He told her his tale of woe, how his car had broken down almost directly in front of her house. He was grateful that she seemed to trust him, and better still, that she understood his English.
She smiled. "Venga! Come! Venga nel salotto! Come into the parlour!" she said, beckoning him through the door into her front room.
Immediately upon entering, he felt a strangeness engulf him. The feeling that he had been here before crept up his spine and settled on his shoulders, like some gargoyle looking at him.
"My English not good," she said.
"No! No!" he protested. "It's fine! I wish I knew Italian so well!" He heard himself speak these words, but they were a mere echo to the clamor in his brain that was shouting, "Why?" Why was this old, old house, on this little dirt road nestled in the hills of Tuscany....why was it so familiar to him....who until three weeks ago, had never so much as set foot outside the United States?
"I learn a little English from the American soldiers." He was aware of her speaking. "You know...the occupation...twenty years ago....no...it was more than twenty. The years go so fast!" Engrossed in his thoughts, he made no response.
"Could it be that I heard stories about this house," he wondered, "in my family, perhaps? When I was very young...too young to remember consciously?"
Oh, but he knew that was not possible. His ancestors, on his mother's side, at least, had been Virginians since the very existence of the State of Virginia itself, and before that, they had been loyal subjects of British monarchs.
"Then why do I have such an intense familiarity with this modest farmhouse in this remote Tuscan village?"
"Scusa? Pardon me?" the woman asked, and he realized he had spoken the last thought aloud.
"Oh, nothing, nothing," he said. "I was just thinking....that is, I am very tired...."
"I get you un' apertivo, an...how you say...apertif?" she asked. "It is late to repair your automobile tonight. Perhaps you rest here, then go in the morning. Yes? But first you have un' apertivo."
"Thank you," he said. "That would be very kind of you."
"Si riposa un po'... you rest alittle," she said. "I return subito...immediately."
He sat on the divan and returned to his thoughts. His father's lineage was German, Prussian more accurately. Maybe that was it. "Nonsense!" he told himself. "Prussia is a far distance from these hills, and it would be too coincidental to suppose that my paternal ancestors, had they ever ventured this far south at all, which is doubtful, would have come upon this very house, nestled in the rolling hills of the Florentine countryside. Besides, even if they had, how would their knowledge of this place have jumped into my brain? It's not something that becomes part of one's genes!...Or is it?"
She returned with a tray and two glasses. They sat for awhile, sipping their refreshment and groping for conversation. Finally they arose, and even before he followed her out of the parlour, he knew there would be a buff-colored hallway on the other side, and that from this hallway would be, on the right, the sala da pranzo, the dining room, and that it would be large and bare, save for a round oaken table and twelve massive, rough-hewn chairs, and that its floor would be of earth. But when they arrived far enough down the hallway for him to glance into the dining room, he saw that he was wrong, for the floor of the sala da pranzo was concrete, and this puzzled him, for in his mind's eye, he had been sure it was a dirt floor. He looked around then, and saw that all the floors were of concrete, and it disqueted him, because his memory told him it should not be so.
She beckoned him to follow her up the narrow wooden stairs. "Venga, please. Come," she said. "I show you the bedroom. It belong to my son, but he is now gone. You will be comfortable here for the night."
Suddenly the wind battered against the window and for an instant, the Spartan bedroom was brightly illuminated. He and the woman stopped and stood still until a crash
of thunder ceased vibrating throughout the house.
Under the influence of the nature of the night, he found himself wondering if perhaps the fates had some purpose in store...given the odd circumstance of his rented Fiat's having chosen precisely this house before which to stage its breakdown. In truth, the very breakdown itself gave him pause--so strange it was that the car had purred merrily along the road one moment, and then had become utterly and completely immobile the next. He shrugged off the haunting thought, convincing himself that his friends were right when they often told him he was too much the poet. "A veritable Edgar Allan Poe," a young lady friend had once called him.
He smiled now at the Signora. "You are most kind," he said. "Of course, I shall expect to pay..."
She smiled and protested,, and bobbed her head, and protested anew. Somewhere in the far recesses of memory, he knew this was the deeply embedded etiquette of this particular countryside...that they protested no, no, and expected the other one to go on insisting, both realizing full well that the outcome would and should, in all civility, be the very thing so much protested at the start. There flashed in his mind, a scene, he knew not from when or where, of himself, in pantaloons and a rough shirt, seated at the oaken table in the dining room of this very house. His shoes, under the table, loomed large in his mind's eye, and unexplainably, they were wooden. He saw a man, in like pantaloons and shirt, standing in the frame of the doorway, smiling, and he saw his parents, but they didn't have the faces of his parents. Still, he knew these to be his father and mother. How he knew was a mystery. At any rate, his parents bade the man enter and share their repast. The man politely protested that he had just eaten, but they insisted that he join them at dinner. He said he really could not eat even one more bite, and they persisted, and he persisted, until finally he entered and sat at their table, and an earthenware plate was set before him, afterwhich the man ate with such enthusiasm, that it was clear he had not had a meal for several hours.and he ate with them.
The scene, so vivid, caused his heart to pound within his chest. He wondered if the Signora heard it. If she did, she took no notice, and the question of payment seemed to have been bandied back and forth enough to now be settled, for she said, "Twenty-five-thousand lire will be very acceptable. You are most generous." She told him she would fill a the wash basin in the room with water from the kitchen, for him to wash with in the morning.
Mention of the kitchen reminded him of a fireplace, a great stone fireplace, and a large pot hanging therein, and of a small, dark woman stirring its contents.
"Tell me, Signora," he said, "the kitchen...is it....does it have a fireplace? And on the wall beside it, is there an oven...that is, a door in the stone wall, with a tunnel hollowed out, and is it used as an oven?"
She shrugged, and the gesture was so typical of these parts, that he felt an inexplicable fondness for her. "You have seen one of these old houses," she said, "and you have seen them all. Si! Yes, it has such a fireplace. It is old, very old, this house.
My great grandfather remembered his great-grandfather telling of this house in his youth. Very old, this house. Tomorrow you see. Now you sleep. The walk to Lucca will take perhaps more than one hour tomorrow. There you can telephone. Reposa bene, Signore. Rest well, sir. I go now to bring you water." She gave a half-courtsey, picked up the wash basin, and was gone.
"That must be the answer," he reasoned, willing himself to believe. "To see one such house is to see them all." But he had never, never to his knowledge, seen one before. His flight from London had set down in Milano only four days ago, and his stops since then, up to this unplanned sojourn, had been in hotels and albergios. The gargoyle loomed, and he tried to blot it out, for after all, this voyage had been planned so that he could settle his nerves, quiet his anxieties. His doctor had advised it.
He lay awake most of the night, sleeping only in snatches, and waking in a sweat of remembering some other facet of the house, some other little scene that had taken place here...an ancient scene, of other times, of another era.
Finally, the chatter of birds outside his window, and a shaft of sunlight across the cold floor heralded the morning. How did he know the floor was cold, still snug abed as he lay? He pushed the question from his mind. The fantasies that the darkness of night had magnified were not be fearful in the lovely light of morning. In all honesty, though, he could not convince himself that they had been mere fantasies.
He washed and shaved, using the long, old-fashioned, leather-handled razor hanging at the side of the washstand. The washstand was not familiar, and for that he was grateful, and felt an affection, an unreasonable relief and love for the impersonability of the washstand, for he knew nothing of its past, and it recalled for him nothing of his.
The old woman, in the courtyard, was calling to her cat. He saw the courtyard in his mind, although it had been dark when he had arrived last night, and in truth, he had not approached the house from that side. "Miscia, miscia," he heard her call.
He had never, not to his conscious knowledge, heard the word before, yet he knew she called her cat, and he wondered how he knew. "Her tone of voice, perhaps," he thought. "Perhaps 'Here kitty, kitty' and 'Miscia, miscia' have a universal inflection."
He shivered and dressed hurridly, and descended the stairs, anxious to quit this house, this vicinity, this very country, as soon as possible. He intended to return to The States immediately, submerge himself in his work, surround himself with his sophisticated friends, and forget such a place as this existed. "I have to," he told himself. "My sanity demands it!"
The Signora, having already set breakfast at the oaken table for him, bid him 'buon giorno', and he returned the greeting. He did not feel up to protesting the amount of work she must have gone to in preparing his breakfast. Yet he knew he should, and being of breeding, and knowing she expected it, he did. The formalities of protestations completed, he pulled out her chair for her, then circled the table to his own place, and prepared to sit down, but the cat chose that precise moment to skitter into the dining room, almost upsetting him as it darted through his legs. Catching his balance, he remembered clearly another cat, a similar cat, but they had never had cats in his home. His mother was allergic to them. He faced it squarely then...the gargoyle. And strangely, he was no longer afraid. He even found himself interested to know if perhaps this cat, this very cat.... "Hmm. Is it also true of animals?" he thought. "And if so, were they always animals, or did they once enter life as other forms?"
He wondered then if he himself had always been human, and would he always be so? Or would he someday, some century, some eon from now, when the elements were rightly aligned, and the mood pregnant...would he someday get a glimpse of grazing in a grassy field, his snout close to the ground, the smell of grass in his nostrils?
"Perhaps it isn't only the human mind," he thought, "that is capable of memory. Perhaps the bovine mind...the feline mind...the mind of an ant...."
The thought was ridiculous, but it was there, and it made him smile.
He sat down to breakfast, and felt akin to the cat, to the woman, to all mankind, indeed to the world, the universe, and far beyond.
"Well, cat," he said aloud, lifting his breakfast cup in salute, "here's to other times and other places!"
The woman looked at him, not understanding. He, however, at last understood perfectly, and could hardly wait to get on with this life of his.
"And the next," he told himself, and the next, and the next."