Where She Has Gone (21 page)

They went on like this, a mix of candour and circumspection and squabbling, like chattering birds not certain where it was safe to alight.

“It was Marta who kept up the house for you,” Giuseppina said. “After your grandfather left it for you in the will. It’s true that she always said you’d come back. She sees things like that sometimes.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Maria said. “He came back because he was born here.”

“All the same.”

“So you were my mother’s friends, then,” I said.

“
Sì, sì
,” Maria said quickly, and then, “You must remember my Vincenzo, the two of you used to play together. He’s in Rome now.”

“Ah.”

When they’d gone they seemed to leave a residue like the trace of some interloper who’d got into the house. It was as if they’d come to test me, what I remembered, how I might implicate them. Or perhaps they had simply come to get a look at me – this was the one, her son, this was what happened next. Time was different here, people had patience, twenty years wasn’t so long to wait for a story to reach its conclusion. In the village’s eyes, I might be like some soldier who had returned after years of war – everything that had happened to me during my absence was irrelevant, wasn’t part
of the tale, didn’t take on any meaning until the moment I stepped back into the village, and was home.

Not long after the women had gone the village mailman stopped by the house, a pale, thin-limbed young man in a uniform of shorts and cap that gave him a slightly comical air.

“
Postino
,” he said, as if explaining his uniform to someone who had never seen such a thing. “How you say, post-man.”

He set his mail bag in a corner and then he and Marta disappeared mysteriously up the steps to the second floor. I heard a mumble of terse conversation, and a moment later he was in the kitchen again.

“I came to help with the bed,” he said. “I think we can manage it.”

“Sorry?”

“Marta said that you’re moving down to
lu podestà
’s old place.”

“Oh. Yes.”

So that was the plan, then. It seemed for Marta like a point of faith in the creed of some intricate private religion that I be installed there, that her years of tending the place reach this fruition.

The young man led me upstairs to a tiny spare room that held an old bed frame and flowered mattress.

“We’ll do the mattress first,” he said. “You take the front.”

When we’d reached my grandfather’s house it took a bit of manoeuvring to get the mattress up the narrow stairs that led to the second floor. We set it against the wall in the bedroom that had been my mother’s.

“You don’t remember me, admit it,” the young man said.

“We used to take walks together up on the mountain there. On Colle di Papa.”

It seemed I had been friends with everyone: Maria’s Vincenzo, the brothers and sisters of Luisa next door. But this was different.

“You’re Fabrizio,” I said.

“So you remember.”

“We used to smoke cigarettes together. Before I left, you gave me a jack-knife.”

“See, I was right, then. We must have been friends.”

I was thrown off by this possibility he was allowing that we might have forgotten one another. In my memory of him he was larger than life, as much a part of the landscape of my childhood as this house, these stone walls. But to him I might be simply some boy he’d known briefly who had gone, like dozens of others.

“So you stayed on, then,” I said. “In the village, I mean.”

“I was in Rome for a couple of years, I worked in a restaurant there. That was a lark. We Molisani, we pretty much run the restaurant business there now. But you can’t beat a government job. And the air here – in the city it’s not the same.”

He gave the same impression he had as a boy of being a sort of vast conduit for information which, however, always emerged from him slightly skewed, slightly tinged with an indefinable residue of him.

“Anyway, it’s good you remember me,” he said. “Some people come back and it’s like they’d never set eyes on the place before.”

When we were done with the bed, he left to finish his rounds.

“I’ll come by for you after,” he said. “We’ll have some laughs.”

He came around again at the tail end of lunch, changed out of his uniform now into jeans and an old flannel shirt. Without waiting for an invitation he made himself at home, seating himself at the table and wrapping a friendly arm around Aunt Lucia.

“
Ciao, zia
!” he shouted at her. “You’re a good girl, you always clean your plate!”

Marta set a dish in front of him and he began in a casual way to mop up our dregs.

“So things must look different from how you remember them,” he said. “They changed the road – remember it was just that old goat path before? It was like the end of the world here.”

“I was wondering about the electricity,” I said. “When it came in.”

“What are you saying? That was way back in Mussolini’s time, he did the whole country then. And before that there used to be an old waterwheel down by the river that made it.”

None of this accorded with how I remembered things.

“But there was that festival one year, when the band had to bring its own generator. They put lights up all over the square. You must remember that.”

Fabrizio shrugged.

“Maybe it’s something else you’re thinking of.”

After lunch he took me out to a patch of land he had in the
contrada
of Bellavigna, beyond the slopes of Colle di Papa. It was spread over the mountainside in a precarious series of dips and plateaus, two or three acres at most, hemmed in by
the tangled growth of various abandoned plots that bordered it. There were a few olive trees, several rows of vines, some tomatoes and beans. He had bought the land with the money he’d saved while in Rome, though there were family plots, his parents too old to work them now and his siblings gone off to Switzerland, to Turin, to Rome, that had gone abandoned.

“That way no one can tell you anything,” he said. “All those family fights, they happen all the time over here. But maybe it’s different in America.”

He had built a small shack in one corner of the field, a sturdy place in mortar and stone with a propane stove and a cot for sleeping. At the back of it, hardly noticeable from the outside because of the way the mountain swelled and fell around it, was a small garden fenced in by walls he had built from rocks he’d dredged up from his land. There were fruit trees, a grape bower, an abundance of roses. In a back corner, taking its source from a nearby spring Fabrizio had diverted, was a tiny waterfall, a trickle of mountain-clear water sliding over stone into a small, placid pool beneath.

“The Garden of Eden, I call it,” he said. “It’s my special place. Nobody bothers me here.”

The garden was like some secret folly or fantasy, rustic and secluded and lush. In the distance the mountaintops rose up, green and grey, encircling the place like a rim holding up the sky.

“We used to have our special places on Colle di Papa,” Fabrizio said. “Remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Back then I always thought I’d follow you to America some day. But I’m still here.”

“It’s not so bad here,” I said.

“I don’t mind it.”

He took me around his field to show me his crops. The blue of the sky here hurt my eyes, so pure was it: the air had a smell of clover and mown hay. For an instant we seemed children again, I tending the sheep in the high meadows near the village and Fabrizio coming out across the fields to keep me company.

“So I suppose people have been talking now that I am back,” I said. “About my mother and so on.”

He gave a dismissive shrug.

“You know how people are. All the foolish things they come out with.”

I pictured him on his rounds quietly collecting the town’s gossip.

“So it’s true, then. They’ve been saying things.”

“This and that. Just nonsense, really. Like the time your mother tore up that money your father sent back from Canada with Alfredo Pannunzio.”

It had been the night of the
festa della Madonna
. There had been an argument of some sort, and then my mother had shredded a bill of some fairly large denomination, fifty or a hundred dollars, in
Zi
’Alfredo’s face. In my memory of the event it had been an entirely private thing, unwitnessed.

“What do people say?” I asked.

“Nothing, really. Just gossip.”

He had grown awkward. I remembered how we had fought once as children when he had tried to explain to me, in a child’s simple animal terms, why my mother had become a pariah.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Oh, you know. How she made such a big deal about tearing the thing up and then someone saw her bring it into the bank in Rocca Secca the next day all taped together again.”

We fell silent. Fabrizio wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m not saying that’s how it happened,” he said finally. “That’s just what people say.”

It was plausible that things had happened that way, though there were a hundred other ways they might have happened that were just as plausible. Seen from this distance my mother could have been anyone, hero or hypocrite, sinner or saint.

“And the man,” I said. “The one she went with. Do people ever talk about him?”

“Everyone has some story. Some people said it was what’s-his-name, Giuseppe
Cocciapelata
, because he went a little crazy after she left.”

“People thought it was someone from the village?”

“Where else?”

“It’s just that I had the idea it was a soldier. A German.”

“But the war had been over for years by then.”

“I just thought. From something I heard once –”

“You were just a kid,” Fabrizio said. “Maybe you thought that because of all those stories about the war that your grandfather used to tell.”

“Maybe.”

I couldn’t bring myself to press him further. Every contradiction of how I remembered things was like having a part of me torn away.

“I can ask around if you want,” he said. “Quietly like that.”

“It’s all right.”

On our return to the village he brought me up along the spine of Colle di Papa to show me where the old high road had passed. Most of it had been dug up now to make way for a new road just under construction, part of the network of impressive straight-line highways that burrowed their way through the region now.

“They spent millions before to change the road so people had to pass through the village and now they’re spending millions so they can avoid it again,” Fabrizio said. “Anyway, it’s all corruption. One way or the other it doesn’t make any difference.”

He led me down the slopes of Colle di Papa, following a tangled maze of narrow footpaths through the scrubby woods that covered it. At a small hollow amidst a clump of pine trees, he stopped.

“We used to come here together, remember?” And he pointed out a slab of stone – I had no recollection of this – where we had carved our initials.

I felt strangely moved. So he had brought me here to show me this place. I remembered the cigarettes we’d shared that he filched from his father, the idle hours we had passed, two knock-kneed boys joined in their delinquency and loneliness. But something else: I had betrayed him here. He had come to rescue me once, from some scheme of the village bullies I’d fallen into, and I had abandoned him, ashamed of my humiliation, ashamed to have him as my only friend. There had always been that shadow between us afterwards, that knowledge of the small hatred I bore him.

“I suppose I wasn’t much of a friend to you back then,” I said.

But I saw at once, by how this seemed to hurt him, that he didn’t remember things as I did.

“What are you saying? We were tight, you and me, all the times we had. But I didn’t think you would remember.”

Marta had set me up for the night in my house, had dressed my bed in stiff linens, brought in a night table and chair, had replaced the canister on the ancient propane stove in the kitchen and set out coffee and a small espresso pot for my breakfast. I still could not quite get my mind around the thought that the house was mine now in some way, that I possessed it, that somewhere a will existed that named me, a deed that had been signed over to me. Being in the house I felt a strange sense of dislocation, as if just beneath the surface of things something deeper was trying to urge itself on me: my body would suddenly remember the turn of a stair, the feel of a doorknob beneath my hand, with a Tightness the mind could never get back to; and then the feeling would be gone. That was the hard thing, this not-quite-presence of all my history here, what was everywhere hinted at but nowhere delivered up. And yet it was odd that what seemed to make the past most palpable, in the end, most real, was exactly this mute
unreachability, the way it beckoned, and beckoned, and beckoned, and could not be touched.

In bed in my mother’s room, I remembered again the dream of soldiers I’d had as a child, the sound of their voices on the balcony as they smoked, the scrape of their rifle barrels against the balcony rail. My mind had made connections then, a child’s intuitive leaps, whose intricacies I could no longer trace. It was as if reality – the logical grid I saw things through as an adult, the where and the who and the how, what could be proved, remembered, deduced – had somehow come in the way of a lost, higher order of understanding I’d had then. My grandfather had shown me a mark on the bedroom wall where he’d said the soldiers who had passed through during the war had shot at a spider; but I couldn’t locate it now amongst the wall’s many fissures and scars. Perhaps the story had been just some amusement he’d made up, an old man’s exaggerations to feed the imaginings of a child.

In the morning, I drove into Rocca Secca with the hope of tracking down an old friend of my mother’s. A wide, welcoming avenue I had no memory of led into the town centre from the highway, with a treelined centre island and newish shops and low apartment houses ranged up along either side. It was only when I’d got past a bustling central square that the avenue ended suddenly and the landscape began to grow somewhat familiar: I had passed into the old town, the streets here winding and narrow and steep and the buildings leaning into one another precariously. The memories began to come back, of Saturday visits with my mother to the local market, of a trip we had made once to the crumbling Giardini estate on the town’s outskirts. Amidst the run-down buildings and
abandoned shop-fronts I passed now, the old image we’d had of Rocca Secca seemed to hold, of a place that couldn’t be trusted, that hid its decrepitude behind a façade of attractive welcome.