Chapter 16
Luca
Luca writes. Matej works. It has settled into that, a rhythm neither of them set out to make, one that forms quietly, without being arranged.
Today Luca is at the kitchen table. Not the desk upstairs, not the counter, not the windowsill — the table, like a normal person. Matej registered this without comment.
The table between them holds two cups, one empty, one forgotten. Outside something has shifted in the air, low and steady.
He’s written four pages. Real pages — not notes, not scaffolding, not the careful neutral prose he uses when he’s performing competence.
Something else. He doesn’t look up because if he looks up he’ll lose the thread, but he’s aware of Matej at the other end of the table, the small sounds of whatever he’s doing with his hands, and the awareness is not distracting.
That’s the thing that catches him, half a second, before he goes back under.
It’s not distracting.
He thinks: the lamp has been on since two. The light doesn’t come back after that.
His father used to say that. Not about this kitchen, not about this plateau — about his own desk in Milan, the one by the window that faced the courtyard. After two, you’re borrowing from tomorrow. He said it like a joke. He probably meant it.
Luca thinks: I should have asked him more questions. While there was still time.
He doesn’t finish the thought. He writes another sentence.
He’s repairing a belt tensioner that doesn’t strictly need to be done tonight. His hands know what to do without him. The left AirPod is in — something about the Mongols, or possibly the fall of Rome, he lost the thread twenty minutes ago and hasn’t gone back.
Luca hasn’t looked up in forty minutes. Matej knows because he’s been counting, without making it visible.
He thinks about the cave when the cheese is at its slowest — deep winter, when the temperature barely moves and the rinds need daily attention. How he usually doesn’t mind those weeks and sometimes minds them more than he lets himself know.
He thinks: there would be room for a second desk. Upstairs — the far wall, under the window. The light is better there in the morning.
He then thinks: although what Luca actually needs is probably not a desk.
Something higher. A beam, maybe. Good sightline to the yard, sheltered from the wind, easy access to the kitchen.
And then he makes a small sound that is almost a laugh and is definitely not something he’s going to explain to anyone.
He sets it down. Picks it up again.
He doesn’t think about it again. He thinks about it again.
He surfaces from the podcast, takes the earbud out, sets the tensioner down. Luca is still writing. Four pages, maybe five by now. The lamp has come on, or Luca turned it on, he’s not sure when.
He looks at the back of Luca’s head.
“Pigs,” he says.
He stops typing.
He has learned, over the last few weeks, that when Matej says a single word out of nowhere it is not a non-sequitur. It is the end of a long internal paragraph he hasn’t been invited to hear.
He turns around. Closes the laptop.
“Pigs,” he says.
“They’re the only land animal that can look directly up at the sky.” Matej picks up his coffee, finds it cold, puts it back down. “Without turning their whole body. The neck structure. Anatomically.”
“How long have you known that.”
“Couple of years.”
“And you’ve been carrying it.”
Matej looks at him.
Luca leans back in the chair. Both elbows on the table. “Okay. Tell me more.”
“That’s all I have.”
“That can’t be all you have.”
It isn’t. Matej sits down, pulls the cold coffee towards him anyway, and talks.
“It’s the atlas vertebra. Same bone we have, theirs sits differently.
” Vertebrate cervical anatomy, evolutionary pressures, a paper on REM cycles in horses, the thing about giraffes he read on a sleepless Tuesday.
Luca follows all of it, his own unfinished chapter completely forgotten.
He asks a question that sends Matej somewhere further than he’d meant to go.
He goes there without checking whether it’s too much.
The lamp is on. Nobody mentions the second desk.