“We won’t get in trouble?” I asked.
“Let’s go right now, while no one’s looking.” He laced his fingers together to give me a boost, and I scrambled up and over the wall.
The property was terribly overgrown. There were wild olive trees and juniper and big prickly pears with stickers the size of my thumb. Right away, I regretted not wearing pants. “The trick,” said Teo as he led us toward a small clearing, “is to look for the boar paths.”
I could feel my heart rate quicken. “As in wild boars?”
“They’re not all bad. In this case, they’re helpful.” He pointed to a shallow trench that ran between two overgrown grapevines. “They’re good diggers, and they’ve got these thick coats of fur, so they can bulldoze their way through the underbrush.”
“Do they ever attack people?”
“Sometimes, on the beach, they’ll try to steal your lunch. But for the most part, they want to be left alone.” He could tell I was nervous, so he added, “Also, they sleep during the day.”
“That’s very good to know,” I said, and he gave me one of his wide smiles.
By the time we arrived at the villa’s first outbuilding, my legs were covered in tiny scratch marks, and I think Teo worried that I was regretting my decision to come. “I promise it’s just a little farther,” he said.
“Famous last words,” I joked, but I could see a turret poking out above the trees. “Is that it?”
While we walked up to the house, I told him about stopping by Bruno’s makeshift lab. “It’s such slow going, processing all the nacchere. I couldn’t get over it.”
He agreed.
“And waiting for the results,” I added, “takes forever.”
“It’d be helpful if they had a lab on the island.”
“Even with a lab, it’d still be days or maybe even weeks before they knew there was a leak.”
He nodded. “The long-term goal is to have these continuous monitoring stations. They’re like microcomputers that sit in the water and spit out results in real time.”
“They’re expensive, I assume?”
“Prohibitively so,” he said. “There’s no way the regional government can afford them, so the money would have to come from the state. And the way things are going, I’m not sure the state can afford them, either.”
“It’s sort of overwhelming to think about.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why, for now, Bruno’s just focused on getting the funding for that environmental survey I was telling you about.”
“You think he’ll get it?”
“Bruno’s optimistic.”
“What would the survey entail?”
“I don’t have all the specifics, but the idea is they’d study the archipelago to determine the best test sites going forward. They think some places are better than others, in terms of getting accurate readings.”
We had arrived in front of the Villa Webber, and I was stunned by how beautiful and how decrepit the building was. It was a Moorish design, with an exterior that at one time had been clad in a pale pink stucco. The stucco had begun to crumble, the windows were broken, and even the window frames had rotted away.
Since everything was open to the elements, it was easy to gain access to the house. As we wandered the rooms, I asked Teo how he had known he wanted to be a journalist, and he told me about the summer he had written and distributed a weekly newspaper to the entire apartment building. “I was eight.”
I laughed, picturing a tiny Teo at his parents’ typewriter, then said, “That’s lucky. To know yourself that well at such a young age.”
He glanced at me. “Did you work? Before you came to Italy?” I was pretty sureBefore you came to Italywas code forBefore you met Paul, but already, we had come to a silent understanding that we didn’t talk about Paul.
I told him about working in the men’s department at Condon’s and how I’d been in college before that.
“What did you study?” he asked.
