The Detour (21 page)

I read the card once and tore it up, ashamed of my own blatant ventriloquism. It would have been a gratifying notion, to think I had absorbed something from Enzo in the short amount of time I’d known him, that his impulsive nature, his
gioia di vivere
, had been somehow contagious. But it would not have been true.

Hearing the sound of tearing paper, Cosimo glanced at the ripped pieces accumulating in my lap. For the first time in hours, he tried to smile: “You’re not starting another fire, are you?”

Cosimo accepted a piece of bread left over from yesterday’s groceries, though I noticed he took one dry bite before pushing it back into the bag, his free hand pressed against his stomach. He said, “I smell something.”

I sniffed my own sleeve. “Neither of us smells very good.”

“Worse than that,” he said, wrinkling his brow.

Earlier in the day, the rear compartment had been hot enough; many more hours had passed since with the sun beating against the metal, raising the temperature as we drove.

“Something rotting,” Cosimo said.

“The milk smell. It was on the ground. It probably splashed onto Enzo’s clothes.”

“Milk,” he repeated. “No, that isn’t it.”

He pushed a finger against his temple, massaging in hard circles. After a while, the same hand went to his nose, which he couldn’t stop rubbing. He tried unrolling the window and, weary of the clouds of hot midday road dust filling the truck, rolled it back again. Despite his attempt to be discreet, the compulsion built over time until I couldn’t stop watching and he couldn’t stop sniffing.

“Maybe a cigarette,” I suggested.

“In a few months, it will be truffling time again,” he said, ignoring me. “I have my best dog, Tartufa. Every autumn, we go …”

This was a good subject, neutral and safe, and I encouraged him for more details: the dog, the black and white truffles, the season, the sights and smells in the Piedmontese woods. And it seemed to work, for a few minutes at least, until Cosimo took what seemed at first to be a short detour but was really the path he was following all along, into a darker place.

“But Enzo never liked the woods,” he rambled. “And I think now—it makes sense—this is why he didn’t want to be a policeman. If it weren’t for a body we found one day in the woods—a corpse, you call it, yes?—he might not have been looking for other different jobs, he might not have worked for Keller …”

Scheisse
, again. “That’s all right. You don’t have to talk about it.”

But he insisted. “It was already four days old, maybe five days. Flies lay their eggs, you know. Under the skin. Everywhere. When you find a body, you can tell when it died according to the insects. They teach us this in the training school.”

“You’re only smelling the milk, I’m sure of it,” I told him, making a face. “Don’t worry. If not a cigarette, maybe you could eat another piece of bread? Is your stomach bothering you?”

“They teach us about the little worms,” he continued. “I don’t know what you call them in German. They teach us about the stages, the problems you have, the third or fourth day.” He pressed on, trying to find the foreign words that eluded him for the tightening clothes and the collecting gas as the body became a dark and rotting balloon.

“Take it easy.”

“And when our mother, strong as she was, was ready to take the body—”

“
Your
mother?”

“I didn’t say
my mother
.”

“You did.”

He frowned. “An old, local woman. When
she
was ready to take the body and clean it and dress it for the funeral—because that’s what we do and what we’ve always done, we don’t leave it to others, no matter the difficulty—”

“All right, Cosimo.”

“So it was no wonder that Enzo did not want to be a policeman.”

“It’s only the milk smell that’s bothering you. The closed space and the heat and the milk. That’s all.”

We came to a fork in the road with a field to our right and a low, crumbling bluff to our left, and in a hollow of the bluff, a green and mossy spot, in which there seemed to be a sort of basin and a small white cross. I assumed Cosimo was going to say a prayer or empty his bladder, or perhaps vomit again. But then he walked slowly around the front, came to my side of the truck, opened the door, and gestured me to slide over into the driver’s seat.

“All right?” I asked him.

“Fine.”

I spent the next twenty minutes reacquainting myself with the shifting, the struggle to coordinate feet and hands and eyes. When Cosimo groaned, I assumed he was expressing anguish at the damage I was doing to the truck’s gears, until suddenly he called out and begged me to stop the truck. His door opened and I heard the retch and the splash, followed by a sighing moan.

He closed the door, wiping his mouth. “We should have wrapped the body.”

“Is it still the smell? Is that what’s getting to you?”

I started driving again, but he continued to press me about our need for a sheet or blanket, some kind of covering, especially with the sun nearing the horizon and the cold night coming soon. I stated the obvious: that Enzo wouldn’t feel the cold; that, in fact, the cold would be better for transporting him. But during all that talk, I kept my eyes glued to the road. It was only when I finally started feeling comfortable with the
steering that I made myself look over at Cosimo and noticed he was shivering, his skin pale and clammy, the whites of his eyes gone yellow.

“
Verdammt
—the body isn’t too cold, you are.”

He whispered into his damp sleeve, “I have a terrible headache.”

“It’s more than that. You’re in shock.” In my flustered state, I let the truck veer off to one side where it rubbed against a low thicket of blackberry bushes until I corrected my course. The sudden scratching noise made Cosimo’s eyes flash open. “We need a doctor,” I insisted.

“I won’t talk to a doctor.”

“But you need help.”

“I only need a blanket.” He shifted uncomfortably. “My stomach hurts—and my head. I just need to lie down, somewhere, just a few minutes …”

“I’ll look for a town.”

“No town.” But after a minute, he relented. “A house. If you can find some farm, maybe …”

We passed alongside a field and, beyond it, a village of a dozen or so stone houses, huddled close, some of them with open animal stalls directly under human quarters. But as soon as we slowed down, dogs began to bark and a suspicious face glowered from an open doorway. There were too many people and too much life squeezed all together. Too much attention. Cosimo shook a dismissive, trembling hand and squeezed shut his eyes against the noise. We had to find someplace smaller. Someplace set apart.

“Don’t fall asleep,” I cautioned as I continued driving, my nose against the windshield now.

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure.” But I had a feeling he shouldn’t sleep yet, not without warmth and some food and a pair of eyes ready to watch over him better than I could manage while steering the truck down narrow roads.

“It’s not a tractor you’re driving there, friend,” he said, teeth chattering. “You can go a little faster.”

“I’m trying.”

Ten minutes later, I loosened the grip of one inexpert hand from the steering wheel and gave Cosimo a shake. He had been moaning again. “Talk to me.”

He opened one eye. “It’s not my brother’s fault that he was a romantic.”

“Open your eyes, please. I must be firm.
Open your eyes
.”

“You take everything so seriously, Mister Vogler. And I can tell you: I’ve seen worse than what I saw today. I’ve seen terrible things.”

“Ernst. I think it is better now for you to call me Ernst.” What was the point of convincing him he was in shock? What was the point in telling him that anyone would be shocked to see his own double in a state of imminent decay? He’d said himself that it was not the same as seeing another corpse, but Cosimo was intent in his professional self-regard, and blinded by his sense of duty. In that, we had something in common.

“Enzo would have wanted me to get you to a proper doctor,” I said. “What do you think about that?”

Cosimo shook his head, not so easily fooled. A moment later, he asked in a groggy voice, “You think I was too easy with him?”

“Certainly. You gave him everything, even …” I was about to say, “even your girl,” before realizing it was too strong a reminder. I finished: “… even your own jacket.”

“That wasn’t a favor to him. You might want a lifetime with a woman, but sometimes you settle for a night.”

“Enzo didn’t get even that,” I said, if only to remind him of what he had not yet lost. But it didn’t work.

He asked, “What do you think a night is worth?”

Nichts
was my answer. Absolutely nothing. But I didn’t want to upset him. I only wanted to keep him talking. “I don’t know. Maybe one night can be pleasant.”

His eyes were looking glassier; his speech was thick. “I wanted at least one night, but I settled for wanting my jacket back, smelling of her. He gets the girl; I get one smell. Her perfume—orange blossoms. Now you see?”

Cosimo tried to arrange his features in a grim smile, but the jostling over each deep rut pained him and he closed his eyes. We could take these bumps only slowly, and the little shack I’d spotted was high on the hill. Steering toward it with intense concentration, I told Cosimo that I thought he still had a chance with Farfalla. Now wasn’t the time to think about it, but someday, he’d see things differently. And as tempting as it might be to imagine that another person’s death required his own, the world didn’t really work that way: a banal lecture never fully understood by the one who hears it, or even by the one who speaks it, but so it was then, and so it remains.

An old man in an untucked shirt, baggy trousers and hanging suspenders came to the open doorway of the small shack. Thick gray brows obscured his dark eyes—until the brows lifted in surprise in reaction to Cosimo’s blue lips.

The shack was furnished with a cot, a table, and a kerosene lamp. One window framed a view of a larger villa, farther up the hill. Inside the modest dwelling, Cosimo managed only a few words, hard to understand through his clacking teeth. I pantomimed our need for a blanket and some kind of food, and I tried to explain about the pains in Cosimo’s head and stomach. The caretaker shrugged, waiting. Perhaps it was my fault for speaking and raising the suspicion of these
contadini
—these country folk. Cosimo alone might have garnered more immediate sympathy. I patted my empty pocket for money, thinking of the large stash in Enzo’s pockets—
forget that
—and tugged at my watch, unbuckling it. The man took it quickly in his rough palm.

Moments later, an old peasant woman appeared, pointing to the villa, but Cosimo shook his head. Too far; too many people. And now there was a flurry of activity, all of us crowded into this space not much larger than a gardening shed. The old man was wrapping Cosimo in a wool blanket, except for his feet, which stuck out at the bottom, uncovered. When I pointed to the oversight, the man waved me away. He brought out some strong-smelling salve and massaged Cosimo’s bare feet and calves, filling the tiny room with the smell of olive and herb and pine. The peasant woman pushed spoonfuls of a white bean soup into Cosimo’s mouth, and
when he couldn’t hold it down, wiped his chin and started again. Yet another woman appeared, having been called down from the main house with more blankets in her arms, and when I tried to step back to make room, I tripped on a bucket near the doorway.