Only a matter of days had passed but already I felt like a fixture in the village, taking my meals at Aunt Lucia’s, setting up my little household. It occurred to me that there was no place in the world now that was any more home than here: this was all I had left, my kitchen table, my stiff-linened bed, my balcony over the valley. Even the villagers seemed ready quietly to accommodate me, growing daily more friendly and more inscrutable, showing me a flawless country hospitality as if to say there was nothing out of the ordinary in my being here. Their kindnesses were like a forestalling: with each day that passed, each kitchen I sat in nibbling pastries or sipping liqueurs, it seemed more unlikely that I would do anything untoward, that I would ask any awkward questions or in any way disturb the quiet surface of things.
I had begun to forget things. Memories that had seemed clear when I’d first arrived were becoming more and more contaminated, overlaid by other people’s versions of the past or simply by mere reality, the different slope of a street or angle of a building that forever obscured whatever subtle truths might have been preserved by my own misremembering. I’d hear some new story or fact and at once all the careful architecture of the past that I’d carried around in my head seemed to shift to make a place for it, my brain producing images that might have been memories or pure inventions, just the mind’s attempt to connect things. There were those two women I’d met in Marta’s kitchen, Giuseppina and Maria – from just the shiver of recollection I’d felt then, whole scenes had since floated up in my mind’s eye that they might have been part of, whole histories had taken shape around them. It was as if I’d come here not to remember but merely to put together a plausible story: these were the elements, I was free to arrange them how I wished.
As the chance that Rita would turn up seemed to become more remote I began to feel a growing sense of futility. If only she would come, then things would make sense, might begin to fall into place. I drove into Rocca Secca one night and called Elena, but she hadn’t heard from her.
“You making out all right?” she said.
It had been only a couple of weeks since I’d seen her, but already she and the whole world I’d left behind with her seemed not quite real. I could barely picture what she looked like, the apartment she sat alone in, its treelined street.
“I suppose,” I said. “No big revelations or anything.”
We both seemed to be lonely for some version of the world that we might be able to confirm for each other.
“Do you think she’ll show up there?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“All this has something to do with John, doesn’t it?”
But all I had still were nothing more than my disputed inklings, my half-theories and fabrications.
“Not really. No.”
I settled in to wait. I’d see Luisa in the street and could feel the need to speak to her, the desire to, the wish that she’d take my arm in hers again. But a small reserve had come between us now. The very wholesomeness of her affection for me seemed to place it off limits: it was not something I deserved or could ever deserve, I had put myself forever beyond such things. Against the first pleasure I’d feel at the sight of her there was always this instinctive drawing back, this not knowing what I was allowed.
“You can come eat with us again some time if you want,” she said. “If you get tired of those old ladies.”
But the days passed and I didn’t go by.
Marta had continued to care for me with her unquestioning matter-of-factness. The strangeness of her household had grown almost comforting now. No one asked me questions there; no one required a reason for my presence. At meals I’d watch Aunt Lucia in her reptilian slowness and wonder what she could reveal to me if I could find some way of reaching her, perhaps the wisdom of the ages or mere banalities, the trite, predictable observations of a narrow life narrowly lived. She gave me the sense that she knew now, in some way, who I was, and yet she didn’t seem to attach any special significance to the fact, as if no great gap separated this young man who took meals in her kitchen from the boy who had begged five-lire coins from her years before. Perhaps that was the very insight I could glean from her, that time and change were not such momentous things.
I spent the afternoons with Fabrizio at his farm, where he retreated every day after he’d finished his rounds. With him I seemed to enter a space like the innocent one of childhood, where everything that was pressing and large, that could hurt, was held back. That was his gift, now as when he was a boy, that child’s special power he had to hold the world off like a task endlessly deferred, a pain you averted the sting of. And yet it was heartbreaking somehow to watch his small, boyish ministrations to his little acreage, his careful suckering and winding and pruning, the attention he put into things in this corner of forgotten field as if staving off some great sadness or despair.
He still had the same penchant for arcane knowledge he’d had as a child. Much of it now went into his farming: he knew every possible variety and strain of his various crops, every disease that could afflict them, what things to plant in what soil and how to shift them to keep the soil from being depleted. The rest of his attention he had reserved for local lore, for stories of ancient feuds that he passed on to me, of the war, of the old aristocracy who had once ruled over the region. He knew the landscape of the area like the back of his hand: these were the hills which Samnite fortresses had stood on, these the sites of reputed miracles, these the still visible markings of where the old tratturi had passed, the grassy highways of old that shepherds had used since time immemorial for the seasonal movements of their flocks.
Often it was nearly dark by the time we returned to the village. Crossing the ridge-line where the new highway was being built, I’d see Valle del Sole in the distance, its houses just grey, ghostly shapes in the dusk, here and there the first twinkling lights coming on. I’d get a sense then of how the village would look once the new road was completed, just a detour again, cut off and forgotten, a flicker in the corner of your eye as you drove past. In a few years the abandoned houses would outnumber the inhabited ones; and then slowly the town would die out. I pictured Fabrizio thirty, forty years hence still working his little acreage, a final holdout against the newly burgeoning wild, reduced to what our ancestors had been hundreds or thousands of years before when they’d first staked a claim on this rocky hillside.
On our way home once, Fabrizio pulled a small object from his pocket: a gold earring.
“I found it near your house,” he said. “You should have it.”
But I didn’t understand.
“Years ago. Not long after you left. It was probably your mother’s.”
It was just a small thing, a round hoop of dulled gold. I tried to picture what she might have looked like, wearing it, who that woman could have been.
“You kept it all this time?” I said.
“In case you came back.”
He was holding it out to me. It didn’t seem right somehow to be taking it from him after he’d so long been the guardian of it. He was always the one giving me things, even when we were small, though he’d had so little then, was always the one who’d worn his heart on his sleeve.
“I thought maybe you didn’t have anything of hers,” he said. “The way she died and everything.”
I remembered a slogan I’d seen once on some sentimental poster: Whatever is not given is lost. But I wasn’t sure how it applied here.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the thing from him. At the back of my mind was the thought that it was something tangible, at least, something to pass on.
We walked on a moment in silence.
“Do you ever think of marrying?” he said.
The question took me a bit by surprise.
“I don’t know. I suppose, if the right person –”
“So you don’t have a girl over there yet.”
“No, no. Not yet.”
He looked a bit awkward.
“Me, I’m happy enough on my own for now,” he said. “Do you think there’s anything wrong with that?”
“No. Not at all.”
We parted at the corner of his street. He had yet to invite me to the house where he lived with his parents, even now revealing the same quiet shame of his family he’d had as a child, though the newish-looking place they lived in now seemed a vast improvement over the crude, dirt-floored one I remembered them living in when he was small.
“You’ll come around again tomorrow?” he said. “I’ll bring some food out, we’ll have a little picnic in the garden.”
“I’d like that.”
As he was retreating down the darkness of his street, he turned and waved.
“Oh, Vittò!” he called out. “We’ll have some times again, you and me, wait and see.”
I wandered one afternoon along the path of an old tratturo that I remembered from childhood, now used as just a local footpath though apparently it had once connected up with a much wider one that came down from Abruzzo. My grandfather had told me stories of the great flocks that had passed in his day every autumn and spring, massive movements that stretched days long along the track and that had seen village-sized camps spring up every night when the shepherds and their families pitched their lean-tos and tents. He had described these movements as if they were great circuses or festivals, every night the sound of music and dancing around the fire, the drone of sheepskin bagpipes and the beat of drums.
The track I followed ran a mile or two along the spine of Colle di Papa before joining up with the old, now-abandoned highway that used to pass by Valle del Sole when I was small. I followed the highway for a distance, all cracked and weedy now, into gloomy woods I had always feared as a child because of the stories of the brigands and thieves who lurked in them. I kept expecting the road to join up at some point with the new one that led back to the village, but beyond each curve the darkness and woods continued. Then finally I came to the junction of an even more ruined road, just a steep, rutted path that led up through the woods toward the crest of a hill. There was an ancient signpost at the corner with a single arrow pointing up the path, its lettering too faded to be read. The whole scene seemed like something out of a ghost story: the dark woods, the ruined path, the single arrow pointing up.
I began to make my way up the path. There were the marks of what looked like recent tire tracks along it, skirting around the worst of the potholes and ruts. After a stretch, the crumbled asphalt gave way to cobblestones and the ruins of buildings began to appear amidst the tangled undergrowth and woods that flanked the road. It came back to me now: this was the old town of Belmonte. According to the story that people had told when I was a child, it had been destroyed by the Germans during their northward retreat, the story always standing as a sort of cautionary tale of how even a town as reputedly prosperous and blessed as Belmonte could nonetheless be reduced to mere ashes and dust. But seeing the village now, just a handful of broken-down hovels, most of them little more than rubble at this point, I wondered if the story had had any truth to it. The place had probably never held much more than a dozen families, hardly worth the bother of destruction; and it had the look now of a sort of afterthought, its cobblestoned street following along only a hundred yards or so before giving way again to cracked asphalt, the decaying houses lined up along it looking as if they had been felled not by bombs but by simple lack of purpose.
Beyond the village, the road wound up along the edge of a hillside. I remembered it led up to a summit where it was possible, because of the way the mountains swung around, to get a good view of Valle del Sole. It was getting toward dusk; already in the shadow of the hillside it was difficult to pick my way along the path. There were car tracks here as well; and then I rounded a curve and there was the car itself, a newish grey Scirocco with local plates. The driver’s door was still open, as if someone had merely stopped an instant en route to somewhere else to admire some curiosity or vista. But beyond where the car was parked the road looked impassable, a hopeless snarl of snaking fissures and gullies: this was the end of the line, there was nowhere further to go.
I reached the summit. The land here opened out to a rocky plateau spotted with yellow-flowered gorse. Toward one end of it, with their backs to me, stood two figures, a man and a woman. The man was gesturing out toward the valley as if to point out some landmark; the woman nodded, and then with a familiar gesture brought a hand up to pull back her hair.
They were standing a few inches from each other, a thin line of sunset lighting the distance between them. My first instinct was to turn, to make my way quietly back down the hill, to let this thing be. But then they seemed to sense my presence and almost in the same instant turned to face me. It was Rita and John.