When the Mountain keeps Secrets

Rue and Remembering

We step back into the cold. The door shuts behind us with the comforting sound of a thing that knows its work. Lucia sets a quick pace that still somehow feels unhurried, hands tucked into her sleeves, boots sure on the frost-hungry stones.

“Your Nonna tied the clover-knot right,” she says without preamble. “Some people flip the last loop and it undoes itself by the first thaw.”

“You know knots,” I say.

“I know what keeps,” she answers. “My grandmother says the difference between a superstition and a craft is whether it serves.”

“And this—” I lift my chin toward the herb bundle we left, “—is a craft?”

“It’s a kindness,” she says, which is not quite an answer.

The square sits like a bowl catching the last of the morning light, cobbles glazed with melted frost. In the middle, the well’s iron handle holds beads of water that haven’t decided whether to be ice. A few stalls have stubbornly set up—thin onions, bruised apples, a wheel of hard cheese that looks like it was cut by a man in a bad mood. The baker’s stall is the busiest, breath of warm crust carrying down the lanes like somebody’s memory of childhood.

Lucia knows half the people by name and the other half by their feet. She nods to the old men who play at arguing about nothing, swaps cheek-kisses with a woman selling walnut oil, steals a heel of bread from the baker’s son with impunity and gives him a coin anyway. When she tears the heel in two and gives me the larger piece, I realise I have been falling into step with her and not the other way around.

“Are you visiting long?” I ask.

“As long as I am,” she says, and shrugs, unhelpful and honest at once. “There’s work to do here.”

“What kind?”

She tosses the last crumb to a hopeful sparrow. “The kind that has to be done,” she says, then checks my face and smiles. “I help my Nonna. And other people’s nonnas. And anyone else who isn’t stubborn enough to refuse.”

“Help them how?”

Lucia stops beside the well, rests her hands on the cold iron, and looks at the space where a reflection would be if anyone had bothered to drop the bucket. “I suppose the word you’re looking for is strega,” she says cheerfully. “But I prefer benandante.”

I know the first word - witch. It’s the one mothers use to make children swallow their soup. The second sits on my tongue like a word in a foreign language that my mouth was built to say anyway.

“What does that mean?” I ask, though I have some idea.

“Good walker,” she says. “A person who goes out when other people lock the door. A person who remembers which plants make you feel better and which plants make you shut up for a while.” She cuts me a sideways glance. “A person who believes the ridge has rules for a reason.”

“And you’re… open about that?” My voice does an unhelpful little squeak. “Just—say it in the square?”

“If I whispered it,” she says, “people would lean closer and they’d end up with the same words in their ears. This way at least I get to see who winces.”

“Nobody here winced,” I say, because I can’t help noticing.

“They’re used to me,” Lucia answers. “And most of them are too tired to argue with something that sometimes works.”

From the corner of the square, a child cries—a quick yelp, not danger so much as insult. Lucia is moving before I see what she has seen. A little boy sits on the low step of the cooper’s shed, where barrels lean like sleepy giants against the wall, twisting his ankle in both hands. The skin above his boot is scraped raw where a buckle bit too hard.

“Guarda qua,” Lucia says, kneeling. “Let me look.”

He looks at her with full suspicion and then offers the ankle like an offering anyway. She rolls his sock down with fingers that don’t believe in hurry, touches the scrape, and hums once in her throat in a note that could be comfort or thinking.

“Do you have salt?” she asks the boy’s sister, who has been hovering at a guilty distance.

The girl produces a pinch from a paper twist in her pocket—the same way a rabbit produces a miracle from a hat. Lucia nods approval, wets the salt with her breath, and presses the tiniest amount into the scrape. The boy hisses, then relaxes as if the pain has made a bargain and left. Lucia takes something from her sleeve—a tuft of wool? No, a shred of some soft plant—and lays it over the place, then winds the boy’s own sock back up to hold it.

“Walk?” she asks.

He puts weight on it and grimaces, but the grimace is mostly for show. He walks across the step with the performance solemnity of someone testing a bridge. The sister thanks Lucia with the careless gratitude of children who accept kindness as a climate.

“You carry salt,” I say when we walk on.

“Sometimes,” she says. “Today he did.” She taps her sleeve. “And I carry plant scraps.”

“What plant?”

She pauses. “Yarrow,” she says aloud. “A little yarrow.”

It could be. I am not expert enough to contradict her and not foolish enough to accuse her of something else.

We drift past the butcher. Lucia slows so subtly I don’t notice until we have already slowed. Her eyes tap the strings of sausage, the paper parcel being folded, the blade set down at a neat angle that has to have been learned from a father’s hand. Her nose flares very slightly, almost a scent-of-snow gesture.

“Troppo presto,” she says under her breath—too soon—and the butcher looks up sharply as if he has been caught reciting a prayer backward. Lucia nods pleasantly at him and moves on without explanation. I file away the phrase next to other questions.

By the time the sun tilts away from the square, I’ve learned that Lucia once ate snow just to see if it tasted like the sky (it does not), that she can whistle the call the baker uses to bring the dog in (and so can the dog), and that she thinks walnuts have the same smell as sleep. I’ve told her almost nothing of myself and somehow still feel known in a way that isn’t uncomfortable.

“Come,” she says, as the wind shifts and threads the lane with woodsmoke. “There’s a place we can sit.”

The place turns out to be a low wall behind the old olive press, out of the worst of the wind, with a view of the slice of ridge between two roofs. We sit, our knees almost touching. She unwraps something from her pocket: a braid of herbs bound in waxed paper. It looks very like Nonna’s bundle, except this one is slimmer, and the red thread knot is different—two loops crossing like a sketch of wings.

“For you,” she says, and hands it over without ceremony. “So your dreams don’t tangle.”

I turn it in my hands. Lavender again, but a thread of something else too—sweet and bitter both, green even though it’s dried. “What is it?”

“Whatever you need it to be,” she says, then laughs at my face. “I’m joking. Mostly. It’s lavender and thyme and a whisper of rue. And a crumb of something I won’t name because people do foolish things when they hear certain words.”

“Like what?”

“Like think the word is a door and walk through it,” she says. “It isn’t. It’s a window, and it sticks.”

“It smells like… like remembering something you forgot on purpose,” I say before I can stop myself.

“That’s rue,” she says softly. “It makes you tell the truth to yourself. Sometimes that’s all a person needs.”

We sit in a silence that’s busy underneath. People pass the lane mouth in pairs and threes, the way they do when the day’s work has the good manners to end at the same time for more than one person. At some point Lucia tilts her head, listening, the exact way Matteo did last night. The air smells different for a breath—a bitter thread like pennyroyal crushed under a boot—and then it’s gone.

“What is it?” I ask.

She considers. “Somebody whistled for a dog,” she says. “Or for something they believed was a dog.”

“Are you always like this?” I ask, and hear the fondness in my own voice before I can hide it. “Saying a sensible thing and setting a spark under it?”

“I am always like this,” she agrees. “It’s less boring than the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“Pretending not to be,” she says.

We fall into talk that isn’t quite gossip and isn’t quite confession. I tell her that sometimes the house feels larger after Nonna goes to bed, as if it’s breathing differently; she tells me that sometimes she wakes to find the cat facing the wall as if listening to something on the other side. I tell her I can never tell when the sky is finished with a colour; she says she can, and proves it by pointing at the strip above the ridge. “Now it’s done,” she says. And it is. The blue gives up some last brightness I hadn’t seen it still holding and becomes the honest colour of evening.

I realise, with a small start, that I like her. Not just in the way you like someone because you need them, or because they are an opening into a world you’re curious about. I like the way she holds her body like an instrument she knows how to tune. I like the way she doesn’t flinch when she says the word strega but uses a different word anyway. I like the way she looks at the world as if it’s already agreed to be interesting for her.

“What did you do yesterday?” she asks, so lightly it could be nothing, and it is only the smallest weight on the hook.

“We walked,” I say. “Up to the chapel.”

“With Matteo,” she says, and smiles not unkindly when I don’t confirm or deny. “He walks as if the ridge belongs to him, but he still asks it for permission.”

“And you?”

“I walk as if I belong to the ridge,” she says. “But I still ask myself for permission.”

“Which works better?”

“Depends what you want to bring home,” she says. “Or what you’re willing to leave behind.”

We are quiet again. The quiet sits easily, like a third person who knows us both but doesn’t interrupt. Somewhere down the lane, someone drops a pan, and three voices call out at once to ask nothing and everything. Lucia bites her lip, not to keep from speaking but as if tasting a thought before she commits to it.

“My Nonna says Signora Maria is one of us,” she says at last, very matter-of-fact. “She just doesn’t call it that because she likes to pretend nobody taught her.”

The words land like a pebble in a still pool and make rings that keep going. “One of you,” I repeat, careful with the syllables the way you’re careful with glass.

Lucia shrugs. “A woman who knows where to put a knot so it stays put,” she says. “A woman who listens to the part of the wind that doesn’t have manners. A woman who can look at a sprig of blue flowers and know whether it’s a gift or a warning.”

“Are you telling me my Nonna is a—”

“I’m telling you your Nonna is your Nonna,” Lucia says gently. “Whatever else she is is her business to name. I only ever name my own business.”

“Which is?”

She grins. “Walking,” she says. “And telling the truth to people who ask for it. And sometimes to people who don’t.”

“What’s my truth?” I ask, because the dare is sitting right there between us with its chin up.

Lucia looks at me and then looks away, which startles me more than if she had stared. “You want to believe the stories,” she says. “But you want to do it without giving anything up.”

“That sounds unflattering.”

“It’s ordinary,” she says. “The mountain doesn’t mind. It likes ordinary. But it doesn’t let you stay there forever.”

I want to argue, to ask her who told her she could speak as if she knows the inside of my ribs, but the wind finds the edge of my scarf just then and tucks a cold finger behind it, and when I look up the ridge has the colour of a thought I’m not ready to finish.

“I should go,” I say, because my mouth remembers the hour even when my head does not. “Nonna will want the beans from the market and her rosemary cuttings.”

Lucia stands with me, smooth as the end of a sentence. “I’ll walk you to the corner,” she says, which is ridiculous because the corner is close enough to throw a pebble at, but it turns out not to be about distance.

At the corner, she reaches into her pocket and produces a small silver coin with a hole in it. She threads a sliver of red string through and ties it not to my wrist but to the handle of my basket.

“For luck?” I ask.

“For remembering to look down before you step,” she says. “Luck is a lazy word for paying attention.”

“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.

“You can thank me by bringing me news of whether your Nonna accepted my grandmother’s rosemary cuttings without making a fuss,” she says. “If she made a fuss, I’ll know I have to bribe her with honey.”

“She doesn’t fuss,” I say, and then correct myself, “She fusses silently.”

“Then I’ll bribe her silently,” Lucia says, with the practical air of someone who has bribed grandmothers before.

We don’t hug. We don’t promise anything. We only let our eyes do that small leaning-forward thing that means more later, and then she turns back toward the square with a stride that says she knows which stones like her best.

I walk home with the herb braid tucked into my coat, the coin against the basket rattling like a small bell when I forget to hold it still. The lane has the end-of-day smell of soup and wool and impatience. When I open the door, the house notices me and pretends it didn’t.

“Beans?” Nonna asks.

“In the basket,” I say, and set them down. “Signora Vittoria says if you want rosemary cuttings, go today, not tomorrow.”

“Today,” Nonna says, as if she has already decided to have decided. “And what was the bundle I sent doing when you arrived?”

“Hanging now in her kitchen,” I say. “High enough the cat needs a ladder.”

“Good,” Nonna says. She looks at the braid in my hand and raises one eyebrow. “And that?”

“From Lucia,” I say, and watch her face carefully.

“Lucia,” she repeats, like testing a coin’s weight. “Pretty name.”

“She says she’s a benandante,” I add.

Nonna’s mouth remembers to be amused, but her eyes don’t. “People say many things,” she says. “What did she do?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Something. It felt—possible.”

“Possible is where most things live,” Nonna says. She takes the braid, sniffs it, nods grudging approval at the knot, and hands it back. “Hang it where it can see you but can’t fall on your face in the night.”

I hang it on the bedpost. It looks at once old and brand new, like something I might have owned as a child in a story I forgot to remember.

***

Sleep is slower to come than I hoped. The house breathes the way it does when it thinks no one is listening, and from the street the quiet has a texture—threads crossing, knots tightening and letting out again. When I do slip under, it’s like stepping into a stream and finding the current kinder than you expected.

I dream, but only in edges. Lucia’s copper-streaked hair turning the colour of a fox in sunlight. A circle pressed into grass and then pushed back up again by a forgiving hand. A silver coin with a hole in it, tied to a basket, tied to a wrist, tied to a door latch. Somewhere outside the dream, or inside it, three notes arrange themselves in the air like careful footsteps and stop at my sill without asking.

I don’t answer. I don’t need to. Morning will want answers soon enough.

When I wake, the braid smells faintly of rue and the kind of truth you can bear if you look at it sideways. A cat—someone else’s, nobody’s, the whole village’s—sits on the window ledge and faces the wall like it has decided to be a prayer.

I think: friend. Not in the way where you collect a person like a charm, but in the way where someone else’s footsteps start sounding like the right tempo for your own. And I think: door. Not because we talked about three of them, or circles, or rules, but because something in the day has moved from the hallway to the threshold and is waiting for me to say how far I intend to walk.

I breathe in. I breathe out. I listen, just to see whether the ridge has kept its breath or spent it.

Somewhere between the two, a choice is being made. I don’t yet know whether I am the one making it.