Chapter 5
Luca
He had heard Matej get up at five, his first morning in the house, the sounds of a man moving through it by dark, no hesitation, no light. Just: up, and out, and the door closing softly behind him.
Luca had slept after that. Deeply, like something had been resolved without his input.
He wonders how many mornings he can reasonably hope for this. He is, he decides, entirely on board with finding out.
The room has a desk.
This is what was in the emails — a room with a desk and a window — and this is what it has.
A desk, a window facing the plateau, a radiator that works after some negotiation, and a bed that is narrow but not uncomfortable, not that he has tested it yet.
He has stayed in worse places for the book.
He has stayed in better places for the book.
This one has something he cannot immediately name, something to do with the thickness of the walls and the way sound moves through them, or doesn’t.
He never just sits. He arranges himself onto the chair in stages, one foot tucked up, until the thing stops being furniture and starts being his.
He begins to write.
He stops.
Not because the work has run out. Because something has surfaced that he has been, with some effort, keeping below the waterline since he arrived.
He is here for the book. That is true. The Karst, the wine culture, the Teran, the producers — all of it true, all of it real, all of it the reason he pitched this to the magazine eight months ago and drove down from Milan to a farm at the edge of a plateau.
He is also here because of a name. Ferrante.
Because of a key he found among his father’s things, and a single word his father spoke at the end, which he has turned over so many times it has stopped meaning anything: legacy.
Because of the estate his family lost after the war.
Because the man downstairs — whose farm this is, whose cheese he ate this morning, whose hands he had been watching all evening before everything else happened — carries a history that is not separate from his own.
He had not planned for the other thing.
He closes the document. Opens a new one. Stares at it.
He thinks: this is still manageable. He has not lied. He has simply not said everything. There is a version of this where the book gets written and the other thing gets resolved and nobody’s hands are dirty.
He has thought this before.
He reaches for the cup. It has gone cold. He drinks it anyway.
Matej finds him two hours into the work, not seeking him out, or not exactly, more that the stairs go past the room and the door was open and he stops.
“Was I too loud,” Matej says. “Earlier. The yard.”
“Come in,” Luca says. “Don’t loiter in the doorway.”
Matej comes in. Leans against the wall instead, which is not meaningfully different. He looks at the desk, the laptop, the notebooks Luca has already arranged in a way that suggests he means to use them. His gaze comes back.
“Mornings — I’m in my head. More than usual. If I don’t respond to something, it’s not personal.”
“Noted,” Luca says. He means it. “Same, actually. I work better before noon. I go somewhere and I’m not always easy to reach.”
Matej looks at him. “So we’re both useless in the morning.”
“Independently useless,” Luca says. “Which is fine.”
Something almost settles in Matej’s face. “If something doesn’t work — the room, the schedule, anything — say it. I’d rather know.”
“Same,” Luca says. “And if something comes up — for either of us — we talk about it. No drama.”
“No drama,” Matej agrees.
They look at each other. It is, Luca thinks, a surprisingly adult conversation to be having the morning after. He appreciates it more than he expected to.
“Internet drops out some nights,” Matej says. “Sometimes during the day too.”
“I have a hotspot.”
Not quite amusement, not quite not. “You’ll need it.”
He straightens from the wall. “Come down when you’re ready. There’s something from the cellar.”
Matej’s footsteps recede. What stays is what they have just settled: Matej’s terms, and his own, stated back.
He thinks of the weeks ahead — the book, the work, the proximity — and feels, underneath it, the discomfort of a man who has just agreed to honesty with someone he is not being entirely honest with.
He is following where things go. He has always done that. It has mostly worked out.
He closes the laptop. Goes downstairs.
The evening has settled in. Matej is in the kitchen, a pot low on the stove, the light yellow against the dark coming up outside. He tells Luca there is a bottle he should try, and goes down to the cellar for it.
What he brings up is a bottle with no label, dark glass, a cork that takes some working.
Not a wine bottle. Luca sees it at once: flatter, the shoulders squared off, the neck short and slightly flared.
A shape from a tradition nobody practices anymore.
Matej sets two glasses on the kitchen table and pours, no preamble, and Luca picks his up and knows, before he has even brought it to his nose, that this is not wine.
“Brandy,” he says.
“My father made brandy too, back when. This one was already here when he took on the farm. From somewhere in the valley, he thought. Old stock. He never knew more than that.” Matej sits. “And I don’t either.”
Luca does, though, not the bottle but the rest of it.
This is, in fact, the thing he knows about that most people don’t — not wine, not the grape itself, but what happens after.
The long patience of distillation. The alchemy of wood and time.
He has written about it once, a long piece for a small magazine that nobody read, and he has been looking, without saying so, for something worth writing about again.
He warms the glass between his palms first — rolls it once, unhurried. Realises what he is doing only after he has already done it. Sets the reflex aside.
He tastes it, sets the glass down, stays quiet.
Then picks it up again. There is a base note in the back of it — something old, something that does not come from a bottle you can buy, something that belongs to one piece of ground and a single year and will not be repeated because you cannot repeat a thing that has already ended.
He does not say any of this.
What he says even less: the taste has put his own father in the room.
Not a memory of him. The absence of him, sudden and physical — the breath going in wrong, his hand flat on the table to hold it still.
That is what does it: the work whole and finished in the glass, and the man who made it gone past any name, past any finding.
His father left a single word and then he was gone, and six months on Luca is still standing in the space where the rest of the sentence should have been.
He breathes once. Lets it pass.
“It’s good,” he says.
Matej looks at him with an expression Luca cannot quite read. “Yes,” he says. “I thought so too.”
They drink. Outside it drops, briefly, and the silence that follows holds.