6.

August 21, 1947

My darling Ida,

A man is a frail thing. Not much more than a wire, a spring. He can be unravelled by silence, poison, fever, ink … My long silence will always be unforgivable, but I will attempt to explain the fracturing of time that has led me here, to this mountainside and this letter. I write to you from a tiny village up in the Vigezzo Valley, a stone’s throw from Switzerland, shocked to be alive two years after the war has ended, but also humiliated to be dying of an infection the doctors seem unable to treat. Where to begin the unravelling of this wire?

By some miracle of God, I managed to get through the German line in the spring of 1944. I rode north only at night, through the woods and plains, stopping at small farms where the salt of the earth fed me and kept me abreast of soldier movements and road blockades. I also received messages from the partisans who’d enlisted my help in the mountains. A man of my age and background was of no use for the actual fighting, so they put me in charge of radio equipment and transmissions.

Between March and October I lived up in the mountains with former waiters, barbers, shopkeepers and factory workers, all of them with rifles and code names. We slept in stone shepherd huts, up in the log rafters nestled in piles of hay and dried ferns. In the winter, we came down to the villages and towns to work incognito. I went by Ennio and made coffins.

Because I was the lifeline to the airwaves and the Allies, I was kept out of harm’s way. So my injury didn’t happen on some night raid of a German barracks or an expedition to blow up a bridge. In fact, it happened one afternoon while I was communing with honeybees.

I had discovered that I could hide spare radio equipment inside the alpine hive boxes and that the bees would happily go about their business. This particular afternoon I was forced to use a little smoke to clear out some of the hive and I suspect it drew the attention of a fascist or German sniper. These lone wolves sometimes roamed the mountains looking for partisan hideouts like furriers looking for pelts. As I crouched over the hive with a smoking branch of spruce, I heard the shot and fell to the ground. There was a starburst of blood against the wooden hive box, and on my left thigh, but the bees were unperturbed as I waited for certain death. I had a small pistol in my rucksack but I’d stupidly hung my gear on a branch of a tree while I worked. So I waited for the next bullet out of the sniper’s chamber, while the honeybees murmured and swarmed.

Eventually, when the gunfire came, it was from my alpine brothers who’d come to investigate the single shot. They fired their rifles into the treetops but we never found the sniper. Instead, we managed to announce our presence all throughout the hills, and so we spent the next eight hours on the move, a former barber and waiter hauling me out on an improvised stretcher of vine poles and saplings. They smuggled a Swiss veterinarian up into the hills to remove the slug from my thigh and patch my wound. If there is a hero in this story, it’s the man who sewed me up with the equanimity he offered to livestock. This partisan war was full of bravery but it did not erupt from my veins. I fled Valetto because I’d rapped the iron-knuckled grip of the local fascists and German officials, and I’d ended up in the north more as a man on the run than a man roused by his own conscience. This is something you should know.

Rinaldo Fumigalli paced under the fresco while he read the first section of the letter aloud to us. He held the papers between white-gloved fingers, leaning into the meticulous vowels of his Milanese accent. At first, his voice sounded far-off, abstracted, but by the time he got to Aldo’s description of being shot in the leg, a note of tenderness crept in. I listened from the side of the room, wedged between Rose and her sleeping dog. Rose had been thirteen the year that her father left. She clutched my arm the whole time, whispering è lui, è lui, it’s him. Over at the long walnut table, Iris didn’t betray any emotion but she took detailed notes in her notebook. Orlando Fiorani shuffled papers during the reading and jotted down—judging by the little shakes of his head—objections and inconsistencies. Rinaldo reached for the second half of the letter and began to pace again.

August 25, 1947

At night, when I am wakeful between feverish dreams and regrets, I can smell Lago Maggiore, even though it’s thirty kilometres down through the sunless wooded hills above Cannobio. We sometimes ventured into these murky warrens during the war … hiding weapons or planning attacks … and I see it now as a labyrinth of switchbacks and stone bridges before the big blue eye of the lake. I see myself swimming out to Isola Bella … I once canoed past the island under the cover of night, on a four-day journey to Switzerland to pick up a suitcase of grenades and radio equipment. I remember the peacocks calling to each other from different sides of the island with shrieks of indignation … I can still hear that sound. Or perhaps it’s a calling from the other side …

Before I sign this letter, I must acknowledge a debt of gratitude. It begins with Giulio Parigi, the father of our dear Alessia. He grew up in this very house and village, and until the war made his living as a chimney sweep, woodcutter and coffin-maker. Although he was a partisan, he never thought of himself as a communist or altruist. He simply believed in the freedom to decide his own affairs, those of his mind and heart included.

In the winter of ’43 he was living with his wife, Carmela, and his two children in Milan. After the big air raid in February, the couple decided to send their children to relative safety—Alessia to us in Umbria and her older brother to a Red Cross family in Switzerland. Then they returned to the Ossola Valley, where they’d both grown up, and started the Society for the Noble Burial of Cadavers to help bury the war dead with dignity, but also to hide ammunition, messages and food destined for the resistance fighters up in the mountains.

When the Ossola Republic was formed, Giulio delivered one of the many newspapers that flourished during this brief flame of independence. He drove a truck around the hills, handing out newspapers and firewood to villagers, but his route also made him widely known and a target once the fascists rallied. After thousands of German-Italian troops marched into Domodossola in October of 1944, a brief and bloody battle followed and then the republic was dissolved, sending most of the town’s residents into Switzerland as refugees. By some act of supernatural courage, Giulio and Carmela stayed behind to tend to their mission.

Initially, it was my name, not Giulio’s, that surfaced on the lips of informants during the German counteroffensive. Carmela had already nursed me back to health after my gunshot wound, and now Giulio hid me in a mountain hut that had been in his family for generations. My alpine brothers had all been killed in the line of duty, or during the fascist backlash.

One night, Carmela came to me with the news that Giulio had been shot as a traitor for aiding the resistance movement and that his body had been left hanging in the Piazza del Mercato in Domodossola. I’ve never seen a woman so broken—her husband shot and hanged, her children far away. She was distraught at the idea of Giulio’s body not being given a proper burial, but it was impossible to move into the town undetected. She wept all night, up in the hay and dried ferns, her face pressed into a wool coat to stifle the sound.

I could tell you of our nights up in the mountains together, of how we fled into Switzerland and were interrogated at the border as potential spies, how we spent a week looking for Carmela’s son … We clung to each other the way sailors do in a shipwreck. I did and do love Carmela, the woman at my bedside. Alessia, who returned from you a few months ago by train, is now the supreme cook of the household. She barely speaks, but she brings me delicate broths that carry the aromas of your kitchen. These broths fill me with nostalgia and shame for my silence. You must believe me when I say I have missed you all profoundly each and every day.

The villages and towns here are in a bad way. The Germans sacked and looted the houses and shops and now the people struggle to get by. Carmela’s children will almost certainly be forced to look elsewhere for work, even Alessia, not yet eleven. With your permission, Ida, I would like to bequeath to this family our stone cottage. I know that might seem like a whim of a feverish man who’s been gone too long from his own family, but I have thought long and hard about it. Valetto is a sanctuary compared to this valley, and I can imagine Carmela and her children beginning again down there. The son might help with household repairs and tending the property, while Alessia might be employed in one of the local kitchens, perhaps even ours. It’s possible that I am underestimating the changes that have occurred in our shifting valley, but I know that this family’s chances of survival up here are slim. I owe my life to them, Ida, and it is my dying wish that I give them some tangible refuge in the world that I am about to flee.

With my deepest love and affection,

Aldo Vito Serafino

The coil heaters ticked away, burning up the afternoon’s plaster dust. None of us spoke for a full minute. Despite Rinaldo’s pacing, I’d sat transfixed during the reading of the letter, as if my grandfather were speaking directly from the afterlife. I wondered if the stone cottage had, in fact, rightfully belonged to Elisa Tomassi’s family for decades and that we were the ones occupying it under false pretences.

Rinaldo slid the papers back into their plastic sleeves and rested them on the table. He turned, cotton gloves still on, hands butterflying white behind his back in contemplation. Orlando Fiorani looked down at his notes before taking up the plastic sleeves. After a pause, he addressed Rinaldo’s back: ‘With regard to several matters: first, there is no witness to the signature, nullifying the effect of this as a testamentary document, and, second, Italian law requires that a testamento olografo be written by a person of sound mind, a condition which runs counter to the suggestion of sepsis and fever in the letter … There is also the fatto brutto that the letter was never sent.’ Quite pleased with himself, Orlando folded his gabardine arms.

When Rinaldo responded to the lawyer, he did so by addressing Iris. ‘These are valid legal points, Professoressa, and no doubt this letter could be contested in a court of law through such a lens. Before we proceed along those lines, however, I think it would be prudent to have an expert graphologist review the letter and compare it against Aldo Serafino’s known handwriting. If there is no match, then we can drop the matter at once.’

It occurred to me that Rinaldo was on a retainer with Iris, that he had no interest in wrapping things up quickly or passing the baton off to a probate court, where he had no authority.

‘How long will all of that take?’ asked Iris.

‘Assuming Signora Violet can find some of Aldo’s handwriting, we will fax and overnight it, along with a copy of the letter, to my secretary in Milan. We should hear back within a day or two. She can arrange to have a graphologist we’ve used before on standby. Does that meet with Serafino approval?’

‘That sounds like it’s for the best,’ said Iris.

‘Very well,’ said Rose into her handkerchief, ‘but I can tell you that those are the words of our father, plain as day.’

‘Let’s not rush to conclusions,’ said Iris.

After a pause, I said, ‘We asked Signora Tomassi to come back here at four. Should we let her know that we need another day or two to evaluate the letter?’

Rinaldo picked up the plastic-sleeved pages. ‘It would be very kind if you could let her know. I must begin preparing the dispatch at once.’

‘Would you mind?’ asked Iris.

‘Of course not,’ I said.

And with that, I became an envoy of Rinaldo Fumigalli’s tribunale.

There was no answer when I knocked on the door of the cottage, so I walked around the back in case Elisa Tomassi was sitting out on the terrace. I found her with a wool blanket across her legs, smoking a cigarette in a wicker chair, watching the sun pink up the chalky calanchi ravines. On an ironwork table next to her, there was an uncorked bottle of wine and half a glass of red, and a Penguin paperback of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, its cover banded in ivory and bottle green. I recognised it as one of my mother’s books right away, from the shelf of thrillers and crime novels and puzzles in the living room, and I felt myself prickle with annoyance. Here was a stranger disturbing the scant evidence of my mother’s presence in this house and on this earth. Then, an image from the letter flashed into my mind—Elisa Tomassi’s grandfather shot and hanged in the piazza of Domodossola, a town I’d visited—and I did my best to sound polite and friendly as I stepped onto the terrace. ‘Apologies, Signora Tomassi, I tried knocking.’

She turned, shifted in her chair. ‘Please, call me Elisa. Is it time for la deliberazione?’

‘There’s been a delay. Rinaldo would like to have the handwriting analysed in Milan, but we should hear back in the next day or two.’

She stubbed out her cigarette into a cracked floral saucer from the kitchen. ‘At home, I’d given up completely. Now I’m smoking like a schoolgirl. Or is it a chimney?’

‘Probably both,’ I said.

She picked up her wineglass, cradled the bottom in her palm. ‘Would you like some wine? Or is that fraternising with the enemy?’

I tried not to appear wary, but I could feel myself averting my eyes and looking out over the valley. Would my aunts notice if I didn’t return directly to the villa? Would accepting a glass of wine divulge my stance on the letter? When I said nothing, Elisa got up, draped the blanket around her shoulders, and said she would fetch another glass. I sat down in the other chair and wondered how many sunsets I’d seen from this terrace with my mother, or with Clare and Susan. This was always the designated afternoon spot for lounging in good weather, because it got the late sun and frequent moonrises over the distant hills.

Elisa returned, handed me a stubby trattoria glass, and poured some wine into it. It was a point of pride with my mother that no two glasses in the cottage matched. Elisa sat back down with her blanket, a pair of Ugg boots halfway up her calves.

‘The chimenea works if you need to build a fire out here,’ I said.

‘Yes, I should do that. I need to get some more firewood.’

On the edge of the terrace, there was a line of clay pots, mostly filled with neglected herbs—leggy rosemary and spindly, browning thyme—but there was also a single agave plant that dappled pale green and blue-grey in the late-afternoon light. Beyond the lichened stone ledge, there were topiaries of indiscernible shapes, a quince tree and a stand of cypress, before the darkening lunar void itself. Clare used to call our gatherings out here existential happy hours because of that view, and I could remember, as a boy, that I used to imagine sleepwalking right off the side of those cliffs and falling through time itself.

‘What did you make of the letter?’ Elisa asked after a sip of wine.

I studied the tessellations of flagstone. ‘I don’t think I can say just yet.’

‘Shrewd,’ she said softly.

‘My aunts want to be sure. We all do.’

‘Naturally.’

She swayed the tiny ocean of wine in her glass, rippling it under a sconce. ‘But didn’t you have some reaction to hearing your grandfather’s voice? Let’s assume for a second that this is really his deathbed letter to your grandmother. What then? I promise I won’t take your response as legally binding.’

‘As a historian—’

‘Excuse me, sorry, but what about as a human person? As just a man?’

I stretched my legs out and crossed them at the calf to regain composure. ‘History is personal for me. So it’s hard to separate it from who I am. This place is in my blood … but listening to the letter felt like I was hearing my grandfather for the first time … Up until now, he has always been the methodical, moustached engineer in framed photographs, or the man behind the ornate bookplates in the library and the poetic taxidermy plaques. The lynx down in the taverna is called emperor of the dark forest, engraved onto the brass plate as if it’s the real Latin name. Now, I feel like I know why. When I heard the letter, it was as if he was standing in a doorway. Suddenly, he seemed knowable.’ I took a big sip of my wine and then, to taper things off, I added, ‘I mean, as much as anyone is knowable. Anyway, that’s what I thought of the letter.’

‘That was quite honest. Grazie.’

‘What happened to your grandfather was a horrible, horrible tragedy.’

‘We have carried it all these years, I think. They ran the image of him hanging and mutilated in the square in the newspaper, recorded for all time. The letter tells some of his story but it also repays a debt. I think you see that.’

‘My aunts’ lawyer seems to think the letter may not hold up as part of a last will and testament.’

‘There is the legal question,’ Elisa said, ‘and there is also the moral question. If it turns out to be his handwriting, which I know it is, then why would your family go against his wishes?’

I let the question hang in the air. Dusk was hardening against the tree-studded hills and down in the blue-shadowed gorges choked with chaparral. It was possible that I’d inherited a cottage that was not my mother’s to give, but regardless of what I thought—or might come to think—I didn’t see my aunts rallying around the final wishes of a father who’d left behind a wife and four daughters in wartime. As the German and Italian fascists retreated north, they blew up the Valetto footbridge and the Serafino women found themselves marooned in a crumbling town without prospects. As soon as they were of a remotely marriageable age, Violet and then Rose left home to marry industrious older men, and according to my mother, these were loveless, economic alliances. My mother was too young for a swift, strategic marriage, and Iris was determined to save herself for a life as an academic, so they stayed on at the villa, working nights and weekends in Ida’s restaurant after the bridge was rebuilt.

But Aldo’s absence had still left its mark on them. Iris never dated until she went to university in Rome, and then she promptly had an affair with her married philosophy professor. And I was sure it was partly because of my mother’s experience of growing up fatherless that she mistrusted the idea that men would ever stick around. When my own father, an American photographer she’d met in Greece in the late 1950s, left her—and me—to go live in New York City in 1976, she told me we always knew we would end up alone together and proceeded to dress like a widow and speak of him in the past tense to our midwestern neighbours.

Weary of my silence, Elisa Tomassi said, ‘Your aunt Iris, when we first spoke on the telephone, said you were coming here on a sabbatical. Are you a professor?’

She didn’t seem like someone who asked polite questions or made small talk, so I wondered if this conversational shift was a tactic. But then she leaned forward in her chair and said, ‘Tell me, what do you teach?’ and I realised she was genuinely curious.

‘History,’ I said, ‘at a small college in Michigan. I’m in Italy for six months to do some guest lectures and research.’

‘What is your research area?’

‘Lately, I study the social history of abandonment. I published a book a few years back about Italy’s ghost towns and villages.’

‘Towns like Valetto?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

She smiled into her wineglass. ‘Excuse me for saying, but it sounds like a very depressing topic.’

‘I actually find these sorts of places inspiring.’

She pushed a strand of hair behind one ear, held my eye until I looked away. ‘How could that be possible?’

I imagined that she ruffled Milanese feathers with that cauterising, leonine stare and the abruptness of her questions, but there was such genuine wonder in her voice that it was impossible to dismiss, as if she were asking how planets or electricity were made. I suddenly found myself wanting to make her understand my fascination with towns and villages on the wrong side of history. I brought my gaze back from the valley and said, ‘Most of these places have a story about an earthquake that decimated the town overnight, or the generations of young people who left for jobs, but then there’s always someone, a mayor or amateur historian who wants to bring the town back to life. There’s a town up in the Alps where the deaths outstrip the births by four to one every year, and it’s offering houses for a few hundred euros if the owners will fix them up and live in them. And they’ll give ten thousand euros to any family that has a baby in the town and stays. My favourite scheme is the village up in a sunless northern valley that installed an enormous mirror on the opposite mountainside to direct sunlight down into the town square in the middle of winter.’

‘That sounds very Italian,’ Elisa said, laughing softly. ‘And does someone rent you a deckchair and blanket and newspaper down in the sunny square?’

‘No, but the mirror has kept people from leaving the town every winter. I love those stories. Italians talk all the time about art and beauty and history, but only a few of them are really willing to keep their ancestral villages alive.’

‘I’m not sure I agree,’ she said flatly. ‘I think most Italians want to save their own history, but they’re also drowning in it. It’s all they’ve ever known. Maybe we don’t think it can be taken away.’

‘That seems possible,’ I said quietly.

As an American with an Anglo-Italian mother, I knew better than to pick a fight with a native Italian on some matter of cultural belief. I’d been cornered by Italian historians and sociologists at conferences before and knew that there were certain arguments I could never win. We sat through a silence, watching a seam of light fade within a cloud. I could feel the wine warming my chest as the air came up from the river, cooling the backs of my hands. The dusk smelled of clay and flint. Determined not to circle back to the cottage dispute or Italian history, I asked Elisa how old her children were.

‘Marcella is twenty and Matteo is seventeen. Yours?’

‘My daughter is almost twenty-four. Susan.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s getting a PhD at Oxford in economics. She did a semester abroad in England during undergrad and she got the British bug.’

‘A terrible disease. My ex-husband was Scottish.’ She nudged her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose. ‘Well, I suppose he still is.’

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I said, ‘I just spent a few days with Susan in Rome.’

‘Very nice. My daughter is running our Airbnb in Milan and hopefully still going to her classes. I will call her tonight to check in.’

She tightened the blanket across her legs, crossed her arms. I wondered if she was afraid that the conversation would turn to her son in England, to his reasons for leaving with his father. In my grief, I’d discovered a gift for reading avoidance in other people’s body language, so I set her at ease by asking about becoming a chef.

‘I hated cooking at first. When I was young, my mother was always trying to teach me about food and get me into the kitchen. Then, when I went to university, I was supposed to study art history. I got a part-time job as a kitchen hand in Milan because my scholarship wasn’t enough for three meals a day. I washed the dishes and sliced charcuterie and plated salads and I watched everything the chef did, a big Milanese oaf with tattoos and knife scars on his arms who never spoke to me. One winter night, the chef was in a car accident and the owner was going to close the restaurant. I asked him if he would let me cook. The whole night, it was like my mother was standing there in the kitchen, telling me what to do, guiding my hands. It went so well that I never went back to the university.’

‘How did your parents take it?’

‘My father had moved away for a job by then, but he wrote that I was making a terrible mistake. My mother, on the other hand, was very happy. A year later I went to culinary school.’ Elisa drained her glass and set it on the table beside her. ‘My mother learned her passion for food and the old Italian ways of cooking from your grandmother. She used to tell me stories about foraging at night for mushrooms and about a hundred- and-fifty-year-old pear tree that grew down here in the valley. The Fiorentina pear was the best thing she’d ever eaten. These were the fairy tales of my childhood.’

‘Is the tree still there?’

‘I haven’t found it yet, but I am determined. The valley still has some old-world fruit and nut trees, varieties that have been largely forgotten.’

‘I spent a lot of time playing down there as a boy. I didn’t realise there was anything special in those overgrown orchards.’

We sat silently for a moment watching the sunset. I thought about the way personal histories intersect, across bloodlines and decades, the way she grew up hearing about a mythic pear tree in Umbria, a place she’d never visited, while I’d climbed a thousand trees in that very valley, oblivious to the living heirlooms around me. We were strangers with shared history, sitting in the falling dark on a terrace suspended on the side of a mesa, but somehow also suspended in time. It occurred to me that neither of us ever got to meet our Italian grandfathers.

I asked, ‘Are both your parents still alive?’

‘Not my father, but my mother is alive.’

‘You said earlier she’s unwell.’

‘Yes, that’s right. She has been unwell for some time. What about your father? Is he still alive?’

I set my glass down on the table. ‘He died when I was a teenager,’ I said. ‘He took his own life.’ The phrasing had always struck me as odd but I remembered that was the way my mother told me, six months after she’d gotten word of her ex-husband’s suicide. She’d said it as if he’d taken something that didn’t belong to him and as if it had happened just that morning. Your father has gone and taken his own life. Years later, I connected with my father’s parents only to find out that they’d called to tell my mother the news as soon as it had happened, that we’d been invited to a memorial service in Brooklyn.

‘That’s so sad,’ Elisa said. ‘I’m very sorry that happened to you.’

The easy tenderness and concern of her comment caught me off guard. I cleared my throat and looked away into the gardens. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d divulged something about myself to anyone besides Susan or Clare, let alone to someone I barely knew and who, if things unfolded a certain way, might take away one of the few anchors I had left in the world. I could have just told her that my father was no longer alive. When she stood and drifted over to the edge of the terrace, I wondered, gratefully, if it was to give me a moment to recover myself. The blanket around her shoulders reminded me of Rose’s description of the refugee children standing at the edge of the terraces like little birds about to fly over the valley, their blankets draped around their shoulders like wings. I wondered if her mother had stood in that very spot.

Taking the last sip of my wine, I said, ‘You can always smell the river at dusk.’ When she didn’t respond immediately, I assumed things had shifted uncomfortably between us and, in a pre-emptive strike, set my glass back on the table. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better head back to the villa. My aunts will be getting anxious about dinner.’ In fact, they’d probably all be eating alone in their apartments and at least one of them would be checking the clock every now and again to measure how long I’d been down here.

‘Thank you for the conversation,’ she said, turning with a smile I couldn’t quite decipher. ‘I’ll wait to hear about the handwriting.’

I got up to leave. ‘Yes, apologies again for the delay.’ As I walked across the terrace, I noticed through the French doors that the cottage was settling into darkness and I had to fight the urge to go inside and switch on the lamps my mother had bought at an estate sale twenty years earlier.