Chapter 8
Luca
He comes in later than usual, a producer in Komen kept him for two hours, a man who talks in full paragraphs about soil composition and expects his listener to keep up, which Luca did, which seemed to surprise him.
Matej is at the table with something mechanical in pieces in front of him, small parts, a lamp angled close, reading glasses Luca has never seen before pushed up on his nose.
Luca stops.
Matej looks up. Registers his expression. “Don’t,” he says.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re thinking it loudly.”
Luca sets down the jar of pickled peppers someone pressed into his hands in Komen and sits down across from him.
The glasses are heavy black frames, architect’s glasses, and they do something to his face Luca was not prepared for — turn the cheesemaker into a man who could be running something.
Paris, Matej says when he asks, years ago, and leaves it there.
“They suit you,” Luca says.
“They’re functional,” Matej says, and goes back to the parts.
Luca watches him work — the precision of it, the absolute economy — and thinks about a colleague in Milan, a good journalist, who once told him: you only ever write about places, never people. He meant it as an observation, not a criticism. Luca has thought about it maybe twice since then.
He is thinking about it now.
He takes out his pen. He has been writing on the floor of the hallway this morning, back against the wall, legs stretched out, because the light was better there and something moved through the gap at the bottom of the door.
Before that, two days ago, the windowsill in the cheese room while Matej worked, which required a specific arrangement of knees.
He is waiting, in some corner of his mind, for Matej to say something about it.
Matej has said nothing. Though once, passing through the hall, he stepped over Luca’s legs without breaking stride or comment — the kind of accommodation that isn’t accommodation so much as acceptance of a new fact.
“The man in Komen,” Luca says. “Told me the Teran grape nearly died out in the seventies. Government wanted higher yields, pushed everyone to Merlot.”
Matej sets down the part he’s holding. “Bajta kept three rows,” he says. “On the ridge above Lipica. Everyone thought he was stubborn.”
“Was he?”
“Yes.” He sets the piece down. “He was also right.”
Luca laughs, a real one, surprised out of him.
He has started to notice — he is a journalist, noticing is structural — that Matej produces exactly one of these a day.
Not a joke, not a story. A fact, delivered without setup, usually mid-task, always with that timing that suggests it has been sitting in his head for hours waiting for the right gap in the silence.
Luca has begun to look forward to it. He has not told Matej this.
Matej glances up, something in his expression, then gone.
Luca thinks: I have been here over a week now. He thinks: that should feel shorter than it does.
Matej
He goes back to the parts but he is aware — with the precision he usually reserves for things that matter — that something has shifted in the room.
Luca’s laugh has a different quality than his working laugh, the one he uses when he’s in interview mode. This one came from somewhere else. Matej has heard both enough times now to know the difference.
For a second he wants to cross the room and do something about that laugh. Not later, not after dark, when the day is long enough to excuse it. Now, in daylight, with grease on his hands. The want arrives whole, before he can file it anywhere.
He knows the difference. That is the problem.
He fits the next part. Sets it down.
He straightens. His legs remember something, not the farm, not this floor. Then it passes.
He has been aware of Luca in the hallway this morning.
Aware in the way he is aware of something that is new and then, after a few days, stops being new without ever having been decided — the laptop on the floor, the notebook balanced on the windowsill in the cheese room, yesterday on the low wall outside with his knees up, writing into the morning.
Matej has said nothing. There is nothing to say.
The man works where the light is and the light is everywhere and the house apparently does not object.
“There’s more cheese,” he says. “On the shelf in the hall.”
It is not what he was going to say.
He doesn’t go back over what he was going to say, or why he said something else instead, or why it has become easier to offer the man food than to finish the sentence that was actually forming. He gets up to put another log on the fire.
Luca gets up for the cheese.
They pass each other in the narrow space between the table and the stove — closer than necessary, not quite touching — and Matej registers, briefly and without dwelling on it, that this is the third time today that has happened.
Later. Dark, the fire gone to embers, the plateau pressing against the shutters.
Luca’s hand moves across his ribs — not hesitant, not asking, just: present. The way it always starts now, in the dark, when the day has been long enough that the managing stops.
Matej lies still and lets it. This is what they do. Not everything — not yet, something in both of them holding that distance without discussion — but this. Hands, mouth, the generosity Luca brings to these hours that is different from everything else about him.
Matej thinks: Less than ten days.