The Detour (22 page)

The second woman, also gray-haired, pantomimed to me:
The man is cold. The man needs to sleep
.

“Of course. But not for long. He can sleep in the truck.”

Overhearing, Cosimo shook his head at the next approaching spoonful of soup and pushed himself to a more upright position. “Leave me here.
Va bene
. Take the truck.”

“With Enzo?”

“Leave him here, also. He’ll be with me. This is a good place for us.”

There was a sound of morbid finality that I didn’t appreciate in that last remark. Just hours earlier, I had wanted to lock Cosimo in the back of the truck. I would have welcomed any chance to leave both him and Enzo along the road so that I might have had a fighting chance to change routes and make the border on time. But not now.

Cosimo pulled the diamond ring from his pocket and handed it over to the woman with the new load of blankets. Her eyes grew wide and she took it quickly. She and the old man wrapped Cosimo in more blankets, burying him behind the cocooning folds.

“He needs to breathe,” I said, stepping closer to the cot again, but their ranks closed. The three peasants continued patting and tucking, and though I was taller and able to see
over their heads, I couldn’t seem to push past them. “Cosimo? Can you hear me?”

The response was a muffled but serene murmur.

“I’m not leaving you here!”

When I tried to push closer again, the older of the two women scowled at me over her shoulder and bumped me purposely with her hip, swathed in broad pleats of vulturous black. The man turned around and eased me backward, one shuffling step at a time, out the shack’s narrow door. Visiting hours were over. I was being escorted away from the patient.

“
Dieci
,” the old man said, holding up his narrow wrist, upon which my watch hung loosely.

“Ten minutes? Ten o’clock?” And the déjà vu of it made me laugh once—a half-crazed, unconvincing bark.

“
Dieci
,” the old man said, revealing a mostly toothless smile.

“I’m not leaving!” I called out one last time as the door squeaked shut. “I’m just checking on the truck!
Va bene
, Cosimo?”

Outside, the sun was hidden below the horizon and the sky was losing its peach blush, turning pale blue to the west, deep indigo to the east, the hills and farms and distant woods reduced to silhouetted black shapes. I followed a footpath back toward the white track where we had parked, between the flowers I’d ignored on our way up to the shack: the flowers on their thick green stalks, all bowed in the same direction. Out of habit, I turned my wrist to check the time, and
finding it bare, dropped slowly down to my knees and began to whimper—tentatively at first, and then louder, until I was groaning and rubbing at my eyes, and then simply sobbing, while the dark faces of the sunflowers remained turned away, embarrassed by the outburst.

T
hen and there, it must have been, my pretending came to an end. I knew there was no point in imagining that these Italian hours could stand apart from the rest of my life; no way to pretend any longer that the sun that rose and set there didn’t also rise and set on the Germany of my past and of my future. Watch or no watch, I could look at the flowers and see that even brainless creatures are aware of the time. Enzo’s death had, at last, penetrated; as had some other things—not all at once, and not completely, but like a rainstorm thrashing fields of bone-dry soil, soaking them well here and running off too quickly there. A wasted watering, where the ground was still too difficult and steep.

When the shack door opened early the next morning and Cosimo hobbled toward me on the path, red-eyed but pink-cheeked, I threw my arms around him. He returned my embrace but seemed perplexed by my effusive rambling about vultures and blankets, death and abandonment. The rest and warmth and food had done its work. He had simply needed some good
contadini
doctoring, he assured me, while pulling himself up and into the passenger side of the truck. He apologized for delaying us further and still did not seem to understand what his body had endured. But anyway, he asked me with undue tenderness: Was
I
feeling all right?

I was, I told him again and again.
I was
. He could sleep more and I would drive, as long as he provided the directions.

There was no argument about competing priorities, even when we came to a fork signed for Modena, a place-name I remembered from the old map. There was no discussion of the remaining day and a half it would take to get to the border from that juncture, or the day it would take to get to Cosimo’s family farm. Traveling to the farm first, and only then to the border, would take three more days total, but in light of all that had happened, this math no longer seemed logically connected to any choices we might make. The choice had been made outside that shack.

We were hopelessly late for my deadline by now, and yet, for a time at least, not late for anything. We were simply driving. The sky was just beginning to leak its black ink, and the gray dawn was beginning to reveal wooded valleys and small, grassy, overgrown vineyard plots, cloaked in mist, more lush and tangled than we’d seen in the dry, hilly lands farther south.

When Cosimo said a word under his breath—“Nebbiolo”—I asked him if it was the name of a town ahead.

“No, the local grapes. Named after the fog—
nebbia
. This is starting to look like home.”

We drove all day without any mention of the cargo we carried, or of much else that I would be able to recall ten years later. Cosimo took over at day’s end, when my own eyelids were closing, but for most of the morning and afternoon, I was the one behind the wheel. Probably the smartest thing he ever did was let me drive most of that third day, so that with every rut and bump and slowly passing kilometer, I was sealing my own fate and there was no point in arguing about it anymore, as I would have if I’d been a hostage or even a mere passenger.

In the next moment I can remember, the undersides of my eyelids felt like they’d rubbed against ground glass. Needles had punctured the dark cloth of the night sky, letting in the first stars’ thin light. Everything had turned sharp: the coiled spring underneath my seat; the edge of the doorframe, hard and cold even through the sleeve of my wrinkled jacket.

Somehow, sleep did come—but only until an unfamiliar sound woke me. The engine had stopped. I rubbed my eyes and saw that Cosimo wasn’t behind the wheel. I heard again the dog’s low, testing growl. We were at the end of a road, near the top of a hill, surrounded by farmland, with two small orange squares of light blazing from a barely silhouetted house
farther up the hill. The Digiloramo family
cascina
, deep in the Piedmont.

From behind the truck, Italian voices drifted—a man and a woman trying to contain their argument in frenzied whispers and the sound of the dog above them, working itself into a lather, whining and growling. Cosimo slapped his leg and shouted, “Tartufa!”—and the dog quieted immediately, following him as he departed. The footsteps faded.

I listened hard, with my hand on the door handle, trying to ascertain whether I was alone. But then I heard the grinding metal of someone trying to raise the truck’s back door, pushing hard against a blockage within. The door rattled but wouldn’t give. I heard more scraping metal, a high-pitched grunt of effort, a sliding sound, before I realized what was about to happen.

When I leapt out of the truck—shouting, “Don’t!”—it was already too late. Hurrying around to the back, I saw her standing with her hands on the door, the dark gap opening. She gasped and pulled one hand away from the door, covering her mouth. I had startled her, compounding the shock of the undignified lump threatening to fall out onto the drive.

I wedged my hip against the unsteady corpse, and in an awkward maneuver wriggled out of my jacket, letting it drop over Enzo’s shoulder and battered face, then resumed pushing the body back into the truck, over the lip of the doorframe.

“Rosina—” I hazarded a guess. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not.” But her face gave her away. “Cosimo told me not to …”

“So why did you?”

She turned on her heel, profile to me, refusing to meet my glance. “I wanted to see. Go away!”

“I’m sorry.” And I was—but I was also flushed with irritation. “You shouldn’t have seen him that way. Cosimo should have warned you.”

“How do you know me?”

“I saw your photograph. Cosimo had it.”

She paused for a moment before completing the turn, her back to me. I tried to tell her she shouldn’t misunderstand what she had seen. But she stopped me, answering in German even more fluent than her brother’s. “You don’t have to explain. Cosimo told me everything.”

Truck door secured, I turned to the place where she had last stood and I called her name again, but she had disappeared into the dark night. Walking quickly, I could just make out the faint glow of her white skirt billowing as she turned the corner of a large, white stucco outbuilding, separated from the main house. I caught up with her as she put her hand to the door.

“Where is Cosimo?”

“Restraining Tartufa. The smell of the truck was driving her crazy. Then he is going to tell my mother.” She started to tug the door handle, then stopped, turning to face me. “I can’t believe it. Just two hours ago, she was serving espresso to the
polizia
. They told her that Cosimo and Enzo had gone missing, and now here, you show up like this.” Her voice caught, but she gained control and finished. “You’re bleeding.”

Dried, rusty streaks stained my wrists and abrasions marked the back of my knuckles, from banging against the inside of
the truck and pushing my fingers through the crate’s wooden slats.

“No doubt you’re thirsty and hungry, too.” It sounded like an accusation. “You’d better come inside to clean up.”

She stood with her feet set wide apart, each hand clutching the opposite wrist, black hair loose and wild and bushy around her shoulders, looking slightly unhinged.

“I think I’ll take a rest here, for a moment,” I said. “Or go up to the main house, if that’s where Cosimo is.”

“Up to the house, is that your bright idea? You’re a genius. I can see how you and my brothers got into this mess, all three of you. You’re a real good-luck charm! That’s what Enzo must have thought …”

Her forthrightness disarmed me, as did the power of her words combined with her unruly, unselfconscious appearance. As in her photo, she refused to stand still. I’d been yelled at by my father and upbraided by other men my age in various situations, but yelled at by a woman with large, dark eyes, wild hair, and a semi-transparent skirt? Never.

As soon as she’d finished admonishing me, she turned to go, calling over her shoulder as an afterthought: “If Tartufa gets loose again, be careful. She bites men she doesn’t trust.”