Well not for everyone, only for myself. This post has plenty of spoilers, I can’t reccomend enough that you first read the book and then come back here to commiserate with me.
I have never before felt so connected to a book’s story, characters and places. I cried so hard during the last few pages, its been days and I’m still fighting back tears, as I did all throughout the preparations and celebrations of Christmas, if not full-blown weeping whenever in private. The tragedy of Teresa and Bern keeps replaying in my mind, to me it is as if they are real people. And yet I don’t regret reading this book one bit. In fact, I’m thankful for having experienced it so deeply and if I could, I would love to have the chance go through it for a first time again.
I picked out Heaven and Earth almost at random. I was sold right away from the vague, one phrase synopsis I saw online, and the very first page confirmed I had made the right choice. I often struggle to find novels I like, usually I find the writting style or the characters annoying and just give up, but with this one it was a perfect match. I would read it in bed at night, it captivated me so much that during the day I’d just count the hours to jump into bed and lose myself in that world. The writing is straight to the point, but descriptive enough that your mind can fill in the gaps to form a good picture. While reading, I had very vivid images of Teresa’s grandmother’s villa, the masseria, the Scalo, the abandoned watchtower. I look back now and I’m overwhelmed with nostalgia. It’s as if I’ve been to those places myself and I desperately want to go back.
The story is about Teresa, who as a teen spends the summers at her grandmother’s villa in the village of Speziale in Apulia, Italy. When she’s 14 she meets three brothers Bern, Tommaso and Nicola, who live at a nearby masseria (agricultural farm) with an odd but seemingly friendly religious couple, Cesare and Floriana. We get to experience the first summers of the group together, spending time at the masseria or going to the piazza in Ostuni or to the Scalo, a trailer surrounded by tables in the rocky shores of a beach where they hang out. Eventually, Teresa and Bern develop a romantic/sexual relationship, but it all comes to an abrupt end when Teresa, now aged 18, returns one summer to find everything has changed. Bern got a girl pregnant, while Nicola and Tommaso have since moved on to their own lives away from the masseria.
The narrative is nonlinear and by the next chapter the story jumps to Teresa, now in her 30s, meeting with one of the boys, Tommaso, her rival for Bern’s attention. He tells her his side of the story, including the truth behind that pregnancy. You know something terrible happened during that time skip, as Teresa says they are the only ones left to talk about their past in the masseria, but you only piece it together bit by bit.
Even if the setting might seem very specific, and by the end the story does takes an almost fantastical turn, I find that the inner turmoils of the characters still keep it extremelly relatable. The struggle to fit in, the painful transition from chilhood to adolescence, and then adulthood, the bitter what if’s and the constant comings and goings of people and places in our lives are themes that anyone has experienced at least once. There is one quote from when Tommaso is telling Teresa about his childhood with Bern and Nicola at the masseria that stuck with me:
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>“Finally, the treehouse in the mulberry became too small. The last one to climb up there was Nicola. He found a hornets’ nest lodged among the branches. We always said that we would build a new, more spacious refuge, maybe over several trees connected by rope bridges, but time had begun moving faster than us.”
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Isn’t it just devastating? I can bet most of us can relate to that feeling, of having such passionate dreams that become obsolete in only a few years when you stop being a kid. It’s also bitter to get to know how close the brothers once were, and yet their futures would be so grim. Throughout the book, the author delivers these hard hitting lines with such few words, I get goosebumps just reading them again.
There are other quotes and scenes from the book that keep replaying in my mind. When Teresa returns to Speziale in her early 20s and recconects with Bern, they live with a group of eco-activists in the masseria. During that time, Bern first recalls the mixtape Teresa gifted to him, first in private and later with the rest of the group:
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>“Remember when you left me the Walkman among the almond shells? Sometimes in the tower I felt lonely, so I listened to your tape. I always listened to it from beginning to end, until it wore out.”
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>“It was awful music.”
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>Bern looked at me as if he didn’t understand.
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>“It was beautiful music.”
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>“I wore out every millimeter of that tape,” he \[Bern\] said, his words slurred and his lips stained dark by the wine.
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>“What tape?” Danco asked, somewhat uncertain. He didn’t like it when someone else drew attention to himself for so long.
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>“A cassette with a lot of different singers. I never knew what it was called. What was the name of it, Teresa?”
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>“I don’t know,” I lied, “it was just a mixtape.”
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>Bern didn’t give up, he was flooded with emotion: “There was one I liked more than the others. I would listen to it, then rewind the tape to the beginning and listen to it again. I got to know the exact number of seconds I needed to hold the key down to rewind it.”
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>With his eyes half closed, and an unguarded bliss on his face, he began singing the melody. I hadn’t heard him sing since the early summers at the masseria and I wished he would go on, but Corinne jumped up: “I know it! It’s by that girl. What’s her name? Come on, Teresa, help me out!”
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>“I don’t remember.”
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>I felt Tommaso watching me as I looked at Bern, still silently begging him, but now hoping for him to say something, to make them stop before they ruined everything.
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>But he remained silent, unable to even return my look. And when Danco said, “What a pathetic story!” I saw Bern swallow, then give his new brother, his new supreme guide, an embarrassed smile full of submissiveness.
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Even these otherwise happy moments are bittersweet, not only because of characters like Danco being assholes, but because you know that only a few years later something terrible happens that turns their lives upside down. The entire experience of Teresa living with Bern, Tommaso and this new group is told in such an effective way by the author. He makes those first few months sound so idyllic, the group had sucess after sucess in their farming endeavours, they were starting to get along and in their free time would play cards and drink beer under the pergola with the beautiful countryside as their backdrop. But then he swiftly dismantles that fantasy and brings us right back to reality, to the hardships the group faced until they eventually split up.
That leads to perhaps the most bittersweet moment in the book, when after living together just the two of them in the masseria, Teresa and Bern decide to get married in order to garner funds for their upcoming fertility journey through gifts from the guests. It’s a simple wedding, with each of their friends helping with something, and despite some fires here and there both of them are happy in the end.
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>On the table were some leftover wedding favors. I got up to get one and went back to the swing. I bit a sugared almond in two and offered half to Bern, but at that moment he started sobbing. I asked him what was wrong, but he was crying so hard that he couldn’t answer. So I took his head in my hands.
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>“Stop it, please, you’re scaring me.”
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>His face was convulsed, splotched with red under his eyes, and he was short of breath.
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>“It was so beautiful . . . ,” he stammered, “the most beautiful day of my life . . . everyone was here . . . did you see? Everyone.”He said it as if even then he had a premonition that nothing like that would happen again. And at that moment, for the first time, I understood the depth of his nostalgia, of how much he missed them all: his mother and his father, Cesare and Floriana, Tommaso and Danco, maybe even Nicola.
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Bern’s sensitivity is often mentioned through the story, which only makes his end even more tragic. Their marriage unfortunately was to be shortlived, after their struggle with fertility Teresa lies that she had an affair in order to set both of them free. There is a lot that happens after the separation, Bern gets back with Danco and a large group of eco-activists, and ultimately becomes involved in a scuffle that ends with Nicola, now a police officer, dead, and we only find out in the very end that it was Bern who did it. You’ll have to excuse me but I will skip it because I really need to speak about Teresa and Bern’s final meeting in the cave in Iceland (I said it would get fantastical!) and I don’t want to make this post any longer than it already is. That exchange is what keeps replaying in my head the most and I need to write my feelings down.
To know that someone like Bern, so sensitive and so fond of nature and freedom would be dying while stuck in a cave is just soul crushing. In their two final meetings, Teresa and Bern can’t even see each other or have privacy as the guide remains by Teresa’s side. As she says, they have to shout what otherwised would’ve been whispered.
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>“Do you know what my favorite moment was? Our walks. Around sunset, when we had finished our chores. You always dawdled a little while I waited on the bench. Then we walked together on the dirt track. Past the iron bar, we usually turned right, though not always, sometimes we went left. But we never hesitated. We always knew which way to go, as if we’d made up our minds beforehand. And if the figs were ripe, we’d pick them even from the trees that didn’t belong to us. Because in reality it all belonged to us. Right, Teresa?”“Yes, Bern.”“It all belonged to us. The trees and the stone walls. The heavens. Even the heavens belonged to us, Teresa.”
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>He did not say my name, not immediately, the first thing he said was: “It’s so cold.”I asked him if he had tried to move his leg, to get up, but he didn’t answer, as if something much more important were weighing on him. He said, “This wasn’t the journey I wanted, Teresa. The journey I wanted was with you.”
I’m ugly crying just by reading these again. It’s one of my fantasies to find someone, move into an old house in the countryside and eventually start a family of our own, something I most likely will not experience unfortunately. I was rooting so hard for Teresa, it’s as if I got to live out that fantasy vicariously through her. I wanted her to get her happy ending, to spend the rest of her days with Bern and the daughter they had envisioned together in the masseria. She was supposed to be happy, she was supposed to win for the both of us. During Christmas everything made me think of the two, every love song or conversation somehow reminded me of Bern stuck in that cave, telling Teresa “the journey I wanted was with you.”
Despite how heartbroken I am, all I want to do is to jump into bed at night and go back. I want to experience their first summers together, their reconnection, their marriage. I want to go back to the masseria, to the grandmother’s villa, to the Scalo. And I realise how stupid and childish it sounds, but I desperately want it to have a different ending this time. I want Teresa not to pretend she had an affair in order to end their marriage, I want them to stick together so that, in the end, she’s not trying to have a daughter on her own, but with Bern by her side. Why am I so obssessively invested in a couple that doesn’t even exist? Why do they feel so real to me?
I know it would never be the same as the book, but I would love to see this story adapted into a high budget and perfectly directed limited series like HBO’s Sharp Objects. The beautiful setting alone begs for it. I can clearly see flashes of how certain moments would look like, the first time Teresa saw the boys sneaking out into her grandmother’s pool, the group driving back from Ostuni to Speziale at night after Nicola defended them, the nights of drinking and playing cards under the pergola. It would be beautiful.
I’m not sure anyone will ready this, but I really needed to write it down.
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by BricksHaveBeenShat