Shortly after Rita and John’s departure Valle del Sole began to fill with former villagers returning from the city for their August vacation. Houses that had been shuttered and dark were opened up again; women in skirts and high heels and children who spoke what seemed, after weeks of dialect, a precocious textbook Italian began to appear in the streets. There was something utterly foreign about this returning group, even in the people I remembered vaguely from childhood – they were citified in what seemed a peculiarly Italian way, with a certain sheen of instinctive elegance but also a certain parochialism, an immediate distancing from the unfamiliar as if all they could need, all they could want, had already been defined by their city lives.
The arrival of this group seemed to take the village away from me in some way. It was as if an era had passed, as if the village had briefly resided in a sort of timelessness, a space where it might have been possible to go back, to step through a doorway to the past, and now had suddenly been brought into the mundane present, just a quaint back-country village which people returned to for their summer vacations. I began to fall in with Luisa again, who seemed as put out by these new arrivals as I was, reduced by them from someone in her element to a simple country urchin, not quite to be taken seriously. Her own house was full of returning siblings now, brothers and sisters and their families back from Turin and Rome. They treated her with the unthinking imperiousness of older siblings, expecting to be catered to, looked after, perhaps feeling at some level that they had abandoned her here and for that reason not able to let themselves see her as an equal.
None of the siblings appeared very approving of Luisa’s attentions to me, the earlier acceptance I had felt in her house when it had been just her and her parents giving way to a slight undercurrent of mocking condescension as if to say it was not so much after all, to have gone off to America, they had done as well or better here at home. Luisa showed a stubborn loyalty to me in the face of this, coming by alone to the house, walking with me in the street and sometimes taking my arm even though the old villagers, the younger returnees, would stare after us burgeoning with speculation. I could see the direction all this was moving in and yet lacked the desire or will to try to put a different complexion on things. But the first flirtatiousness that there had been between us had been replaced by a kind of solemnity now, as if we could no longer ignore the fact that we were young, that we were attracted to one another, that there seemed nothing in our lives to impede a natural coming together.
We drove out one day to see the Samnite ruins at Pietrabbondante, an old fortress town perched on a stony summit that formed a lookout over the entire valley. The road up followed hairpin switchbacks and passed through villages that were replicas of Valle del Sole but without the veil of familiarity to obscure their actual strangeness, the sun-baked, prehistoric stillness and silence, the mangy dogs in the square and the children who stared at the sight of our passing car. At the end of the road, Pietrabbondante sat high and remote on its great heave of rock like some lost Andean hill town. Up that high, the wind came down with an elemental purity and force, bits of the sky itself seeming caught in it, small wisps of its cool, unearthly blue.
The ruins were at the town’s outskirts, along a slope of craggy hillside dotted with gnarled crabapple and olive trees. A gravelled path led down to them from the roadway. We had to sign a register at a tiny gatehouse that an old man in a rumpled suit and tie presided over.
“Watch that your wife doesn’t slip on the stones on the way down,” he said.
The path continued for quite a distance before we rounded a hill and the ruins finally appeared before us on a small plateau. Great squares of white stone formed the foundation of what seemed to have been a temple; spread out around it were the low, rectangular remains of smaller, more minor buildings, their bits of wall showing the same stone and rubble construction as the houses of Valle del Sole. There was a feel of abandonment to the place as if someone had begun work here and then lost interest, a few fenced-off areas that showed the tentative beginnings of new excavations overgrown now with weeds. Littered throughout the site were massive blocks of cut stone, great giant-sized bits of rubble spread out in a seemingly random dispersal as if whatever great form had once existed here was gradually reverting over the years to a state of perfect, utter disorder.
“They keep hoping the tourists will come,” Luisa said. “But who ever sees tourists here in the middle of nowhere?”
Beyond the temple, hidden from view until we were actually upon it, a small amphitheatre lay sheltered at the bottom of a grassy hollow. It was a surprise after the meagre offerings of the rest of the site, its half-dozen rows of stone benches sitting so placid and still, so human in their dimensions, they seemed to be awaiting an audience that must arrive at any moment. The whole construction was an odd mix of delicacy and brawn, a retaining wall along the edge of the upper rows built up of huge, uneven blocks pieced together without mortar, but then the ends of the bottom rows graced with carvings of subtle, griffin-like figures and the seats themselves forming a perfect symmetry of smooth, rounded slabs of cut stone. The seats had been gently contoured to accommodate the curve of a back, a feature that struck me as unexpectedly tender, that these fierce mountain people had taken that care.
As a child I had hardly known of this place, though I’d lived just across the valley almost in sight of it.
“Do they teach you about these things in school now?” I said.
“Oh, well. This and that. About the Samnites and so on. Because we came down from them.”
We took a seat in one of the front rows. It was like being up against the sky here, against the gods. Beyond where the stage would have been the land fell away toward the valley, gently at first and then more steeply; two thousand years ago one would have sat in this place and gazed out over what might have seemed the whole of the known world. A few hundred people could have been accommodated here, no more – that was what a civilization was, back then, a few hundreds huddled together against the dark watching some scene unfold that might have been simple-minded or trite or more primal, more pure in its pain, than we could imagine.
“So what can you tell me about them?” I said. “About your ancestors?”
Luisa shrugged.
“We beat the Romans once. We had them trapped in a valley but instead of killing them we just made them pass under our swords to show they’d lost and then sent them home. But after, they wanted to wipe us out, because they’d been shamed like that. They came back and wrecked everything, and then when they built their roads they made sure that none of them passed through here so we’d just be left to die out. But we didn’t die, you see? We’re still here.”
I laughed.
“You’re very proud, you Samnites,” I said. “Very tough. I can see that.”
“You, too. Don’t think you’re any different. You’re still one of us.”
There was a sound of wind and beyond us, on the hillside, the trees swayed like bending dancers. But in our sheltered hollow the air remained perfectly calm and still.
“It’s funny,” Luisa said, “but I always thought of your mother whenever they talked about that, about how proud we were. I was just a baby when you left, but that was always how I saw her, from what people said. Una vera Sannita.”
She seemed to be holding the memory of my mother out to me like a gift.
“You would have liked her,” I said. “She wasn’t so different from you.”
We were sitting almost touching. I could feel the heat of her, could smell her country odour of soap and sweat. There was something in her profile that looked suddenly familiar beyond words, the ancestral trace there, the distillation of lineages that went back and back and back.
“I wonder, sometimes, if things had been different,” she said. “If my family had gone. Like you did.”
“But this is your place. You’re at home here.”
“Yes.”
A small despondency had come between us. We both seemed to have felt the moment pass when I ought to have touched her, taken her hand.
“I suppose we should be going,” she said.
The days passed. As if by agreement Luisa began to come by less often; nothing was said, but it was clear that we were taking our leave of each other. I went by Aunt Caterina’s once and walked down to the old homestead again, drawn to the place as if there was something I’d missed, some answer I might still stumble upon. But its ruins seemed as remote now, as unfathomable, as the bits of scattered rubble at Pietrabbondante. I felt a sense of desolation go through me at how lost to time things were, at the irreducible foreignness of this place though I had come from it. The clay bowl that Luisa had repaired sat still intact on its weathered sideboard, a bit of rainwater collected in the bottom of it – in ten, perhaps a hundred years it might be sitting there still, as much an enigma to those who came then as these fallen rafters and stones, the hard, mysterious lives that had gone on here, were to me now.
Just under two weeks had passed since Rita’s departure when I decided to leave the village. I felt no sense of destination, only the impression that my time here had run out. Marta came by to close up the house, turning the water off and bolting up the shutters.
“Don’t expect it to wait here for you another twenty years,” she said.
The day of my departure Luisa and Fabrizio came by to see me off. It occurred to me for the first time that circumstance ought inevitably to have made of them a couple, yet the whole time I had been here I had never once seen them together. Even now, as they stood elbow to elbow to see me off, they seemed connected only through me, though they’d surely known each other all their lives. There was something in this that tore at me, as if we had each of us in our way missed our fates, our chance at happiness.
“Next time I see you it’ll be in America,” Fabrizio said, though I knew it was a trip he would never make.
My second departure from Valle del Sole, twenty years after the first, felt more final and more fatal: there had been the future, at least, to drive off into then, all the unknown, limitless world. It took only a few minutes of driving now for Valle del Sole to disappear from view; and then I was on my own again without destination or hopes, with no place left now to go home.