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Under a Sardinian Sky
Sara Alexander


Sometimes a family’s deepest silences hide the most important secrets.Carmela disappeared from her Italian hometown long ago and is mentioned only in fragments and whispers. Mina has resisted prying, respectful of her family’s Sardinian reserve. But now, with her mother battling cancer, it’s time to learn the truth.In 1952, Simius is a busy Sardinian town surrounded by fertile farms and orchards. Carmela Chirigoni, a farmer’s daughter and talented seamstress, is engaged to Franco, son of the area’s wealthiest family. Everyone agrees it’s a good match. But Carmela’s growing doubts about Franco’s possessiveness are magnified when she meets Captain Joe Kavanagh.Joe, an American officer stationed at a local army base, is charismatic, intelligent, and married. Hired as his interpreter, Carmela resolves to ignore her feelings, knowing that any future together must bring upheaval and heartache to both families.As Mina follows the threads of Carmela’s life to uncover her fate, she will discover a past still deeply alive in the present, revealing a story of hope, sacrifice, and extraordinary love.







SARA ALEXANDER attended Hampstead School, went on to graduate from the University of Bristol, with a BA hons in Theatre, Film & TV. She followed on to complete her postgraduate diploma in acting from Drama Studio London. She has worked extensively in the theatre, film and television industries, including roles in much loved productions such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Doctor Who, and Franco Zeffirelli’s Sparrow. She is based in London.








For Pietruccia and Carmela,

wheresoever they dance




CONTENTS


Cover (#u1bcfdf22-9477-5bfd-b8dc-79a066323754)

About the Author (#ue1d07184-10b2-5bb9-b779-c69ac8b1e3a9)

Title Page (#u29c1096f-1897-5a5e-a522-7151c73075cd)

Dedication (#u0f44e317-bcdf-51b0-a973-7d96cf8b953a)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_ef89b237-195e-56a4-8547-abcf7a966d26)

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_2c49b298-9252-513c-9c04-69ff7f9aa7c3)

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_df65d4aa-0d04-50d4-a7c7-62cf47681081)

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_37e66100-51bb-5a7e-bc73-0397fb1d0f59)

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_0f3cdfec-b45b-5d4c-b208-591bf7b6f123)

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_9623c75d-fb4b-5ab0-9a19-aad79c469216)

CHAPTER 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE (#ulink_3fdae9ff-f44a-5392-832b-76b7c630ce81)







London, England—2007

In Zia Piera’s wardrobe I can find anything from a fluorescent paisley dressing gown from 1963 to a pair of dejected Baghdad trousers with a jarring 1980s print. Hipsters would salivate over the latter. I’ve never grasped the concept of ironic dressing. I’m not a girl who could spend a day with that geometric noise on me. I like the anonymity of my half-dozen washed-out T-shirts and two pairs of jeans. It makes packing for my travel writing a swift affair so I can use my time for more fulfilling tasks like eating food I don’t recognize and can’t pronounce or sniffing out the local inebriation haunts in whichever nook of the globe my work has zapped me to.

I catch my reflection in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door as I open it. My body is straight as a board. My head is topped with a mass of rebellious black curls perched above a “thinker’s” nose, as my uncle calls it, with little to ogle at in between. The mirror and I are fair-weather friends. My ancestral line suggests a predisposition to ample bosoms, a pert ass, irresistible olive skin, and those gooey chocolate eyes guys fall into, just like any prime example of a Sardinian female. My sister, not I, received such gifts at birth.

I’m inept at ironing, blow drying, and nail painting. I don’t lick my floors clean, wipe the sink with bleach after use, or stash half a pharmacy of feminine hygiene washes. I escaped those Italian manias. Doesn’t mean I can’t cook the best gnocchetti I’ve ever tasted, roast a suckling pig to perfection, and tell you the year any particular Cannonau red wine was barreled—just by the smell. I also give up very, very rarely, on anything. Ever. This alone proves I am not, in fact, adopted.

I peel off Zia Piera’s tailored jacket, which, out of respect for my mother, I had borrowed for the service this morning to disguise myself as a bona fide Italian grown-up. I reach inside the wardrobe for a hanger. The five decades of hoarding clothes means there are suitable outfits for all occasions—whether it’s a solemn day, like today, or a frivolous night at my best friend’s house when she’s ordered me to play a Russian duchess, complete with mink stole and sequins, at one of her murder mystery parties with her Shoreditch actor mates. I prefer necking espressos and whiskey, just the two of us, but her thespy darlings are good company when all is said and done, even if they spend too much time arguing over which locally brewed botanical spirit deserves supreme worship. I fit the jacket around the hanger and squeeze it into a narrow space on the burdened rack. Then I grab my tobacco out of my pocket and walk into my parents’ spare room, slumping onto the bed to roll up.

Zia Piera’s funeral this morning has emptied my tank. My aunt died five days ago. We had all taken turns to sit by her throughout the day and evening that led to the night she passed. She was skeletal, disappearing into the bedsheets. My ten-month-old nephew had refused to settle down to sleep in the next room; my sister was over to help and looked gaunt with worry and frustration. Sometimes Zia Piera’s expression reminded me of my sister during labor. The pain, like contractions, seemed to come in waves. In between, she would settle, the thin skin on her cheeks hollowing into her face.

When my mother entered, not long before midnight, she’d taken one look at her sister and asked me to call for the doctor. I did. We’d helped Zia Piera onto a chair beside the bed when he arrived. He spoke softly, as if he was interrupting, like someone shuffling along a full row of seats in the middle of a play. “I’m going to ask you a few questions, Piera,” he’d said.

She nodded.

We looked at him.

“Can you tell me where it hurts?” he’d asked.

Mum and I turned back to Zia Piera.

In the second it took for us to do so, she had taken her last breath.

The doctor offered condolences. We all began talking in whispers. He started filling out forms. My mother had tapped into her nurse background and performed all the necessary procedures with clinical calm. My sister’s baby finally fell asleep, as if he had intuited the release in the room next to his. My father brought up a bottle of mirto, an aromatic elixir, which my aunt had made some months ago by soaking wild myrtle berries in aqua vitae. We toasted her carcass. That is what it seemed to me. She was somewhere else now. Not there, in that skinny frame.

My Piera had fat fingers stacked with sparkling, semipreciousgem rings that she’d bought after fierce haggling with the Senegalese beach sellers hawking the crowded Sardinian coast. My Piera wore rhinestone-encrusted sneakers and visited her sister, who now lives in my late grandmother’s house, inland of those beaches, with cases full of curry powder, dry-roasted peanuts, and pyramidal British tea bags as exotic gifts. My Piera could cook for twenty-five people with the ease another would fry an egg. She had a tongue to cut through any bullshit and a razor-sharp memory that filed every wrong, every triumph, and every little beige moment in between—from the pope’s visit to her hometown of Simius when she was three to what socks the local north London bus driver wore two weeks ago.

Now Zia Piera smiles at me, like she always does, from the photo on the bedside table of this tidy room reserved for guests or itinerant offspring. We took the shot at our favorite Sardinian cove on the last day of our stay at the summerhouse, when we knew she’d only ever return to her island as ashes. Cancer was rippling through her lungs even though, at seventy-three, she miraculously had come out on top after surgery and chemotherapy for pancreatic tumors. All the pictures of her during her final summer are resplendent. She’d gone on a last-minute retreat near Bologna with a friend and, in her words, “met the angels.” She reconnected with her long-lost cousins in southern France.

In short, she did what I’d urged her to do one wet afternoon in Edinburgh, when she visited me while I covered the city’s theatre festival for a broadsheet. I asked her then if she was scared. She responded with a quintessential Sardinian shrug. Could mean yes. Could mean no. Could mean I don’t know; the universal body language for I can’t give you words for that, or the Sardinian for I won’t give you an answer to that. Why commit to a thought, a stance, when we could hover in the vagaries of a purgatorial no-man’sland?

“You are in a way really lucky,” I’d said at the time, once again clawing out of the earthy pits of realism toward delusional optimism. “You’ve been given a warning. It’s a chance to do everything you’ve always wanted. Don’t waste it.”

Her tears finally came—the first I’d seen since the ordeal started the previous year. In that condensation-thick Scottish café, Zia Piera and I sobbed into laughter, leaving little pools on the dirty floor for the impish shadow of Death to frolic in.

The only other time I’d seen her cry was when she talked about her beloved sister Carmela.

I stick my head out of the spare room window and inhale. I was with Zia Piera when the doctors diagnosed her pancreatic cancer. When they asked her if she exercised she answered them with a gruff “No!” Then they laughed—I explained she walked three miles daily because in the next neighborhood she could buy bananas two pence cheaper per kilo. When they asked her if she was on medication, she replied, “Yes, I take ibuprofen if I have a toothache.” They didn’t understand her at first, her thick Italian accent always elicited either condescension or bafflement from the listener. Once I had repeated it, they laughed at that too—at that sweet, old Italian lady with the funny voice and the dancing hands, whose number was almost up. Grimness and comedy twirled a dance—the perpetual symbiotic pair, like fish and chips, tea and cake, pasta and parmigiano.

I breathe out my smoke and watch it waft over my mother’s prizewinning back garden. My boyfriend—I use the term with some hesitation—drifts into my mind. I stayed over at his place last night so I could cry loudly. Then we made love all night. He likes having sex to music. Last night it was the opening track of Astral Weeks. It played the first time we did it. That was the night I fed him nearly comatose with my family’s guarded recipes: homemade gnocchetti with sage butter and a liberal, fresh grating of Sardinian pecorino, followed by braised lamb with fennel and green olives. Then I revived him with a truck driver’s portion of very alcoholic tiramisu and a large pot of espresso to accompany my aunt’s homemade mirto. Only then did he finally loosen his guard and perform a fine demonstration of unbridled British passion; much like the crackling of a suckling pig roast, if you have the time, it is worth the wait. Only I prefer to have sex without the music. I like to hear nothing but the charged breathing of a lover, his sweat on my throat, the squelch of his hand hot in mine as we lift off into the ether. I hate an underscore. It feels contrived.

That’s why I know it can’t last. He’s a romantic, and his instinctive approach to seduction is like that of any true Brit: crablike. Couple this with the fact that my family can leave even the strongest soul bulldozed and it leaves little hope of a future together.

My father is my Jewish mother. He’s armed with a colorful spectrum of passive aggression, an unstoppable zest for life, and bombastic meltdowns that are devastating and fortifying; after growing up with him, the newspaper editors I work for feel like puppies on Valium. He was born to Russian-Polish Jews, grew up in a leafy suburb of north London, and fell for a demure Catholic girl from a then-little-known rustic island in the Mediterranean. I went to a Catholic school with all the other local Italian, Ghanaian, and Irish families. I learned the Bible stories by heart. I chose favorite saints, dependent on which names I liked best rather than good deeds.

At home, however, I’d pore over my dad’s collection of books about Atlantis and listen to his after-dinner lectures about space, or spirits being frequencies that we might tune into like a radio antenna—radical thinking for a nice Jewish boy from Golders Green. When my elementary school teacher asked me to draw God, I did my best scribble of a mesh of yellow and blue light in the center of my page, because that’s how my dad would describe Him/Her/The Universal Source. I remember my teacher’s arched eyebrow, but nothing more came of it because I went to mass every week and my grades were good.

My family speak over one another. We overfeed. We argue for fun. Loudly. I watched my boyfriend at the crematorium, even though I had insisted his attendance was a punishment he didn’t merit. I saw him look desperate to feel comfortable—and fall short despite his best efforts. No doubt he’s in love with the idea of charging at this fairly successful, London-born, Sardinian-Jew (ish) travel writer with boy hips and a Medusa mop. But the reality must be exhausting, I’m sure.

I look down at the yellowing tip of my forefinger. It reminds me how deeply my smoking disappoints my mother. I start to sob again. My mother is halfway through her own course of chemotherapy for breast cancer. The two women I love most in the world have been out to battle for months. One has fallen.

Now I wade through the first stages of grief while watching my mother battle on. I feel helpless, except for the odd misplaced joke I can offer here and there to lift spirits. I’ve sat next to Mum as the chemicals drip into her vein. I’ve given a mouthful to the mincing male matron reigning over the night staff in the hospital, who had mistakenly taken her blood pressure on her arm when her notes explicitly said not to, due to the removal of several lymph nodes. I’ve watched her sleep through the thick panes of a solitary room when her white cell count was dangerously low and contact was unadvised because of the high risk of fatal infections. I’ve watched her hair fall out. We’ve laughed at her shiny new head. We’ve chuckled when strangers compliment her fashionable new hairstyle, because we know it’s one of her wigs. We’ve clutched those snatched moments of happiness in all the small things, for each dinner she manages to cook on the good days. But there is still too much left unsaid. Too many questions I haven’t had the courage to ask. At night I cry in the bath. I sob until it hurts.

I cry on her behalf, for losing the sister who held me first while my mother rose to consciousness after a general anesthetic for a C-section during the heat wave of 1976. Zia Piera had lived in the house since that day. She had cooked for a small army every night. When we left for university she sent food parcels to my sister and me. Each delivery contained enough dried ramen to make you never want to set eyes on a noodle again, a lifetime supply of homemade biscuits, and tiny packets of saporita—a blend of spices, which, after much coercing, she had reluctantly revealed was her secret ingredient in tomato sauce, then dispatched them in wholesale quantities. I cry for two sisters facing a life without the other by their side.

When the tears fade into numbness, I feel a familiar, cold terror well up inside. I just let it drift through me, like a passing gray cloud. The worst has already happened. Zia Piera, who no one could imagine living to anything younger than 102, is dead. Yet the world plunders on. The sun rises, the weeds ramble, the universe squiggles into infinity. Mum and I have no choice but to face life and death with awe, fear, and joy.

I stub out my cigarette on a small ceramic dish and walk back into Zia Piera’s room next door. I open the wardrobe again and nuzzle my face into the dresses. They smell of her. There’s a bag hanging on a hook beside the mirror. I pull it down and run my hands over the soft leather. I like to imagine her fingerprints on the worn indentations along the front flap. I will take it everywhere I go now. There will be a warehouse amount of such vintage appendages to trawl when Mum and I feel ready to clear her room. What we will do with the 700 matchboxes and large collection of sugar sachets she’d pinched from every place she’d ever had a cup of tea in, ever, escapes me. In the end we’ll manage to let those go too, I imagine. The top two shelves of her bookcase are lined with a collection of porcelain dolls, forever looking at a hypnotic apparition on the horizon. In the bathroom next door, which she had the sole use of, on account of the folks having a cheeky en suite put in, her colorful, glittery nail polishes still sparkle on the skinny glass shelves inside the mirrored cabinets, a miniature cross between a pound shop and Aladdin’s cave.

I sit down on her bed. Mum changed the sheets after the private ambulance took Zia Piera out of the house on a stretcher, surrounded by a black body bag. I look at her pillow. That’s where I watched her toss and turn, every now and then mumbling inaudible mutterings. The last few words we exchanged echo in my mind. She had turned to me, eyes half closed. “Carmela?”

“No, Zia, it’s Mina, your niece.”

“I want to go with you to fetch the thread.”

“It’s all right, you can rest now.”

I took her bony hand in mine. It was cold. My heart lurched.

“Carmela, where are you?” she asked, “Come back, Carmela. . . .” Her pleas faded into shallow breaths.

Carmela’s life has been retold to me in barbed whispers. Sometimes, at the mere mention of her name, family members’ and friends’ eyes still well with tears. A palpable sadness tinges even the happiest of times. It has always seemed that my mother and her three siblings neither laugh with all their bones nor cry like no one is watching. As I consider how the two women I love most in the world have battled cancer, it strikes me that the stifling of unexpressed, unresolved pain over their eldest sister manifested as life-threatening illnesses. The past eats at the women I love most on this planet, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let those haunting memories do any more damage. No dignity in being that passive bystander, harboring their pain to pass on to the next generation. The responsibility of breaking this cycle falls to me. I won’t watch my mother lose the fight.

Only one way to expose the real Carmela. Only one way to release her hold over my mothers. It’s what I’ve always done.

I write.




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_deb289e0-746d-5629-a836-6ee31a51392f)







Seven years had passed since the roars of V-Day before the Sardinian town of Simius flung off its ashen veil of world war and threw an Assumption Day fiesta full of spectacle and hope. Children squealed beneath the strings of lights that rendered the stark, dusty central promenade unrecognizable. The narrow houses that lined the square, crushed together like skinny matriarchs pushing against one another for attention, boasted long strips of red and green fabric hung beneath their weary shutters. Benevolent, rosy-cheeked men butchered nougat. Farmers sold their pungent pecorino. Women flogged slabs of bitter almond brittle. And yet the Simiuns would never throw their hands in the air with the abandon of the singsong Neapolitans or caterwaul into the night with the joie de vivre gesticulation of the Romans.

Carmela looked over at the portly accordion player, who squeezed life into his instrument and bellowed a ballu tundu, a traditional dance performed in a circle, heralding the start of the festivities. A troupe from a neighboring town, south of Simius, swarmed the piazza. They interlocked arms in a tight line and began to dance. The accordion player’s fingers raced up and down the keyboard as the tune whirled into a fast ditty.

Carmela admired the female dancers’ costumes, and not simply because she and her colleagues at her godmother’s tailoring studio had made them. Their starched white headscarves were wrapped around their heads in a complicated crisscross pattern, held in place with gold pins on either side. The scarves framed their faces, drawing attention to the dark twinkle of their almond eyes, much like a Spanish mantilla or the veils of Arabian princesses; historic invaders from both places had left their mark on her island’s history and traditional dress. They wore billowing white blouses with intricate laced cuffs and collars. Over these were very tight-fitting, sleeveless bodices in bright red satin with gold embroidery, which cinched in their tiny waists. The neckline was cut low to allow the ruffles of the collars to show. Their plain, long black skirts with angular creases were topped with narrow aprons festooned with vibrant needlework depicting flowers, birds, and patterns in primary colors as bold and joyous as their expressions were inscrutable. Around their necks were velvet chokers from which coral and turquoise crucifixes hung. In their ears, garnets and cornelians, with intricate gold settings as delicate as fine lace, swung as they bobbed into their steps. At the yoke of the neckline each dancer had a brooch, made from two flattened, golden conical shapes, like tiny Bronze Age shields, set with coral or turquoise at their centers.

The men, dressed in long black woolen waistcoats despite the balmy August evening, glided in white shirts with sleeves that ballooned toward tight, starched cuffs. The black tunics below flared out like skirts, reaching down to the middle of their thighs, where the tops of their white cotton trouser legs underneath puffed over the rims of their high black boots. The length of their velveteen black hats flopped over to one side, like a hare’s ear.

The dancers stared out into the distance, their shoulders perfectly level, as their feet shuffled, syncopated and synchronized. Despite the joyous melody, their expressions were cool with indifference, as if their feet moved involuntarily. Their torsos were held bolt upright; they wove in and out of formations like ornate planks. Carmela would have liked to lose herself in the colorful beauty of the display but couldn’t help dissecting their costumes with the mathematical eye of the seamstress who had crafted them over the past year. Each autumn brought a slew of commissions for the numerous summer festivals in which the dancers would perform. As she tried to commit any improvements she would make to memory, there was an urgent tug at her elbow. “We’re a girl down!” Carmela’s sister Piera was flushed with panic. It made her look wirier than she was already.

“What?”

“Ripped her ankle. You’re on!”

“Nonsense!”

“Here’s her costume,” Piera said, shoving a mass of color in front of Carmela. With that she grabbed Carmela’s arm and dragged her down into the warren of darkened streets in a frantic search for an abandoned doorway to change in.

“This is ridiculous!” Carmela cried out, trying to catch her breath. Piera cut a sudden turn downhill, passing their Zio Raimondo’s shoe shop. Then she jerked to a halt beneath the arches of The Old Spanish House, a high-walled diminutive fortress left by the sixteenth-century Spaniard invaders her islanders were so proud of.

“Just ask one of the Nugheddu girls!” Carmela said, trying to fight off her sister’s quick hands scrambling over the buttons on the back of her dress.

“I’m not asking any of those trollops from the next town!”

“Then tell the dancer’s partner to sit it out too, for goodness sake!” Carmela snapped, quickly reaching to catch her own dress as it fell over her slip toward the cobbles. “Piera!” she gasped, seizing her sister’s hands. “Have you lost your mind?!”

“I let you out of my sight for two seconds and you’re down an alley getting undressed!” a voice called out. The spidery silhouette of Carmela’s fiancé, Franco, crept round the corner. She yanked her dress up high over her front, covering as much of her body as she could, though the warm night air still brushed over her bare shoulders.

“Perhaps you can knock some sense into my sister!” Carmela cried.

“Impossible,” Franco replied. “She won’t let any man in spitting distance.” He leaned against the wall of the house that flanked the steps.

Piera didn’t mirror his grin. “Carmela’s got two minutes to save us from disaster,” she huffed, stuffing Carmela’s feet into the black underskirt and yanking it up. “Turn around!” Piera ordered, spinning her to face the wall, throwing a blouse over her head, and beginning to squeeze her into the bodice.

“This dancer’s half my size,” Carmela muttered.

“Not everyone’s been blessed with your curves. Take this shawl,” Piera replied, throwing it over Carmela’s shoulders and knotting it at the base of her back, “It’ll hide the gap at the back.”

Franco stood watching. Carmela felt her cheeks flush.

Piera whipped a scarf around Carmela’s head and began fastening it at the back of her neck. Franco looked her up and down. “I’ve never liked those old-fashioned head things till now.”

He sauntered down the last few steps and planted his lips on Carmela’s before she could brush him off.

“Franco . . .” she said, smoothing the embroidered apron Piera was wrapping around her so it would lie as well as it might.

“Piera’s almost my sister-in-law. Not the last time she’ll see me kiss you.”

“Not if I can help it,” Piera piped from the hem of Carmela’s skirt, where she crouched down to pick it out from under her square heels.

Franco smirked. “Tomboys make fine spinsters, Pie’.”

“That’s enough, you two!” Carmela said, feeling the heat of embarrassment and increasing nerves.

“Franco! Vieni subito!” a voice called.

The three looked up toward the steps.

“Cristiano?” Franco yelled up to his cousin as he came panting down toward them. Franco pulled away from Carmela. “What in God’s name?”

Cristiano stood, breathless and giddy with liquor. “You must come—the boys have got the Americans in a drinking competition. We’ll lose if you’re not there!”

Carmela willed Cristiano’s eyes to tear themselves away from her body.

Franco gave him a shove. “Where’s your manners, you cretin? That’s how you look at my fiancée?”

Carmela winced. She felt like a gormless mannequin wearing the wrong clothes.

“Come on, you imbecile,” Franco said, giving his cousin a kick as they set off. “You watch this, Carmela,” he called back with the malevolent bristle of an adolescent, “we’ll show those G.I.s what Sardinians are made of!” With that they bounded around the corner to inebriation.

Before Carmela could take a breath, Piera grabbed her wrist and led her in a gallop back up through the alleys. Their footsteps ricocheted off the thick walls of the houses, which huddled along the viccoli barely wide enough for a loaded donkey. They reached the main square just as it was time for the local troupe to begin their performance. The injured dancer’s partner moved toward Carmela and wrapped his arm around her waist. Before she could compose herself, she was spun around like a top, shuffling into the middle of the long line of dancers, hoping she didn’t look as much the deer before a hunter as she felt. She adored creating the costumes, and her deft work attracting admiration, but being the center of attention in this way was something Carmela loathed. The entire dance was spent holding one side of the skirt down with her thumb so that it wouldn’t ride up to her chest.

Carmela had watched every rehearsal, using the time in between choreography calls to give each of the performers their fittings, adjusting their costumes accordingly. By tonight, she was as familiar with the routines as threading a needle, though she had never planned to perform them. During the bridge, the dance mistress had chosen a few measures for the now-fallen dancer and her partner to perform alone while the remaining members of the troupe jigged upstage in a line. It was a scandalous departure from the military patterns of these traditional dances, and one Carmela had hoped to enjoy from the safety of a crowd.

Now she found herself led this way and that. The world whirred. She aimed to stare at a spot directly in front of her, to maintain balance in the fog, just as the dance mistress had instructed the dancers during rehearsals. Her eyes couldn’t focus with the sea of faces ahead of her. She lost her footing. Her partner would have almost spun her horizontally had he not had the forethought to shunt them into a retreat and rejoin the line—a measure too early. The troupe, counting in their heads, was thrown off beat. The remainder of the dance was a ramshackle version of what they had spent months preparing for. Carmela could feel the hot glare from the dance mistress on the sidelines.

As soon as the accordion wheezed its closing chord, Carmela fled the square, grabbing her own dress and retreating to the secluded changing spot. She didn’t wait for Piera. It was too painful to look anyone in the eye, even her own sister.

In the quiet, Carmela began to slip out of the costume she had spent hours making and back into her own. She brushed away embarrassment with each stroke of her ruffled hair. Why should she care what she looked like anyway? A betrothed woman had no place worrying about her appearance. Her job was to prepare for marriage, to portray a wholesome image to the world. To look good enough for a fiancé to invite her to be his wife, she supposed, but not so much that it would seem she chased attention elsewhere.

“Everything all right, ma’am?”

Carmela twisted around to the American voice, grasping the top of her dress and pulling it up to cover as much of herself as she could.

“Apologies, ma’am.”

She squinted up toward the steps, at the unfamiliar silhouette. The man’s voice was clear and warm, silky even, very different from the timbre Carmela was accustomed to hearing from the soldiers. Or perhaps it was her comprehension that had improved.

“I caught you running. I wanted to make sure I needn’t be chasing after someone on your behalf,” he continued, with a polite turn of his head away from her, signaling that he had noted her state of near undress. What must he be thinking of her skulking in the shadows this way? The fading light from an oil street lamp streaked across his eyes for a brief moment. “You can’t be too careful at these fiestas.”

“Yes,” Carmela replied, struck by something more startling than the blue of his eyes. She was half dressed down a darkened alley speaking English with a perfect stranger. He was a soldier, no less, and they weren’t well known for their manners. Despite all of this, she felt something peculiar in the presence of this man she didn’t know: safe. It was more disarming than fear itself.

Carmela recalled how she and her sisters, as young adolescents, had run down to the piazza when these corporals had arrived eight years ago. She imagined that those V-Day hero cheers from the mainland were still ringing in their ears as they swaggered into her town, victorious. They liberated the island from the decay of war with gum and smiles. The shoeless poor still ambled the white roads of neighboring villages, farms crumbling in the crags of the ancient valleys inland, and for many, hunger was entrenched in quotidian life. But the fatal sting of malaria had finally been eradicated, thanks to the Americans, and this alone was cause to celebrate. Carmela and her sisters had returned home that day with their pockets bulging with hard squares of pink, covered in wrappers they couldn’t read, to be pummeled with their grandmother’s vitriol against those devils incarnate. She had confiscated their loot, placing it into the glass urn filled with candy reserved for visitors.

“I’m fine, really,” Carmela said at last, feeling as if she owed a decent reply to a genuine concern for her safety. “It is a long and silly story.”

He smiled. “Your English is better than my Italian. Compliments.”

“I work with people from London sometimes,” she said. The little English she knew, she had learned from an adventurous London family, the Curwins, who took residence in a Victorian villa every summer since the war ended. Carmela and Piera worked for them as seasonal domestics. Because of the eradication of malaria, Simiuns had felt the first blushes of tourism.

The soldier stepped back into a shaft of light, casting his shadow through one of the arches and onto the stucco wall beside him. He had an open, handsome face. Carmela had seen many handsome faces since the foreigners settled. Their tall, pale beauty was so different from the small, dark men most girls were promised to at a young age. It made the soldiers somewhat of a novelty, one that many local girls chased after but that always left Carmela cold.

She realized she must have been staring straight up into the light, because he had morphed back into a silhouette. Carmela shifted and grasped the tip of her dress tighter to her chest.

“Good night now,” he said, breaking the silence.

With that he placed a cigarette onto his lips, turned on his heels, and climbed back up to the fiesta. She watched his smoke spiraling up into the night air.

After securing every button on her dress and clutching a carefully folded pile of costume, Carmela began her ascent toward the piazza. She placed the dancer’s costume on a bench by a neighbor’s sweet stall, relieved to find everyone’s attention directed toward a new event taking place in the center of the piazza. She joined the throng, bristling with anticipation ahead of a live performance. The audience surrounded a smaller, impenetrable circle of an all-male choir. No danger of being asked to substitute this time.

Carmela noted the starkness of their expressions, that characteristic Sardinian stare that would not let on whether it loathed or loved what it saw. For a fleeting moment she perceived that hard, diffident shell for which her islanders were infamous, but also the molten center that it protected. Maybe this is what it felt like to stand close to a range of volcanoes.

Her eyes drifted over the American soldiers, dotted among her neighbors. For a split second she thought she caught sight of the alley soldier. She squinted. He was fair-haired, with the same white skin flushed with a rosy pallor. But even from this distance, she could see that the way he moved as he spoke with his colleagues was jerky and juvenile. He was a blond pup, with none of the understated grace of the man in the viccolo. She brushed away the futility of the thought without taking her eyes off the young soldier. Instead, she considered how different the Simiuns were compared to the prim Milanese, the refined Turinese, or the girdled girls who these young American men might have left behind before their journey to her craggy, crystalline-coved isle.

There was a rumble from the bass singers. A hush fell, so swift, so thick, that the night sky itself seemed to grow darker and the scatter of shimmering stars glistened brighter. Carmela couldn’t remember the last time such a great number of Simiuns were so silent. Even in church, there would always be the echo of stray toddlers exploring the side chapels, followed by the tireless footsteps of their mothers, or older men who thought their whispered gossip couldn’t be heard from the back pews.

The singers upheld the silence.

Finally, the bass singers took a breath, in perfect unison, as if they shared a set of lungs among them, and intoned several measures of percussive humming. Their voices rose as if from the earth underfoot, trembling the crust of the land, like the first warning of an impending earthquake or the distant rumble of a thousand wild horses thundering toward Simius from the parched plains that surrounded it.

Carmela could feel the vibrations on her chest from where she stood. Now the other singers joined in. A column of sound rose. The ancient harmonies mesmerized the crowd. Carmela allowed the honeyed notes to wash over her, as rich and deep as the burnished red of the naked trunk of a stripped cork tree. The melody was sonorous, full of loss and longing, somewhat at odds with the unadulterated joy of the surroundings.

The music described a long-lost antiquity. The chords crushed together, dissonant almost, sweeping Carmela back to a time when the Neolithic settlers sheltered in those caves carved into the rocks on the outskirts town. Where those peoples once saluted the sun and venerated pagan gods of fertility, her family now celebrated May 1, with picnics of homemade cheese and bread. She and her sisters would gaze out over the valley that looked like an enormous emptied lake. They ate, sat upon that same stone, smooth with an age of travelers’ steps. She pictured those Neolithic men now, beneath fat moons, wrapped in animal skins, singing these same melodies into the night. Carmela lived for these stolen moments of pleasure, a respite from arduous monotony, transported by the music in churchless worship.

Her eyes landed on Franco, on the opposite side of the outer circle. She watched him, glancing over the milieu, giving half nods to any of his father’s compatriots at the town council office. His eyes returned to rest on her. He smirked, mischievous, then peeled the dress off her shoulder with his gaze. His smile was unchanged from the adolescent chimp she had acquiesced to during the cherry harvest in the early summer of their sixteenth year. Her breasts had had a growing season of their own, something that hadn’t escaped the attentions of a young Franco. He was the son of one of the most influential landowners—a heavyweight on the town’s council—a burden Franco carried with neither ease nor grace. Carmela watched him run a hand through his thick black hair, sharing a joke with his cousins, who shifted about him like the hungry stray cats that skulk along Simius’s narrow viccoli.

A solo tenor’s voice lifted up and over the group as he recounted the Sardinian tale of the deer woman who could settle for no man. The lyrics were plaited with fierce longing. He wailed his highest note, consumed with his song, as if this deer woman he sang of were his own lost love. It pierced the inky night, a lost sheep’s bleat down a starlit valley.

The hairs on the back of Carmela’s neck prickled. Franco’s trysts, though exciting, never brought her this rapture. This heightened passion could only ever exist in song, surely, those fables of poetic love. This was not the real feet-in-the-dust, earth-in-your-hands love that Carmela could expect from joyful married life. A good wife would be rewarded with life’s honest pleasures—food on her plate, babies with fleshy thighs at her breast, and wine to drink to her family’s health.

The singers closed with a glissando and a final rich, hummed chord that hovered, golden, in the air. Then the night erupted with applause. Carmela listened to the hands pounding with pride, but her eyes couldn’t tear themselves from Franco. She remembered how it felt when his salty mouth had made her heart pound and his body felt like an unchartered universe to touch, taste, and discover. Like the choir’s song, at once stirring yet distant, this boy, with his cherry and wild fennel kisses, felt like someone she once loved in a dream.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_b913b1f4-f021-5cdc-a4d8-6c2f5cf4174f)







The cottage on Carmela’s family’s farm stood camouflaged against the boulders of the surrounding hills. A low wall made up of roughly chipped rocks undulated from the house over to the near distance where it gradually broke off, stone by stone, till there was no wall at all. In the middle of August the grapes on the hundreds of vines—lines of gnarled soldiers—grew plump with juice but remained green, awaiting the ripening autumnal sun. Dozens of tomato plants hung heavy with their second round of lustrous red, plum-shaped fruit. Beyond those were the almond, cherry, and plum trees. The cherries had long since been devoured, sold, or bartered in exchange for staples such as sugar or coffee. The June harvest of nuts had been dried, toasted, ground for marzipan, and then rolled into coin-shaped sospiri—bite-sized sweets dipped in white icing. They stored well for months and were given as gifts on feast or saint days. Only the plums remained to be picked. Their sweet, jamlike flesh, destined to fill hundreds of jars as preserve, would glaze the family’s breakfast breads throughout the winter.

Carmela’s father, Tomas, and his younger brother, Peppe, joined forces on the farm. After the war, and the division of land that followed, the two had found themselves owners of this narrow idyll. There was produce to feed their respective families and enough left over to barter for anything they didn’t, or couldn’t, grow themselves.

The two brothers had built a roof over the ruins of the home they found there, using mismatched terra-cotta tiles salvaged from crumbling villas on the outskirts of town. After several months of sweaty work, they had converted the stones into this two-room cottage. One room had the skeleton of its original hearth resurrected. This was where Carmela’s mother, Maria, performed her culinary spells when the women joined them from town to help. The other room had several cots for sleeping, though it was usually only the men who would stay there overnight. The women would return to their Simius homes, where their day-to-day lives were anchored and the children schooled.

Tomas paced the stone floor, hot in the middle of a rant, his sun-parched skin creasing into sharp lines. “Fire-and-brimstone-thunder-lightning-heavens-and-hells!!!!” The two-year diet of sugar, lemons, and bananas during his time in Africa, building roads for Mussolini, had left him with a mouth of rotting teeth that caused him considerable pain. “Cross-the-devils-heavens-above!” he cried, stomping his dusty boots and clenching his fists. The bronzed muscles on his wiry forearm bulged.

One end of a thread was tied tightly around the metal door handle and the other around the culprit. Maria stood beside him, her alabaster face serene, unruffled by the frantic tirade of her husband; her black eyebrows didn’t furrow, and no worry creased her forehead. Maria’s white skin, unlike the tawny olive of her siblings, had earned her the nickname of Spanish princess. Genetic surprises were not uncommon in Simius. Maria’s cousin was born to a small, dark woman with thick, black locks but grew to be almost six feet tall, topped with a mass of copper hair and bright blue eyes—a nod to the area’s Norman, rather than Spaniard, history. The tone of Maria’s skin was set off by the jet black of her hair, the color and sheen hinting little to her forty years. Only on rare occasions did Carmela spy it liberated from the bun wrapped in a tight knot at the base of her mother’s head, cascading in thick, natural curls down to the middle of her back.

Carmela had inherited the same lustrous locks, though hers were less cooperative. They fell in erratic waves by her shoulders, creasing into tighter curls depending on the weather, or sometimes, she supposed, her mood. She gave up trying to tame it into a bun and swept it off her face with a scarf tied around her head instead, or a pin or two clamped around a few strands as an afterthought. Carmela’s skin was several shades lighter than her sisters’ also but had little of her mother’s porcelain quality. Where her mother guarded her thoughts and feelings, Carmela’s every emotion rippled across her face despite any attempt at concealment, the deep ochre of her eyes revealing each flickering thought. On certain days, Carmela noticed marbled flecks of her father’s green in hers. Piera swore this happened only when her sister was trying not to lose her temper, or if she’d cut a pattern wrong or burned the garlic.

Carmela sat at the wooden table before the wide stone hearth and stopped kneading the dough for fresh gnochetti. She admired the tender stoicism her mother radiated, the way her soft wrinkles underlined an innate wisdom, especially when her father was mid-fury. It was an occurrence Carmela would have wished unusual, for her mother’s sake. If it wasn’t a painful tooth, Tomas ranted about the onion being cut incorrectly for red sauce—eventually Maria placed it in whole for the duration of cooking and removed it before serving—or that the cauliflower had boiled too long and fumigated the house with the smell of sewer. It was a blessing that he had found someone as exacting as he was but who managed to keep her attention focused on minutiae with apparent ease.

Maria’s sister-in-law, Lucia, sat on the opposite side of the table and shifted her glance from her baby, asleep in his wooden cot at her feet, oblivious to the drama. Tomas took a breath, gave the door a defiant slam, and let out a guttural growl.

The familiar tinkle of a dead tooth tapping on the wood restored a short-lived peace.

Maria wrapped a strip of old sheet around her two fingers and dipped it into an enamel bowl of water. She held it out to her husband. He flicked her hand away.

“Water’s for washing!” Tomas whistled through the new gap. “Give me the bottle!”

“Tomas,” she implored, “you need to clean it first.”

He stomped over to the wooden dresser and yanked out the aqua vitae from the lower cupboard. The women watched him rip a fat strip off the old sheet in one motion and douse the frayed material in the alcohol. His mouth opened wide. Tomas stuffed the sodden cotton inside. His jaw clamped down. He winced. Then he straightened, his cheek bulging with cloth.

Carmela saw the steely determination for which he was infamous flash in his green eyes. Her father could plough through agony of any sort like no other. A dogged stubbornness marked everything he turned his hand to. Tomas could dig his entire farm without stopping, not even for a sip of water. The first time the younger hired hands had worked at the farm, they raced ahead of him, ridiculing his grandfather speed, as they called it. An hour later, they succumbed to paralyzing hunger and thirst. Under the relentless sun that day, they guzzled their water and inhaled Maria’s homemade bread and cheese. Meanwhile, their eyes fixed on their swarthy, bare-chested boss, twice their age. They gawked at him with admiration as he lifted and dropped his pick into the rich soil with slow, mechanical movements, an unyielding ox, till the pink sun dipped down into the hills, its fading rays streaking in through the branches of the cork oaks. They never teased him again.

Tomas threw the door wide open. Carmela looked out of the small window of the hearth room, watching her father charge back out to his fields. Beyond the ploughed earth, the yellow grasses swayed in a breeze, offering little respite from the midsummer sun. Inside, the stone rooms allowed the women to work in the comfort of the cool temperatures, unless it was cheese-making day, like today, in which case the milk simmering on the wood fire in the hearth raised the temperature.

Beyond Tomas and his younger brother, Peppe, sweating over the long rows of tomato plants, Franco’s family’s parched land lay dotted with cork oaks. Their trunks had already been stripped. The cork bark hung, maturing, in one of the two adjacent huts, later to be boiled, flattened, and sold.

These two circular huts were the oldest structures on the farm, left by solitary shepherds, whose century-old footprints, some said, could still be found, untouched, on the floors of virgin forests where autumnal gatherers dug for truffles. One hut was used for drying out cork and cheese, and the other, with a fire pit dug into the center of its earthen floor, was used to smoke their homemade sausages, which swung high above the flames, suspended from the conical thatch. It was here that Tomas, his brother, and any occasional worker would gather at the end of the day to sip their pungent wine out of tiny ridotto glasses. As night fell, they would grieve for times gone by and argue over whether America’s sidewalks were truly covered in gold or if all of God’s riches were right there, under their noses, among their beloved Sardinian wilderness.

Carmela loved the light, space, and fresh air of the farm, a world away from the cool darkness of their town home. The latter was built with the small fortune with which Tomas had returned from Africa. In its inception, he had favored size over finesse. He cared little for fancy fixings or elaborate plaster moldings. Where his neighbors had ornate columns that upheld covered terraces on the top floors of their narrow, old homes, his new creation had a veranda closed in with large, square glass panes. He erected a practical construction large enough to keep his family warm and dry. Tomas chose not to paint over the stark gray of the concrete with the pastel earthen hues of the homes that surrounded it. To his mind a house served a purpose, no more. It was neither an extension of his artistry nor something to gawk at, admire, or covet. He grew up shoeless, darting along the dirt alleys before his family’s one-room cottage. Now his children had a large terrace of their own, granite stairs, concrete walls, and a kitchen with a table that sat twenty. Tomas sweated several times his own weight in Africa for it; his pride was justified and unabashed.

On the farm, it seemed like everything and everyone grew. Carmela attributed this, in part, to the fact that Nonna Icca, her father’s mother, never joined the women there. She preferred to remain in town and guard the house. In Nonna Icca’s mind, the walls had hidden chinks through which all the towns’ gossips would peer at their lives like vultures, waiting to peck at scandal.

She had lived in the house since Carmela was born on a stormy Christmas Eve night in 1930. Icca’s screams overpowered her daughter-in-law’s as she cried out to God to forsake them from the oncoming apocalypse. Although thunder rumbled the house, the first sounds Carmela heard were that of her grandmother banging her bony fists on the wooden doors to ward off what she deemed to be Lucifer’s battalion. Being surrounded with four hard-working sons, a manicured daughter who was spared manual work of every sort, and a gaggle of, mostly, obedient grandchildren did not allay Icca’s bitterness. She sat, day after day, atop her raffia stool by the front entrance of the house, strategically placed to witness all incoming and outgoing human traffic, clutching the rosary in one hand and her broken heart in the other. By now, she ought to have been in the Promised Land. Instead, her husband had returned from the Americas, gold in his pockets, Panama Canal dirt under his fingernails, whereupon death visited him with appendicitis. A month shy of their departure for New York, he was playing cards with the angels while she bit back her tears.

Carmela tore her gaze away from the window. Lucia had begun industrious production of gnocchetti from the lump of pasta dough, big enough to satisfy several herds of farm help.

“Icca’s a tyrant and that’s the end of it, Mari’,” Lucia began, as she pinched tiny pieces of the dough and rolled them over a corrugated metal plate. It left circular indentations over the small pasta shapes. “She can stick her snide remarks where the sun don’t shine—and I don’t mind saying that to her face, dried-up old sow.”

Maria never commented on gossip, neither admonished nor agreed. This morning, however, as Lucia preached, Carmela noticed her mother’s white cheeks flushed the pale pink of crushed rose petals. Maria heaved the oversized copper milk pan off the wood fire. Carmela stood up and grabbed one of the round handles from her. They placed it down on an iron stand in the middle of the room to begin preparation of salted ricottas.

“I told Peppe,” Lucia continued, flicking the little pasta shapes that dropped onto a floured tray like raindrops on a tin roof, “I didn’t marry you to be anybody’s serving girl. I’d go to a lady’s house and get paid for that. Six children he has from me. Six little piglets that need feeding. Who in Jesus’s name is supposed to do all that and look after mother hen up at yours as well?”

“Lucia . . .” Maria interjected, as a feeble courtesy. On the subject of Icca, Lucia would never have her opinions altered.

Carmela brought the wooden cheese molds to her mother, and together they soaked their forearms in a bucket of water and patted them dry with care.

Lucia went on. “We move to our own house, and Icca’s asking me to do her washing! ‘Too many dirty sheets coming out of your and your daughter’s quarters,’ I says. ‘Stained sheets have no place in a spinster’s house.’ Unless, she shits herself in her sleep? Don’t know how you stand for it.”

Lucia’s baby squirmed into a hungry cry. “Jesus, that child is never satisfied, greedy like his father.” She pulled him up and, in one brisk motion, flipped up her shirt and attached him to her ample bosom. The room tipped into silence but for the contented suckling of his tiny lips. Carmela and Maria dipped their hands into the warm whey till it reached their elbows. They filled the small, bowl-sized mold and gently raised it to the surface. Carmela had performed this ritual with her mother since she was a child. Working alongside Maria set a high standard for becoming a wife herself. Carmela’s discipline supported her well—any dress she made would be finished with impeccable precision and an eye for detail.

Lately, though, the force with which her imagination swept over her, and her inability to settle on one task for too long, unsettled her. She attributed her distracting daydreams to wedding flutters and tried her best to think little on it. Over the past few weeks, at her godmother’s studio, where she had apprenticed since she was thirteen, she was bombarded with ideas for dresses and trousseaus. The pictures flashed in her mind as clear and colorful as those in a high-gloss magazine spread. Her hand could barely keep up with the pencil careening over her notebooks. It raced across the page, trying to manifest those visions, with the frantic energy of a child leaping to catch the swinging string of a beloved balloon before it floats up into the clouds, forever out of reach.

Carmela looked back down into the pan, lifted out the full mold, and squeezed out the excess liquid. Then she placed it upon the stone ledge by the back wall and topped it with a circular piece of sanded wood and a slab of granite to press the ricotta down into shape.

“Love a man with appetite, Mari’!” Lucia boomed, breaking into laughter. The fat of her arms jiggled. “I could feed half the town with this left tit. Given up on the right, the little devil almost bit her off, I told him straight—you bite me one more time and I’ll bite you like the wickedest donkey on the farm and you’ll know it, all right.”

“He’s two months old, Lucia. . . .” Maria said, reaching back down into the warm pan.

“You got to be strong to a man, Mari’, or he’ll walk all over you. Mark my words, Carmela—you fill a shirt and have a waist as narrow as a new olive—best listen to your Zia Lucia before your fiancé fills you with ideas!”

To Carmela, Maria was strength personified. Her mother never tired but devoted herself to the work of providing for her family with a very private, near religious ardor. There was not a minute in the day when her mother’s hands lay idle. Even in the deep quiet of the afternoon, her fingers would be racing over some skirt or shirt to be mended. From the time the sun rose, her mother glided from one task to the next with a grace that Carmela could not even begin to imagine imitating. When Tomas exploded over the hot topic of any particular day, Maria listened, unswerving, letting his rancor wash over her like water, suffusing his steam with wordless patience, neither intimidated nor defiant. If that was not strength, then what was?

Lucia threw her head back when she laughed, sung like no one was listening, cared little for what anyone thought of her. She would jump up and twirl at the first sound of music; life danced through her. She told Peppe what she thought and could scream into a fight at the slightest provocation. She drove her truck to and from the local markets, unafraid of the rough roads, happy to roll up her sleeves and fiddle with the engine as needed. She appeared to be her husband’s equal. Her childhood began in the orphanage, but Lucia refused to let life swallow her up. She was a survivor.

But was all this passion, this vociferous philosophizing over the battle to be won, a testimony to strength? Wasn’t finding the beauty in the everyday rhythms of life, committing with an open heart to one man and the children he helped a woman bear without jostling for control, true strength? Wasn’t this the faith that everything was built on? After all, Carmela thought, how ridiculous it was for humans to fight off God’s plan, succumbing to the illusion of control. Why then, in that very union of marriage, made under God’s eyes, was control so important? Was not this grappling ungodly? Sinful, even? How far could love take you if, in the end, it was a battleground? Few years had passed since everyone agreed that the futility and horror of war was not to be forgotten or repeated. Why, then, invite it into your own home?

It seemed to Carmela that striving to put a man in his place was a refusal to acknowledge that different members of a household had different roles. Although Tomas would scream and shout over the tiniest detail, it was Maria who held the domestic reins. It was she who saw that everything ran like the well-fitting cogs of a flour mill. A church was not built with two steeples. Was the tiny gold crucifix upon the altar any less important than the tall spire? A family, like a church, is built over time, each new member drawing and feeding strength to those who came before, like the construction of Simius’s gold-tipped cathedral, which rose up toward the stars, brick by brick, over decades.

Carmela did not want to think she’d ever stand up to her fiancé, Franco. The playful anarchy of Lucia’s home was entertaining and joyous, from afar, but Carmela longed for the delicate treasure of a home and a marriage honed with care, gentleness, and devotion. How could she stand beside Franco at the altar if she believed the reality of their life together would be a constant wrangling of wills? Lucia lived for this, fought hard for the thrill of winning every little argument with her husband.

Carmela had never played like this with Franco. Their love began in a blush. A sideways look from beneath the mottled shade of a cherry tree. Carmela and her siblings were helping her father with the harvest, along with several aunts and uncles. That June’s heat had lacked the oppressive beams of August or the scorch of July. A breeze blew. The children and adults sang, making the plentiful work light. Against the cloudless blue of early summer, Franco caught her eye. Of course they had known each other since they crawled the dirt of their farms, but that day it felt as if they had met each other for the first time. His face had creased into a mischievous grin. It was as if he could read the playfulness inside her, which she denied herself. The firstborn, studious apprentice to her godmother had little time for distractions. And yet.

Later that afternoon, as they waddled the weight of the luscious red berries in their heaving baskets, he’d spoken to her about his dreams. He had ambition. His eyes lit up when he talked about his soon-to-be burgeoning empire. He spoke like a prince, not a whisper of doubt in his voice about his trajectory toward wealth and responsibility. That’s how it had felt that day, when his eyes lingered on hers past the end of sentences, between thoughts, in the silences percussed only with the crunch of their feet on the hot earth. To a sixteen-year-old Carmela, it was all she could do not to think that he had just met the most beautiful woman in the world. In his eyes she saw the future. It was bright. Filled with possibility. And freedom—an intoxicating promise of something beyond her own world.

Floating through these memories now felt like a half-remembered dream. Her thoughts hovered in the narrow space between sleep and waking. It was nearly impossible to know if any of them had happened at all. Perhaps Franco had only been that sixteen-year-old for one day. Perhaps it had taken all these seasons since for Carmela to realize that he might never have been that boy at all. Like her aunts always said, “Sun and fruit remove sight.”

She had felt as if he once had the power to offer her something different from the certainty of small-town life. But as the days passed, it became harder to ignore the little voice in her head whispering that this was little more than her own brittle illusion, stitching made in haste without a knot at the end of the thread. Over time, his ambition had begun to curdle into a stubbornness of someone beyond his years. His excitement about the future ebbed into a subtle paranoia that he may not have the responsibility and riches gifted to him. There were other siblings whom his father adored more. In place of his breezy swagger germinated the near imperceptible seeds of bitterness and jealousy. He was a slightly bruised cherry—altered but little, yet marred nonetheless. Carmela wiped a tiny wisp of hair from her face with the back of her hand, and with that these fruitless shoots of thoughts.

Lucia rolled the last squeeze of dough into a final gnocchetto. Her impatient hands rested for a moment, till the one that wasn’t cradling the baby swirled through the air to punctuate her speech. “One good thing about milking—I don’t have to put up with the curse every month.”

Maria looked up from the pan. Her cheeks had returned to their vanilla white.

“Tit’s out again!” Peppe exclaimed, striding in to fill a glass with water from a terra-cotta jug.

“Just jealous it’s not for you,” Lucia answered, without missing a beat.

“They’re the mismatched mountains of the North.”

“You and me, more like!”

Carmela watched her aunt and uncle chuckle, wondering if she too would dance around her husband like this after six children and uneven, milk-laden breasts. Is this the kind of wife she would be? It was hard to imagine Franco teasing her like this, almost as hard as it was to picture him stamping his feet over rotting teeth. Carmela took her sudden impatience to know where her life would take her as another painful reminder of her immaturity. A wise woman like her mother never let her thoughts race headlong into anything.

Another wave of energy bubbled up inside. She dropped a second mold into the whey, dipping her hands into white warmth. As she lifted it out of the pan, Carmela felt the liquid streak down her forearms. All her simmering thoughts evaporated into the milky air.

The sun began to hit the height of afternoon when the clatter of a vehicle brought everyone out from the back of the house, where lunch was drawing to a reluctant close. It wasn’t a sound any of them were accustomed to hearing there. A cloud of dust rose from the dirt track leading to the farm, which was set back almost a kilometer from the main road. The family would travel the three kilometers from town on foot or in Lucia’s fruit truck. The brothers paused to scrutinize, squinting into the near distance. As the vehicle reached the rusted gate, it stopped.

The engine fell silent.

Tomas marched over to the driver.

The family’s distrustful Sardinian glares scissored across the scorched earth. A serviceman got out of the jeep with one lithe jump. Nothing about the crisp white of his shirt, or sweat-free brow, suggested he had traveled from the base in a roofless vehicle under the unforgiving August heat. Tomas shook his hand and gave him a welcome pat on his back. Everyone shifted.

“L’Americano! Venite! Gather round!” Tomas called out, as the two turned and began their walk toward the group.

“And that,” Lucia muttered under her breath to Carmela, “is what tourists call a breathtaking view.”

Carmela flashed her aunt a disapproving frown.

“What? You don’t make babies sitting on the back pew.”

“This,” Tomas announced, “is Lieutenant Joe Kavanagh. He’s from the base.” He gestured to the mob. “Got a bit up here,” he said, tapping his temple. The officer flushed.

“He’s promised to help me get my hands on some equipment. Wants to see how we do things.”

The bashful lieutenant smiled as if he had understood every word of Tomas’s Italian. Although he appeared to hold substantial rank, judging by the appendages on his jacket, there was something about the way his knowing eyes swept over the land that suggested he was no stranger to farming. Carmela glanced at the faces around her but gathered little from their inscrutable, unblinking expressions. Tomas reached a warm arm around the soldier. “Is this how you treat a guest?” he called out to everyone. “Pour the man a drink!”

Maria, Lucia, and Carmela hurried back to the house as the men joined Tomas. Maria covered a tin tray with ridotto glasses and a green bottle of garnet-colored wine. Carmela placed a slab of pecorino onto a chopping board, uneven and scarred with scratches from years of use. Then she filled a basket with roughly torn strips of pane fino, the large circular flat bread for which the town was famous, along with a handful of small paniotte rolls she and her mother had baked that morning.

Tomas led the visitor toward the long wooden table under the shade of a gnarled vine canopy at the back of the cottage. Its legs were made from two wide oak trunks, a rugged altar at which feeders worshipped Maria’s cooking.

“This is the man you told me about?” Peppe whispered to his brother, as they sat down.

A handful of local young men, hired for extra help that week, straggled behind like a pack of dogs salivating for a treat.

“Play our cards right and we could do very well,” Tomas replied.

Tomas gestured for the American to sit. Carmela noted the lieutenant’s posture. He seemed so at ease, or else created an impeccable performance to that effect, even among this group of strangers intent on force-feeding him and making him drink into a fog. The men took their places on the benches and thrust a glass into Kavanagh’s hand, filling it to the rim with Tomas’s wine. Their glasses raised skyward. “Saludu!” Tomas called out.

“Salute,” the lieutenant replied.

That silken voice unlocked a memory.

Carmela stood by the door that led into the house, hovering between participation and service, the chopping board and basket still in either hand. She watched as the men coerced him into drinking in one gulp so they could refill. Peppe signaled to Carmela to pass the pecorino, made from their own sheep’s milk. She walked over to him and placed both board and basket before him, allowing him the honor of slicing the cheese. He carved out a generous slab, wrapped pane fino around it like a blanket, and bellowed across the table, “Tieni! Take it, Americano. God bless our sheep! God bless America!”

The men clinked to America and long life. Kavanagh was fed a sample of their ricotta too, and several slices of their homemade sausage, fragrant with fennel and thyme, balanced with just the right amount of salt. The group made easy work of polishing off three of them. When four bottles stood empty and the lieutenant still appeared intact, Tomas called down to Maria at the other end of the table. “Got ourselves a professional, Mari’. Bring out the hard stuff!”

She disappeared into the house, followed by Carmela and Lucia.

“Going to take more than wine to make this one dizzy,” Lucia whispered, frisky. “I’m going nowhere until that collar is undone and I get myself a look at more skin than just a neck. And those eyes, no? Clear like the Chia coves.”

Maria reached into the bottom of the wooden dresser and shook her head with a reluctant smile. She passed up glass bottles of homemade liquor to Carmela, for the tray; aqua vitae and Tomas’s fragrant mirto, an aromatic, potent after-dinner drink made from their native myrtle berry.

“Give it here!” Lucia exclaimed. “I’ll do the pass with the mirto, Mari’, get me a closer look!” With that she whisked the bottles out of Carmela’s hands before she could get them onto the tray. Carmela followed Lucia as she flew back out of the door, laying out fresh ridotto glasses before each man.

“Oh, here she goes,” Peppe said, as Lucia sidled up to the table. “Why must you always nosey about the men, woman? You stay in there and I’ll stay out here, and we’ll all go home happy!”

“Someone’s got to protect her beautiful nieces from you lot!” she replied, flashing Kavanagh a toothy grin.

The men laughed at the couple’s familiar repartee, which accompanied the end of most meals. Peppe fidgeted in his seat.

“Americano! Which one for you?” Lucia asked.

“Mirto, per piacere.”

A stunned pause fell over the merry group. His Italian impressed them. Mumbled surprise rumbled into clinking glasses. The men slurred wishes of good health as the initiation fast approached completion. The afternoon trickled through another bottle of each digestif, alongside plentiful servings of Maria’s seadas, thin pastry-encased slices of cheese, pan fried till crispy on the outside and oozing on the inside, topped with a drizzle of the neighbor’s acacia honey.

The setting sun cast its ruby glow over the men as they cajoled in a soup of half languages that everyone appeared to understand. The Americano started to gesticulate in Sardinian. Carmela noticed his hands were worn, those of a man accustomed to hard physical work. The way they moved smoothly through the air, however, was more akin to an artist describing a new work than that of a worker discussing the fluctuating prices of milk and cheese. His sleeves were rolled up now, exposing his muscular forearms, much to Lucia’s delight.

Tomas looked over to his daughter and signaled for her to bring out yet another bottle. She moved to clear the empty ones first, when her father took her hand. “Americano!” He hiccupped. “You’ll forgive me, I haven’t introduced you to my daughter. This is my eldest, Carmela. Not just a pretty picture—inherited my brains too!”

Kavanagh’s eyes widened, his head cocked slightly. “Actually,” he replied in English, stretching out his hand, “I think we’ve already had the pleasure.”

Carmela flashed a brief half smile in return and gave his hand a perfunctory shake.

“She speaks English too, you know?” Tomas began.

Carmela stiffened. She was no stranger to being put on the spot by her father after he had drunk too much. Her face reddened in spite of herself.

“Go on, Carmela, say something!” Tomas cried, swinging his arm up like a ringmaster announcing the headlining act.

Carmela felt the glare of a dozen eyes. What was this fixation with her knowledge of English? It was a skill, but she was not an acrobat who lived to hear applause for her tricks. Carmela had a heightened sense for when her father would perform such turns and now berated herself for failing to escape in time.

“Attenzione, everyone!” Tomas called out, “My firstborn is going to speak like an English!”

The blood thumped in her ears.

“Please, don’t put yourself on the spot on my account,” the lieutenant said, undoing the top button of his collar. The blue of his eyes deepened. Carmela would have liked the warmth that shone in them to relax her, but it only made her unease swell. Her eyes darted up and down the table, scanning the remnants of the food, a gourmet graveyard. She raced around in her mind for something simple to say, but it was like a bare white room. Her eyes lifted. They met her mother’s, reminding Carmela it would be no great pain to humor her father. She found her voice.

Carmela muttered something about welcoming the lieutenant to Sardinia and the Chirigoni farm, but the applause drowned out the end of her sentiment. Her eyes flitted over a sea of sun-cracked smiles. Kavanagh flashed her a grin, as warm and wide as hers was taut.

She beat a swift retreat inside.

The cicadas serenaded a fat moon by the time the group bid each other reluctant good nights. Carmela stood in the shadows of a cork oak beyond the house, scraping food off the plates and into a trough for the pigs. She looked up as her father and Peppe creaked the gate shut. The lieutenant strolled to his jeep, jacket swung over his shoulder, a satisfied sway to his walk.

She watched his taillights zigzag into the blackness of the hills.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_7dd45e3b-5e15-5fa3-bbff-893fb3d1d67e)







The long windowpanes of Yolanda’s dressmaking studio reached up to fresco ceilings, but its clouds were cracked, and the sanguine putti—happy harp-playing angels—now had several bare plaster patches where rosy cheeks once grinned or chubby thighs bent into flying arabesques. The business took up the entire third floor of Palazzo Grixoni. The building ran almost the length of the narrow street, Via Santa Lucia, a brutal incline from the main Piazza Cantareddu ending at Fontana Grixoni. This marked the center of town. From here, Simius sprawled up and around like a funnel. The icy mountain water gushed out of the marble lions’ mouths, ensuring Simiuns had access to fresh water, unlike some of the neighboring villages. Its Victorian black-and-white marble base, topped with busts of the Grixoni family, who had commissioned it, flanked Palazzo Grixoni. In the halcyon days of the mid-nineteenth century, when the valley had been christened with the proud title of Logudoro, land of gold, Palazzo Grixoni had been home to the wealthy merchant family of the same name. Now, as Simius blew away the ashes of war, buildings like these had been divided and rented out as separate quarters.

Carmela sat at her worktop by the farthest window from the entrance and lifted her eyes from her stitching. Her gaze drifted out toward the fountain. She watched the women below as they swayed, balancing long, terra-cotta jugs upon their heads filled from the flowing faucets. Yolanda insisted on keeping the shutters closed against the heat, especially at this time of the morning, but today there was intricate work to be finished and the girls worked better in natural light. Besides, any money she might save on electricity would result in increased profits.

Carmela unpicked her stitching for the third time. Yolanda walked over to her. “You feeling all right, Carme’?” she asked, leaning on the worn wood of the worktop.

“Yes, of course.”

“Look at me, tesoro.” Yolanda lifted Carmela’s chin with a gentle hand. “You’re distracted today, my darling. Your skin is almost white.” As Carmela’s godmother, Yolanda reserved this tone for her alone; all the other girls worked in fear of her biting tongue and fierce intolerance for careless mistakes. This was the place every woman with taste traveled to from along the entire coast. Sometimes customers even came up from as far as the capital city Cagliari, half a day away on the south of the island. Carmela’s deft hand and incisive eye for cut and current trends owed much to the business’s success.

“Your London lady from the villa has made an appointment for today,” Yolanda said, trying to appear relaxed. “I need you to be at your best.”

Carmela, of course, was aware that her godmother had a feral sixth sense for when her thoughts were drifting. In truth, she hadn’t been able to concentrate since Piera told her that posters announcing her official engagement to Franco were plastered on the walls of the houses by the cathedral. She’d spent most of the morning trying, and failing, to contain her excitement over the fact that her name was in large black letters for all to see, only steps from here. At the same time, Carmela knew how important Mrs. Curwin’s appointment could be. The wealthy family from London would pay double that of the locals. Mrs. Curwin bought most of her attire from the dressmakers of New Bond Street, central London, a place she described with broad brushstrokes but that remained a misty picture of a faraway land in Carmela’s mind.

Yolanda rallied. “Do your magic and she may order an entire wardrobe. Good news for this young woman who’ll be standing in my shoes one day, no?” Yolanda reached into the leather pouch hanging from her belt, beside her coiled tape measure, and pulled out three coins. “Take these lire and buy yourself a spremuta at Bar Svizzero. Tell Antonio to give you magnesia too, yes? Then come back looking like the Carmela with the bright eyes and fast hands.”

She was more than ready to heed her advice. Her legs ached to race her down the street and take a swift glance at her temporal fame. The dry heat, toasting the cobbles outside, beckoned. She looked up at the sharp face of her godmother. It was crease free despite her fifty years, with feline eyes that rose ever so slightly up toward her temples, imbuing her with a permanent air of sage curiosity. Carmela struggled to picture herself even half as shrewd. The studio’s success lay in the perfect balance between Carmela’s artistry and her godmother’s quick head for figures and unfaltering leadership. Over the past few months Yolanda mentioned Carmela’s inheritance of the business more than usual. It filled Carmela with a rush of excitement and ideas, but if she was destined to take over one day, how would she summon the steel to captain all these seamstress girls, so happy to smile to your face, then sending daggers at you from behind closed doors? She reached up for Yolanda’s coins, thanked her, and left the room, knowing the kindness did not go unnoticed by the other young seamstresses.

Carmela wound down the darkened staircase. Suffused light shafted through, in ornate patterns, from the decorative metal grate above the main double doors. Behind the wooden banister, the paint looked as if it had been dragged downward by a powerful force, streaking the wall where it had clawed to try to remain attached. Her footsteps echoed off the marble steps. They were wide enough to show off the dazzling ball gowns of the original owners, not the worn shoes of a seamstress.

The white sun beyond the heavy door blinded her.

“Congratulations, Carme’!” a woman called down to her from the fountain. “Just read about the soon-to-be-newlyweds in the piazza. Not every day you get your name posted on the wall, you know!”

“Thank you! I’m going to see it now!” Her voice bubbled like an overexcited adolescent.

“It’s next to Ignazia Cau’s death notice,” another chimed, hoisting a jug up onto her head. “God rest her soul. . . .”

The women muttered a blessing and set off in opposite directions. Carmela stood and listened to the water as if the sound itself might cool her down, but she knew that even the unforgiving ice of February would not have that effect on a special day like today.

The pitter-patter feet of her youngest sister, Vittoria, drew Carmela round.

“Aren’t we in a hurry?” Carmela called out to her.

“Nonna made me say the rosary twice!” Vittoria said without slowing her trot. “She’s angry because Zia Rosa is late home. And now I’m late for the sisters!” Her candlestick legs propelled her downhill. With a quick turn she disappeared into a narrow viccolo that led to the back entrance of the cathedral, where the summer session of the children’s church group was held. Vittoria had been in the Cherubs for several years. Last night, as Carmela had tucked her into the bed Vittoria shared with Gianetta, she had, with much exhilaration, relayed that the nuns had finally graduated her to the Angel’s class. Then, Vittoria had carried on, without pausing for breath or punctuation, that if her dream to become as good a seamstress as Carmela failed, she would follow her second calling to the convent.

Carmela watched Vittoria’s dress flap as she ran and made a mental note to add a trim from some of the off cuts back at Yolanda’s. A flamboyant woman from the next town had ordered an elaborate floral pattern for a light overcoat. Carmela could patch together the scraps and make her sister the happiest ten-year-old on the street.

Carmela continued on down to Piazza Cantareddu, passing a slew of tzilleri. The pungent smell of damp barrels and wine-stained stone floors wafted out from those darkened cantinas, while outside men stood around sniffing their ridotto glasses, arguing over everything and nothing. A voice called out to her.

“There’s my bride!” Franco swung in beside her.

“What are you doing here?”

“I can think of a nicer way to greet your fiancé—only we don’t want to shock these old men.”

“Sorry, I’ve only got a little while—”

“We made the wall, Carmela. You should walk around town like you own it. Which you will, in a few months.”

He took both her hands in his and turned her to face him, “Not so bad for a farm girl, no?”

Her mind flitted to the stack of embroidery to complete at the studio. His phrase grated. He used it often, and always as an expression of endearment; after all, their first tentative trysts were under the cover of her father’s vineyard. There was no shame in being a farm girl. That very earth had borne their love, in every sense. Carmela and Franco were grafted together there, twisting around each other like new vines. She looked into him. The sun shone into the darkness of his eyes, picking out the hidden chestnut flecks, invisible in all light but that of the blinding midmorning beams. He took her elbow and drew her over toward one of the upturned barrels, where several men she didn’t recognize stood, sipping wine.

“This is my fiancée, Carmela.”

She nodded. From the look of their shirts, Carmela hazarded a guess they were men of some influence.

“These signori are here from the council in Tula. I’m showing them our sights.”

Carmela flashed Franco a quizzical look. Why would men from a town thirty kilometers away be in Simius for sightseeing?

“You are welcome to use Carmela’s English however you see fit, gentlemen.” Franco’s face unfolded into one of his winning smiles, which few people could resist.

“Yes, Signorina,” the oldest of the three men said, his cheeks red with sun and wine, “your fiancé has promised us that you can be our interpreter in future meetings between us and the Americani.”

Carmela tried to rein in her confused frown before it creased her forehead, and failed. Franco never cared about her English. To him it seemed little more than a puzzling pastime. Now he was peddling her basic knowledge of it?

“We’ve heard they’re about to start looking for land,” a second man, shorter and rounder than his colleagues, piped in. “They’ve got some rockets they want to shoot up into the sky. My cousin’s son works at the base sometimes. People are talking. They’re going to fly planes and play war games. Plenty of dollars to give us landowners in return.”

Carmela opened her mouth, hoping something half intelligent might come out, but before she could speak, the last man, the silent of the three, wrapped his fingers around the plate loaded with cubed cheese and sliced smoked lard. He lifted it and offered it to her. A lazy fly heaved itself off the side of one of the rinds and landed on his knuckle, long enough for Carmela to note the black under his nail.

“Thank you, gentlemen, it all sounds very interesting, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been sent on an errand to Bar Svizzero for my godmother, and I really ought to get along.”

“Piacere,” the first man said, holding out his thick hand. Carmela shook it, out of courtesy, wishing she didn’t feel that it bound her to him in some way. Then she turned to Franco and kissed each cheek. His eyes drifted past her on the second kiss. She had disappointed him. These men must be more powerful than she had guessed. It would have been polite to partake in some food at least. A sweaty piece of cheese or a tiny nibble of greasy lard wouldn’t have been such a great sacrifice in order to place Franco in a favorable light.

Bar Svizzero became a welcome oasis on the other side of the piazza. Carmela headed straight for it—the poster would have to wait till after work. A couple of ladies eating dainty balls of gelato out of glass cups looked up and gave her a polite nod, then readjusted their hats. She smiled back, having the vague sense they had been into Yolanda’s several times for small alterations. What must it be like to have the biggest choices in your day be which hat to wear or whether to try the local honeyed nougat or toasted hazelnut gelato?

Franco was holding court at Bar Nazionale, where men played cards and smoked. He felt most comfortable doing his business there. Bar Svizzero, in contrast, prided itself on attracting the wealthier female clientele—wives of traveling merchants, landowners, or fallen aristocrats with Savoyard money left over from the days when Sardinia was its own kingdom. The owner, Antonio, had once spent a summer in Switzerland with a distant aunt. On his return he had changed his bar’s name, ordered an ornate counter from Turin, and doubled his profits. The valley wasn’t called Logudoro for nothing, after all.

“Buon giorno, Carme’.” Antonio smiled as Carmela entered the cool of his bar. The low vaulted ceilings gave the impression the room had been chiseled into the rock.

“Caffè?” he offered. His crisp white jacket was spot free even though he was the only one manning his barely tamed, highly polished chrome espresso machine.

“No, Anto’, I’ll take a spremuta, per piacere. And some magnesia.”

“Wedding jitters already?”

Carmela smirked. He was almost convinced.

“My sister was the same,” he said, reaching for three lemons from the basket on top of the empty glass display cabinet where Antonio kept the fresh breakfast pastries. The scent of vanilla sugar still powdered the air, alongside the toasted nutty caramel from the morning’s roaring espresso trade.

“Lost ten kilos before the big day,” he said.

“She was a beautiful bride, Antonio.”

“Thanks to you. No one else could have made her look half her width and twice her height!” He sliced the fruit in half on a pristine marble chopping board and twisted the lemons on a glass juicer. “Mother was lucky to get her married off when she did.”

The fresh smell of citrus had the desired effect.

“There you are, Signorina.” He poured the juice into a flute, then stirred two generous spoonfuls of sugar into it with a long, slim metal spoon, and finally topped it with sparkling water and a tiny spiral of rind. “I’ll run next door for some more magnesia. I’m clean out.” With that he parted the bead curtain. Carmela watched them tip-tap to stillness.

She took a sip of spremuta and her tongue tingled sour and sweet. She emptied the flute and glanced over the rainbow of cordials behind the counter. Their labels fascinated her, intricate works of art, embellished in gold, with elaborate, decorative lettering. All that pomp and polish for alcohol. It was beautiful, maybe a little frivolous? Across the piazza, men were pouring wine out of plain green bottles. Would her father’s gruff concoctions taste better if they were decanted into one of these bottles?

From where she sat, she could just about see Franco’s tiny head through Antonio’s delicate lace curtains. She watched him holding court. She and her fiancé existed in different, yet parallel, worlds. What of it? This was a good thing. A strong couple was not a marriage of similarities. Would she have wanted Franco to sit by her and admire Antonio’s collection of liquor? Discuss her morning or Mrs. Curwin’s appointment later that day? Did he wish Carmela had stayed by his side for the rest of that meeting with those three shirts? Even though the answer to all of the questions starting to swirl in her mind was a resounding no, Carmela took more than a moment to shake off the brief wave of uncertainty that swelled. She berated herself for letting a careless faux pas affect her longer than necessary. She watched Franco reach out his hands to the men. He looked happy, as did they. What harm she thought she may have done was already forgotten. Her etiquette was not going to clinch or lose a deal after all. There was comfort in that, at least. And plenty of time to hone the art of being a wife to one of the most influential men in town.

Dressing the many women who came through Yolanda’s doors was the exaltation of God-given gifts. To some, it was deemed simple, sinful vanity. But to Carmela, the presentation of anything revealed the respect a person had for it. A dirty plate with cheese and lard slapped on in haste offered less physical and spiritual nourishment than a simple basket laid with a few homemade bread knots upon a starched square of linen. One revealed and revered the time and effort of preparation, where the other displayed a scant respect. A perfectly cut skirt, suit, or wedding gown exulted the wearer and gave permission for the onlooker to feel uplifted too. There had to be power and purpose in beauty. Why else was the earth strewn with breathtaking sights? What could be the purpose of the penetrating azure of her island’s sea, the fire red of May’s poppies, the intoxicating fuchsia of a prickly pear’s fruit, if not to exhilarate a soul?

Antonio prided himself on importing obscure concoctions from far corners of the continent, especially Paris. Though so far, by the look of the unopened bottle, no one in Simius had acquired a taste for violet liqueur. Did Antonio’s love of all things foreign reveal a worldly attitude? His curiosity about life beyond the parameters of their small town was something she respected. No one gossiped about the fact that he still lived with his mother. If he had been a woman, he would have been labeled a spinster, an unwanted, an unlovable. But as a man in his early forties, he had simply earned a mixture of respect and pity from his peers, having sacrificed his own life to take care of his mamma.

At the end of the counter was a copy of Vogue that Antonio kept on display. He said it attracted the ladies who had an eye for fashion and the purse to match. Some such must have been leafing through it, because it was folded open at a beach spread. Carmela thought about her grandmother’s expression if she imagined any of her grandchildren at the beach dressed in short puffy shorts, pulled in tight at the waist and attached to a bodice that left little to the imagination. The model in the shoot played with a multicolored paper balloon that floated just beyond the tips of her fingers. Carmela was moved by the buoyancy of the moment that the photographer captured.

She picked up the magazine and turned its pages, convincing herself it was preparation for Mrs. Curwin’s appointment, even though no doubt she would arrive, as always, with a small shipment of dog-eared magazines to show the outfits she adored. Carmela would then work out accurate patterns from sight and match them to Mrs. Curwin’s measurements, re-creating the designs of the fashionistas with ease.

Audrey Hepburn looked out at her on the page, sitting on one hip on a studio floor, a mass of layered tulle cascading about her. Carmela took in the pure embodiment of effortless grace, a modern-day princess. Her heart ached; she spent hours re-creating such things for others, but she knew there would be few occasions for her to do anything close to it for herself. Besides, the generous curves of her silhouette were a world away from the elfin figure in the magazine. Sometimes she’d imagine herself at a fitting. She’d picture the dressmaker, dreaming up ways to taper her wide shoulders, her athletic arms—which she always wished were more like her mother’s than her father’s—and how to divert the eye to her narrow waist instead. Franco and his family were one of the wealthiest in town, but they cared little for the frivolity of parties or unnecessary expense. After all, Franco would preach, one didn’t accumulate wealth by spending it, like a peasant. It was a patter that accompanied their Sunday promenades, after mass, when she, Franco, and the rest of the town’s younger generation would congregate in Piazza Cantareddu and admire the elaborate window displays of the closed boutiques that lined it.

Flipping the magazine cover shut, she pushed it back over to its place. The model on the cover puckered her red lips into an expression of faux surprise. Her hair flew in the wind, beyond her was the sea, and in her hand she held a camera.

Perhaps Franco would be open to considering a honeymoon after all? Somewhere on the island where no one from Simius would know them. Somewhere Carmela might slip into a skimpy bathing suit to feel the wind caress her bare stomach, hair twirling a wild dance on the breeze, and not a soul around to remind her it was not the done thing of any respectable Sardinian woman. A part of the coast where only chic Parisians, classy Florentines, or royal Spaniards would strut for the summer, with little regard for propriety, their heads full of poems and sultry cigarettes. Perhaps Franco would swim with her, trace down her neck with his warm lips as the poppy red sun dipped into the pink water.

Antonio flung the bead curtain open before she could indulge herself further.

“She changes prices on a whim,” he moaned. The grocer next door was a distant cousin of his. Her narrow shelves ached with card boxes of pasta and vats of olive oil. Although she had barely enough room to fit more than three customers at a time, she made ends meet in part, Antonio would insist, by not offering significant discounts to her neighbors. “She’s still bitter about my father breaking his engagement with her, is all,” he said, opening up the large jar of milk of magnesia with a pop. The coy maid on the label flashed a saccharin smile.

Antonio took a teaspoon and ladled a generous helping of the white granules into a tumbler, then lifted the beaded linen doily off a ceramic jug on the counter and poured water from it. Carmela watched it fizz together, transfixed for a moment by the bubbles racing up to the surface.

“Take a good siesta this afternoon. If I was your mother, I’d be worried.” He smirked, half joking.

“Of course you would,” she said, taking a gulp, “Here, keep the change.”

“Someone’s on the road to partnership, then?”

“Just trying to thread needles straight.”

The sound of laughter blasted in from outside, followed by a group of soldiers bursting into the small bar, filling the space with uniforms. Antonio grew an inch taller and began his well-rehearsed patter. With little convincing they ordered a dozen caffè corretto, espresso spiked with aqua vitae. Carmela thought it strange that they would be drinking at this time of the day, and in uniform. Perhaps the addition of coffee to the liquor made it somehow permissible. There was an excited jitter about the men, as if they had little time for a big celebration. Antonio was a tornado, powering out the large order from his beloved coffee machine that whooshed into production.

The beads swayed again and another officer walked in, to deafening cheers.

“To be sure, sir,” one man shouted out, “back in my family’s Ireland, we’d be wetting the baby’s head with Guinness, not coffee!”

The pack laughed.

“Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Lieutenant K!” another called out.

Carmela’s ears pricked.

Her eyes darted to the gilt mirror in front of her, but she couldn’t make out any of their faces; the bottles were stacked too high. As their bellows vibrated Antonio’s little cave, Carmela took a snatched glance over to the crew. The corporals looked young. She saw them take turns patting an officer on the back. He laughed with them, relaxing into the celebration but still keeping rank. Then he was ushered into the middle of a circle they formed around him. The men clinked their tiny cups of creamy espresso, topped with enough hot water to make it palatable to the American clientele but pungent with Antonio’s generous shot of alcohol.

She didn’t need to see his face to know who it was, because the voice gave it away. When he turned around toward the bar, she caught a flash of his aqua-blue eyes and felt a short, sharp twinge of vanity—a brief wish to have spent a little more care on her appearance that morning. She silenced the sudden hurricane of jumbled thoughts with one swift, polite smile. He returned the pleasantry, but Carmela wasn’t convinced it was a new father’s joy she read in his eyes.

She twisted back round to Antonio, but he was thick in the onslaught of more orders, pulling another round of shots, delighted for the profitable morning. She slid off her stool and flew out of the bar, wind on her heels.




CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_3a20be54-f68b-5cec-bdd4-1e4ea115b9e0)







Mrs. Curwin swished into Yolanda’s studio, sparkling with the same charisma with which she shimmered at the center of her parties. Carmela had no memory of Mrs. Curwin ever waltzing into rooms, conversations, or relationships, without the kind of ease and grace most could never aspire to, let alone achieve. This British lady of the house made no secret of the fact she had been raised among the poor of London’s East End Jewish immigrant community. She often reminisced about those early days, without feigned nostalgia, rather to express a deep appreciation for her new position. Carmela loved the way Mrs. Curwin neither succumbed to a maniacal fear of losing her riches nor flaunted it, as others from similar backgrounds did. She enjoyed her wealth with neither guilt nor condescension, but with respect for the husband who had accumulated it from his hanger factories that supplied most of London. She was married to a man she adored and bore him two boys with ease. To Carmela, it seemed that her life was but a dance.

Yolanda rose from the fabric desk and cut across the room in one smooth, direct motion, like a sharp scissor blade slicing material. She offered a warm handshake. “Piacere, Signora Curwin, sono Yolanda.”

“Piacere, darling,” Mrs. Curwin replied, extending her hand. “I insist you call me Suzie.”

Yolanda smiled, trying to follow.

“Signora asks you to call her Suzie,” Carmela translated, moving toward them from her table on the other side of the room.

“Yes, do talk for me, Carmela,” Mrs. Curwin added. “My Italian is worse than I think!” She waved her hands in the air with a giggle. “Carmela, darling, be a love and take my hat, will you? You have that wonderful look of fresh air about you today—even more than usual.”

Carmela smiled and hung the red, wide-rimmed hat on the stand by the fitting area. The space was separated from the seamstresses’ stations by three full-length mirrors framing a small square rug. Across the width hung a rail with a heavy navy velvet curtain ruched to one side, held together with a plaited cord. Mrs. Curwin glided toward the three mirrors, opened her pocketbook, and powdered her nose. “It’s positively sweltering out there!”

While Yolanda and Carmela stood a polite distance away, waiting for her to finish, Carmela scrutinized Mrs. Curwin’s dress. The front bodice was cut on the bias and gathered at the upper edge to a yoke emphasizing her tiny waist. The extended shoulder seams formed cap sleeves in a deeper shade of red cotton. The full skirt was gathered at either side of the front waistline. It was the perfect summer dress—cool, alluring, and elegant.

She turned back to face them, her cheeks flushed with excitement. “I’m throwing a party next week, and nothing I’ve brought from London seems appropriate—too formal, too black tie. I’m looking for something light but suitable for evening. Decadent but understated. I know dear Carmela has magic hands—and eyes that cast spells.” She flashed Carmela a twinkling smile. “If your sewing creations are half as good as the lamb and fennel you made for lunch the other day, my dear, I’ll be belle of the ball!”

Mrs. Curwin reached into her woven bag and pulled out some magazines. “Let me show you what I’m thinking.”

“Caffè, Signora?” Yolanda asked.

“Sì,” she replied, like a child in a pasticceria. “Latte poco, grazie.”

“Macchiato,” Carmela explained to her godmother.

Yolanda replied with a smile. Carmela could tell she was trying not to appear too desperate.

Carmela pulled over a high-backed chair for Mrs. Curwin and sat on a small wooden stool beside her. Several pages of her magazines were dog-eared. “Now, Carmela, I adore this halter neck,” she said, flicking past the first few pages and pointing to a model on a Parisian street, “and doesn’t every woman feel irresistible in a pencil skirt? But I’m not sure I like the way they work together in this dress here, do you?”

“We can do anything, Signora.”

“A delicious dilemma!” She laughed, leafing through to the next dog-ear. “You see, I adore the off-the-shoulder—”

“Signora, ecco il caffè,” Yolanda said, arriving with a wooden tray with the two-cup coffeepot she had set to rise just ahead of the appointment. She placed it on a low, wooden stool beside them. Carmela noticed that Yolanda used her best espresso cups, white bone china with fine, gold-painted trim. Yolanda placed one cup and saucer in the center of a square of embroidered linen and poured coffee into it from the metal pot. To this she added warm milk from a china jug. An oval plate lay beside it, painted with bright pictures of traditional Sardinian dancers, topped with fresh pastries from the pasticceria down the lane; copulette—paper-thin pastry cases filled with sweet almond paste, topped with smooth, white icing that looked like small diamonds of virgin snow. Alongside lay tiricche—pastry cut with delicate scalloped edges, filled with fig jam and rolled into horseshoes. Carmela breathed in their fruity sweetness as she lifted the plate to Mrs. Curwin.

“Darling, how could I possibly refuse?” she said, reaching out a manicured hand for a copulette. Carmela noticed how the girls at the nearest stations eyed Mrs. Curwin. None of them ate sweets in the daytime. They were strictly for weddings or fiestas, not morning breaks.

Mrs. Curwin took delicate bites with relish, careful not to spill any of the crumbling icing. Then she stirred some sugar from a ceramic caddy into the tiny cup. “Why, oh why, are the streets of London not lined with espresso bars?” She took a sip and moaned with pleasure. “I’ll talk to Marito about it. Soho would be the place, of that I’m certain.”

Since the Curwins’ first visit to Sardinia five years ago, Mrs. Curwin had stolen sporadic words from Italian and peppered her English with them. She now referred to Mr. Curwin as Marito, Italian for husband. “If I could convince Marito to open the first one, I could bring a little bit of Sardinian paradise to the London drizzle—but only if you’ll come and prepare the sweets, Carmela! We’d have all those fashionable city boys queueing up to gawp at you besides.”

Carmela smiled, flattered—the creamy, marsala-spiked zabaglione she made for the family last night had not gone unappreciated. Then she thought about Piera, at this moment likely returning from the market in the unforgiving heat, loaded with produce to prepare the Curwins’ dinner.

Over the next hour Mrs. Curwin showed Carmela several other magazine spreads. Carmela took her sketchpad and a length of charcoal from the drawer underneath her desk and returned to the fitting area to begin a quick outline of some initial ideas. Her hand skimmed over the page at great speed. The other seamstresses began to tidy their stations for their three-hour lunch break. Carmela could feel them glancing over her shoulder at her sketch as they passed on their way out.

She began with the outline of a pencil skirt but added some extra bounce just below the waist. A bodice rose up above it. The neckline was off the shoulder. Two sweeping curves overlaid one another to form a heart shape by the collar bone and extended slightly wider than the arms. The border was accentuated with a lighter fabric. On the side of the waist she drew a jeweled clasp. It was dramatic and imaginative. Exactly what Mrs. Curwin had hoped for.

“I love it, darling!” she said. “Those sharp lines are stunning, coupled with the softness over the décolletage. It’s just beautiful. Yolanda!” she called, leaning toward her with a conspiratorial twinkle. “If I were you I would tell you to offer her partnership in a heartbeat—only make sure she keeps her summers free to carry on feeding my family to distraction!”

“What does she say?” Yolanda asked Carmela, barely masking her panic.

“She likes it.”

Carmela walked along the only road out of town that led to the Curwins’ rented summer villa. Huddles of houses gave way to parched countryside. The town’s hills were dipped in the rusty hue of the fading sun, rising and falling in crags down toward the crystalline coast. Wild fennel sprouted in tufts along the side of the dusty, white road. Carmela yanked at one of them and chewed it; the refreshing taste of anise cooled the inside of her cheek.

The road was punctuated with grand Victorian villas. Their porticos rose above Corinthian columns, with verandas wrapped around the width of the houses. High arched windows were framed with granite cornices and hung with heavy, dark green shutters. Several were now rented out to inquisitive tourists like the Curwins, who paid handsomely for their month stay and appeared to take pleasure in the faded majesty. The families who owned them were descendants of the island’s aristocrats. They took responsibility for arranging local staff to undertake all domestic duties.

The Curwins’ villa belonged to Franco’s uncle, one of the reasons Carmela and Piera could rely on being hired each year. Domestic work was seen as the mainstay of orphans or immigrants, but working for the British held a certain cachet. The positions were sought and fought over.

Carmela turned to the driveway and walked through the tall iron gates. She passed a fountain carved into the rock, which trickled with water from an underground spring. Beside it, wide lily pads floated upon the green surface of a pond. On the opposite side, a small stone chapel stood, where the original owners attended private masses, joined by neighboring families so as to avoid the necessity of traveling into town and mixing with folks of lower class. The four rows of pews were polished weekly, but outside, ivy threatened a coup and the wrought iron cross rising from the tiny steeple was fighting a losing battle against the elements.

Carmela carried on past the high, wooden double doors of the entrance, terra-cotta pots of blooming geraniums lining the side of the house, and reached the side door of the kitchen. Piera had her hands deep in preparations for dinner. Carmela was greeted with an earthy whiff of sautéed garlic with warm spinach wilting in a skillet upon the stove.

“Nice of you to stop by,” Piera huffed, grating a snowfall of nutmeg into the pan.

“I’m sorry, I was cutting patterns. Mrs. Curwin came in today. She loved my design.”

“Wonderful. Now work some magic here, please.” Piera moved to the floured surface of the marble counter; picked up a long, wooden rolling pin; and began thinning a sheet of pasta dough. “Sauce won’t cook itself, you know.”

Carmela washed her hands under the iron faucet of the large ceramic sink. An enamel bowl next to the stove was already filled with tiny cubes of carrots, celery, and onion. Carmela placed another skillet on the stove top, drizzled some dark green olive oil into it, and lit the gas ring. She peeled the clove of garlic that Piera had left beside the bowl, crushed it with one quick blow of a knife, and placed it into the warming oil to infuse. Beside Piera, a metal crusher clamped onto the worktop had a large bowl of fresh tomatoes beside it, pulped into passata. Carmela cranked the handle a few more times to squeeze the final tomatoes into the bowl.

“Daydreaming again?” Piera piped. “Or do you like burned garlic?”

Carmela snatched the skillet off the flame and poured in the diced vegetables, trying to brush away the pique of irritation. She took a deeper breath. Their aroma was sweet and earthy, unchanged from her earliest memories of dancing around the hem of her mother’s apron. Others found peace in the chilled silence of church. For Carmela, it was in the kitchen. The excitement of today, the short-tempered mood of her sister, would give way to an inner peace. To prepare a meal with success required the cook to devote her complete attention to it—mental, physical, and emotional. It was a well-known fact among the Simiuns that an angry, distracted, or lazy cook produced only bitter food.

The sisters’ culinary duet was well oiled. If Carmela was a little late, though, like today, it took a few dishes before Piera would settle back into their combined rhythm.

“Hard day?” Carmela asked, stirring the trittata so that the olive oil glazed all the small pieces evenly.

“While you were dreaming up dresses, I had to shunt in and out of town like a donkey. Nonna was on fire all day.”

“I heard. Vittoria came running past the studio today, flapping like she’d been stung.”

“When Zia Rosa finally got home, she bossed me around like a slave. Never been happier to get to work, I tell you.”

They slipped into a familiar silence. Carmela let the vegetables soften before adding the tomatoes. She sprinkled a small spoonful of sugar over them, a pinch of saporita—a blend of nutmeg, paprika, and cumin—and then reduced the heat to let the sauce thicken.

“You know that woman from Pattada came again the other day,” Carmela began. “There are some off cuts enough for me to make you a new summer dress.”

Piera pummeled the dough as if it were an old enemy. “Pass me the spinach.”

Carmela grabbed the woolen potholders and lifted the skillet off the stove, then picked up another chopping board—a slice of an olive tree trunk—and placed it underneath. Before Piera could ask her, she moved to the wooden icebox and grabbed a slab of salted ricotta. She sliced a generous amount and crumbled it into the warm spinach. Then she threw a pinch of salt and ground some pepper into the mixture. With two teaspoons she carefully cupped small balls of green and placed them at even spaces along the rolled-out dough.

“I look ridiculous in those dresses—like a boy in a skirt.”

“Not when I make them, you don’t. Smells delicious, Piera,” Carmela said.

Piera lifted the second pasta dough sheet and laid it like a blanket over the balls of spinach and ricotta.

“Here.” Carmela took the wooden wheel out of Piera’s hand. “I’ll finish. You won’t cut straight if you’re thinking about Nonna.” She rolled the serrated wheel along the length of the pasta and then along the widths, cutting out perfect parcels of ravioli. Then she dusted them with flour and placed them on a tray.

“Did you see your poster?” Piera asked, brightening at last.

“Almost,” Carmela replied, wishing the image of that tired plate of cheese and lard didn’t flash in her mind, or the coolness in Franco’s eyes as they kissed good-bye. “We didn’t stop for lunch today.”

“It’s nearly six,” Piera said, brushing down her apron. “You know they eat early.”

Carmela never paid much mind to the usual time Simiuns ate their dinner before she worked for the Curwins. Few were the Simiun families who dined before nine o’clock, and it certainly would not include pasta. At home, Carmela and her siblings would be lucky to get more than a cup of warm milk and bread. Feasting at night was deemed gluttonous excess, particularly in their household, an indulgence reserved for special occasions only, like Christmas Eve.

Carmela lifted the loaded tray to the stove and gently dropped each parcel into a deep pan of boiling water. The ravioli bobbed as if reluctant swimmers gasping for air.

“Ladies, that smells absolutely divine!” Mrs. Curwin said as she sashayed into the kitchen wearing a two-piece swimsuit in a tropical flower print, a halter-neck bikini top, and tight shorts to match. An oversize white linen shirt hung over her bronzed shoulders. “I’ve been taking in the last rays on the back terrace. It’s glorious at this time.”

She reached into the icebox and removed a jug of water with sliced lemons floating inside. She poured herself a drink. “I think we’ll eat out there this evening, Signorine.”

“Of course, Signora,” Carmela answered, as Mrs. Curwin floated out of the room to change for dinner.

Piera scooped the ravioli out of the pan. She layered them gently on a wide, flat dish, spooning sauce in between as she went. When all the pasta was on the dish, she grated a generous amount of pecorino over the top. It oozed into the hot sauce. Before she placed the cheese back into the icebox, she pulled off a tiny hunk to nibble.

“I saw that,” Carmela said.

Piera grinned.

The sisters filled another bowl with paper-thin slices from a fresh fennel bulb and narrow wedges of orange. They squeezed the remaining juice from the inside of the orange peels into the bowl and sprinkled salt and freshly ground pepper over the top. With a generous splash of olive oil, the salad was complete. They tore some pane fino and placed it in a basket, then topped it with a few sheets of pane carusau, thin sheets of crisp bread they had warmed in the oven and drizzled with olive oil, a little salt, and some fresh rosemary. A carafe was filled with their father’s wine. They laid two large, wooden trays with all the dishes and carried everything outside.

The terrace at the back of the villa was paved with large terracotta tiles, framed with a delicate marine mosaic of waves and fishes. Overhead, passiflora and clematis wove a thick, fragrant canopy. Piera and Carmela took out a linen tablecloth, four plates, and four heavy green glasses from the wooden sideboard that stood against the wall of the house and laid the table with them. On each plate they positioned a rolled linen napkin wrapped around a knife, spoon, and fork. A thin bottle of dark green olive oil, a small pot of grated pecorino, and a pepper mill were placed in the center of the table, along with all the plates of food and breads. On top of the sideboard was a basket of velveteen peaches and purple-green plums, for after dinner.

Mr. Curwin came out first, holding a glass of cold, white vermentino, a book tucked under his arm. “Buona sera, ladies, this looks wonderful.” He pulled his linen trousers up an inch as he took his seat and then he straightened his collar. His skin was not as bronzed as his wife’s. Mr. Curwin preferred the cool of the shade in which to read historical accounts or biographies to the dazzling rays in which his wife and children basked. His eyes were small and light brown, bright with an intelligence he reserved for well-timed, dry quips. The boys raced up from the back of the garden, where they had been playing around the lemon and fig trees, and hopped into their respective seats.

“Hands, boys,” Mr. Curwin said. They marched inside.

Mrs. Curwin made her entrance in a simple, yellow cotton crossover dress that was tied in a bow at the back. It showed off her sun-kissed skin. A cluster of citrine sparkled in each ear. “How we will ever go back to English food escapes me, Marito, really.”

“Yes, you remind me every time we come, dear,” he replied, reaching forward to snap off a crisp of pane carusau.

“Then take my advice and buy these girls plane tickets!” She smiled, half joking.

Carmela imagined Franco’s expression if she were to tell him she had packed for a London life. Her mind flew back to the time an uncle had asked her whether she would accompany him on one of his salesman’s trips to the south of the island. He had been trying to earn commission on the sale of sewing equipment and told Carmela she would be the best person to demonstrate how good such and such a needle was, and so forth. She remembered sitting on the front step outside the house before daybreak the following morning, clutching a small overnight bag. When the morning sun slit across the violet dawn and he still hadn’t shown up, she realized he had been teasing. How foolish she had felt to even think her grandmother would have let her go, or that her uncle would have seriously thought about taking her. What kind of impression would he have made traveling alone with a young, unmarried girl, only sixteen at the time, even if she was his niece? Piera hadn’t stopped laughing at her until they fell asleep that night, probably relieved, Carmela had since realized, that her sister hadn’t left her alone, forgoing the predictability of a Simius life for the adventure of life on the road.

“Now, ladies, before you go and the night girls take over,” Mrs. Curwin said, “have a think about our party, yes?”

“Party?” asked Piera.

“Yes. Next week. Marito has invited about thirty people. Fellows from the base, mostly. The charming captain introduced me to his chief lieutenant—even Marito had to admit he was a darling American—”

“I used that word?”

“Absolutely! He’s the most marvelous specimen either of us had clapped eyes on. They’re pretty new around here, so they told me—how Americans do love to talk—and we thought we’d give them a proper welcome, if you like.”

She lifted her glass, and Mr. Curwin filled it with vermentino. “In truth, it’s a bit of a belated birthday bash for me, actually. Wear your dancing shoes, won’t you, girls? Everyone needs a break sometime!” She raised her glass toward her husband. They drank. Carmela pictured her grandmother watching, agog, as two of her grandchildren left for work in their best shoes.

“We’ll talk about the menu over the next few days,” Mrs. Curwin continued, running a swift hand through her hair, lifting it higher off her face. “Just thought I ought to mention it now in case you need to order anything special from the salumeria, and so forth.”

“Of course, Signora,” Carmela answered.

“Suzie, darling, please. Now head on before it’s too dark.”

Carmela and Piera turned back to the kitchen and laid the skillets to soak in the deep ceramic sink. Two young girls came in to take over for the night shift and exchanged a perfunctory greeting. Piera and Carmela stepped outside and began their winding walk back to Simius in silence, under the canopy of a starlit, purple dusk.

“Ticket to London?” Piera asked after a while, kicking a stone.

“Tickets.”

“Franco’s always wanted to meet the Queen, no?”

The daydream brought a broad smile to Carmela’s face. Considering even the slightest possibility of a life beyond her shores was seductive. She breathed in the cool, scented air of the evening, aromatic with sun-toasted juniper and thyme. In the near distance, the lights of Simius twinkled; beyond it, the cobalt sea. Franco was right, of course; this island was the perfect place for them. Paradise was underfoot. How foolish to even entertain the idea of chasing dreams in London, or Marseilles, or Munich, like many of their contemporaries, running after invisible riches.

The sliver of a moon crept up over the distant hills, jagged silhouettes of the surrounding valley. Carmela thought about the woman playing on the beach in Antonio’s magazine. That life was nothing more than a photograph, after all.




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_22a57b71-2490-55d2-8c44-6be670cee291)







Carmela and Piera reached Simius just as their family prepared to sit for dinner. They washed their hands and took their respective places around the long wooden table, a formidable island in a narrow strait.

“Nel nome del padre, e figlio, e spiritu santu,” Grandmother Icca intoned from her chair at the head of the table. She crossed herself.

“Amen,” Maria and her children echoed.

Carmela looked down at the tiny piece of meat in her bowl. It lay adrift at the center of her bowl, surrounded by a thin red sauce, the reluctant survivor of a shipwreck. All flavor had been simmered away. Wilted runner beans floated about it with a scant helping of potato pieces. Carmela returned to the Curwin villa in her mind, imagining the satisfied couple relaxing on their terrace after their meal, bellies full of fresh ravioli, moon rising to the underscore of cicadas’ serenades as they savored their way through the bowl of plump, fresh fruit.

“Admiring your reflection or waiting for the cow to raise from the dead?” Icca asked.

Carmela looked up. It took a moment for her to realize the comment was directed at her. “It’s delicious, Nonna.”

“It’s overdone.” Icca switched her gaze to her daughter-in-law, at the opposite end of the table. “Maria, take greater care over my recipes.”

“Yes, Nonna,” Maria answered in the placid tones she’d mastered to deflect Icca’s criticism. Carmela tore some pane fino from the small pile on the table.

“Plenty of time to fatten up after you’re married,” Icca said, reaching out her hand. Carmela knew better than to do anything other than place the entire piece in Icca’s hand. The family returned to silence but for the percussive tinkle of their spoons against the enamel bowls.

Vittoria, sitting on the opposite side of the table, had almost devoured her entire helping. It would seem graduation to the Angels had finally given her an appetite. “Buonissimo, Mamma!” she squealed, searching for remnants of sauce with a lick of each corner of her mouth. Gianetta, two years Vittoria’s senior, sat beside her and had separated each of the vegetables. She chewed every studious mouthful several times, her mane of straight, jet locks motionless, relishing having the family’s meat dish in the middle of the week as opposed to Sunday. Tore, Maria’s only son, sat on Carmela’s left, hunched over his plate under the weight of his adolescent world, brooding over his stockpiled bread beside his glass. No one would rob him of it on account of him being the only boy of the house and apt to need the extra energy to help his father at the farm the following day. Tomas was spending the entire week out at the farm, thus tightening Grandmother’s stranglehold. Piera, on Carmela’s right, wiped her plate clean with a slipper of pane fino.

Carmela glanced over at her mother, enjoying her meal. It was hard to imagine her as the young woman described to her by Lucia, defying her father and marrying Tomas. One day, when they found themselves alone in a snatched moment between chores, Lucia had recounted the tale of Maria’s father, how he had warned his daughter that she would cry every day of her life if she went ahead and married a man he did not approve of. Days after the wedding, which only a few of her siblings attended, Maria lost her mother. Carmela imagined a newlywed Maria, honoring her duties as a wife while stepping in to become her siblings’ substitute mother. Her mother lifted her eyes from her plate. Carmela watched their chestnut warmth glisten despite the pallid light of the bare bulb overhead.

Icca bore into Carmela. “She gets her faraway from your side of the family, Maria. Spends all her day looking at those magazines with the customers. Fills a girl with foolish ideas. My boys’ bones are for working.” A tiny spit of bread flew out of her mouth and landed in Carmela’s bowl. “This house wasn’t built on air.”

“I am sorry, Nonna. I’m dreaming up food. Mrs. Curwin plans a party.”

“Indeed? The wretches south of here have no shoes and under our noses we fatten up the foreigners.”

Maria turned toward her firstborn. “I can see you have little appetite, Carmela—I’m sure Vittoria and Gianetta will be glad for a bit extra. Why not go upstairs to finish your sewing work.” She followed her instructions without reply, sliding off her chair and stifling the guilt she felt for her escape. As she climbed the granite stairs to the bedroom she shared with Piera, Icca’s voice echoed, “You’ll be sorry you raised her with a soft hand, Maria, you mark my words.”

On Mrs. Curwin’s insistence, the driveway to the villa had been lined with glass lanterns. The candlelights flickered in the early evening, leading the guests toward the main doors. Tore stood before them, assuming the role of butler, but summoned up little more than a begrudging half nod to the invitees as they entered.

First to arrive were the Villanova family from Milan, who pounded up the gravel drive like they had a train to catch, noses pointed in the air as if a bad smell followed them. Signor Villanova was the director of a bank back home and was careful to make sure everyone knew it. His wife Gironema, descended from Piedmont aristocracy, had a bouncing gait, emphasizing her short-waisted frame. Her eyes traced over Tore as she approached, then dismissed him like someone looking at a poor imitation of a famous sculpture. They considered themselves intrepid explorers by visiting the undiscovered villages of Sardinia for their summers, though a small army of domestics made sure their rented villa was pristine and all meals were prepared in timely fashion.

“Buona sera, darlings!” Mrs. Curwin exclaimed, throwing her arms high in the air. A drop of her gin and tonic fell onto Signor Villanova’s bald patch. “Do come on in, please, I’m so glad you could make it.” She placed a welcoming hand on the small of Signora Villanova’s back, leading them through the dining room to the terrace.

The Fadda clan followed soon after. They lived year-round in the next villa, but the two daughters’ translucent skin revealed a life spent indoors. Their black locks were scraped away from their faces and knotted into a severe bun at the base of their necks. Their dresses were simple, without ostentation, and made of dark cotton that did little to add any form to their bony frames. Signor Fadda waddled close behind, almost a foot shorter than his wife, with the portly belly of a man who had come from poverty and ate his way through his newfound riches.

In the kitchen, Piera and Carmela performed a frantic dance. All the pans were off their hooks on the white stone wall and in use. Piera reached over Carmela, who was laying out thin slices of sausage on the inside of a small length of cork tree bark that formed a natural tray. Piera tasted a small piece of poached calamari steaming in a ceramic serving bowl, adjusted the seasoning, then butchered a handful of parsley and threw it over them. She mixed in a glug of olive oil, a crushed garlic clove, and the juice of half a lemon.

“Antipasti should be out by now!” Piera puffed. “Stay in front of what you’re doing and you’ll get it done faster.”

Carmela was unruffled, not allowing Piera’s frenzy to distract her from the care she took over her dish of cold cuts.

“Gianetta! Vittoria!” Piera called. Her sisters dashed into the room.

“Signora Villanova has got a ring the size of my eyeball!” Vittoria exclaimed, pantomiming the woman’s strut around the table.

“That’s enough,” Carmela said. “Take these two trays and offer all the guests. No dropping!”

Vittoria and Gianetta balanced the cork in their hands and gazed down at the load with hungry eyes. They breathed in the salty olive oil of the warmed pane carusau, the herbs of the sausage, the pungent cubes of pecorino, the paper-thin prosciutto ribbons. It was barely resistible.

“I’ve saved you both a plate. For later. No fingers.”

“Sì, Carmela,” they replied in unison before turning on their heels for the terrace.

Outside, Mrs. Curwin held court and poured the drinks. Mr. Curwin engaged in serious conversation with Signor Villanova, over a salad of broken Italian and English. The Curwin boys were the first to accost Vittoria and Gianetta, grabbing handfuls of cheese at such speed that Vittoria nearly dropped her entire tray, before they dashed back out to the darkened fruit trees. The boys were followed by Salvatore, Peppe and Lucia’s middle boy, here at the party to be an assistant to his father, in charge of roasting, though no one had pinned the child down since their arrival. He shoved a fistful of salami into his mouth and another into his pockets before he too disappeared toward the brush beyond the garden.

A caravan of lights appeared, snaking round the bend in the near distance.

“The party has arrived!” Mrs. Curwin exclaimed, glancing over to the silhouette of the hills. “Excuse me, everyone.” And with that she sauntered to the front door. The dress that Carmela made cinched at Mrs. Curwin’s tiny waist and skimmed her hips in a pencil skirt cut to accentuate their toned curve. The smooth bodice drew attention to her bare décolletage with a delicate sweep of heart-shaped trim that extended beyond the shoulder line. She had opted to experiment with a deep purple fabric rather than a traditional black, which Carmela decided added a royal flair to what might have been a more conservative cocktail dress. Mrs. Curwin completed the outfit with purple suede open-toed shoes that rose to her delicate ankles, finished with gold trim and a tapered golden heel on which she perched with effortless balance. Her hair was curled away from her face, drawing attention to her bright green, almond-shaped eyes and the bronzed glow. An amethyst circled by tiny diamonds sparkled in each ear.

When Mrs. Curwin reached Tore, American G.I.s were already crammed into the vaulted lobby like a litter of excitable puppies. Bobbing above their heads was the wide horn of a record player, its base held in the crook of a soldier’s arm, while another soldier balanced a heavy card box up on his shoulder, filled with records.

“Welcome, gentlemen!” Mrs. Curwin flashed them a painted smile. “You may help your sisters now, Tore,” she said, adding sotto voce, “these are the last of our guests.” She wafted back out, leaving the scent of violet in the air. The soldiers followed their pied piper and filled the terrace with noise. The Fadda sisters straightened, gawking at the mass of testosterone. Signora Villanova followed close behind her husband, who took great pains to shake each of their hands. Mr. Curwin was quick to fill glasses for each of the men with a generous measure of sparkling rosato, a local, crisp wine with a rose blush. They held them up to the star-dusted sky. “To Sardinian summers!” Mrs. Curwin yelled above the throng. They replied with a bellow and celebratory clinks.

As Mrs. Curwin made a second sweep of the fast-empty glasses, one of the soldiers cleared an area on the sideboard and placed the record player on top of it. Another pulled over a chair on which to rest the box of records. Moments later, as Al Martino sang about his heart into the inky night beyond the blossoming canopy, the soldiers polished off two trays of antipasti and three bottles of rosato.

Vittoria and Gianetta entered the kitchen with their empty trays. “There’s thousands of them!” Vittoria squealed. “Do you think they have gum?”

“’Course,” Gianetta answered, sober.

Carmela lifted a basket of warm bread. “Vittoria, take this. Gianetta, you’ll do the shrimp.” Carmela doused the hot skillet with vernaccia—an earthy, aged wine—and shook it over the pink shells till the alcohol evaporated and filled the kitchen with garlic- and wine-scented steam. “Tell Signora Curwin that the risotto will be out soon, understand?” And with that she tipped the shrimp into a ceramic dish, sprinkled a handful of parsley over it, and sent the girls out.

“When you’ve done that, go out and give Zio Peppe some water,” Piera called after them. “He’s in the garden, by the fire.” Gianetta nodded as the girls marched back out.

“Where’s Tore, for the love of God?” Piera said, shaking her head, ladling chicken broth over the rice with one hand and stirring it with the other.

He shuffled in. “I’m here.”

“Could have fooled me,” Piera answered, drizzling another ladle of liquid into the risotto. “Pass me the Parmesan!” She reached out a hand into which he placed an enamel bowl of grated cheese. She grabbed a fistful that became melted ooze in the hot rice. Piera took the pan off the heat and spooned it into a terrine.

“I’ll follow Tore with this,” Carmela said. “Then I’ll let Mr. Curwin know we’ll carve the meat soon.”

Carmela followed her brother onto the terrace, dodging the dancing couples to reach the table of food at the far end. One soldier grabbed onto the younger of the Fadda girls, who giggled in spite of herself as he swung her like a dervish. Signora Villanova, thrilled with her dance partner, looked up at the young man, though from the looks of her unsteady jerks she was not the easiest dancer to lead.

Mrs. Curwin glided across the tiles. With the gentlest touch to the small of her back or wrist, her partner sent her swirling in and out of his arms, then back and forth through the crowd. They spun to the center of the terrace, and the guests gathered around and cheered. As the young man jitterbugged with her, she threw her head back with abandoned laughter, never once missing a beat or falling out of sync with him.

“I taught her everything she knows, ladies and gentlemen!” Mr. Curwin shouted over the music, smirking.

“Of course, my darling!” she answered back, beaming, then reached out her hand to him. The two men spun her between them as she basked in the raucous applause of her guests.

Tore returned to the kitchen with the empty trays of antipasti. “They’re drunk already.”

Piera focused on the steaming dish of cauliflower she spooned into another terrine, catching out of the iron skillet the final pieces of tender olives and tomatoes she had cooked them with. “I don’t care if they’re dead—just get this out!”

“When do I get to eat?” Tore asked.

“When I say so!” Piera shooed him out with the cauliflower dish in hand.

The bell marked ENTRATA rang in the glass-fronted service box hanging over the door.

Carmela looked up from the radicchio leaves she had just begun to pat dry.

“Hurry,” Piera said, “God gave me only two hands.”

Carmela took off her apron and placed it on the back of the chair, then smoothed her hair. She flew through the living room, past the ornate rococo settee, the velvet ottoman, and the somber portraits of Franco’s uncle’s ancestors. Mrs. Curwin’s laughter bubbled above the twirling dancers and Perry Como. Carmela caught glimpses of the party through the square holes in the crotchet lace curtains of the living room windows. She tried to imagine how it must feel to be swung around your terrace by young, visiting soldiers while your husband enjoys you from afar.

Reaching the main doors, Carmela turned the fat, gold knob with two hands and heaved them open. The silhouette of a man stood before her, blackened against the candlelit path behind him.

“Buona sera, Signore,” she said, politely.

“Buona sera,” he replied, removing his hat. “I hope I’m not too late.”

“You’re fashionably late, Lieutenant, that’s what you are,” Mrs. Curwin cooed as she glided in behind Carmela, flushed with dance and rosato. “And handsome as a button.” She laughed, breathless. “No dueling for my heart, though, do you hear?”

The lieutenant smiled, bashful.

“Beauty is beauty is beauty,” she continued, “to be appreciated at all costs, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, ma’am,” another man answered, stepping in behind Kavanagh. He was taller, with a strawberry tinge to his blond locks and the beginnings of gray creeping in at his temples. His face was dotted with freckles, which Carmela tried not to stare at. His eyes were closer to slate than the luminous blue of Kavanagh. They raced over Mrs. Curwin’s outfit in one swift move.

“Captain Casler, I am honored you could make time to stop by!” Mrs. Curwin said.

“Just trying to do the proper thing for a pair of proper Brits.” His face creased into a sharp smile.

“Lieutenant, Captain, this is the inimitable Carmela.”

She felt their eyes on her, followed by the flush of her cheeks.

“Her talents are utterly wasted here,” Mrs. Curwin continued. “Look at what she made me!” She twirled, hands on hips, inviting their gaze. “Ought to have her own studio on Fifth Avenue, not Piazza Cantareddu! I want her to come work for me in London, but she’s intent on getting married to her dashing childhood sweetheart! A horribly pretty pair. If you are looking for anyone to help you with interpreting work, this is your lady!”

Carmela felt her cheeks turn a deeper shade of plum.

“Shall we?” Mrs. Curwin asked, with a coquettish tilt.

“Yes, ma’am,” the captain answered, offering her his arm. The pair left for the terrace, where Mr. Curwin headed toward them with a welcome glass of rosato.

“Third time’s a charm, right, Carmela?” Kavanagh said.

Carmela looked at him, blank.

Kavanagh cleared his throat. “It’s the third time we’ve been introduced.”

Carmela smiled, feeling her head give an involuntary nod instead of words finding their way out. He tipped his head and walked away. She liked the way her name sounded when he said it.

A pound at the door startled her. She opened it.

“Franco!” she gasped. “I thought you weren’t getting back to town till tomorrow.”

“You never told me there was a party,” he said, stubbing out the butt of his cigarette on the gravel. “I got to hear about what my fiancée is doing from strangers?”

“What?”

“That why you’re dressed like that?”

Carmela stepped forward and planted a soft kiss on his mouth. It tasted like ash. “Is your uncle coming, too?”

“His house, isn’t it? Madame invited us last week. Your little secret, eh?” He reached forward, took her chin in his hands, and ran his tongue over her top lip, then strutted down to the terrace.

Carmela watched him disappear into the throng, then turned back and walked out through the door and along the front of the house. She carried on past the side of the house toward the fragrant herb garden, flanked with the last of the summer’s plum tomatoes and bell peppers. Peppe sat by a pile of hot coals placed at the center of a dusty circle, a safe distance from the foliage, turning the spit. His flat cap sat at a jaunty angle, and his tiny wooden stool ached under the weight of him.

“Almost ready?” Carmela asked as she watched him dip a tied bunch of rosemary into a terra-cotta pot of olive oil and run it across the caramelized crackling of the suckling pig.

“Americans come, everyone wants now. Rush life, die quick.”

Carmela smiled. Peppe’s face was burnt ochre in the glow of the coals, emphasizing the deep creases of his face. They watched the spit turn without talking for a moment, with a cicada chorus in the blackened brush and echoes of laughter rolling up in waves from the terrace.

“Gianetta brought you water?” she asked.

“I wait till Sunday for my wine like a priest?”

She grinned. “Depends. Have you said confession?”

“You grow a mouth on you like Zia Lucia, no one will want to marry you,” he answered with a benevolent twinkle. As the first child born to the brothers, it sometimes seemed to Carmela that Peppe was as much her father as his brother Tomas.

“Let me share a glass of the good stuff with my favorite uncle!” Franco yelled, appearing at the kitchen door and sauntering over with a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.

“There’s the vagabond!” Peppe replied. “You’d do best not to travel till she’s got that ring on her finger, if you know what’s good for you.” He chuckled.

“Gonna keep my treasure safe, don’t you worry.”

Franco’s eyes planted on hers. For a fleeting moment, they slit with a passion that Carmela would have liked to describe as love. She was his treasure. Had he ever described her this way? Perhaps. So why did her mind claw the word just now? There was so much still to do inside with her sister, as the party was dancing into life. Yet the word pricked, a minuscule spike from a cactus fruit that can’t be seen to be removed but sharpens into the skin with even the gentlest brush of fabric. Treasure? Hold on to precious, she lied to herself. Treasure: something to keep hidden under lock and key. Something to covet, gaze upon. Own. Carmela had followed Franco into the muddy distance between love and ownership. She had become his possession after all. If he wasn’t assured his father’s empire, if his brothers would usurp him in the end, then Carmela was the one thing in his world that would belong only to him. She had promised him as much. A mist of quiet doubts fogged her mind. Her gaze lowered toward the fire. She willed her thoughts to whip up into the dark night with the flames.

By the time Carmela returned to the kitchen, Piera was reaching boiling point faster than the pan of linguini. “Russian army at the door, or were you having a cocktail?” she asked, heaving a huge tray of roasted potatoes out of the oven, then lifting up her apron to wipe the sweat off her brow.

Carmela lifted the pasta off the heat and drained the salty water into the sink. The steam blinded her for a moment. “Franco’s here.”

“I don’t see him helping.” Piera darted to the large wooden dresser that took up almost half the length of one side of the kitchen. She opened one of the upper glass-paned doors with such ferocity that the lace curtain inside nearly swung off its hook. “Oh, for crying out loud! Tore!”

“Take it easy,” Carmela said, trying to smooth her sister’s ruffled feathers. “They’ll think we can’t cope.”

Piera stomped back to the other side of the table and reached into the wooden icebox for a small jar filled with bottarga, dried fish roe. “We can’t! I said three simple courses. But no! You had to turn Mrs.’s ear with a menu fit for a godforsaken royal wedding! Which, in case you didn’t know, is not what I like to be sweating over on a hot summer’s night!”

Tore entered. “Please bring down that top bowl, Tore,” Carmela said, trying to keep her tenuous grip on calm. He reached up, then carried the large bowl over to her. Carmela tipped the linguini into it, covering the hand-painted circle of traditional dancers. She reached for the bottle of olive oil, then waved a generous amount across the steaming heap of pasta, while Piera attacked the potatoes with a metal spatula. Tore snatched a small piece from the corner just before Piera made to swat his knuckles.

“Franco found a soldier to dance with, then?” Piera snipped, punctuating each syllable with a scrape.

“He’s with Zio Peppe.” Carmela sprinkled the cured fish roe over the linguini and stirred the strands so that each piece was coated with an even, salty glaze. “Am I like Zia Lucia?”

“No. Your breasts still point to heaven.”

Carmela smiled.

“Now for the love of God, let’s get this out!” With that, she snatched the hot bowl from Carmela’s hands and shoved it at Tore, who beat a hasty exit, wincing at the heat of the potato ricocheting about his mouth.

Carmela returned to the radicchio leaves and laid them in a glass bowl. She shaved slivers of cucumber and placed them on top. Then she took a handful of ruccola from an enamel bowl filled with pickings from the garden and tore them onto the other leaves, releasing their metallic aroma. Finally she peeled a couple of long radishes and sliced them. Piera threw a generous sprinkle of salt over the salad. “Here, take the salt cellar out to Zio Peppe,” she said, placing it on the center of a large slab of cork lined with myrtle stems. Carmela thought about leaving Piera with a line to soothe, but the way her sister stabbed the enormous watermelon in preparation for the fruit tray persuaded her it was best to wait till later.




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