John was preparing lunch when we came in, intent over a pot on the stove. His bedroom door was open, a small knapsack lying on his bed.
It took me an instant me to realize it had been John in the distance along the riverbank.
“We’ve been to the river,” I said.
“Ah.”
“There was a hot spring down there. Where our mother used to go.”
His eye caught mine, and I knew for certain that it had been him I’d seen. He had been looking for the hot spring.
“Did you find it?” he said.
“No.”
All through lunch there was a palpable sense of the question hanging clearly between us now, that did not even quite need to be posed anymore. Something, I wasn’t clear what, had made the thing suddenly bone-sure – that look in his eyes, perhaps, a look that had seemed both an affirmation and an appeal, like a secret passed. I was acutely aware of his body suddenly, of his ruddy physical presence: if I reached over to him, if I put a hand against his skin, I’d be able to feel his flesh real against my own, that he existed, had not all these years been merely a figment of my imagination.
I felt the anger rising up in me now at his deception, wanted only to get him alone, to put the thing to him directly. But then somehow an expedition was being planned, there was the afternoon to fill, and before I knew it we were on the road in my car, the three of us, with the same sense of barely restrained tensions as when we’d been to the zoo a few months before. John had suggested a visit to some kind of archaeological exhibit in a nearby town, giving terse directions from the back seat, a map spread over his knees, while I negotiated the town’s tangle of winding streets. I missed a turn and we ended up in a narrow cul-de-sac where I had barely room enough to wheel the car around, the back bumper scraping up against a low stone wall that edged the roadway.
“Maybe we ought to just give this up,” I said.
“We should be close now,” John said. “Just a ways back.”
We came at last to the building we were searching for, a large, medieval-looking place at the edge of the town’s old quarters. Inside, a spry, grey-haired man who spoke fairly fluent English – the curator, it turned out – offered to take us around when he learned we had come from overseas, leading us into a cavernous hall where various display cases and information panels had been set out. We were the only visitors; the curator had to turn lights on, move a barrier aside, as if opening up some special, rarely used room of a house for relations who had come.
A sign at the entrance to the exhibition hall read, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THE COMMUNITY OF THE FIRST EUROPEANS. I hadn’t quite taken in till now what it was we had come to see: findings of some sort, evidence of Homo erectus, that had been unearthed just outside the town during the construction of the Naples expressway. A photo on a display panel showed the site as it stood now, a fenced-off area of bulldozed earth with a few awkward constructions in fibreglass and corrugated steel housing the digs. Next to this was an artist’s rendering of how the site would have looked seven hundred thousand years before: it showed a watery meadow studded with willows and poplars, a herd of bison grazing in the background and a man or near-man, small and stoop-shouldered, stoking a fire in front of the opening of a tiny hut.
The curator was giving a running commentary.
“The first people who settled here probably followed the paths made by wild animals when they moved between the mountains and plains in spring and fall. Then over hundreds of thousands of years, those paths became the same ones that shepherds used to move their flocks, the ones you can still find now here and there. So you see how it’s all connected, how that little man in the picture there is our father.”
John was sticking close to Rita. In the dim lighting and cave-like hollowness and damp of the exhibition hall it seemed we ourselves were reverting to a sort of half-humanness, to basic animal principles of aversion and threat. I remembered the sense I’d had of John that time I’d followed him home, how primal the connection between us had felt to me then. It was as if I’d been tracking him ever since, on his scent, was at the moment now where he was just that single leap from me, where my muscles twitched from his closeness.
At one of the display cases John stood a moment elbow to elbow with Rita, pointing out some detail to her. Looking at them I felt a chill go through me: for the first time I saw the echo of him in her, a ghostly mirroring of him in her shoulders, the line of her back. It was there so clearly suddenly, like some lineament that marked a species.
Almost in the same instant both Rita and John turned, sensing my eyes on them.
“Is anything the matter?” Rita said.
“No, no, it’s nothing.”
The curator had moved on to a display of what he called the living-floor of a campsite that had been unearthed. It seemed merely a sort of prehistoric dumping ground, littered with broken bones and tusks and primitive bits of cut limestone and flint worked just barely enough to be distinguishable from the rocks they were scattered among. But the curator explained how much could be learned, deduced, across the millennia from these few shreds of things, as if everything of importance had left its indelible trace. I thought of my stumbling attempts to get at the truth of my own past: it seemed that more could be known for certain about these ancient ancestors, about events that had taken place at an unfathomable distance of years, than of what by comparison had happened hardly a moment ago.
“It’s eerie to think of them moving around here back then,” Rita said. “What they could have wanted.”
“They wanted what we do,” the curator said. “To eat. To sleep. To have a fire at night to keep them warm.”
We came to the end of the exhibition. As we were walking back toward the exit there was a moment when Rita and the curator were in conversation and I was able to draw John aside. My heart was pounding.
“I have to talk to you. It has to do with Rita.”
He gave me a guarded look, as if not surprised by the request yet not quite willing to concede that it had been expected.
“Yes, of course.”
“Tonight. After supper. We can go up to the bar.”
Rita and the curator were talking near the exit. He had pointed out an old device built into the wall to one side of the door, a large wooden wheel with wedge-shaped compartments that let objects be passed through from outside.
“The women used to put their babies there,” he was saying, “when they had one they couldn’t keep. Back when this building was a convent.”
“How do you mean?” Rita said.
“You put the baby in on one side, turned the wheel, and the nuns picked it up on the other, no questions asked.”
Rita ran a hand over the rough wood of one of the compartments. The space looked just large enough to nestle a baby in, wedged in between the narrowing sides.
“It doesn’t seem like something the Church would do,” she said.
“It was better than just letting the things rot in the fields. Every now and again even the Church showed a little compassion back then.”
The sun outside was blinding after the darkness of the exhibition room. From the parking lot there was a view of the valley the town looked over, and of the town itself arching around the curving summit it rested on toward the long, impressive bridge that formed part of the Naples expressway. John stood a moment staring out, with that sea captain’s look he’d had when I’d seen him gazing from the window of his apartment months before, as if he were assessing some coming storm that only his eye could make out. But then seeming to grow suddenly aware of me and Rita waiting for him, he gave an apologetic bob of his head, and we climbed into the car and headed back to Valle del Sole.