The End (15 page)

Yet as the trip wore on she perceived in spite of herself a more and more powerful intuition of, of—what was the word? she was unsure there was a word—of here-ness. Providence had brought us here, to this of all places, to our remote country. No, but it had nothing to do with the Constitution or the Battle of Bull Run. History, politics, culture, those were her mind’s milieus, and they could not have been more impertinent to this queer intuition, which was neither purely a product of her thoughts nor of the place itself. Fog rose from an anfractuous river that flickered through the beams of a covered bridge they crossed. The spirit of the place pressed itself against her senses, but she was not the kind of creature that was capable of letting it in, of becoming an unconscious part of a vast, unconscious whole. The result was a feeling of sharp physical pain at the base of her neck that rose up the back of her skull, as though a malignant hand were petting her. She was separated, by virtue of being a conscious animal, from the rest of creation, which was unknowing and therefore complete, and therefore irrevocably real. The trees were both in the place and of it. But to
know
that one was
here
was to be an awareness amid the limitless unaware; it was to be in a place but never of it, like a pearl in a cake.

“Enzo!” she said. It was nearly impossible to make oneself heard over the engine.

“Here I am for you,” he said.

“Enzo, stop the machine. I want to be sick.”

There was only one lane and no shoulder, but he stopped the car immediately, obstructing the road. No one approached from either direction. He opened the door, but she did not let him help her out. Lina pulled down her window, making mewling syllables of concern.

Mrs. Marini walked in the clover toward a fence where some sheep were feeding. The cold and the pervasive, brisk smell of manure refreshed her. The morning had broken completely, and the sun shone all over the sprouting grass in the sheepfold and over the sheep, three of whom trotted out to regard her more closely. Then the rest of them followed. There were about twenty. Enzo stood nearby, his one hand hovering trepidatiously in case a part of her clothes should need to be pulled away from her vomit. In the other hand, he held the strap of her purse, which he had brought from the car.

“What may I do?” he said. He wore a stiff jacket Lina had made for him out of the stuffing of an old chair and a piece of canvas. The collar was half turned up in a rakish way, but it was his only vanity.

Across the meadow, at the edge of the trees, three men in heavy clothes tore the mossy shingles from the roof of a barn.

In fact, Mrs. Marini did not feel nausea and had not felt it before, but it would have been inefficient to explain herself, so she didn’t answer him. The pain in the back of her head left her.

“Hello, you little thing,” she said to a lamb with a black face.

One of the men wrenched a portion of the old tin flashing from the bottom of the chimney and threw it to the ground.

The lamb quivered on its tiny legs; it couldn’t have been a month old. It ducked its head under a ewe’s stomach and nursed while it and the mother both looked upon her with the agreeable, crazed eyes of sheep.

“Little Molly,” she said. “Aw.”

The lamb fell to its knees, then got up again and faced her and spoke its brief word.

Lina said, “She isn’t sick.”

“Yes, I am,” Mrs. Marini protested.

“Oh, not so badly. Let’s get a move on.” Marriage had tapped the honey from Lina’s blood, which was gratifying to see.

Mrs. Marini was not, of course, under the delusion that she had communicated with the lamb, who was only a lamb, after all, whereas she was an old person, from whom so many of those who were once close to her were now absent that it was arguable whether they were all alive and she was the dead one.

She gripped a rail of the fence and made herself laugh.

“See?” Lina said. “Here we go. Chop chop.”

They got back into the car.

“I’m starved. I could have eaten that one you were talking to,” Lina said. She had grown flatteringly thicker, too.

“Your mother will have some coffee and oats, I expect.”

Enzo made a shiver. His bowels did not tolerate whole grains.

Soon they arrived.

Umberto Montanero had grown a dense and handsome beard. The rigid hairs were black, brown, gray, white, and red, and extended to his breast pockets. The whiskers about his mouth were not stained by tobacco or food and did not hide his lips. The flanks were combed, the bottom corners neatly rounded; a cleavage ran up the middle (the chin whiskers were shorter than the rest). It was as though he wore an elegant jacket about his face. He had welded a miniature sickle for cutting twine to a steel ring that he wore on his thumb. He accepted Lina’s and Enzo’s kisses and greeted Mrs. Marini in formal language, making the slightest inclination of his torso in her direction—a satirical bow, a masterpiece of contempt. He took a drink from the pump, and blessed his groundwater, and the morning, and his own good health, and Saint Joseph, and his sound old boots that kept his socks dry.

Lina said they would be out to help him once they had changed their clothes.

“That’s all very well,” he said. His pruning shears were fitted with a spring; he snapped them shut and they popped open again with a decisive screech that seemed to give him courage.

They were standing in the mouth of the barn. A rabbit leapt from the open window of a dead car that lay on its side under the dripping hayloft. The vineyards were immaculate, but the house, the barn, the coop, and Patrizia herself—who emerged from behind the car as three more rabbits fled a branch that she methodically wagged over the packed dirt of the floor—were in squalor.

“Close the gate!” she cried.

“And may you be blessed, too, madam, even you!” Umberto said, indicating Mrs. Marini with his shears and slamming the low gate behind their backs. “And may the Lord sustain me, but only so far as I can throw my spit. And may he bless even you!”

He swallowed his phlegm.

Patrizia, the indispensable companion of Mrs. Marini’s middle age, whom she had dropped, closed her in her stinking embrace.

Mrs. Marini had never relented in her devotion to the sacraments, but she was not a Christian.

Umberto stalked into the vineyard. Enzo and Lina followed shortly, and the two old women were left alone in the house.

The farm was in an unincorporated township on an unpaved state highway in Ashtabula County, near the border with Pennsylvania. The northwesterly winds that crossed Lake Erie from Canada moderated the summer heat and insulated the region from the first autumn cold snaps, producing a long, temperate growing season conducive to grape farming. During the first months of winter, the winds became saturated with moisture as they passed over the comparatively warm surface of the lake, so that the region received three to four times the early winter precipitation of the inland towns and the cities to the west and was nearly always under profound snow by New Year’s Day. Then the lake froze.

Prohibition had compelled many of the farmers there to dig out their vineyards and turn them over to corn or pastureland. The others had replanted them with table grapes, principally Concords, as the previous owner of Umberto and Patrizia’s property had done. Umberto sold the crop to a jelly manufacturer in Geneva, when they had a crop to sell. Owing to consistent cloud cover the previous summer, the sugar yield of the grapes wasn’t even enough to pay the migrant pickers’ wages, so they had let a year’s work rot on the vine.

As soon as the others had gone out, Patrizia retrieved a portfolio from the cellar. All of the documents in it had been folded many times sloppily, as though they had been stowed in a pant pocket. Patrizia had never learned to read. She would like to know precisely what they said, please.

Several hours of deliberate study ensued. Mrs. Marini read aloud and translated. Patrizia tersely paraphrased and asked whether she had the right idea.

Owing to arrears in the payment of their mortgage, the bank owned a lien on the property. Owing to arrears in their taxes, the county owned another one.

Patrizia was unimpressed and unsurprised. In some of the documents she made a series of diagonal folds, a filing code that Mrs. Marini presumed her husband would not notice.

There was a four-year-old auction receipt for a mule, which they had lately butchered and eaten. In this she made a simple lengthwise crease across the middle and flattened it out again.

“What does that one mean?” Mrs. Marini asked.

Patrizia made a gesticulation. It meant, Into the fire, but later.

They broke for a snack.

“We never eat such piquant cheese anymore,” Patrizia said, as what Enzo had brought them from the city today. And her happiness in splitting it with her front teeth was an example of the superior power of the senses over the mind.

A decisive period emphasized each of the pores of her nose. Her unglossed fingernails flaked. Few of her molars remained, and she managed to mash the cheese using her tongue and palate, with the lumbering, mute physical dignity that Mrs. Marini had always admired.

To explain her desire to have the portfolio read to her would not have been Patrizia’s way, and Mrs. Marini didn’t care to know any more than was self-evident—namely, that they were ruined but that Umberto had withheld the details from her. In fact, being occupied with a demonstration of her command of a complex subject (money), Mrs. Marini didn’t care to think of anything else and was quite free of sympathy. This was invigorating, as always, but inappropriate. She wished she weren’t aware that it was inappropriate, but she was. As recently as two years ago she could have made herself unaware with an act of will, but the worm had turned again.

The unshameable egoism of the years following the swerve had been invented by a woman who had expected to die soon. Naturally, at the time she had believed it was more in the line of a discovery than an invention, but anyway it had restored her. Death was no longer interesting. Through the influence of her current intimates, who were two generations her junior and had immediate, present-day concerns, she had begun again to ask herself what would happen next. The fraudulent Nico voices, spirits of the middle past, squawked at her less incessantly. Instead the further past came calling—seldom, but in terrible blows.

In the deep past, as in the current moment, this exuberant
I
was like a fat person that stood close in front of where she sat, obstructing her view of anything but its own backside.

In the afternoon, the two women went out onto the porch.

Mrs. Marini asked whether Umberto’s cousins often came from Youngstown to help with her harvest.

“Yes, sometimes,” Patrizia said, suspending a rabbit from a hook in the overhang, its blood dripping into a bowl on the concrete slab of the porch. The porch was the only obviously sound structure of the house. Enzo had poured it. There was not a square angle to be seen anywhere else.

“I suppose there’s a crowd,” Mrs. Marini said, “a reunion atmosphere, and the latrine gets clogged.”

Patrizia sighed.

Mrs. Marini looked at her.

Do not look away from me! said the sigh. You were the closest friend I had in the world, and my husband dragged me out to this godforsaken place, where we don’t even have a toilet inside, where you knew I never wanted to come. I liked canasta on a Thursday night, like you. And you have let seven years pass without a single word. You could have said, “Enzo, let me come with you when you visit your mother-in-law. She must be lonely.” But you forsook me.

Patrizia cut the animal from its throat to its anus, then around the neck and the ankles, and ripped away its hide.

There’s no point in dressing properly, said the woman’s face. I have to listen to Berto and his idiotic plans and his raving about the eggs that are an hour out of the hen and the yolks are red, like they’re supposed to be. What difference does it make? Eggs all taste the same. Think of what I have for conversation here. Think of all the talking we used to have. Look at this house. Look at the paint coming off. We can’t afford paint. We don’t have time to paint. See the barn? See how it leans? A stiff breeze could knock it to a heap of boards on the ground. And I wish it would. I pray for that. We are bankrupt, and I am so glad! You thought we were poor before. And you left me here without even a little talking now and again.

“No more,” Mrs. Marini said to herself.

The records accompanying the deed showed that the Montaneros were the fifth owners of the property since the state of Connecticut had sold its colonial reserve (a 120-mile-long tract still called the Connecticut Western Reserve that formed the northeast corner of Ohio) to the Connecticut Land Company, in 1796. Why, what an unlikely piece of information! She could read it all right here in the cheery brochure from the real estate company.

Patrizia hacked the rabbit into pieces. Mrs. Marini got up and searched the purlieus of the house for dandelions to eat in the salad.

“The vineyards are so sharp and pretty,” she said to Patrizia, who was washing the pieces of the rabbit at the hand pump by the barn.

Patrizia shook off the meat over the grass. Indistinctly she pronounced a single English word.

“Beg pardon?” Mrs. Marini said.

“Herbicide,” Patrizia repeated.

Mrs. Marini washed the greens at the pump. It was incredible that water so cold was not frozen.

Patrizia made a pouch of her apron and bounced the rabbit parts in it to dry them, and faced Mrs. Marini as if she were speaking. A kerchief imprecisely contained her nappy hair. She had used to flatten it with an iron. Her face was utterly sad and in conflict. It said, You have not understood at all.

They went into the house. Patrizia browned the meat in grease and covered it in grape vinegar and simmered it on the stove. She went outside and honked the horn on Enzo’s car to let them know to come in for supper soon.

Mrs. Marini flattened the morning crossword on the table. Through the window, she saw Patrizia slam the car door and trudge, in unlaced work boots, through a depression of mud. Her body tottered like that of a man carrying a pail of water with one hand. Her breasts hung to her stomach. She was not wearing a brassiere. Mrs. Marini thought, I have committed a crime.