That was when the people who received him at their tables began to find him very interesting. They didn’t much try to talk to him so much as become extremely engaged in conversations about him. It wasn’t difficult to tell when they were talking about him, as they did a lot of communicating with their hands and weren’t shy about gesticulating towards him when they argued. He picked up a phrase that always came up when they argued about him:
la mamma
. It sounded similar to the English "mama" but it only ever came up long after he was introduced to any mothers who lived in the house. When the time came for him to leave each of these families, whoever it was who first brought up "la mamma" took him outside and pointed him in a particular direction. He continued north and slightly west according to their instructions, and it mostly felt good to have a sense of somewhere else he needed to be.
While he was relieved not to be going in circles, he was nowhere near articulate enough to know whether his hosts had any sense of why he was on the road. In one ill-advised interaction, he succeeded in communicating through pantomime to his hosts the idea of getting sick and dying. Since they found this play-acting very funny, he supposed they must not have mistaken it for a warning that he was sick and dying, but how would he convey the idea of "in the past"? How could he act out the concept of "beginning" or "origin"? How, indeed, would he ask the question of "how"?
Furthermore, even if his hosts could answer his question, how would he be able to interpret the information with so little knowledge of their language? Perhaps they could give him a name, or show him on the map where he needed to end up. If they had a more complex answer, how would he understand it? How much time would he waste searching for something that was lost on his pitiful monolingual ears?
Far from becoming the triumphant fulfillment of his aspirations of the last two and a half years, Charlinder found that his walk through Italy put him in an increasingly nervous and unsteady state of mind. Perhaps he was picking up the people's residual trauma from being the homeland of the Plague. Perhaps he simply wasn't getting enough to eat. Or perhaps it was the experience of having already marched through over a dozen other countries that gave him a creeping realization that "northern Italy" was a very large area for one clueless person to walk around. It had once included several major cities, and he didn't know where to look. Was the white house even in or near any of those cities, or was it hidden in the depths of a forgotten countryside?
Then he began to ask himself: did the white house even mean anything aside from a malfunction of his travel-roasted brain? Was there any reason to think that any of the locals, assuming he would ever be able to communicate what he needed, knew any more than he did? What exactly was the
thing
he was looking for? Was it a library? A university? A laboratory? Or was it a private home where someone had documented something of significance? What exactly was his destination, and how was he supposed to know? Would he even recognize it when he saw it?
The next day he wondered: just what kind of information might he find? Would it be a set of photographs taken through a microscope? Would it be a chart that analyzed the makeup of the virus? Was it a study that traced the disease back to its first victim? Was it...he couldn't think of what else would have been done, because he hadn't lived in that era. Had the information even survived that long? Could he expect to find it intact and usable after over 120 years? How could he even expect that such information had ever existed in the first place? The Plague appeared to have killed all the scientists charged with studying it, and before they could make any breakthroughs.
He walked through an expanse of city remains once called Bologna. This time, the pulsating in the ground didn’t feel like a heartbeat so much as like ripples in a pond, and they all led in the same direction. The sense of being asked to move along wasn’t really a feeling of something pushing him out so much as pushing him through. The message was to keep heading north until he was out of the city. That much was easily explained; everyone kept telling him to keep going north, as if his life wouldn’t be complete until he saw the Alps. What he didn’t expect was when he came near the city limits, and the message of "north" changed to "and when you get out of the city, stay on this side of the river."
When he was far enough outside the city remains to lose the ripples in the ground, his sense of direction abandoned him. The idea that he should keep going north, but stay on this side of the river, made no more sense than that he should dig a hole and bury himself. All his nervous doubts of the past several days coalesced into ugly thoughts as persistent and plain as someone whispering in his ear. He'd just spent the last thirty-two months marching himself into a trap. He knew nothing about what he was trying to prove. All the scientists' work was demolished by now, as if any of it had ever contained the data that he needed. He could spend months wandering around northern Italy, and all it would ever get him would be trips through more cities fallen to mountains of rubble. He was more likely to get a sign from God out here than any answers from science. He may have just come this far to do the Faithful's work. The thought of it made him retch.
He followed the river for the rest of the day because there was nothing better to do. He saw the white house in his dreams again but this time he had a voice. He kept asking the house, "What are you doing here? What'll I find in you?" A breeze sometimes ran through the branches of the orange-and-white trees, and the fluffy animals stood on their hind legs to face him, but he was the only one who had anything to say.
When he woke up, his thoughts proceeded as though his mind had snapped in half. The part of him that reasoned, kept calm and explored options was out of commission. He packed up his bedding and continued marching north simply because he couldn't sit still. The white house in his dreams, he realized, was a sadistic game his subconscious had chosen to play on him as punishment for all the upheaval, uncertainty and discomfort he'd inflicted on himself with his half-baked scheme of a journey. He had left home without the slightest idea of what he would bring back or how he would know where to find it. He had spent the last two and a half years--no, more like three years--living in the comfortable but farcically naïve assumption that everything would become clear once he reached that mythical land of Northern Italy. It wasn't clear, and he had no right to be surprised.
There was a village coming up. Good--he was hungry, but in no mood for that pathetic routine of making cute faces at the villagers to beg for their hospitality. He would simply go straight into the first house that smelled good and open up whatever pot was boiling on their hearth. If anyone tried to stop him, he was ready to fight. In fact he wasn't concerned about getting beaten up anymore. There was nothing to be found that would prove or even support his side of The Great Plague Debate. He couldn't enlist the Italians' help, as he couldn't explain his intentions to them. No one out here could speak English, now why hadn't he thought of that when he was twenty years old and addicted to Being Right?
He was in the village now. He would have to do one of two things, now that he'd achieved this newfound clarity. He could stay, learn the Italian language, and see if he could find anything out, in which case even if he did find out what Eileen didn't know, he might never see his home again. His other option was to call the whole attempt a bust and go back to Paleola empty-handed.
Children peered fearfully at him from behind their mothers' skirts; adults waited for him to state his name and business. How would he get back home, though? He doubted that any country had redeveloped the engineering and nautical skills needed to get a boat across the Atlantic. If he couldn't go by water, he would have to turn east and walk back through the continents he'd just traveled. He would have to go back, in other words, more or less the way he'd come.
The thought of doing such a thing stopped him in his tracks. Go back the way he came? He might as well have found a cliff and jumped off. He looked toward the sky; the roofs, trees and clouds spun around his head.
"I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL I'M DOING HERE!" he shouted at nothing.
Looking back towards the ground, he started turning on the spot. "What in the Hell was I thinking?!" he demanded with his hands at his head. There was a small boy toddling unattended nearby. Charlinder ran towards him, asking, "Do
you
know what I'm doing here?" The boy whimpered and ran away. Charlinder turned towards another frightened child, demanding, "
Why
did I come out here?" The child also ran off, while Charlinder took no notice of the adult feet coming closer. There was a sharp pain at the back of his head, and all went blank.
Part 4: Gentiola
Chapter Twenty-Four
Impossible
White.
That was the first thing Charlinder sensed as he regained consciousness. There was something white, and his head hurt. He closed his eyes again because the whiteness was painful. He was upright and something pressed into his back. He opened his eyes again. The white color he saw was a halter of some densely woven material wrapped around his torso, which kept his arms immobilized at his sides. He was standing on a wooden platform, which, as his eyes gathered focus, turned out to be the floor of a horse-driven cart. He was tied to an upright at the side of the cart, which was otherwise empty except for his baggage. On the ground behind the cart, a couple of guys were arguing over him, and that phrase came up again:
la mamma
. If Charlinder had been more alert, he might have laughed. It was almost like another family had taken him into their home for the day, only this time he couldn’t just get up and leave. The guys eventually settled their argument and got up on the driver’s bench behind the single gray horse.
Were they taking him to their mother, perhaps? If so, what did they expect their mother to do with him? Would she beat him up for scaring the village children? That idea made as much sense as any other. Charlinder had caused offense, and it would take a mother's wrath to punish him for his transgression. Well, if that was the case, he surely hoped their mother would also feed him, as his guts were snarling. The horse was pulling the cart down a flat, dusty path through a forest. Then Charlinder remembered that he was once again tied up in a cart and getting taken who-knows-where by a couple of guys who were thoroughly annoyed at him. He didn't have a dairy animal this time that they could dry up. What would they do to punish him, then? He noted, on the positive side, that there were no mountains in sight, and it was August. That didn't rule out the possibility that
la mamma
was a very deep and fast-moving river. Though, for some reason, he didn't feel threatened. If they'd wanted to kill him, they'd have done so already.
More light was coming through the trees ahead. They were approaching a clearing in the forest, and as the path straightened out, Charlinder gained an unobstructed view of the source of this penetrating light.
Straight ahead was a piece of land, no more than a half acre, enclosed in a tall, black, wrought-iron fence. Most of the land visible from the road was planted in gardens that showed patches of dry, drab limpness among crisp colors. Behind the gardens were trees bearing orange fruit and white flowers. Chickens pecked at the soil between rows of herbs. A few melon-sized balls of fluff were just visible hopping around a large wire cage under a low wooden shelter. In the middle of the clearing was a stately, rectangular, snow white house.
All other concerns momentarily abandoned, Charlinder was staring at the house so rapturously he didn't bother paying attention to what his captors were doing. He was jolted back to his body when they untied the ropes around his waist and pulled him out of the cart.
Holding him by the elbows through the restraining material, the captors walked him up to the gate. There, they started shouting at the house. His first thought was that he was in perfect mental health compared to these guys if they expected the house to answer their demands, but then the front door opened and a woman stepped outside. His captors went quiet. Charlinder watched the woman rush up to the gate, which spontaneously clicked open before she reached it.
The guys took Charlinder with them inside the gate. The woman stood there with her fists on her hips, awaiting an explanation.
She was a small woman, though nicely curvy, about a foot shorter than Charlinder. Somewhere in her mid-thirties, she was tan, fine-boned and green-eyed, with thick brown hair flowing down her back in lush waves. She wore a loose, shapeless sort of gown made of tiers of gauzy off-white material hanging from her shoulders, and on her feet she wore a pair of sandals made of strips of fabric sewn to the edges of leather soles. She said something angry to Charlinder's captors. They responded defensively; they were trying to make her understand something, but she was not satisfied. The argument escalated, and since Charlinder had no idea what they were saying, he contented himself by watching the woman's eyes bore into his captors.
She was overall a pretty woman, but her eyes were nothing short of mesmerizing. They didn't simply flash in annoyance, they outright glowed in the most intriguing shades of green, blue and gold. Her eyes had a presence and personality all their own, and Charlinder was increasingly excited to see her put his captors in their place. She eventually said something to them they couldn't answer, so instead they undid the restraints that held his arms immobile. One of them went back to the cart and tossed Charlinder's pack to the ground by his feet.