9.

ELISA TOMASSI DIDN’T EMERGE FROM my grandmother’s rooms until evening. By that time, my aunts had returned to their apartments, Rinaldo had fled to his hotel, and I’d spent a few hours drinking wine and grappa with Milo in his workshop behind the villa. He hadn’t been in the dining room during the conference call with the graphologist, or when Ida appeared, but his prediction was that I was now officially dead to both Iris and Violet, ufficialmente morto, and he suggested that I sleep in his sons’ childhood bedroom or seek political asylum with my aunt Rose. If there is a blood feud, he said, una bega familiare, you will want Rose as your protector and ally. I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but it came to me that the English had borrowed the word vendetta from the Italians during the nineteenth century, during the Victorian golden age of cyanide and strychnine poisonings.

Gently drunk, I walked through the Umbrian night into the empty piazza, then out along the corrugated edges of the town, the wind and rain siphoning up from the valley. From a distance, I could see the Saint’s Staircase spiralling down into the blue-grey void and I thought about Italians’ refusal to demolish the past. There was no reason to keep the stairs perilously attached to the side of the cliffs other than to evoke a house where a saint lived more than three hundred years ago. In my book, I’d written that Italians walk through their own histories every day, passing the ravages and triumphs of bygone days. There are streets and hillsides where Roman and Etruscan ruins butt up against papal and nationalist monuments. And in dozens of empty towns and villages, the new settlement was made a short distance away, in plain sight of the original devastation or abandonment. Walk away and don’t look back was the least Italian idea I could imagine. In fact, looking back seemed to be the main point of leaving something behind.

I wandered back through the piazza and tried to imagine my grandmother’s reaction to the letter. Was there peace or anger in knowing where Aldo had ended up? Was it mitigated by the fact that she’d lived more than half her life without knowing his fate? It occurred to me that, unlike stone monuments and ruins, family histories live and die on a tide of paper and memory, and they can vanish or return without warning. All this turned over in my mind as I walked back in the rain toward the villa gardens. From the top of the terraced hillside, I noticed that the lights were on over at the cottage and I saw a silhouette shifting behind the gossamer curtains in the kitchen. I descended the stone steps and walked over to the front patio, but then I lost my nerve and stood for a long time in the halo of the porch light.

Elisa Tomassi peered at me through the kitchen window and opened the door. ‘You frightened me,’ she said, standing in the doorway in a sweatshirt and jeans, pulling the untameable comet of her hair into a ponytail.

‘I was trying to talk myself out of knocking.’

‘You’re drenched. Would you like to come in to warm up?’

‘It’s getting late. I’m sorry for disturbing you.’

‘I’m not going to hold this door open forever. Come in.’

I stepped into the kitchen, took off my wet jacket. She fetched me a towel from the bathroom and we both saw, in the same moment, that it was monogrammed with my mother’s initials—H.S. There were half a dozen of these monogrammed towels at the cottage, a long-ago gift from my grandmother to encourage better décor and more frequent visits.

‘I was going to make something to eat,’ Elisa said. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘I could eat something, thank you.’

I dried my hair and face and she hung the towel back in the bathroom. I sat on one of the high stools at the orange-tiled countertop. When she came back, Elisa moved with ease around the cramped galley kitchen as she cooked, as if it weren’t furnished like a holiday rental with a two-burner gas stove, a tiny oven and a dorm-room refrigerator. The drawers and cupboards, once desolate with tins of expired soup and battered, cheap utensils, now contained her hand-forged German knives, her glass jars of spices, the coffee beans from a roaster in Milan and the antique glass measuring cups that might have been in her family for generations. On the stovetop, there was a coppered omelette pan and a vintage espresso maker of aviation-grade aluminium. The fact that she’d brought all these things here, even though the outcome of her claim on the cottage was uncertain, struck me as brazen, but then I imagined that these were the things that gave her comfort, that as a trained chef it pained her to cleave garlic with a blunt, plastic-handled knife. Perhaps she always travelled with her knives and pans and vintage measuring cups.

She poured me some red wine, sautéed some porcini mushrooms in olive oil, mixing them with garlic, onion and fresh herbs.

‘You should know that the funghi were gathered illegally,’ she said proudly.

‘How so?’

‘These days, you’re supposed to have a permit to go mushrooming. It’s to deter over-collecting and amateurs from picking a deadly variety. In theory, you can take your basket of mushrooms to a local doctor or pharmacist and they will confirm that you’re not about to kill yourself or your loved ones.’

‘Sounds like my life is in your hands,’ I said.

‘Naturalmente. If it’s a consolation, my mother taught me how to forage when I was a young girl. So you are quite safe in these hands.’ She spooned the sautéed mushrooms into a ceramic dish of polenta, grated some pecorino on top, and put it into the oven.

I said, ‘According to my grandmother, you should only ever stir polenta clockwise.’

‘She is correct. Unless you want wolves and demons on your doorstep. This should be ready soon. We can go sit by the fire.’

I was happy to see that nothing had changed in the living room. The massive chestnut beams and the white plaster walls, the stone floor covered in threadbare kilim rugs, in faded golds and blues, the smell of wood and cinders, these were all exactly like I’d remembered them. The walls were still bare except for the generic cityscape of Rome and the bookshelves were still lined with puzzles and paperbacks arranged in no particular order. There was an impressive fire burning in the hearth.

‘Did Milo bring you some wood?’

‘I gathered it myself down in the valley,’ she said. ‘Along with the mushrooms.’

I pictured her bounding up the steep chalky ravine with firewood and a basket of mushrooms looped on one elbow. There was something of the sturdy alpine north about Elisa Tomassi, a suggestion that despite her sleek metallic eyewear and her years in Milan she still moved through the world as the granddaughter of a partisan resister, coffin-maker and chimney sweep. Her hand movements belonged to someone who knew how to fell trees and thatch roofs. We sat in the big leather armchairs and looked out through the French doors, where the trees swayed and the slantwise rain lashed at the terrace. We sipped our wine, listened to the wind chastising the metal chimes. As winter approached, the night air roiled up from the valley, crashing against the jagged lip of the town like detonating surf.

‘Thank you for what you did today,’ she said. ‘On the call with il grafologo.’

‘I only said what I thought was true. It’s possible, though, that I might be thrown out of the family.’

‘In my experience, widows are excellent at holding grudges.’

‘The Serafino women are gold medallists.’

‘What a remarkable woman your grandmother is.’

I waited for the wind chimes to dim away. ‘Do you mind if I ask what happened in there for all those hours?’

Elisa stretched her hands into the firelight, gathering up a synopsis. ‘Well, she fell asleep for at least twenty minutes after we had tea, so that needs to be taken off the clock. Then she asked me to read the letter aloud to her. By the end, I was crying, but she just listened quietly. She’s like a statue in a park, the way she sits there listening, as if nothing can surprise her.’

‘She’s also half deaf,’ I said on a sip of wine. ‘It’s the secret to her longevity. For at least a decade, she has only heard fifty percent of what the world delivers.’

‘You’re funny,’ she said without laughing. ‘She told me about her hundredth-birthday party and all the guests she’s invited. It sounds like quite the production.’

‘Donata might call it something else. How did she take the news of what happened to Aldo?’

Elisa brought her eyes back from the fireplace. ‘She said she was relieved to know that Aldo died with someone who loved him at his side. She said that it made her happy to picture my mother bringing him soups that she learned to make down here.’

‘I was expecting her to be angry. Maybe in shock.’

‘Well, after her nap and some goose livers, she also said that he was a selfish bastardo egoista.’

‘A mixed result, then.’

Elisa got up to rearrange the fire with an iron poker. She rolled the bark side of a split log onto the winking coals and leaned another piece on top. When she was happy with the fire’s configuration, she came back to her chair. ‘Your grandmother asked to see my mother.’

‘You said she’s unwell.’

‘Yes, she’s not been well for a long time. But I think your grandmother implied that unless my mother comes to Valetto the cottage dispute will never be settled, that her daughters will always stand against it.’

‘I think I can convince the widows to let you stay part of the year,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I know you are trying to do the decent thing, but it’s the principle of the promise. My grandparents didn’t save part of Aldo Serafino’s life, after all.’

This irked me and I took a sip of wine to take the edge off my reaction. I wanted to tell her that the cottage was the place where I’d discovered my own intellect and easiness with solitude, that it was in this very room where I’d written much of my book, one of the few things that had given my life meaning after Clare’s death. But it was clear that she was determined to make her claim and that she believed history and a deathbed promise trumped whatever emotional attachment I might have to the place. Looking into the glowing embers of the fireplace, it struck me that I was a historian who wanted to argue against the authority of his own discipline.

She said, ‘Your grandmother says that she has wanted to talk to Alessia for many years, that there are things she wants to tell her before she dies, that she missed the chance with her youngest daughter. She said she wants to make amends.’

My mother barely spoke to Ida during her final years and had stopped returning the letters that came from Italy. ‘Make amends for what?’

‘She wouldn’t say, but tomorrow I’m going to drive north to see if I can convince my mother to make a trip down here. I’d like all this to be settled once and for all.’

‘Will she will come?’

‘My mother doesn’t like to think about the past unless it’s to remember old recipes. She doesn’t much like the present, for that matter. Half the time, she won’t even answer her telephone. She’s what you might call unplugged.’

‘But it sounded like she has fond memories of being here.’

‘When I was growing up, she always told me wonderful stories about the fruits and plants she gathered here, about cooking alongside your grandmother, but she refused to come with me to claim the cottage. She said she has no interest in reliving ancient history.’

My mother had described her childhood in the villa as a series of trials and torments, from the cold stone floors to the winter morning fogs. Sea smoke, she called that particular fog, as if she’d survived a shipwreck. As she got older, she returned to Valetto less and less.

Elisa said, ‘Your grandmother also wants you to come north to see the town and the house where her husband died, and the grave where he is buried. As the historian, you are being assigned the task of documenting his death. You’re supposed to bring back proof and take photos for the family album.’

I ran my hands along my knees. My pant legs were still slightly damp. ‘I’m supposed to be working on a guest lecture about the social history of abandonment in Italy, starting with the Etruscans.’

‘It’s not Etruscan, but you might be interested in our ancestral village up in the Ossola Valley. There are fewer than fifty people now. My mother still lives alone in the house where your grandfather died. The neighbours help her out. She has always refused to move to Milan to be closer to us, to her grandchildren.’ Elisa contemplated our reflections in the French doors. ‘Well, I suppose there is only one grandchild in Milan after Matteo went with his father to England.’

The chimney flue took a gulp of smoky air.

‘That must have been hard, to have him leave.’

‘He and his father are very good pals.’ She pulled herself out of her chair. ‘I should go check on our polenta con funghi. Perhaps you can refill our wine for dinner.’

Fifteen minutes later, while we ate our polenta at the kitchen counter and drank more wine, Elisa asked, ‘What was your wife like?’ and I heard the air empty out of my lungs. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘Your aunt Iris told me about your loss the day I arrived. I hope I’m not prying.’

As with all Elisa Tomassi’s questions, this one came earnestly and it seemed important not to deflect it. I held a sip of wine in my mouth and, after a moment, I said, ‘Clare …’ as if the question had simply been to remember my dead wife’s name. For half a minute it felt like trying to describe the sound of water, but then I tried to imagine Clare as someone you might meet on a train, or at a dinner party, and how you would recall the way she squinted when she didn’t quite hear something and asked you to repeat it. Or you might remember that she put an ice cube in her sauvignon blanc and whispered lowbrow while doing it with hooligan glee. I wanted to give an objective, ordered account of Clare moving through the world, but then it came out headlong and in no particular order.

‘She was tall, pale, had a wicked sense of humour. Every Friday night she made pizzas for Susan and me and made us dance in the living room. In bed at night, she used to paddle her feet back and forth to go to sleep and her feet were always cold, so she wore hiking socks to bed. It was this funny sound, all that wool rubbing together, that seemed so natural to me. In the middle of the night she would wake up in a sweat and have to take the socks off and she’d throw them across the room and it sounded like a bear roused from hibernation.’

Elisa laughed at this, cradled her wineglass in one palm.

‘She had an incredible memory, knew poems by Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop by heart, even though she’d only taken three English classes during her university days. She could remember notes she’d written in the margins of novels all throughout the house. She loved to argue and debate, but she did it carefully and with curiosity, always willing to be proven wrong. Apart from hand-tossed pizza, she was a terrible cook and was easily frazzled in the kitchen. She could poach an egg perfectly, that was about it, and she made her technique of adding white vinegar to the water and creating a little whirlpool for the egg to land in sound like particle physics. She held secret grudges, pretended not to. She wrote long letters and emails to her brothers in Maine, who wrote terse, ungenerous replies. Until she was banned from doing so, she performed terrible magic tricks at Susan’s childhood birthday parties, and she played the guitar in the basement when she made candles. Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones covers … Every fall she had allergies and she never laughed if she didn’t think a joke or wisecrack was funny. She was ruthless that way, left you hanging in mid-air. Didn’t want to insult your dignity by laughing at something that you both knew wasn’t really funny. What else? She loved ginger-flavoured candies and would run someone down to beat them to a discount clothes rack at an outlet mall.’ I shot out a laugh. ‘Her thumbs were double-jointed and she always got into bed an hour before me to read and think or listen to audiobooks. On our first date, at this terrible New Jersey Italian restaurant I took her to when I was in grad school and she was in law school, she said to me, “Tell me something, Hugh Fisher, are you always so gently dishevelled?” and she said it with a smile, as if it were a compliment, and I went ahead and kissed her, figuring she knew what she was getting into.’

Elisa nodded into this detail, either agreeing with my wife’s assessment of my appearance, or with the sentiment behind the story. ‘She sounds wonderful,’ she said softly.

‘She was also fiercely independent,’ I added, in case I’d glossed over a crucial aspect of this woman she’d never meet. ‘There was a devoted group of birdwatchers and a hiking club and an annual pilgrimage with Susan to a women’s folk festival while I stayed at home and graded papers.’

After a long moment of silence, Elisa asked, ‘After she died, what was the first thing you forgot about her?’

No one had ever asked me about Clare in this way. ‘Her voice,’ I said. ‘The precise sound of it.’ I could remember certain qualities—her wry, throaty laughter, the way her singing was high and clear and folksy in the shower or the basement—but the sounds themselves, the tone and timbre, had all vanished. All this came to me as I stared down at my empty plate.

‘How many years has it been?’

‘Six.’

I went to the stovetop and served myself a second helping. This violated some unspoken Italian rule about the guest and the chef and I felt it bristle in the air between us. Had I always been a guest in this cottage? But I needed something to do with my hands, so I ate some more. ‘It’s delicious,’ I said. I was experiencing a flaring vulnerability hangover and I remembered this feeling from the early days of grief, when I dodged my colleagues after they’d stopped by my office to drop off a sympathy casserole. They always left a little dazed by what came out of my mouth. Grief is a locked room, I told one of them, and I’ll be trapped in here forever. I never made eye contact with that particular historian again. Rallying, I asked Elisa about her children.

She took her time answering, staring up at the chestnut rafters to either collect her thoughts or wait for my ode to a dead wife to dissipate. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Marcella wants to be a journalist or a documentary filmmaker, depending on the day. She wants to tell stories about the downtrodden and the oppressed, sees herself as a heroine in ripped jeans. She’s very smart and kind, but there’s a bit of hostility. I used to think it was just a phase, but it’s been there since she was thirteen. When she’s not out with her friends at some benefit concert or fundraiser, she’s going to a hip-hop class or jogging around the neighbourhood. She’s very loyal to me, in her own way, though she can’t abide any discussion of feelings. That is her idea of certain death.’

‘Susan is the opposite,’ I said. ‘She’s big on feelings and insights, though she has an economist’s way with words. When she asks why I’m walking through an abyss of loneliness it sounds like she’s reading a nutrition label.’

I waited several beats before asking Elisa about her son in England. My Clare monologue seemed to have earned me the right to this question.

She said, ‘As a boy, Matteo loved practical jokes and he was always falling off bicycles and roofs and playground equipment.’ She took a bit of polenta, chewed, considered, chewed again. ‘He’s always been very good at accents and impressions and at school he had a special talent for impersonating his teachers. He loved science and mathematics but thought history and languages were very boring. He played soccer at school and bocce with the old men in our neighbourhood, who called him piccolo maestro because of his skill at the game. His bedroom was always a disaster area, full of dirty clothes and posters of motorcycles, and he kept a pet lizard under a heat lamp. As a kid, when it was someone’s birthday, he could be very sweet. He would make something with his hands out of wood or put together a playlist.’

‘What was the best practical joke he ever played on anyone?’

‘He made posters for psychic readings and put his sister’s mobile phone number on them and pasted them all around the neighbourhood. For weeks she got calls asking her to help find lost dogs or determine whether a husband was cheating.’

‘Kind of mean,’ I said, ‘but also kind of brilliant.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You said he went to live with his father in England?’

She ran a fingernail into a grout line of the tiled countertop. ‘Matteo and I always butted heads. His dad never really parented him, so I was left to lay down the law. And let me tell you, it was a very permissive law because I worked such long hours at the restaurant. After the fire, when our marriage started to go downhill, it felt like Matteo took his father’s side. He wants to be a chef, or so he thinks, so now he’s dicing onions and peeling potatoes for Benjamin’s new London gig.’

‘Do you talk to him regularly?’

She ignored this. ‘You know, he would have had a perfect impression of Signor Fumigalli. Where did your aunts find that Milanese peacock?’

‘He used to work with Iris at the university. They were colleagues.’

‘Matteo would have perfected his Fumigalli impression within a few minutes and had us all in stitches.’

I smiled at this image and put down my fork. Neither of us seemed interested in eating any longer. A dead wife and absent son had been conjured, a second bottle of wine had been opened, and my thoughts kept circling back to my own outpouring. Ever since naming Clare’s voice as the first thing I’d forgotten, my mind had been rubbing it over, and I felt exhilarated by the possibility of understanding more about my own losses and eroding memories. What other half-buried things did I know about my own grief and wife that, if asked about directly, I could surrender? That for several years I kept Clare’s mobile phone active because I didn’t want anyone else to take her phone number. That during the time before I released the number, I sent her texts from work, only to come home and read them on the phone that was always charging by her side of the bed. These seemed too incriminating and neurotic to volunteer, but then something broke to the surface.

‘I think Clare thought about leaving me once.’

Elisa wiped a spot on the counter with her napkin. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Years ago, when I was going for tenure and Susan was maybe five or six, Clare picked her up from school one afternoon and drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to go camping for a week. There was a note on the kitchen counter when I got home.’

‘Maybe she just wanted to be in the woods and hear the birds.’

‘No, I think it was more than that.’

‘Did you do something wrong?’

‘I was gone a lot, doing research to finish my first book. And when I was home, I was distracted and easily annoyed. I’d sit in my study surrounded by a pile of books and papers. I was convinced if I didn’t get tenure my life would be ruined, that I’d end up working as a line cook in Ypsilanti.’

‘There is nothing wrong with being a line cook,’ Elisa said.

‘I know, I just mean—’ I cut myself off in case I said something else incriminating.

Elisa folded and unfolded her napkin into a square. Without a hint of accusation or judgement, she said, ‘Well, perhaps the camping trip was to send you a signal to get out of your head and stop ignoring your family.’ She glanced over at me, then back down at her napkin folding. ‘Did you ever ask her if she planned on leaving you?’

‘I wanted to ask her about it before she died but it had come to feel irrelevant. You don’t want to say to the dying person, so I’ve been thinking about that time you disappeared for a week and went camping with our daughter. What was that about? Because maybe you already know what it was about, but if you ask, and she says I was going to leave you, then everything might be tainted.’

‘Why would it be tainted? She didn’t leave you. She obviously decided to come back.’

‘Yes, but maybe it wasn’t for me. Maybe it was for Susan.’

‘You can’t think like that. Did you change after she came back?’

‘Yes. We started having date nights again and I took Susan on outings every Sunday afternoon.’

‘Let me guess, to ghost towns in Michigan?’

‘Very funny. We went to museums and movies and I taught her how to swim at the YMCA pool.’

‘Then it sounds like you redeemed yourself. As a father and a husband.’

‘That’s a generous interpretation. If you ask Susan, my real calling was to become a widower. She likes to remind me that Clare’s car is still in the driveway, unregistered, with the tyres deflated.’

Elisa asked, ‘Do your neighbours complain about the car?’

‘There seems to be no statute of limitations on grief so they resist calling the city to complain. Midwesterners will do a lot to avoid social discord. But I wish I could be more pragmatic with Clare’s things. Susan has offered to help me sort through everything and take it to the Goodwill.’

‘What is Good Will?’

‘A charity where you can take your old toasters and sweaters.’

‘One day you will wake up and be ready for Good Will.’

Elisa took out her cigarettes from her purse and went to stand by the kitchen door. She opened it a crack, lit her cigarette, blew some smoke out into the night air. It had stopped raining and the wind had died down.

‘You can smoke in here,’ I said. ‘My mother always did.’

‘It’s a disgusting habit. Please don’t encourage it.’

‘I’ve been wondering, why is your English so good?’

‘That’s kind of you to say. It’s not perfect. I studied for years in school and always made friends with the exchange students. My ex-husband also liked to correct my mistakes.’

‘You mentioned he’s Scottish.’

‘Yes. Before moving to Milan, Benjamin was head chef at a Glasgow hotel.’

‘He left Italy after the fire and the divorce?’

‘It sounds quite melodramatic when you put them in the same sentence.’

‘Sorry.’

‘He stayed for a year, then got the job in London, and he told me Matteo was coming with him the night before they left. Matteo couldn’t even look me in the eyes.’

She leaned against the doorframe, holding her cigarette at an angle. It felt like we’d arrived at the end of something, so I collected the dishes and took them over to the sink.

‘Thank you for the delicious meal.’

‘Don’t wash up,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it later. Also, I would hardly call that a meal.’

I turned the tap on to make a feint at rinsing.

‘Would you like to take a walk?’ she asked, her voice half out the door.

I said nothing because it seemed like she already knew my answer. I reached for my jacket and grabbed the flashlight that had hung beside the refrigerator for decades, its batteries dutifully replaced by Milo every winter solstice.

We passed through the terraced gardens silently, the hulking villa on the crest of the hill like some beleaguered warship floating through the night, a single cone of lamplight coming from Iris’s apartment. Elisa shone the flashlight at the cobblestones as we climbed up toward the piazza, but as the clouds began to break apart, she switched it off so that we could see a silver-white whorl of starlight hanging above the valley. We stood quietly, her breath amplified by the ascent and all that wine and the fringed hood of her parka. We could faintly hear the river far below, and I could make out the silhouettes of the darkened, empty houses on the other side of the canyon.

‘Why do you want the cottage so badly?’ I asked.

She put her hands into her pockets, leaned back, stared up at the sky. ‘I see the cottage as an offering to my family. It somehow makes what happened to my grandfather a little more bearable.’

She continued to walk along the pathway and I fell in beside her.

She said, ‘Maybe it’s more than that, I don’t know. It just feels like the right thing.’ She stopped, turned to me. ‘Marcella says I’m running away from my own life.’

‘That’s exactly what Susan says about me. How do twenty-somethings know so much?’

‘Because they have no experience to get in the way of their theories.’

‘Well said.’

‘You could have taken a sabbatical in Florida or the Caribbean. Instead, you came back to spend time with four old women on a slab of tufa and give lectures about abandoned towns. What does that say about you?’

‘It says everything about me. I hate the beach, for one thing. I didn’t realise it when I asked for the sabbatical but I also came back to Valetto looking for some trace of who I used to be. As a boy.’

‘What was he like, this boy?’

‘Shy, earnest, kind, wildly curious.’

‘And he was happy here?’

‘So happy. At least that’s how I remember it. I’d leave my parents fighting in the suburbs of the Midwest and I’d come here to be with my crazy aunts and my fearless grandmother in a medieval villa. They treated me like a prince. I lived in the cottage by myself, ate mortadella sandwiches over the sink, spent my days reading and doing crosswords and exploring the valley and playing chess with old men in the piazza. Most afternoons, Milo sent me across the footbridge for magazines or gelato and to pick up groceries or prescriptions for my aunts. Every day there was a new mission. It was paradise. The happiest I’ve ever been.’

‘I bet you were a very sweet boy.’

I felt myself flush in the darkness, not because I couldn’t accept this simple compliment for the boy I’d been, but because I knew it to be true and felt a pinprick of panic that nothing of my younger self could be salvaged.

Sensing my reaction, Elisa said, ‘I also bet your aunts and grandmother spoiled you rotten.’

‘There’s no denying it.’ I gently took the flashlight from her and aimed it up at the building façades that rose from both sides of the alley. ‘In a lot of ways, this is the place where I became a historian,’ I said, moving the light across the wet stone and stucco. ‘It was in these buildings that I first studied all the things people had left behind. Some of them were abandoned after the big earthquake in 1971, including my grandmother’s restaurant. It’s the one on the corner.’

We took a few more steps and I shone the flashlight across the weathered sign above the boarded-up doorway. The painted letters of the name—Il Ritorno—had vanished years before, but there remained a faint, watermarked outline ingrained in the wood. Elisa craned up at the sign, and then peered in through one of the unboarded windows.

‘I heard about the restaurant from my mother. Your grandmother put her to work in the kitchen after the war.’

‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Yes, until she went back up north. Can we go inside?’

I remembered taking Clare and Susan inside the abandoned houses and the restaurant one summer. I’d made the mistake of building the interiors up to be catacombs of history, places where you could contemplate the tide head of elapsed and passing time, and it was immediately apparent that neither of them could see it. What they saw were blooms of blue-green algae ravaging plaster walls. The left-behind dinner plates and cutlery, the open green wine bottles, the medicine cabinet that still held a razor and two aspirin lined up on a shelf, these were all just items of wreckage for them. Clare began sneezing and Susan looked at me as if she’d found me in our garage engaged in a shameful hobby. We left in silence and never spoke of it again, but I remember holding it against them for years, that they failed to see how these rooms were not only my boyhood sanctuary but wormholes through time, places where you might inventory the hours and the minutes of other people’s lives as precisely as a crime scene. Here was the glass someone drank from right before the earth shook and the ceiling collapsed. Here was the aspirin for the headache or the fever, and you couldn’t help wondering why it had never been swallowed.

I led Elisa toward the back of the restaurant, into the kitchen through the unlocked door. As soon as we were inside, I had the sensation that we were divers picking our way through an underwater shipwreck. The ferrous, damp air burned the back of my throat, and I noticed Elisa putting her nose into the collar of her parka. But then she took the flashlight from me and started to inspect the kitchen with a kind of forensic glee.

‘They were in the middle of plating the meals,’ she whispered.

Six china plates and two soup bowls sat on a stainless steel counter. Some of them were empty and sheathed in dust and plaster and some of them fluoresced with mould when the light made contact. A single plate still had a large bone on it, bleached and stripped clean from decades of work by mice and rats and ants. I’d always been surprised that a dog or a feral cat didn’t find their way into the kitchen and carry it off. I was expecting Elisa to be repelled by all this. Instead, she leaned closer and shone the light just a few inches from the bone.

‘Pork chops,’ she said brightly.

Then she turned to the stovetop, where there was a big blackened soup pot, two small saucepans and a frying pan, their contents turned to indecipherable swaths of colour and char.

‘I can imagine your grandmother standing right here, plating the food,’ Elisa said. ‘If she’s doing six meals at once, they were probably pretty busy.’

‘The restaurant was full the night of the earthquake. You can tell from the dining room.’

‘Show me.’

We walked through a stone archway and ducked under a wooden beam angling down from the ceiling. A dozen tables were arranged around pillars and over by the windows that faced the street. Chairs and bottles of wine were toppled over but the place settings were remarkably intact—tarnished silverware, blackened cloth napkins, small plates stippled with mould where some of the guests had already taken their antipasti or primi piatti. The wineglasses had all turned opaque, some of them broken or on their sides, some of them upright and crystallised red. Elisa walked around the room while I guided her with the flashlight. At a table by the window, she pulled one of the cane chairs upright, sat on it and placed a tattered napkin across her lap.

‘I’ll have the special,’ she said.

‘You’re very brave,’ I said.

‘I can imagine them sitting here when it happens.’

‘And then they all start running for the door.’

‘They must have been terrified.’

‘I’ve never understood why no one ever came back inside. Why not clean up or salvage something? My grandmother says she never even came back for her knives.’

‘Because all of it was cursed,’ Elisa said matter-of-factly.

‘And then some American boy comes along and decides these buildings are full of mystery.’

‘Yes, I can see you here. I admit it’s not for everybody.’ She stood, patted down the pockets of her parka. ‘I think I need another cigarette to clear my head.’

As we walked back toward the kitchen, Elisa noticed a tattered paper menu, the page mildewed with tiny black specks and blue-green starbursts. ‘Oh, my God. Can I take this with me?’ she asked, holding it into the flashlight. ‘I want to see what they were serving.’

I’d made it a rule to never remove anything from abandoned places, including the buildings in Valetto, but there was genuine awe washing across Elisa’s face, so I told her to take the menu with her.

We walked back through the kitchen and she stopped at the stove for a second, moving one hand between the burners and the stainless steel counter. ‘The flow is perfect,’ she said. ‘The chef can take a small turn to the right to plate on the countertop and the waiters can come from the other side.’ She took a step toward the counter. ‘My mother would have stood here, a little to the right of your grandmother. No one is in anybody’s way and the chef is at the centre of everything. They knew exactly what they were doing.’

She continued out the back door and lit a cigarette in the alleyway. It had started to rain again and we walked back down toward the cottage in a light drizzle, passing the darkened villa, neither of us speaking until we got to the front patio.

I said, ‘I better go find somewhere to bunk down at the villa. Iris’s guest room might be off limits at the moment.’

‘If they’ve locked you out, there is a spare bedroom here,’ she said. After a few seconds, perhaps slightly embarrassed, she added, ‘Of course you know there is a spare bedroom.’

‘Thank you. I think it’ll be okay.’

‘If you decide to come north with me tomorrow, I’m planning to leave at eight o’clock sharp. I will meet you on the other side, in the parking area beside the footbridge.’

I told her I would think about it and let her know in the morning. We said good night and as I climbed up through the terraced gardens, I thought about the room up north where Aldo Serafino had written the letter and taken his final breath, about the possibility of a headstone in a cemetery, of witnessing his final resting place. A historian lives for such pinheads in the map of time, but there were also reasons not to go north with a woman I barely knew. For one thing, I’d lose momentum on my lecture and research. For another, whether I liked it or not, I’d be part of a delegation to lobby for her mother’s return to Umbria, which would only strengthen her family’s claim. Despite the fact that neither Elisa nor my aunts showed any interest in my scheme, I clung to my vision of spending summers of studious leisure in the stone cottage and that Elisa would live in it most of the year, rent free, before fleeing the hot and dry Umbrian summers for Milan or the Alps. But how would such an arrangement work, even if all parties could be persuaded? And what would she actually do in Valetto to make a living and then take the summers off?

All this conjecture evaporated when I came through the villa’s front door and switched on a lamp. An envelope with my name on it, written in my grandmother’s hooped cursive, stood propped on the hallstand. Inside was a notecard From the desk of Ida Serafino:

Dearest Hugh,

Your grandfather wrote that a man is a frail thing, not much more than a wire … And I don’t think I can die in peace without knowing more of the where and how that particular wire unravelled. Would you be willing to find out on my behalf? I’ve asked Signora Tomassi to entreat her mother to return to Valetto and she’s agreed to allow you to accompany her up north. Thank you in advance for your service.

Yours sincerely,

Ida Serafino

There was no denying such a request, it seemed to me, as I folded the note into my pocket and moved down the hallway, switching on lamps and auditioning rooms where I might sleep. Eventually, I settled on a divan amid the papery rummage of my grandfather’s former study and fell asleep to the sound of the rain and the smell of old books. The woody edge of lignin as the pages of a book yellow has always been a special comfort to me, despite the fact that it’s a visceral reminder of the past dissolving into thin air.