OFTEN I have traveled the road to Montefiore in memory. Today I travel it in true time, true dust, true air. When the track lends me height enough, I can glimpse the villa’s red roofs above the various ranks of poplars, cedars of Lebanon, pines, across the intervening valleys.
Ranuccio doesn’t say much. A habit of silence still obtains from his days in the abbey. But he tries to break it, naming the things of the world for me as if I have lost language. Perhaps I have. By cataloging the road we introduce the world to each other. Newborns in a new world.
But when I ask after my father—or Cesare—or Lucrezia—or garrulous Primavera—or sweet dim Michelotto, and why we left him weeping in that circle of stones on the hill—or vain and frightened Fra Ludovico—Ranuccio has no answers. He will only squeeze my hand. He will not let go—he won’t let go! Not unless I need to escape into the bushes to relieve and cleanse myself.
I won’t let go of him, either, for reasons I don’t yet understand. But there is time. Again, there is time. It rushes like a cloud of insects, an aeration of instants fluttering up from fissures in the ground, against my face; I brush them to see through them, beyond; but I try to see them as well, the instants. Each leaf, whether she be like her sister or not. Each creak of the brother timbers of the world. Each moment of rot and blossom, by turns and simultaneous, and the world in colossal panorama behind, ninety billion instants flying up like snow blown in my face.
We turn at the bottom of the final slope. The world seems emptier than it once did, as if the Four Horsemen have done their job too well, and I have lived on into an afterlife. But no afterlife could smell as sweet as goose shit, could ring with nonsense hammering as of someone most mundanely fixing a warped window casement just out of sight.
We begin to rise. I am hardly equal to the task, after my long rest. Ranuccio would carry me, but I refuse the offer. We pass a flooded field. We cross a stone bridge. We study a green lake for its secrets. I stop to rest on a rock wall I had forgotten—how dear even simple rocks can be. A bit of thornbank I remember from long ago, wilder now, overgrown, grips with all its might to its life.
I see a priest in a soutane and a straw hat against the sun, making wide gestures in the roofless chapel, preaching, for all I can tell, to a gaggle of geese. I see a stout figure on a low stool in the kitchen garden, pulling up radicchio and flecking the dirt off it with a vigorous motion. I see a figure beside her helping—man, woman, I cannot tell—who puts one hand to a hip, and straightens up.
The hand goes up to the eyes, shading them, to study me as I approach out of the shouting light. Then both hands go up, the gesture, in all the dark places that we humans live, of surrender. He suffers what is inevitable. He surrenders to the impossible. He can’t get breath at first, but then he does. He calls my name.