Just to be Sure

Lucia Bertolini had set the long table for the large monthly village dinner herself, plank by plank, the good linen dragged out from the chest that smelled of cedar and old weddings, and she had told Marco three times (three, as if the number itself carried some protective weight) that no loaf, no roll, no heel of bread was to be set down with its belly to the sky. Upside down, a loaf on the table was a coffin waiting for its dead in her family superstition. Her grandmother had said this over every table Lucia could remember, in the same flat voice she used for weather and debts, and Lucia had absorbed it the way one absorbs the shape of one's own hands. The guests were arriving under the fig trees, the terrace filling with the particular noise of a village that only had one party a month to spend itself on, and Lucia moved among them, handing out wine and compliments while some other part of her, some patient animal crouched just behind her eyes, kept its gaze fixed on the bread. She would laugh at Signora Adami's joke about her husband's knees, and in the same breath, without appearing to look, she would find the basket at the table's centre and confirm: crust up, crust up, good. She would turn to kiss Don Pietro's cheeks, and her eyes would flick sideways to the smaller basket near the cheeses, crust up, still good — and something in her chest would loosen for exactly as long as it took to tighten again, because there was always another basket, another guest's careless hand, another half hour before the meal even started. Why should this matter so much, she asked herself, refilling a glass she had already filled. It was her grandmother's superstition, not a law of the physical world; bread did not know which way it lay; the dead did not consult bread for their invitations. And yet this is the trouble, inheritance, that we cannot simply set down because we've named them foolish. She could feel the exact shape of the fear without believing a word of it, the way you can feel a phantom ache in a tooth long pulled. To stop checking would mean deciding, once and for all, that the superstition was empty. And what if, in the one unwatched second, it were not.

By the second hour the tension had migrated fully into her hands. She refolded napkins that did not need refolding, only so that her fingers might pass near the baskets and verify, again, the small orthodoxy of crust-up. Marco caught her at it and touched her wrist, "Lucia, sit, eat something". She smiled and sat and lasted four minutes before rising again, drawn back to the table as if on a string, murmuring some excuse about the olives.

It was Carlo Ferretti, of course, who did it. Amiable, half-drunk Carlo, telling a story with both hands, who reached for a roll without looking and set it back down on the cloth crust-first, its pale belly turned up to the lanterns like something exposed on an operating table, and went on talking, entirely unaware that he had just committed a small funeral in the middle of a party.

Lucia saw it from across the terrace, over the shoulder of Don Pietro's wife, and felt the sight arrive in her stomach before it arrived in her mind. She excused herself mid-sentence. She crossed the terrace with the smile still arranged on her face, that terrible social smile that keeps functioning independent of everything happening beneath it, and as she walked she found herself doing the thing she always did and hated doing: rehearsing, in the space of eight steps, every death she had ever half-expected: her father's heart. Marco on the coast road at night. The children, God, the children, at the far end of the table eating bread that any one of them might, at any moment, without malice, turn upside down. She reached the roll and turned it over: crust up, decently, invisibly, a gesture so small no one at the table registered it as anything but a hostess tidying her table and only then did the coldness in her stomach begin, reluctantly, to thin. The party went on around her, indifferent to what she carried. Someone had started singing, badly, and her husband Marco's laughter rose above it, warm and unbothered, the laughter of a man who had never once in his life turned bread over and felt the floor tilt beneath him. She envied him that. She envied all of them, actually, Carlo already forgetting his small crime, the children swinging their legs under the table, Don Pietro's wife dabbing sauce from her chin, the whole easy congregation of people who could set a thing down and simply leave it set down.

Lucia refilled glasses that didn't need refilling. She found herself circling the table now without pretence, no longer bothering to invent an errand for her hands. Crust up. Crust up. A small litany, private as breath. She thought of her grandmother's kitchen, the flour-dusted table where the rule had first been spoken, not as warning exactly but as fact, the way one says the stove is hot and she understood, watching her own fingers hover near the basket for the fourth, the fifth time, that she had not inherited a superstition at all. She should sit and enjoy, like others, like the unaware ones.

But she did not sit down again. She stood a moment longer with her hand resting near the basket, feeling faintly ridiculous and entirely unable to walk away. Lucia understood, the way you understand a thing you have always known but never said aloud, that she would be doing this again in ten minutes, and in ten minutes after that, for as long as there was bread on the table and people careless enough, in their happiness, to forget which way the world was supposed to face.