Arcadia Awakens (17 page)

She could tell where this conversation was going. “So neither Cesare nor you can openly challenge the other? And because you’ll come into your inheritance in a few weeks’ time, Cesare is keeping up appearances and obeying you.”

“At least about unimportant things.”

She struck the steering wheel with her hand. “That girl has been shut up for
six years!
”

“That’s unimportant to him,” he corrected.

She looked into his eyes. In the background, bare hills were gliding past.

“You don’t trust me,” he said.

She laughed mirthlessly. “Of course not.”

“Because I took you to the island with me?”

“Because you didn’t tell me the truth about why you did it.”

“Would you have come if I’d told you?”

“Maybe.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I would.”

She sensed that he was still watching her, but she had to concentrate on her driving. The road was winding again.

“Would you make a right just up ahead?” he asked.

“And then?”

“I’ll show you something.”

“More mysteries.”

“There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

“You’re the mystery.”

He smiled. “Me?”

Rosa nodded, and brushed her hair back from her face. But she didn’t say any more, and turned off to the right next time the road forked.

They came to a dusty barrier across the road, made of wooden planks nailed together crosswise. Alessandro indicated that she should drive around the blockade. And the next two as well.

They were the only people in a bleak landscape of burnt stubble fields and wild olive trees. A cloud of dust billowed in their wake, dividing the landscape behind them like a brown wall. On the hills, cacti reached their arms to the sky.

Ahead of them lay an expressway access road. Except that there were no guardrails or markings. No road signs either. And no other vehicles at all. Yet the road, following a narrow curve, led to a broad ribbon of asphalt tracing a straight line all the way to the horizon. Again, it had no lines painted on it and there were no signs. Rosa thought there would have been space for four traffic lanes on it, but it was covered with the dust and loose soil that had blown over it.

No other sign of life. Just the two of them, the car, and a forgotten road to nowhere.

“Where does it go?”

“To the end of the world,” he said.

He was right about that.

R
OSA COULDN’T DRIVE AS
fast as she would have liked because there were cracks in the asphalt of the road surface. It had risen up in many places, where one tiny plant had found its way through to daylight, followed by a hundred others. There was something unsettling in knowing there was so much life seething under the dead gray ribbon of road, eager to break the bars of its dungeon and burst out into freedom.

“What is this road?” she asked.

“An expressway that was never completed. It was supposed to link the A19 right across the interior to the A20 up on the north coast. My father landed the contract and let his construction gangs loose in this area—until a new government in Rome put a stop to it.”

“And now it simply stays the way it is?”

“Tearing up the finished part would cost almost as much as building the whole thing in the first place. The provinces of Sicily have no money. There were protests years ago, but after a while the organizers just moved on to the next scandal, the next ruined building that made someone or other rich.”

“Not someone or other. The Carnevares.”

He was looking straight ahead. “My family, yes.”

She concentrated on the road, staring at the ugly, now useless, construction ahead of her—and suddenly realized that she liked it here. Maybe because nothing like this existed anywhere else—its charm lay in the totally unique nature of the place. Of course there were deserted roads elsewhere. But in front of her stretched mile upon mile of empty asphalt over which hardly any vehicle had ever driven apart from bulldozers. It gave her goose bumps all the way down her back.

“And under it?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is this just an expressway that no one uses, or is something hidden underneath it?”

He’d understood her at once, she was sure of that, and it was to his credit that a trace of shame made him hesitate to talk about that part of his family’s business.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

“I saw your lake. And the dam.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “That old story? Not a word of it is true.”

“Who told you so?” she asked contemptuously. “Your father?”

He pressed his lips together and didn’t reply. “Children of the clan,” he said at last, “are lied to from the moment we’re born. If our mothers and fathers pretend we’re leading a perfectly normal family life—well, that’s the first big lie, and after that it never stops. They try to make us think everything’s the same as for other people, other families. But
nothing
is the same.” He shifted restlessly in the passenger seat. “If we grow up and have kids ourselves, and then grandchildren, we keep finding out stuff we’d never have thought possible. Finding out—”

“Crimes,” she suggested, with a shrug.

“Business deals. With all the inevitable consequences, going beyond anything we can imagine. And it’ll be just the same for our kids, and their kids—because after a while we lose any real sense of our own behavior. We don’t even realize we’re no better than our fathers and grandfathers.”

She slowed down and glanced at him. “And I thought
I
was a pessimist.”

“We’re born into this life. Into the clans and their tradition. We didn’t ask for all that, did we?”

“I ought to have stayed in the States.” She reflected for a moment. “You too, come to think of it.”

“I don’t think those stories about Giuliana and the dam are true,” he said, unmoved. “But do I know for sure? And do I know what I may find out sometime, maybe just by chance, in some old file somewhere?”

She was still thinking about that when the horizon ahead suddenly got much closer. She swore quietly, took her foot off the gas, and braked. The car stopped less than twenty yards from the end of the world.

Alessandro got out. “Did I promise you too much?”

She was still staring ahead over the wheel, so he came around the car and opened the door for her, not with exaggerated gallantry but as a matter of course. “Take a look up close.”

“Up close?” she murmured. “But there’s nothing to see there. Nothing at all.”

“You just have to look hard. Then you’ll find what you’re after.”

It sounded almost as if he were trying to help her in her search for the unique, awkward magic of the place. And she realized he must have thought the same, the first time he ever drove along this road to nowhere, maybe every time he returned. Even today. Maybe everyone, in the face of this void, was searching for something to cling to. Alessandro perhaps even a little more than other people. In the last few minutes she’d discovered more thoughtfulness in him than she’d have thought possible, more desire for answers. Thinking this, it was difficult to look away from him and turn her eyes on what lay ahead of them again.

The trail, overgrown with weeds, ended in a jagged edge of splintered asphalt, as if a mighty mouth had bitten off the road. Beyond it yawned a deep abyss with a drop of three hundred feet or more—a wide rocky ravine with steep walls that had countless openings in them. At first Rosa thought they were a strange natural feature, a curious structure in the porous stone. Then she saw that they were caves.

“Tombs,” said Alessandro, “several hundred of them. About three thousand years old. They were made by the Siculians, one of the original peoples of Sicily. The Arabs exterminated them later. They left no trace behind but their necropolises, the cities of their dead. There are several more of them on the island, and this one isn’t even the largest. The Pantalica ravine down south is—”

“Do you ever keep your mouth shut just for a moment?” She didn’t mean to snap, and he didn’t seem offended. But she couldn’t listen anymore; she had to walk on for a little way and see the place alone, with her own eyes, before getting any explanations.

She walked up to the edge where the road broke off, impressed but not afraid of the height and the wind blowing up from below. At the bottom of the ravine lay large chunks of concrete rubble. The gorge was about a hundred and fifty feet wide, possibly more, and the opposite edge looked as abrupt and jagged as this one. Beyond were the humped backs of hills, and dusty valleys, and somewhere beyond the horizon no doubt traces of civilization again. At the moment, however, she and Alessandro seemed to be alone in the world.

“The bridge to the other side was the last part finished,” said Alessandro, breaking the silence. “But after the construction work stopped, the government said the bridge had to go. My father’s firms were commissioned to destroy what they’d only just built. But after that the provincial government in Enna didn’t have the money to take the rubble away, so it all stays there just as if it fell from heaven. Thousands of tons of concrete in the middle of the Siculians’ valley of death.”

There was a note of respect in his voice that startled her. He was always surprising her, and she had to admit that she liked that.

She sat down cross-legged on the hot asphalt, not caring that her minidress had ridden up. The edge of the gorge was only a foot and a half in front of her, and gusts of wind kept blowing up from below to try to drag her down into the depths. She was strong enough to resist the urge to let herself go with them.

Alessandro sat down beside her and splayed his fingers on the asphalt. It was as if he could sense something under it, the heart of this secret place. Suddenly she, too, felt it, beating like her own.

“You don’t really think it was a dream, do you?” he asked abruptly.

“The snake and the tiger?”

He nodded.

“So what? That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I was in therapy for almost a year.” How easy it was to say that. Maybe for the very reason that she hardly knew him. “They’re always telling you that none of what you see and hear is real. Or none of the interesting things anyway. Never mind what you believe or don’t believe, they say, it’s all in your head. Because you’re crazy.”

“But you’re not crazy,” he said.

“I could be crazy as all get-out and you’d have no idea of it. I could be an ax murderess. Fucking Freddy Krueger from your worst nightmares.” She slowly turned her head and looked at him. At his attractive, open face that could turn dark and reserved within seconds. The curve of his lips. The green eyes that looked into her a little too far and that she couldn’t defend herself against.

It could have been so simple. But she was who she was, and
simple
, in her case, meant on the other side of the globe. Probably somewhere beyond Australia and down at the South Pole.

She had problems getting too close to anyone. And she couldn’t even trust herself anymore, let alone anyone else. She avoided meetings and conversations, without knowing why. Inside, she guessed she was as twisted as one of the wild olive trees on this island.

She was a nightmare, more particularly her own nightmare, and everything in her cried out to her to put up barriers and barricade the gates at once.

It would have been only fair to tell him so. To explain, right now, that she was the bloody
Titanic
whose wake would carry him under, if he didn’t jump into the lifeboat and head for the open sea.

Instead, he leaned over to kiss her.

She waited. Hesitated. Then withdrew her head before their lips could touch. For a split second he looked offended, but then he smiled, blinked at the sun, and said, “Well, when it gets to that point, I want to be there.”

“When what gets to what point?”

“When you’re not looking at everyone else as if they’d just declared war on you. And when you realize”—he pointed across the ravine—“that things may look like the end of the world but the world still goes on, over there on the other side. Maybe just one really large step would cross it.”