Where She Has Gone (23 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Ah, well. Everyone has their cross to bear.”

He had pulled back into his private hurt. A couple of customers came in and a weak, reflexive smile of greeting washed across his face, then faded.

“You must have to get to work,” I said.

“Eh? Oh, the others just keep me around now to make me feel important. My wife’s brother, he’s the chef now, he’s the one who really runs the place. I thought my son might take it over, but he’d rather work in the city for a stranger than for his father.”

He saw me to the door.

“And what about the girl?” he said. “It was a girl, wasn’t it? I always wondered about her. If she would turn out strong, like her mother.”

“In some ways,” I said.

“To tell you the truth, I was always a little in love with your mother. It was such a waste, what happened. Maybe the girl can have the life your mother didn’t.”

“Yes.”

Something caught his eye on one of the tables outside as he showed me out.

“You forgot your coin,” he said, and he picked it up and pressed it into my palm.

I had supper that night with Luisa and her parents next door. From childhood I had a dim recollection of her house as a run-down hovel of a place always teeming with dirty-faced children; but now, probably through the interventions of the brothers and sisters who’d moved away, the place had been completely modernized and refurbished, with a large marble-floored entrance hall and a cavernous dining room clearly used only for special occasions and a bright kitchen crammed with modern appliances. Luisa’s parents, work-hobbled and elfin, sat huddled up around the kitchen’s fireplace while Luisa finished supper, seeming in hiding there from the unfamiliar newness of the rest of the house.

“Your grandfather was always very good to us,” her father said. “Your mother too, she always helped out with the children or whatever we needed.”

It came out over supper that Luisa was friends with the daughter of my Aunt Caterina, Maria. She offered to take me to my aunt’s farm the following day, and well before eight she
was at my door, dressed in the same willowy summer dress she’d had on when I’d met her. The dress gave her the air of being much younger than her twenty-odd years, perhaps because her body looked so undefended in it, like some precious thing whose value she hadn’t yet realized.

“I called ahead, they’re expecting us,” she said. “We’ll stay for lunch.”

“Your parents won’t mind?”

“Why would they mind?”

Of my aunt’s place I knew only that it was somewhere in the countryside beyond Castilucci, in what as a child I had always imagined as a sort of outback. I had no memory of ever having been there when I was small, most of my contact with my father’s side of the family then having come at my grandparents’ house in Castilucci proper, and could call up only this sense of it as a place primitive and remote, the way we had thought then of whatever lay outside the confines of town. Luisa and I set out in the Opel along the Castilucci road but forked off it after a few miles onto a ridgeway that looked out over our own river valley to the south and toward the high mountains of Abruzzo to the north. There were farmhouses spaced out at intervals here, more spruce and trim than I would have imagined them, with little courtyards out front and trellised rosebushes up their façades. Down toward the valley, a great combine was already mowing down the first of the summer’s grain.

My aunt’s farmhouse was perched above the road atop a steep bit of hillside, a cement driveway crudely ribbed against slippage leading up to it. The house, long and narrow like an Indian longhouse, had a look of raw incompletion, here and there the walls only half-stuccoed and a lone part-wall
stretching out at the far end to suggest a room that had never been built. There was a flurry of movement as we drove up to the small courtyard the house looked onto, the barking of dogs, a scattering of chickens; and then doors began to open and people to emerge, children, women in aprons, coming out in small clusters from the separate quarters each door seemed to lead into as if the place formed a little village.

It was the first time since my return that I’d had any contact with my father’s side of the family. People were shy and decorous in their greetings, everyone seeming modelled on the same frugal proportions, wizened and small, so that among them I felt like a stumbling giant. The children had crowded up behind their mothers; two of them, a boy and a girl, beautifully blond-haired and blue-eyed, looked like changelings that had been dropped here, staring out at me silent and still as if I had come from another planet.

From the end doorway of the house Aunt Caterina emerged, tiny and thin as a schoolgirl.

“I would have recognized you in an instant.” There were tears in her eyes. She reached a hand up to my cheek as if to assure herself I was real. “I see your father in you all over again. He would have been your age when he left.”

I tried to imagine what he might have been to her, this young man, her brother, setting out. After he’d gone she had never set eyes on him again.

“But come. You must be hungry.”

Luisa went off with my cousin Maria while my aunt served me breakfast in the kitchen of her quarters at the end of the courtyard. Drying onions and meats hung from hooks in the ceiling; a pot simmered on a low fire in the fireplace. In a
corner, cloaked in shadows, an old man sat shelling chick peas into a basin: my aunt’s husband, Nicola. His hair had gone completely white since I’d last seen him, and his face had taken on a wrecked look, carbuncled and red. From the point he seemed to be making of ignoring us I thought at first that he might have gone simple.

“So you’ve come back,” he said finally.

“
Sì
.”

“Well we’re not going to turn you away. That’s not how we do things here.”

“Who said anything about turning him away?” my aunt said.

He pretended not to hear her.

“What happened with your mother there. People don’t forget things like that.”

“For the love of Christ, Nicola, what’s that got to do with him?”

“I’m just saying.”

He went back to shelling his peas. He seemed to be struggling with some feeling of offence he couldn’t quite give a shape to.

“Just ignore him,” my aunt said. “The wine has started to rot his brain.”

She served up some bread and a few slices of salted ham. Uncle Nicola, despite himself, looked over assessingly at what she’d set out.

“You should have served the other stuff, it’s not as dry,” he said gruffly.

“You made this yourself?” I asked him.

“Eh? That’s right.”

“It’s very good.”

“Six months, we let it cure. You won’t get it like that in America.”

“It’s very good.”

“Yes. Well.”

He drew his chair a bit closer to the table to take some bread and meat.

“Bring him the other stuff for lunch,” he said to my aunt. “We’ll see how he likes that, if he thinks this is good.”

Afterwards I followed Aunt Caterina around on her chores, down to the stables to feed some boars they kept, rough, feral things, to make a local salami, and then across the road onto a promontory that overlooked the river where they had some hives for honey. My aunt kept up a brisk pace, worried about a storm that was supposed to be coming in, though above us the sun shone in an almost cloudless sky.

“I know it’s been hard for you,” she said. “The thing with your father. He always had that in him, the moods he used to get into, but still it was a shock. Like having something cut out of you.”

“Were you close to him, when he was here?”

“Close?” She laughed. “I gave him the back of my hand sometimes, if that’s what you mean.”

The wind had picked up and a low bank of clouds had begun to roll in by the time we reached the hives, which were arranged in a rough semicircle against the bank of a sheltered hollow, swarms of bees hovering around them in arcane activity. Aunt Caterina approached them in naked vulnerability, carefully prying loose the lids and then one by one removing the honeycomb frames inside to scrape their honey
away into her bucket, her face furrowed in concentration as if her pillage were a sort of intense, delicate interweaving of her own will with that of the bees.

“You’re not afraid of them?” I said.

“What difference would it make if I were?”

By the time she had finished, the clouds that had been coming in were practically upon us. We began to make our way back toward the house, fighting the wind the whole way, Aunt Caterina angling into it with her skirts gathered up in one hand. I had taken her bucket from her, but now it seemed that there was nothing anchoring her down against the wind’s sudden force, that in a minute it would balloon up her skirts and carry her off.

Well before we’d reached the road it began to rain, just a few fat drops at first and then a sudden pelting like stones being flung at us. Hail.

“
Addio!
” Aunt Caterina cried, hiking up her skirts and beginning to run. There was a sort of shanty along the side of the path we were on and Aunt Caterina ducked beneath it and beckoned me to her.

“We didn’t get you here all the way from America to have you die in the hail!”

We had just missed the worst of it: it was coming down now in great golf-ball-sized chunks that rattled the tin roof of our shanty. Nearby, a patch of wheat looked already beaten down, as if a horde of spirits had raced through it.

“It’s the grapes that get off the worst,” my aunt said. “The rest’ll come back.”

In a few minutes the hail had given way to a steady downpour. Aunt Caterina hunched down onto the bench that ran
along the back of the shanty and wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. From somewhere in her skirts she pulled out a wrinkled apple and offered it to me.

“No, thank you.”

“Then I’ll eat it myself,” she said, and took a bite.

We settled in to wait. Great runnels had already formed in the gulleys of the pathway that passed in front of the shanty.

My aunt pointed out into the rain.

“Just down the hill there is where you were born. Where those trees are. You were three weeks late, I remember that.”

I wasn’t sure what she was referring to.

“I thought I was born in Castilucci,” I said.

“No, it was here, I remember. We had the place in town, it’s true, but this was where your grandfather built his farmhouse, in the middle of the bush like that. It was like the end of the world there. And your poor mother, waiting day after day with no midwife for miles because it was harvest time and your grandfather couldn’t be bothered to keep her in town.”

I gazed out through the rain toward the cluster of trees she’d pointed out a mile or so down the hillside. There were no roads here, no power lines, only fields and scraggy pasture.

“You can still see the house there,” my aunt said. “What’s left of it. If you want, I’ll get Maria and Luisa to take you down after lunch.”

She took a last bite of her apple and tossed the core out into the rain.

“Did they get along back then?” I said. “My mother and father?”

“Oh, you know how it is. We didn’t even think about that sort of thing in those days, not like young people do now. But it was hard for them, living out in the bush like that, and with
your grandfather the way he was. And then the baby they lost. But you probably don’t know about that.”

“What baby?”

“There was a girl before you. Marina. One night the three of them were coming home on your father’s bicycle from some festival in the town and they hit a rock and went over. It was nothing, we thought, there was just a little bruise on the back of her head. No one thought to go to a doctor back then for that sort of thing. But that night she went to sleep and never woke up. Your father never got over that. Everything that happened after, with your mother and the other girl – Rita, you call her, isn’t that it? – it was just part of the same thing, the way I see it. They couldn’t look at each other afterwards, the two of them. There was always that baby between them to remember.”

The rain was still coming down. But over the mountains to the east a sliver of blue had appeared; and then, as we watched, the sliver widened and the rain slowed to a final spattering like a towel being flung dry, then died. In the amber cloud-reflected light it left behind some mystery seemed to hang, some revelation.

I was still trying to make a place in my mind for this new piece of the past.

“I didn’t know anything about that,” I said.

“You see how it is,” my aunt said. “You go all your life thinking things are one way and then you find out all of a sudden that they’re another.”

Through some conspiracy my cousin Maria had arranged for Luisa to accompany me down to my grandfather’s old farmhouse alone. We set off after lunch, following the same path
that my aunt and I had for a distance but then veering off onto a much steeper one that passed through pasture and a bit of vineyard. Luisa took my arm along a particularly treacherous stretch to keep from slipping in the muck left behind by the morning’s rain. She was wearing loafers today, not the heavy-soled work shoes I’d first seen her in, though they might have served her better along the muddy path.

There had been more than a dozen of us at lunch, ranged around a table that had been set out in the open of the courtyard. Uncle Nicola had taken on a boozy protectiveness toward me by then, as if he had projected his own bias against me onto the others.

“No one can hold it against you, what happened, or against your father either. It was your mother, she was the one. I’ve always said that.”

In the silence that had opened up I had seen Luisa’s eyes dip with embarrassment for me.

“Am I saying anything that isn’t true? Tell me that.”

The old homestead was nearly halfway down to the valley, nestled against the hollow of a hill so that it only appeared when we were upon it, trees and tangled growth masking its ruined forms like camouflage. Along the approach to it was a small outbuilding that seemed still to be in use by someone, its structure intact and its door padlocked shut. But the house itself was a ghostly wreckage of fallen rafters and walls, the front of it crumbled away to reveal its insides like a cutaway. On the ground floor there could still be made out the rudiments of a home, a fireplace, some crude shelving built into one wall; on what was left of the second, an empty window frame looked out onto the bushy slope of the hillside.