I had supper that night with Luisa and her parents next door. From childhood I had a dim recollection of her house as a run-down hovel of a place always teeming with dirty-faced children; but now, probably through the interventions of the brothers and sisters who’d moved away, the place had been completely modernized and refurbished, with a large marble-floored entrance hall and a cavernous dining room clearly used only for special occasions and a bright kitchen crammed with modern appliances. Luisa’s parents, work-hobbled and elfin, sat huddled up around the kitchen’s fireplace while Luisa finished supper, seeming in hiding there from the unfamiliar newness of the rest of the house.
“Your grandfather was always very good to us,” her father said. “Your mother too, she always helped out with the children or whatever we needed.”
It came out over supper that Luisa was friends with the daughter of my Aunt Caterina, Maria. She offered to take me to my aunt’s farm the following day, and well before eight she was at my door, dressed in the same willowy summer dress she’d had on when I’d met her. The dress gave her the air of being much younger than her twenty-odd years, perhaps because her body looked so undefended in it, like some precious thing whose value she hadn’t yet realized.
“I called ahead, they’re expecting us,” she said. “We’ll stay for lunch.”
“Your parents won’t mind?”
“Why would they mind?”
Of my aunt’s place I knew only that it was somewhere in the countryside beyond Castilucci, in what as a child I had always imagined as a sort of outback. I had no memory of ever having been there when I was small, most of my contact with my father’s side of the family then having come at my grandparents’ house in Castilucci proper, and could call up only this sense of it as a place primitive and remote, the way we had thought then of whatever lay outside the confines of town. Luisa and I set out in the Opel along the Castilucci road but forked off it after a few miles onto a ridgeway that looked out over our own river valley to the south and toward the high mountains of Abruzzo to the north. There were farmhouses spaced out at intervals here, more spruce and trim than I would have imagined them, with little courtyards out front and trellised rosebushes up their façades. Down toward the valley, a great combine was already mowing down the first of the summer’s grain.
My aunt’s farmhouse was perched above the road atop a steep bit of hillside, a cement driveway crudely ribbed against slippage leading up to it. The house, long and narrow like an Indian longhouse, had a look of raw incompletion, here and there the walls only half-stuccoed and a lone part-wall stretching out at the far end to suggest a room that had never been built. There was a flurry of movement as we drove up to the small courtyard the house looked onto, the barking of dogs, a scattering of chickens; and then doors began to open and people to emerge, children, women in aprons, coming out in small clusters from the separate quarters each door seemed to lead into as if the place formed a little village.
It was the first time since my return that I’d had any contact with my father’s side of the family. People were shy and decorous in their greetings, everyone seeming modelled on the same frugal proportions, wizened and small, so that among them I felt like a stumbling giant. The children had crowded up behind their mothers; two of them, a boy and a girl, beautifully blond-haired and blue-eyed, looked like changelings that had been dropped here, staring out at me silent and still as if I had come from another planet.
From the end doorway of the house Aunt Caterina emerged, tiny and thin as a schoolgirl.
“I would have recognized you in an instant.” There were tears in her eyes. She reached a hand up to my cheek as if to assure herself I was real. “I see your father in you all over again. He would have been your age when he left.”
I tried to imagine what he might have been to her, this young man, her brother, setting out. After he’d gone she had never set eyes on him again.
“But come. You must be hungry.”
Luisa went off with my cousin Maria while my aunt served me breakfast in the kitchen of her quarters at the end of the courtyard. Drying onions and meats hung from hooks in the ceiling; a pot simmered on a low fire in the fireplace. In a corner, cloaked in shadows, an old man sat shelling chick peas into a basin: my aunt’s husband, Nicola. His hair had gone completely white since I’d last seen him, and his face had taken on a wrecked look, carbuncled and red. From the point he seemed to be making of ignoring us I thought at first that he might have gone simple.
“So you’ve come back,” he said finally.
“Sì.”
“Well we’re not going to turn you away. That’s not how we do things here.”
“Who said anything about turning him away?” my aunt said.
He pretended not to hear her.
“What happened with your mother there. People don’t forget things like that.”
“For the love of Christ, Nicola, what’s that got to do with him?”
“I’m just saying.”
He went back to shelling his peas. He seemed to be struggling with some feeling of offence he couldn’t quite give a shape to.
“Just ignore him,” my aunt said. “The wine has started to rot his brain.”
She served up some bread and a few slices of salted ham. Uncle Nicola, despite himself, looked over assessingly at what she’d set out.
“You should have served the other stuff, it’s not as dry,” he said gruffly.
“You made this yourself?” I asked him.
“Eh? That’s right.”
“Six months, we let it cure. You won’t get it like that in America.”
“It’s very good.”
“Yes. Well.”
He drew his chair a bit closer to the table to take some bread and meat.
“Bring him the other stuff for lunch,” he said to my aunt. “We’ll see how he likes that, if he thinks this is good.”
Afterwards I followed Aunt Caterina around on her chores, down to the stables to feed some boars they kept, rough, feral things, to make a local salami, and then across the road onto a promontory that overlooked the river where they had some hives for honey. My aunt kept up a brisk pace, worried about a storm that was supposed to be coming in, though above us the sun shone in an almost cloudless sky.
“I know it’s been hard for you,” she said. “The thing with your father. He always had that in him, the moods he used to get into, but still it was a shock. Like having something cut out of you.”
“Were you close to him, when he was here?”
“Close?” She laughed. “I gave him the back of my hand sometimes, if that’s what you mean.”
The wind had picked up and a low bank of clouds had begun to roll in by the time we reached the hives, which were arranged in a rough semicircle against the bank of a sheltered hollow, swarms of bees hovering around them in arcane activity. Aunt Caterina approached them in naked vulnerability, carefully prying loose the lids and then one by one removing the honeycomb frames inside to scrape their honey away into her bucket, her face furrowed in concentration as if her pillage were a sort of intense, delicate interweaving of her own will with that of the bees.
“You’re not afraid of them?” I said.
“What difference would it make if I were?”
By the time she had finished, the clouds that had been coming in were practically upon us. We began to make our way back toward the house, fighting the wind the whole way, Aunt Caterina angling into it with her skirts gathered up in one hand. I had taken her bucket from her, but now it seemed that there was nothing anchoring her down against the wind’s sudden force, that in a minute it would balloon up her skirts and carry her off.
Well before we’d reached the road it began to rain, just a few fat drops at first and then a sudden pelting like stones being flung at us. Hail.
“Addio!” Aunt Caterina cried, hiking up her skirts and beginning to run. There was a sort of shanty along the side of the path we were on and Aunt Caterina ducked beneath it and beckoned me to her.
“We didn’t get you here all the way from America to have you die in the hail!”
We had just missed the worst of it: it was coming down now in great golf-ball-sized chunks that rattled the tin roof of our shanty. Nearby, a patch of wheat looked already beaten down, as if a horde of spirits had raced through it.
“It’s the grapes that get off the worst,” my aunt said. “The rest’ll come back.”
In a few minutes the hail had given way to a steady downpour. Aunt Caterina hunched down onto the bench that ran along the back of the shanty and wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. From somewhere in her skirts she pulled out a wrinkled apple and offered it to me.
“No, thank you.”
“Then I’ll eat it myself,” she said, and took a bite.
We settled in to wait. Great runnels had already formed in the gulleys of the pathway that passed in front of the shanty.
My aunt pointed out into the rain.
“Just down the hill there is where you were born. Where those trees are. You were three weeks late, I remember that.”
I wasn’t sure what she was referring to.
“I thought I was born in Castilucci,” I said.
“No, it was here, I remember. We had the place in town, it’s true, but this was where your grandfather built his farmhouse, in the middle of the bush like that. It was like the end of the world there. And your poor mother, waiting day after day with no midwife for miles because it was harvest time and your grandfather couldn’t be bothered to keep her in town.”
I gazed out through the rain toward the cluster of trees she’d pointed out a mile or so down the hillside. There were no roads here, no power lines, only fields and scraggy pasture.
“You can still see the house there,” my aunt said. “What’s left of it. If you want, I’ll get Maria and Luisa to take you down after lunch.”
She took a last bite of her apple and tossed the core out into the rain.
“Did they get along back then?” I said. “My mother and father?”
“Oh, you know how it is. We didn’t even think about that sort of thing in those days, not like young people do now. But it was hard for them, living out in the bush like that, and with your grandfather the way he was. And then the baby they lost. But you probably don’t know about that.”
“What baby?”
“There was a girl before you. Marina. One night the three of them were coming home on your father’s bicycle from some festival in the town and they hit a rock and went over. It was nothing, we thought, there was just a little bruise on the back of her head. No one thought to go to a doctor back then for that sort of thing. But that night she went to sleep and never woke up. Your father never got over that. Everything that happened after, with your mother and the other girl – Rita, you call her, isn’t that it? – it was just part of the same thing, the way I see it. They couldn’t look at each other afterwards, the two of them. There was always that baby between them to remember.”
The rain was still coming down. But over the mountains to the east a sliver of blue had appeared; and then, as we watched, the sliver widened and the rain slowed to a final spattering like a towel being flung dry, then died. In the amber cloud-reflected light it left behind some mystery seemed to hang, some revelation.
I was still trying to make a place in my mind for this new piece of the past.
“I didn’t know anything about that,” I said.
“You see how it is,” my aunt said. “You go all your life thinking things are one way and then you find out all of a sudden that they’re another.”
Through some conspiracy my cousin Maria had arranged for Luisa to accompany me down to my grandfather’s old farmhouse alone. We set off after lunch, following the same path that my aunt and I had for a distance but then veering off onto a much steeper one that passed through pasture and a bit of vineyard. Luisa took my arm along a particularly treacherous stretch to keep from slipping in the muck left behind by the morning’s rain. She was wearing loafers today, not the heavy-soled work shoes I’d first seen her in, though they might have served her better along the muddy path.
There had been more than a dozen of us at lunch, ranged around a table that had been set out in the open of the courtyard. Uncle Nicola had taken on a boozy protectiveness toward me by then, as if he had projected his own bias against me onto the others.
“No one can hold it against you, what happened, or against your father either. It was your mother, she was the one. I’ve always said that.”
In the silence that had opened up I had seen Luisa’s eyes dip with embarrassment for me.
“Am I saying anything that isn’t true? Tell me that.”
The old homestead was nearly halfway down to the valley, nestled against the hollow of a hill so that it only appeared when we were upon it, trees and tangled growth masking its ruined forms like camouflage. Along the approach to it was a small outbuilding that seemed still to be in use by someone, its structure intact and its door padlocked shut. But the house itself was a ghostly wreckage of fallen rafters and walls, the front of it crumbled away to reveal its insides like a cutaway. On the ground floor there could still be made out the rudiments of a home, a fireplace, some crude shelving built into one wall; on what was left of the second, an empty window frame looked out onto the bushy slope of the hillside.
“I guess your grandmother just left the place to rot after your grandfather died,” Luisa said. “Since they had the place in town.”
Of the house in town I still had some memories I could call up, images of rooms, of fireside meals, of a view from a window; but of this place, nothing. It was as if there was a dark spot in my brain where those memories should have been, a place that was there but could not be got to.
We had come down to the little courtyard that opened out in front of the house, the weedy remnants of a stone terrace embedded there. Luisa wandered in among the house’s ruins. At the back of what must have been the kitchen was a sort of sideboard in raw, rain-bleached wood. Luisa tried one of the doors; it opened. Inside, sitting alone there on a shelf like a religious icon, was a plain clay bowl with a shard broken away, the missing shard still lying at the bottom of it as if all these years the bowl had sat there awaiting the hands that would come to mend it. Luisa set the bowl on top of the sideboard and fixed the shard in its place. It held.
She picked a sprig of wildflower from nearby and set it in the bowl.
“Like home,” she said.
We wandered up to a stone bench built into the side of the little outbuilding that flanked the house and took a seat there, beneath the shade of a towering oak. The bench gave a comfortable view of the courtyard at the front of the house. It was a place where a mother might have sat on a summer afternoon, to watch over a playing child.
“It must be strange to think you were born here,” Luisa said. “In one of these rooms.”
The wind and rain of the morning had given way to a crisp, spring-like clarity and warmth. From this tree-sheltered hollow, the slopes and the valley below, the ring of mountains in the distance, seemed like a cradle designed to hold just this place, this ruined home, this dappled light. A breeze rustled through the hollow and for an instant the life that had gone on here seemed suddenly possible, real, my father out in the fields, my mother preparing a midday meal.
Luisa picked up a stone and lobbed it idly at a lizard that had begun to scutter toward us.
“You must feel, I don’t know, like a stranger here after all those years in America. It must be so different there.”
“I suppose. Except now that I’m here, I’m not sure any more where I feel more like a stranger.”
“Maybe it’s not so different for those of us who stayed behind,” Luisa said.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the stories people tell of the past – it all feels so long ago, when people had to live like that. Even this house. It seems a thousand years since anyone lived here. Sometimes I feel like those of us who are left here are just playing at things – we still go out to the fields sometimes and have our few olives and grapes, but everything’s different. Things don’t matter the way they did then.”
We sat silent. For an instant we both seemed to feel the same small sense of insufficiency, as if there was some kernel of a thing we couldn’t quite get to.
“If you want,” Luisa said, “we could go down to the river. There’s a place there I could show you.”
“What sort of a place?”
“Just a place. A secret place.”
The path down was narrow and stony and steep, skirting the edges of orchards and craggy fields and bordered here and there by weedy stone walls that lizards scurried over as we approached. Luisa went ahead, the path too narrow for us to walk abreast. At one point she broke into a run, calling back to me to follow, though in a minute she was already far ahead of me, disappearing as the path wound around corners and then appearing again on some distant lower slope. Then for a long stretch I could not make her out at all. I felt a lurch of panic. I tried to quicken my pace, but the path had grown more treacherous now, gully-scarred and crumbling.
I rounded a corner and came upon her suddenly, sitting waiting for me on a rock.
“Look at you!” she said. “You’re as red as a beet!”
She had hiked her skirt up above her knees and was flapping the hem of it to cool herself. I felt a shiver pass through me, coming upon her like that. All this was familiar in some way, this path, this crisp warmth, the young woman sitting in wait.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Luisa said.
“I thought I’d lost you.”
She laughed.
“Come then, I’ll hold your hand.”
She passed an arm through mine and led me on, the land levelling now and the path starting to widen. When we reached the river finally, swollen and murky from the morning’s rain, it began to come back to me: I had made this trip before. We’d crossed over on these same rocks that Luisa now led me across, though they seemed so much smaller than I remembered them; we had followed this same brambled path along the far shore. Luisa continued to lead me on, along a track that was just a narrow ledge between the riverbank and a cliff face; and then we came finally to the cave. A tiny brook, just a stony exhalation of wetness, flowed out from it toward the river.
“It’s a hot spring,” Luisa said. “Maria and I used to come here when we were small.”
Inside, sunlight from the entrance cast looming shadows of us that merged with the blackness the cave receded into. A strong odour of fetid dampness breathed out from the walls. Toward the back was the spring, a small, bubbling pool dully glimmering in the dark.
“My mother used to come here,” I said.
“She brought you here?”
“Once. I think she brought her lover here.”
I had said this without thinking how intimate a thing it was to share with her. But Luisa showed no sign of embarrassment.
“What makes you say that?” she said.
“I don’t know.” I had an image of finding something here that time, behind a rock. But there was no rock here now, nor any of the toothy shapes the place had in my memory of it. “How she acted, maybe. Or something else, I don’t remember.”
“Anyway she wouldn’t have been the first. People have been bringing their lovers here for years. Centuries maybe.”
“Has anyone ever said anything to you about him?” I said. “About my mother’s lover?”
“I thought he was just a stranger. Someone passing through. That’s what my parents told me.”
“Did they say more than that?”
“No. Just that.”
“Maybe they know more than they said.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so. They’re simple people, they don’t ask too many questions.”
She had entered the cave and slipped a shoe off to dangle her foot in the pool.
“Is that why you came here?” she said. “To find out who he was?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure any more.”
“I wish I could help you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She moved a bit further in, bending to cup a few handfuls of water to her face, her neck. From where I stood at the cave’s entrance she was barely visible now, just a smudge of shadow and grey against the deeper grey of the cave.
“And your sister?” she said. “Does she want to know?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“They say it was strangers who took her in.”
“That’s true. When she was a bit older.”
“It must have been difficult for her. Without a mother or father like that.”
Her voice seemed strangely altered now, echoing disembodied off the damp stone. In the dark it was as if the cave itself was speaking, requiring an answer.
“I think she’s managed all right in the end.”
I could not make her out at all now. There was a silence, a rustle of clothing being removed, a pause, and then the suck and gulp of something submerging and at once the indefinable feeling of her being lost to me, in another element, like a spirit suddenly fled. I felt a sense of privation, as if something had come, been almost tangible before me, then vanished again. But a moment later she emerged: a sound of water on stone, of cloth again, and then she was coming out of the dark like an apparition, her hair dripping, her dress clinging to her skin. There was an instant in the grey when she was not quite herself again, when an image from the past seemed superimposed over the present as if two negatives had got crossed.
“You couldn’t see me, I hope,” she said, laughing. “But then you’ve probably seen lots of naked women.”
It was nearly dark by the time we’d finished the long climb back to the house. The air had turned chill; Aunt Caterina built a fire in her kitchen and Luisa and I pulled our chairs up to it to warm ourselves.
“So I suppose you went down to the hot spring,” my aunt said, casting a wry look at Luisa. Everyone seemed to be so openly encouraging of our coming together – I couldn’t gauge if this was something new, if things had changed so radically in the years I’d been away, or if there had always been, beneath the veneer of village puritanism, this acceptance, the tacit approval of the sensuality of the young.
My aunt made us stay for supper. Afterwards, before we left, Luisa took me to a little hillock above the house and pointed out by name all the villages and towns twinkling in the dark in the hills surrounding us. It was as if she were offering them to me, offering them back. Each name called up some echo for me from childhood, stories and images, the particular place each town had held in the local lore as if part of some grand drama that daily unfolded in the amphitheatre the mountains formed.
“Have you been happy in America?” Luisa said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You look so serious sometimes.”
“Would I have been happier if I’d stayed here?”
“Maybe.”
There was a low hum of conversation from the house, a flicker of orange light in my aunt’s window from the fire still burning in the fireplace. Around us the mountains stretched, grey shadows against the night, and then the villages, nestled into the slopes or strung out along ridge-lines like torchlight processions. The dark they fought back seemed ancient, unyielding, the same dark that for centuries, millennia, people had built their night-time fires against, that they’d struggled through to get home.
Luisa was close enough for me to feel the heat coming off her.
“It’s still in your blood, this place,” she said. “I can feel that.”
And the lights in the distance seemed to blink their greetings as if in assent.