Mimmo glanced at Faustina, but she had her back to him, and was staring at the boxes of stuffed birds.
‘You’re sure he’ll come?’ he said.
‘I imagine he already knows you were friends when you were children. Or if he doesn’t, he’ll find out soon enough.’ I spoke to Faustina. ‘You should stay here. Mimmo’s going to hide you.’
‘And you?’ she said, her back still turned. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.’ I saw Stufa lying on his back with his eyes closed. His hands, folded on his barrel of a chest, rose and fell with every breath. His emerald sent green spikes into the air.
Mimmo and Faustina were watching me from different corners of the room. Just then, I thought I could see their future. I wasn’t part of it. I didn’t feel aggrieved, though, or envious; I was too exhausted to feel anything. I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb, wishing I had slept for longer.
I asked Mimmo where the tavern was. The other end of the village, he said. I walked to the front door and opened it. The sky had darkened. A few white flakes drifted past my face. Something clicked into place, and I found that I was smiling.
‘Is that snow?’ Mimmo said.
‘If everything goes well,’ I said, ‘you’ll never know what happened. Maybe they’ll send people from Florence to investigate. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. You won’t have anything to say. You’ll be outside the story. Free of it.’
Stufa’s eyes slid open. He yawned, then swung his legs on to the floor, the nails on his big toes wide and flat, as though they had been beaten with a hammer. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands braced on his knees, fingers pointing inwards, elbows out. His laughter was as quiet and dry as leaves being blown across a flagstone floor. He had just remembered where he was, and what he was about to do.
I went outside and climbed on to my horse. From the doorway Mimmo told me to wait. Moments later, he handed me a bag containing some provisions. I thanked him.
Faustina stood nearby, her mouth set but not quite steady. ‘If everything goes well. What does that mean?’
‘Look at the snow,’ I said. ‘It’s just like after you were born. When you first came here. It’s a good sign.’ I reached down and touched her face. ‘I love you,’ I said. Then I turned my horse around and rode away.
As the street bent to the left, I glanced over my shoulder. She was still standing by the green front door.
I called out to her to go inside.
She didn’t move.
The snow was light as dust, but, judging by the sky, which hung like a swollen sack over the village, it would soon get heavier. I passed the church and came down on to the main street. At the bottom of the slope, in the small, oddly shaped piazza, a group of children were dancing with their heads tipped back, trying to catch the snowflakes in their open mouths. I rode past them, then pressed my heels into my horse’s ribs. She broke into a trot.
Up ahead of me the world had shrunk. To the north, the woods and ridges were shrouded, brooding — almost violet. I looked south, towards Monte Amiata. Its stark upper slopes, coated in white, glowed in the weakening light, and for a moment I was nineteen again, Etna to the left of me as I escaped. This sudden sense of displacement unnerved me. But even more unnerving was my apparent willingness to submit to it. Had I been asked which of the two predicaments seemed preferable, I would probably have said the one I was imagining, the one I had been remembering and regretting all my life, not the one in which I now happened to find myself.
I took a mallet from the back room and carried it out to the flat land west of the house. Snow settled on my shoulders as I knocked the remaining chunks of stone into the well. I heard them bounce off the walls, but didn’t hear them land. I had no idea of the depth of the well. Still, I supposed it would be deep enough.
Once I had obliterated the last traces of the well-housing, I foraged for sticks, but Faustina had been building fires for weeks, and dead wood was in short supply. I scoured the copse on the western edge of the property, then set off down the track we had used earlier that day.
Some time later, I crept back towards the house with a bundle of twigs. I worked as fast as I could, arranging bits of wood in a criss-cross pattern over the well. If Stufa came before I finished, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Snow dropped into the round black hole and vanished. Watching the descending flakes, I began to feel weightless, dizzy, as though I were being sucked backwards, feet first, up into the sky.
I covered the sticks with weeds, leaves and blades of grass. The simple grid or lattice I had built would support a fall of snow, but it would give the moment a man set foot on it. I stood back. The last smears of light behind the trees were brown as old bloodstains. I reached for three twigs I had set aside and drove them upright into the ground around the well, then I withdrew into the house and lowered the bar across the door.
I unpacked the food Mimmo had given me. I had no appetite, but forced myself to eat. A small wedge of pecorino, some radishes. Half a carrot. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to the barred door. The night before, I’d had Faustina for company, and Stufa had not yet arrived. Now, though, he was a mile away, and there was nothing for it but to wait. I decided to sleep upstairs, otherwise I would get no rest at all.
On the first floor the rooms were laid out on either side of a wide corridor. Halfway along, a scythe leaned against the wall, like a thin man who had stopped to catch his breath. I chose a room above the kitchen, with a window that looked east, towards the village. I put a hand on the chimney-breast. It was warm from the fire I had built earlier. I went downstairs, dragged the bed up to the first floor and pushed it against the chimney, then I blew out my candle and pulled the blankets over me. As soon as I was lying still, the house came alive. All sorts of knocks and creaks and whispers. When would Stufa come? At midnight? Dawn? I kept thinking I heard someone moving around below. I must have left the bed a dozen times. The white land hovered in the darkness. The air had an edge to it, like glass. Once, I saw a light come and go in the thickets we had ridden through that afternoon. A poacher, perhaps. In this weather, though?
Morning came. The silence was so profound that I thought I had gone deaf. I stood at the window and looked out. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, but there were no footprints. There had been no visitors. A sense of dread held me where I was; I couldn’t seem to move. At last, my bones chattering in the cold, I turned away. Wrapping the blankets round my shoulders, I crossed the corridor.
From a window at the front of the house I saw that the well was undisturbed. You wouldn’t have known it was there. I went downstairs. As I rebuilt the fire, I realized the deep snow wasn’t wholly in my favour. It would help Stufa too. He would be able to approach the house without me hearing. If I wasn’t to be caught off guard, I would have to keep watch from one of the windows that had a view of the track.
I lifted the bar on the door and stepped outside. The snow was smooth as milk, except for the little arrow-trails left by birds. Such stillness. Such a hush. It seemed possible that the world had been emptied while I was sleeping. All the souls had been gathered up, and I had been forgotten, overlooked.
Sometimes, when I thought about my mother’s unlikely reappearance in my life, I would see it as an opportunity, a gift, and I was tempted to turn to her and say, Tell me the truth about the past. But I had never quite managed it — and even if I had, I doubted she could have told me, not after what she had been through, not after all these years. The truth was a key on the floor of the ocean, its teeth mossy, blurred. Once, it might have opened something. Not any more. And perhaps, in the end, I didn’t want to hear it, anyway. The idea that Jacopo might have been right all along — or if not right exactly, not entirely wrong …