The woman halted at the front door and tapped on Uncle Giorgio’s knee. He let go of the pommel and simply tumbled into her arms. She was as strong as a strong man, took his weight easily, settled him on his feet, drew his arm round her shoulder and put hers round his waist and half-led, half-carried him into the house. At the door she turned and signed to Alfredo to follow.
Alfredo hesitated. The house, the woman, the man, the homecoming itself seemed unbearably scary and strange. But he thought he could feel the mountain watching him, and he was certain that however fast he ran it would have the power to reach out with a tongue of flame and between pace and pace turn him to ashes. Leaving the man to cope with the mules, he numbly followed the others into the house.
They were waiting for him on the far side of an empty stone-flagged hall. The woman picked up a lit lantern and gave it to Alfredo. She helped Uncle Giorgio on through an archway into a dark passage, and then slowly and carefully down a steep ladder-like stair. At the bottom was an even darker passage. She turned right. They passed several openings—cellars and storerooms, Alfredo saw as they were briefly lit by the lantern. The passage ended in a heavy iron door. Uncle Giorgio pulled a large key from an inner pocket and gave it to the woman. She beckoned to Alfredo to take her place, then unlocked the door, pushed it open, handed the key back to Uncle Giorgio and stood aside. Leaning heavily on Alfredo, Uncle Giorgio dragged himself into the room.
It was a vaulted chamber, wider than the bakehouse at home, but with a low roof supported by a pair of pillars. In the dimness around the walls Alfredo could see bookshelves, shelves of jars, the gleam of brass vessels and pipes, and what looked like a fiddle in its case. In the center of the room, between the pillars, stood something like the bottom section of a much larger pillar, a bulky brick cylinder with an iron lid. Though no heat came from it, and the chamber felt no warmer than the passage they’d left, Alfredo knew at once what lay beneath that lid. Fire. A compact mass of pure heat, somehow contained within the cylinder, not radiating at all. It was so strange that for a little while he forgot his terror and simply stared as they drew nearer.
They reached it and Uncle Giorgio let go of Alfredo, propped himself with one arm on the brickwork and with the other reached shakily out and with his bare hand grasped the handle. It was beyond his strength to lift the lid. Alfredo moved round and held his open palm a little above the metal. Still no heat. Cautiously he took hold of the handle. It was faintly warm. He started to heave the lid up and at once his eyes screwed shut of their own accord rather than face the blast of light that struck them. Light like the light of the sun, but with as little heat as that of the moon. There was no smoke, no odor of fire at all. Yet the heat was there, though somehow it stopped at the surface, so that even on bare flesh he couldn’t feel it at all. But it struck and almost overwhelmed his inward senses, more intense than anything he had known or imagined, heat from the heart of the sun.
He turned his face away but even then could barely open his eyes. The room blazed with light, flinging shadows as intensely black. Uncle Giorgio was beckoning impatiently. Alfredo’s fear returned as he edged back round the glaring crucible. Had he been brought here to be fed into the furnace, a sacrifice to the fire, which would then somehow magically heal Uncle Giorgio’s throat? No, Uncle Giorgio had a book in his hands—the psalter—but they were shaking too badly for him to turn the pages as he wanted. He let Alfredo take it from him and find the place. Alfredo had known without asking. Psalm 137, Super flumina. He showed it to Uncle Giorgio, who nodded. Alfredo turned, closed his eyes, drew a breath, steadied himself and sang to the fire.
Fire that Father had so loved, and taught him to love; fire that had taken away all that he had loved, his parents, his brother, his home, even the Bonaventura, everything except the act of singing. His grief, his loss, his anguish, welled into the music, welled into words that were already there to take it:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein.
For they that led us away captive required of us a song, and melody in our heaviness: “Sing us one of the songs of Sion.”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?…
He paused, because there was a three-bar rest for the descant at that point in the setting, but another voice sang on, wordless, a full octave higher than his own highest reach, but sweeter and truer than the best voice in the choir.
Startled, he opened his eyes. Uncle Giorgio, wearing spectacles now, their lenses densest black, was leaning forward, stretching an arm out over the surface of the crucible, holding a small ladle. Something had changed at the center of the glare, too bright for Alfredo to make out, or even to look at for more than an instant. He closed his eyes and rejoined the music two bars late. It didn’t matter. The other voice was ready, eager for his coming. In an exultation of sorrow the two of them sang through to the end. When he opened his eyes again, the glaring surface was just as it had been when he had first seen it. Whatever had been in the midst of it was gone. Uncle Giorgio signaled to him to close the lid.
After that fierce light the chamber was blackness for a while, despite the glow from the lantern. By the time Alfredo could see, Uncle Giorgio was sitting in the chair, holding the little ladle in his left hand and a small glass syringe in his right. With trembling fingers he dipped the nozzle of the syringe into the bowl of the ladle and sucked out the contents. He tilted his head back and raised the syringe. Alfredo could see the liquid through the glass, just a few drops, golden in the lamplight. Uncle Giorgio squeezed them one by one into the back of his throat. He closed his eyes, bowed his head and sat motionless. Alfredo heard the sawing rasp of his breath, once, twice, three times, but less each time and then silent. He waited, too dazed with the wonder of the singing, his own voice and the other, double but single in the song, for either terror or amazement.
After a while Uncle Giorgio looked up, drew a deep breath, rose and stretched as if he’d just woken from deep sleep.
“The tears of the salamander,” he said in a voice like any other man’s, only a little husky. “The ichor of the sun. Sovereign against all ailments of the flesh.
“And at last, Alfredo, I can welcome you to Casa di Sala. My home, and now yours.”
ALFREDO SAT ON THE WINDOW SEAT IN HIS room, gazing out at the night. His room—Uncle Giorgio had said so, showing him in. It was large—larger than his parents’ had been, above the bakehouse—with a bed big enough for five, and some heavy dark old furniture. In the back of the closet Alfredo had found a small chest, empty apart from a few schoolbooks. The one he opened had the initials A.V.DI S. inside the front cover. The first two were the same as his own—Alfredo Vittorio…No! All three were the same as his own, now—Alfredo Vittorio di Sala. Impossible. The books were old, with underlinings and doodles in the margins. No again, not impossible. Antonio Vittorio di Sala—Father’s name once. This room must have been Father’s room, long ago.