Colum McCann - Zoli

All of this is to tell you, chonorroeja, that the idea of going any further no longer pulsed in me. There is an old Romani saying that the river is not where it starts or ends, but it seemed that I had certainly come to the crest of something, I had thrown away the idea of Paris, and the shape of my walking had changed. I replaced the blankets, packed the food he had left me, kissed the table in thanks, then walked out of the hut. I followed a valley road for five full days. I could not help but bring my mind around to Enrico, how he had not questioned me about anything at all and yet it had not seemed a lack of curiosity or a dislike. The further I got from him, the more he came back to me. He once said to me, in later years, so much later, that the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.

On a rainy day in the mountains, I heard the sound of rolling tires. He pulled up behind me in a ruined jeep, called to me, and said perhaps I was a little tired, and I said, yes, and he told me that I was welcome to get into the jeep for shelter. I said it hardly looked like shelter since there was no roof. He shrugged and said: You can always pretend. I looked out over the mountains, then walked across, got in the seat beside him. Dry, isn't it? he said. We turned around in the road, with the rain lashing us sideways. I huddled down against the blowing heater. The road opened up before us and I suppose this is where my traveling story ends.

We went to Paoli's cafe where Paoli looked across the counter, shook his head, grinned, and told us to sit.

I asked Enrico why he had not asked me anything about being a Gypsy and he asked me why I had never asked him anything about not being one.

It was perhaps the most beautiful answer I have ever heard in my life.

We knew each other slowly, in terror and excitement, drew apart, stepped backwards. Sometimes I caught sight of him in the dim lamplight and he seemed closer to the shadows than he was to me. We clasped in an awkward embrace and sat for a long time without moving, but the distance grew shorter, unfolded, and the desire never wore itself out. It seemed to me that the world had tried me and finally showed me joy. For a long time we found in ourselves little to say and we learned to be together without speaking. The moment we lived in was enough. During the night he slept with my hair across him and

I watched his ribcage move up and down. The mornings came and he stepped to the stove, brought it to life. There was a spot of soot where he had touched my cheek. At night I told him of Petr, of my days with Swann and Stränsky, of what had happened between us-he simply sat and listened until a sharp line of windowlight opened the morning.

When he left, sometimes for days on end, I would wait up without ever sleeping. I was not sheltered from despair, and there were times I wondered how in the world I could survive in such a place, days I was sure I would just walk off into the hills, disappear, keep moving, to no particular place, or purpose, but then he came back and the light opened up again, and it seemed to me that happiness had returned, unasked. It was hard to remember what waiting had once meant.

There were all those years I had spent in the caravan- strange, when I looked out, not to see any horses.

Enrico was not an easy nor a simple man. He did not like where he had come from and he hid it for a long time. It had never struck me that wealth could fester, but Enrico fought his. I finally learned that his was a family of famous judges and lawyers, of wealth and renown, even sympathy. He tried to leave it behind, the fine houses of Verona, the open spaces and courtyards, the white statues in the garden, but I suppose when you leave something behind it will always follow you. What Enrico belonged to was nothing more or less than the mountains. He had already gone, at a young age, through a series of jobs in hotels, chairlifts, restaurants, but he really only wanted to be alone in the peaks, and so he had found a hut on his country's side of the border, sheltered by a hill and trees kept small by winter. He built the hut using money from odd jobs. He had few visitors and was known by some as Die Welsche, the stranger, though in truth he himself said that he was just a citizen of elsewhere.

Enrico knew he would stay in the mountains the day he gave his leather suitcase to the local cobbler and asked him to make a pair of shoes from them.

He lived beyond the reach of most people and grew to enjoy what Paoli called his fine idleness. He was liked, your father- he brought his medicines across the mountain, kept himself quiet, and had no time for the bombers who wanted to level the telegraph poles in the name of Tyrol. He stayed away from his family, sought nothing from them, and went hungry when it was time to go hungry. He did not use this as a badge of sacrifice, he was no saint, far from it. He said years later how stupid it had been to deny their existence, and yet it was my own difficulties that eventually forced him back to his family.

I had been in his hut for just three months when the cara-binieri came up the road. Fresh uniforms, white belts, epaulets. It was like watching the approach of sadness. Don't say a word, Enrico whispered. They marched in, put me in handcuffs, stood me at the door, and then gave your father a good beating in front of my eyes. Afterwards he took the first train he could back to Verona, in his old clothes and white bandages, and, though he never told me what he gave in return-it was the first time ever he had asked a favor of his father-he returned with a document that released me from the clutches of the cara-binieri. Within a few days a car arrived with a court officer and handed me a blue passport, said it was compliments of the Italian government. He left without another word. I asked Enrico what it had taken for this, but he shrugged, said it was nothing, that what was an ordeal for me was an easy task for him. Yet even then I knew that it had taken some of the life from him- the carabinieri had never before known where, nor which family, he came from. It also pierced some of the Tyroleans who doubted him now, but Enrico said it was not his choice to care, I had the passport and that was enough-a man would always be traitor to one thing if he truly believed in another.

He laced his boots and continued his work, smuggling goods across the mountains. He knew that if ever they found him he would spend his time in jail-he would not ask for a second favor. It eventually happened one spring and he was away for a three-month stretch. I thought my heart would scale the walls of the hut, chonorroeja. I lay awake listening to you climb in my body.

And so it happened.

One afternoon, Enrico lifted a fine suit from a wooden chest, blue with very thin pinstripes. He held it up to the light and said: I hate this thing. He rolled it in a ball and wrapped it in brown paper. We're going to Verona, he said. He had bought me a fine dress though it was two sizes too short and it showed my new size. It is hard to forget the oldest of customs, blood laws, territory, silence, but he would take no part in them. He put his hand to my stomach and grinned like a fool. We were driven to Bolzano by Paoli who whistled all the way. On the train Enrico ran his hands together nervously, and then all of a sudden tried to explain his family, their history, but I hushed him. Right there in the carriage he dressed in the suit, the dark tan of his neck sharp against the pale white of his body. We sat, the countryside clicking by. Once or twice he stood and laughed out loud: Here I am! he said. Here I am, going home!

A few hours later we were walking down a wide laneway together. The house in Verona put me in mind of Budermice, the light so clean it felt like it had been wrung through water.