John handled the burden of greeting. I couldn’t see him now except through the veil of my suspicions: there would be some telltale marker or sign, some gesture or curve of muscle or bone, that would give him away.
“Well.” He extended a hand, awkward and yet seeming at some level genuinely pleased to see me. “Rita said we might find you here.”
Nothing in the look of him made the thing clear at once – there was the set of his brow, perhaps, but I no longer trusted myself, the tricks my mind played. He had grown a beard since I’d last seen him, tinged with grey like his hair; it seemed to mask him like camouflage, leaving only his eyes to know him by though they were what seemed to make the thing most unlikely, that I could look into them without any flash of recognition.
“How did you find this place?” I said.
“Ah, yes.” He looked embarrassed. “Just wandering and so.”
There was always something in his embarrassment that was like a plea sent out, that way he had of discouraging enquiry, of making every question seem as if it had touched some injury in him.
“Are you coming from Rome?”
“Actually,” he said, “we’ve been in Campobasso a couple of days.”
I was stung that they’d been so near without looking for me. I had no way of knowing now whether they’d planned to look for me at all.
“You should have come to the village.”
“Yes, of course.”
Rita stood to one side, the setting sun hidden behind her as if in eclipse, lighting a halo around the shadow it made of her.
“You were looking out at Valle del Sole,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “We weren’t sure.”
We both seemed a bit stunned to be reunited here on this gorse-studded summit.
“I have a house. My grandfather’s old place. You can stay there if you want.”
Her eyes went to John as if to ask his permission.
“We still have our hotel for the night,” she said.
“You can come tomorrow, then.”
“If you think you have room for us.”
We stood a moment not certain what to do next.
“You came on foot?” John said.
“Yes.”
“We’ll drive you back.”
It was nearly dark by the time we arrived at the village. Rita, sitting in back, had her face up against the window to peer out. The streets were deserted, the village seeming peculiarly unwelcoming and bleak in the twilight hush. A dog ran out from an alley and chased alongside us a few yards, barking, then dropped away.
“Which house?” John said.
He would know the house, if he was the one. But already I felt wearied for us both by my suspicions, couldn’t bring myself to be always testing him. Now that he was here beside me in the flesh he seemed so harmless, my suspicions so tenuous.
“The one at the end.”
The house was shrouded in darkness, sitting just beyond the reach of the village’s last streetlight.
“This is where you grew up?” Rita said.
“Yes.”
We had barely spoken so far.
“You could stay for supper,” I said.
I couldn’t make out her face in the dark.
“We should probably get back.”
“But you’ll come tomorrow.”
“If you’re sure it’s all right.”
They arrived toward noon the following day. I had scrambled to make arrangements, scrounging cots and linen from Marta and Luisa. For friends from Canada, I had said, not having thought through how else I might introduce them. Then when their car pulled up outside the house, I felt a spasm of panic: all this was wrong, bringing them here; nothing of what we were could be made sense of here.
John was already unloading bags of groceries from the trunk.
“We brought some things,” he said, a bit doubtfully, as if he were asking some favour of me to accept them.
The house felt transformed with Rita and John in it, its air of preservation, of holding intact some ghost of the past, seeming to flee before their backpacks and bags, their travellers’ impermanence, as if some spell had been broken. I showed them to their rooms, John to one on the ground floor and Rita to the one next to mine upstairs. Rita and I stood a moment at her door, looking in.
“There’s no bath in the house,” I said. “You’ll have to use my aunt’s up the street.”
“That’s fine.”
The room was bare except for the cot I’d dug up for her and an old wicker chair and a small barrel that I’d set up as an end table. I’d set a glass on the barrel with a few wild-flowers in it.
“There’s a good view from the balcony,” I said.
She went to the balcony door and opened it to stare out. It was the first time I had really dared to look at her, as she stood across the room with her back to me.
“Has it been hard for you?” she said. “Returning here?”
“Not so hard. Not as hard as I thought.”
I tried to read her through the curve of her back, the fall of her hair on her shoulders, the way she held herself. That seemed to be how we spoke to one another now, faceless like that, unable to bear the direct gaze.
“And for you?” I said. “How have things been?”
“Oh, the same, I guess. Not so hard.”
We kept to our places, me at the door, her at the balcony, as if some force held us just there, at that precise distance. I could hear John downstairs, the rustle of grocery bags.
“I suppose I should get some lunch ready,” I said.
“Sure. I’ll be down in a minute.”
John had managed to find the couple of pots I’d borrowed from Marta and had set water to boil for pasta.
“Is there any problem?” he said.
“No. No problem.”
It was hard to gauge how much he knew of what had gone on between me and Rita – something, surely, if not from anything Rita had told him then simply from the strange energy between us. I had the sense that he held himself back from knowing more, almost as a gesture of trust, an offering against his own secrets.
“It’s not much of a kitchen,” I said.
“We can manage.”
We set about making a meal. They’d brought pasta and bottled sauce, some cheese, some lettuce and vegetables for salad. John worked with the no-nonsense competence of a man long used to preparing his own meals. I thought of his apartment, with its fusty not-quite-disorder, of his solitary life there.
“We haven’t talked about your trip,” I said.
“Perhaps we can wait for Rita. To have her view of things.”
“She’s been all right?”
I couldn’t keep the thickness out of my voice.
“Yes, of course.” He said this in a tone that sounded neither guiltless nor completely reassuring. “A little confused, perhaps.”
“Confused about what?”
“Oh, the future and so on. It’s normal for her age.”
When Rita came down she had changed from her jeans to a ruffled long-sleeved dress full of creases and folds as if it had lain unused at the bottom of her pack the whole trip. The dress seemed to change her, to rusticate her, made her look like some peasant girl dressed up in her Sunday best.
“I saw from the balcony that there’s an extra floor at the back,” she said.
“That’s the stable.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t remember ever telling her the exact details of her past, their exact architecture. And yet her question hadn’t seemed innocent.
“It’s empty now,” I said. “I can show it to you after lunch.”
John came with us when we went down. I almost thought that he was trying to tell me now, not Rita but me, that he was trying to find the right wordless way to say yes, he was the one. We stood, the three of us, at the bottom of the side steps and the air seemed ripe with suspense, as if at any instant the stable door must open and John’s younger self must appear there.
“Our mother used to work back here,” I said. “In the garden. Our cousin Marta keeps it now.”
I opened the stable door, to the dank smell of cold earth and rotting stone. Rita and I went inside. For a moment we stood alone in the stable’s murky light.
“There would have been animals here,” I said. “Some pigs, a few sheep. I used to take the sheep out to pasture after school.”
Somehow my mind was fixed on these simple, banal details, the things I could say for certain. Everything else, the open door, the two eyes peering out, that Rita could have been conceived here in this smelly grotto, seemed suddenly far-fetched.
“Do you remember what it was like for you back then?” Rita said. “I mean, really remember?”
“Sometimes. In a way.”
We came back out to the open. It was only now that I noticed Luisa staring at us from her balcony. It seemed from her stillness that she had been watching us for some time.
“So these are your friends,” she said, her gaze fixed on Rita.
“Yes. They’ve just arrived.”
“Do they speak Italian?”
“No.”
Her eye went to John, then back to Rita. She let the silence hang an instant.
“You should bring them around some time,” she said finally.
“Yes. Maybe tomorrow.”
We made our way up the stairs. Rita glanced back toward the balcony, but Luisa had gone.
“You sound different, in Italian,” she said.
“How, different?”
“I don’t know. As if you belonged here.”
I had to take them around to Marta’s to let her know they’d be needing to use the bath there. Marta was just clearing away the remains of her own lunch, shooting a quick, appraising look at John and Rita and then continuing with her work as if she had already summed them up, slotted them into her order of things.
“They’re friends from Canada,” I said.
“Friends? If you say so.”
It seemed pointless to wait for her to extend any gesture of hospitality to them. Even Aunt Lucia, perched in front of the television, gave no sign of any interest in them.
“They’ll need to use the bathroom sometimes,” I said.
“So let them use it, then.”
I led them out. There had been no missing Marta’s animosity. It seemed an unfortunate way to introduce them to the village, not least because the apparent arbitrariness of Marta’s actions almost always ended up pointing toward some truth.
“Marta’s a bit strange,” I said. “Don’t mind her.”
But we all seemed to have been made ill at ease by her reception.
We continued up the street toward the square. The village had taken on its midday torpor, sun-deadened and still, the only sounds the buzz of flies and the rustle of lizards darting in the shadows of ruined buildings. We passed a couple of villagers, but they seemed shy at the sight of these new strangers, nodding and mumbling some neutral greeting and moving on. But then one of the women I’d met at Marta’s my first morning – Maria, the large one – spotted us from her stoop.
“Oh, americano! Who are these foreigners you’ve brought?”
Before I could think of a way to refuse her she had got us into her kitchen, with an almost predatory aggression, settling us at her table and keeping an assessing eye on us as she went about preparing coffee and setting out sweets.
“But is it your fiancée, this one?” she said.
“No, no. Just a friend.”
It wasn’t long before other women had begun to appear at Maria’s door, passing the same appraising eye over Rita and John as if Maria had set them on display here. In the end there were more than half a dozen of them crowded into Maria’s kitchen, large and small, ancient and middle-aged.
“They’re just friends,” Maria explained, to each new arrival. “From Canada. Though the man, he looks like a German to me.”
“Tedesco?” one of the women said to John. “Deutschmann?”
John reddened.
“Sì, sì, Deutschmann,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with the Germans,” one of the others threw in. “People said, because of the war, but I’ll tell you the Germans always respected us. You know who were the worst, the Canadians! It’s true, they were the worst!”
It came out in all this that John spoke a few words of Italian, some of the women trying to draw him out in conversation. But the attention to him was only in passing, it seemed, a diversion. Rita was where the real interest lay, barely veiled and strangely intense, the women’s eyes always coming back to her. They asked me questions about her, where she came from, what she was to me, seeming to know that I would lie and yet still somehow taking pleasure in my responses, as if all that mattered was that she remain in their sphere.
“She’s so pretty,” one of them said. “With those eyes.”
And there was a mood in the air of almost reverential deference, as if Rita had come with some secret, some arcane knowledge, that they wished to be privy to.
“They must have guessed who you are,” I said, when we were outside again. It was the only thing that explained their fascination: they were searching for our mother in her, what spark or power she had passed on to her.
“It was very strange,” Rita said. “The way they were looking at me.”
“I think they’re a little afraid of you.”
The women’s attention seemed to have changed her in some way: she looked suddenly less foreign here, in her long-sleeved dress and black hair, seemed to have taken into herself some of the stone and shadow of this place.
“I thought I understood a bit what it was like for her,” she said. “For our mother. To be in a place like this. To be watched.”
John had hardly spoken. The whole time we had been at Maria’s he had seemed to want to will himself into invisibility, putting the women off with a reticence that came close to rudeness.
“I didn’t know you spoke Italian,” I said.
“A few words, only. From when I was young.”
“You studied it?”
“No. No. I picked it up here and there. But it was many years ago now.”
The two of them spent the rest of the day in retreat at my house, John sitting reading on the balcony off his room and Rita doing some laundry out back in a big copper tub I sometimes used for my baths, spreading clothing to dry over branches and posts like bits of decoration. From the kitchen balcony I saw Luisa come out to offer her a washboard.
“Thank you. Grazie.”
“I have machine,” Luisa said, in stumbling English. “Is better.”
“No, no, it’s all right. It’s nice to be in the sun like this.”
“Yes.”
Later, that night, taking a walk through the village after Rita and John had gone to bed, I ran into Luisa near the square.
“So it’s your sister who’s come, then,” she said.
“So people know.”
“You were right not to say. It’s nobody business.”
“But everyone knew just the same.”
“You know how they are. They said it was the eyes that gave her away. Because they were blue.”
“But how would they have known that?”
“It’s not that they knew. It’s just what people are saying, that it’s because of the washing blue your mother took when she was pregnant. Silly things like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They used to believe that before. That you could get rid of a baby by swallowing washing blue.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m just saying what they thought.”
“But it’s not something my mother would have done. It doesn’t sound like her.”
“It’s what people say. You were small then, how could you know?”
We were walking back along the village’s main street toward home. Here and there a light was on in a window, in the background the dance and flit of the ghost that televisions cast up, the fire that people gathered around now.
“And the man?” I said. “What are people saying about him?”
“I don’t know. They were making fun of him a bit, because he’s a German.”
“Just that?”
“One of them said he looked like someone she’d seen on the TV. In one of those war films.”
We’d come to the door of her house.
“So you and your sister are close,” she said.
“Fairly. Yes.”
“I could see that. I thought she was your girlfriend at first. I was even a little jealous.”
“Ah.”
She laughed.
“Povero Vittorio. You think I’m going to try to trap you and make you stay here the rest of your life.”
But I didn’t know how to answer her, how to make light of things the way she did.
The light was still on in Rita’s room when I went in. For a moment I stood at her closed door, heard the page of a book turn, the creak of bedsprings. I could go in to her now and she would be there on her narrow bed, her body a slender swell in the bedsheets. Then as I stood I heard her rise, heard her feet pad across the stone floor till she was just a door-width away, till I could hear the sound of her breathing. She seemed to hesitate there at the threshold as if she knew that someone waited on the other side, that some decision could be made. But then came the click of her light switch, and the sound of her padding back to her bed in the dark.