Chapter 26
Luca
He has been sitting here for twenty minutes without writing anything.
This is not unusual. What is unusual is that he knows exactly what he wants to say — has known since somewhere in the cave, sitting on the cold floor with a copper coil in one hand and a recipe in the other — and is still sitting here.
As if the first sentence is a door he doesn’t yet know how to open.
Outside: the sound of Matej in the yard. Something metal, a low impact, a working rhythm, unannounced. Luca has learned this rhythm. He knows the difference between the sounds that mean an hour and the sounds that mean twenty minutes.
He has time.
He opens the document. The cursor blinks.
He has written the opening of this book four times in the last three weeks, in four different directions, and deleted all of them.
The first was about his father — the story told over the dinner table, the inheritance narrative, the wound that never healed cleanly.
He got six hundred words in and stopped.
It wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was just someone else’s book.
The second was about wine. Obviously. That’s what he was hired for, that’s what he knows, that’s the container he has been moving through the Karst with for months. He could write that book in his sleep. He almost has.
The third was about the border. How it moved. What it took with it. He got further with that one — three pages, dense, the history pressing through every sentence. But it sat wrong in his chest, the wrongness of writing around something instead of at it.
The fourth he won’t think about. That one was about Matej, and he wrote it at two in the morning in a room in some village whose name he can’t remember, three days in and before he understood what was actually happening, and he deleted it immediately and never opened it again.
This is the fifth.
He starts with the stone.
Not metaphorically. Literally — the Karst limestone, how it was formed, three hundred million years of compression and dissolution and the slow patient work of water finding its way through.
He writes about the dolines, the sinkholes that open without warning in fields that look solid.
He writes about the caves — not Matej’s, not yet, just: the system.
How the entire plateau is hollow underneath, riddled with passages, and how the people who settled here six thousand years ago built their lives on a surface that was also an interior.
He writes about the Bora. How it comes from the northeast, off the Adriatic plateau, and accelerates as it funnels through the gaps in the ridge.
How it is not metaphorical either — it is a physical fact, a meteorological condition, a thing that shapes the grapes and the stone and the people who stay.
He writes: The Karst is not a landscape that gives easily.
It takes stubbornness to read it correctly — to understand that what looks like scarcity is actually precision.
The thin soil, the wind, the cold that comes early: these are not obstacles.
They are the conditions under which something irreplaceable becomes possible.
He reads it back. Keeps it.
He writes about wine because he was sent to write about wine and because the wine is genuinely part of the story — the Teran, dark and iron-edged, that nearly disappeared in the seventies when someone decided efficiency mattered more than character.
Three rows kept on a ridge above Lipica. A man everyone called stubborn.
He writes about the Osmiza tradition — the pine branch above the gate, the table in the yard, the wine poured without fuss for whoever comes. A practice that predates every border that has moved through this region. Austrian, Italian, Yugoslav, Slovenian — the branch goes up in autumn regardless.
He writes about the Ferrantes because he has to, eventually, and because the story is not the story he was told.
He writes about them not as owners but as one thread in a longer fabric — a family that made brandy on this plateau for two generations and then lost everything and then, eighty years later, left a disassembled copper still in a cave where the microflora kept it company and the limestone kept it dry.
He does not write about reclamation. He does not write about injustice.
He writes about the still, the recipe, the two languages it was written in — Italian and something between Slovenian and Friulian, the language of a border that hadn’t settled yet.
He writes: What was preserved here was not property.
It was knowledge. The accumulated, irreproducible knowledge of how to make something from this place that could only have come from this place.
Then he writes about the caves.
This is where the book opens up — he can feel it as he writes, how the argument expands. The caves are not background. The caves are the point.
He writes about what constant temperature does — eleven degrees Celsius, year-round, regardless of what happens above.
He writes about the humidity, the airflow, the slow breath of a system that has been breathing for longer than anyone has been here to notice it.
He writes about the microflora — the communities of bacteria and mould that colonize the limestone walls and have nowhere else on earth to be found, because they are the product of this stone and this air and this darkness, built up over centuries.
He writes about the revival. Not as nostalgia — he is careful here, because he has seen what nostalgia does to a food story, as it softens everything into amber.
He writes it as logic: that after a century of industrial production, of standardization, of the optimization of yield over character, some people are returning to the caves.
Not because the past was better. Because the caves are still there.
The microflora is still there. The knowledge, where it survived, is still there.
He writes: The cheesemaker I met in the Karst does not describe what he does as revival. He describes it as conversation. The culture in the cave has been developing for longer than he has been working with it. He is not recreating something lost. He is continuing something interrupted.
He does not use Matej’s name. He will ask, later, whether he can. He suspects he knows the answer but he will ask anyway.
He writes for another hour without stopping.
When he surfaces it is because the sound from the yard has changed — or stopped, he isn’t sure which. He looks at the screen. Four pages, dense, the beginning of something that is actually the thing he came here to write, though he didn’t know that when he arrived.
He reads the last paragraph back.
The stone remembers. That is the operating principle of the Karst — not mystically, not poetically, but chemically, biologically, in ways that can be measured and tasted and followed.
What went into the land comes back out of it, changed, concentrated, made into something that could not exist anywhere else.
The people who understand this have always been here.
They will continue to be here. The question, as it has always been, is whether anyone is paying attention.
He saves the document.
He doesn’t hear Matej come in.
He becomes aware of him as he has learned to — the air changes, or the light. Matej is in the doorway, jacket still on, looking at the screen without reading it — or maybe reading it, Luca can’t tell from here.
Then Matej’s eyes move to him. Luca reads his face: not the closed version, not the performed neutrality. The other one. The one that costs.
He doesn’t say anything. He turns and goes back down the stairs.
From the kitchen: the sound of water. The stove. The sequence that means there will be coffee.
Luca turns back to the screen.
He thinks: I love you.
He thinks: yes.
He saves the document again, for no reason, and goes downstairs.
The coffee appears. Matej is already drinking his.
They stand at the counter as they do, without needing to make it a thing.
“Honey doesn’t expire,” Matej says.
Luca takes his cup.
“They found some in Egyptian tombs,” Matej continues. “Still good. Three thousand years.”
“How long have you been carrying that one.”
“Since Tuesday.”
“What happened Tuesday.”
“Found a jar at the back of the cellar. Grandmother’s. Didn’t know how old.”
“Did you eat it.”
“Of course I ate it.”
Luca drinks his coffee. Outside the yard is bright and cold, the winter light doing the thing it does here — low, precise, nothing soft about it.
“Was it good,” he says.
“Yes.” Matej looks at his cup. “Old honey tastes different. Concentrated. Like it decided what it was a long time ago.”
Luca looks at him.
Matej looks back, the expression that means he knows exactly what he just said and is going to let it sit there.
“Hm,” Luca says.
He goes back upstairs to write.
He knows the road this time.
The first time he had driven it watching the satnav, the white gravel arriving later than the screen promised, as roads do up here.
Now he takes the turn off the main road without thinking about it, the plateau opening out on either side, the vines cut back to bare wood in their straight rows, dormant, and the low stone and the iron dark in the cold ground.
He has a box of Matej’s cheese on the passenger seat.
That part was his own idea. The wine was the errand; Matej had said bring back as much as you can fit and left it at that, as he leaves most things, and Luca had decided somewhere on the road that he was not going to arrive empty-handed at a place that had once sent him home loaded like family.
So: the cheese. Two round wheels of it, wrapped as Matej wraps them, in cloth and then wax paper.
It is not a gift, exactly. It is the other thing, the thing he has watched the whole region run on, the slow ledger of who brought what to whom.
He is keeping an account now. He did not use to keep accounts in places.
He kept notebooks, which is not the same.