Many years ago, my grandmother had told me that we never fully know someone. I’d been in the pool up to my hips while she, lying on the lounge chair, squeezed the puckered skin of her knees, observing what her body had become.
“You never stop learning, Teresa. And sometimes it would be better not to start at all.”
That afternoon I hadn’t paid attention. I was eighteen and I was intolerant of any advice. My mother always reproached me for being impulsive and obstinate, a combination, she said, that would lead to no good. But my grandmother’s words stayed with me somehow, and after the night at Tommaso’s house, that long night of wakeful vigil and grievances, with him bedridden, I often found myself thinking about them.
“We never fully know someone . . . It would be better not to start at all.”
The truth about people. That was what she was referring to, I think. Is there ever a point at which we can say we know it? The truth about Bern, about Nicola and Cesare and Giuliana and Danco, the truth about Tommaso and again about Bern, especially about him, as always. Now that I’ve filled in the gaps of his story, of our story, can I say that I really know him? I’m sure my grandmother would say no, that any sensible person would say no: because the truth about people, about anyone, simply doesn’t exist.
And yet, in spite of everything I’d learned about Bern from Tommaso and Giuliana, from all those who had the privilege of being with him when I wasn’t there, my conviction remained the same as it had been before, my answer identical to the one I hadn’t given my grandmother for fear of disrespecting her: I know him. I knew him. As no one other than I did.
Because everything there was to know about Bern I’d known just like that, having seen it in the first look he’d given me from across the doorway of the house, when he’d come to apologize for a ridiculous infraction. The truth about him was wholly revealed in his dark, close-set eyes, and I had seen it.
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, when I woke up, Tommaso was not in the room and the door was closed. The sheets on his side of the bed were a tangle, the pillow folded in half. Maybe nausea had made him sit up again. A wintry light flooded the room with dust motes. All that remained of the turmoil that last night’s story had triggered in me was a backwash of exhaustion.
I heard Tommaso’s voice, then Ada’s ringing tones, from outside the door. Something bouncing on the floor a few times. Then the intercom buzzed and they went out. Silence. So I got up and raised the shutter. The solidity of the objects I touched struck me as something new. I opened the window and the December air flowed in.
Four floors below, on the sidewalk, stood Corinne, wearing a cream-colored coat. The elegance suited her. Tommaso and Ada appeared in front of her. I watched them talking. Then Tommaso bent down to kiss his daughter. When he straightened up, he boldly leaned toward Corinne. Their cheeks brushed lightly, and finally she walked off, holding Ada by the hand.
When Tommaso came back in, I was making coffee.
“I didn’t let you say hello,” he said. “It seemed best that she not see you here in the morning, it would have been a bit complicated to explain.”
“How are you feeling?”
“As if they decapitated me and then glued my head on backward.”
In fact, he still looked terrible. He leaned against the kitchen counter.
“She talked about you. About the cookies you baked for Santa,” he said.
“I managed pretty well, I think. But the cookies were awful. You don’t even have any butter in the fridge, did you know that?”
We drank coffee. I knew it was my turn. I didn’t talk for long, though, I was not as exhaustive as he had been with me. I told Tommaso little more than what I had written to Cesare in my note. I described the fissure in the cave that Bern had found a way to squeeze into, as if he wanted to inseminate the whole earth, but I told him nothing about what Bern and I had said to each other through the damp rock. And I didn’t tell him about Germany or about Bern’s father or about Giuliana either.
Tommaso’s expression never changed, he did not cry and in the end he did not ask me any questions. I went to look for my handbag. Tommaso asked me what plans I had for Christmas dinner.
“No plans, no dinner. And you?”
“Same.”
On the landing I thought that would likely be the last time I’d see him, my most faithful foe.
“Thanks for saving me yesterday,” he said. “I suppose one offers to reciprocate in such cases, but I wouldn’t know how.”
I didn’t feel like going home, so I indulged in taking a walk. I strolled through the old city, among the dilapidated buildings and abandoned courtyards. I reached the swivel bridge and continued on past it. Even in the center, the bars and shops were closed; on the streets there were only families on their way home from mass, some with bouquets of flowers and bags full of presents. I found myself at Corinne’s house without having decided it beforehand. From a distance I glanced at the windows and thought I spotted someone behind the glass. I missed Corinne, I missed her voice, her sardonic smile. Maybe someday I’d go and see her. Heading back, if I retraced my steps slowly enough, I would be safely past dinnertime. Not that solitude scared me, but it seemed easier this way.
When I turned onto the dirt track, almost two hours later, I was ready for the usual prefiguration of Bern, but that day it didn’t happen. Wherever his ghost had been lodging during the last few months, whether in the countryside around the masseria or just in my head, that Christmas morning it had gone, and would not reappear. In the house, everything was exactly as I had left it the night before. The pens that had fallen off the desk were scattered on the floor, and the caps had popped off some of them. I picked them up and put them back neatly in the pen caddy.
BUT I WAS WRONG about Tommaso, about the fact that I probably wouldn’t see him again. It was I who called him a few months later. Spring had already begun, I’d bought a big flowering hydrangea that I planted against the bare wall of the house, where the roof would guarantee enough shade. The hydrangea demanded a shameful amount of water, but I had always wanted to have one, and maybe I was beginning to be tired of the yard’s austere aridity. After all, it wouldn’t harm anyone, it wouldn’t worsen the condition of the soil, but it would help me every time I looked at its lush globes of white petals.
I phoned Tommaso and asked him if his offer of returning the Christmas favor was still good. He said yes, but warily, as if he expected a request that would be difficult for him.
“Would you go on a trip with me?”
“A trip to someplace far away?”
“Very far. But your expenses will be paid.”
In February I’d returned to Sanfelice’s office in Francavilla. I had not made an appointment, I simply showed up. Then I waited for a brief opening between two visits, as the new secretary, a bright, efficient girl, studied me. If I had followed the usual procedure, I wouldn’t have had enough courage to see it through. Instead, there I was.
When he saw me, Sanfelice straightened up in his chair, his face alarmed, a hand already on the phone to call for help.
“He’s not here,” I said, “don’t worry.”
He drew his hand back from the receiver, still uncertain. “The last time he came here he scared the patients to death. And me too, to be honest. See the Rolodex? He grabbed it and started destroying everything.”
He shook his head to dispel that image from his mind. Then, realizing that he had left me standing, he invited me to sit down. I told him that I wanted to try again.
“Does your husband agree?”
“I told you, he’s not here.”
Perhaps he wondered if he should inquire further, but he decided not to. I explained to him that among the forms that Bern and I had signed in Kiev was a consent to freeze the embryos. Maybe they were still there.
“Well, we can ascertain that right away.”
He took out an agenda and entered the number. He spoke a while in English with Dr. Fedecko, nodding to me.
AND SO IN APRIL, four years after taking that route with Bern, I again crossed the bridge over the Dnieper, its waters sparkling on a day that was still cold, and almost unbearably luminous. Boats moved slowly in both directions, fanning out the surface of the water.
I noticed that Nastja was throwing hostile glances at Tommaso through the rearview mirror. Since leaving the airport she had spoken very little.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but he’s just a friend. Bern couldn’t come.”
“Oh, I don’t interfere in other people’s business,” she replied, acting offended, but I knew the clarification had appeased her.
“I’m here because the dark day has come,” I said.
“What dark day?”
“You were the one who told me that once. That you have to put things aside for when a dark day comes. And now it has.”
She smiled at me. “Then I’m glad I told you.”
AFTER THE TRANSFER, Tommaso tiptoed into the room where they had left me to rest.
“I’m not sleeping,” I said. “Come on in.”
He wore blue nylon booties over his shoes and a paper gown tied in back. His diligence was touching.
“See those cupolas up there?” I said, pointing to them. “It’s the Lavra. Bern loved it.”
But Tommaso was studying me intently, clearly apprehensive. “Do you feel all right?”
“Sure.”
“So now what happens?”
“Now we go home. Would you hand me my clothes, please? They should be in the closet.”
I think it was at that moment that I decided. As Tommaso gently helped me slip my arms into the sleeves of my sweater, slightly embarrassed maybe at having to deal with my half-naked body, I decided that I would grant Cesare’s wish.
But I waited for May to go by, then June as well, so that by the time I called him and the appointed day arrived, summer was already at its peak.
Cesare arrived wearing a purple stole around his neck. “Which spot did you choose?” he asked me.
“The mulberry.”
We set out for the tree, where Bern and his brothers once had their treehouse. Cesare and I led the way, with Marina following closely behind us and Tommaso farther back. Ada skipped around him.
The incessant chirping of the cicadas accompanied us among the olive trees; the setting was identical to my first summers there, when for me Speziale existed solely in that season.
Cesare asked Marina to hold his stole while he dug.
“Show me what you brought,” he said.
I turned to Tommaso. From the side pocket of his pants he took a yellowish book whose corners were all curled up.
“I found it,” he said.
From his hands Cesare took the copy of The Baron in the Trees that had been Bern’s when he was a boy. He leafed through the pages, still crouched on the ground. For a moment he focused on an underlined sentence.
Placing the book in the small grave, he recited a psalm and then a passage from the Gospel of John: “‘My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?’”
He asked if anyone wanted to add something. We were all silent, eyes fixed on the cover of the book. And, since no one spoke, he began singing. He had lost some of the pitch he once had and at times his voice seemed to crack, especially when he strained for the higher notes, with that somewhat nasal timbre I remembered so well. But the resolve with which the song resounded in the blistering air, that had not changed at all. I thought he would continue solo to the end, but Tommaso joined him in the second stanza. They sang the rest of the song together.
I think Ada sensed the solemnity of the moment. Looking up, she watched her father sing, as if that simple act showed her something unexpected and very important about him.
We covered the hole back up. Cesare sent us to collect stones and placed them over the spot where the book was, forming a small pyramid. Goodbye my love, I thought.
WHEN CESARE AND MARINA LEFT, Tommaso and I walked among the olive trees, while Ada chased after one of the feral cats.
“Will you come sometimes?” I asked him.
I was sure he saw people and events from the past everywhere he looked, just as I did. “Ada likes it here,” he said. “She seems to have grown attached to the place already.”
“I’ll need help from here on out. For free,” I added.
Tommaso smiled. “For free, of course.”
We didn’t make any promises, however. That was just fine.
I told him about the shafts of green light that had appeared over the lake after Bern died. I hadn’t told him before, but for some reason I felt I owed it to him.
“The Northern Lights are very rare at that time of the year, that’s what they told me.”
“But you weren’t surprised.”
“No, actually not. Sometimes I feel like a lunatic. Look what we just did, we buried a book.”
Tommaso twirled his finger in the air, making the cuckoo sign.
“Maybe it’s nuts,” he said. “And probably what you saw was only an atmospheric phenomenon with precise causes. Only it’s terribly sad to think so.”
“You know what Danco would start shouting now?”
“Obscurantists! Evil reactionaries!”
“Goddamn backward-looking dinosaurs!”
We laughed. Then Tommaso said: “I heard he returned to Rome.”
“Yes, that’s what I heard, too.”
A magpie flew up from the ground and went to perch on a branch. For a moment our gazes met up there.
We played with Ada some more, then they too left. I sat down on the swing-chair. I had sudden moments of exhaustion, as if all the blood in my body were abruptly drawn to a single location. Sanfelice had told me it could happen, especially in the early months. I waited for those minutes to pass.
The sun had eased its hold, now the light was so hypnotic and perfect that I wanted it to stay that way forever. It was the time of day when you fell hopelessly in love with that place. I remembered the emotion that overcame Bern every time he gazed deferentially at the countryside at sunset. Would that emotion be handed down? Was it written in some sequence of the genetic code, or would it vanish? I didn’t know. But I hoped it would not be lost. All I could do, someday, was tell my daughter who her father was, try to explain to her what he’d revered and the mistakes he’d made doing so. Convey what, in his short life, he had loved of the earth and of the heavens, unremittingly, with all the abandon and impetus that are granted to a man.