19.

THE DENUNCIATION HAD BLOWN THROUGH the villa like the tramontana, the Umbrian winter wind that sometimes hurls itself out of the valley to loosen roof tiles and down trees. In the aftermath, we moved through the rooms in a silent daze. During the epic clean-up—the dishwashing, the stacking of rental chairs and tables, the bundling of table linens into laundry baskets—nobody spoke of what had transpired. My grandmother retired at her usual time with a pot of fennel tea, at the threshold to her second century, and Marcella and Susan led Alessia back down to the cottage before it was fully dark. My aunts vanished, one by one, into their apartments, Iris with her hand on Rinaldo Fumigalli’s tweed elbow. As I walked between rooms, looking for stray wineglasses and appetiser plates, I kept coming upon Milo, now in his shop coat, sweeping ash from the hearthstones. We were cautious and wordless with each other. What was left to say on the matter of a spring night in 1944, or about a man who had refused to make amends for his misdeeds? History does not offer us closure. It offers us the inscrutability of the present. It offers us a river of paper, or a digital ocean whorled by so much flotsam.

Drifting back into the kitchen, I watched as Elisa stood alone, disassembling the vintage Volano meat slicer to clean it. As she bent over to peer into its inner workings, I asked her if there was anything left for me to do and she said that this was the last of the clean-up. I told her that I wanted to go down into the valley and throw the pocketknife I’d stolen from Silvio Ruffo into the river. That maybe this would give me some sense of completion. She wiped the disc blade with a bleach-soaked cloth, not looking up, as if she’d known about the pocketknife all along.

‘Give me ten minutes and I will come with you,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to be alone.’

‘I’d like you to come,’ I said.

And so we picked our way down the chalk-white pathways into the valley after dark, stood by the river as it flowed, dark and silty, at our feet. Before I tossed the knife into the river, she took a moment to study it, opened the blade and ran her thumb across its edge.

‘He kept it sharp,’ she said, handing it back to me.

I tossed it out toward the middle of the river and we listened to its tiny plunk. I wanted that sound to mean something, to be satisfying, but the sound and the gesture struck me almost immediately as hollow. I tried to imagine the knife washing downstream, that it might be found by a farmer or fisherman who would use it on an apple or a piece of bait, without any thought of its history, but all I could conjure was the knife buried in clay and silt.

‘Did it matter?’ I asked. ‘What we did?’

‘It mattered,’ she said, looking into the moonlight scaling the water. ‘We shamed him in front of everyone. We shone some light down into the cellar of that house. That meant something to my mother, I think, though I doubt she will ever speak of it again. After we walked back to the villa from the piazza, she told me that she wants to go home to the mountains and doesn’t want to see the psychologist in Milan again.’

‘My mother thought therapy was a kind of sorcery.’

‘I want to believe that in her mind, she has finally stepped off that chair. That she feels some kind of healing. Will you let me believe that?’

‘I will let us both believe it.’

We stood for a few moments, listening to the wind and the river, before climbing back up to the town. The idea of sleep seemed impossible so we walked up through the terraced gardens, past the cottage and back toward the piazza. Before I knew it, we were walking along the perimeter path along the edge of the volcanic pedestal, out toward the spot where a bronze plaque commemorates the vanished house of the medieval Franciscan saint, the wrought-iron staircase that spirals into mid-air above the valley. I hadn’t been back to the Saint’s Staircase since I was a boy, not since that morning I climbed down to find a figure rearing up at me through the fog. Despite knowing it had been a trick of light and perspective—a shaft of raking sunlight pinning my silhouette onto a vaporous cloud—the sense of dread I’d felt on the stairs had stayed with me, off and on, for years. It returned during blackouts and storms, during in-flight turbulence, and on those white afternoons when Clare was dying by the hour in the bedroom we shared. And it had come for me—I realised now—when I sat reading my mother’s lost letters under a slate roof in the foothills of the Alps.

So when I saw Silvio Ruffo sitting on a low wall by the gated entrance to the stairs, the thickening in my throat was immediately familiar. Hours after his denunciation, unclaimed by his family, he sat with a few purring stray cats at his feet, feeding them scraps of salami and prosciutto from his pockets. As this surreal vision settled over me, my mind gravitated to the idea of him putting sliced meat into his pockets during the antipasto course of the birthday party and that he’d been carrying it ever since. In all likelihood, his pockets were full of charcuterie during all phases of the denunciation. When Elisa saw him I felt her whole body tense beside me. She took my wrist to pull me up a dozen feet away.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a moment of pity for the old man, wondering how he’d get back to the nursing home, whether his disgraced children planned to leave him out here all night. My brain went to logistics, to the impossibility of bringing him back to the villa or walking him across the footbridge. So I pulled out my mobile phone and dialled the local carabinieri headquarters in Bevona, told the disgruntled officer that a ninety-six-year-old man had been abandoned in Valetto and he needed to be collected by the Ruffo family. I told the officer that the grandfather was by the Saint’s Staircase and that he should go knock on the apartment door above the Ruffo pharmacy. Elisa stood silently beside me, mesmerised by the sight of Silvio Ruffo tearing a ribbon of prosciutto and hand-feeding it to a tabby with a kinked tail.

Maybe his hearing aids were back on, maybe he heard everything I’d said into my phone, but he didn’t let on by turning in our direction. Instead, after a long silence, he pinched his trousers above his bony knees, used his cane to leverage himself into a standing position, and shuffled over toward the spiral staircase. There was a padlocked iron gate and a danger sign in front of the staircase, but like most deterrents against falling off the rim of Valetto, it was far from foolproof. If you were determined to get onto the stairwell, all you had to do was step over a foot-high stone ledge farther down the pathway and then circle back on a narrow strip of gravel and dirt. And that’s exactly what Silvio Ruffo did with a fair amount of effort, planting his backside on the ledge, then lifting his legs one at a time to swing them over, then reclaiming his cane on the other side.

When he got to the top of the stairwell, he gripped the iron railing, used his cane to anchor himself to the step below, and began his halting descent. To navigate the corkscrew bend, he had to adjust his hips and upper body in tiny increments. All this is to say that we had a full minute or so to stop him or call out his name. I heard Elisa wonder in Italian what he was doing, but we both knew what he was doing. I remember that when he paused on the bottom step he finally craned up at us through the spiralled iron railings, his chin lifted, his body taut with defiance. I’ve revisited that moment countless times in the years since, trying to understand the hollowed-out expression on his face, or why I experienced a moment of magical thinking, certain that it was his figure that had startled me on the stairwell as a boy—a premonition in the fog. Looking up at us, he had the wild and imperious stare of an injured bird of prey, a lame goshawk unhooded and appalled by the loss of his empire. He turned away, took a breath that lifted his shoulders, extended the tip of his cane into mid-air and stepped into the blue void of the valley. We heard the updraft billow through his suit like the snap of a spinnaker. Then we heard the muffled impact of him hitting the cliffs a hundred feet below.

We waited for the carabinieri to arrive with a Ruffo delegation, but when they came an hour later, it was only Roberto with them, his hair tousled, wearing sweatpants and slippers. It was striking that only the grandson had come, and I wondered whether the son or the daughter guessed what had taken place. The carabinieri asked us detailed questions about what we’d witnessed and why we didn’t intervene. Eravamo sotto shock, Elisa said, We were in shock, though we both knew that didn’t quite cover it. Then there were phone calls and radio dispatches, a helicopter was roused from some distant outpost, and we all waited into the dawn hours for the body to be air-lifted and taken to a nearby morgue. One of the carabinieri took notes about the birthday celebration, about our grievances against the old man and the denunciation, and we were told that they might have further questions and that we’d be asked to make official statements at the local headquarters. Roberto Ruffo explained to the carabinieri that his grandfather had been Umbria’s oldest living fascist, and that ha fatto molto male qui. He did great harm here.

‘And did you come for your grandfather after this denunciation?’

Roberto said, ‘We returned to look for him after the party but he’d already vanished. I walked all through the town, calling his name, but he was hard of hearing.’

There was something perfunctory about the way he said it and I wondered if the young officer believed a word of it as he wrote it down.

‘Allora, di chi é la colpa?’ asked the officer, shrugging. Then who is to blame?

He wasn’t necessarily looking for an answer, but I said, Storia, History, and I was serious, but also enjoyed watching him add it to his mental list of suspects. The sun had come up, warming the air with pine sap and turning the chalk-white ridges on the western side of the valley the colour of saffron. I took Elisa by the elbow and we started back for the villa.

It was only in the retelling that Elisa and I grappled with our silence at the stairwell. After breakfast, we assembled Alessia, the widows, our children, Milo, Donata and Rinaldo, to describe Silvio Ruffo’s final moments. We all sat in the library, nursing cups of tea and coffee. At first, there was palpable relief that Silvio Ruffo had been loosed from the world, but then there was a discussion about whether or not we’d collectively sent him to his grave and whether Elisa and I should have stopped him.

‘It felt like watching a big wave about to crash on the shore,’ Elisa said. ‘It didn’t seem like we could stop it.’

I described the way he sat with the stray cats, feeding them scraps of salami, the look on his face right before he stepped off the bottom step.

‘We might have opened the doorway,’ my grandmother said from her wheelchair, ‘but he is the one who stepped through it. And what you’re describing has nothing to do with remorse.’

‘Esattamente,’ Elisa said. ‘But there was also something dignified and ceremonial about it, like he was making an offering. Was it to us? I don’t know.’

‘Non era un’offerta,’ said Alessia from the corner. It was no offering. She’d brought in a small spool of wire and sat wrapping some pieces of quartz for one of her creations. ‘Stava riprendendo il controllo.’ He was taking back control. ‘He wanted to be the one to decide how this story ends.’

We all watched as she continued to wrap stones with wire and we must have all decided that it was right for Alessia to have the last word on the subject. When he was buried in a shepherd’s cemetery up in the Umbrian mountains a few days later, there was no obituary in the local newspaper, just his name and the dates that bookended his life.