Where She Has Gone (26 page)

“Is there any problem?” he said.

“No. No problem.”

It was hard to gauge how much he knew of what had gone on between me and Rita – something, surely, if not from anything Rita had told him then simply from the strange energy between us. I had the sense that he held himself back from knowing more, almost as a gesture of trust, an offering against his own secrets.

“It’s not much of a kitchen,” I said.

“We can manage.”

We set about making a meal. They’d brought pasta and bottled sauce, some cheese, some lettuce and vegetables for salad. John worked with the no-nonsense competence of a man long used to preparing his own meals. I thought of his apartment, with its fusty not-quite-disorder, of his solitary life there.

“We haven’t talked about your trip,” I said.

“Perhaps we can wait for Rita. To have her view of things.”

“She’s been all right?”

I couldn’t keep the thickness out of my voice.

“Yes, of course.” He said this in a tone that sounded neither guiltless nor completely reassuring. “A little confused, perhaps.”

“Confused about what?”

“Oh, the future and so on. It’s normal for her age.”

When Rita came down she had changed from her jeans to a ruffled long-sleeved dress full of creases and folds as if it had lain unused at the bottom of her pack the whole trip. The
dress seemed to change her, to rusticate her, made her look like some peasant girl dressed up in her Sunday best.

“I saw from the balcony that there’s an extra floor at the back,” she said.

“That’s the stable.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t remember ever telling her the exact details of her past, their exact architecture. And yet her question hadn’t seemed innocent.

“It’s empty now,” I said. “I can show it to you after lunch.”

John came with us when we went down. I almost thought that he was trying to tell me now, not Rita but me, that he was trying to find the right wordless way to say yes, he was the one. We stood, the three of us, at the bottom of the side steps and the air seemed ripe with suspense, as if at any instant the stable door must open and John’s younger self must appear there.

“Our mother used to work back here,” I said. “In the garden. Our cousin Marta keeps it now.”

I opened the stable door, to the dank smell of cold earth and rotting stone. Rita and I went inside. For a moment we stood alone in the stable’s murky light.

“There would have been animals here,” I said. “Some pigs, a few sheep. I used to take the sheep out to pasture after school.”

Somehow my mind was fixed on these simple, banal details, the things I could say for certain. Everything else, the open door, the two eyes peering out, that Rita could have been conceived here in this smelly grotto, seemed suddenly far-fetched.

“Do you remember what it was like for you back then?” Rita said. “I mean, really remember?”

“Sometimes. In a way.”

We came back out to the open. It was only now that I noticed Luisa staring at us from her balcony. It seemed from her stillness that she had been watching us for some time.

“So these are your friends,” she said, her gaze fixed on Rita.

“Yes. They’ve just arrived.”

“Do they speak Italian?”

“No.”

Her eye went to John, then back to Rita. She let the silence hang an instant.

“You should bring them around some time,” she said finally.

“Yes. Maybe tomorrow.”

We made our way up the stairs. Rita glanced back toward the balcony, but Luisa had gone.

“You sound different, in Italian,” she said.

“How, different?”

“I don’t know. As if you belonged here.”

I had to take them around to Marta’s to let her know they’d be needing to use the bath there. Marta was just clearing away the remains of her own lunch, shooting a quick, appraising look at John and Rita and then continuing with her work as if she had already summed them up, slotted them into her order of things.

“They’re friends from Canada,” I said.

“Friends? If you say so.”

It seemed pointless to wait for her to extend any gesture
of hospitality to them. Even Aunt Lucia, perched in front of the television, gave no sign of any interest in them.

“They’ll need to use the bathroom sometimes,” I said.

“So let them use it, then.”

I led them out. There had been no missing Marta’s animosity. It seemed an unfortunate way to introduce them to the village, not least because the apparent arbitrariness of Marta’s actions almost always ended up pointing toward some truth.

“Marta’s a bit strange,” I said. “Don’t mind her.”

But we all seemed to have been made ill at ease by her reception.

We continued up the street toward the square. The village had taken on its midday torpor, sun-deadened and still, the only sounds the buzz of flies and the rustle of lizards darting in the shadows of ruined buildings. We passed a couple of villagers, but they seemed shy at the sight of these new strangers, nodding and mumbling some neutral greeting and moving on. But then one of the women I’d met at Marta’s my first morning – Maria, the large one – spotted us from her stoop.

“Oh,
americano
! Who are these foreigners you’ve brought?”

Before I could think of a way to refuse her she had got us into her kitchen, with an almost predatory aggression, settling us at her table and keeping an assessing eye on us as she went about preparing coffee and setting out sweets.

“But is it your fiancée, this one?” she said.

“No, no. Just a friend.”

It wasn’t long before other women had begun to appear at Maria’s door, passing the same appraising eye over Rita and John as if Maria had set them on display here. In the end there
were more than half a dozen of them crowded into Maria’s kitchen, large and small, ancient and middle-aged.

“They’re just friends,” Maria explained, to each new arrival. “From Canada. Though the man, he looks like a German to me.”

“
Tedesco?
” one of the women said to John. “
Deutschmann?
”

John reddened.

“
Sì, sì, Deutschmann
,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with the Germans,” one of the others threw in. “People said, because of the war, but I’ll tell you the Germans always respected us. You know who were the worst, the Canadians! It’s true, they were the worst!”

It came out in all this that John spoke a few words of Italian, some of the women trying to draw him out in conversation. But the attention to him was only in passing, it seemed, a diversion. Rita was where the real interest lay, barely veiled and strangely intense, the women’s eyes always coming back to her. They asked me questions about her, where she came from, what she was to me, seeming to know that I would lie and yet still somehow taking pleasure in my responses, as if all that mattered was that she remain in their sphere.

“She’s so pretty,” one of them said. “With those eyes.”

And there was a mood in the air of almost reverential deference, as if Rita had come with some secret, some arcane knowledge, that they wished to be privy to.

“They must have guessed who you are,” I said, when we were outside again. It was the only thing that explained their fascination: they were searching for our mother in her, what spark or power she had passed on to her.

“It was very strange,” Rita said. “The way they were looking at me.”

“I think they’re a little afraid of you.”

The women’s attention seemed to have changed her in some way: she looked suddenly less foreign here, in her long-sleeved dress and black hair, seemed to have taken into herself some of the stone and shadow of this place.

“I thought I understood a bit what it was like for her,” she said. “For our mother. To be in a place like this. To be watched.”

John had hardly spoken. The whole time we had been at Maria’s he had seemed to want to will himself into invisibility, putting the women off with a reticence that came close to rudeness.

“I didn’t know you spoke Italian,” I said.

“A few words, only. From when I was young.”

“You studied it?”

“No. No. I picked it up here and there. But it was many years ago now.”

The two of them spent the rest of the day in retreat at my house, John sitting reading on the balcony off his room and Rita doing some laundry out back in a big copper tub I sometimes used for my baths, spreading clothing to dry over branches and posts like bits of decoration. From the kitchen balcony I saw Luisa come out to offer her a washboard.

“Thank you.
Grazie
.”

“I have machine,” Luisa said, in stumbling English. “Is better.”

“No, no, it’s all right. It’s nice to be in the sun like this.”

“Yes.”

Later, that night, taking a walk through the village after Rita and John had gone to bed, I ran into Luisa near the square.

“So it’s your sister who’s come, then,” she said.

“So people know.”

“You were right not to say. It’s nobody business.”

“But everyone knew just the same.”

“You know how they are. They said it was the eyes that gave her away. Because they were blue.”

“But how would they have known that?”

“It’s not that they knew. It’s just what people are saying, that it’s because of the washing blue your mother took when she was pregnant. Silly things like that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They used to believe that before. That you could get rid of a baby by swallowing washing blue.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m just saying what they thought.”

“But it’s not something my mother would have done. It doesn’t sound like her.”

“It’s what people say. You were small then, how could you know?”

We were walking back along the village’s main street toward home. Here and there a light was on in a window, in the background the dance and flit of the ghost that televisions cast up, the fire that people gathered around now.

“And the man?” I said. “What are people saying about him?”

“I don’t know. They were making fun of him a bit, because he’s a German.”

“Just that?”

“One of them said he looked like someone she’d seen on the TV. In one of those war films.”

We’d come to the door of her house.

“So you and your sister are close,” she said.

“Fairly. Yes.”

“I could see that. I thought she was your girlfriend at first. I was even a little jealous.”

“Ah.”

She laughed.

“
Povero
Vittorio. You think I’m going to try to trap you and make you stay here the rest of your life.”

But I didn’t know how to answer her, how to make light of things the way she did.

The light was still on in Rita’s room when I went in. For a moment I stood at her closed door, heard the page of a book turn, the creak of bedsprings. I could go in to her now and she would be there on her narrow bed, her body a slender swell in the bedsheets. Then as I stood I heard her rise, heard her feet pad across the stone floor till she was just a door-width away, till I could hear the sound of her breathing. She seemed to hesitate there at the threshold as if she knew that someone waited on the other side, that some decision could be made. But then came the click of her light switch, and the sound of her padding back to her bed in the dark.

It rained through much of the night, a hard, driving rain that hit like a scattering of pebbles against the glass of my balcony doors. At one point I awoke with a start at the thought of Rita’s clothes outside, then remembered she’d brought them in after supper. But through the rest of the night I couldn’t get the image of them out of my dreams, those coloured bits of her spread through the garden, saw them picked up by the wind and scattered all over the valley and beyond. It would be hours’, days’ work to collect them, a hopeless trek through the muck and cold. Rita waited behind at the house while John and I set out; but it was impossible, the rain was too hard, the road too long.

In the morning Rita was at the kitchen table, alone, when I went down.

“John’s gone out walking,” she said.

Sunlight was pouring in through the balcony doorway, just a few drifting wafers of cloud left behind from the night’s rain.

“Will he be long?”

“I don’t know. He gets pretty far sometimes. He said not to wait around for him, if we wanted to go out or anything.”

It was the first time we’d really been alone together. We both seemed awkward at the prospect of this time stretching out before us.

“So you and John have been getting along?” I said.

“It’s been okay.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ought to be cautioning her in some way, but I wasn’t sure against what.

“I don’t want to pry. It’s just that you’ve never really talked much about him.”

“We’re just friends, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, her cheeks colouring a bit. “Like I told you.”

“That’s not what I meant. I was just wondering about his past and so on, that’s all.”

None of this was going quite right, the subject seeming more fraught for her than I’d expected.

“It doesn’t really come up much,” she said. “I guess he holds a lot back, coming from Germany and everything. The war and all that.”

“Did you go there at all? To Germany?”

“A bit.” She seemed hesitant about going on. “He took me to his home town, near Munich. I thought it would be this pretty little village, from how he talked about it once. But it was just a new-looking suburb, it could have been anywhere. I guess a lot of it was destroyed in the war. And then it was like he was just a tourist there – there wasn’t anyone he wanted to see or anything. It’s almost as if we went there for my sake, not his. So he could show me.”

“Show you what?”

“I don’t know. What he was. How little he had.”

She seemed to have understood something about him that she wasn’t quite able or willing to put into words but that she was setting up almost as an admonition to me, a warning not to tamper with whatever it was that they had between them.

“Well he seems nice enough,” I said stupidly.

We’d grown awkward again. I found myself wishing once more that she hadn’t come here: what was the point of all this weight we had to bear around each other, of everything that couldn’t be discussed, resolved, of this stricture in my throat as if I were gazing at water, near at hand, unreachable, while dying of thirst?