Chapter 117
THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, Francesca took me to Caprera to gather pinoli. She parked the car at the edge of a grove of tall pine trees, then retrieved two plastic tubs from the backseat and handed me one.
I had seen plenty of pine trees in South Carolina, but the trees on Caprera were different—all trunk and no branches until you got about a hundred feet in the air. All of a sudden the branches exploded outward, like the ribs of an umbrella.
From beneath the trees, with the sunlight pushing through the thin pine needles, all those branches looked like dark doilies against a white sky.
It was stunning, and I got that same feeling I’d had standing in the center of the Pantheon, looking up at the hole in the ceiling.
It’s not that I saw God—I didn’t. But when I was in a place that achingly beautiful, I wanted to.
Francesca allowed me to admire the trees for a little while, but then she told me that if I spent the afternoon looking up at the sky, I’d go home with no pine nuts.
“What am I looking for?” I asked, and she plucked a pine cone from the forest floor and handed it to me.
“See all those small brown seeds nestled among the scales?”
I wiggled one free and held it between my thumb and forefinger. It looked a little bigger than a coffee bean. “I don’t know why, but I thought pine nuts were smaller,” I said.
She laughed. “They are. Come look.” I followed her to an empty picnic table, where she used a rock to crack the seed in half. “This,” she said, extracting the milky white nut and holding it up for me to see, “is your pinolo.”
She told me to eat it, so I did. “It tastes like pesto,” I said, and she laughed.
“I think you mean pesto tastes like pinoli.”
“That, too.”
We spent the morning walking slowly through the grove, our eyes trained on the ground.
I quickly realized that finding a pine cone full of pinoli was actually quite hard because so many of them had been picked over by people or birds.
The trick, Francesca said, was to look for individual seeds among the pine needles that blanketed the forest floor.
Initially, the tiny brown shells were hard to spot, but over the course of an hour or two, I got good at picking them out.
While we walked, I filled Francesca in on Teo’s new girlfriend, and she admitted that she’d already met her. “We went out for drinks with them a week or two ago,” she said, and I was too astonished to say anything other than Oh.
“Does it bother you?” she asked.
“You’re allowed to go out for drinks with whoever you want.”
“Well, yes, I know,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I meant does it bother you that Teo is with this Nina person.”
“Why would it bother me?” I said, stooping to pick up another tiny seed.
She studied me for a moment, then shook her head and said, “No reason.”
We didn’t speak of Teo for the rest of the morning, and when we returned from Caprera, we were hungry and had cricks in our necks.
Francesca offered to make me a sandwich and said that I could either shell my pinoli on her balcony or borrow one of her mallets and do it at home.
“Whatever you do, do it outside, because the shells fly everywhere,” she warned as she unlocked the door of the apartment building and led me upstairs.
Bernardo must have heard us on the stairs, because by the time we reached the apartment, he was waiting for us at the door. “Non ti aspettavo a casa,” said Francesca as she kissed him hello, and he grumbled something about an exam, then followed us inside.
“Vuoi un panino?” Francesca asked him as she set down her things, but he said he’d already eaten.
“Guarda tutti i nostri pinoli,” I said, showing off first Francesca’s container of pine nuts and then mine. “Avremo abbastanza pesto per un anno.”
He laughed at that, but it came off seeming forced.
“Cosa c’è che non va?” Francesca asked him, and he told her that Bianca had just been by with bad news. Another baby—belonging to the Bombagi family—had been born this morning, at Paolo Merlo, with the same abnormalities as the other two.
Francesca was slicing bread, but she put down the knife. “è morto?”
He nodded. “Questa volta era una bambina.”
I understood that the baby was dead, and that this one had been a girl. “That’s so awful,” I said in Italian, and Bernardo agreed.
“Does Teo know?” I asked.
“Bianca’s calling him now,” said Bernardo.
“This is what he was talking about,” said Francesca, who had picked up the knife once more and was attacking the bread with vehemence. “One baby? It’s a tragedy. Two? A strange coincidence. But three? If three is not proof that something’s wrong, I don’t know what is!”