Chapter 29
Matej
Matej stands in his own hallway and Luca is two metres away and the distance between them is the length of a decision that has already been made, and Matej doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
He turns towards the kitchen. “Are you hungry.”
“I ate on the road.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Then: “Maybe.”
Matej goes to the kitchen. He needs something to do with his hands.
Luca
He stands in the room and tries to locate himself.
He has been in this room many times. He knows the slant of the ceiling, how the lamp on the counter casts the walls in a colour that is almost amber, the photograph above the window that Matej never looks at and Luca has looked at too many times.
He knows the couch, and the low table, and the fire, and the smell of this house: stone and woodsmoke and the faint animal warmth of old walls that have been lived in for a long time.
He knows all of this. He is standing in the middle of it and his hands are shaking slightly, which he notices and decides not to make into a problem.
I love you.
Three words in a doorway. He has heard them before, from other people, in other rooms, said with varying degrees of accuracy. He has even said them himself, once or twice, as you say things when you believe them to be true and later understand that belief and truth are not the same thing.
This was different.
This was Matej saying a thing the way Matej says everything: plainly, without hedging, as if the words are the accurate description of a condition that exists.
Luca has spent weeks watching him do this with the cheese, with the cave, with the afternoon light.
The acidity is off. The culture needs more time.
This wall has been here since before I was born. Just true things, said plainly.
I love you. Said the same way.
Luca sits down on the couch. He does not trust his legs entirely.
Matej
He cuts bread. He cuts cheese: a wheel from August, one of the earlier batches, not the best he’s made but honest, the kind that asks nothing of you. He pours two glasses of wine.
He said it.
He has not said that to anyone since Théo, and that was a long time ago, and it was a different thing, or it was the same thing badly situated, or it was true and insufficient at the same time.
He has thought about this occasionally over the years, as you think about injuries: clinically, without dwelling.
He had reached a conclusion: he was not someone who said things like that easily, and so when he said them, he was sure.
He is sure now.
And Luca is here. That’s the other thing. Luca is here, in his house, on Christmas Eve, because he drove four and a half hours in the dark and couldn’t remember why he was somewhere else. Matej picks up the board and the wine and he is, quietly, unreasonably glad.
He carries the board and the wine to the other room.
Luca
Matej sets things on the table — two glasses, one board, placed between them without commentary, because the positioning is the commentary.
He sits down at the other end of the couch.
Not far. The couch is not large.
Luca picks up his wine. The fire is doing its work. The room is warm in the way of rooms with stone walls and real fires: not the even institutional warmth of radiators but something that varies, that has a source, that you can orient yourself towards.
“You drove from Milan today,” Matej says.
“Yes.”
“That’s five hours.”
“Four and a half. The roads were empty.”
Matej looks at him, that expression, almost amusement but held back. “You were going to wait until after Christmas.”
“I was going to wait until I had something figured out.” Luca turns the glass in his hands. “I drove past the turnoff. Kept going. Pulled over.” He stops. “Turned around.”
Silence. The fire.
“I didn’t have anything figured out,” Luca says. “I still don’t. I just” — he stops, tries again — “I was sitting in Milan and I couldn’t remember why I was there.”
Matej is quiet. Then: “And now?”
“Now I’m here.” He looks at him. “That’s the thing I had figured out.”
Matej
He listens to this.
He is good at listening. It has always been his natural condition, the receiving end rather than the giving, the AirPod in one ear and the other ear on the world.
He has spent years being the person who takes in information and processes it somewhere quiet and emerges with a position.
He has thought of this as a form of discipline.
He is now considering the possibility that it has also been a form of withholding.
Luca does not withhold. Not anymore. He did, at the beginning, that careful journalism-trained attention that looked like openness and functioned as distance.
But somewhere in the last three months that changed.
He says the thing. He sits with the thing.
He drives four and a half hours in the dark because he couldn’t remember why he was somewhere else.
This is the thing I had figured out.
Matej looks at him: slightly wrecked from a long drive on a decision, hair still from the road, jacket not yet off, holding the wine glass with both hands, thinking seriously.
“Stay,” he says.
More like naming what has already been decided. Saying it into the air so it exists outside of them.
Luca looks at him. “My things are in the car.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t bring everything.”
“You can get the rest.”
“Yes,” Luca says. And then, after a moment: “I know I can.”
The wine glasses are still in the way. One of them moves the board, or both of them do; it doesn’t register as a decision, only as the distance closing. The couch is not large. It was never going to stay this size.
He meets him halfway. They both do. There is nothing careful about it and nothing rushed, just the plain fact of it arriving: two people who have been sitting two feet apart all evening deciding at the same moment that two feet is too far.
Luca
They eat. They drink the wine. The fire settles into its slower register.
Luca says: “I want to be here. I want to help build whatever this becomes: the cave, the distillery, the rest of it.” He looks at the fire, not at Matej. “I know I’m not a cheesemaker. But I can be useful.”
“You already are,” Matej says.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” He’s quiet then.
“I’ve been thinking about what it needs.
What would make it more than just me, alone, making cheese in a cave.
” He picks up his glass. Sets it back down.
“It’s better with you here. Not just...” He stops.
Starts again. “The work is better. I notice things I wasn’t noticing. ”
For Matej, Luca understands, this is a declaration.
“Okay,” Luca says.
“Okay,” Matej agrees.
Matej
Later, the wine almost finished, the bread gone, Luca says without looking up from the fire: “I’ve been thinking about what you told me. The accident.”
Matej doesn’t say anything.
“I just wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten it.”
The fire makes its sound.
“I know,” Matej says.
“I’m not going to ask you anything about it.” Luca turns his head to look at him. “I just carry it. The way you told me. What it cost.”
Matej looks at him. He has been carrying this alone, and Luca has just put a hand under the weight of it.
“Good,” he says. Simply. “That’s good.”
Luca
He had not said it out loud before this moment.
He had thought it, in Milan, in the small room, writing until his hand hurt.
He had written around it, written towards it, written the thing it came from without naming the thing itself.
The Friulian kitchen. His grandmother’s hands.
The smell of Fanika’s sourdough and how the cave breathes in the dark and what it feels like to watch Matej work: that absolute concentration, a man doing exactly the thing he is built for.
He had written: some places are inherited. Some are found. The difference is not in the place.
He had not written: I want to stay.
He says it now, to a fire and a glass of wine and a man who named it first, and it is the truest thing he has said in years.
He cuts a piece of cheese from the board. Eats it.
“This one,” he says.
“August batch,” Matej says. “Not my best.”
“It’s good.”
“The one from September will be better. Six months from now, maybe nine.” He looks at the board. “You’ll be here for that.”
Luca looks at him. Matej says it as he says everything — flatly, as a simple fact about the future. You’ll be here for that.
“Yes,” Luca says. “I will.”
Matej
They sit with the fire for a long time.
They talk — not about anything that requires resolution. In the register that has developed over three months: half-finished thoughts, references that don’t need explaining, the occasional long silence that is not absence but presence of a different kind.
Luca tells him about his father. The Karst he never spoke of, the place his own fathers came from. He never explained it, Luca says. He never even named it. I thought the silence was grief. Now I think it was more like orientation. That he knew exactly which direction he was facing and never said.
Matej thinks about his father’s key on the hook. Ten thousand times past it and never wondering. “The useful part was somewhere else,” he says.
“Yes.”
Outside it is December and very still. Inside: the fire, the wine, the cheese nearly finished. The photograph above the window. Two men on the couch, no longer performing anything.
At some point Luca’s head finds his shoulder. Matej doesn’t know exactly when this happened. He puts his arm around him and they sit like that while the fire works its way down to coals.
He thinks about the word legacy. How his father used it: as something owed, a debt carried forward. How Luca’s father used it: as something lost, a wound reopened seasonally. How neither of them had thought to ask: legacy of what, exactly? The land? The name? The knowledge in the hands?
He thinks about the recipe in the tin box. The copper on the floor of the cave. Something built to be reassembled by whoever came next and was willing to do the work. Willing, and curious, and here.
He looks at Luca, asleep now against his shoulder, entirely still, no longer holding anything at bay, and he thinks: this is it.
Not the cave, not the keys, not the eighty-year-old bottles.
This. The thing you can’t put away for safekeeping and can’t claim by inheritance. The thing you find, or don’t.
He found it.
He feeds the fire one more log. Settles back. The night is quiet.
The fire goes down.
They go upstairs.
What happens next belongs to them.
Matej
The Bialetti is on the stove when Matej comes down. The grinder on the counter. Four kilos of beans.
Matej looks at it.
“We’ve talked about the coffee,” Luca says, without turning around.
“You talked about the coffee.”
“At length.”
Matej picks up the mokka pot — and whatever that brown powder is, which in Luca’s considered opinion constitutes a crime against humanity. Opens the cabinet above the stove. Sets them inside.
“Left of the stove,” Luca says.
“I know where it goes,” Matej says. Then, mostly to himself: “I’m drawing the line at oat milk.”
Luca hands him a cup. It is, Matej concedes silently, better coffee. He does not say this. He drinks it standing at the counter, and into the cup, where Luca cannot see it, he allows himself a small smile.