She leads us into the house, into one of the guest bedrooms, and insists that we shower right away; she brings us shampoo and two robes. She’s scared: she never looks me in the eye, and I stare down at the ground. After washing, we sit on the two beds with our naked, hairy legs sticking out beneath the light blue robes. Elisabetta took away our clothes before we could stop her — how does she plan to dry them? Witold giggles and says that maybe they’ll forget about us and we’ll be stuck in here for a week, but then he gets serious again and I know he’s thinking about what he saw. One of the twins brings in two cups of coffee and sets them down on a little table; he asks us if we want a cognac and says that our clothes will be ready in half an hour. I glance at Witold and say No, thanks, the coffee is all we need.
The second twin appears in the doorway, mirroring the figure standing next to our beds, and says that Rossi wants to speak to us. We follow him, walking barefoot across the cold floors. In the dim room Elisabetta is sitting on the edge of the bed and holding Rossi’s hand; he’s stretched out under the covers. Elisabetta says that Alberto wants to thank us. His eyes are closed; it looks like he’s sleeping. There’s half a minute of silence. Does she really have to hold his hand?
“Remind me of your name, please,” Rossi says.
Witold doesn’t react; I touch his arm and whisper that Rossi’s talking to him.
“Witold Witkiewicz,” he says feebly.
“Witold,” Rossi repeats.
Silence falls again. It’s the first time I’ve been in this room; it looks identical to Alfredo Renal’s room, which Rossi showed me more than a month ago: the same furniture, in the same arrangement, but not the same room — the other one is at the end of the hall. I think, He should have simply gone and slept in that room. There is a photograph of Alfredo Renal on the bedside table, another one standing on a dresser, and one hanging on the wall behind me, next to the armoire with the mirrored door; that’s the picture I want to inspect more closely, because from the corner of my eye I see that there’s someone standing next to Renal.
“Witold,” says Rossi, “what country are you from?”
“Poland.”
“It must be a beautiful country.”
I take one step to the side and peek at the photo; no one sees me do it. They are eighteen or twenty. Both wearing jackets and ties, clothes that look more adult than they are themselves. They’re smiling. Renal has his arms down at his sides and his head lowered a little bit, as if the light bothers him. Rossi, standing next to him, looks like the older brother, with a hand in his pocket swelling one flank of his jacket, the other arm held out, with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers.
“I’ve never been there,” Rossi speaks up again, “but it must be beautiful.”
Soon we’ll be out of here. I’m not cold, but I’m shivering. I want to get dressed. Elisabetta strokes Rossi’s still damp hair, readjusts the pillows behind his back, and then takes his hand in hers again and squeezes it. She doesn’t turn even slightly to look at me.
“Not as beautiful as yours,” says Witold, surprising everybody. “Italy is an extraordinary country.”
“Witold is an expert in Italian literature.” I feel I have to clarify this, to justify his enthusiasm.
“Italy has given the world a wealth of literature,” Witold goes on, smiling. “And most of all it has given us opera. Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. I think there’s nothing greater; sometimes … sometimes I think I would like to have been an Italian in the nineteenth century, to have been a patriot during the Risorgimento, going to the theater at night to hear the Trovatore or Rigoletto.”
Standing in the midst of us gray Italians, the Pole suddenly seemed taller: he stood there wrapped in his robe as if it were a hero’s mantle. We looked at his smile with something like deference, and then Rossi began to cry.
“Calm down, quiet down,” Elisabetta said to comfort him, and she waved us out of the room.
We went out, nearly pushed along by one of the twins. In the guest room were our clothes, magically washed and ironed and laid out tidily on the beds. Witold wasn’t smiling anymore. “What did I say that was wrong?”
“First you save him, then you make him cry,” I remarked, shaking my head.
We worked on the Renal garden for two more days, and Jan came back to help us re-create the cone of crushed glass that the wheelchair had crashed into; we left many little details unfinished, which didn’t actually bother me since I didn’t want to think about the ending: the end of the job and the end of coming to the villa and the end of the affair with Elisabetta, despite her assurances. We could have gone on working even with the villa closed up for the summer, but Rossi’s assistant told us it would be better to finish in September, right before they organized a nice party to inaugurate it; and she smiled — she always smiled at me now. During the summer the property was patrolled by security guards, and it just created trouble for them if there were people coming and going. “If we’re not here, they can shoot on sight?” I asked her seriously. She was taken aback and stared at me for a second, then burst out laughing; she must have decided that I was a joker (but I wasn’t laughing).
We finished restoring the pond on Thursday evening, and on Friday morning we drove to the villa in the R4. I wanted to say goodbye to Rossi again, check on him, and see Elisabetta one more time, just to squeeze her hand for a brief moment. It had been very hot for the last few days, and the idea of leaving these hills to go work down on the plain, near a highway intersection, was dreadful. Driving along the tunnel of plane trees, I felt absolutely sure that this was the last time I would go to the villa, but I didn’t believe my premonition — I’ve never believed in premonitions, whether mute and vague and imprecise or detailed descriptions of disasters and calamities.
One of the twins was coming toward us with a wheelbarrow that held a suspicious shape inside a black bag. Apparently they had found a drowned dog in the pond; before dying he had jumped from one cone of crushed glass to another, cutting his feet and going mad with pain. The man lifted the edge of the bag to show us the mutilated paws. For the first time his tone was not neutral; it sounded like he was blaming me, and since I don’t think he cared particularly about the dog, he might have been accusing me of being responsible for Rossi’s accident. I wanted to say, “Finally you have an opinion; when did you decide to start having opinions?” but instead I just stuttered, “Are the cones badly damaged?” His eyes flew open wide — for once they showed an expression — but the rest of his face stayed inert; his stunned eyes were like early snowdrops blooming long before any other flower. He didn’t answer me but just started walking again with his wheelbarrow hearse, the dog paws jouncing along outside the bag.
I didn’t want to go see the damage; Elisabetta came down to say goodbye to us, and we helped her load the last bags into the old Lancia Thema. Rossi came down at the last minute and simply waved to us; he looked very depressed. We left right after they did and spent the rest of the day at the data center garden site, talking as little as possible, taking measurements and making lists of the materials and tools we would need. I felt like I’d been sent to a penal colony: I sweated and drank and drank and sweated, and my head boiled under my straw hat. As we were going home, I decided it was my duty to say something: Witold was gloomy — the Renal job had been special for him too, and it had ended on the wrong note; also, the roads were bubbling with vacation traffic, as if we were the only people on the plains who’d been left out. I began telling him about the plans I had in mind, the clients who had called in the last few weeks, the magazine that wanted to do a story about us. I purposely said “us” because I knew it was the quickest, most direct way to put Witold in a good mood. It did me good too.