63

 63

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the search they’d called her name loudly, hoping to be heard, and urged the dogs on when they came back to rub damp noses against their palms. Now they let them roam loose. They didn’t call out and they spoke as little as possible among themselves. Sandra was there, with sneakers on her feet and a woolen shawl around her shoulders. And Maria the Big Mouth, swallowing her saliva and holding her side but refusing to let anyone help her. Renzo was there, Bruno, Serafino, and everyone who’d been children and adolescents together, played hide-and-seek or pretended to fight beside the Quargnasca. Sister Annangela and Marilena completed the expedition: they arrived late in the Fiat Cinquecento; they’d been searching the village’s disused cellars and abandoned houses for hours before on their own.

With her short legs, Sister Annangela had to go around trunks and bushes that Anselmo had stepped over or tromped down without even seeing them. A few steps from the water there was a cold smell of metal and anise, but here and there another scent of wax, wet fibers, and semolina pudding. Broken branches of elder exposed their white sap like the fragile bones of a bird and reawakened something in Marilena’s memory: words dating back to stories she’d read with Silvia at boarding school. So when she recognized the lid of a coffin among the ferns, she thought she was hallucinating.

With her hand she signaled to Sister Annangela, but the other woman was unruffled. “I can’t believe they’re still turning up,” she said. Marilena understood and calmed down: it was one of the coffins torn from the earth by a flood two years earlier, when apocalyptic rain had turned entire mountain slopes soupy with mud and detritus. The flood had wiped out bridges, and landslides had swept away stretches of woodland, cars, textile machinery, animals, people, and cemeteries.

“Do you think there might be a skeleton around here, too?” Marilena whispered.

“I have no idea. Look over there: I think that must be the clamp from a loom.” Sister Annangela said a prayer and the two women moved on through the elders and bilberries, taking care to avoid the remains and rubbish they encountered, though it was difficult to tell them apart.

Anselmo and Gianni, both lanky, were almost walking as a pair. Gianni was a couple of years older, and there was a time when Anselmo had eyed him suspiciously because he saw how Silvia idolized him and because, during the war, he’d come at night with two companions and a Sten gun over his shoulder to take money from the partisans’ trunk his grandfather kept hidden in the house. His grandfather actually thought well of Gianni, and Anselmo had ended up convincing himself that he really was half genius.

It was late and before long they’d have to use torches, but Anselmo didn’t notice; he kept going, head down, irritated by the tenacious, triumphant vegetation that got in his eyes seemingly on purpose to make him stop. He ended up asking the others to spread out, while Gianni still trailed him.

“You see how the woods recover completely. Until a few years ago there were only meadows up here.” Anselmo stopped to scan the landscape. “Silvia and I, though, we always went from around the Rivi hill.”

He shook his head, and Gianni thought he could see tears. He was about to go up to him and put a hand on his back when they heard shouting behind them. They turned quickly, stomachs gnawed with tension.

It was Maria, who’d twisted her ankle badly and was sitting in the middle of some weeds sulking. “I can’t put any weight on it. Go ahead. You can pick me up on your way back.”

“No, we’ll go back now,” Anselmo chirped. Maria and Gianni looked at each other dumbfounded, but a minute later he swore in his usual loud voice and they felt heartened.

“What a fool I am, what a fool,” Maria repeated while Sandra wrapped a handkerchief around her ankle.

They made a seat with their arms to carry her to the closest hamlet. She giggled to camouflage her pain and Anselmo and Gianni did the same to conceal the strain. Just for an instant, Anselmo imagined that he was carrying Silvia.