When the Mountain keeps Secrets

An honest shape

I carry the water in and forget to notice that the bucket is heavier than I am. The house accepts the wet of my boots with the resignation of old planks. I set the bucket down, peel off the top pair of stockings, and rub my hands until they remember they have blood in them.

There is a comfort in chores if you are willing to be comforted. I am willing and unwilling in equal measure. I sweep the last of yesterday’s ash from the hearth and lay the wood the way Nonna taught me: crossbars that invite flame to learn manners. I bank the fire so it will last without becoming proud. I move the brazier a thumb’s width because a thumb’s width can matter. All the while, my mind leans toward the journals like a plant that knows where the light lives.

I don’t go to the attic. The bar will stay where it is until I have company to put it where it isn’t. But the journals are no longer there. I did that already, last night, when the house decided to pretend it wasn’t watching me. They sit now in my room, pressed flat beneath the mattress, the leather spines like a row of closed mouths.

I fetch the top one and the map, because maps are a way to argue with weather. I spread the paper on the table and weigh the corners with a cup, the salt crock, the stub of a candle, a small smooth stone that has lived here so long it knows where to sit. The drawing looks at me without blinking. Rocca Calascio is there, a dark tooth. The little chapel is there, a dot that a person made on a day they wanted to remember the small things that hold up the large ones. The old pens are there in circles made of coins and patience. And higher up, in a place the weather keeps for itself, the word: Fonte. The note beside it, in my mother’s hand, thin and fast: non è più pulita.

It is no longer clean.

I think of the well in the square, its water cold and good this morning, back when the day was ordinary and not yet full of signs. I think of the number of times I have drunk and not wondered what the word clean would do if it were taken away. I think of the way poison looked in ink, a smear that wanted to run and could not get away.

The fire does that soft sigh that means it has remembered how to be flame without me. Outside, a gull of light crosses the wall when the clouds think about moving and then decide to stay. I put a hand on the map’s paper and feel the ridges where it has been folded too long. I imagine a spring that feeds an old stone. I imagine the old stone not caring and caring anyway. I imagine the three paths I saw in the square and draw them, lightly, with the corner of the candle stub: a round, a slant, a hand. They don’t meet here either. They do something worse. They suggest a direction.

I put the map away because the day has only so many thoughts in it, and I promised someone who is not here that I would save some for later. I allow myself the smallest trespass, just enough to take the journal back out and open to the page with the three overlapping circles. La Guardia d’Orso. Custode della Luna. La Guardiana delle Ombre. The hand in the third circle looks like nothing and like somebody I could touch and like myself. The red thread drawn round the wrist makes my own wrist feel warmer.

A shadow crosses the shutters in three pieces—the kind of shadow that only exists when clouds and sun cannot agree. I close the journal because the house is trying to mind its business and I should mind mine. I put it back in the chest and set my shawl on top, the sprig of eryngium turned outward so its blue heads can stare at me and remind me I am being observed by more than paper.

The day tilts. Snow thickens and thins the way a person walks between two rooms in one conversation. The boy’s warning reaches forward, a hand on the elbow of the hour: be careful where the water runs under. The lanes hide what they are when they are generous and then show it when you have forgotten to watch, the way a person will sometimes tell the truth after three cups of wine.

It is somewhere between noon and a guess when I see movement on the high line that leads toward the pass. Not the sharp, quick movement of a dog or a goat. Something more deliberate, a dot that pulls a thin dark thread behind it—the way a person does when the snow has ideas about their ankles. I go to the window and remind myself of the rules about distance: I am not an eagle. The snow makes the near far and the far near. Still. There is someone up there on the line that is not ours and not the one the shepherds prefer.

Pietro? The thought comes like a pebble someone else tossed. He said he meant to begin the ascent tomorrow and the weather answered by moving the idea of tomorrow into a room with a door he cannot find. It could be him. It could be anyone. It could be a trick of my eyes, which have been reading old ink and have learned mischief.

I watch until the dot becomes resolute about being a dot and then disappears into the mouth of white where the slope curves. It leaves behind a feeling more than a fact: that the place where people shouldn’t be will always have one person who thinks perhaps they are the one the place had in mind.

In the kitchen, the fire goes on being kind. I put a pot on because hunger is as honest as shapes. Beans again; a stub of sausage cut thin enough to make sense as a seasoning, not a claim. When the water bumps at the edges of the pot, I let myself take two pages of the journal that aren’t marked with anything I have to carry around like a live coal. I read about a year when the first snow came like this and stayed three days and cows gave less milk and the baker’s oven sulked without reason until someone mended the oven door with wire that had never been used for anything else. It is the sort of story households tell one another to keep themselves usable.

The afternoon decides to be shorter than it looks. The light becomes the kind that is in a hurry to be somewhere else. I bank the fire as instructed in the letter and latch the shutters as if I have always been the sort of person who latches shutters in time. The red threads on the window catches make a small, brave line. I tie a third around the bedpost because three is an honest shape and I am in a mood to be honest with furniture.

Somewhere after dusk takes the edge off the white, the wind remembers it has opinions. It doesn’t hammer. It sidles and tries to be handsy. The juniper smell wakes up as if smoke understands weather better than anyone gives it credit for. I move the brazier a different thumb’s width and tell myself that if I am fussing, then I come from a long line of women who fussed their way through trouble.

The first sound from outside is small: a soft sift, like someone is drawing the back of their glove along the wall under my window. Cat, I think, because thinking cat is easy. The coin trembles once and is done. I do not get up. I pull the blanket around my shoulders tighter because blankets like to be told they are doing something important.

The second sound is the snow itself, shifting on the tiled sill the way flour shifts when someone sets a bowl down too hard. Then nothing. Then the thin, quick scratch of something at the very edge of the window frame. Not a knock; that belongs to doors. Not the tap that belongs to polite ghosts. More like a test. The sound a person makes with a nail when they are deciding whether a paint has finished drying.

“È il vento,” I tell the room, because that sentence has looked after a lot of nights and it deserves to keep its job.

The wind—good worker that it is—tries again, different this time. A long, slow brush. A pause. Another, lower down. The wall remembers these gestures the way skin remembers a touch that had something to say. I can feel the shape of the house around me, the way you can feel the shape of your own body when you lie still and admit you live inside it.

I think of Nonna’s letter. I think of her voice when voice is a thing you can send down wood: If the wind knocks from the wrong side, don’t knock back. This is not exactly knocking. This is the suggestion of a conversation that would be delighted if I would mistake it for language.

I go to the window anyway, because the part of me that listens for secrets is stronger than good sense when I can smell snow. I do not open it. I only put my hand on the inside wood and set my ear where cold can make its argument. There is no sound you could take to a priest or a drunk. Only the sense of a presence leaning, the way a person does when they don’t want to put their weight on you but need to stand near something that stands.

I count to three because counting to three is a thing that seems to make the world behave. One, the house breathes. Two, I breathe. Three—there is a faint, unmistakable noise from the lane below: a step in snow that is not trying to be quiet and not trying not to be quiet. Another, after a pause. Another. Three steps. The kind of three that circles rather than approaches.

I do not move the latch. I do not move at all. I let the three steps take up their space. In the quiet that follows, a flake of loose plaster lets go from somewhere higher and drifts into my hair. I do not brush it away. I listen to the sound of my own heart making foolish arrangements with my ribs and then remembering it has a job.

When I can finally make myself step back, I do it slowly, the way you walk away from a sleeping dog you don’t mind.

I blow out the lamp because this is a night that belongs to dark, not to flame. The embers in the brazier keep their own small council. I lie down and keep my eyes open until the eyes themselves agree to the opposite plan. When I sleep, it is the kind of sleep that knows it will be inspected in the morning.

I wake once, deep in the blue of the hour that steals names. Outside, the whiteness has taken on a light of its own. The coin moves in the slightest draft and makes a patient click no louder than a mouse’s good idea. From the lane comes the soft whuff of snow giving way under something large and the almost-sound of breath. It holds. It lets go. It holds again. It is not close. It is close enough.

I don’t answer.

When morning remembers me, I find what the night left behind: on the sill outside, where the wind likes to sulk, a little ridge of snow has been pressed down in a long, broad arc. Not claws. Not neat dog-business. The kind of mark weight makes when it learns a surface. Below, in the lane, half a pattern has been erased by a light drift—only half. I can see where something big stood and then where something lighter crossed, and between the two the gentle blur where a hand might have balanced itself on the wall for a moment that had more to do with companionship than need.

I do not take the broom to it. I leave it to the sun and to whatever it means when three things say their names to the same patch of snow.

On the table, the letter from Nonna lies where I left it. I smooth it with two fingers. The postscript looks like it was smiling when it wrote itself: Three is an honest shape—use it. I tie a third red thread where the first two hang. I set three small pieces of wood for the morning fire. I cut three slices of bread so I will have an alibi if anyone asks why I am counting.

When I lift the latch to check the lane, the cold takes my hand as if to say good morning. Down the slope, a figure turns the corner—small, bundled, purposeful. Not my Nonna. Not yet. The snow has decided to stay another day.

I make the house ready to be alone, and I make myself ready to act as if alone is a kind of company. The mountain keeps its counsel under the white, and the three paths from the square have already softened into a story only those who saw it will believe. That is all right. The day is long. The spring on the map sits where paper says it does whether the sky approves or not. And somewhere between the old stone and the water that feeds it, a sentence my mother began is waiting for my part of the breath.