Where She Has Gone (22 page)

Just off a square in the very heart of the old town I found what I was looking for: a restaurant whose window showed the small figure of a hunter with a rifle slung over his shoulder, the Hostaria del Cacciatore. The place looked so much more modest and plain than I remembered it, tucked away here off a square that seemed as if it might have been an important focal point once but now had the sleepy, forgotten air of a place that time had passed by. In the centre of the square was a large stone pedestal that must have once held a monument of some sort but stood empty now, a lone pigeon preening itself at the edge of it.

I parked the car. A couple of metal tables were set up in front of the restaurant on the cobblestones there, an older man with the slightly corpulent look of someone who had spent his life amidst food sitting at one of them, peering out through reading glasses at the pages of a newspaper.

I went over to him, not yet certain if he was the one.

“I’m looking for Luciano.”

He glanced up at me over the tops of his glasses, set down his paper. It was him, I thought, though older than I’d imagined, with the tired, distracted air of someone nursing some ancient worry or grievance.

“Then you’ve found him,” he said, looking me over.

I felt my heart race at having tracked him down so easily, sitting here in the sun as if he’d been waiting for me, biding his time these past twenty years till I returned.

From my pocket I took out the old one-
lire
coin I’d brought with me from home and set it in front of him.

“Do you recognize that?”

There was a small flash of panic in his eyes, an old man’s panic, as if some task he would once have been up to, but was no longer, might be required of him.

“What’s this about?” He picked up the coin and turned it over in his hand. “It’s an old one-
lire
. What’s it to do with me?”

I had hoped for some moment of recognition, some tiny epiphany.

“You gave me a coin like that once.”

He looked me over again, bringing a hand up to remove his glasses. I could sense his mind straining to figure out some connection to me.

“I’m sorry –”

“It was years ago. I was with my mother, Cristina. From Valle del Sole. The daughter of the
podestà
?”

“Cristina? But she died ages ago, what are you saying?”

“I’m her son. Vittorio.”

He was squinting up at me as if he could not quite make me out, a hand against his brow to block the sunlight.

“You mean to say you’re Cristina’s son? The woman who died, that’s the one you mean?”

“Yes.”

“But I thought – yes, yes, of course, you’ve come back, is that it?” Understanding slowly washed over him and he rose, extended a tentative hand. “But look at you, how could I have known? The little boy she had, of course, I remember now. I’m sorry, your name –”

“Vittorio.”

“Vittorio, yes. Please, please, sit down. You have to realize I’m an old man now, I don’t remember things.”

There was the small panic in him again. He pulled a chair out for me, fumbled to clear his paper away from the table.

“After so many years. Here, what am I thinking, I’ll get the boy to bring you a coffee.”

He went to the door of the restaurant and called in, waited an instant, but no one appeared.

“
Dai
, come inside, I’ll get it for you myself. It’s my grandson who’s helping out, Antonio – the father’s in Rome now but he sends the boy out here for the summers to keep him out of trouble.”

I followed him in. The interior of the restaurant was done up in a slightly overwrought rustic motif, with exposed rafters and wall beams in dark, varnished wood and undulating stucco work done up to resemble stone. It was well before noon and the place was deserted, the chairs still up on the tabletops. Luciano went to the bar and prepared two coffees at the machine, pouring a quick shot of brandy into his own.

He led me to a table near the window.

“After all these years,” he said again.

“Does your wife still do the cooking here?”

“My wife? You remember her?”

I had an image of a large, falsely friendly woman whose eyes had shot daggers at my mother when we’d had lunch here one day.

“I think I met her once.”

But Luciano’s eyes had gone wet.

“She died five years ago now,” he said.

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“These things happen. But I don’t have to tell you what it is to grieve for someone.”

We sat silent. Luciano took up his cup and drained it in a single draught, like someone taking medicine.

A young man in black-and-white waiter’s garb emerged from the kitchen door and began setting chairs down from the tables.

“Antonio, get us some more coffee here. And bring that bottle, the one on the counter.”

From up close it was clear that Antonio was little more than a boy, fifteen at most, looking stoic and earnest and innocent in his trim waiter’s outfit as he set out our coffees. He poured a bit of brandy into Luciano’s.

“No one was more upset with what happened to your mother than I was,” Luciano was saying. “I can tell you that.”

“It was so long ago now.”

“Yes, that’s how it happened back then. For every little sin. It’s not as if she was the only one, with all the men off in America like that. The orphanages were full in those days. Or sometimes you’d just find the thing frozen to death in the fields.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Anyone will tell you about it. Nowadays, of course, it’s different. If a girl wants the baby, she keeps it, and if she doesn’t, well, she just goes to the doctor and cuts it out.”

He drained his cup again and absently refilled it from the bottle of brandy Antonio had left behind.

“What about yourself?” he said. “Do you have a family?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe that’s for the best. You find a woman now and you don’t know where’s she been before you. In my day, you saw a girl at a dance, she smiled at you, but then before you so much as asked her her name you had to go to the parents. I remember your own mother and father – I don’t know if you know this but I was the one who introduced them. It was terrible how it turned out with him in the end. People here say it was because of your mother, what he did, even after all those years. But nobody knows what’s in a man’s heart when he does a thing like that.”

“I didn’t realize you knew him.”

“He used to come in sometimes to sell us a bit of this or that from the farm. Your mother I knew from the market, just to talk to her like that. So once I see her across the square while your father was here and I go out and tell her there’s a young man I want her to meet.”

“My mother told me that they met at a festival in Castilucci.”

But Luciano was insistent.

“You’re wrong there, I remember it like yesterday. I can still see the expression on your father’s face when I brought her in. You know how it is, he wanted to act like it was nothing. But I could see right away that she was the one for him. After that they used to meet here sometimes when your mother came in to do the shopping. To get around their parents, you understand.”

So he had been my father’s friend. None of this fit with the memory I had of him, as a sort of confidant for my mother’s indiscretions.

“You know,” he said, “the funny thing is that what your father liked about your mother was that she was educated. All she had was grade eight, that’s nothing now, but back then
anything more than grade five and you were a professor. That was the thing your father most regretted, that he never got an education. Before he met your mother he was even ready to go into the seminary just so he wouldn’t have to spend all his life farming his few hectares of stones for a living. But after they were married, he could never forgive her those couple of years of schooling she had over him. It was the very thing that brought them together that wrecked them in the end, that’s what I say. It’s funny how things work out like that.”

He stared into his cup.

“Ah, well,” he said. “All the things that could have been different.”

“I was wondering about the man,” I said. “The one my mother was involved with.”

“Eh? Yes, of course, there’s that.”

“Do you know who he was? Where he came from?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you there.”

“You mean you didn’t know him?”

“I don’t think anyone knew him, except your mother, of course. People knew
about
him, or at least they said they did. But you know how it is, what people don’t know they make up.”

“But you never actually met him?”

“No, no, I can’t say that I did.”

“But I heard you talking about him once. It was in the market – my mother and I had come in and you were buying your vegetables. The day you gave me the coin.”

“Yes, I was wondering about that. I’m not saying it’s not true, but for the life of me I can’t remember the thing.”

“You said the coin was a lucky charm. That it stopped a bullet from entering your heart during the war.”

“Ah, there, you see? It couldn’t have been me, then. I never served in the war, they never called me.”

“But you just made the story up, don’t you see? Because the coin had that mark on it.”

“Are you sure it’s me you’re thinking about? You know how the mind is, it plays tricks. Maybe you mixed me up with somebody else.”

The kitchen door opened again, and a scowling, heavyset man looked into the restaurant. His eyes took in the bottle at Luciano’s elbow and he shook his head and retreated back to the kitchen.

Luciano hadn’t seen him.

“You see how it is,” he said. “You have your story, I have mine. The truth doesn’t even enter into it.”

He poured some more brandy into his cup.

“Are you sure you won’t have some of this?” he said, though it was the first time he’d offered it.

“No, really, thank you.”

There seemed no way to bring him around to my version of things.

“I had the idea that he was a German,” I said. “My mother’s lover, I mean.”

“A German? What made you think that?”

“From what you said that day. And then I saw him once, coming out of our stable. From how he looked then. His blue eyes.”

“That’s not much to go on. You’ll find plenty of people around here as blond and blue-eyed as any German. It was the Normans, you know, they came through here. There’s still a church they put up in the town, you can see it, up near the old Roman gate there.”

“But I remember it so clearly,” I said. “He was on the run. You said someone from the German embassy had come looking for him, because he’d been a deserter or something during the war.”

“A deserter? But who would have cared about that, after the war? You see how it doesn’t make sense? He would have been a hero for that.”

We were at an impasse. Perhaps I’d got it all wrong, every bit of it.

“Anyway, why do you want to go digging up all these old stories?” Luciano said. “What’s past is past, it only hurts your head to go thinking about it.”

“I just thought things would be clearer to me now,” I said.

“You know what it is about the past. It’s like a woman – from far away it looks like a lovely thing, but then the closer you get the more you see the imperfections.”

Antonio had finished arranging careful place settings on the tables for lunch.

“
Nonno
, we’re going to open soon,” he said.

“Eh?
Sì, sì
.”

Luciano had taken on an air of reverie now. He absently tilted the brandy bottle to gauge how much remained, poured a bit more into his cup.

“Not many people know this but I have a story, too,” he said. “Not so different from your mother’s. I was young, just seventeen, and there was a girl I was crazy about. A cousin, in fact. We were going to run away together, because of the families, you know, but then one thing led to another and she got pregnant. After that it was out of my hands – her parents kept her locked up in the house so no one would know, and then when the thing was born they sent it off to some kind of
orphanage. I never so much as laid eyes on it. When you’re young you think you’ll get over these things, you made a mistake but you move on. But I could never forget what had happened. There was always this little thing at the back of my head about that baby. So finally – it was almost fifteen years ago now – I went to the parents of the girl. They were the only ones who knew what had happened to it – even the girl herself didn’t know, and anyway they’d found her a husband in Argentina, that’s how they did things then. The parents said, leave it, it’s all in the past now, but I had to know. In the end they gave me a name – Aurelio, they’d called him – and an address, of a hotel in Termoli it turned out. When I went to the place and asked after the boy they sent me back to the kitchen, and there sitting in the corner was this sort of halfwit, you could see that at once, you know that look they have on their face. I have to tell you, for a minute I thought I would just turn around and go home, seeing him sitting there like an animal – it turned out they just kept him around like that to do the odd little job here and there. But then something, I can’t describe what it was like, but it was as if someone was squeezing my heart, because, you know, I could see there, even wrecked the way he was, that he was my son. After that I went to see him twice every month. Always on the same day because he could understand that, he liked everything to happen always the same. I brought him things, I even bought a little apartment for him so he didn’t have to stay in the hole they kept him in at the hotel, and I paid a woman to come by to keep an eye on him. Even through all that I don’t think he ever realized what I was to him – he was like a little child, a baby really. But I never loved anything the way I loved him. What he gave me not all the riches in the world could give me.
And then one day, just a little thing, he was crossing the street after a ball or something, a butterfly, for all I know, and a car got him. Just like that. By the time I found out, he’d been buried already. No one had even thought to call me. After that it was never the same for me.”

His eyes had gone wet again.