What I remember most about the morning the police arrived is the silence. A silence different from usual, as if even the birds were struck dumb and the lizards frozen in the grass at hearing those words that changed everything: It appears your husband is involved in a murder . . . A police officer. His name was Nicola Belpanno.
The policeman asked my permission to enter the house. I didn’t see any reason to prevent him, yet I didn’t immediately move to let him pass, he had to ask a second time and then slip sideways through the space between my shoulder and the doorjamb. His partner came in after him, embarrassed, his head lowered.
I looked at the room as it must have appeared to them: the table in disarray from the night before, set for one, my muddy boots tossed on the carpet, the blanket crumpled up on the sofa. All signs of neglect on the part of someone who never expects visitors.
“Can we go up?”
“I haven’t made the bed yet,” I replied stupidly.
I leaned against the fireplace wall. I wanted to say that there were no secrets up there, nothing they were looking for: Bern hadn’t been in those rooms for a long time, even though I had imagined him practically every night before falling asleep alone. I’d pictured him crossing the space with his long strides, and I’d talked to him, talked to him out loud. But I stood there watching the policemen move silently about and then take the stairs.
It appears your husband . . . His name was Nicola Belpanno.
I could almost understand the sentences separately, but the connection continued to elude me.
I did not offer the cops a cup of coffee or a glass of water. It didn’t occur to me.
When we were at the door again, the only one of the two who seemed authorized to speak said: “I believe we’ll be back for a more thorough inspection. Maybe even today. I’d be grateful if you would avoid going anywhere in the next few hours.”
Then they left.
I sat in the swing-chair. Its shaky frame creaked, even though I didn’t feel I was moving. A strange form of shock, entirely new, was taking hold of me.
. . . involved in a murder.
Around nine o’clock the telephone in the house began to ring. Here we go, I told myself, now it’s starting.
It was a girl from a sales call center. I let her finish, registering everything she said, every unessential bit of information about a discount on sports channels and a leased decoder. Then I told her that I didn’t own a TV and something in my voice must have frightened her because she cut it short.
I stared at the silent phone for a while, as if waiting for the right call. Then I went back to sit under the pergola. The policeman had advised me not to leave, and I wouldn’t. I would stay right there, until the ridiculous version of events I’d heard at dawn proved to be a hoax.
His name was Nicola Belpanno.
THEY RETURNED in the early afternoon, three cars, tires squealing unnecessarily before they parked. They had a search warrant and a different attitude from what they’d had that morning. Now they were more determined, aggressive.
I went to sit under the holly oak. I stayed outside while each object was touched, turned over, opened, emptied. From the bench I noticed that some of the leaves were dotted with yellow. I picked one off and examined it against the light.
The same officer with whom I’d spoken in the morning joined me and sat down next to me. “Let’s start again from the beginning, all right?”
“Whatever you say.”
“This morning you stated that your husband hadn’t been in this house for a long time.”
“Three hundred and ninety-five days.”
He looked surprised. Obviously he was surprised. On the night of our wedding, I thought, Bern was standing where he was now sitting.
“Should I conclude from this that you and your husband are no longer together?”
“I suppose you could conclude that.”
“Yet at the registry office he is still listed as residing here. You did not initiate separation proceedings.”
At that point I should have explained to him that the separation from Bern had in fact been announced. Announced by his burning a woodpile in the middle of the night. If he looked closely, he would still make out the scorched spot on the ground. And I should have explained to him that Bern could not change his residence for any other place in the world, because his soul was lodged here, among these trees, among these stones. Instead I was silent. The policeman tapped his pen on his notebook.
“Can you tell me where your husband was living during the past year?”
I lied, just as I had done a few hours earlier, in response to the same question. But whereas in the morning I had done it out of a vague precautionary instinct, I now lied deliberately to protect Bern. Whatever he had done.
“I don’t know.”
From that moment on, the grilling became more pressing. The agent had made an effort to be friendly, but it was clear that we were not on the same side. Was I aware of my husband’s involvement with extremist environmental fringe groups? Did I also have associations with those elements? Were there places my husband habitually frequented, places he spoke of often? People he may have named? Had I ever seen him manufacture weapons? Was he interested in building explosive devices before?
No, no, no, my only answer was no. Seen from a distance, the policeman and I must not have seemed so different from the boys who sat beside Cesare in turn, with him doing the talking and me being silent, staring straight ahead or at my feet, a few monosyllables dragged out of me from time to time.
“Mrs. Corianò, I advise you to cooperate. It’s in your own best interest.”
“I am cooperating.”
“So Bernardo Corianò is not linked to any extremist groups.”
“No.”
“And Danco Viglione? What can you tell me about him?”
“Danco is a pacifist.”
“You talk about him as if you knew him well.”
“We lived together. Here, for two years.”
“I see. You, Corianò, Danco Viglione, and who else?”
“Danco’s girlfriend. And another couple.”
“Giuliana Mancini, Tommaso Foglia, and Corinne Argentieri.”
“If you already knew, why did you ask me?”
But the agent ignored the question.
“You see, I find it very strange that you describe Viglione that way. Calling him a pacifist, when he’s actually a convicted offender.”
I felt it hard to breathe. “A convicted offender?”
“Ah, you didn’t know that?”
The policeman flipped back a few pages through his notebook. He read: “For aggravated assault in 2001. Resisting an officer in 2002, in Rome. He and others stripped naked during an international summit. Odd, isn’t it? Your housemate spent a few nights in custody. You weren’t aware of it, I guess.”
Someone was rummaging around in my bedroom, I saw him pass from one side of the window to the other. All he would find was loss.
“As for Giuliana Mancini,” he went on, “the lady was arrested a couple of times with Viglione, but has also been charged with computer fraud. At the moment she too appears to be untraceable.”
He straightened his shoulders. He set the notebook facedown on his lap, as if he were laying down a weapon.
“I’m curious. What exactly did you all do here together?”
“We harvested the olives. We sold our products at the market.”
We were realizing a utopia. But I didn’t say that.
“You were farmers, in short. And your husband, Corianò, is he a pacifist too?”
“Bern has his convictions.”
“Explain that better. What exactly does he believe in?”
What indeed. He had believed in everything and stopped believing in everything. At that point I no longer knew.
I said, “He has a lot of faith in Danco.”
The policeman looked at me, a flicker of triumph in his eyes. If Bern was a follower of Danco and Danco was a previous offender, then Bern too must be a dangerous individual. Answering him like that had been a mistake, but it was too late now. The agent was silent, maybe waiting for me to reveal something more, to go further, but I didn’t say another word. Under the holly oak the air smelled like resin.
“How did he die?” I asked him finally.
“They bashed his skull. With a spade.”
He used that brutal expression on purpose, I think, to get even with me for being reticent. It worked, because the image planted itself in my eyes: Nicola’s head bashed in by a spade. It would never go away.
“Have you already talked to his father?”
“With Belpanno’s father? Someone is with his parents right now. Why do you ask?”
I looked him in the eye.
“Do you know him?” he asked.
He looked off balance, as if he realized he’d been talking to the wrong person the whole time.
“Nicola and Bern are practically brothers. They grew up together. You people think Bern hurt Nicola, but you’re wrong. His father, Cesare, will confirm it.”
The agent told me not to move. From the holly oak I watched him walk away, then talk on the phone, plugging up his free ear with a finger. He did not come back to ask me any more questions.
After that they left. The same deafening stillness of the morning. I opened the goat’s pen and watched her step out and idly graze the winter grass. She was looking for the harebells hidden among the blades.
I went into the house, imagining that I’d find it topsy-turvy, but it was orderly, a somewhat chilly tidiness that wasn’t me, as if by putting things in place the cops had wanted to reproach me for my neglect. I sat down at the computer. The news appeared as the lead story on the Corriere del Mezzogiorno’s website: “Policeman Fatally Wounded During a Tree-Felling Demonstration. Suspects on the Run.”
You could click on the title story or on one of the in-depth analyses: The location of the conflict—Interactive map of Xylella—A life in government service.
No mention of Nicola and Bern being related. I started reading the main article, but by then I was so shaken that I had to get up, go outside, and pace back and forth for several minutes.
When the phone rang again I ran to answer it. It was strange to hear my mother’s voice. Since Bern was no longer living here, since the obstacle of Bern had been removed, we talked at least twice a week, but that wasn’t the usual day, that wasn’t the scheduled time.
“Oh, dammit, Teresa! Dammit!”
She was crying. I asked her to please stop. A very fragile balance was at stake. Something massive and irreparable was ready to explode in me and I knew it would happen if I kept on hearing her sob.
“They’re talking about it on the radio too,” she said.
“Of course,” I replied, but meanwhile I was thinking that my parents never listened to the radio. Maybe things had changed since I was gone. Maybe now they did.
“Come back here, Teresa. Come home. I’ll go to the agency and get you a ticket.”
“I can’t leave the area. The police advised me to stay nearby.”
Mentioning the police triggered a fit of hysteria. But this time it didn’t produce any reaction in me.
“Isn’t Dad there?”
“He went to bed. I persuaded him to take a Xanax. He was beside himself.”
“Mom, I have to go.”
“No, wait! Your father asked me to make sure to tell you, tell Teresa that we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it, do you hear me? We know him. He wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
BY THE FOLLOWING DAY the wind had swept away the clouds. I was expecting another milky day, lingering rain, a landscape matching my dejection, but instead the sky was crystal clear and the rays of sun slanting through the countryside brought a new warmth. The first day of spring, a week early.
Outside the town’s newsstand was a small post with a scrolling digital display in block letters: TRAGEDY IN A FAMILY OF SPEZIALE. So the news they’d missed about Nicola and Bern being related had emerged.
“Where are they talking about it?” I asked Maurizio, the newsagent.
“Everywhere. But especially here.”
I glanced quickly at the headlines of the Quotidiano di Puglia and the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. Both front pages showed the same photograph of Nicola that I had found online the day before. I hunted for some coins at the bottom of my bag.
“Don’t worry about it,” Maurizio said, folding the newspapers.
“I don’t see why,” I said, handing him a fifty-euro bill. “That’s all I have.”
“You can pay me another time.”
“I said no.”
He took the change from the cash register. Meanwhile, other customers had gathered. I knew them, and they knew me. I noticed their looks, their eyes went from the newspaper headline to my face, then back to the headline. Maurizio very slowly counted out the bills. When he looked up, his expression had changed from before. He said, “When they were kids they used to come to the newsstand and stare at everything, their eyes popping out of their sockets. My father always told us about it.”
In the car I read the article in the Gazzetta in a rush. It didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know, only that the search for the fugitives had been extended to all of Puglia. That word “fugitives” hit me. Pictures of Bern and Danco and Giuliana were provided, and everyone was urged to cooperate.
I noticed that Nicola’s age was wrong, thirty-one instead of thirty-two. He had turned thirty-two the month before, on February 16. I had sent him a happy-birthday message and he had replied thanks with a lot of exclamation points. For years that’s all we’d done, sent meaningless birthday greetings.
I looked for the obituary page. His item was the first. He was remembered by his parents and, in the box below, by his police colleagues. Nothing was said about a funeral. I went to the Quotidiano di Puglia and reread the same information, the same error about Nicola’s age, but here they’d added that the funeral had been postponed because of the autopsy. When I looked up from the page I saw an elderly gentleman, one of the regulars in the piazza, seated on his bicycle, stopped a few steps away from the car. He was staring at me.
When I returned home I found the school bus parked in front of the masseria. The children were gathered around, each with his backpack containing a bag lunch. I had completely forgotten about the visit scheduled for that morning. The teacher, Elvira, and her colleague were waiting for me under the pergola, twisting their hands. I apologized for being late. It sounded ridiculous.
“We weren’t sure if you’d feel up to it,” Elvira said.
“It’s fine.”
“I’m sure everything will be cleared up, Teresa.”
She touched my arm, gently, and that unexpected contact startled me. I turned to the children: “Did you find the goat? Yesterday I left her pen open. Go look for her, go on. She usually wanders off that way.” I waved my hand to send them away and they started running in the direction I’d indicated.
Later I looked on as they carved pumpkins and scooped the orange pulp onto the ground. I distributed carrot seeds, one apiece, then watched them dig holes in the soil with their fingers, deposit the seeds, and cover them back up, full of hope. I promised that I would look after the seedlings, knowing full well that I wouldn’t water the seeds even once, that I would let them die of thirst, every last one of them.
“Now do whatever you like,” I said. “Run, climb, tear the place apart for all I care.”
I went into the house without bothering to say goodbye to the teachers. I closed the door and sank onto the sofa. I was still there, perfectly alert, when the school bus drove off along the dirt track.
CONTRARY TO WHAT was originally theorized, Nicola had not died from the spade striking the back of his head. According to the autopsy, that blow had caused a fairly mild concussion. It had been the impact with a sharp rock that had caused much more severe internal hemorrhaging, an impact that the fall alone was not able to justify. “A further contributing factor must have crushed Belpanno’s head forcefully against the rock,” the press release reported. A further contributing factor. On the temple, on the opposite side, there were bruises compatible with the cleated sole of a massive shoe, a boot, maybe an army-issue rubber boot. Someone had flattened his head against the rock with his foot.
Just when the date of the funeral was announced, Danco’s jeep was found along the coast, parked in a grassy clearing. The area was rarely frequented in the winter, the article online said, whereas in the summer it was always crowded because it was just a few steps from a well-known hangout for young people, the Scalo. Reading that, I felt dizzy. I saw Nicola and myself there many years ago, me unhappy with being alone with him, and him looking for an excuse to keep me there.
The investigators’ opinion was that Bern, Danco, and Giuliana had fled by sea, with the help of an accomplice. It did not appear that any of them was familiar with navigation. Inside the ruined tower, a few hundred yards from the jeep, the carabinieri had found a bag with a few clothes and some food remains. According to the reporter, the escape was an implicit admission of the crime. And the hideout, as he insisted on calling it, showed it was premeditated.
The thought of Cesare haunted me. Should I send him a telegram? Was it already too late? There were lists of appropriate phrases on the internet; I read and reread them, but none seemed even remotely adequate.
“Our thoughts are with you . . .”
“May the eternal memory of . . .”
Finally I dropped the idea altogether.
I was undecided about the funeral as well, up until the last minute. An hour from when it was due to start I was still at the masseria, dressed in my work clothes, wandering around aimlessly in the hope that time would leap forward three hours, or maybe ten years. I had to make a mad dash along the highway, under a persistent, furious rain, straightening my hair with my fingers and trying to rub my eyes free of the expression of loss that had marked my face for days.
Police headquarters had insisted that Nicola be accorded a state funeral: a clear sign of solidarity toward law enforcement. The pews of Ostuni’s cathedral were filled from the first to the last row, even the back of the church and the aisles were jammed with people standing: policemen with their families, carabinieri in ceremonial uniform, ordinary citizens drawn there by indignation.
I kept away from anyone who might recognize me, especially from Cesare and Floriana, who were virtually unreachable in any case, wedged between Nicola’s coffin, covered with flowers, and the wall of people behind them.
I spotted Tommaso standing beside a column. He was trying to go unnoticed. There was just a glance between us, more hostile than emotional, our mutual distrust was still there.
The ceremony took place in utmost silence, as if we were being watched from above. The bishop called a younger priest, Don Valerio, to the pulpit. It was only after I’d heard him speak for a while—after he said, “I visited the house where Nicola lived with his parents a number of times, I blessed that house year after year”—that I remembered a muggy August day when Cesare had told me about his friend the priest in Locorotondo.
And here he was, Don Valerio, his furrowed forehead barely projecting above the lectern, his eyes dark and blazing. He described the masseria as a perfect sliver of the world, in which evil could not intrude. But evil, he said, had even managed to creep into the Garden of Eden in the form of a snake.
The bishop had sat down. He listened to the priest with his eyes closed. Don Valerio continued: “There is something that we cannot accept. Didn’t the Lord promise us eternal life through our children? And now it seems He’s revoked that promise. Cesare and Floriana would have a right to doubt God today, but I know that they will not. Because they have made faith the foundation of their every action. Listen well to what they have to teach us on this day of mourning, when even the heavens have joined in our weeping: every single moment of our stay on this earth makes sense as long as we believe in Jesus and in eternal life. If we stop believing, we might as well sit in a corner and let ourselves die.”
He paused for a long moment. The bishop had bowed his head. I looked for Tommaso again, but he was gone. Don Valerio bent the microphone toward his mouth, but when he resumed his talk he was more subdued, as if his strength were about to run out: “I’ve been hearing a lot of talk these days. I hear accusations being made. As often happens, people talk without knowing what they’re talking about. We all love gossip, don’t we? And what’s better than a violent death to generate gossip? Well, I saw Nicola with the boy he considered a brother. With Bernardo.”
The name was a shock. The bodies crammed into the cathedral flinched.
“When I knew them, I saw two boys incapable of hurting anyone, let alone hurting each other. Raised with so much love as to make them immune to wickedness. I could be wrong, of course. As I’ve already told you, the snake even corrupted Adam and Eve. But let’s wait for the moment of truth. This is not yet that time. This is the time of mourning and of prayer.”
There was another talk after his, by a colleague of Nicola’s, who unfolded a sheet of paper with trembling hands and read from it, stumbling over every word. He described Nicola so differently from how he was in reality that I lost the thread. For a while, after he returned to his seat, there was only the din of the rain hammering the roof, as the bishop blessed the wooden coffin.
That’s when the scream erupted. An animal scream, which rose from a terrible depth, a scream that the local newscasts would air that night, the following day, and the day after that. Cesare held Floriana by the arms as she tried to lunge forward, not exactly toward the coffin, but toward something that she alone was able to see.
I elbowed my way through the paralyzed mob, not moving toward Floriana, but in the other direction, toward the exit blocked by the crowd.
There were people standing outside as well. I ducked under the umbrellas, pushing and shoving to make my way past them. The bishop had started talking again, the loudspeakers blared his voice: “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord . . .”
A hand grabbed me by the shoulder. I tried to shrug it off, but it tightened its hold. I turned around. Cosimo stared at me, distraught.
“What did you all do to him? What did you do to that poor boy?”
His blotchy red face was very close to mine. His white hair was sopping wet, the shoulder pads of his jacket sodden with rain, like sponges.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
He was still clutching my shoulder. A lady nearby watched us but did not intervene.
“There is only hell for people like you!”
I managed to struggle free, or maybe he loosened his grip. When I made it out of the crowd, I too was drenched. My umbrella had been left in the church, but I didn’t dream of going back for it. The rain had turned the pavement into a water chute. I fell once, twisting an ankle. Someone approached to help me, but I was already on my feet and running more precariously than before.
Driving back to the masseria, I tried to shut out the thoughts swarming through my head from the funeral: Floriana’s animal cry, Don Valerio’s words and those of Cosimo, the wreath of damp flowers lying on the coffin. The windshield wipers swept the glass at top speed, but that wasn’t fast enough, it was pouring so hard, too hard, you couldn’t even make out the road.
I REMEMBER very little of the weeks that followed. There was more rain, pounding at first, then intermittent, until there were only puddles left scattered in the yard, and finally those too dried up. Then came the inconsolable croaking of the frogs, all night long: I thought of the first summer with Bern.
April. A scrawl appeared on a wall along Speziale’s main street: NICOLA LIVES. A few days later, LIVES had been covered over with an offensive word in red letters, and a circle of the same color had been drawn around the letter A, forming the symbol of the anarchists.
May. I lived as though suspended. A sirocco wind blew for weeks and already there was talk of the drought that would devastate the countryside in the months to come. That uncharacteristic spring, oppressive and dry, only intensified the feeling of stasis.
The police search had dug up traces from the past. I found a Bible that had belonged to Bern and the others. I spent a lot of time leafing through it. Comments in the margins, in tiny letters in three different handwritings, noted the meanings of the most difficult words:
stranger (a man from another country)
diadem (a kind of necklace for the head)
fetid (very smelly)
grotto (cave)
trickle (drip)
caducous (destined to live a short time)
halter (rope for horses)
pervert (someone who has illicit and evil thoughts)
scourge (catastrophe, grave disaster, often sent by God because of a sin committed)
drifter (someone who no longer has a place to stay and wanders around the world like an exile, dejected and solitary)
“Drifter.” I repeated that word in a whisper. I constantly wondered where Bern was. Only his return could restore the normal flow of time and the seasons.
To keep me company there were the bugging devices. Truthfully, I hadn’t found any, I hadn’t even looked for them, but I knew they were there, that the police had planted them around the house. I also knew that the phone was being tapped, and that from time to time plainclothes agents drove up as far as the iron bar across the track, remained parked there awhile, and finally left. It made sense. All of that commotion on their part made sense. My husband was wanted for killing one of their own; an international arrest warrant had been issued against him.
Nevertheless, what the bugs recorded was irrelevant. Not just because Bern would not show up there and wouldn’t even phone, but above all because the devices couldn’t capture anything of what the masseria really was, of what it had been. They were listening for clues encoded in my conversations, interpreting sounds, but they couldn’t pick up the countless happy moments, the years of our living there together, Bern and me, the mornings in bed and the long, leisurely meals, when we let ourselves be mesmerized by the rustling foliage of the pepper tree outside the window. They didn’t capture the exhilaration of the years the six of us had lived there amid a glorious chaos, nor the intensity of our feelings for one another, at least at the beginning. And they did not capture the hope that had infused the masseria, since Cesare’s time there. The only thing the hidden microphones could detect was an acoustic rendering of my loneliness. The rattling of dishes and cutlery. The gushing of the taps. The clacking of the computer keyboard and, in between times, the long hours of silence.
THE FIRST to appear on television was Giuliana’s father. He said what I already knew, namely, that he had not been in touch with his daughter for ten years. But Danco and Giuliana were not all that interesting for the public. The fascination lay entirely in the blood bond between the cousins who were once inseparable and later became so hateful that one could kill the other. Bernardo and Nicola. Nicola and Bernardo. Simply mentioning their names as a pair was all it took for everyone in Italy to know whom you were talking about. Alternatively, all you had to do was bring up Speziale. A cloud of gossip rose around the masseria. Now that the incubator of that scandal had been disclosed, reporters and cameramen even ventured as far as the house. After turning them away at the door, I watched them moving about the property, looking for the best angle to photograph the dwelling. They wanted to take my picture as well, and a couple of them succeeded.
There were phone calls and emails sent to the masseria website, mostly from television stations, though sometimes they were purely obscene insults. My parents again tried to persuade me to return to Turin, just to find some peace while waiting for things to settle down.
At the newsstand in Speziale the covers of the weeklies featuring Bern and Nicola continued to be on view outside, displayed with perverse pride. I stopped walking past there, then I stopped going to town altogether. I did the shopping in supermarkets miles away, run by immigrants, and always during hours when they were deserted.
Just when the media found themselves running out of new developments, just when the focus on Bern and Nicola was finally tapering off, Floriana appeared in a television broadcast. It was aired early on a Wednesday evening and was watched by more than a million viewers.
Since there was no television at the masseria, I drove to San Vito dei Normanni that evening, where no one knew me. The one-way streets were clogged with cars. I passed a bar and through the window I saw a monitor hanging on the wall. I parked. There were only men inside, with the exception of the bartender, a corpulent woman with a clinging yellow tank top and a tattoo on her arm. They studied me silently as I passed between the tables.
I sat down in a spot closest to the screen, turning my back to everyone. I ordered coffee and didn’t notice when it was put on the table because Floriana had already appeared in the video. Behind her, a kitchen stove I had never seen before.
She nodded in response to the interviewer’s welcome, and the interviewer then opened by saying, “Perhaps many viewers may not remember Floriana, but I do. For the women of my generation, little more than twenty-year-olds at the end of the seventies, she is a symbol. Floriana Ligorio was among the first women to oppose the detestable practice of exploitation of farm laborers in the region she comes from, Puglia.”
Floriana nodded without answering, because that wasn’t a question. The host went on, addressing the public directly now: “There is a photograph that became famous at the time. Here it is, the girl whom the policeman is holding by the arm is Floriana.”
For a few seconds the image filled the screen. Soon afterward it appeared smaller, lying on the table between the two women. Floriana looked at it without touching it, as if she doubted it was really her.
“Do we sometimes have to struggle to get what’s right, Floriana? Struggle even against a policeman?”
“He was gripping my arm, all I tried to do was free myself.”
“In an interview at that time you called the policeman in the photograph a ‘dirtbag.’”
“Our battle was a just one.”
“What would you think if your son, Nicola, in a similar picture taken today, were the policeman gripping the girl’s arm?”
Floriana’s head snapped up. “He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Can you describe your relationship with your son?”
“On Sundays he came to see us. For lunch. If he wasn’t on duty.”
“And you never had any arguments? After all, it seems clear that your ideas differed. You were a symbol of dissidence, and Nicola became a police agent.”
“A mother is able to accept her child’s choices.”
The bartender in the yellow tank top approached the table and asked me if there was something wrong with the coffee. I said everything was fine.
“You didn’t drink it,” she said, grabbing the cup.
On the screen, the interviewer had noticed Floriana’s agitation, an agitation that she herself had provoked, and was now reassuring her that everyone, she herself included, was on her side, and shared the pain of her loss, a cruel loss.
“But here we are, and this is a unique opportunity to shed some light on every aspect of this affair. We have to face it bravely, Floriana. There are many testimonies from demonstrators who were at the scene of the murder. They witnessed Nicola and his colleague’s arrival. They tell of an aggressive, defiant attitude. Some claim to have been verbally attacked, and others say that Nicola continued fingering the belt holding the gun in an incendiary way.”
At that point Floriana lost control: “It’s my son who was killed. My son, Nicola, was murdered by a group of terrorists. He’s the one who’s dead! That’s what we should be talking about!”
“Is that what you consider them? Terrorists?”
“What else would you call them?”
The interviewer nodded, then gave a summary of what had happened. She reminded viewers that the principal suspects in the death of Nicola Belpanno were Danco Viglione and Bernardo Corianò, the victim’s cousin. Their photographs were shown. She asked Floriana if there was anything in Bern’s past, some episode perhaps, that would give any hint of the violent young man he would become.
“He had his odd ways, like all children. He grew up without parents.”
“Do you mean that Bernardo is an orphan?”
“Cesare’s sister, Marina . . .”
“Cesare is your husband, right?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re talking about your sister-in-law. We’re just trying to make it clearer for those who are watching us, Floriana. Continue, please.”
“Marina was very young when she became pregnant, she was only fifteen.”
“Fifteen?”
“She came to us because she didn’t know where else to go. If she had told them at home . . . My in-laws were very strict people. Nicola had just been born and we had bought this little house in the countryside and fixed it up. There wasn’t even a well. We had to go to the village fountain every day and fill our containers with water.”
“Were you hippies?”
“No. I mean, we didn’t see ourselves that way. Hippies don’t believe in God.”
“Whereas you and your husband are very devoted.”
“Yes.”
“Your husband even founded a sect.”
“He wouldn’t want it to be called that.”
“Let’s go back to Marina, your sister-in-law. She came to you to ask for help because she was pregnant. And so young. Southern Italy, in those days . . . It must not have been easy.”
“She wanted to find a solution.”
“What kind of solution?”
“She was only fifteen, she was scared.”
“Do you mean she wanted to have an abortion?”
“Cesare was very concerned about her. He’s the big brother, he’s ten years older, and in their family . . . he’s always been like a father to Marina. But he too was very young. We were all very young and we had no money. One evening, Cesare went off somewhere. He stayed out all night and when he came back he said that we would take care of Marina’s child no matter what.”
“What had he done that night when he stayed out?”
“He had prayed.”
“Did your husband often do that? Stay out all night praying?”
“Sometimes he did.”
“So we can say that Bernardo was born as a result of your husband’s praying.”
“Yes.”
“And can we say that with his praying your husband saved the child who thirty years later would kill his own son?”
Floriana fingered the transparent frame of her glasses, as if to make sure they were still there. A few seconds of silence followed. The interviewer shuffled her sheets of paper.
“All right. We’ll continue with this, Floriana. We’ll pick up exactly where we left off.”
There was a commercial break. When the program resumed, it was not a continuation of the interview with Floriana. Instead, images of Speziale’s town center were shown: the street that cut the town in two, the bar-café, the grocery store, and the small church where many years ago I had attended my grandmother’s funeral mass.
A car was driving along country roads that I knew all too well, with dry stone walls on either side of them. Taking the longest possible route, it arrived at the barred entrance to the masseria. The reporter had no qualms about ducking under the iron bar and walking along the dirt track, on my property, followed by the cameraman. He went as far as the house, where the doors and windows were closed.
The interviewer said: “Your husband preferred to see to Nicola and Bernardo’s schooling himself. Why?”
“Cesare is an educated man.”
“There are many educated people who, nevertheless, decide to send their children to school.”
“We had our convictions. We still have them.”
“Meaning you would do it all the same way again?”
“Yes. Or maybe not everything. Not all of it.”
“In view of what has happened, don’t you think that the isolation may have contributed to altering Bernardo’s personality?”
“Bern. We always called him Bern. No one calls him Bernardo.”
“Bern, of course, excuse me.”
“Cesare gave all of them an excellent education. Better than that of other children their age.”
“Is it true he forced them to memorize passages from the Bible?”
“No, that’s not so.”
“When we spoke the first time you told me that . . .”
“I said that Bern memorized parts of the Bible. He was the one who wanted to. Cesare never forced him to. For him, they only had to know a few short passages, only what was essential.”
“Essential for what?”
“For them to understand.”
“For them to understand what, Floriana?”
The camera panned for a moment to the interviewer, who was now frowning.
“Floriana, I think it’s important that you clarify this point. What did the boys have to know at all costs?”
“The principles of faith. The principles of . . . behavior.”
“And were there punishments for anyone who refused to learn what Cesare considered essential?”
Floriana shook her head slightly, as if shivering.
“During our first conversation you told me that there were severe consequences for those who did not obey him.”
Floriana was silent. The interviewer lowered her voice even further.
“Did his son, Nicola, and Bernardo ever receive corporal punishment from Cesare?”
Floriana turned her head purposefully, as if looking for someone. Then there was an abrupt cut. In the next frame she had a half-full glass of water beside her. Her upper lip was a little moist. The interviewer was more severe than before.
“After Nicola’s death you decided to leave your husband. Do you think that he is partially responsible for what happened?”
Floriana took a sip of water. She stared at the glass with a lifeless expression. Then she nodded.
“Why did you decide to share your story today?”
“Because I want people to know the truth.”
“Does the truth set us free, Floriana?”
Floriana hesitated, as if the question had triggered a startling memory. Her eyes widened a little more, just for a moment. With conviction she said: “Yes, I think so.”
“What would you say to Bernardo if you knew he was watching us right now?”
“I would tell him to stand up to his responsibilities. As he was taught to do.”
“And what would you say to Nicola if you could, Floriana? What would you say to your son?”
“I . . .”
“Would you bring Mrs. Belpanno some tissues? Don’t worry. Take all the time you need. Have some more water. Do you feel up to continuing? We were talking about Nicola. When I came to see you, you told me that Cesare has his own very personal idea of the Catholic religion. He is convinced that souls are reincarnated. So, if you were to close your eyes and . . . Close your eyes, Floriana. Try to imagine: into what creature would your son have been transformed?”
The picture on the screen suddenly changed, as Floriana’s mouth opened. A music show appeared on the monitor.
I went to the counter, but the bartender paid no attention to me; she was busy listening to another story from the guy with the paint-spattered face. When I interrupted them, they both turned to look at me.
“Please put the channel with the interview back on.”
“Nobody’s interested in it.”
“I am.”
“For just coffee you can go watch television at home,” the barmaid snapped, then turned back to the man.
He didn’t say anything. He brought the beer bottle to his lips and took a swig, still staring at me.
“I’ll have a beer too,” I said. “It’s important, please.”
She picked up the remote control from the counter and, instead of changing the channel, placed it on the shelf behind her, in front of the bottles.
“The coffee is on the house. Now get out of here. We can tell you’re a friend of those people.”
I left. Stunned, I wandered through the streets of San Vito, now deserted. I didn’t find another bar, just a kiosk selling watermelons, with a small TV set up top, but I took a look at the person sitting there and didn’t dare approach. I thought of ringing a doorbell at random, but I had done enough foolish things; I was tired, drained.
I did not see the end of the interview. Only many months later did I learn how Floriana had answered the question: she said that she had never really believed in reincarnation, that for years she’d let her husband mislead her, but not anymore. She said that the Lord grants us only one life on earth, this one, and there won’t be another one afterward.
ONE AFTERNOON in August I was keeping an eye on one of the intruders through the bedroom shutters. He had no camera. After knocking, he’d wandered around the yard for a while. I’d lost sight of him as he walked around the house, then he’d reappeared and looked purposefully at my window, as if he sensed my presence. He’d sat down at the table under the pergola, half hidden by the dense tangle of vines, and he hadn’t moved from there.
Half an hour went by, maybe more, and he still showed no signs of leaving. Suddenly I was enraged. I went downstairs and opened the door like a fury.
“Go away right now!” I shouted. “You can’t stay here!”
The intruder leaped up. For a moment he seemed about to obey me, but then he stayed where he was.
“Are you Teresa?”
He was younger than me, overweight, and he looked harmless. He wore battered Birkenstock sandals and a sweat-stained T-shirt.
“You have to leave immediately,” I repeated, “or I’ll call the police.”
But instead of going away, he seemed to get up his nerve. He took a step toward me and bobbed his head in a kind of bow.
“My name is Daniele. I’m a friend of his.”
“A friend of whom?”
“Of Bern. He—”
I put a hand over his mouth and gestured for him to follow me to the olive grove. When we were a reasonable distance from the house, I inundated him with questions; Daniele answered me patiently, as if that outburst was just what he expected from me. He told me that he had met Bern at the encampment in Oria, more than a year ago, and from that moment on he had always been by his side. He was also with him on the night at the Relais dei Saraceni, but he hadn’t seen what happened. As he spoke, he avoided meeting my eyes. He addressed a spot somewhere to my right, from time to time wiping his flushed face with his hand.
“Can we move out of the sun?” he asked at one point.
I realized then that I had led him into the middle of a sunlit clearing, its soil scorched, as if even the trees were infested with microphones.
We stepped under an olive tree. He was panting a little. I asked him why he had waited so long before coming to find me.
“I was under house arrest. For four months. The police thought I was the one responsible for the arsenal, just because I’m studying chemistry. But they had no proof. And studying chemistry is not yet a crime.”
“Was it true?”
“What?”
“Were you responsible for the arsenal?”
Saying that word, “arsenal,” seemed a little ridiculous to me. Daniele shrugged.
“Anyone would be able to make those explosives. On the internet there are thousands of tutorials.”
He looked around, squinting in the direction of the house, as if looking for it over the barrier of trees, then he whirled around.
“The food forest is that way, right?”
“How do you know about it?”
“He always talked about this place. About the masseria. He described every last detail to us. And over there is where the bees were kept. Where the reed bed is.”
Hearing him mention the reed bed made me feel a little dizzy.
“I’m saving up some money,” he went on, not noticing. “When I have enough I’m going to buy some land. In fact, to be honest, I already found it. There’s only a ruin there for now, but it can be fixed up. It will be like the masseria.”
“Would you like to see the food forest?” I asked him.
His eyes lit up. “Will you take me there?”
But as we walked among the plants that were wilting in the sultry dog days, I got the impression that Daniele had already been there. Probably he had looked for it on his own, while he was waiting for me to come out of the house.
“Do you really never give them water? Not even a drop?”
“During this period, yes. A couple of times a week.”
He bent down on his knees to examine the wall of branches on which the aromatic herbs grew. He touched it.
“It’s just like he described it to us.”
I asked him how old he was. “Twenty-one,” he replied.
He stood up. “I had never met anyone like him. He was a great inspiration for me.”
“Take me there,” I said.
I hadn’t planned to ask him. I hadn’t even thought I’d want to. Daniele looked at me. “Where?”
“Where it happened.” He shook his head. “I really shouldn’t be seen around there.”
There was a moment of silence. Then he added, “If you want, we can go to the encampment. In Oria.”
“The encampment was disbanded.”
He looked around. “Do you have anything better to do?”
“AND ANYWAY, the encampment can’t be disbanded,” he said once we were in the car. “They can drive us out, but we continue to exist. It’s Bern who taught us that. We already have a place near Tricase, an old limestone quarry. But we’re waiting for things to settle down.”
You could barely see the road through the dirt-streaked windshield. Daniele was bent forward, clutching the steering wheel nervously. With his right hand he yanked the gear shift.
“Many of us are still under surveillance. One guy even had a plainclothes cop come to the university. The organic chemistry professor asked the agent if he was new. Then he wrote a synthesis on the blackboard and asked him if he understood it. The cop turned purple with embarrassment, and practically fled the classroom. He had even brought a notebook to take notes.”
The car jolted as he changed gear. He cleared his throat.
“But we’re in the South, nothing works really efficiently for too long. Pretty soon even the plainclothes agents will give up and go away.”
A heavy-metal piece blared from the car radio. From time to time Daniele began shaking his head in time to the beat, lip-synching the words. Then he asked me, “What do you know about Oria?”
I looked out the window, a little embarrassed. Nothing, I didn’t know anything.
“There were about forty of us,” he explained. “We made the rounds night and day, divided into groups, it was exhausting. But the area was still too big to patrol all of it. Hundreds of olive trees marked with a red X, can you imagine? Danco drew up very complicated work-shift schedules with times and routes. If a group ran into one of the cooperatives hired to fell the trees, someone would have to split off and run in search of reinforcements. The remaining ones were too few to protect the olive trees. Not to mention the fact that the tree cutters often showed up at several places at the same time. In a word, they were trouncing us.”
“You talk about it as if it were a war.”
Daniele turned around. “What else would you call it?”
The roadside was littered with garbage; beyond it stretched tomato fields and olive groves, a line of purple haze on the horizon.
“Danco’s strategy couldn’t work. He proposed solutions that were more and more far-fetched. He sent the younger guys around to measure the distances between the olive trees, saying that with precise mapping he would be able to monitor everything. And in the meantime the Xylella epidemic kept spreading. We had reached a dead end.”
When Oria was already visible in the distance, we took a dirt road. Instinctively, I checked the phone: there was no signal. Daniele stomped heavily on the pedals with his sandals, again silently mouthing the words to the song. I had gotten into the car of a stranger, I had let him take me to a remote spot in the countryside from which I would not be able to call for help, solely because he had claimed to be a friend of Bern’s. I asked him if we were nearly there, and he nodded without turning his head.
“Bern didn’t draw attention to himself much,” he resumed after a while. “He stayed in Danco’s shadow. I’d hardly noticed him. It seems impossible, but it’s true.”
We got out of the car in the middle of nowhere, crossed a mowed wheat field, and found ourselves at the edge of what must once have been an olive grove. But all that remained of the trees were the flat stumps of their trunks, and piles of branches and dry leaves. There was no trace of the encampment anymore.
Daniele went on talking: “One day we were all feeling very disheartened. We sat cross-legged, in silence. Bern stood up. He started walking around. He went from one olive tree to another, as if he were listening to an inner voice that told him now this way, turn around, another ten steps. Then I saw him grab on to the main limb of an old, majestic olive tree.”
Daniele turned to look at me. He smiled. He pointed to a stump about twenty yards from us: “That one.”
We went over to it. He touched the flat part of the stump, circled one of the rings with his finger. I felt like doing it too, but something about sharing his emotions about Bern embarrassed me.
“Can you picture it?” he asked. “It was very tall. Bern climbed up. We watched him scale the upper branches, so high that he became invisible. He stayed there for the rest of the day. A number of people tried to persuade him to come down, but he didn’t pay any attention to them. I only approached the following morning. Nothing had changed much, in any case. Bern was still in the tree, just in a different spot, which to him had seemed a more comfortable place to spend the night. By then we had all moved over there. And that was maybe the first lesson that Bern wanted to teach us: that one single symbolic act is more powerful than a thousand obvious, recurrent actions. But I say that today. There are a lot of things that I only now understand.”
Daniele was silent for a few seconds, as if he were doing so that very instant: understanding something that had previously escaped him.
“After a couple of days, that was all we talked about. Bern would not come down from the tree and we had to devise a makeshift pulley to send up his meals and water, his toothbrush and toothpaste. One evening the temperature plunged; at dawn the tents were all soaked with dew. Bern asked for a sleeping bag and someone told him that he could very well come and get it himself. The situation had begun to get on people’s nerves. His stance seemed to ridicule the whole initiative. Even Danco kept away from the olive tree; for the most part he stayed in his tent, drawing up increasingly complicated shift schedules, strategies for patrolling and remote communication. But not me. I sensed the power of Bern’s act; I felt it in my bones. So I brought him a sleeping bag. I rolled it up, crammed it inside a backpack, and clambered up. ‘Not on this branch,’ he told me. I remember it perfectly: ‘Not on this branch, it won’t support us both,’ as if the olive tree were a grandiose extension of his body and he knew its strength, the way each of us knows the strength of his own arms and fingers. I left the sleeping bag where he’d indicated. For a while we stayed there, gazing at the expanse of olive trees that stretched out beneath us, not saying anything. To Bern I seemed no more relevant than the birds that perched and then flew off. There was something in his eyes. A determination. A flame. The others were making supper, and from up there their bustling about seemed so insignificant. Then Bern said, ‘Tomorrow I’d like a bucket and some soap.’ Not ‘Please,’ not ‘Do you think you can bring me?’ And to make it clear that he didn’t want me up there with him a second time, he specified: ‘You can use the pulley.’”
Daniele had sat down on the stump. When he turned to smile at me again, I saw that he was moved. So I sat down next to him. The wood seemed to transmit a strange warmth.
“I became his on-the-ground aide. His assistant, that’s right, the others acknowledge it today. That I was the first to put my trust in him. Without my dedication, Bern wouldn’t have made it. They would have starved him until they forced him to come down, or he would have let himself starve to death, who can say? In any event, we wouldn’t be who we are today. But I’m not sure I deserve all the credit. It may seem absurd, but I’m convinced that it was he who chose me. Every morning I loaded what he needed on the pulley and sent it up. When the rope was yanked twice I brought the basket back down. Inside was a list for the following day. He washed his clothes himself, in the bucket, and spread them out to dry on the more slender branches. During the day he sat motionless for many hours, and at night he disappeared inside the sleeping bag. Not even the rain was able to discourage him. At first he let it fall onto his head. Then he sent me a request for a ball of twine and some scissors. It was the only time he added ‘please.’ I couldn’t find any twine around, and I became agitated. By then I never even considered the idea that Bern could come down and take cover. It would have been a huge betrayal. It rained harder and harder. Finally I took the fasteners from my tent, letting it sag under the pelting torrents. I sent the cords up to Bern. I stayed and spied on him from under the dripping branches, the fat drops hitting me right in the eye. I saw him break off a few carefully selected branches and weave them together using a very complicated technique. Within an hour he had built a roof that at least partially covered the sleeping bag, a roof resistant enough so that the water was diverted to one side and fell into a single teeming cascade. He went underneath, crawled inside the sleeping bag, and did not send down any other requests.”
We stood up and started walking again, a random zigzag course among the olive-tree stumps. Daniele was perspiring heavily, and by then so was I.
“They came in the dead of night,” he went on. “It was the best way to catch us off guard. They surprised us from several directions at the same time. It was clear from the outset that the intention wasn’t only to chop down as many trees as possible, but to disband the encampment once and for all. The carabinieri were there; it was a full-scale ambush. We shot out of the tents. We knew what to do, Danco had instructed us, so we scattered into small groups, one per tree, in strategic positions. ‘The maximum possible coverage,’ Danco always said. It was freezing, the ground was damp, and we were barefoot, some in undershorts and T-shirts, yet we took our places according to plan, each group to its olive tree, our backs pressed against the trunk, holding hands. From one post to the other we shouted insults at them and words of encouragement for us, trying to be heard over the sirens and engines and the roar of the buzz saws that were then switched on, as if the tree cutters were ready to slash any obstacle in their way, us too, if necessary. The carabinieri managed to disperse the first groups. There were some very young boys, still minors, all it took was a threat to call their parents. I was paired with Emma, one of the first to form the encampment. Her hands were frozen, her lips purple, but she was so furious she paid no attention. I was afraid that if I loosened my grip, she would run up against one of the tractors and try to stop it by kicking and punching it. The truth is that we were impotent, so I held her hands and she struggled, because all we could do was protect that one single olive tree. Have you ever heard the crack that a centuries-old tree produces when it crashes to the ground? It’s not a crack, it’s an explosion. The ground shuddered. And suddenly I remembered Bern, Bern on top of the olive tree that I could glimpse on and off in the blue gleam of the flashing lights. I was sure he hadn’t moved from where he was. The trunk of his tree was assigned to Danco and Giuliana. I felt the urge to run to them and reinforce its defense, but I couldn’t abandon my post, it wasn’t in the plan. Then the tree cutters switched off the electric saws and backed away a few dozen yards. The carabinieri were wearing gas masks and they started hurling tear gas. As a result they managed to drive all of us away from the trunks. The order they had received must have been clear: no more wavering. They allowed us to get our blankets and clothes from the tents, and we searched for them blindly, our eyes burning. Those who struggled the most were handcuffed, Emma as well. It wasn’t necessary for me or for Danco, we knew it was useless to get worked up. We watched the tree cutters with their safety helmets and reflector coveralls attend to one olive tree at a time, very calmly now, with a kind of satisfaction.”
Daniele spread his arms.
“Imagine a grove,” he said. “Here. Trees everywhere. Now look at this. A few days later Bern told me how it had been to watch from above, to see the crowns of the trees crumple one by one. He said he’d cried at first, but at a certain point he’d stopped, and the sadness had been instantly replaced by rage. From up there, he said, you couldn’t see the men who were sawing the trunks. You could only see the crowns disappear, as if something invisible were swallowing them up. It took many hours, all night. In the end only one tree was left standing. The carabinieri had spotted Bern through the leafy branches, with his clothes spread out to dry, the roof to shelter him from the rain and the system of pulleys and buckets. They wanted to keep that tree for the grand finale. It was almost noon when they returned to him. They ordered him to come down, otherwise they would climb up and get him and they would arrest him. He didn’t answer. Not once did he answer, as if he didn’t speak their language. The carabinieri conferred about who should go up and finally two of them clambered up, led by a very agile tree cutter who acted as trailblazer. When they were fairly close to Bern, he moved. He climbed higher, very nimbly, like a spider. And when the three men had almost reached the limb on which he waited for them, he started moving toward the end of it, clinging to it with his hands and knees, gripping it between his legs as it got thinner and thinner. The wood bowed a little. The tip was so slight that it wouldn’t even support a child. Bern looked at his pursuers, still without a word, but what he was saying to them was very clear: one more step and this branch will crack. We were all standing there. Someone started applauding, and we repeated his name, ‘Bern, Bern, Bern.’
“The carabinieri were nervous now. Those below ordered the ones in the tree to make him go back, otherwise he’d kill himself. The two in the tree repeated the order to Bern, but without conviction, by then they were scared. They backed up very carefully, trying not to disturb a single leaf. Bern did not move from the very tenuous branch tip until the second carabiniere also set foot on the ground. He had won. We had won. Most people were distracted, hugging one another, but not me, I kept watching him, so I saw it when he released his hold to move his hand forward a little and the branch suddenly gave way, as if the tree itself had been resisting with him the whole time, but now had no strength left. Rather than let himself plunge into space, he managed to hang on, but he struck his shoulder against the trunk. Maybe it would have started all over again, the carabinieri would have climbed up and he would have fled to another branch, and maybe the third or fourth time he would have had a serious fall. But his shoulder hurt and in any case he couldn’t hold out forever. It was another thing he would later explain to us, as we waited for the X-ray report at the emergency room in Manduria. Still, when I saw him come down, I was disappointed.”
The sun was disappearing completely behind us. The wind died down abruptly. It seemed as if the entire countryside had fallen silent to hear the end of Daniele’s story.
“The tree was cut down. There was a hush. Danco went over to Bern and put an arm around his waist. Together they contemplated what had maybe been a defeat and what had maybe been a victory. We went to the hospital in Manduria and came back with Bern bandaged up and a supply of painkillers. He treated me as if he barely knew me, cordially, yes, but as if I hadn’t been the one attending him the whole time he was in the tree. It hurt a little. Then he decided to leave to spend a few days at a friend’s house in Taranto. When he returned here, to the camp that we still hadn’t had the resolution to move, he brought the news about the tree felling planned at the Relais dei Saraceni. He described a magnificent stand of olive trees. He knew they weren’t really infected. Then he said that this time it would be different.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“He said he had realized that resistance was no longer enough. ‘From now on we’ll talk about fighting,’ he said, ‘and every battle needs weapons, even if that offends you, even if it’s not what you envisioned. But look around you. Look what they did!’ And while we all tried to take in what for the moment were merely ideas, shocking, sure, but just ideas, Bern started singing. On the tree stump, in front of all of us.”
THE CLASS VISITS to the masseria did not resume with the beginning of the school year. I phoned the teacher, Elvira, but she didn’t return my call. I tried again a few hours later, then the following day and the day after that. When she finally took the call, I could not contain my irritation.
“I wanted to know the fall calendar,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Teresa. There are no visits scheduled.”
“I’m planning to build an aviary, to hold all the species in the area. Redstarts, black-throated wheatears, thrushes.”
The idea of the aviary had only come to me an hour earlier. I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had to build one. Was it conceivable that birds of different species might live in the same cage?
“I’m sure the children will like it,” I persisted.
“The teachers’ council decided not to include the masseria among this year’s extracurricular activities. I’m sorry.”
“The last visit was disappointing, I know. The masseria was a shambles.”
Would I have begged her? And would begging have changed anything? But Elvira did not give me time to find out. Her tone of voice suddenly changed: “How do you think I could justify it to the parents, visiting the house of a . . .” She stopped, she couldn’t manage to say the word.
Then, as if expressing a resentment she’d harbored all summer, she added: “You should have told me, Teresa.”
“Told you what?”
“I brought children there, for God’s sake! Children!”
After that phone call I saw the masseria with different eyes. The gutter had broken off during a storm several months before, the viburnums had died of thirst, and the food forest was a wreck. As for me, I looked like only a distant relation to the woman in overalls who on the website was smiling and holding a garland of flowers.
I counted the money left in the tea canister: forty-two euros. That figure made me burst out laughing.
Even the gardener lost patience with not being paid. He came for the last time. He confirmed that the holly oak was infected and showed me the streaks of resin along the trunk, like bleeding wounds. It would die slowly; it could take years. Did I want him to come back and chop it down? I said it was fine like that. I chose to have the holly oak stay where it was, dying slowly, day after day, with me.
I sold the hens first. Then the beehives. I sold some tools and finally I sold the goat to a cooperative in Latiano. They wouldn’t slaughter her because she was too old, but she could be impregnated and the kids would be born in time for Easter. They asked me if I wanted one, they would set it aside for me. I said no, thank you.
The drought of the last few months had caused an abundance of figs to ripen. I picked through the masseria’s trees, then collected the ones on my grandmother’s land as well. Riccardo had left a couple of weeks ago, he wouldn’t know. I arranged the best fruits neatly in boxes, I tried to make them look appealing, putting leaves underneath and on the sides. With the others I made some jams. The next day I loaded the car and drove to the traffic circle between Ostuni and Ceglie. I parked in the wayside, set the goods out on the lowered tailgate, and sat on the wall in the shade.
And so I’d become an itinerant vendor, like the bare-chested old men who peddled watermelons along rural roads. When I saw them, as a child, I wondered how they could make a living, and I often forced my father to pull over and buy something. He tried to explain to me that they were farmers, not paupers, but he couldn’t change my mind.
A number of people slowed down to take a look at the boxes of figs, but they rarely stopped. The whole countryside was full of figs, and the tourists, the only ones who would have been impressed, had already gone. One guy lowered the car window and from behind his sunglasses, in a perfectly cordial tone, made me an obscene proposal. I recognized a farmer from Speziale with his wife, in an Ape 50, and they recognized me. They owned land in the area where the masseria was. They drove on without a nod.
Nevertheless, before sunset I had sold all the boxes and most of the jams. I would have to come up with something else soon, but in the meantime, by keeping my needs to a minimum, I could get by for a few weeks.
One evening, from a distance, I saw the neighbor’s Ape 50 stop in front of the iron bar. He got out, deposited something on the ground, and drove off. I walked along the dirt track that was overgrown with weeds. I looked in the basket: fresh vegetables, two packets of pasta, a bottle of oil, and one of wine. Charity. I would never fully understand that place. I would never understand Speziale’s rules or its inhabitants, their constant vacillation between hatred and compassion, their angry ways and their equally brusque acts of kindness. I cooked the vegetables and set the table under the pergola. It was the first meal I’d sat down to eat for months.
THE CHANGES MADE to the masseria the year before had at least left me with an internet connection; it worked sporadically, but the speed was acceptable. In any case, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any faster than it was: the seconds spent waiting for a new page to load, watching a blank screen, were moments of pure absence, without pain.
I mostly watched YouTube videos. I started from any one of them, then I let myself be shuttled along from one connection to another, no more decisions, lulled by that ephemeral geography. Outside, the sun went down, and the house sank into darkness, except for the bright rectangle of the screen where I was straining my eyes. I kept at it for quite a while, until very late. When I stopped, I’d be so groggy that I would drag myself to the couch to sleep.
One morning I was awakened by the rumble of wheels on the dirt track. I hadn’t yet opened the shutters, though it must have been late morning. I remained lying there, staring at the grid of light on the ceiling. I heard a knock, then another a few seconds later.
“Delivery!” a male voice called out.
I went over to the window and opened the shutters just enough to peer down below, my eyes squinting in the sunlight. The delivery boy waved a package in my direction. “Are you Mrs. Gasparro? You have to sign.”
I pulled on one of Bern’s old T-shirts and went downstairs.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I was awake. I have a touch of flu,” I lied.
“This district doesn’t have a name, does it? I had a hard time finding it.”
The package had the Amazon logo printed on it.
“What is it?”
“You should know, you ordered it,” the boy said, smiling.
“I didn’t order anything. I don’t even have an account with Amazon.”
He shrugged and held out a screen on which to sign.
“Use your finger. It doesn’t matter if the signature isn’t perfect,” he said. Putting the device back in a side pocket of his pants, he added, “It must be a gift, then. Usually there’s a card inside.”
When I was alone, I opened the package. It contained a bottle, with a picture of a plant and some kind of magnified bug on the label. It was clearly a gardening product, but the instructions were in German and other languages that I couldn’t even identify.
It had to be a mistake. In any case, I had nothing better to do, so I sat down at the computer and patiently typed the German words into Google Translate. The result was barely comprehensible, but it was enough to confirm that it was a natural pesticide. You were supposed to dilute a capful in ten quarts of water and use it to water the diseased plant every other night. In the end the gardener had felt sorry for me, or for the holly oak. More charity. I gave the tree its first dose of medicine and it was enough to make me feel better.
ONE DAY Daniele returned to the masseria. We sat under the pergola for a long time, sipping the carob liqueur he had brought. When we got up the bottle was empty.
Drunk as I was, I took him into the house, up the stairs, to my bedroom and Bern’s. He let himself be led. I watched him undress in front of the bed, barely able to balance on one leg and then the other to pull off his socks. He had a flabby belly, it made me giggle.
Afterward I don’t know what got into me. I licked his face and bit his shoulders until he begged me to stop because I was hurting him. Then I lost the will altogether, overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. I fell back on the bed, and in an instant I was far away from there. I let him do what he had to do, until it was over. The objects in the room expanded and contracted as they used to do when I was a young girl.
Only later did I remember the bugs. I wondered what the cops thought as they listened, how they judged the wife of the terrorist who, after having seduced a younger man, had talked to him for an hour about the husband who had disappeared, confessing how she missed his body, how she’d been missing him just before. And who knows how they judged the young man who had heard that confession without interrupting her, who’d never once stopped stroking her hair.
In the morning I woke up alone. Daniele was in the kitchen, where he’d made breakfast. The glasses we’d used the evening before were washed and turned upside down beside the sink. We ate in silence and right after that I told him to leave and not come back. He did not ask me to explain.
THE SECOND DELIVERY arrived a few weeks later, in October. The same van parked crookedly near the barren vegetable garden, the same delivery boy.
“So you finally signed up,” he said, handing me the package.
“Signed up?”
“With Amazon. Don’t tell me it’s another mistake, because I don’t believe it.”
“Nevertheless, I’m afraid it is.”
“The thing is that Amazon doesn’t make mistakes. Are you sure you didn’t order it?”
I signed the little screen with my finger.
“If I were you, I’d take a look at my credit card account,” he said, “just to be safe.”
This time I didn’t wait for him to leave before unwrapping the parcel.
“Is there a card?” he asked, as I stared, dumbfounded, at the cover of the book.
Then he must have left, surely he left at some point, though I can’t say exactly when because I don’t remember anything about those minutes, except that I was alone again, still under the pergola, still holding the book that was shaking in my hands. I couldn’t stop looking at it, yet I couldn’t so much as leaf through the pages.
It was a different edition from the one I knew, more vivid, glossier, yet it was the same book that I had unsuccessfully tried to read many years ago, the same author, the same title: Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees.
I sat down at the computer and went to the Amazon site. I typed in my email address, and kept getting it wrong because my fingers were trembling. I followed the procedure to reset my password, a password that I had never chosen. A code was sent to my email, which was clogged with unread messages, advertisements, discount offers, and grotesque sexual proposals.
I entered the code, then I had to choose a new password. I stared at the screen for quite some time, my mind a complete blank, unable to decide on a sequence of letters and numbers. When I finally did, I found myself in my Amazon account, an account that I had never opened.
I clicked on “Your Orders” and two items appeared: the organic pesticide and The Baron in the Trees. I selected the book and a new screen informed me that I had purchased it on October 16, 2010.
There had to be a section on payments, but it took me a while to find it. The registered credit card coincided with mine, I recognized the last four digits, which were visible.
Increasingly bewildered, I left the house and drove to the only ATM in Speziale. During the summer it had been uprooted with a tow hook, but they had now replaced it with a new one. My current account balance was no longer in the red, though I myself had not deposited anything. I printed out the bank statement. It showed a wire transfer of one thousand euros made a month earlier, then the two Amazon charges and the card fees. The wire transfer had been made by my father.
I went back to the masseria. The business card must still be somewhere on the shelf. In the state of neglect in which I’d sunk, I’d done nothing but let things pile up: receipts, advertising flyers, empty food containers, balled-up plastic bags. I rummaged through the disorder, haphazardly at first, rooting around with my fingers, then tossing everything that didn’t interest me on the floor. I found the card: “Alessandro Breglio—Computer Assistance.” I dialed the number but stopped before the last digit. Someone might be listening.
An hour later I entered the store in Brindisi, cluttered with monitors and keyboards waiting for repair. The young man looked at me, trying to place me in his memory, but I didn’t give him time.
“Is it possible that someone could have gotten into my computer and done things in my place? Such as buying things?”
His eyes lit up. “They hacked you? It’s possible, sure!”
“And where can they do it from?”
He smiled. “Even from the moon. I can come and take a look if you want. We have a very reasonable security app.”
“I need to track down the person who made the purchases.”
“I think that may be very difficult. You can try the police, but from experience I can tell you that they won’t pay any attention to you. Have a seat, let me explain how our app works.”
“I don’t want the app!” I may have screamed at him, because he shrank back in his chair, looking shocked.
After a moment he said, “I would think about it if I were you. These hackers are diabolical. If they want, they can also spy on you. Do you know about the webcam? The small lens above the screen? This. In theory, they can watch you from here if you leave your computer on.”
I tried to remember if the computer was on the night I’d brought Daniele to the bedroom.
“So do you want me to come and take a look at the computer or not?”
But I had already turned and was on my way out of the store.
On the way back I drove very slowly. For a long stretch I was behind a truck carrying straw; the stalks broke loose and fluttered through the air. A line of cars formed behind me, but I didn’t try to pass the truck. I wanted to savor the nostalgia that sight gave me as long as possible.
Once I got home I called Turin. It was my father who answered.
“I just wanted to know how you are,” I said.
“Hold on.”
I heard him move into another room, close a door.
“And I wanted to thank you for the money,” I added.
Maybe that was a mistake. Those simple words, overheard by someone, could trigger a disastrous chain reaction. What if it hadn’t been my father who’d arranged the bank transfer? I was groping my way through a plan I didn’t know. I had only instinct to rely on, instinct and blind trust in Bern.
My father cleared his throat. “I keep thinking about what you wrote to me.”
What he added after that, in a rushed, timid voice, caught me so off guard that I’m not sure I responded before hanging up. He spoke the most natural words for a father and a daughter, the most unnatural of all for the two of us: “You know I love you too.”
For several minutes afterward, I stood there staring at the scraps of paper strewn all over the floor, as if that jumbled chaos also contained a secret message to be deciphered.
I opened a bottle of Primitivo, took it outside. The air was warm and fragrant, and I could make out the scent of peppercorns drying on the branches. The hibiscus that I had planted the year before had climbed almost halfway up the wall. Each detail produced a vivid, almost painful impression in me.
I read the book that Bern had sent me. I let the lines scroll before my eyes one at a time, until the last one. The copy had not passed through his hands, I knew that, it had come to the masseria from the shelf of a warehouse, yet I held it to my nose and inhaled its smell.
When I stood up it was dark. The screensaver’s jigsaw puzzle arranged and rearranged itself in the dim light, like a breath. I moved the mouse and the monitor returned to how I had left it a few hours earlier. The translucent eye of the webcam seemed to be off. Bern was out there somewhere, he couldn’t tell me, but he had found a way to let me know, the only way the bugs could not detect. Maybe he was watching me at that moment.
I dropped my jacket on the floor, I took off my sweatshirt. To slip off my T-shirt, I turned my back, I did it sensually, almost ironically, as if I were playing around in front of a mirror. Then I started swaying, just a hint of movement, not really dancing, even though I tried to hear a song in my mind.
I looked straight into the cold eye of the computer as I unzipped my jeans, as I stood there in my underwear and unhooked my bra and stepped out of my panties, certain that Bern could see me at that point, the computer’s lens like his close-set dark eyes. I moved again, I tried to do it the way he would have liked, what I had done for him sometimes. For a moment his hands were on me.
EACH DAY I waited for a new delivery. And each day, when it did not come, I went into my Amazon account to check if anything had changed. But there was no further activity.
Then, one morning at the end of November, Daniele showed up at the masseria with another young man. I went toward him as he got out of the car.
“I told you not to come back.”
“You have to come with us.”
“Are you listening to me? You’re on my property.”
“There’s no time. Get in!”
There was a commanding tone in his voice that made me obey him. He was already tilting the seat forward to let me climb in.
“You don’t need anything, just get in,” he said, seeing me glance uncertainly at the house, where my handbag with my wallet and keys was.
The wheels raised a cloud of dust as he made an abrupt U-turn. The other guy was typing swiftly on his phone. He didn’t so much as glance at me.
“Did you hear?” Daniele asked me.
“Hear what?”
“They got Danco.”
The guy who was texting on the phone said: “They’re almost there.”
“Shit!”
Daniele took a chance and passed dangerously before a curve. I leaned forward between the seats. Suddenly I was extremely tense. There was a lot of traffic on the highway, but we sped along, zigzagging to get past everyone.
“And Bern?” I asked, my mouth dry.
Daniele shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The guy on the phone ran his thumb over the screen to enlarge a picture. He showed it to Daniele, who nodded, then took a deep breath and looked at me in the rearview mirror again. “We have to get to Brindisi before they put him in a cell.”
For the rest of the way they acted as if I wasn’t there, talking on the phone with other activists, or between themselves, in a jargon that I mostly had a hard time understanding and that didn’t really interest me. I leaned back in my seat. I prayed, silently, fervently, that nothing bad had happened to Bern. That he was safe.
In Brindisi the other guy stayed to keep an eye on the car while Daniele and I ran to the police station. Two police cars drove up soon after we arrived.
A knot of people had formed, blocking the steps of the building. I thought they were journalists, but when the agents got out of the cars followed by a man in handcuffs, each taking him by the arm, and when that man, Danco, smiled brazenly at the small crowd, they formed a barricade around him, linking elbows in a human chain.
Daniele pushed me forward, but I hung back. I looked at Danco, his satisfaction as he strutted toward his companions.
Again Daniele pushed me. “Let’s go!”
“No.”
When he realized I wouldn’t move, he ran to join the demonstrators by himself. The two sides studied each other in silence. Danco acted as though he had nothing to do with what was going on around him.
At that instant he turned his head in my direction as if he knew exactly where he’d find me. He stared at me for a moment, then his lips widened in a smile that I thought seemed full of sadness.
Two armored trucks arrived and disgorged a squad of riot police who easily broke through the human barrier, creating a corridor through which Danco was made to pass. Then he vanished into police headquarters.
FROM THAT EVENING ON, the news broadcasts gave a daily report of Danco’s silence. He said nothing: neither about where he had been for all that time, nor about the accomplices who may have been with him, nor the reason why he had suddenly decided to come back and turn himself in. His obstinacy astounded everyone, but not me.
Later on, it became clear that he was merely leading up to his big moment. We were already into the new year when he decided to tell his version. He did so with a statement that he read before the judge and the media, insisting that he be heard without interruption from beginning to end.
He was much better groomed than he’d been when I had seen him in front of police headquarters. His hair and beard were shorter, and he wore a gray suit, with an olive sprig in place of a pocket handkerchief, a touch that would draw sarcasm from many commentators.
He read with a firm, scathing tone of voice, his eyes moving from the paper to the judge, without a trace of subjection. He read to those who were present in the courtroom but also to everyone who would hear him in a recorded broadcast, conscious of our large numbers. He read his letter from prison, not as a confession or surrender, but as an all-points bulletin.
He described a plot behind the felling of the olive trees. He spoke of a member of the European Parliament, a certain De Bartolomeo, who had signed the first order to cut down the trees and soon afterward had designated a new species to replace the existing one. Genetically modified olive trees, resistant to Xylella, with a patent registered by a company in Cyprus, a company in which De Bartolomeo’s wife, coincidentally, was a shareholder. Millions were at stake. He explained that the owner of the Relais dei Saraceni, Nacci, had given bribes to De Bartolomeo to ensure that his olive trees would be among those chosen to be felled. Perfectly healthy olive trees. All this to satisfy the needs of an increasingly blind, ravenous, and ruthless capitalism.
From time to time he sipped water from a glass. Those pauses too appeared calculated. His lawyer sat beside him, with his arms crossed and a defiant expression. Danco explained that he had always found the use of violence repugnant, and that therefore he was dissociating himself from some of the “unpleasant” events that took place that night at the Relais dei Saraceni.
“With regard to the death of Nicola Belpanno,” he concluded with the same lack of emotion, “I can only affirm that I was not the one who crushed his skull. I was there, I saw what happened, but it wasn’t me. And that’s all I have to say on the subject.”
IN WINTER, moss grew in the cracks of the concrete, a springy, shiny cushion that disintegrated at the beginning of summer, and then came back.
I painted the outside of the house because the rain had stained it with brownish drips. The scandalous drawing that Bern and I had once painted had completely disappeared, buried under layers and layers of whitewash. I scratched with my fingernails to find a trace of it, to no avail.
The last official words pronounced on Nicola’s death were those of Danco in the courtroom. The prosecution had objected that the mark of the bruises on Nicola’s cheek was compatible with a shoe worn by him, but the defense had shown that those hematomas were so indistinct as to be compatible with anyone’s shoe. Consequently, his deposition prevailed, a unilateral testimony that, albeit indirectly, blamed Bern. But Danco was lying, I knew it. Bern’s innocence was imprinted in my flesh, like the certainty of our days together.
I put in a request to the prison in Brindisi for a private interview. Though there was much resistance, the request was granted, but when I sat in the visiting room, Danco did not show up. I tried a second time, and again he didn’t come. On the third request, the prison staff told me that the detainee did not wish to receive visits.
On the phone my mother kept repeating the same words: “You’re still young.” At first it was a consolation, “You’re still young, you can start over again,” but the more the months went by, the more ominous the message seemed. “You’re still young, but not for long, thirty-one, thirty-two now, and you have to start all over again.” But start what over again?
Moneywise, at least, things were better. A couple of guys from Noci, two dreamers, hired me as a consultant. They wanted to start a permaculture project. I didn’t know if they were aware of my connection with the policeman’s murder, they probably were, but still, it hadn’t been talked about for a long time.
A neighbor asked to rent the greenhouse. He paid little but regularly. Plus, there was the money that my father now deposited for me every month. I learned that he now spoke of me as a skilled agronomist. For a long time I’d thought he was the only element missing in my life. During the lengthy period in which he’d refused to speak to me, I kept telling myself that if only things were put right between us, my life would be perfect. A notion that now seemed foolish.
NEARLY TWO YEARS: from the time Danco surrendered to the police, to when Mediterranea Travel, a travel agency in Francavilla Fontana, phoned to tell me that my plane ticket had been issued and that the flight was confirmed for the following day.
“You have the wrong number,” I replied.
The woman on the other end took a moment to consult something, then asked: “Am I speaking with Mrs. Gasparro? Teresa Gasparro, born in Turin on June 6, 1980?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Then we spoke yesterday. You really don’t remember? You told me to book the flight urgently.”
A rush of adrenaline charged through my arms and legs.
“But of course. I wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry. Would you please tell me the flight times again?”
“Departure from Brindisi at 20:10. You have a two-hour stopover at Malpensa. The Icelandair flight is at 23:40. It arrives in Reykjavík at 1:55.”
When I’d heard the phone ring, I’d been planting the pots of strawberries. I had rich, dark soil wedged under my fingernails.
“I envy you a little,” the woman on the phone said. “I was there two years ago and it was the best trip of my life. Don’t miss the glacier that ends up in the sea. You can take a boat ride among the icebergs. Three days isn’t enough time, but make sure you don’t miss that.”
I asked her if I could pick up the ticket at the agency. She said it was electronic, she had already sent the reservation to my email address. If I preferred, she could also handle the boarding passes. She asked me to confirm that I would be traveling with only a carry-on.
I don’t remember how we ended the conversation, maybe I just hung up. Soon afterward I was studying the boarding pass on the computer monitor. I read the terms and conditions, written in small print, in their entirety, as if some crucial clue were lurking there too. But there was nothing more, just a seat number and an ad for a hotel that promised a discount on admission to the Blue Lagoon, with the photo of a man and a woman wrapped in towels, gazing at the horizon through the sulfurous vapors.
I should measure the sides of the carry-on bag, check the maximum and minimum temperatures in Reykjavík, pack my things, maybe do something with my hair, which in recent months I’d gotten into the habit of cutting myself with the kitchen scissors. Instead, I went outside and sat under the pergola.
The tablecloth with the world map was so faded that the top layer of plastic was flaking off. I touched the jagged, pale pink spot that was Iceland. A piece of continent adrift.