Ambiguity

CLARE THOUGHT, TWO DAYS later, how simple and straightforward everything had seemed. Harder of course to bring even some of it about — to engage in blackmail, if that was what it was, to stride from one kind of person to another. A process that rarely has lasting results, a voice wanted to say.

She loaded her brush with terra rosa, that rich red of Tuscan

fields. The paint was gritty with the substance she had mixed in. She thought how everything important took place very close to the ground, how useless it was to try for perspective at great height. Look how the colour adhered to the copper sheet. Look how the metal surface — in some parts still bright, in others an extreme and gorgeous rotting blue — reflected the three-dimensional quality of paint mixed with flecks of rocky earth; how this broke up the light, so the colour seemed to glow from within. Imagine receiving this surprising gift from the ground, this new idea.

Up in the olive grove, she heard the clatter of Niccolo’s cultivating contraption sputter to a halt. Silence rushed in.

Niccolo.

Only yesterday she’d stood exactly here, shaking, looking out across the valley, wondering who she’d imagined she was. This was after she’d returned from seeing Harold Plank. Shaking at that, and at her situation generally, wondering how she would manage. Acknowledging, too, that there was one more essential thing left undone.

She’d opened the makeup case, removed the metal box that held the ashes, wrapped the casket in the beaded shawl, and put the two hand-drawn maps in there, too. She would carry this bundle to the meadow and bury it at the base of the horseshoe cliff near the entrance of the tomb, in a place she hoped would remain undisturbed. The rest would be left up to time and alchemy — whether over centuries the casket would corrode, fall apart, the contents join the soil of Tuscany, or whether the metal would leach into the fibres of the shawl, replace the cloth with a rough and lasting weave. Either prospect would have pleased him, she thought. But if instead the casket were discovered whole, in fifty years or a thousand, the mystery this would present would surely have pleased him most.

The spot she’d chosen, among the fallen rocks, had been hard to dig. The pile of earth beside the hollow struck her as hard-won and significant, and when she’d completed the burial, she’d rubbed some between her fingers. Hard clay in the process of turning itself into limestone, before tightening back into the ball our planet would be again one day, whirling and shining and cold and hard, not the faintest memory in the entire universe that we were once part and parcel of it, formed like this hard matter from the dust of stars. She’d scooped the remaining soil into her pack.

As she was finishing up, from the direction of her olive grove, she’d heard the surprising sputter of Niccolo’s cultivating machine.

WHEN THE THOUGHT OF Marta and Niccolo had surfaced over the past weeks, she’d pushed it away, sick at what had happened — at what she’d allowed by negligence at first, and then allowed by not pursuing. What was Niccolo doing back on her place, now?

Simple. He had come to cultivate the olives. He did not think that she would want to neglect the olives, but also he did not think she understood their care. He had promised her uncle that he would give the olives care.

When he saw her clambering down the hill into the grove, he looked straight at her. As she approached, he subjected her to a stare that was round, dark, powerful, scrutinizing, and at the same time hardly personal: as if possessed of much larger and timeless concerns.

Niccolo, an old man and a thief, speaking for the land. Who was she to imagine that any value it held was not his as much as anyone’s? The stare did not so much ask the question as make it irrelevant altogether. Any suspicion between them was over now, it suggested. There was no need of explanation on her side, any more than on his. What was important was the matter of the olives.

Important, further, that the house Marta had tended should still be tended; that the niece who had been put in their care should receive that care. Consequently, here was Marta coming, with a bag of greens.

Like phantoms of Clare’s first impression of them — their gnarled goodness and kindness, the simple country virtues she had imagined welcoming her here — she saw how Marta and Niccolo would creep back into the supporting edges of her life, unless she put up her hand, said Stop! Right now.

Her eyes travelled over the terraces as this possibility gathered

itself up, became thin as air. She saw the scarred, carved, ancient trees with their load of bitter little stony fruit, saw the olives maturing, plumping out, preparing for the chill month sometime in early winter when they would fall or be battered to the ground. How did all of that take place? What was the procedure for turning green nodules into spaghetti with oil and garlic? She was hungry. Ambiguity. That word suddenly danced up in front of her, gleamed. Then she caught a further gleam. In the grass, down the hill at the edge of the terrace with the washing lines — a piece of copper, long and partly curled. No, several pieces of similar shape and length, which until now had been hidden beneath the tall green weeds, exposed as the growth turned sere.

How to explain the way things happen? The way at the same time as she was saying to Niccolo, “Vieni, vieni! Come on and help me haul this in!” she’d been seeing the transforming purpose it would serve.

Bashing copper drainpipe into sheets was soothing. Bashing it flat, bashing it thin.

When had these remnants been left behind? There was so much she did not know of the history of this house. The shiny condition of the conduits on the roof made her think the work had been done not long ago. He’d left everything in good shape. With forgiveness? Or with a plea for forgiveness, which he could never otherwise express? You could dig and dig, but what could you ever truly hold? Fragments to arrange in one pattern or another.

She found a sledgehammer in the shed, laid the copper segments on the flagstone porch and pounded, raising a hell of a din and sparks. After several hours, this resulted in three mauled, dented, marvellously textured sheets, each measuring about five feet by two.

This morning she had felt very calm. After she had propped the first copper sheet up on the trestle table, she didn’t need to search out the illustration from the journal still in her pack: “Figure 5. A section of King Herod’s garden taken in the northeast corner.” Her hand remembered the image it had traced on white hotel bathroom tile. She was pleased to lay it down again in conté crayon, with strong lines. The stratigraphy took on the weight of her years, in gritty paint mixed with soil. Beyond the window, light rippled across the Val di Chiana. A haze of heat obscured the farther hills. She had climbed a long way for this calm.

SHE WOULD NOT STOP breathing just because she caught the sound of a car coming up the hill, though still very far away. Just because she heard it turning in to her drive, caught snatches of the song on the radio, heard footsteps on the stairs, heard them crossing the stone terrace, then the scrape of the wooden door. No, this did not mean her brush stroke would be any the less controlled. Look at that flare, that burst of colour. Just because the cavity of the human chest was not built to contain such an explosion, that did not mean she would not stand back and squint at her work, deeply absorbed, before she turned.

He said, “I am so glad you have decided not to sell your lovely place. I was very much heartened when your friend Nikki came to tell me. Though I confess I did not recognize her at first, with that shorn hair.”

Across the valley, the haze thinned. The saint’s town gleamed for a moment, and then was gone, like the meaning of what she had just heard.

“So you will live here,” he said.

“Yes. Here.”

He came and stood beside her. He smelled of hot sun, water, sand. He leaned in close towards the copper sheet, studied the texture of the paint, then the clutter of squeezed tubes and the little hill of grainy soil she had gouged, the paint-smeared pocks and valleys. She steeled herself for the moment when he would ask what she was doing. But she had forgotten the essential thing.

“This is very beautiful,” was all he said. “This is very … avant garde, I would have to say. Yes, this is what they will pronounce, in the galleries where the new work of Clare Livingston shows.”

She had forgotten how his foolishness roamed into the deep woods of those that had vanished, how he would work to bring them forth, no matter what, though they insisted their time was past or had never been.