Where She Has Gone (27 page)

There was still the whole morning before us to fill, and then beyond that the days, the weeks, the years.

“We could go for a walk,” she said.

But I couldn’t bear the thought of passing through the village again, of those eyes on us.

“Maybe in the countryside.”

We ended up following a path that wound gently down toward the valley from just beyond the edge of town. The air felt scoured after the night’s rain, the grass and weeds along the path still dappled with wet. We passed an old man I didn’t recognize at work at his little plot; he nodded darkly in greeting, then stared on at us as we went past before bending back to his work.

A couple of miles out Castilucci appeared in the distance, spread out along a narrow promontory that jutted out into the valley.

“Is that the town your father was from?” Rita said.

“How did you know?”

“It’s how Aunt Taormina described it. She used to tell me stories about it.”

I always felt a twinge of shame at the memory of Aunt Taormina, because of how as a child I’d thought of her as hopelessly plodding and slow-witted. But during the years that her and Uncle Umberto’s family had lived with us she had been a sort of surrogate mother to Rita.

“What sorts of stories?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Ghost stories, mostly. There was one about a woman who people said was a witch. How they dug up her grave after she died but it was empty.”

There was something in this I couldn’t quite make sense of, perhaps simply that she had memories of her time with us that were separate from my own, or that she had fit in in this way, hadn’t always been hopelessly outside of things. I had the instant’s sense that all the while that she’d lived with us, that I’d imagined her as impossibly alien, this other person had existed, someone who had truly been part of the family, who had talked like us and remembered what we remembered and had heard stories like we had at her aunt’s knee.

“You must have spoken Italian fairly well then,” I said. “To have understood her.”

“I guess it’s true. I never really thought about it.”

“But you don’t remember it now.”

“Sometimes I think I can almost understand. With those women yesterday, it was so familiar. But it’s like in a dream. It’s like the words get garbled somehow just before they get to me.”

We had come fairly far by now. Behind us, Valle del Sole was just a smudge of mossy tile and whitewash in the hillside.

“This whole place,” Rita said. “That’s how it feels to me. Like it would make sense except for some little thing I can’t put my finger on. It’s almost as if I thought I’d come here and the past would just be here, that I’d pick it up and then I’d understand, I’d be someone else, maybe that little girl who knew how to speak Italian or whoever I would have been if things had been different. But I guess it doesn’t work that way.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“It’s not that. I suppose it’s freeing, in a way. To know there isn’t this other identity out there I have to keep looking for as if there were some kind of curse over me.”

We were getting close to the river. The vista here was much different from where Luisa and I had come out when we’d gone to the hot spring, the river stretching out bucolic and wide and wheat fields rolling gently down to sandy shorelines on either side, with no sign of the cliff face that Luisa and I had walked along.

“There was a place along here where our mother used to go,” I said. “A hot spring.”

“Should we look for it?”

But now that I’d mentioned the place it suddenly seemed too intimate a thing to speak about.

“It’s a bit far, I think. Maybe another time.”

We came to the shore. There was no crossing where we were, just a uniform stream of silver-blue, eerily silent though moving swiftly after the night’s rain. Rita took her shoes off and waded into the shallows. Far up along the shore, past the gorge formed by the promontory Castilucci sat on, a tiny figure was moving, a knapsack over one shoulder. As I watched he came to some sort of footbridge and began to
make his way across to the other side, from the distance looking as if he were floating across the surface of the water.

Rita and I walked along the shoreline to an outcropping of rock at the river’s edge and sat, a little apart from each other, Rita still in her bare feet. Here in the valley the air was almost completely windless and still, the sun shining down on us like the essence of itself, a dry, bone-soothing filament of heat.

There was a sudden calmness between us as if we had come to a crossroad and had paused there an instant in the quietness of decision.

“I remember how you used to visit me when I was small,” Rita said. “Me and Elena. Those Sunday afternoons. It’s funny how something sticks out like that, as if everything else was just time passing and then there were these moments where you were already thinking, This is what I’ll remember. This is what the past will seem like, when it becomes something you can’t ever get back to.”

“I never thought you cared much back then whether I came or went,” I said.

“I used to go crazy when you didn’t come. I must have thought you’d abandoned me or something. It’s hard to describe now – it’s like you were inside me somehow, like you were a lung or a heart, something I couldn’t do without. I never thought of it as love or anything like that. It was more – crazy than that. Like not knowing where my own body ended. Just crazy.”

“If I’d known,” I said.

But I knew it wouldn’t have made any difference. Everything had been so wordless then, so outside the realm of what words could give shape to.

“Elena said something once,” she said. “It was after Dad died. She was so angry then, like you told me. She said people like us – she meant you too – people without a real family, were pathetic. That the whole world was connected that way, and if you didn’t fit in, if you didn’t have something that was yours, then you were nothing.”

“There’s the two of us,” I said. “There’s that.”

“Yes.”

She traced a line in the sand with her toe and then with a slow pass of her foot erased it.

“It makes my head scream sometimes,” she said. “Just thinking of it all. Everything that doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

But it was true, the way some things could be simply impossible, could never be reasoned through. There was only the searing line they made through the brain, the devastation they left behind.

“Elena said some things about you that worried me,” I said. “About school and so on.”

“Oh, well. You know her. She has a tendency to overreact.”

“She said you were flunking out.”

“She said that?”

“It’s not true?”

“I dropped a couple of courses, that’s all. After Dad got sick. It was all a bit much.”

“She made it sound like you were a little messed up.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe that’s the problem.”

But sitting here beside me she seemed entirely sane, clearheaded, strong.

“When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to think there were two of me. The real one, the ugly one, that I was on the inside,
a kind of freak but also special in some strange way, and then this other one who wasn’t special at all, who was just completely normal and average and ordinary, who got average grades and wasn’t especially kind or mean and who had average friends and did average things. Then I found out I could fool people, that I could pretend I was just the average one and people would believe me. For the longest time I thought that that was what I was doing, just pretending. But suddenly it was like I didn’t know any more which was the real one. It was like I had to choose: this is who I’m going to be.”

“And which one did you choose?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She kicked at the sand.

“Maybe it’s just that I can’t face that,” she said. “Being ordinary. Maybe because I think other people would be disappointed in me. That you would.”

She was asking me to set her free, was laying out two paths for herself, one of which could not quite include me.

“Maybe I would,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you should choose that. It’s not as if it’s such a bad thing, being ordinary.”

A small breeze blew up and Rita’s hair fluttered, a nimbus of reddish black in the sun. It was almost unbearable to look at her, to feel this sense that all my life had prepared me for only this one thing, to love her.

“I suppose we should go,” she said.

But we simply sat where we were without speaking. I wanted to move in and hold her to me, to feel her body against mine one last time, the way it fit against me like a natural extension of my own. There were just those few inches between us, that bit of air, it could not make any difference;
except the longing in me would only grow stronger then, my arms would only remember more surely the lost feel of her within them.

She rose, finally, as if to release me from the spell of her closeness, and waded into the shallows at the river’s edge. Then without looking back at me she began to move slowly away from the shore into the current. The water inched up to her calves, to the hem of her dress. At midstream she stood a moment facing the current like a naiad at the prow of a ship, letting her hands trail in the water’s grey. Then, as quietly as she’d gone out, she turned and came back to shore.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“I think so. Yes.”

We returned home along a different route, a narrow asphalt road that wound up through wheat fields and tiny, quiet villages that were just a smattering of ramshackle houses. The cool damp of morning had given way to a midday heat that seemed to have wrung the sound out of things, the fields preternaturally silent and still. The road gradually wound away from the route we’d taken on the way down until it was hard to tell any more what direction we were headed in. But then it ascended a slope and we came out suddenly onto the highway that led into the village.

As we entered the outskirts of the village, Rita took my arm in hers as if something had been settled between us. We would walk this last stretch together, she seemed to say, brother and sister, and we nodded to the villagers we passed as we walked on arm in arm toward home.

John was preparing lunch when we came in, intent over a pot on the stove. His bedroom door was open, a small knapsack lying on his bed.

It took me an instant me to realize it had been John in the distance along the riverbank.

“We’ve been to the river,” I said.

“Ah.”

“There was a hot spring down there. Where our mother used to go.”

His eye caught mine, and I knew for certain that it had been him I’d seen. He had been looking for the hot spring.

“Did you find it?” he said.

“No.”

All through lunch there was a palpable sense of the question hanging clearly between us now, that did not even quite need to be posed anymore. Something, I wasn’t clear what, had made the thing suddenly bone-sure – that look in his eyes, perhaps, a look that had seemed both an affirmation and an
appeal, like a secret passed. I was acutely aware of his body suddenly, of his ruddy physical presence: if I reached over to him, if I put a hand against his skin, I’d be able to feel his flesh real against my own, that he existed, had not all these years been merely a figment of my imagination.

I felt the anger rising up in me now at his deception, wanted only to get him alone, to put the thing to him directly. But then somehow an expedition was being planned, there was the afternoon to fill, and before I knew it we were on the road in my car, the three of us, with the same sense of barely restrained tensions as when we’d been to the zoo a few months before. John had suggested a visit to some kind of archaeological exhibit in a nearby town, giving terse directions from the back seat, a map spread over his knees, while I negotiated the town’s tangle of winding streets. I missed a turn and we ended up in a narrow cul-de-sac where I had barely room enough to wheel the car around, the back bumper scraping up against a low stone wall that edged the roadway.

“Maybe we ought to just give this up,” I said.

“We should be close now,” John said. “Just a ways back.”

We came at last to the building we were searching for, a large, medieval-looking place at the edge of the town’s old quarters. Inside, a spry, grey-haired man who spoke fairly fluent English – the curator, it turned out – offered to take us around when he learned we had come from overseas, leading us into a cavernous hall where various display cases and information panels had been set out. We were the only visitors; the curator had to turn lights on, move a barrier aside, as if opening up some special, rarely used room of a house for relations who had come.

A sign at the entrance to the exhibition hall read,
SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THE COMMUNITY OF THE FIRST EUROPEANS
. I hadn’t quite taken in till now what it was we had come to see: findings of some sort, evidence of
Homo erectus
, that had been unearthed just outside the town during the construction of the Naples expressway. A photo on a display panel showed the site as it stood now, a fenced-off area of bulldozed earth with a few awkward constructions in fibreglass and corrugated steel housing the digs. Next to this was an artist’s rendering of how the site would have looked seven hundred thousand years before: it showed a watery meadow studded with willows and poplars, a herd of bison grazing in the background and a man or near-man, small and stoop-shouldered, stoking a fire in front of the opening of a tiny hut.

The curator was giving a running commentary.

“The first people who settled here probably followed the paths made by wild animals when they moved between the mountains and plains in spring and fall. Then over hundreds of thousands of years, those paths became the same ones that shepherds used to move their flocks, the ones you can still find now here and there. So you see how it’s all connected, how that little man in the picture there is our father.”

John was sticking close to Rita. In the dim lighting and cave-like hollowness and damp of the exhibition hall it seemed we ourselves were reverting to a sort of half-humanness, to basic animal principles of aversion and threat. I remembered the sense I’d had of John that time I’d followed him home, how primal the connection between us had felt to me then. It was as if I’d been tracking him ever since, on his scent, was at
the moment now where he was just that single leap from me, where my muscles twitched from his closeness.