Chapter 3

She left the flat at five, before the town was properly awake, and told Nunzia she was going up to the yard for the early slab delivery.

The Canalone road went up out of Marbolina in switchbacks, and above the last house the province closed it to the public with a red-and-white barrier that the quarry trucks rolled through all day. Nobody guarded it. There had never been anything to guard it against.

The drizzle had stopped the night before and the road was black and cold and smelled of diesel and wet ash. Silvia walked up past the barrier and then off the road onto the old powderman's path, a foot track that cut the switchbacks shorter and came out above the second bend. She knew it in the dark. She had known it since she was six, riding up on the powder cart with her legs swinging, holding her father's tobacco tin because he had his hands full of the reins.

Orfeo's shed sat on the shelf of ground below the Carchio lip, where the old powder magazine had been before the war. Corrugated roof, one door, one window with a plastic sheet where glass used to be. A chimney pipe. Above it, the mountain went up white in the dark, and the gang saws down in the valley had not started.

She stood outside the door for a while, because after the walking there was nothing left to do but knock.

He opened it. He had been awake.

He looked at her and did not say anything, and she looked at him and did not say anything, and the shed behind him had a cot, a chair, a lamp on a nail, a bucket, and a wall.

On the wall, above the cot, pinned with two nails, was a photograph.

It was a small photograph, square, the kind the school photographer used to produce in an afternoon, and it had been pinned there long enough that the light had eaten the left side of it down to the color of milk. A girl, about ten, in a checked dress, standing in front of a marble block with a piece of paper in her hand and an expression of enormous, self-satisfied seriousness.

Silvia had that photograph at home in a biscuit tin. She had put it there herself after she was told her father had died in Genoa, because she could not look at it and could not throw it away.

Below it, on the shelf under the window, sat the tobacco tin.

"Bianca says the tin sounds like a bell," she said, "when you put a stone in it."

His mouth moved. He had a broken jaw that had never set right, and the mouth was always a little open, and it made him look stupid in a way he was not.

"She's got good ears," he said.

Silvia's hands were cold. She put them in her pockets. She had brought the gold hoops in her left pocket, wrapped in a piece of newspaper, her mother's small gold hoops, worn only on feast days and one other day a year, and she took them out and put them on the shelf next to the tobacco tin without explaining.

"Those were hers," she said. "You know whose they were."

He looked at the little parcel and his whole face folded, slowly, like a sheet of lead being bent by somebody who knew what they were doing and did not enjoy it.

"Signora Ferretti's been feeding you," she said. "You'll tell me why."

"I won't."

"Then tell me what you were doing on my church steps."

"I sit there," he said. "I get the sun."

"There's no sun on that side."

"I get the light." He turned away from her and picked up the bucket and went out past her into the cold, and she stood in the middle of the shed where she had grown up, in the smell of him, in the smell of a man who had not been hugged by anyone who would admit it in nine years, and she looked at the photograph of herself at ten and knew, with the whole flat certainty of her body knowing a thing before her mind caught up, what she had refused to know on the steps.

She walked down the mountain in the dark.

At the bottom, where the Canalone road met the yard gate, a Carabinieri car was parked in front of the office, engine running, and the two men in it were not drinking coffee.