Home to Italy (9 page)

One night,
as Luca had predicted, it all finally caught up with Peppi.

It happened shortly after spring had settled in to stay and the transformation of the courtyard and gardens was nearly complete. The grapevines that once overwhelmed the arbor over the bench had been tamed and the flower beds restored to order. The bushes and shrubs along the wall were all pruned and the entire area around them thoroughly raked. It took many days of relentless effort, but in the end Peppi succeeded in getting it all back to the point where things could be maintained with a minimum of effort.

What was once an eyesore that everyone did his best to ignore soon became a favorite spot where the workers enjoyed passing their break times. Peppi planted many bulbs that would blossom later in the summer, but some of the early bloomers had already burst forth. The workers enjoyed strolling about the grounds, watching day by day as the new flowers sprang up. Even Luca, despite his protestations that Peppi was working too hard, was drawn there by the simple beauty and tranquility of the place. Lucrezia never ventured into the courtyard, but now and then, when he was working in the gardens, Peppi noticed her gazing out from her office at the arbor. Invariably she would turn away the moment she saw Peppi looking at her.

One afternoon, Luca came out to the courtyard while Peppi was weeding one of the flower beds. He stood over his friend and shook his head.

“It all looks beautiful, but you're doing too much, my friend,” he told Peppi. “You need to go slower, rest more.”

“Nonsense,” said Peppi. “I love what I'm doing. Why should I rest?”

“Because you're an old enough athlete to know better,” Luca tried to explain. “Life is like cycling. You train hard for a while, then take some time off to recover before doing more. That's how you grow stronger. But if you overtrain, don't give yourself time to recover, you end up weaker than when you started. You crash. And you, my friend, are riding for a serious crash.”

“I feel strong as an ox these days,” said Peppi with a smile.

“And you're as stubborn as one too,” grumbled Luca. “I can't remember, were you this thickheaded when you left Villa San Giuseppe or was it something you developed in America?”

“America's a wonderful place,” said Peppi with a smile. “You should visit it one day.”

“Maybe in the next life,” sighed Luca. “I've got too much to do around here right now.”

“That's my point,” said Peppi.

Luca glared at him for a moment before the two of them broke out in laughter. “Just promise me you'll take some time off,” he said as he began to walk back to the factory.

“Maybe,” Peppi called after him, “but first I thought I'd work on the landscaping out front.”

“I don't want to hear it,” said Luca, covering his ears.

That had been a week earlier. The trouble started a few days later when Peppi began work on the gardens around the front of the factory. He had slept poorly that previous night and he started the day with a nervous twinge in his stomach. Just the same, he accompanied Luca on a morning bike ride before starting work. He felt more tired than normal during the ride and found himself struggling to keep pace. It occurred to him afterwards that he had forgotten to eat breakfast, so he blamed his poor effort on his lack of proper pre-ride nutrition. Peppi promised himself that he would eat a more substantial lunch to make up for it.

By noon Peppi felt ravenous. When he finally sat down to lunch, he ate voraciously, but somehow he didn't feel satisfied. Nonetheless he returned to work that afternoon as usual and kept at it till almost sundown. That night Peppi went to bed exhausted and awoke the next morning feeling much the same, a pattern that would continue for the next several nights.

Though it had developed over many weeks, it seemed to Peppi in the days that followed that he had suddenly lost all his energy. He felt nervous and irritable all day and chastised himself for being lazy. In the hope that it might somehow snap him out of the doldrums, Peppi decided that what he needed was to press harder. So he sought out other projects to do in addition to the gardening. He repaired a window and painted a door. He kept an eye open for any opportunity to help at the factory, be it helping to stock inventory or loading one of the trucks, anything to stay busy.

This surge of intense activity briefly made him more productive, but soon things started to decline. In the mornings, Peppi had trouble deciding simple things like what clothes to put on or what to eat for breakfast. Throughout the day, he wasted time trying to make up his mind over easy little decisions that he would ordinarily make in an instant. Worse, as the days went by, he felt interminably sad and found his thoughts dwelling on Anna and the mulino and all the occasional sad events that are part of the fabric of every human life. Try as he might to shake those thoughts from his head, nothing helped, not even cycling. If anything, he felt worse on the bike than he could ever remember.

Things went on this way until one night when, after falling into a deep sleep, Peppi suddenly awoke in the middle of the night. Shivering, he sat up and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his brow. His heart was pounding and an overwhelming sense of anxiety was gnawing at the pit of his stomach. He felt nauseous. He arose and went to the bathroom to throw some water on his face. This only served to make him feel dizzy.

Peppi went back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing wrong, that he was just coming down with the flu or some sort of stomach bug, but the more he thought about it the more nervous he became. Suddenly, he realized that he could not catch his breath, and the nervousness turned to panic. It lasted for several minutes and Peppi was certain that he was about to die, though he could not understand why. As quickly as it started, the episode passed and Peppi collapsed onto the bed. Exhausted, he stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours before he finally drifted back into a fitful sleep.

It was Lucrezia
who first noticed that Peppi was missing the next day. The “old man,” as she often referred to him, was quickly becoming something of a fixture around the factory and she had become accustomed to seeing him every morning when she arrived for work. He was always doing something, raking out the gardens or fiddling with a squeaky door hinge. Invariably he would greet her with a tip of his cap and a bright
“Buon giorno, Signorina!”
Invariably Lucrezia would barely acknowledge him, offering only a perfunctory
“Buon giorno”
of her own as she swept past him on the way to her office. It was the way she greeted just about everyone.

When she came to work that day and did not see Peppi, Lucrezia assumed that he was out back in the gardens somewhere or perhaps out riding his bicycle. The weather had turned beautiful, so who could blame him for not wanting to work? As the morning wore on, Lucrezia peeked out the window now and then, certain that she would catch a glimpse of him pruning the bushes or watering the flower beds, but still there was no sign of Peppi.

Just before lunchtime, Lucrezia emerged from her office to check up on how things were running out on the floor. She looked about; not seeing Peppi anywhere, she motioned to Enzo to come over. Enzo blanched, for more often than not, whenever Lucrezia called him over, it was not to exchange pleasantries.

“How are things running today, Enzo?” Lucrezia asked with a reasonable amount of geniality.

“Everything is fine, Signora Lucrezia,” said Enzo. He was troubled by the soft tone of her voice and he waited nervously for the other shoe to drop. “We've got a big shipment going out later today,” he added, “but other than that, things are going along as they should.”

“And everything's in the right boxes today?” Lucrezia asked in a rare moment of playfulness.

“Absolutely!” exclaimed Enzo. “On the souls of my children.”

“That's good,” said Lucrezia. She looked over Enzo's shoulder at the other workers in the factory. “Where's the old man today?” she asked casually.

“Peppi?” said Enzo. “I don't know. We were all wondering the same thing just a little while ago. No one has seen him all morning. Do you want to speak with him? Should I send someone out to find him for you?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” huffed Lucrezia, her earlier warmth vanishing like steam from a kettle. “I was only curious. I'm sure he'll turn up sooner or later.” At that she turned away and walked back to her office.

Sooner turned into later and still Peppi did not appear. Luca arrived early that afternoon and, not seeing his friend, he asked Lucrezia if she knew where he might be.

“No one knows,” she said indifferently. “We haven't seen him all day.”

Luca rubbed his chin for a moment. “I'd better go check his room,” he said.

 

Luca knocked on the door to the apartment and waited a moment. Not hearing any response, he knocked harder, but still nothing. He opened the door and leaned inside.

“Peppi?” he called.

From the bedroom came the stirring of bedcovers. Luca stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

“Peppi, it's me, Luca. What are you doing in bed at this time of day?”

“Go away,” Peppi groaned. “I don't want to see anyone today.”

Luca opened the bedroom door and gazed in at Peppi who was curled up beneath the blankets. “What's the matter?” he asked. “Are you sick?”

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” Peppi answered. “It came over me last night. I'm exhausted and feel nervous all over. Every time I even think of moving or doing anything at all, I get all panicky. I think I've lost my mind.”

Luca chuckled as he stood over him. “I told you this would happen,” he said smugly. “You're not sick.”

“What do you mean?” said Peppi.

“You're overtrained,
stupido,”
he answered. “You crashed.”

“Crashed?”

“That's right. What have I been telling you all along? You needed to slow down, to rest. You wouldn't listen to me and this is what happens. You've stressed your mind and your body to the point where they're just not going to let you do it anymore.”

“But how did it happen?” Peppi lamented. “I don't understand.”

“Don't understand?” Luca snorted. “Let's see, first your wife dies, leaving you all alone. You leave your home, travel across the ocean to another continent where you decide to start your life over. Then you travel all the way back to the place of your birth only to find it destroyed by an earthquake. You end up living in this little hovel of an apartment and you work like a dog from sunup till sundown. All this—not to mention that you're not quite as young as you once were. Forgive me,
amico mio,
but you're not Superman. Nobody is. You've put yourself through a tremendous ordeal.”

“But I didn't mean to do it,” Peppi said unhappily.

“Nobody ever does.”

“But when will it go away?”

“You didn't get like this overnight and it's not going to go away overnight either,” said Luca. “And it won't go away at all unless you take care of it.”

“What do I do for it?” said Peppi, pulling the covers more tightly around himself.

“Nothing,” Luca answered. “You stay curled up on that bed and you don't think about anything or move a muscle until you're rested and ready to do it. It might take a few days, it might take a few weeks. Who knows, it might take a few months or more. No matter what, you can't rush it. It's time to start listening to your body again; you've been ignoring it for too long. It will let you know when the time is right.”

Luca stayed for a while longer, lecturing Peppi further on the need for rest, reassuring him that if he did what he was told, he'd be back to his old self before he knew it. Once he was satisfied that he had made his point, Luca decided to leave Peppi alone to rest. He promised to have someone bring by some food later on even though Peppi complained that he felt too sick in the stomach to even think about eating.

“Don't worry, you'll get your appetite back,” Luca assured him. Then he closed the door and returned to work.

Later that evening, after dinner, Filomena prepared a tray of food for Peppi while Luca leafed through the newspaper. “What do you think is really wrong with him?” she asked as she spooned out some leftover linguine into a bowl. “He seemed fine just a few days ago.”

Luca shrugged. “He doesn't say it, but he misses his wife,” he replied. “He's sad and he's tired. Those are the two worst things that a person can be, particularly a man.”

“What, you think being sad and tired is any easier on a woman?” laughed his wife.

“Eh, it's different for a man,” said Luca, tossing the newspaper onto the table. “Women can talk about things that make them sad much better than men—and that helps. But men, we just carry it all around with us like a sack of potatoes. We try to ignore it and sometimes, if we're strong enough, we get used to the weight of the sack and the sadness goes away on its own. But other times it just weighs on us, heavier and heavier, until it wears us down and eats away at our hearts and our souls. We try to ignore it by staying busy, which is the worst thing to do, because sooner or later it wears you down to the point where everything finally caves in. That's what happened to Peppi. He let it wear him down, so now he has to deal with it before he can go on and be happy again.”

“My, you've become quite the psychologist in your old age,” Filomena needled him.

“I've seen a thing or two in my time,
amore mia,”
chuckled her husband, “and I try to learn from what I see.”

“Well, let's see if you can learn to carry this over to Peppi without spilling everything,” said Filomena, covering the tray she had prepared with a cloth to keep everything warm. “Here, take it before it all gets cold.”

Luca heaved a sigh. “Why is it that women are always telling me what to do?” he said, getting up from the table.

“Because they know what's best for you,” his wife answered.

Luca chuckled again and picked up the tray. Filomena opened the door for him and turned on the outside light so that he would not stumble in the darkness on his way down to the factory.

“Hey,” said Filomena as he was leaving, “do you think you'd miss me as much if I were gone?”

“I'll be missing you every minute I'm away from you till I get back from Peppi's,” Luca said over his shoulder.

“Hah!” scoffed Filomena. “A likely story.” She stood in the doorway and smiled as she watched her husband walk down the path. “And make sure he eats everything!” she called to him. Then she closed the door and went back to the kitchen to do the dishes.