It rained through much of the night, a hard, driving rain that hit like a scattering of pebbles against the glass of my balcony doors. At one point I awoke with a start at the thought of Rita’s clothes outside, then remembered she’d brought them in after supper. But through the rest of the night I couldn’t get the image of them out of my dreams, those coloured bits of her spread through the garden, saw them picked up by the wind and scattered all over the valley and beyond. It would be hours’, days’ work to collect them, a hopeless trek through the muck and cold. Rita waited behind at the house while John and I set out; but it was impossible, the rain was too hard, the road too long.
In the morning Rita was at the kitchen table, alone, when I went down.
“John’s gone out walking,” she said.
Sunlight was pouring in through the balcony doorway, just a few drifting wafers of cloud left behind from the night’s rain.
“I don’t know. He gets pretty far sometimes. He said not to wait around for him, if we wanted to go out or anything.”
It was the first time we’d really been alone together. We both seemed awkward at the prospect of this time stretching out before us.
“So you and John have been getting along?” I said.
“It’s been okay.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ought to be cautioning her in some way, but I wasn’t sure against what.
“I don’t want to pry. It’s just that you’ve never really talked much about him.”
“We’re just friends, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, her cheeks colouring a bit. “Like I told you.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was just wondering about his past and so on, that’s all.”
None of this was going quite right, the subject seeming more fraught for her than I’d expected.
“It doesn’t really come up much,” she said. “I guess he holds a lot back, coming from Germany and everything. The war and all that.”
“Did you go there at all? To Germany?”
“A bit.” She seemed hesitant about going on. “He took me to his home town, near Munich. I thought it would be this pretty little village, from how he talked about it once. But it was just a new-looking suburb, it could have been anywhere. I guess a lot of it was destroyed in the war. And then it was like he was just a tourist there – there wasn’t anyone he wanted to see or anything. It’s almost as if we went there for my sake, not his. So he could show me.”
“I don’t know. What he was. How little he had.”
She seemed to have understood something about him that she wasn’t quite able or willing to put into words but that she was setting up almost as an admonition to me, a warning not to tamper with whatever it was that they had between them.
“Well he seems nice enough,” I said stupidly.
We’d grown awkward again. I found myself wishing once more that she hadn’t come here: what was the point of all this weight we had to bear around each other, of everything that couldn’t be discussed, resolved, of this stricture in my throat as if I were gazing at water, near at hand, unreachable, while dying of thirst?
There was still the whole morning before us to fill, and then beyond that the days, the weeks, the years.
“We could go for a walk,” she said.
But I couldn’t bear the thought of passing through the village again, of those eyes on us.
“Maybe in the countryside.”
We ended up following a path that wound gently down toward the valley from just beyond the edge of town. The air felt scoured after the night’s rain, the grass and weeds along the path still dappled with wet. We passed an old man I didn’t recognize at work at his little plot; he nodded darkly in greeting, then stared on at us as we went past before bending back to his work.
A couple of miles out Castilucci appeared in the distance, spread out along a narrow promontory that jutted out into the valley.
“Is that the town your father was from?” Rita said.
“It’s how Aunt Taormina described it. She used to tell me stories about it.”
I always felt a twinge of shame at the memory of Aunt Taormina, because of how as a child I’d thought of her as hopelessly plodding and slow-witted. But during the years that her and Uncle Umberto’s family had lived with us she had been a sort of surrogate mother to Rita.
“What sorts of stories?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ghost stories, mostly. There was one about a woman who people said was a witch. How they dug up her grave after she died but it was empty.”
There was something in this I couldn’t quite make sense of, perhaps simply that she had memories of her time with us that were separate from my own, or that she had fit in in this way, hadn’t always been hopelessly outside of things. I had the instant’s sense that all the while that she’d lived with us, that I’d imagined her as impossibly alien, this other person had existed, someone who had truly been part of the family, who had talked like us and remembered what we remembered and had heard stories like we had at her aunt’s knee.
“You must have spoken Italian fairly well then,” I said. “To have understood her.”
“I guess it’s true. I never really thought about it.”
“But you don’t remember it now.”
“Sometimes I think I can almost understand. With those women yesterday, it was so familiar. But it’s like in a dream. It’s like the words get garbled somehow just before they get to me.”
We had come fairly far by now. Behind us, Valle del Sole was just a smudge of mossy tile and whitewash in the hillside.
“This whole place,” Rita said. “That’s how it feels to me. Like it would make sense except for some little thing I can’t put my finger on. It’s almost as if I thought I’d come here and the past would just be here, that I’d pick it up and then I’d understand, I’d be someone else, maybe that little girl who knew how to speak Italian or whoever I would have been if things had been different. But I guess it doesn’t work that way.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“It’s not that. I suppose it’s freeing, in a way. To know there isn’t this other identity out there I have to keep looking for as if there were some kind of curse over me.”
We were getting close to the river. The vista here was much different from where Luisa and I had come out when we’d gone to the hot spring, the river stretching out bucolic and wide and wheat fields rolling gently down to sandy shorelines on either side, with no sign of the cliff face that Luisa and I had walked along.
“There was a place along here where our mother used to go,” I said. “A hot spring.”
“Should we look for it?”
But now that I’d mentioned the place it suddenly seemed too intimate a thing to speak about.
“It’s a bit far, I think. Maybe another time.”
We came to the shore. There was no crossing where we were, just a uniform stream of silver-blue, eerily silent though moving swiftly after the night’s rain. Rita took her shoes off and waded into the shallows. Far up along the shore, past the gorge formed by the promontory Castilucci sat on, a tiny figure was moving, a knapsack over one shoulder. As I watched he came to some sort of footbridge and began to make his way across to the other side, from the distance looking as if he were floating across the surface of the water.
Rita and I walked along the shoreline to an outcropping of rock at the river’s edge and sat, a little apart from each other, Rita still in her bare feet. Here in the valley the air was almost completely windless and still, the sun shining down on us like the essence of itself, a dry, bone-soothing filament of heat.
There was a sudden calmness between us as if we had come to a crossroad and had paused there an instant in the quietness of decision.
“I remember how you used to visit me when I was small,” Rita said. “Me and Elena. Those Sunday afternoons. It’s funny how something sticks out like that, as if everything else was just time passing and then there were these moments where you were already thinking, This is what I’ll remember. This is what the past will seem like, when it becomes something you can’t ever get back to.”
“I never thought you cared much back then whether I came or went,” I said.
“I used to go crazy when you didn’t come. I must have thought you’d abandoned me or something. It’s hard to describe now – it’s like you were inside me somehow, like you were a lung or a heart, something I couldn’t do without. I never thought of it as love or anything like that. It was more – crazy than that. Like not knowing where my own body ended. Just crazy.”
“If I’d known,” I said.
But I knew it wouldn’t have made any difference. Everything had been so wordless then, so outside the realm of what words could give shape to.
“Elena said something once,” she said. “It was after Dad died. She was so angry then, like you told me. She said people like us – she meant you too – people without a real family, were pathetic. That the whole world was connected that way, and if you didn’t fit in, if you didn’t have something that was yours, then you were nothing.”
“There’s the two of us,” I said. “There’s that.”
“Yes.”
She traced a line in the sand with her toe and then with a slow pass of her foot erased it.
“It makes my head scream sometimes,” she said. “Just thinking of it all. Everything that doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
But it was true, the way some things could be simply impossible, could never be reasoned through. There was only the searing line they made through the brain, the devastation they left behind.
“Elena said some things about you that worried me,” I said. “About school and so on.”
“Oh, well. You know her. She has a tendency to overreact.”
“She said you were flunking out.”
“She said that?”
“It’s not true?”
“I dropped a couple of courses, that’s all. After Dad got sick. It was all a bit much.”
“She made it sound like you were a little messed up.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe that’s the problem.”
But sitting here beside me she seemed entirely sane, clearheaded, strong.
“When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to think there were two of me. The real one, the ugly one, that I was on the inside, a kind of freak but also special in some strange way, and then this other one who wasn’t special at all, who was just completely normal and average and ordinary, who got average grades and wasn’t especially kind or mean and who had average friends and did average things. Then I found out I could fool people, that I could pretend I was just the average one and people would believe me. For the longest time I thought that that was what I was doing, just pretending. But suddenly it was like I didn’t know any more which was the real one. It was like I had to choose: this is who I’m going to be.”
“And which one did you choose?” I said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She kicked at the sand.
“Maybe it’s just that I can’t face that,” she said. “Being ordinary. Maybe because I think other people would be disappointed in me. That you would.”
She was asking me to set her free, was laying out two paths for herself, one of which could not quite include me.
“Maybe I would,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you should choose that. It’s not as if it’s such a bad thing, being ordinary.”
A small breeze blew up and Rita’s hair fluttered, a nimbus of reddish black in the sun. It was almost unbearable to look at her, to feel this sense that all my life had prepared me for only this one thing, to love her.
“I suppose we should go,” she said.
But we simply sat where we were without speaking. I wanted to move in and hold her to me, to feel her body against mine one last time, the way it fit against me like a natural extension of my own. There were just those few inches between us, that bit of air, it could not make any difference; except the longing in me would only grow stronger then, my arms would only remember more surely the lost feel of her within them.
She rose, finally, as if to release me from the spell of her closeness, and waded into the shallows at the river’s edge. Then without looking back at me she began to move slowly away from the shore into the current. The water inched up to her calves, to the hem of her dress. At midstream she stood a moment facing the current like a naiad at the prow of a ship, letting her hands trail in the water’s grey. Then, as quietly as she’d gone out, she turned and came back to shore.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I think so. Yes.”
We returned home along a different route, a narrow asphalt road that wound up through wheat fields and tiny, quiet villages that were just a smattering of ramshackle houses. The cool damp of morning had given way to a midday heat that seemed to have wrung the sound out of things, the fields preternaturally silent and still. The road gradually wound away from the route we’d taken on the way down until it was hard to tell any more what direction we were headed in. But then it ascended a slope and we came out suddenly onto the highway that led into the village.
As we entered the outskirts of the village, Rita took my arm in hers as if something had been settled between us. We would walk this last stretch together, she seemed to say, brother and sister, and we nodded to the villagers we passed as we walked on arm in arm toward home.