I had rented a car for the trip out to Valle del Sole, an old pastel-blue Opel I’d got a line on from the concierge at the hotel. The car had the same general stink as the city, the same exhalation of shadowy odours. It stalled a few times as I made my way through the city’s outskirts; but once I was on the expressway it seemed to get its wind. The man I’d rented it from, a thin-haired and unctuous used-car dealer in the Trastevere, had required only a month’s prepayment, in cash – no credit cards, no documents, no surety I wouldn’t simply drive off with it and never return.
Outside the confines of Rome, the heavy air of the city gave way to a sun-scoured clarity. The hills that cradled the expressway were dotted with craggy villages and towns, picturesque and quaint as if they’d been arranged for a travel brochure. The villages were probably not so different from the one I was travelling to, would have their winding main street, their bar, their church on a hill, their old people staring out from second-floor balconies; and yet there was nothing in them that struck me at once as familiar, as if their prettiness were a sort of scrim, something that held back their real natures. Seen from the expressway, they looked hopelessly inaccessible: there was no way to get there from here, no turn in the road that could cross from this gleaming asphalt into the mystery they seemed to hold in themselves.
I passed the monastery of Monte Cassino. The hill it stood on looked as if it was still recovering from the devastation of the war, scrubby and rubble-strewn and barren. Mr. Amherst had fought here with the Allies, he had told me once. It seemed an odd quirk of history, that he’d been a soldier here while my father was just a hundred miles away, still a boy in the fields, and while my mother, perhaps, heard the bombs fall from Valle del Sole and thought of those other young soldiers who had passed through our house once, and might be dying. At the top of the hill now, the monastery itself stood newly risen and whole, a white, glittery fortress, a tour bus just inching its way up the hill to reach it. All that had happened there would now be a matter of a paragraph or two in a guide book: this many had died, these walls were destroyed and repaired. Gone would be the single bulletholes, any evidence that such a one and another, their destinies perhaps connected in ways they couldn’t know, had faced each other across a divide and sought one another’s lives.
At the turn-off for Venafro I came onto a wide, newly paved highway that ran through a plain of green fields toward more mountains in the distance. This was the road that my mother and I would have travelled to get to Naples when we left the country two decades before. It didn’t seem recognizable now except in a vague, generic way, as if any landscape of mountain and fields could have served the purpose as well as this one. I stopped for gas at a sort of truck stop, with a small coffee bar and shop to one side, then the pumps, a garage in back. Except for the different dimensions of things, the little cars, the not-quite-definable aura of Europeanness, I might have been anywhere, on any windswept highway where gas was pumped and travellers stopped to drink coffee or have a pee. At the road, incongruous, swinging in the breeze, was a painted yellow sign in English that read CASH ’N CARRY.
Even as I entered the mountains the highway continued broad and unswerving and level, smoothed out by an impressive succession of bridges and mile-long tunnels. Up on the hilltops, sheep grazed and dreamy villages lay folded into the slopes; but the highway continued on its straight-line path as if it had nothing to do with these things, was only a way through, a way past. There was just the barest sprinkling of traffic, an occasional lonely vehicle speeding along in the other direction or glimpsed distantly across a divide, and then beyond that only the still silence of the mountains.
It was just after noon when I reached the turn-off for Rocca Secca. The road grew more narrow and serpentine now. A sign announced the town and I felt the first flutter of memory, a stirring in the brain as if something was struggling to come alive there. But the road passed through outskirts of apartment blocks, feed depots, garages, that bore no resemblance to the Rocca Secca I remembered, a place of cramped shops and thick-walled houses pressed up hard against the street. I drove by a huge, curving structure of grey concrete and had to stop to make sense of it: it was a church of some sort, built to resemble a ship, the walls bowed and the roof and façade angled out to form a prow. Looming out like that at the outskirts of the town it looked ominous, like some last chance for salvation or escape.
I reached a junction. One branch led to the town centre, the other led onwards. A weathered sign pointed the way: VALLE DEL SOLE 7. So the place still existed; I had this proof now. There was still time to turn back, to forget everything, and yet everything, in a way, was already forgotten, this road I had travelled a hundred times, this valley I had stared into. I was searching for the turn-off that would lead me down to Valle del Sole from the high road when I rounded a curve and came suddenly on the outskirts of a village; and then in a minute I had passed through its straggle of stony houses to open country again. I stopped the car to check the sign I’d missed on the way in: VALLE DEL SOLE.
I got out of the car. From where I stood the village lay spread out before me, tiered up along the hillside a mix of earthy greys and mossy browns like a hundred others I’d passed along the way, as unremarkable. Everything about it was wrong: the road had never come in this way, the houses had not been cramped into so paltry a space, the church above the square had not looked so forgettable. And then the simple feel of the place, the unlikeliness that anything memorable or of import could ever have happened here, that all the history I’d carried crammed in my head could have had its seat in this half-ruined assortment of mountain-strung homes.
I left the car where I’d parked it and walked the short distance back to the edge of town. There was not a soul in the street, nor had I passed anyone on the way in. The houses were a mix of ruin and tidy repair, some newly stuccoed and painted, others with boards over their windows or with roofs and walls fallen in. Of those with the look of still being inhabited, most had flowers out front, potted geraniums and hibiscus and oleander or trellised rosebushes spilling bursts of pink and red. The flowers gave the street an air of poised expectancy, like a movie set sitting in wait: any minute the crews would come, bring cameras and men dressed as peasants, prod donkeys and goats to parade down the street for a take.
There was a stone bench built into the wall of the house that stood at the very edge of the village, just a narrow slab of grey with a worn spot in the middle. To one side was a scar, a small furrow, that some boy’s hand must have worried away at with a nail or a bit of wire. I could see him, his hand, could feel the hot July sun beating down on him; though it took an instant for this image to shape itself into a memory, for the boy’s hand to become my own, for the bit of wire to become a five-lire coin that someone, a neighbour or aunt, had given me. This was my grandfather’s house, the one he’d bequeathed to me, where I had lived, where everything had happened. This was the door, its worn threshold; these were the stairs that led down to the stable; this was the bench, though not as I remembered it, not some numinous, mythical thing, but merely this real, mean, inscrutable slab of stone. The place hadn’t crumbled as I’d expected: the roof still stood, the walls were intact, the front door was still on its hinges. There was a padlock on the door as if someone had tried to seal the place against change, had decided time would not enter here.
I heard a sound behind me: an old man was rounding the corner from the direction of the square, a hoe over one shoulder. For an instant I felt certain I knew him, could feel his name urging itself to my lips; but then nothing. He put a hand up against the sun to survey me as he approached, nodding curtly in greeting. There was a moment then when something had to be said, when some explanation for my presence had to be arrived at.
His eyes went to my car down the road, squinting to make out the plates to see where I had come from.
“Are you looking for something?” He spoke with the careful formality reserved for outsiders, the strain to put things in proper Italian.
It seemed precipitous simply to reveal myself.
“I was wondering about this house,” I said, stumbling.
“That’s the podestà’s old place.” That was the title my grandfather had always been known by, “lu podestà,” the mayor, after the post he had held from the time of the Fascists. “It’s been empty twenty years. Marta keeps it up, up the street there.”
He kept his eyes on me.
“Coming from Rome?” he said.
“Yes. Yes.”
He was still taking in the details of me, my accent, my clothes. Nothing fit, and yet he seemed willing to grant that this house might be important to me, in some foreign, citified way.
“You want to know more about the house, you speak to Marta,” he said. “Just up the street, like I told you. Number 12.”
And he turned and walked on.
The door at number 12 was open, the doorway barred only by a curtain of coloured plastic strips to keep out the flies. The curtain brought back a surge of memories: this was where my great-aunt Lucia had lived, and where my grandfather had moved when my mother and I had gone and his own house had been closed up. Sundays, when I was small, we’d sometimes had our meals here – I remembered pots over an open fire, the smell of cooking, the air of formality those meals had had not so different from my Sunday meals with the Amhersts in Mersea, with that same feeling of things held in abeyance.
I heard movement inside but couldn’t make anything out through the curtain.
“Permesso?” I called out.
“Chi è?”
The voice was hostile and sharp, as if I’d interrupted some important task. Before I could respond there was another shuffle of movement and a bony arm parted the curtain. The woman staring up at me came barely to my chest, wizened and gnarled like some stunted thing: my aunt’s daughter Marta.
My eye went instinctively to her leg, my unconscious mind remembering what my conscious one had forgotten, that she was club-footed. A crude brace sheathed one of her calves.
“Scusi,” I said. She stared up at me with a narrow-eyed, eremitic intensity that seemed to mirror me back distorted somehow, to make strange all the usual terms of reference. “I’m Vittorio. Your cousin. The grandson of lu podestà.”
There was that glint in her eye of the madness that had always seemed to threaten in her when I was a child.
“Well come in then,” she said finally, making grudging way for me as if I were a beggar who had come to the door.
Inside, without a word, she set about making coffee at a small gas stove in the corner. I stood hovering near the doorway, not sure how to proceed, if she’d understood who I was or had simply fit me into some arcane private order of things that had nothing to do with me. The room before me looked only dimly familiar: there was a kitchen counter along one wall; there was a blackened fireplace with the remnants of a fire still smouldering in it. To one side, in darkness, was a sitting area with an old couch and a few wicker chairs. A television was on there, tuned to what appeared to be an American western, the sound turned down to a barely audible hum.
All the windows in the room were shuttered over, the only light coming from the translucent strips over the doorway and the blue glow of the television.
“I don’t know if you remember me from when I was small,” I said.
She kept up with her preparations.
“You can sit down if you want,” she said, and motioned with her chin toward the kitchen table.
I sat. It was only now as my eyes adjusted to the light that I realized there was someone else in the room with us, an old woman sitting in a wicker armchair in front of the television. Even as I noticed her she began to turn toward me, shifting her hands on the arms of her chair with a vegetal slowness and scanning the room in my general direction as if trying to pick me out of a fog.
“Marta, chi è?”
But Marta ignored her. She poured a single cup of espresso and set it in front of me.
“You’ll have to put your own sugar in it. I don’t know how much you want.”
The old woman stared out a minute more, then finally turned slowly back to the television. I could only assume she was my Aunt Lucia: it seemed impossible that she was still alive, she who had always struck me as hopelessly ancient even when I was a child. Yet there she sat unchanged, as if the past twenty years had been merely the twinkling of an eye. I wasn’t sure how to acknowledge her, if she was lucid enough to realize who I was or was touched with the same half-madness as her daughter.
Marta was still standing at the counter.
“I suppose you’ll want to see the house,” she said. “I kept it up for you, like your grandfather wanted.”
This was the first sign she’d given that she’d in fact understood who I was. With that established, the tone that I had taken for hostility began to seem a kind of timidness, like a child’s sullen evasion of some not-quite-familiar relation.
“Yes, I’d like to,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”
But she had already taken a keyring down from a nail in the door frame and stood waiting for me while I finished my coffee. It seemed wrong not to greet Aunt Lucia in some way before leaving the house; but the instant I had set down my cup Marta was out the door. I followed her. She moved swiftly, one hand guiding her bad leg over the street’s cobblestoned unevenness. At the door of my grandfather’s house, with the air of a ritual she had repeated many times, she turned a small key from her keyring in the padlock to remove it and then a larger one in the door itself to click back a deadbolt.
We stepped inside. Marta flicked on a light. I had expected dust and decay, but the room we looked on stood in pristine order. There was a scarred wooden table in the middle of the room, a counter against the back wall with some rough cupboards and a rust-stained porcelain sink, a fireplace to one side with a plain stone mantel above. Everything was as I remembered it and not, was familiar in some wordless, visceral way and yet utterly foreign and shrunken, too tangible somehow to be real. This was what it came down to, my past here, this barren room, these desolate objects, like a museum’s depiction of how things might have been.
“The water’s off,” Marta said. “There’s a tap to turn it on in the stable but I’ll have to do it, you won’t find it.”
“Oh.”
There were details I couldn’t account for, a marble floor that I remembered as concrete, a side balcony overlooking the valley, the simple dimensions of things, their small unprepossessingness. And something else: I couldn’t put my finger on it at first but then it came to me – the light. There had been no electricity in the village when I’d left it, that was how I remembered things – I could call up a dozen memories that depended on the fact, that made no sense without it. Perhaps the lights had been put in after we’d gone. Yet the fixtures in the room, the worn switch by the door, the frayed wire the light bulb dangled from, looked as if they’d been there forever.
“I didn’t think there’d be electricity,” I said.
Marta shot me a guarded look.
“Electricity?”
“The lights, I mean. I thought no one had lived here since we left.”
“That’s right.”
“Ah.”
She led me through the rest of the house, opening doors into empty rooms. There was my grandfather’s room on the ground floor, and then upstairs my mother’s and my own. I kept expecting some surge of memory to take me over but felt only the same disjunction, the sense that my memory was being not so much stirred as stripped away, couldn’t bear being confronted like this with things as they were.
There was not a speck of dust on the ledges or floors, not a single cobweb on the ceilings. It was eerie, this pristine abandonment – it made me think of pictures I’d seen of Pompeii, of whole rooms, houses, streets held forever frozen at the moment of catastrophe.
“It’s very clean,” I said.
Marta grunted.
“I didn’t do any painting. You’ll have to do that yourself if you want.”
It was growing clear that she had kept the place up ever since it had been left empty, no doubt in some sort of perverse fidelity to the wishes of my grandfather, who had promised me at the time of my departure, though I was only a child then, that the house would be waiting for me should I ever return. It had been to Marta that my grandfather’s care had been entrusted when my mother and I had gone: he had still been bedridden then from a fall, and perhaps had remained so, for all I knew, until the end of his life. At the time, there had seemed a sort of gloating in Marta at this victory over my mother, at having wrested from her her father’s care.
When we had come back to the front door, Marta handed me a latchkey.
“You’ll have to decide what you want,” she said. “You can bring a bed over or you can stay up at our place, it’s the same to me.”
It seemed she was prepared simply to abandon me here, had fulfilled her obligations and was ready now to wash her hands of me.
“Well. I’m not sure. If there’s room at your place. For tonight, at least.”
“Suit yourself.”
And she started back up the street toward her house in her grim, purposeful way as though she’d just dispensed with some long-put-off errand.
I was left alone. The place seemed infected by Marta’s strangeness, by this weird sense of mission with which she’d maintained it. I wondered what it had taken to keep the house from crumbling as so many others had. Perhaps it had been simple force of will, as if it was only the realization that there was no one who cared any more whether they stood or fell that made houses crumble at all.
I stepped outside and followed the crooked stone steps that led down to the back of the house, where the stable opened out beneath the main floor. Someone, no doubt Marta, had kept up the back garden: there were neat rows of tomatoes and lettuce and fava beans, shored up between furrows cut deep into the earth to control the water flow along the slope. A little terrace of broken stone connected the side steps to the stable door, which was weathered and old but still intact. I pushed it open. Here, too, there was a light switch. I tried it and a bulb came on from an ancient outlet attached to a ceiling rafter.
The room had the look of a grotto or cave, the walls spongy with moisture and sediment, the floor of plain, beaten earth. There was no light except from the dim light bulb, no ventilation except through the cracks in the door. If anything had happened here, back when the place had been rife with the smell of animals and shit, it would have had to have been some crude, unromantic thing, dirty and quick. Apart from a few farm implements in a corner now, a hoe, a spade, a watering can, the space was empty – it looked as if someone had scoured it, cleaned it down to bare earth and stone, then left it to moulder.
I sat down on a stump that someone had placed outside the stable door. The sun was shining, in that way it had, that I remembered, with a dry, dreamy mountain heat. It would be possible, in this heat, to forget things, to walk out to some sunny corner of pasture, and fall asleep. The landscape itself, stretching lazily down to the valley, was busy forgetting: where I remembered an unbroken sweep of carefully tended fields the wild had begun to take over, great patches of gorse and tangled undergrowth hemming in the occasional still-tidy holdout of vineyard or vegetable plot. It was as if this place itself, the land with its wilderness, the village with its ruined houses, had grown senile and old, was gradually nodding toward some eternal sleep.
I felt eyes on me suddenly and looked up to the back of a neighbouring house to see a young woman standing on a balcony there, staring toward me. She kept her gaze on me though I had seen her, in a curious, questioning way as if my being here in her familiar view, her familiar world, meant I could pose no threat.
I nodded in greeting, awkwardly.
“Buongiorno,” I said.
She was dressed in a loose summer dress, legs bare but her feet in heavy-soled work shoes that looked bumpkinish against her bare legs.
“You’re the grandson of lu podestà,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she’d simply hazarded a guess or if the word had already somehow got around.
“Sì.”
“Bentornato.”
She was very pretty, I saw now. Her hair, wavy and dark and long, caught glints of red from the sun.
“You used to play with my older brothers and sisters,” she said. “They’ve all moved away now.”
“Ah.”
“Mi chiamo Luisa.”
“Vittorio. Mi chiamo Vittorio.”
“Yes. Maybe you’ll come by sometime for a coffee.”
“Sì.”
She smiled. This was the first normal conversation I’d had since I’d arrived here, the first sign of welcome.
“I’ll see you soon then.”
And she turned and went in.
I had supper at Marta’s. Somehow I had ended up simply turning myself over to her brusque ministrations: after a long walk in the countryside surrounding the village I’d found myself making my way back to her house with the tired, lonely sense that there was sanctuary there, that I’d be safe. The instant supper was set out, Aunt Lucia got up from her place in front of the television and made her way to the table, infinitely slow but with no other apparent sign of infirmity.
At the table she looked me over as if trying to place me.
“Is this the one?” she said. “But this is the boy from before, the mailman’s friend. Tell him to come closer.”
I brought my chair around next to hers and took one of her hands. It had the veined translucence I remembered from childhood, glossy and smooth like a water-smoothed stone.
“It’s Vittorio,” I said. “Your nephew. You used to give me five-lire coins.”
And she looked me up and down and nodded her approval before finally turning to her food.
Against one wall of the kitchen was an old curio cabinet with some framed photographs inside. There was one of my grandfather, in his reservist’s uniform, his war medals neatly lined up along his breast pocket; there was one of Aunt Lucia and a man I took to be her husband, though I’d never known him. Tucked away in a corner was one of a young woman and child standing sombrely before the doorway of a house. The woman, it seemed, was pregnant.
“It was the day you left,” Marta said, seeing where my eye had gone.
The woman had a plain, peasant look, her hair long and dark and limp, her dress hanging formlessly over her belly. She was holding the hand of the boy beside her.
“I don’t remember this,” I said.
“If you remember it or you don’t, there it is.”
The doorway we were standing before was Aunt Lucia’s. I recognized the keystone, the plastic strips. But everything that might have made sense of the picture had been cut out of it, whatever was going on at its periphery, whoever this woman was that Marta seemed to claim was my mother. I could hardly fathom this image of her: it was not just her plainness that struck me, how far she fell from the ideal of her I had created, but that she stood so vulnerable, so grave, with such a look of the mountain peasant that I could hardly imagine I’d ever known her.
“You can have it if you want,” Marta said finally. “It was only you we kept it for.”
And in my room that night I hid it away in one of my suitcases as if it were a piece of evidence to be concealed.