The road to the old house had narrowed since I last saw it.
Or perhaps it had always been narrow and childhood had simply made it appear larger.
The trees had grown close together, forming a dark corridor that swallowed the last sounds of the town behind me. By the time the path ended I could no longer hear anything except the wind passing through the branches.
Castello Virelli stood where it always had.
From a distance it still resembled the place I remembered from childhood — the ancestral house, the centre of our family's small mythology. But approaching it now felt like encountering a photograph of someone who had aged without your permission.
The iron gate stood open.
Pedro had used the house in his later years, though he never truly lived here. It was the sort of place men retreat to when they discover that the world has begun to remember too much about them. The forest sealed it off from the noise of San Giusto. Whatever remained of a man's conscience could breathe here without interruption.
I stood for a moment looking at the façade.
Once this house had contained an entire family.
Christmases. Holidays. The long dinners that ended with arguments nobody remembered the following morning.
Then time performed its quiet work.
People acquired professions, spouses, apartments in distant cities. They developed schedules, responsibilities, explanations.
One by one the visits stopped.
Only my father remained.
When Papa suffered the stroke that turned him into a quiet, breathing monument to old age, everyone suddenly discovered urgent obligations elsewhere. They had children to raise, offices to attend, lives to maintain.
My father stayed.
He gave up everything with the strange devotion that only the eldest son seems capable of. Day after day he lifted the frail body that had once commanded the entire household. Fed him. Cleaned him. Sat beside him through the long evenings when speech was no longer possible.
My mother helped him.
She treated the old man not as a burden but as something closer to a child — washing him, dressing him, speaking to him with a patience that sometimes embarrassed the rest of us.
Eventually Papa died.
And the house passed, by the obscure mathematics of inheritance, to Pedro.
Pedro returned here after leaving the military. He called it retirement, though the word never suited him. He spent long stretches of time alone, wandering between the house and the detached library where he kept his books.
Perhaps it was guilt.
Men who carry guilt often prefer forests.
The library had burned completely.
It stood a short distance from the main house — or rather what remained of it did. The structure had collapsed inward, leaving a blackened skeleton of beams and stone.
Thousands of books had lived there once.
Many of them first editions.
A strange place for a fire.
If someone wished to destroy Pedro they could have done it in the house itself. Why burn the library?
I stepped closer.
The smell lingered.
House fires leave a scent that survives long after the flames disappear. Campfires die with a gentle, ashy breath. A house fire is different. It devours varnish, glue, leather, paper — each material releasing its own slow confession into the air.
The result is oddly rich.
Almost pleasant.
I had always been able to distinguish them.
There was oak here. Resin. Burned paper. The faint sweetness of old wood polish.
And beneath all of it something else.
Fear perhaps.
Or guilt.
Pedro was somewhere inside that mixture of smoke and dust now — reduced to a supporting ingredient in the final perfume of the place.
I breathed in again.
Strangely comforting.
Strangely invigorating.
"Well," I said quietly to the empty ruins, "you're in there somewhere."
Then I turned toward the house.
"Where are you, cousin?"
The piano began playing before I reached the door.
At first I thought the sound belonged to memory. The house had been empty for years. It was the sort of place where imagination could easily confuse itself with reality.
But the music continued.
Bach.
The Goldberg Variations.
For a moment my heart stopped.
Matteo.
It had to be him.
He was the only person I knew who played Bach like that.
I entered the house slowly.
The piano stood in the same room where it had always been — my father's old instrument, its dark surface reflecting the last light from the windows.
Someone was playing.
But I could not see him clearly.
And suddenly I realised I did not want to approach.
If I moved closer he might stop.
So I remained where I was, letting the music unfold.
Variation after variation.
The room dissolved.
I closed my eyes.
Something peculiar happened then.
My body seemed to disappear, leaving only the sensation of falling — as though I had stepped from a great height into open sky. The sun hovered somewhere above me while the earth moved slowly upward to meet me.
There was no fear in the fall.
Only a strange happiness.
A brief suspension of gravity.
Then the music ended.
"La petite mort," I whispered.
A voice behind me answered.
"You must be Silvio."