Chapter 9
Luca
He has been here long enough to start understanding the village.
Not the history. He has the history, or a version of it, assembled from three guidebooks and a monograph he found in a secondhand shop in Se?ana and a conversation with a man at a wine estate who turned out to have a doctorate in regional archaeology and, once started, no intention of stopping.
He has the history. What he is beginning to understand is something else: the texture of daily life in a place this size.
In Milan you can live for ten years above people whose names you never learn.
Here the economy of attention runs the other way.
Everyone knows everyone, and has for forty years, and a stranger is not anonymous but simply not yet filed.
He goes to the café before he understands what the café is.
It sits on the road into the village, beside the shop, and it is not a place anyone would describe as nice.
Fluorescent light. A counter, four small tables nobody uses.
And, incongruously, a good machine: a proper professional one, like they have in Milan, grinding the beans fresh for each cup.
He arrives at half past seven because he has a meeting later and because at six he would only be underfoot, and even at half past seven he has misjudged it: the morning is already thinning out, but it is still there, passing through.
The regulars come between six and eight.
He works this out over the following weeks, but he sees the shape of it on the first morning.
A man parks an old Store tractor outside, leaves it running, comes in for a small coffee, drinks it standing.
Behind him a man in a suit gets out of a new Audi.
Then a Fiat with one working headlight, two men in work jackets.
A BMW. Another tractor. They do not sit.
They stand at the counter, or just inside the door, and they drink coffee.
Only coffee, or cappuccino, some of them an espresso in the thick-walled little cups they use in Italy; there is nothing to eat here, no pastry, no pretense of it.
They talk for the length of time it takes to drink it, which is about ten minutes, and then they get back into the tractor or the Audi and drive into their day.
The woman behind the counter works the way Matej works, hands that know the next thing before the head does.
She knows what each of them drinks before they reach the counter.
She has a coffee landing in front of a man at the moment he stops walking.
She talks back into the conversation when it needs her and otherwise keeps her hands moving, the machine, the cups, the till, and the talk goes on around her without requiring her.
His own espresso, when it comes, is better than it has any right to be.
The beans are fine, decently roasted, ground at the right moment; left to his usual standards he would find something to object to, and he goes looking, and what he finds is the water.
It is hard here, faintly mineral, the limestone in it, and it pulls the coffee a half-step off true from what the same beans would give him at home.
Not worse. Just somewhere else. He decides he can live with the beans they pull through this machine, which is, for him, an unusually generous verdict to reach before eight in the morning.
Luca cannot follow most of the conversation around him.
He catches weather. He catches something about taxes, said with the flatness that taxes are said with in any language.
He catches the harvest, trgatev, a word he knows now, and then a longer exchange he reconstructs rather than understands: the young wine, how it is coming along after the picking, when the first of it will be ready to drink, something about the sugar and the yeast still doing their work in the dark of somebody’s cellar.
He builds the conversation out of the few words he has and how the men hold their hands while they say them.
He is probably half wrong. It doesn’t matter. The shape is right.
There is a long, satisfied discussion he gets almost none of except one repeated word, kro?i??e, which turns out, when he looks it up later, to mean roundabout.
They are building one in the next village.
This is, apparently, news. It carries the weight of news.
He will learn, over time, that the entire region runs on roundabouts, that there is hardly a traffic light to be found, that this is a point of quiet regional pride and also simply that it works.
Nobody speaks to him. But he is registered.
He feels it like he is starting to feel everything here: the brief inventory-taking, the glance that costs nothing and misses nothing, the filing-away.
He drinks his coffee. He is, without noticing it, doing exactly what everyone else in the room is doing: coffee, ten minutes, then on into the day.
Then he goes next door to the shop.
The shop is one of the chains, the same red logo as the large markets in the towns, but here it is one narrow room, shelves to the ceiling, everything crowded in: coarse salt beside dish soap beside batteries beside six kinds of bean.
Not a relic, not a quaint village store.
A functioning small branch of a national chain that happens to sit in a place where everyone knows everyone, which makes it, for all the logo, the most familiar room in the village.
He has been in a few times before this. Each time he was buying things Matej needed — a tin of tomatoes, once; a bottle of olive oil; a dried bean Matej had written on a scrap of paper in Slovenian, which the woman found without comment. Each time she acknowledged him minimally and let him go.
This time there is another customer, an older man, and when Luca says his small amount of Slovenian, pri Kosu, at Kos’s place, the entirety of his useful vocabulary and apparently always sufficient, the man’s face changes with interest rather than mere placement.
He says something to the woman. Luca catches none of it except the lift of a question at the end, and the woman’s reply, and then the man turns to Luca and asks him something directly, and when Luca’s face does the wrong thing the man tries again, in Italian, as the old people here do: has he tried her limoncello yet.
So Luca answers in Italian, because it is easier, and because Italian gives away nothing he is not willing to give.
A man from Milan: true enough, and it stops where he wants it to stop.
He does not reach for the other language, the one that would place him precisely, that would tell these people which valley on which side of which border, that would open the whole of it: the vineyard, the grandmother, the father, the year he is still carrying around unfinished.
Italian is a door he can hold at whatever width he chooses. He keeps it narrow.
He has not tried her limoncello. This is a deficiency. It is corrected at once.
The woman reaches under the counter and produces a one-and-a-half-litre Radenska bottle, a mineral-water bottle refilled now with something pale yellow, and a single small glass.
She pours. The man watches with the proprietary pleasure of someone presenting a thing he is certain of.
It is, Luca gathers, her own: her recipe, her family’s, like every family here has its own and considers it, quietly, the best. To refuse it would not be refusing a drink.
He understands this much without being told.
He drinks. It is bright, sweet, very cold, much stronger than it pretends to be, and genuinely good. He says so, in Italian, and means it, and the saying of it lands well. The glass goes back on the counter. The man takes a turn from the same glass. It is half past seven in the morning.
When it comes out, that he writes, that there is a book, that this Italian who says pri Kosu is putting the region into pages, the woman says something Luca only half follows, but the man translates the gist with relish: then he must write about her limoncello.
That it is the best. Luca says he will consider it seriously. Everyone is satisfied.
Before he pays he adds one thing that was not on the scrap of paper.
A bag of the soft fruit jellies from the rack by the register, the cheap kind, in the bright wrapper.
He has noticed that Matej keeps a bag of them in a drawer in the kitchen cupboard and works through it slowly and replaces it without ever mentioning it, and that he favours the green ones and leaves the orange, and that the supply has been low for two days.
Luca does not let himself ask why he is buying them.
He buys them. He puts them at the bottom of the bag, under the salt, where they will not look like anything.
He pays, and leaves with the warmth of the limoncello under his breastbone and the sense of having been, this time, not just looked at but let in.
He has a meeting to get to. He drives.
This becomes, quietly, a rhythm. Matej writes things down. Luca buys them. Nobody discusses it.
Matej
He watches Luca cross the yard from the upstairs window.
Luca has his jacket half-zipped and he is looking at the ridge, not where he’s going — how he always looks at things, like he is measuring them, like the landscape owes him an explanation. He nearly walks into the gatepost. Adjusts without looking down. Keeps walking.
Matej turns back to what he was doing.
He has been noticing things. He has been noticing things since the man arrived and he has not done anything with the noticing and he is not going to start now.
The man is a guest. The man is here for a book.
The man will leave in — he doesn’t calculate how long.
He doesn’t calculate it because the number will be either larger or smaller than he expects and he doesn’t know which of those is worse.
He goes back downstairs.
Luca
The post van comes on Tuesdays and Fridays.