The impact of the wheels touching down on the airstrip woke me. For a few seconds I could hardly move my neck. I’d been determined to stay awake through the entire trip, to register every detail before the moment I would see Bern again, but the late hour and the slight lack of oxygen in the pressurized cabin had gotten the better of me. On the stairway leading off the plane I was surprised by the very dry, icy wind. It was the dead of night, yet the sky was still bright, a radiant yellow line low on the horizon. I should have known, and instead I had imagined landing at Reykjavík in the dark.
Behind the security barrier a group of people were waiting for the arriving passengers. They wore mountain clothes, woolen caps that seemed quite odd to me coming from summer—a summer from which I’d been catapulted there. Still moving forward, I looked around for Bern, him or his black clothes among those garish colors. I looked for him in the first row, then in the one behind it; a few people looked at me meaningfully, in case I corresponded to the surname written on the signs they held up. I looked for Bern inside that tiny airport and instead I found Giuliana, standing apart by the window.
She raised a hand, not exactly a wave, more like saying, “Over here.” Then she walked off toward the exit.
I reached her outside. The well-lit airport signs were extraordinarily brilliant; everything was so sharp and clear, as if there wasn’t a single particle of dust to pollute the air.
“Is that all you have?” she asked, looking down at my jacket.
“It’s warm enough.”
It wasn’t, in fact. Giuliana said shortly: “I have something in the car I can give you.”
As we crossed diagonally through the parking lot, me trudging just behind her, I had so many unanswered questions, so many questions I could have asked her. The most important one being: Him, where is he? Instead we remained silent as we walked to the car, where Giuliana grabbed my bag and put it in the trunk, touching my fingers for the first time, without meaning to, I think. She pulled a windbreaker out of another bag and practically threw it at me.
We drove the first few miles through a surreal plain, the headlights revealing fluorescent lichens and small pools of a liquid that looked like milk. Giuliana said we would spend the rest of the night in a nearby village, Grindavík. It would make our trip a little longer, but not by much. It was the only accommodation she’d been able to find.
“The place we’re going to is too far to start out now. We’ll leave early tomorrow.”
Then she asked me if I had changed my currency at the airport.
“I didn’t have time.”
“Usually the guesthouses accept euros,” she replied, annoyed, “but they’ll give you a shitty exchange rate.”
Maybe it was just the haircut, a mannish razing with a very short, upright fringe that emphasized the angular shape of her skull. But studying her from the passenger seat, I was sure that something about her body had changed too. She had shriveled up. I imagined a worrisome gauntness under the red ski jacket, an extension of the thin, nervous fingers that gripped the steering wheel.
We entered a cluster of houses, all similar, so perfect with their vivid sheet-metal façades that they resembled those of a diorama. Grindavík. It gave the impression of having been built in the span of one night. Farther on, beyond an equally pristine port, you could see the solid sheen of the sea.
A very blond young man greeted us at the reception desk. Or, better yet, he didn’t greet us at all, because he didn’t stop watching a movie on his iPad, even while he photocopied our documents, took my money, and gave us one key card for both of us.
Giuliana said something to him, very casually, in a language that wasn’t English. As we climbed the stairs, I asked her if she had learned Icelandic.
“The bare essentials,” she replied.
“How long have you been here?” She fiddled with the magnetic lock that at first did not recognize the card.
“We’ve been here for a year and a half.”
The room was microscopic, the walls wood-paneled. There was a strange smell, maybe it came from the carpet. The double bed was narrower than a normal one. As for the bathroom, it was shared. Giuliana went in before me; she didn’t take long.
I brushed my teeth and washed my face and considered getting in the shower, but the plastic curtain was black with filth, crumpled up on the sopping-wet bottom. I put on my pajamas, wrong like the rest of what I’d packed, and went back to the bedroom.
Giuliana had taken off only her jacket and shoes, tossing both on the floor, and was now lying in fetal position, on the side by the window, with her back turned to me. Stock-still, as if she were already sleeping.
I hesitated for fear of waking her up, but finally I asked her: “Where are we going tomorrow?”
“To Lofthellir,” she replied.
“What’s that?”
“A place up north.”
“Is he there?”
“Yes.”
From that perspective, lying with her back to me, with her shaved head, she looked even more like a man. She did not turn around, and by then I understood that she wouldn’t. I climbed onto the bed, first with one knee only, unsure whether to share that forced intimacy, then with the other as well.
“Why didn’t he come?”
“He couldn’t. Tomorrow you’ll see why.”
I don’t know what came over me, why I started shaking Giuliana the way I did, repeating why didn’t he come with you, I want to know why, I want to know right now; shaking her until she grabbed my arm and shoved it back with equal ferocity.
“Don’t you dare touch me again,” she said.
After rearranging the pillow under her head, she added: “Now get some sleep. Or stay awake, I don’t care. Just keep quiet.”
She went to sleep. I remained propped against the pale wood paneling. I realized that I hadn’t seen a single tree on the trip from the airport to there. The smoke detector on the ceiling emitted green flashes at regular intervals. The window was covered partway down by a plastic roll-up shade, so a little light filtered in. It wasn’t day, nor was it night, and I lay there waiting for I didn’t know what, in that endless twilight.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, Giuliana was putting on her boots.
“It’s six o’clock,” she said. “We have to go.” She finished tying the laces, stood up, and opened the door. “See you downstairs.”
I heard her stride down the corridor, the sleeves of her synthetic jacket rustling. For a few moments I was paralyzed, incapable of anything, then I gathered up the things I’d left scattered around. Before leaving, I took one last look around the room: the bed was only half disturbed, at some point I must have felt cold and gotten under the cover, but I didn’t remember it. On Giuliana’s side the blanket was drawn taut, the turned-down sheet barely wrinkled.
I went to the bathroom again and this time I clearly recognized the smell of sulfur that I hadn’t been able to name a few hours earlier. It rose up from the pipes or it was the water itself.
Downstairs, the lobby was deserted. There was a coffee machine, but it was out of order. I saw Giuliana’s off-road vehicle waiting by the front door, with her in the driver’s seat, impatient.
“You can have these for breakfast,” she said, tossing a supermarket bag in my lap.
I looked inside: a pack of triangular sandwiches and a few snacks, some familiar, others with unknown names.
“What, you don’t like them?”
“Sure, they’re fine.”
I opened the crustless sandwiches, which were in pairs, took one out and offered it to her. Then she seemed to relax a little. After taking a bite and chewing it, she said, “All you find is crap here. After a while, you stop noticing. But up ahead we can stop for coffee. If you want.”
I’m not sure I can faithfully reconstruct the conversation we had in the following hours. The words all form a solid chunk of memory, and the order gets mixed up, not only because of Giuliana’s way of speaking, which often became agitated and disjointed, but also because the sleep that I had not managed to make up for during the brief night at the guesthouse was suddenly overtaking me. I’d nod off for a few minutes, and when I woke up Giuliana continued talking, or I would ask her a question. I’m sure I must have interrupted her more often than I remember, but my voice has been erased, irrelevant compared to the account of the time when she and Danco and Bern had been fugitives, and to the tortuous sequence of events that had finally brought her and Bern, just the two of them, to that island. My brain must have rearranged the information in whatever order suited it, but it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter anymore at this point.
At each turn the landscape was less recognizable. Endless, uniform meadows, farms in the middle of nowhere, rocky expanses riddled with holes, precipitous fjords and volcanic beaches, and that one exposed road, smooth and always slightly sloping, winding interminably in front of us. The road that Giuliana preferred to speak to instead of me. At a certain point she may actually have said, “Well, I suppose you want to know,” in that malicious tone I remembered. And maybe I really did reply, “Yes, I want to know.”
What I’m sure of is that her arms jerked up futilely, letting go of the steering wheel, and her cheeks trembled as if she were gritting her teeth. “And what gives you the right to know?”
I looked down at my wedding ring, turned it halfway around my ring finger. Engraved on the inside was Bern’s and my date: September 13, 2008.
This, I thought, this gives me the right.
“We stayed in one place for a long time,” Giuliana said, still struggling with reticence, “hiding. It’s a miracle we didn’t kill one another in that time. Three of us shut up in a garage day and night. For months.”
“In Greece,” I said faintly.
“Greece? What gave you that idea?”
“That’s what everyone said. That you had fled to Corfu in a rubber dinghy. Or that you had gone there via Durrës.”
She shook her head. Her laugh was caustic. “I must have missed that. Well, apparently Danco’s idea worked in the end.”
“What idea?”
“Leaving the jeep on the coast. I was sure no one would swallow it. The life jackets on the rocks, fuck! It was so theatrical. The only thing missing was a note saying ‘We left from here.’”
I recalled the images on the television news, the streets of Athens strewn with flyers. I let that backdrop fade out of my mind, then I said, “So you didn’t stay in the tower.”
“No, we never stayed in the tower. And we were never in Greece, we never even thought of it. We had decided from the beginning to head north.”
I kept silent, an implicit encouragement to her to go on talking. Head north, where? And how far north? With whom and for how long, and to find what?
“Through one of our people we had made contact with a truck driver, a Polish guy who traveled up and down the Adriatic coast. You just had to look at him to know he couldn’t have been involved with the cause, he didn’t look anything like an environmentalist. He drove a semi.”
“What’s a semi?”
Giuliana didn’t turn around this time either. “You really don’t know?”
She let a moment pass before explaining it to me, just enough time for that grain of ignorance to settle between us, marking a further distance.
“It’s a big rig for transporting cars. The double-decker carriers, you know? It seemed like a safe-enough solution. Someone drove us to the parking lot he would leave from.”
“Who took you?”
“Daniele.”
I don’t know why, but at the moment I didn’t register how odd it was that she would mention Daniele, as if she took it for granted that I knew him.
I felt slightly nauseated, the taste of the sandwich was sour in my mouth. I felt overcome by the urge to sleep and at the same time gripped by an uncontrollable agitation.
Giuliana went on: “I didn’t know what had happened. Only that Bern and Danco had come running down through the olive-tree grove shouting, ‘Let’s go, move!’ And then we were in Daniele’s car, and Danco was constantly turning around to look through the rear window, while Bern, seated up front, didn’t do so once. He kept his hands oddly on his knees, as if they weren’t his. And even later in the parking lot, as we waited for Bazyli, there was something strange about his posture, a kind of stiffness. He asked me for a cigarette and I gave it to him and only then did I see why he had kept his fingers pressed to his knees the whole way: his hands were wounded, there were two patches of dark blood, already dry. I rubbed them with a handkerchief, but without water the blood wouldn’t come off. So Bern spit on them. He held out his hands with a docility that wasn’t like him, they were . . . limp. I asked him if I was hurting him, and he said not to worry. I cleaned the blood off of one hand and then the other; there was no wound underneath. I looked at him, but he remained blank, letting the information pass from his eyes to mine in silence. I too lit a cigarette and we waited there in the parking lot with nothing more to say. It was Danco who explained that it had been an accident: ‘They attacked us.’”
Talking about the cigarette that she had smoked in the parking lot on that crucial night made Giuliana search for the pack in her jacket pocket and reach for the car’s cigarette lighter. She touched the glowing circle to the tip with a precise gesture. Only after she had exhaled the first stream of smoke from her nostrils did she ask me if it would bother me at that hour.
“No, go ahead,” I told her. She lowered the window a few inches, and after that she blew the smoke into the opening.
“Bazyli wasn’t surprised to see us,” she continued. “He didn’t ask any questions. He simply repeated the name of the destination where he would drop us off. A figure had already been agreed to, two hundred euros for each person he would transport, and he demanded that we pay him the money immediately. Each of us had gone to the Relais supplied with cash, because we had no way of knowing how things would go. Bazyli showed us which cars we would travel in, one person per vehicle, because we had to lie down and not raise our heads for any reason. I got a white Citroën and saw Danco and Bern get into theirs. We didn’t exchange a word, no goodbye or good luck, not even a look. The seats were covered with nylon sheeting and I lay down. Even before hearing the clanking as the semi started out, I had fallen asleep.
“I woke up because of the cold. Two or maybe three hours had passed, but the sky was light, a dense white. The inside of the car was an icebox. I huddled up, trying to wrap the nylon around me, but it didn’t help. Bazyli had mumbled that the trip would take sixteen hours or so, I would never make it at that temperature. Plus I had to pee. I held out for almost an hour, but finally I couldn’t take it. Bazyli hadn’t mentioned any stops, hadn’t left a mobile number, and anyway, Danco had seized our SIM cards so we wouldn’t be tempted to use our cell phones. There was nothing else I could do but crawl between the two front seats and start sounding the horn, for ten whole minutes. Finally I realized that we were pulling over, that we were stopping, but it took quite a while before Bazyli opened the door. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he laid into me. When I explained that I needed a toilet immediately, he helped me climb down and told me to hurry up.
“Outside the bathroom I met Danco, but we pretended not to know each other. It’s strange, we hadn’t decided on it before, we hadn’t agreed on that point, but there was a kind of instinct that guided us. I let him see that I was cold and he went into the service station to look for something that I could put on, but all they had were kids’ raincoats with ridiculous designs of superheroes. He took two from the display rack. I had no more money. Near the exit I touched a package of snacks and then put it back. Again, Danco understood. He bought the snacks and a box of crackers. We went out one at a time.
“When we went around the corner to return to where the truck was parked, we saw Bazyli with two policemen. He was explaining something, gesturing. I was so scared, I couldn’t move, until I felt Danco’s hand clutching my arm and pulling me back. We stayed like that, practically not breathing, leaning against the wall that the police might appear around at any moment. Bern hadn’t left his hiding place. By this time they might already have found him. I told Danco that we had to get out of there, climb over the guardrail and run through the fields. He said leaving Bern there by himself was out of the question. When we peeked around the corner again, there was no sign of the cops. Bazyli was waiting beside the semi.
“‘What did they want?’ I asked him, but he motioned for us to get back to our places as quickly as possible. He handed me an empty plastic bottle, saying, ‘Next time, here.’ Then he pointed to the packages of food I was holding and with an unmistakable gesture let me know that he would strangle me if I spilled any crumbs in the car. I think he meant it.”
GIULIANA CRUSHED the cigarette stub in the ashtray between us. There were others in there, the little pile reeked. She must have noticed my glance, because she said: “Ten years of decomposition, I know. And here on the island cigarettes cost a mint. But this is no time to quit.”
She closed the lid on the ashtray.
“Do you have any chewing gum?”
“No.”
Her eyes twitched constantly, a nervous tic that I didn’t remember her having before. To avoid a truck coming from the opposite direction, she swerved too far to the right, and the wheels ended up on the dirt shoulder. A pebble flew up and hit the windshield.
“And do you know how long it takes for chewing gum to decompose?”
“No.”
“Five years. Alkaline batteries?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on, take a guess.”
“Can we drop the riddles?”
Giuliana shrugged. “We used to play that game in Freiberg. One of the many ways to pass the time.”
“Freiberg?”
“At Bern’s father’s place. We stayed with him. He sent a friend of his to pick us up where Bazyli had left us. He had us brought to a garage of his.”
“Bern hadn’t seen his father since he was little,” I said.
Giuliana turned for just a moment.
“Well, maybe he didn’t see him, but he certainly was in touch with him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the phone number memorized. Maybe he didn’t want it known. Bern can be very private about certain things. I imagine his father is one of those things, and I certainly can’t blame him.”
Talking about Bern that way, letting me see that by then she knew him better than I did, gave her heartfelt pleasure. But I couldn’t help asking her why.
“His father is not the next-door neighbor that everyone would like, let’s put it that way. He mostly deals with reselling works of art of somewhat dubious origin.”
“Stolen?”
Giuliana put her thumb to her mouth and bit her cuticle.
“I’m convinced he fences them for someone else, otherwise he’d be much wealthier. But he has a storehouse full of the stuff. Masks, vases, sculptures, and so on. All heaped together in that garage, which for some reason has a bathroom and a small refrigerator. And an internet connection. He must have spent fairly long periods of time there. Anyway, that’s where he kept us. For eight months.”
Before our wedding, when I had asked Bern if he wanted to track down his father to invite him to the ceremony, he had stared at me with an incredulous expression and shook his head, as if the idea were absurd. Instead, his father had always been in the same city, Freiberg, and he spoke to him on the phone. When had he done that? At times when we were not together? When he went off among the olive trees alone, as though responding to an irresistible call of the countryside?
“Our German period,” Giuliana said, and chuckled. “Freiberg. Not that we got to see much of the city. Sometimes we went out, we took turns, but we had to be very careful. The German didn’t want us to.”
The German. The grave-robber, my father had told me. An unexpected sadness came over me. Giuliana didn’t notice.
“Danco was uneasy. The business about the artworks bothered him. All that stuff should have been in a museum. By staying there, he said, we became accomplices. As if that were the real problem. But he wasn’t very lucid. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe, and yank the sheets suddenly, uncovering all three of us. Then he’d start pacing around the room, gasping for air. Something like that had happened to him at university too, panic attacks due to the exams, but it was nothing compared to Freiberg.”
“All three of you slept together?” My mind had focused on that insignificant detail.
“There was only one bed,” Giuliana replied expressionlessly.
“Danco said it wasn’t he who killed him.”
After pronouncing those words, my cheeks began to tingle, then the tingling became a burning sensation and spread to my neck and arms.
“Have you seen his lawyer?” Giuliana asked. “Hired by his father. Viglione Senior couldn’t wait to make himself useful. Danco always knew he had his back covered. But I imagine that’s how it is for all of us: ultimately we go back to where we started. Which is a rather serious problem for me.”
She burst into caustic laughter. I remembered her stories, from when she and Corinne would vie to see which of them had had the worst childhood. None of that interested me now.
“He was lying, wasn’t he?” I asked.
Giuliana’s fingers flicked up for a moment, then settled again on the steering wheel.
“Who can say?”
“You can. You were there. And afterward you were with them the whole time.”
“Sorry. I can’t help you with that. I understand that it may seem important to you, but to me it isn’t.”
I sensed a tension in her body now, as if she were preparing for a fight. Or was I the one spoiling for one?
“It’s not important? You mean to say you never asked him what really happened?”
Giuliana shook her head. She continued looking at the road. I may have leaned toward her.
“You lived in a garage for eight months, you slept in the same bed all that time, and you never talked about that night?”
“What’s done was done. Would talking about it change anything? We were all there at the Relais. We three and thirty others. It could have happened to anyone.”
“You’re joking!”
“You’re getting a little too worked up, Teresa.”
“A man is dead! A man I knew!”
“Yeah, Bern told us that. You had an affair, you and that cop.”
“Did you ask Danco how things went at the Relais or not? Did you ask Bern or not?”
Giuliana absently brushed her hair back, what was left of it. She seemed surprised that it wasn’t as long as it used to be.
“Let’s stop here,” she said, taking an exit off to the side. “We have to get gas. I hope you have some cash left.”
INSIDE THE SERVICE STATION we split up. There wasn’t a real bar, just a corner with tall coffee dispensers and a stack of paper cups next to them. The price, indicated on a sign, was to be paid at the cashier. If you drank the coffee and left without paying, no one would have noticed, but that probably didn’t happen on the island.
I wandered among the shelves awhile, the same souvenirs I would see again and again in the days that followed, but that at that moment were new: seal-shaped stuffed toys, thick wool sweaters with traditional designs, hats with Viking horns, and miniature trolls.
A large map of Iceland, slightly yellowed, hung on one wall. Framed pictures highlighted the tourist attractions: geysers, volcanoes, waterfalls, all names impossible to pronounce. In one photograph I thought I recognized the icebergs in the sea that the woman at the travel agency had told me about. For some reason I was sorry to miss them.
“We’re almost at Blönduós,” Giuliana said. She was holding two containers of coffee and handed me one. She pointed her finger at the map. “We’re traveling this road. It forms a ring around the island. We have to get here.”
A lake, located almost in the center, to the north.
“Mývatn,” I read.
Giuliana corrected my pronunciation, then explained something about the construction of words in Icelandic. All of a sudden I saw the absurdity of being in that shop, in that remote place on earth, with a person who by then was in all respects a stranger to me, surrounded by refrigerator magnets commemorating the volcanic eruption that a couple of years earlier had covered half of Europe with ashes. Yet being there with Giuliana, traveling to a destination that I couldn’t even pronounce correctly, was one of the first vital experiences I’d had in a long time.
“Why there?” I asked.
“We were looking for a place that hadn’t been corrupted by man. Something intact.”
“And did you find it?”
Giuliana turned away abruptly, her back to the map and me.
“He found it, yes. Let’s go.”
FOR A WHILE we rode in silence. I stared at a formation of clouds to my right, a high, puffy mass, like a nuclear explosion, motionless in the sky. Even the clouds seemed different here. No matter how far we drove, the cumulus did not move with respect to us: impossible to reach, impossible to go around, impossible to avoid. Then Giuliana said: “It was a delicate balance. You have to try to understand that. None of us had ever been in such a situation. No one had ever even imagined it.”
She took a deep breath. She accidentally turned the windshield wipers on, and they scraped against the dry glass, screeching. For a moment she seemed thrown into confusion.
“A week after we arrived, the German came to see us. I would have recognized him even if he hadn’t opened his mouth. He stood in front of Bern, and the resemblance was astonishing, with the exception of their coloring, because the German’s hair was mostly white and he had light eyes. He spread his arms, Bern went to him and let himself go completely. I don’t know why that gesture moved me, we were all still upset, a week had gone by and we’d never left the place, shut in there with no news, left in suspense, with only someone who brought us food and didn’t say a word. And now here was Bern’s father, and Bern letting him hug him like a child.
“The German shook hands with me and Danco. He asked us if we were getting bored. It had never even occurred to us to be bored. Then he asked us if we had used the computer, but that hadn’t occurred to us either. So he sat down at the desk and explained that we could surf the net securely. He had a firewall like that of the Pentagon, plus an untraceable IP address. He did not specify that all those exceptional precautions were due to the illegal trafficking in works of art; we realized it ourselves, or at least I did, and I think Danco did too, whereas Bern may have just been bewildered. The German sat at the computer, with me behind him, Bern behind me and Danco in back; he wanted to keep his distance even though he was intrigued. After days of stagnation, that was our first distraction.
“The German asked if any of us was familiar with Tor. I was, because at university many of us used that software, mostly to buy weed; those were the years when playing hacker guaranteed you a certain fame.
“‘So sit here in my place,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you kids will need a transformation, unless you want to stay in here forever. We can’t change your faces, but we can at least find you a new identity.’ He got up and I sat down at the computer. The procedure was simple enough. We just had to take photographs, upload them, and in a few weeks we would receive three brand-new passports. We could choose whatever nationality we preferred, but the German advised us that unless we spoke another language perfectly, it was better to stay with Italian. He had brought us a camera. The documents would be sent to a postal box where he received all his shipments. He conveyed an incredible calmness as he spoke, and seemed almost amused. He stayed with us a while longer, telling us about the system used to authenticate the works in the garage and sell them online. A complicated system in which he obviously took great pride. Then he promised to come back and see us as soon as possible. Before leaving, he ruffled Bern’s hair, as any father would do to a son.
“Bern suggested we all choose the same surname, as siblings. We discussed that possibility, but it didn’t seem advantageous to me; it would have added an element of risk. Then we talked about where we would go once we got the new documents. Not somewhere in Europe, that was obvious. Bern and I proposed destinations, explored them on Google Earth, and every night we convinced ourselves that we had found the ideal place: Cuba, Ecuador, Laos, Singapore. In the morning we questioned everything again. By then Danco refused to participate. He kept saying that the forged passports were dirty. Which criminal organizations were we implicitly asking for help? He adhered to his rigid, unassailable principles of morality. He couldn’t see what Bern and I were all too well aware of: that by then we had overstepped that ethic. From our standpoint, the morality that Danco defended was simply inadequate.”
GIULIANA REACHED OVER to the backseat, where her bag was. She fumbled inside, but couldn’t find what she was looking for, so she grabbed it and put it on her lap.
“Here,” she said, handing me a passport.
The face, under the shimmering reflections of the laminated paper, was hers, her hair already shaved. Next to it, her new name: Caterina Barresi.
“When we get there, please call me that,” she said somewhat gravely.
“What name did he choose?”
“Tomat. It’s Friulian, quite recognizable, and you can say what you want about Bern’s accent, except that it sounds Friulian.”
We were at the end of a fjord. In front of a rock cliff were two twin houses with sloping roofs, a distance away.
“Danco and Bern were barely speaking to each other. Deep down, Danco held Bern responsible for what had happened. Actually, they were on bad terms even before the Relais. Danco did not accept the idea of using weapons. They were contrary to everything he had always believed in, he said, and that was true, I knew it was. But they were also contrary to everything I had believed in, or Bern for that matter, or all the others who were at the encampment with us. Could we help it if they had become necessary? Sometimes you have to go beyond what you think is right in order to achieve a higher goal. The new order must come about through disorder, that’s what Bern made us understand, but not Danco, no, he refused.”
I thought about the day Danco had showed up at the masseria with Bern’s list of things to take, about the determination in his eyes, a rancorous determination that I hadn’t understood.
“But one day, at the encampment in Oria, Bern took him on a walk through the felled olive trees and convinced him.”
Giuliana lowered the window, put an arm out to resist the cold air, then leaned over to offer her face to the wind as well.
“Or so it seemed at least,” she added in a bitter tone. “Can you drive a little?”
I really didn’t want to. The drowsiness was still there, mixed with the acidity of the sandwich and the horrible coffee I’d just drunk. And I knew I wouldn’t dare maintain Giuliana’s speed on that road, where every curve seemed about to eject us.
“I just need half an hour. To close my eyes,” she insisted. We traded places. Before getting back in the car, Giuliana bent down and grabbed her ankles, and stayed like that for about twenty seconds, her muscles taut under her jeans.
For the first few miles she kept her eyes closed and her head erect like a statue, but she wasn’t sleeping, I knew it. When she opened them again, she said, “I miss the olive trees. I miss just about everything. Especially the warmth. Summer didn’t even last a month here. It’s because of global warming. The ice that melted in Greenland has cooled the Gulf Stream. While the rest of the world is melting in the sun, we end up freezing, even in August.”
“I was at the encampment,” I said then, maybe to console her, or just the opposite, because I wanted to intensify her nostalgia.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Daniele told me.”
“You talked to Daniele?”
Giuliana glanced at me. “I talk to him almost every day. Why would he have gone to look for you otherwise?”
Her mood changed again. Suddenly more conciliatory, she added: “We resumed communication a couple of months after arriving in Freiberg. It wasn’t the least bit easy. If my computer skills were rusty, Daniele’s were pitiful. And there was the problem of sending him the first message without leaving a trace. I got the idea of using Amazon. Daniele was under house arrest, so it was entirely plausible that he would order things via the internet. So I had him buy an electric toothbrush, since it was an item that we had joked about together some time before. He’d told me that his mother made him bring one with him everywhere, even to the encampment. There he was, out in the countryside, wandering around with that buzzing gadget. It took me a while to get access to his computer and his credit card. But when he received the electric toothbrush he understood. I sent him the instructions in a series of emails that anyone would have mistaken for spam. And within a few days we had a protected network available so we could write to each other directly.”
She propped her foot on the dashboard and slid lower in her seat.
“I don’t know why I’m even telling you these things. You could go back to Italy and report everything to the police.”
“That’s what Bern did with me too,” I said. “He sent me a plant product and a book.”
“Bern and I sent you those things,” Giuliana clarified, giving me an ironic look. “Or, rather, as far as the fertilizer is concerned, me, Bern, and Danco. On his own, Bern wouldn’t even have been able to boot up the computer.”
“But why not let Daniele tell me where you were? If you were already in contact with him.”
“Damn, why didn’t I think of that!” she said, and started laughing.
“Why, then?”
“It was he, Daniele, who didn’t want to. He’d studied you for a while and in the end he decided you couldn’t be trusted.”
He’d studied me. He’d come to bed with me.
“Were you able to see me?” I asked, feeling more and more tense.
“When your monitor was on, yeah. If you ask me, you have a pair of my panties.”
She laughed again, a spiteful laugh, a little strained. I slowed down and stopped the SUV in a rock-strewn pull-out.
“What are you doing?”
I got out and started walking through the tract of heather. The island was barren, you couldn’t see anything in the direction in which I was going, absolute emptiness, I could have walked on endlessly without encountering a single obstacle. I heard the car door slam.
Giuliana shouted, “Hey, come back here! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Come on back!”
But I didn’t stop. The topsoil among the plants was dark, almost black. Giuliana must have started running. Soon she was in front of me, blocking my way.
“We still have a long way to go. If we lose time we’ll have to wait until tomorrow. And tomorrow may be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
I kept going, so she was forced to walk backward.
“You’ll see. Now let’s go.”
“Where is Bern? I won’t get back in the car until you tell me where he is.”
“I told you, you’ll see.”
I screamed at her: “Where the fuck is he?”
“He’s in a cave.”
“A cave?”
“He probably won’t be able to hold out for much longer.”
I stopped walking then. Giuliana stopped as well. The wind lashed us from the side, not in gusts like Speziale’s tramontana, this was a constant force.
I wasn’t all that surprised, actually. Bern inside a cave: I could imagine it. In all those years I had grown used to his bizarre quirks. He’d lived in a ruined tower, in a house without electricity, up in a tree. All I asked was “For how long?”
“Almost a week.”
“And he can’t come out?”
“No. He’s stuck in there.”
That stubborn, angry wind, the quivering tufts of heather clinging to the stones. Giuliana reached out to grab the edge of my jacket.
I let her lead me back to the car. She got back behind the wheel. I huddled at the far end of the seat, as far away from her as possible, but we didn’t drive for long. She parked in front of a building larger than the others, in a prominent position on a hill.
“We can get something decent to eat here,” she said. “I think we could use it.”
INSIDE, a fireplace was lit. Heads of cloth animals were mounted on the walls, as though that alpine decor were a parody, since no one would have dreamed of stuffing real animals. We sat down in a corner, my back to a window. I felt a weariness spread through my limbs. When they brought us the menus, I didn’t have the energy to look through mine. It seemed like too purposeful an act, too normal. An unspoken question, unutterable, held me frozen: if he can’t come out, what will happen to him?
Giuliana ordered for me. They seemed to know her. But they probably knew Caterina, not Giuliana. The girl serving the tables, her face and gestures so open, brought us two white cream soups. Dark pieces floated on the surface.
“It’s mushroom,” Giuliana said. “I hope you like it.”
I must have been very pale, or maybe there was something more serious than the pallor about me, something troubling, because such concern wasn’t like her. I don’t remember if it was she who guided my hand to the spoon or if I did it instinctively, but I ate the soup, spoonful after spoonful, the morsels of mushroom chewy under my teeth, tasteless, like bits of styrofoam.
I felt a little better afterward, but I didn’t taste even a bite of the salmon that came next. Just seeing it made me suddenly sick. I rushed to the bathroom and threw up.
I stood in front of the mirror for a long time, looking at a face I didn’t recognize, cheeks reddened by the restaurant’s heat or by the cold outside, or maybe by the shock. When I returned to Giuliana, the table had been cleared. She asked me if I felt better; I didn’t answer.
She signaled the girl, who appeared a few minutes later with the bill. As on all the other occasions, she waited for me to take out my wallet and pay for both our meals. When I was about to pick up the Icelandic crowns left as change in the small saucer, she stopped me with a wave of her hand.
“Leave it as a tip.”
IT HAD STARTED to rain, a light, very fine drizzle. Looking at my sleeve, I realized that it wasn’t really rain, but sleet. At the end of August. I remembered when Bern, in the parking lot in Kiev, had walked to a rotunda covered with icy snow and placed his hand on it, the wonder in his eyes.
“Why did you send me those things?” I asked. “The pesticide, the book. Why, if you didn’t trust me?”
“It was Bern who insisted on it. You looked so dejected, he was worried about you. And about the tree. On those forums where you asked how to treat it, the answers you got were just a load of crap. Obviously it was Danco who found the pesticide. It was one of the rare times when he went to the keyboard and interacted with us. By then he barely spoke to us. At night he had terrible nightmares, or he didn’t sleep at all. I had asked the German to bring me some sleeping pills and I would sometimes crumble them into his food. I’m a little ashamed when I think of it, but I did it for him. I was really afraid that he was losing his mind.”
“So Daniele knew where you were,” I said. I couldn’t let go of that thought.
“We desperately needed to do something. By then we had our passports, our new immaculate identities. Daniele sent us photographs of the olive-tree reserve at the Relais dei Saraceni, or what used to be the reserve. Craters instead of trees. In the first weeks, at least people talked about us, hunted for us, we felt movement around us, but once autumn came the monotony became unbearable. ‘We’re sitting here twiddling our thumbs while they destroy everything,’ Bern kept saying.”
She sighed, as if she’d told that story dozens of times already and repeating it was getting to her.
“One day I hacked into Nacci’s computer. Exactly as I’d done with Daniele and with you. I had gotten the hang of it and his password was so obvious that I guessed it on the fifth or sixth attempt. I found all sorts of filth there. And in particular I found his correspondence with that European Parliament member, De Bartolomeo. Proof that we were right from the beginning, about the golf course and everything else. If someone had only listened to us, well, none of what happened would have happened.”
Suddenly, her willingness to tell all made me furious.
“What are you really sorry for? Are you sorry that Nicola was killed? Are you sorry about the olive trees? Or are you only sorry for yourself?”
For the first time Giuliana looked at me with a hint of uncertainty.
“The olive trees were the most important thing,” she murmured.
“The olive trees? Do you really believe that olive trees are more important than a human life?”
“At the time I thought so. We all thought that, I think. Maybe we were wrong.”
Yes, you were wrong. You sure as hell were wrong!
But I didn’t say that. What I said, with the same accusatory tone, was: “You had explosives.”
She shrugged, as if it no longer mattered. She remained silent for a few minutes before continuing: “The investigation into Nacci’s affairs seemed to awaken Danco. He had already decided to turn himself in, but none of us could have imagined it.”
Giuliana’s arm was propped against the window and her head was resting on her arm.
“One morning Bern and I woke up and Danco wasn’t there. None of us was supposed to go out without having first discussed it with the others, even the German had recommended that, and especially not at that hour, when the streets were full of people on their way to work. We sat and waited for him for a couple of hours, then Bern couldn’t stand it anymore and went out looking for him. When he came back he looked terribly weary, forlorn. He’d understood.
“Something changed in him, afterward. I don’t know why exactly, but I think it was seeing Danco on television, handcuffed, letting himself be led into the police station. ‘Doesn’t he seem free?’ he asked me. ‘Free?’ I repeated, pretending not to understand, but it was true. Danco in handcuffs looked free, much more so than we two were, stuck in that garage. But there was no time to think about how we felt. We had to leave immediately. Danco might already have revealed our hideout to the police. We packed our bags. Bern preferred that we didn’t notify the German. He wrote a goodbye note, stood staring at it for a long time, then crumpled it in his fist. He couldn’t even say goodbye to his father the way he wanted to.”
GIULIANA HAD TEARS in her eyes, overcome by tenderness. And seeing her so moved, lost in that memory of Bern and his father, I understood. Not as though I were realizing something that had earlier been wholly mysterious or inconceivable, but the way you catch a puff of dust fluttering through the air after having followed it for a long time with your eyes. I understood what I already knew and had never wanted to admit. I’d known it from the moment I had looked for my husband in the small crowd at the airport arrivals hall and instead of him I’d found her.
I said, “Why did you cut your hair like that?”
She made that gesture again, which I’d seen her repeat numerous times since the night before, her fingers searching for the long hair that no longer existed.
“I don’t know.”
“To be less recognizable?”
“No,” she said, but corrected herself immediately. “Maybe. I thought . . . I liked it better this way.”
“It’s Bern who likes it like that, right?”
Yes, I’d known it long before I landed on that cold, remote island. The hostility with which Giuliana had welcomed me to the masseria, which had never really abated, the way she stared at Bern, the habit of putting her hands on his back at the end of the day, massaging his neck and shoulders, and him closing his eyes; a friendly gesture, nothing more than that, I told myself, yet each time I had to find something to do, so I wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t see the expression of surrender that came over his face.
“You slept together.”
And since Giuliana still didn’t speak, conceding only mute assent, it was I who said: “It happened even before. Before I arrived at the masseria.”
“What difference does it make now?”
She looked for the pack of cigarettes, took one out, lit it. Her fingers were shaking.
“And while I was there?”
“Stop being paranoid.”
I grabbed her arm. I squeezed as hard as I could. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I just didn’t want to let her get away, as if her body were bound to the truth that she refused to tell me. Giuliana stiffened her muscle but didn’t try to break free.
“I have a right to know,” I said softly.
“Only twice. At the beginning.”
I let go of her arm, sat back.
“And Danco?”
Giuliana shrugged, a movement that could mean she didn’t give a damn about Danco anymore. Or it could mean that Danco had known about it. That the whole story, his abrupt rift with Bern, and maybe even his arrest were linked to that awareness.
All of a sudden I felt a familiar, distancing sensation wash over me: of objects moving away and getting smaller, except that this time it wasn’t them moving away, but rather me: I was receding at a frenzied speed, farther and farther back, in a tunnel that had opened up inside my head.
“Stop!” I ordered Giuliana, but she continued driving and I didn’t have time to say it a second time before the first acidic surge rose from my stomach and filled my mouth; I held it in with my hands as Giuliana jammed on the brakes. I opened the door and vomited the rest of the soup, all those venomous mushrooms.
She handed me a tissue, and when I didn’t take it, she laid it on my knee. I used it to wipe my mouth.
Then I leaned back in the seat again, my eyes closed, the beating of my heart slowly returning to normal. With a nod I told her she could continue on.
WE REACHED the lake a couple of hours later. The sky had opened up, you could feel summer now. A dense vapor issued from a fissure on a barren mountainside. There was the smell of sulfur there too, stronger than in the guesthouse.
We skirted the lakeshore for a while; the surface of the water glittered, and tiny green islands sprouted here and there. This was a more recognizable setting, more reassuring than the miles of uninhabited, alien nature we’d driven through in the preceding hours.
Giuliana turned into a slightly sloping parking area. She switched off the engine.
“The bathrooms are in there.”
I felt weak, dazed. I asked if we were stopping there.
“We have to change vehicles. With this one we can’t get to the cave.”
The new off-roader had gigantic, overly inflated tires, as if someone had blown them up disproportionately as a joke. It belonged to a guided tour agency, a name with the word “Adventure” in it, or “Outdoor.” On one side it had the image of a group of people rafting, with splashes of foam surrounding their smiling faces.
Giuliana introduced me to our guide, Jónas. He was no more than twenty-five, and was in short sleeves despite the temperature, a waterproof jacket knotted around his waist. They spoke in a rapid, clipped English that I wasn’t able to understand. Then Jónas asked me with the utmost cordiality if I had gloves and if the shoes on my feet were the only ones I had. In both cases, Giuliana answered for me: I would use her gear. Jónas helped me climb onto the jeep’s high footboard, while she watched from below, and a moment later we were on our way.
We took the road that circled the lake, back the way we’d come. We continued on for another half hour or so past the point where we had turned in, before Jónas turned right onto an unmarked dirt road. Giuliana and I were sitting in different rows. There were a dozen or so seats in the jeep, all empty except ours.
I was observing the landscape, beginning to get used to the vastness. I found myself imagining what Bern had felt when he saw that terrain for the first time, the wonder that must have riveted him, because in him the sense of wonder was always boundless.
“We were looking for a place that had not been corrupted by man. Something intact,” Giuliana had said earlier.
I wanted to ask her to explain it to me better, but I couldn’t stand the idea of hearing her talk about Bern again, not then.
After a few miles the road became rougher. The mule track at the beginning had narrowed to double dirt ruts, barely visible, which had probably been made by the abnormal wheels of the same jeep we were traveling in. Grass grew in between. It reminded me of the dirt track at the masseria, but a treacherous, forsaken version, as it might have looked after a flood. There were depressions and dips and protruding boulders; the jeep swayed on its suspensions as if about to overturn.
In the rearview mirror, Jónas signaled to me to hold on to the rubber strap hanging from the ceiling, and I grabbed it a moment before an even deeper hole bounced me out of my seat.
A little farther on he stopped, got out of the vehicle, and bent over to examine one of the tires. I saw him go around and open the rear door. He returned to the wheel with a toolbox.
“Did we get a flat?” I asked Giuliana. Instinctively, I turned to look at her, and that simple gesture seemed to sanction a truce. I immediately regretted it.
But she barely looked at me: “He has to decrease the pressure to improve the traction. The road gets worse from here on out.”
When Jónas had completed the operation on all the tires, we set out again. It seemed impossible to me that the condition of the track could get any worse, but I was wrong. In the hour that followed, I had to hold on tight to the strap with one hand and grip the base of the seat with the other.
The shaking continued even after the bumpy road ended abruptly and we kept driving on a soft carpet of dark sand, at the base of a volcano. That tremor came from within now, from the fear of finding myself with Bern after all that time. The sky was even stranger than it was elsewhere, a dull blue, scored with white streaks that crossed in all directions.
Jónas repeated the operation with the tires, in reverse. I stared at the low trees, similar to rhododendrons, that grew at the foot of the volcano. Then I spotted a trailer in the distance, the only trace of humanity in the midst of all that emptiness.
INSIDE THE TRAILER, climbing boots were arranged by size on wooden shelves. On the opposite side, tossed chaotically in a box, were mud-splattered safety helmets.
“We’ll change our shoes,” Giuliana said.
“I can keep these on.”
Given the situation, accepting a favor from her was unthinkable. But the severity with which she answered made me bend down and untie my Adidas. I put on her hiking boots.
“Cross the laces at the top. Pull them tighter,” she ordered me with the same commanding tone as before.
Then Jónas gave me a pair of snow boots, a helmet, and heavy wool socks that smelled of sweat. He explained to me that I would put them on before entering the cave; we had to walk half an hour to get there. He pointed in the direction we would set out.
“Lava camp,” he said, turning to the expanse of wide, flat boulders that stretched before us. Small canyons ran through it like veins. The cave was somewhere in the middle of it—Bern was somewhere in the middle of it.
The walk was longer than predicted. Maybe I was slower than Jónas expected, or maybe we took a circuitous route, because they too seemed to be proceeding instinctively, with a precise destination point in mind but no fixed course through the rocks.
I was exhausted, yet tension kept me going. I stepped on a rock and my foot twisted. Giuliana reacted quickly to support me from behind and keep me from stumbling, but I had to stop for a few minutes. Jónas crouched down in front of me and made me place my leg over his knee while he unlaced the boot and moved my foot cautiously from side to side. He asked if I could continue, telling me I needed full mobility to enter the cave. My ankle hurt, but I said yes, then I did my best not to show that I was limping.
At last, at the entrance to the cave we found two other young men. They had set up a tent and were sitting at a camp table, with two thermoses in front of them. Introductions were made hastily. They exchanged a few words with Giuliana about the delay, maybe we shouldn’t go, they said, better to wait until tomorrow. Giuliana insisted. They agreed, but said we would have to be out within an hour.
As they debated, I approached the edge of the crater, which was about ten yards wide, yet invisible until you reached it. At the bottom a gleaming mantle of shimmering moss covered a heap of stones, probably the remains of the collapse that had created the opening. On one side ran an iron ladder, with only a rope to act as a handrail. I took a step forward to get a better look, but I got dizzy and had to back away.
I didn’t listen to much of what Jónas advised. My desire to go down there was as intense as my desire to get away from there as soon as possible, to go home. I understood that the inside of the cave was covered with ice, that the soles of the snow boots were studded with cleats to provide traction, but that I would have to be careful. Jónas asked me if I suffered from claustrophobia; he had to repeat the English term, twice.
Then he and I went down, him in front. Giuliana did not follow us, but remained at the entrance with the other two guys. I went back up the few steps. “You’re not coming?”
She had her arms folded, and her eyes had dark circles under them, or maybe it was just the light.
“He wants to talk to you,” she said. “That’s what he asked me, so go.”
Then she turned, and I saw how much it had cost her to say those words, how much it had cost her to meet me at the airport in Reykjavík and share a bed with me and then be in the same car together for ten hours, all to bring me to the man for whom we’d silently been rivals for years. I felt sorry for her.
At the bottom of the ladder the light was poor, but you could see the metal gate that marked the entrance to the cave. We stopped a few steps from the ice. Jónas told me to put on the woolen socks, the cleated boots, and the helmet with the front-facing light on top, which he switched on for me. He also had an additional sweater. I was already warm the way I was, but he forced me to put it on, since the temperature inside was close to zero. Soon enough I’d see what he meant.
The entry was the hardest part, but I didn’t yet know that. You had to clamber up a slippery boulder and crawl on your belly through a slit about half a yard wide. Jónas went ahead of me, showed me how to do it, but it took me five attempts. Then I had to make my way through a tunnel, stooped over. I couldn’t breathe, and felt my heartbeat accelerate wildly. Maybe what I’d told him wasn’t true, maybe I did suffer from claustrophobia. I remembered the night when Bern had taken me to the tower, the dark steps and the panic that had made me beg to leave there as quickly as possible.
The ice was thick and the beam of light revealed forms trapped inside it, colorful stones made brilliant by that crystalline layer.
When the tunnel sloped downhill, Jónas told me to let myself slide, holding on to the rope. He would help me with the landing. For a while my arms refused to loosen their grip on the rope, but I heard Jónas encouraging me, his voice terribly distant, and I let myself go.
Finally we found ourselves in a chamber, a large cavern with ice as its floor and dark rocks overhead. Jónas warned me to be careful not to bump into the stalagmites that were scattered everywhere; some were a few inches high, others came up to my forehead. He said it had taken hundreds of years for them to form, but that just brushing them with my foot would be enough to shatter them. I had to step exactly where he stepped.
At first, I proceeded very slowly, until I became familiar enough with the slippery floor. We crossed the chamber and entered another through an opening in the rock. I looked around to gauge how big it was. It was smaller than the first one and there was no visible way out this time. It looked like the terminus of the cave.
Jónas raised an arm and pointed to something ahead of us, up above, and only then was I able to make out a very narrow, horizontal cleft.
“He’s in there.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and called Bern’s name. It produced an echo that seemed never-ending.
The silence had not yet been fully restored when Bern answered: “Yes.”
Then I could no longer contain myself; a gush of emotion flooded my chest and tears streamed from my eyes. Later, much later, remembering that moment, I would think about how those tears spilling onto the ground had joined the perennial layer of ice, but not at that moment. At that moment there was only Bern, beyond a rock whose thickness I could not imagine.
Jónas helped me climb a couple of yards closer to the cleft. He pointed to a ledge where I could sit. Going any farther up would have been impossible for me, but from there Bern was able to hear me, I just had to speak loudly. Jónas would stay at the base of the chamber; he couldn’t risk leaving me alone.
“Bern,” I said.
There was no answer. Jónas told me to raise my voice. I repeated the name, nearly shouting.
“There you are,” he answered then.
I had the impression that he was a bit lower than I was, because the sound was so remote, so muffled, but maybe I was wrong. What would I say to him now?
But it was he who spoke: “You came in time. I knew you would make it. For me not to hear your voice again was unthinkable.”
“Why don’t you come out, Bern? Come back out of there, please.”
The cold took my breath away. The air inside the cave was dense, laborious to inhale.
“Oh, Teresa, how I wish I could. But I’m afraid it’s too late for that. I’m no longer able to. I must have fractured something when I fell down here. The tibia, I think. And a rib maybe, although the pain in my side comes and goes. I haven’t felt it for a few hours now.”
“Someone will come to get you. Someone can come down and get you.”
Jónas was somewhere in the dark. He had turned the lamp on his helmet off, perhaps to allow us an illusion of intimacy.
Bern seemed not to have heard me.
“There’s a high, smooth wall on this side, like a plate of silver. A fine veil of water is trickling over it. It’s almost like a mirror, I can make out the shape of my head when I project the light in a certain way, though the battery won’t last much longer. How I wish you could see this wonder, Teresa. You know what I’ll do? I’ll pretend that the face I glimpse is yours and not mine. Would you do something for me?”
“Of course,” I murmured, but he couldn’t hear me like that, so I shouted it.
The strangest goodbye in the history of the world, forced to yell what we would otherwise have whispered.
“Look around you. Choose a shape, a rock that looks like a face, that looks like me.”
I aimed the lamp’s beam along the wall of the cave, frantically, not recognizing anything but edges and projections and bulges in that chilling place.
Bern remained quiet, giving me time, then he said: “Did you find one?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Good, so now you can look at me. Can you hear the sound of the drops? You’ll hear it if we remain silent for a moment. They’re like notes, the notes of a xylophone being faintly struck. But you have to turn off the light, so the mind won’t be distracted by what the eye sees. Sight always seizes all of our attention, Teresa. Shh, listen now.”
I did as he said. I fumbled with the lamp’s switch until it went out. The cave plunged into total darkness, the most absolute darkness I had ever experienced.
After a few moments I heard the plink-plopping of the drops. Some produced sharp clicks, like wooden sticks, and others emitted notes at regular intervals. New ones were constantly being added, as if my brain were slowly becoming accustomed to capturing them, as if my ears were picking them out of the silence. In the end the sound became full to bursting, a concert of hundreds of tiny instruments, and I felt as if I could see again, but with a faculty that I had never used before.
“Did you hear it?” Bern asked, his voice now a roar compared to the drip drip drip. “Such a thing can only have been created by God.”
“Do you believe in God again, Bern?”
“With all my heart and soul. I never really stopped believing. Although now it’s something different. It’s throughout my entire body, inside and out. I no longer have to make any effort. Do you know the saying, Teresa? ‘I fled from your hand to your hand.’ Do you know it?”
“No. I don’t know it,” I said brokenheartedly.
“It was one of Cesare’s favorites, when we disappointed him. Sometimes we did it on purpose. He’d pretend not to notice, he knew we’d come looking for him again. And when we did, he would whisper those words in our ears: ‘I fled from your hand to your hand.’”
He took long pauses between one word and another, as if he found it hard to breathe.
“Tell me about the masseria, Teresa. Please. I miss it more than you could ever imagine. There’s not much that I regret in this cave, apart from not seeing you. And the masseria. Tell me how it was when you left.”
“The figs were ripe.”
“The figs. And did you pick them?”
“As many as I could.”
“And the holly oak? Were you able to make it recover?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good to hear. I was very worried. What else? Tell me something more.”
But tears kept me from saying more, my throat was strangled.
“Even the pomegranate produced a lot of fruit,” I shouted toward the fissure.
“The pomegranate,” he repeated. “We’ll have to wait and see, though, at least until November. You know how that tree is. It always promises glorious fruits and a week before ripening they split open. Cesare used to say that. He said there was something wrong with the roots. Maybe it’s the proximity to the pepper tree, but I’m not sure that’s it. You have to cover it when the first cold spell arrives.”
“I will.”
“Do you know what my favorite moment was? Our walks. Around sunset, when we had finished our chores. You always dawdled a little while I waited on the bench. Then we walked together on the dirt track. Past the iron bar, we usually turned right, though not always, sometimes we went left. But we never hesitated. We always knew which way to go, as if we’d made up our minds beforehand. And if the figs were ripe, we’d pick them even from the trees that didn’t belong to us. Because in reality it all belonged to us. Right, Teresa?”
“Yes, Bern.”
“It all belonged to us. The trees and the stone walls. The heavens. Even the heavens belonged to us, Teresa.”
“Yes, Bern.”
All I could manage to repeat was, “Yes, Bern,” because my mind was racing ahead, to the moment when I would no longer be able to hear him.
From the darkness where he was watching over me, Jónas said it was time to go. But how could you decide when to end a time like that? How could we break off that conversation and leave Bern alone? I knew I couldn’t hold up much longer, though, my feet were frozen stiff inside my boots. I couldn’t move my fingers anymore.
“I need to ask you something, Bern. About Nicola.”
He was silent for a while, then he answered very evenly: “You have to speak louder. I can’t hear you that way.”
Had he really not heard me, or did he just want to make me repeat it? Maybe he knew that my courage was already petering out; he still knew me better than anyone else.
But I was able to say it a second time, to shout it so he couldn’t pretend not to hear me, and the re-echoing in the cave slammed my doubt against every boulder and hurled it back at me, multiplied. “I need to know about Nicola. Was it you, Bern?”
I pictured his close-set eyes open in the darkness, his expression. I had no need to find a rock that looked like him, he was imprinted inside me.
“I’d like to tell you a lie and swear it wasn’t me. But there will be no more lies, I promised myself.”
“But why did you do it, Bern, why?”
“Something compelled my foot. Something powerful. Nicola’s head was on the rock and that force raised my foot and drove it down. The Lord stopped the hand of Abraham, but out there, in the olive grove, He did not stop me. There was no God at that moment, there was His opposite there with me, and he rammed my foot into Nicola’s head. I’d like to tell you that none of this is true, Teresa. It’s what I wish more than anything in the world.”
“He was your brother. I don’t understand.”
“He . . . The two of you . . .”
“But that’s not true, Bern! It’s not true! You were the only one.”
“And he’d said those words.”
“What words?”
But he was silent again now.
“What words, Bern?”
“He was the one who gave her the leaves. He picked the oleander leaves and put them in her hands. He did it to protect himself.”
“Which leaves? What are you talking about, Bern?”
“Sometimes we lose who we are, Teresa.”
Jónas’s light went on at the back of the cave, he came toward me. “We have to leave now,” he said.
“No.”
“We have to leave!”
Somehow he dragged me out of there. Getting out proved to be more difficult. I had no strength left, the result of the cold and my grief. I tried putting my foot in the toehold that Jónas showed me, but the boot lost its purchase; I no longer had any sensation. I slid back until he stopped me with his hands. He said we had to hurry, I was in danger of hypothermia.
Bern’s voice filled the chamber once again:
“Will you come back?”
I promised him I would. We made our way through the cave, among the fragile stalagmites of ice, crawling up the slope on our bellies, stooped over our knees in the tunnel, and this time Jónas did not let go of my jacket sleeve the whole time, as if he were afraid of losing me.
After that there’s a gap in my memory, until the moment when I found myself lying on one of the huge rocks in the lava field, under two layers of blankets, the sky once again above me, and that strange night that was too light. Giuliana stood over me, studying me. She said I had lost consciousness climbing up the metal ladder, and had very nearly tumbled down.
When I managed to sit up, they made me drink small sips of coffee. Half an hour had passed, maybe less.
“He’ll die,” I said.
Giuliana looked away. She poured more coffee into the thermos cap. “Drink some more.”
“How has he been able to survive all these days?”
“He has good equipment. Food. Water. He was prepared to stay in there a week. And his endurance is incredible.”
“But why don’t they get him out?”
“Nobody is able to get in there. And even if someone managed to, they wouldn’t be able to help him.”
“They can drill through the rock. Make an opening.”
Her eyes blazed. “The cave is a protected place!”
“But Bern is in there!”
Giuliana put a hand on my cheek, a cold, dry hand. “You’ll never understand, will you?”
WE RETURNED to the lake in that slowly declining twilight. The two other young men came with us. The way back seemed shorter to me than the trip out had been.
There was a room for me in the apartment where the guides lived. It was as spartan as a hospital, the quilt folded on top of the bed. The dinner hour had passed; Giuliana said we wouldn’t find anything open, but there were snack machines on the ground floor if I was hungry.
I stood under the shower for a long time to drive out the cold that seemed to have penetrated my bones. When I stepped out, the whole room was full of white steam. I didn’t even have the energy to take clean underwear out of my bag; I wrapped myself in the quilt, naked, and fell asleep.
That night I dreamed about the masseria. I couldn’t get in the house because the door was locked, but I knew Bern was in our room, lying on the bed. I called him from the yard, but he didn’t answer. At one point a pebble was thrown out of the open window. I picked it up from the ground and threw it back. Maybe Bern had chosen that way to communicate with me. Then more pebbles began shooting out from the window, fistfuls of them. In the end they rained down from the sky as well, a black, hammering hail that in seconds buried the house and covered the countryside, leaving me in the middle of an endless desert.
IN THE MORNING we returned to Lofthellir. Only one of the young men who had been watching the cave entrance the day before came with us. He sat in front and talked to Jónas the whole time, shreds of conversation in that guttural, primitive, hateful language. Sometimes they laughed, but they seemed to quickly restrain themselves, as if aware that it seemed insensitive toward me.
At breakfast Giuliana had approached my table. Before setting down the skimpy dish she’d prepared for herself, she’d asked me if I would prefer to be alone. I told her to sit down, though not too politely. We exchanged a few words about nothing, about how unthinkable it was for Italians to eat smoked herring at that hour, even after one had lived there for months.
In the jeep, however, we managed to talk again. I asked her why Iceland, why that cave, why the inaccessible fissure in that cave.
“It’s because of something that Carlos said.”
“Who is Carlos?”
Giuliana tugged her sleeves down until her fingers disappeared.
“A guy from Barcelona. After Freiberg we went there. We had made contact with a group.”
“What kind of group?”
“A little of everything. Independents, black bloc activists waiting for a pretext to riot. We drove there in a rented car. We thought we were being pursued, so we did it nonstop. By some miracle we didn’t encounter any roadblocks. But we didn’t stay long, I didn’t like the situation there, and Bern in particular worried me.”
She stretched her legs under the seat. She stared at them for a few seconds.
“He refused to leave the apartment. ‘It’s all so sick out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see it? Don’t you see how by now we’ve ruined everything?’ They were things we’d discussed a million times, but now he meant something different, something I couldn’t fully grasp. One day he began talking about how he had slept in a tree with his brothers. He had persuaded them to stay outside to see the shooting stars. Staring at the dark sky, he’d felt he was part of something that surpassed him. It was a very detailed account. At that moment I felt the frightening immensity of the love he had inside. It wasn’t just about the trees, it was about everything and everyone, and it didn’t let him breathe, it was suffocating him. Does that seem crazy to you?”
It didn’t seem crazy to me. It was the most accurate description of Bern that I had ever heard. So Giuliana genuinely loved him. But that thought no longer upset me. Now, I simply accepted it.
“Anyway, one of the leaders of this Catalan group came to see us and that was the breaking point. This man, Carlos, had worked on Greenpeace ships in the Arctic. They talked for a long time. Bern was captivated. It was Carlos who first mentioned the Anthropocene to him.”
“The Anthropocene?”
“The geological era we live in, in which everything on the planet, every place, every ecosystem, has been altered by man’s presence. A concept that I had already heard talked about elsewhere, though Bern hadn’t, and for him it was like a revelation. In the days that followed he spoke of nothing else. The desire to find at least one exception began to grow in him. Something that had not yet been seen, ruined. Something pure.”
“Is that why you came here?”
Giuliana gave me a patronizing look.
“Iceland is the exact opposite of purity. The Vikings cut down all the trees on the island centuries ago. From a certain standpoint, Iceland is the ultimate realization of the Anthropocene, even though people come here to look for uncontaminated spaces. That’s why Carlos mentioned it. He said ‘Iceland,’ but he could equally have said ‘Amazon rainforest.’ Bern took it as a dictum. So we came here to look for an exception. Our money ran out quickly; in less than two weeks we were broke. For a few months we worked on a farm by a fjord. A terribly isolated place.”
Jealousy flared up again for a moment: Bern and Giuliana in one of the painted sheet-metal houses, shrouded in fog, warm inside and frigid outside. The sex between them. I suppressed that image as best I could.
“After the winter we moved to the lake. We met Jónas and the others there. They needed more staff for the high season, people willing to do a little of everything. Sometimes the tours they organized were dangerous. But Bern still had his plan in mind. Together with Jónas we visited the island’s most remote spots, and they were never good enough. The mere fact of being able to reach them was proof of it. Until we discovered the cave.”
“But you can get into the cave too, there’s even a metal gate.”
“Only as far as you went. No one has ever been in the next chamber. Its existence was known, but access to it was too dangerous and difficult.”
“So Bern decided to be the first.”
“And probably also the last, considering the outcome.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?”
Giuliana looked quickly at me, then away again.
“Every one of those guys would love to do what he did. They wanted to find out what was in there, and that way they would at least have been part of the discovery. Having studied the air currents within Lofthellir, they’re convinced that there is a way out. At some location in the lava field.”
“So could Bern find a way out of there?”
“If he hadn’t fractured a leg, maybe. Now it’s out of the question.” We rode in silence for a while. We were on the worst stretch of the road, the jeep lurching on the shock absorbers, but this time the violence of the jolting did not surprise me.
Maybe to dispel the agonizing foreboding that had come over us, Giuliana said: “The tourists have a lot of fun on this road. Some start screaming as if they were on a ride at the amusement park. Bern liked it, too. He was enthusiastic about everything he saw on the island. When he entered the cave for the last time, he was smiling. Even though he knew it could end badly, even though by then he was just a bundle of nerves and determination. I’d never seen him so content. Maybe only at your wedding.”
To this day I don’t know if Giuliana said that to make me happy, but at that moment I chose to believe her. “A bundle of nerves?”
“He’d lost more than forty pounds. A child couldn’t have fit through there, let alone an adult like him. But he was sure he’d make it, and he was right. For months he’d studied the sequence of movements, the necessary contortions. We took measurements of the cleft, of every projection and irregularity as far as we could see with the flashlight, and he built a plaster cast exactly the same. He kept it in the yard. It’s still there. It weighs a ton. From the room I would see him practicing.”
“From your room?” I interrupted her. I couldn’t help myself.
“From our room, yes,” she said tiredly. “It was as if he were practicing a choreography. He wrote everything down in a notebook. And when he wasn’t training, he would sit still, cross-legged on the ground, as if he were meditating or praying, waiting for even the last molecules of fat in his body to melt away. Fasting was no trouble at all for him. Once he told me that his uncle had fasted for one month straight when he was young, and therefore he could easily get by with a cup of broth and some fruit every day. It had become impossible to make him eat anything else. He saw manipulation in any type of food.”
“He’s always been obsessed with those things,” I said. “Since he met Danco, at least.”
And you, I wanted to add, but I didn’t.
“Not to that extent,” Giuliana countered. “By then he refused to eat tomatoes because they hadn’t existed here in Iceland before men introduced them. Unfortunately, nothing edible existed in Iceland before being introduced by man. So he drank broths made from a local herb. If I was the one who cooked them, I would add some meat on the sly. I’m sure he was aware of it, but he pretended not to notice. He was extraordinarily acquiescent. You felt as if you could hurt him, crush him with a wrong word or two. And not just because he was so thin. Still, once he was ready to go in there, after all the training, after he and Jónas had altered his clothes to adhere as tightly as possible to his body to keep him warm, and after we smeared them with fish oil to help him slide between the rocks, he was happy.”
THAT DAY TOO Giuliana waited outside. Maybe she had already said her goodbyes to Bern before I got there; I wouldn’t ask her, not even later on. Jónas accompanied me again. I was more assured, and it took us half the time to reach the end of the cave. I went to sit on the flat rock again, inside that absurd, echoing confessional, and called to Bern.
He answered only after the third or fourth time, when my heart, fearful, was already pounding out of control. His voice seemed fainter, farther away, as if during the night he had slid a few more yards down the frozen incline, where I imagined him shrouded in darkness.
He did not say my name, not immediately, the first thing he said was: “It’s so cold.”
I asked him if he had tried to move his leg, to get up, but he didn’t answer, as if something much more important were weighing on him. He said, “This wasn’t the journey I wanted, Teresa. The journey I wanted was with you.”
But it wasn’t him talking. Bern was no longer there. A specter spoke in his place, an echo of his voice that had remained trapped in that cavity of ice and stone.
For a few seconds there was only the silvery plink plink of the droplets. Finally he cried, “Forgive me!” and those were the last words he uttered, the last sound able to rise to the top of the rock incline, pass through the fissure, and come down to me. As if he had lasted all night and all morning just to emit that one sound.
After that I called and called to him, I don’t know for how long, until a light appeared in front of me, aimed right in my eyes, and arms wrapped around my shoulders, and somehow, maybe dragging me, Jónas took me out of there.
GIULIANA HAD MANAGED to get the tourist visits canceled for that morning, but it was peak summer season, and by afternoon everything was to resume as usual. Toward three o’clock a party of about ten people arrived. I watched them proceed through the lava field single-file, each carrying a helmet and boots in their arms. Did they know that there was a man trapped down there? A man who was dying?
Giuliana stood beside me while one of the guides repeated the explanation about how to conduct themselves in the cave, the same explanation I had heard the day before. I had the feeling she was keeping an eye on me, in case I were to do something rash. But all I did was approach the guide when he finished speaking and ask him if I could join the group. Jónas stepped in, treating me kindly but firmly. His staff member, the other young man, would call out to Bern. If Bern answered, then he would take me inside again.
An hour went by, it seemed much longer. I dug a furrow in the soil with the tip of a twig, covered the groove back up, then dug again, deeper. When the guide reappeared at the top of the metal ladder, it wasn’t me he addressed but Jónas again. He shook his head, and I understood that Bern hadn’t answered.
We went back to the jeep. I sat in back. Throughout the trip I harbored a dull rage toward the tourists, for their cheeriness. Giuliana sat beside me, but her presence gave me no comfort.
BY THEN there was no longer any reason for me to stay in Iceland, but all the same I changed my return ticket once and then a second time. All in all, I stayed in the apartment with a view of the placid surface of Lake Mývatn for two weeks. I called my father and asked him to go to the masseria to take care of the vegetable garden and all the rest. I couldn’t tell him where I was, nor what had happened, but he realized that it had to do with Bern from the way I started crying on the phone, unable to stop. He would leave that same day, he promised. I said I would explain what he had to do once he got there.
I did not return to the cave. Each morning I dressed as if I were going there, I showed up at the jeep’s departure point, but when the tourists started to gather, young couples with a passion for harsh climates, amateur speleologists, overweight women who would likely not even be able to enter, my nerve failed. I felt like an intruder. Then I’d approach Jónas or the guide assigned to the shift and remind him to call to Bern once inside. Eventually there was no need to tell them anymore, they reassured me with a nod, patiently. I imagine they’d stopped calling to him early on, but I clung to the idea that it wasn’t so: there wasn’t much left for me to hold on to other than that perseverance.
It still wasn’t clear to me what Jónas knew about the reason Bern and Giuliana had ended up there, but when the time came he did not insist on reporting Bern’s death to the authorities, as though he sensed that the man who had ventured into that forbidden part of the cave existed and did not exist for the rest of the world. As though he understood that nobody, except me, would come to claim him.
To endure, I took long walks around the lake, in one direction in the morning, the opposite way in the afternoon. Mostly I went alone, but sometimes Giuliana came with me. She had at least partially shed the reserve of our first hours together. I leaned over the water to see if there were any fish, but I never saw anything, only algae swaying below the surface.
THE NIGHT before I left, I was awakened by someone knocking at the door of my room. I stayed in bed, uncertain, wondering if it was a dream, but then there was another series of knocks. I got up and opened the latch. Giuliana was dressed in a jacket and boots.
“Put something on. Come outside, quick.”
Before I had time to ask her why, she was hurrying down the carpeted stairs. I threw on some jeans and a fleece I had bought to get me through all that time there.
The guys were on the lawn. Jónas pointed to something high above. The sky was arrayed with shafts of brilliant green light.
“You never see it at this time of year. It’s a miracle.”
They all had phones in their hands and were looking for the best angle to photograph the sight; they were excited, though undoubtedly I was the only one witnessing that phenomenon for the first time. The green rays seemed to radiate from a precise point on the horizon and from there spread out through the air like smoke. I did not ask if that was the direction of the cave. But when Giuliana said, “It’s for you,” I knew that it was really so.
One at a time they tired of looking and went back into the house. Finally, Jónas and Giuliana also left. The lights in the sky persisted. If they changed, their movement was so slow as to be imperceptible. Back in the room, I raised the plastic roll-up shade so I could keep watching them. In the morning, when I woke up, they had vanished.
GIULIANA AND I shared a cigarette in front of the airport. I didn’t want one, but I wanted to prolong that moment.
“Will you stay here?” I asked her.
She looked around at the landscape, as if deciding there and then.
“For now I can’t imagine anyplace else. And you? Will you go back to the masseria?”
“For now I can’t imagine anyplace else.”
She smiled at me. She crushed out the lit part of the cigarette and put the butt, the filter that would take years to decompose, in her pocket. Everything came to an end, and sooner or later it would happen, even to the grief we had in common.
“Maybe you’ll see me show up there one day,” she said.
We brushed cheeks, shyly, then I went into the airport. When I turned around, she wasn’t there anymore.