Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

"Ha! I'm flattered. I'lltell you about my last chapter, all right."

"Why?"

"You're ideally suited to hear my secret. That's why I brought you here."

A warm, powerful wind curls up the side of the cliff, making the shutters of Ternova's houses clatter and the pine trees whistle. Mr. Schmitz can't see anyone behind these shutters but he feels the presence of watchful eyes.

He wheels Rutherford back from the precipice of the piazza to the town's main street. At the door to the old tavern he knocks, but no one answers. He leans his forehead against the darkened storefront window, his eyes darting about in a vain effort to locate some evidence of life.

"What a funny thing has happened to our poor Ternova."

Rutherford sits still in his wheelchair. His head hangs over to one side and his eyelashes are stuck together with dried mucus. The down on the tongue-shaped mark on his face has grown coarser.

Mr. Schmitz throws his body against the door. No response, just the hollow echo of his collision. Do not panic, he tells himself, but he has a feeling of something crawling behind his ears. He leans his full weight against the door and it creaks open.

Mr. Schmitz finds himself in a living room, furnished with a kind of shabby luxury. There is a musty sofa that is missing all of its cushions but one, a chipped bronze floor lamp with a torn green shade, and two pink damask chairs facing away from each other, next to a baize-topped poker table. A long filthy mirror in a dark oak frame reflects to the room an obscure image of itself. On one side of the room, there is a small door that leads to the tavern.

"You'll be fine right here," says Mr. Schmitz, wheeling Rutherford into the room. He pulls the floor lamp's gold bead chain and, to his surprise — and momentary alarm — the bulb casts the room in a dim marigold hue.

"Hello?" he calls out. "Buongiorno? Is there anyone here? "

Mr. Schmitz walks through the side door into the tavern. The room smells like stale hops. Chairs are stacked upside down on all the tables, and a newspaper is spread out on the bar. It's Il Poliglotto , containing articles written in Italian, Slovenian, English, and German, and a Sunday supplement written in Triestino dialect. The date on the top of the page is nearly two years earlier. The headline reads, in Italian:

TONGUE TRANSPLANT SUCCESSFUL: LIFE IS SWEET AGAIN FOR MEDEAZZA MAN

Mr. Schmitz puzzles over this for a minute, scanning the photograph— a smiling man eating gelato — for meaning. But then, at the bottom of the page, a single column of text catches his attention:

TERNOVA ABANDONED

by Carla Boccata

Ternova, a far-flung hamlet hidden in the southern-facing side of the Carso, will be abandoned at the end of this year's harvest by its three remaining citizens, Giovanni Pertucci, 72; Lucia Lancarotto, 90; and Graziella Faenza, 73.

"We're too old to spend another winter up here on our own," said Ms. Faenza. "What would happen if there's an emergency, or if Lucia has another attack?" she asked, alluding to a stroke suffered by Ms. Lancarotto last spring. "When would they find us?"

The three remaining Ternoviani say that they will move in with their children, who long ago relocated to Trieste to raise their own families.

The rugged terrain of the Carso has never yielded great amounts of produce, and life in its villages has always been isolated and meager. But since the construction of paved roads in the 1980s, the towns of this mountainous region have been put into regular contact with modern life, often with negative results. Ternova joins a growing list of Carsican villages that have been abandoned in recent years, as younger generations head to the city in search of a higher standard of living and better opportunities for prosperity.

Ternova was best known for its small cathedral, the San Giusto di Trieste, celebrated for its checkered marble piazza, which overlooks the Carso plateau and the Adriatic Sea. High points of Ternova's history included: a mention of the village by the great Friulian poet Langustino (1205–1234), in his ode, "There are so many small towns in the mountains/in which of them hides my love?" It was the birthplace of noted mountain climber Anton di Brusca (1860–1934), the third man in recorded history to climb Marmolada, the highest point of the Dolomites, in 1887. And it served as a staging post for an auxiliary regiment of the Allied military forces during World War II.

"We are sad to leave our beautiful village," said Ms. Faenza. "But it would be sadder to die here. Because no one would find us for a very, very long time."

Mr. Schmitz sets the paper down on the bar, looks up, and shudders. Rutherford is staring at him from his wheelchair in the living room. His eyes are wide open and his mouth is twisted into something resembling a grin.

But Rutherford is not awake. It is a trick, perhaps, of the nervous system, or the product of an errant synapse firing in his addled brain, that has made Rutherford's features take this shape. He has shifted in his chair, like anyone might during sleep. And that makes sense to Mr. Schmitz. Why, after all, should an unconscious body behave any more predictably than a normal slumbering one? And yet. .

Mr. Schmitz spends the better part of the next hour trying to provoke Rutherford into moving again.

"Did you think I was going to leave you?" he asks, checking for a reaction. Rutherford gazes dumbly ahead, his wide smile raising the points of his fraying mustache.

"Are you afraid? Lonely? Rutherford? "

Rutherford's eyes do not move. They do not even dilate.

"Do you think we might. . die here?"

Rutherford stares on.

". . and that no one. . no one. ."

Mr. Schmitz concludes that Rutherford spent whatever was left of his strength when he moved his face into its current contortion.

Mr. Schmitz tries to assemble the EEG machine. But the electrodes are hopelessly tangled, the control module rattles, and the Lectron tube has been punctured, smearing conductivity gel all over the battery pack. Mr. Schmitz is at a loss. He leaves Rutherford and returns to the tavern. He finds a refrigerator behind the bar, opens it, and sees a six-pack of Peroni. He drinks three bottles while standing at the bar. He sits down to read the newspaper article again, and drinks a fourth. He sips the last two back in the living room, beside Rutherford, who has not stopped grinning.

Mr. Schmitz puts his hand on Rutherford's shoulder to steady himself. It occurs to Mr. Schmitz: does he really trust a machine to tell him what his friend is thinking? Mr. Schmitz is not even certain, after all, that he would know how to interpret the LED signals. There must be other ways for paralyzed men to speak. The alternative is too horrific.

From now on, Mr. Schmitz would look for other signs. He'd monitor the modulations of his friend's breathing, his pulse, the moistness of his eyes, and the temperature of his skin, in the hope of discovering new codes and signs. Even in his sleep he'd listen for Rutherford's voice.

First, however, he has to secure their new home. He raids the tavern for canned goods, tests the sink to make sure the pipes still work, and prepares the bedroom on the second floor, finding two pillows and a clean set of sheets in the closet. It is late now, but Mr. Schmitz is too excited to sleep.

He runs out into the street and knocks on the door of every house, breaking down a front gate in the process, with a shoulder-first bodythrust. He finds nothing but more canned food, which he retrieves and brings back to the tavern.

"It's better this way," says Mr. Schmitz. "We will build this town anew."

Mr. Schmitz lies in fetal position on the pool table for some time after that, passing in and out of sleep throughout the night. At one point he retrieves the blanket from upstairs and spreads it so that it covers Rutherford and, to a lesser extent, himself. Night up here in the mountains is long and silent. It's as if even the sparrows are afraid to fly so high.