Lay yourself open, Gina had said. Make yourself vulnerable. “You want me to leave the party.”
“Would you?”
He pushed his sunglasses up and looked towards the sea. “It’s something we can talk about, but not at this moment. I’m enjoying this day, this peace with you.”
By her silence, he read pacification. His thoughts drifted to his conversation with Gina. Everything he had thought to have understood about that woman had been turned upside down on its head last night.
His son’s squeal interrupted his thoughts. Near the water, Marco was standing with a green plastic bucket over the Colonel, his legs showing patches of the sugar-fine sand that had stuck to them. The Colonel was in a bathing costume, kneeling and excavating their spot on the beach with his big hands. Angelo had never seen his father like this.
“Would you look at that?”
When she did, Chiara’s face read a mixture of amusement and scorn.
“I’m going down there to see what those two are up to.”
The Colonel and Marco were too busy to notice him, and as he came closer, Angelo could see they had made a circular pit, as if they were building the moat to a castle before the castle itself. Inside and outside the pit were mounds of sand dotted with pebbles and rocks. The mounds were a mess of shapes and sizes, and if they were to be part of the ramparts, then the Colonel was being lax about the design. The two of them were busy near the middle of the pit, building a wall across the excavation. Marco patted the sand into place, and the Colonel gave instructions.
Marco looked up from his end, his little green pail next to him. “Is it time to pour the water in, Nonno?”
“What are you doing?” Angelo asked.
“We’re building a dam,” Marco said, looking at his grandfather again.
“Are you now? What kind of dam?”
The Colonel pulled back from the wall and stepped out of the pit.
“Nonno, what is it called again?”
But Angelo could see it now. The scar on his head throbbed.
“Why the look, Angelo?” the Colonel asked. “Marco should know what it is we do and how. The sand makes an excellent model.”
Angelo pointed to the rocks and pebbles grouped inside. There, the Colonel had been pretty precise after all. It was the Reschen Valley. First, Gorf and Spinn, then more rocks and pebbles for Reschen and Graun. “And those? Those are the villages?”
Marco pointed to a sharp rock, bigger than all the others, sticking straight up out of the sand. “That’s a big church. Nonno says we have to blow up all the houses and buildings.”
That rock. The church in Graun. And there, those three stones, that could be Arlund.
“I’ll get the water,” Marco cried. He ran to where the sea licked the sand.
Angelo watched his son scoop water into the pail and, when he returned, asked Marco to hand it to him.
“But I want to do it,” his son whined.
He pried the handle from his boy’s fingers. “You will, but before you begin dumping water on these villages, you need me first. I am the one who has to check the dam structures and approve them. And these houses. Did you evacuate the people?”
Marco shook his head. “There are no people, Papa. They’re all gone.” He put his hand out for the pail, but Angelo hid it behind his back.
“Are you certain? What will happen to them if you pour water all over them?”
His son dug his toes into the sand.
“Angelo,” the Colonel said, “we were having a fine time before you came.”
“You’re the one who said you want to teach him, so let us teach him. Marco, if you want to learn how this is done”—he looked at the Colonel and then at his son—“then it must be done properly. Before you can have this bucket of water, we need to relocate all of these people and their houses.” He set the pail off to the side and reached for the stones of Spinn, then placed them on the mounds on the outside of the reservoir. Marco got to work on the other end, on the village of Reschen.
The Colonel brushed sand off his hands, and Angelo checked to see if he too would help relocate the stone houses, but he simply watched.
“You see, Marco,” Angelo said as they worked, “what your grandfather has forgotten is that these people’s lives come first, and to relocate them is very expensive.”
“What’s ’spensive?” Marco asked, letting the stones slip from his hands and randomly onto the mounds.
He went to Marco and led him a few steps towards the water. He picked up a broken shell. “If money were shells, then we’d need lots and lots of them. Imagine you have to walk up and down this beach all day long, collecting shells. You have to give the shells to the people in those houses so they can afford to live. What your grandfather has also forgotten is that we don’t have enough shells to do that, so you shouldn’t have built a reservoir in the first place.”
“What your father forgets is that too few shells is a temporary condition. Always.” The Colonel had the pail in his hand. He pointed it towards the sea, where in the distance, large ships were heading to Genoa. “You see them? They’re sailing to a place called Industry. And in Industry, they make shells.” He held the bucket out for Marco. “There’s more shells coming, Marco. Pour the water in.”
The boy grabbed the bucket—a happy child—and ran to the pit, dumping the
