergola, I found the sheet with the list: written on the back was Tommaso’s new address.
I DIDN’T HEAR anything more about Bern for a year. Until the morning I was awakened by the crunch of tires on the dirt track; it was not long after daybreak.
I reached the door a fraction of a second after someone started knocking firmly. I didn’t ask who it was before opening; I grabbed my parka from the coat rack and put it on over my nightgown.
One of the policemen introduced himself, but I wouldn’t remember his name, maybe I didn’t even catch it. He said, “Are you Mrs. Corianò?”
“Yes.”
“The wife of Bernardo Corianò?”
I nodded again, though it was strange to hear Bern mentioned in the chill of dawn.
“Is your husband at home?”
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“You haven’t seen him today?”
“I told you, he doesn’t live here anymore.”
“And do you have any idea where he might be at this time?”
Something prompted me to say no, a vague protective instinct. Somewhere I still had the sheet with the address left by Danco, and in any case I had memorized it from looking at it so often. But I said no.
You promised to watch over one another . . . Don’t ever stop.
“Would you rather we came inside and sat down, ma’am?”
“No. I’d rather we remain standing. Right here.”
“As you prefer. I suppose you aren’t aware of what happened last night,” the policeman said, stroking his chin, as if embarrassed. “It appears your husband is involved in a murder.”
“You must be mistaken,” I said. A nervous laugh escaped me.
“There was a confrontation over cutting down some olive trees. He was among the protesters.”
The light on the countryside was whitish, opaque.
“What murder?” I asked.
“A police officer. His name was Nicola Belpanno.”