When the Mountain keeps Secrets

Three circles, One spring

I turn a page and lose my place and then find it again not with my eyes but with the unease that tells me where the work is. My mother has made a list of names. Not villager names—though there are those, too, in a neat block at the end with little notes (good with sheep; talks too much and not about the right things)—but other names that sound more like titles: La Guardia d’Orso, Custode della Luna, La Guardiana delle Ombre. Some of them I have heard in jokes told too late at night when adults forget there are children with ears. Some of them are new and feel old anyway.

There is a map folded in the back, crushed into the spine like something that did not want to be a map and had to be told twice. When I ease it out, the paper threatens to c***k along one crease, and I hold my breath the way you hold your breath when you are defusing a situation with a person who needs defusing. The drawing is amateur and also easy to believe: a rough outline of our slope, the fortress like a tooth, the little chapel like a dot a person made with a pen they loved too much, the old pens like coins tossed and forgotten. The road is a line. The river a thinner line. Above the pasture, higher than I like to think about, a mark: La Fonte with a cross beside it and, in the margin, a note that looks like it was written later, in a hand that had been walking too fast.

non è più pulita.

It is no longer clean.

The lamp flickers once like it has an opinion about my heart rate. I turn the wick down a fraction so the chimney will stop complaining. I should stop. I know I should. Nonna would not have me up here without her, not because she wants to keep me ignorant like people say old women want to keep girls ignorant, but because she knows the weight of certain kinds of knowing is easier to carry in a pair of hands that have carried it before.

My hands are clever. They are not yet good at weight.

I put the first journal down. I stack the others without opening them. That is the plan I announce to myself and the room.

I open the second one anyway.

The dates are closer. There is a change in the handwriting right away, like a person who has started sleeping less and telling herself it is a temporary arrangement. The first page talks about a winter when dogs stopped barking for two nights and how everybody pretended not to notice so the silence would not become proud. The next page has a smear across it as if someone noticed the ink was wet and tried to keep a word from running away. Under the smear, I can still see the word trying to stand up.

veleno.

Poison.

I shut the book so quickly dust lifts like a sigh from between the pages. I set it gently on top of the first and press my palm against the leather as if I meant to hold the words inside and not my breath. The attic does its small ticking; the tiles make the tiny contracting sound they make when the temperature has decided to do something sensible after a day of showing off.

I am not alone up here. Of course I am alone up here. But I am not alone up here.

At the far end, in the gloom where the rafters make their meeting, something shifts. Not an animal; not a human either. A change. The air has the taste in it that it gets when something outside is close to the wall and has decided the wall is a place to lean. I cannot hear it; I know it. The coin on the curtain tie downstairs is too far away to click; my ear, traitor, supplies the sound anyway, the smallest tremor of metal that is really only in my head and is made of memory.

I could put the journals back. I could slide the false bottom into place and spread the shawl so nicely over the lid that even Nonna’s eyes would slide off it and go elsewhere. I could climb down and put the bar back and go to my bed and press my face into the pillow and tell myself I have not rearranged anything in my world that cannot be put back where it was.

Instead, I wrap the journals in a clean bit of cloth I find in the second trunk and tie them with the kind of knot Nonna says is a kindness because it can be undone by someone who is cold or tired. I slide the packet under my arm and stand up slowly so my knees will not make their loud, traitor sound. I ease the false bottom into place and smooth my palm over it once the way you smooth the hair of a child who is pretending to be asleep so you will carry them.

“Grazie,” I say to the chest that held what I came for. It seems fair.

Crossing the attic feels longer this time, though my feet know the boards already. I lower the hatch, set the bar back in the hold, and feel the iron seat itself with the satisfaction of a tool being exactly where it belongs. The dark on the landing is ordinary dark again. The lamp’s circle is small and trustworthy. I breathe with my mouth closed because dust is a kinder flavour when you don’t invite it in.

Downstairs, I do not go to my room right away. I stand in the kitchen in the warm draft the stove makes and listen to the house tell me that what I did is done. The coin does not move; the red threads do not flare; the salt twist does not weigh more or less. I am the only measurement that has changed.

I choose a hiding place that will make Nonna scold me if she finds it because it is too clever and because clever places are always the first places other clever people look. Then I choose a hiding place that is not clever: between the mattress tick and the straw where the fabric is already worn thin and would be mended next week if there were a second pair of hands here to hold the corners. I slide the bundle there and pat the place flat and then smooth the blanket over it as if I have put to bed a thought I intend to wake up again.

On my way back down, I pause with my hand on the stair rail and look up because I do not want to and because I do. The hatch sits exactly where it ought. The bar’s shadow is a simple stripe.

“Domani,” I whisper into the stairwell because it is a word that means both promise and reprieve. Tomorrow.

I wash my hands at the basin and the water is colder than it should be. When I hold my fingers under my nose out of habit to see what work has stained them, I smell dust and leather and the faintest ghost of rue from the herb braid, because the scent of truth is stubborn and gets into the small places where you keep your plans.

I try to eat a bite of bread. My teeth do the work; my mouth forgets to collect its reward. I put the bread down. I place the lamp so the light makes the corner where the attic stair begins into just a corner again. I sit on the edge of the bed without meaning to and then lie down entirely on purpose because the body sometimes likes to remind the mind who is in charge.

Outside, the lane talks to itself in little stones rolling under a cart wheel and someone’s cat deciding to be important at a gate. The sky does the colour—the one it does just before it decides to be entirely night—and I watch it through the thin place in the curtain where the fabric rubs against the tie and has given up. I do not expect to sleep.

I sleep like a person standing up inside her own head, one hand on the bolt.

When I wake, not much time has gone by because the room is the same blue-grey and my face has the same feeling it has when I have cried but I have not cried. The house is doing that listening it does when all the people in it are counting. The counting is not out loud; it is older than out loud. It is the counting you do between one knock and the next.

There is no knock.

There is the softest pressure at the place on the wall where the attic beams rest on the stone, a pressure that knows its strength and is not trying to prove it tonight. It comes and goes—a leaning and a letting go. Not a paw. Not a shoulder. Not anything I can name without seeming foolish to myself in the morning.

I reach my hand toward the wall and stop before I touch it, as if I have learned a manners lesson I did not know I was taking. I let my fingers hang in the air, neither insisting nor withdrawing. The pressure fades a fraction, then returns, as if an old friend who owes an apology has chosen instead to sit nearby and be quiet.

“Tomorrow,” I say again, which is a ridiculous thing to say to a house or a mountain or a memory, and the room accepts it the way it accepts the lamp’s shadow edging the cupboard: as a fact that will be truer if I repeat it.

I sleep in pieces after that. In one I am walking on the fortress path, and the stone under my hand is warm, and my mother’s journals are heavy in my basket, and someone ahead of me keeps not turning around when I say wait. In another I am in the old chapel with the bear in the wall and the eyes are not open but I know what colour they would be if they were. In the last I am sitting at this kitchen table and the journals are laid out like a feast and I can read every word and none of them mean what I think they mean yet.

Morning will come. Matteo will or will not knock. Lucia will or will not arrive with a string of rowan in her pocket and a sentence she has been waiting to say. Nonna will or will not be where she needs to be when she needs to be there. The house will remember or forgive. The mountain will decide which.

For now, the bar holds. The latch in my head lifts and settles, lifts and settles, like a person breathing.

I lie very still and let the day that isn’t here yet take my weight for a moment, the way a hand takes the weight of a head when a person you love has fallen asleep next to you and you do not want to wake them.