She looked like Giuseppe, yes, with perhaps a passing resemblance to the woman I had met only this morning. But instantly, even with the darker complexion, I felt like I was seeing an older version of my own daughter, Olivia. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Jesus,” Matthew whispered, clearly seeing the resemblance too.
“Salve,” called the girl as she approached, then rattled off a few questions in rapid Italian that I couldn’t follow.
Matthew tipped his hat and answered in kind. Yet again, I was impressed by how quickly he had adapted to the language here. He said he wasn’t completely fluent, but he seemed to communicate with ease. All I caught was our names as he gestured to himself and then to me.
“I see,” said the girl in English. “You are Americans.” She sighed, as if the very thought exhausted her. “Well, I am Lucrezia Bianchi, one of the owners. My sister, Rosina, she is inside. If you want, we can show you around. The realtor is lazy—he won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Maybe you need a new realtor,” Matthew joked.
The girl’s mouth quirked, but there was too much bitterness there for a full smile to emerge. “Follow me. There’s some mess in the kitchen from the work, okay?”
I glanced at Matthew, who shrugged, as if to say, “What else can you do?” And so, we followed the girl into the house with the acute sense of people expecting ghosts to pop out behind every corner. And why not? Memories could be nearly as frightening.
Like a lot of houses of its kind, it looked larger than it was. The thick stone walls took up more space than one might expect, and the fact that there were so few windows meant that most of the house was cast in perpetual shadow, dependent on sconces, a few dusty chandeliers, and the occasional sunlight reflecting off the warm stucco walls.
Most of the interior was still the way I remembered it—the plain, sturdy furniture, the smooth wooden sink, the beaten tile floors. I started when I spotted the old stone fireplace at the far end, complete with the rug where Giuseppe had lain me bare in the firelight. The memories were so far away—he was nothing but a ghost. But they were powerful, nonetheless. That was, of course, the spot where my daughter had likely been conceived.
Matthew took my hand as we walked into the living room. This time, I didn’t shake it away. I wanted his solid strength close.
“When was this place built?” Matthew wondered.
Lucrezia shrugged. “It’s not so old. Only three hundred years, I think. They had to rebuild after a fire.”
Matthew gave me a sly wink. I knew what he was thinking—this was such a difference between the United States and nearly everywhere else in the world. We had such a truncated view of history, so evident in things like architecture. A hundred-year-old house in the United States would be exceedingly rare and considered absolutely ancient.
“It was profitable until a few years ago,” continued the girl. “We made olive oil. We had enough to pay the caretakers, and a good yield that we sold at the markets. But then the trees got sick. More than half of them are dead now.”
“It’s a shame,” Matthew murmured as he looked around. “It’s a beautiful place.”
“Rosina!” hollered Lucrezia from the bottom of the stairs. “Dobbiamo mostrare la casa a degli americani.”
There was a clattering of footsteps, and another girl appeared who resembled Giuseppe even more strongly than her sister.
“Perché?” she demanded. “Quali americani?”
Beside me, Matthew cleared his throat. “That would be us,” he said, in English for my benefit before repeating himself in Italian.
“Oh!” said the girl. “Hello.”
“This is my sister, Rosina,” said Lucrezia. “I’m sorry she is rude. She loves the farm very much. We both do.”
The younger girl broke into a sudden spat of angry Italian, and Lucrezia immediately started snapping back at her. I couldn’t follow most of it, but it was clear they were mostly fighting about selling the house.
“Excuse me,” I broke in suddenly. “But there’s been a misunderstanding. As much as I’d love a tour of the grounds, I’m not here for the house. I’m here to meet, well, the two of you.”
The girls immediately stopped squabbling to stare at me.
“Us?” repeated Rosina, shoving a messy lock of brown hair out of her face. “Why are you here to meet us?”
“Your mother sent me,” I said. “She—I met her this morning. I, well. I knew your father, Giuseppe, a long time ago. My name is Nina de Vries.”
Their expressions didn’t change, but something else, something much more subtle did. A tiny shift in posture, a slight movement of chins. Whatever it was, it was palpable and frosty. And told me that, like their mother, they understood exactly my connection to Giuseppe Bianchi.
“Our father?” Lucrezia asked. “When did you know him? He died almost ten years ago.”
I nodded. “Yes, I know. I was very sorry to hear it. I was a student of his at the university the year before his death.”
The frost turned to ice.
“Lo sapevo,” Rosina muttered to her sister, which I did understand as “I knew it.”
I took a step forward, hands held out as I reluctantly dropped Matthew’s. “I know what you must be thinking.”
“That we’re surprised our father had an American lover?” snapped Rosina. “No, not such a surprise. Four of you came to his funeral. And you all looked like whores.”
“Rosina!” snapped Lucrezia.
I swallowed. “No, it’s all right. I—it’s all right.”
“Well,” said Lucrezia, who was, like her mother, a bit slower to speak but maybe more intimidating than her sharp-tongued sister. “What do you want, then? A keepsake? Forgiveness? We don’t have either. Babbo left us nothing but this old farm, and now it isn’t worth anything. With so many dead trees, it can’t even earn enough to pay
