Paradiso: Utterly gripping and emotional historical fiction (The Paradiso Novels Book 1)

by Francesca Scanacapra

Gianfrancesco smiled and said, ‘Yes. In that case, things are better already.’

  He tipped the last of the seeds into my hand, then screwed up the paper wrapper and slipped it into his satchel. I licked my fingertip and dipped it in the salt.

  ‘Why don’t you catch the school bus?’ I asked. ‘It goes right past the end of your driveway.’

  ‘My mother said she would drop me off and pick me up in the car.’

  ‘Oh. Why isn’t she picking you up today then?’

  He fiddled with the buckle on his bag. Then: ‘I asked her not to. Some of the boys here were taunting me about it.’

  ‘Why would they taunt you?’

  ‘They don’t like me because I was at a private school before.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Why should they be bothered about something like that?’

  ‘Well, it seemed to concern them a great deal They pushed me into the wall and threw my books on the floor.’

  ‘Did you tell?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘How about your mother? Did you tell her?’

  ‘No. I didn’t want to worry her. I just asked her not to bring me by car any more. That’s why I’m catching the public bus. It gives me a reason to stay behind and study anyway.’

  Gianfrancesco adjusted his spectacles and continued, ‘Those same boys got me into trouble before.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You remember when that tobacco train was held up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, two of the farmhands wanted to go and get some tobacco and I went with them. I didn’t tell my parents because I knew they would forbid it. I didn’t go with the intention of taking any tobacco - I was just curious to see a derailed train. But one of the farmhands gave me a sack anyway and told me to fill it up, so I did. I thought that as there were so many people helping themselves, it wouldn’t matter. Anyway, word spread that the police were coming and people scattered. I couldn’t find the farmhands. I asked a group of boys if they had seen them and they told me they had gone towards Mazzolo. So I went in that direction, only to walk straight into a police blockade with a sack full of stolen tobacco on my back. They arrested me for theft and took me to the police station in Cremona in the back of a van. The boys who told me to go that way were the same ones who were taunting me the other day. They sent me towards Mazzolo on purpose because they knew the police were there.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ I was shocked. ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘My father was angry and my mother was incandescent. I had to do some pretty disgusting chores for the rest of the summer holiday as punishment. When you came back to my house with your mother, I saw you. But I was cleaning out the slurry pit - I was in it up to my knees. I couldn’t come and say hello when I was in that state.’

  Finally, the bus drew up in the square where we were waiting and we got on. It was empty, but we sat at the back anyway. Ten minutes later we had pulled up by the old gateposts.

  ‘Will you come to my house again?’ Gianfrancesco asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘On Saturday.’

  ‘If my mother will let me.’

  ‘Tell her we have a good crop of pears. You can have some to take home. As many as you want.’

  When the bus stopped outside Paradiso a few minutes later, my mother was standing by the gate, her hands on her hips.

  ‘Where on earth have you been? I was worried sick!’

  My explanation did not please her and she huffed as I crossed the threshold.

  Since my father’s death my mother had hardened. She said that she refused to let grief incapacitate her, but she had become sterner and more insular. Her patience was easily tested and I did everything in my power not to irritate her, which was easier said than done because everything did seem to irritate her, apart from her embroidery work. She focused on it from the moment she got up in the morning until the light faded, and spoke very little. Conversation, even if it was about something pleasant, seemed to darken her dark moods further. Any questions I asked were either ignored or met with a brief answer, then she would shut down. She rarely mentioned my father.

  My mother had always had a way of soothing me by telling me that things would be all right. It was that assurance which had helped me through my long months of exile at the convent. Sometimes I thought she said it not just to convince me, but to convince herself too. Since my father’s death she hadn’t said it once.

  I knew that it would be best to wait before asking whether I could go to Cascina Marchesini that Saturday and I was particularly helpful that evening - so helpful, in fact, that my mother scolded me for fussing and getting in her way.

  I saw Gianfrancesco the following day in the schoolyard. He was standing alone, leaning against the wall of the sports hall. Rita did not want to go over with me to talk to him.

  ‘My father says his mother’s a Fascist,’ she said. ‘You go and talk to him if you want. I’m not coming.’

  Gianfrancesco looked pleased when he saw me. He said immediately, ‘Did you ask your mother whether you could come to my house?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Will you ask her?’

  I nodded, but perhaps he had noticed the doubt on my face.

  ‘Don’t forget to tell her about the pears.’

  When I asked my mother that evening, she wasn’t keen to allow me to go. She listed the chores which I needed to do before she would consider it, and the list was quite a comprehensive one. However, the mention of a bounty of fruit was enough to soften her resistance eventually. She told me to ride my bicycle carefully, to pull over and stop if I heard a car and be home by five o’clock.

  Zia Mina had procured a bicycle for me. I think she hoped it would provide some distraction following my father’s death. Salvatore had taught me to ride it in the yard. I loved it and happily volunteered to ride to the village to carry out small errands whenever I could. I didn’t tell Zia Mina where I was going that afternoon.

  It was a beautiful, hazy, late-September day. The summer heat had abated, the mosquitoes had died off and the leaves on the trees rattled gently as they dried out and prepared to fall.

  I had never been on the North Road alone before. I had ridden out in the other direction to go to the village, but never on the North Road. There had been no reason for me to do so. I had a sense of freedom, as though I could ride on for ever. I held my breath as I cycled across the canal.

  Gianfrancesco was sitting on the grass verge, his back against one of the brick gateposts. He leaped to his feet and waved when he saw me.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ he called out, smiling broadly. ‘Your mother didn’t mind?’

  ‘I had to do a lot of jobs first.’

  ‘And I had homework to do.’

  His bicycle, which was enormous, was propped against the other post.

  ‘Can you actually ride that big machine?’ I asked.

  ‘More or less. It was my father’s and I still need to grow into it; plus I need some speed to get it going and then jump on. It’s a technique.’ He held up a grazed elbow. ‘A technique I have yet to perfect.’

  I looked at the old gateposts, which still seemed nonsensical to me and asked, ‘Were there walls or hedges here once?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of having gates?’

  ‘There used to be deep ditches. They were to keep cows in, not people out,’ he said, then looked sadly across the fields. ‘But there are no cows to keep in now.’

  ‘What happened to them? You had three hundred of them, you told me before.’

  ‘They were sold. After my father died, Mamma thought she could employ somebody to look after them, but it wasn’t possible. They had debts, you see.’

  ‘The cows had debts?’

  ‘No, silly.’ He laughed. ‘My parents were the ones with the debts.’

  The farm was silent. All the barn doors were closed. Patches of weeds grew in stringy tufts. There was a mournful,
neglected feeling to the place. A small, solitary grey hen picked at the cracked ground.

  The huge wedding-cake house had all its shutters drawn. The oleanders looked shrunken and close to death. I stopped and pointed at the coat of arms above the central window.

  ‘Are those herons?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m surprised you can make them out. The carving’s quite badly eroded.’

  ‘I saw them in your family mausoleum. My father said he thought they had a meaning.’

  ‘They do. Several meanings, actually. In Ancient Greece the heron was the symbol of the struggle of good overpowering evil. It has other meanings too, like peace and longevity. And of course here in this region herons were really common. Not so much now the rice fields are gone, but we do still see them along the rivers. On our coat of arms their necks make the shape of an M for Marchesini. And some people say we look like herons because we’ve all got long legs, but I don’t think that was intentional when the coat of arms was designed though.’ He smiled.

  ‘That’s funny. When my aunt worked in the rice fields they used to call her “The Heron” because she was so tall.’

  We made our way around the side. The only sign of life was an assortment of tattered dishrags drying on a wooden stand. Suddenly Gianfrancesco stopped and said, ‘Do you miss your father a lot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I miss mine a lot too. But it gets better with time. Whenever I think of him, I try to remember all the nice times we had together. Like being out in the fields, or on the tractor with him, or in his study looking at his books. It helps. I call it making a stone memory.’

  ‘A stone memory?’

  Gianfrancesco nodded. ‘I read that memories can be like pictures drawn in sand. A gust of wind can blow them away and they can be gone and forgotten forever. So I imagine that all the good times with my father are carved into stone. I think of them over and over again until I’m certain of every detail, and as I’m thinking, I imagine those details chiselled into stone so that I can remember them forever.’

  ‘I like that. I’m going to do that too.’

  ‘And thankfully I have some photographs. Do you have photographs of your father?’

  ‘No,’ I replied sadly. ‘We didn’t even have one to put on his tomb.’

  Gianfrancesco said quietly, ‘My mother is very different now. Is yours?’

  ‘Yes. She’s stricter. She gets impatient more easily. I think she misses Papá a lot, but I also think she’s relieved he doesn’t feel any more pain.’

  ‘My mother was hysterical. A doctor had to give her an injection to calm her and now she has to take pills to sleep. But don’t tell anyone that. She wouldn’t want anybody to know.’

  I bowed my head. Suddenly it felt very heavy.

  ‘Are you afraid you’ll lose her too?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t sleep for worrying about it,’ Gianfrancesco confessed. ‘Even though I know it’s very unlikely, I imagine her having an accident in the car, or taking too many pills and never waking up.’

  ‘I feel exactly the same as you. I think about terrible things happening and of being left all by myself.’ I looked up, expecting Gianfrancesco to appear gloomy, but all I could see in his expression was relief.

  ‘I’m glad it’s not just me,’ he said.

  We spent the afternoon wandering around Cascina Marchesini, exploring its abandoned barns and outbuildings. The dairy was locked shut, its windows obscured by cobwebs. The milking machines stood silent. The cheese store was empty.

  But as we meandered through the orchards, chatting and picking pears I felt happier than I had since Papá had died.

  ‘Take as many pears as you want,’ Gianfrancesco told me. ‘I’m afraid they will go to waste otherwise.’

  ‘You can preserve them. You shouldn’t waste food.’

  ‘I know. But my mother isn’t interested in things like that and Fiorella has so much to do, she wouldn’t have time.’

  ‘We could do it,’ I suggested. ‘If we had sugar and jars.’

  ‘Do you know how?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ve seen my aunt do it loads of times. Pears, peaches, cherries, plums. You can preserve anything in sugar. Would your mother let us?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. I would have to ask first, but she doesn’t usually mind what I do as long as I’m here and I’ve done my homework. How about your mother? She could have some of the preserved fruit, of course. She could have half of it. And your aunt. She could have some too.’

  We both grinned excitedly. Gianfrancesco clapped his hands together.

  ‘A project!’ he announced. ‘It’s great to have a project.’

  ‘We will need sugar though, quite a lot of it. And a lemon, maybe several lemons. And we have to sterilise the jars or the fruit could go fizzy and make us ill.’

  ‘We need a list then. Wait here.’ He ran fast back to the house and returned a short time later with a jotter and pencil. ‘Right,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You’re the expert here. What’s the first thing we need?’

  ‘We need to harvest the fruit.’

  ‘Of course.’ He noted this down. I saw that his handwriting was beautiful. ‘Then what?’

  ‘We have to get the jars ready. That will take some time. You see, we have to put them in boiling water to sterilise them, then let them cool. I will have to see what kind of jars you have. Are they the ones with rubber seals?’

  Gianfrancesco shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I can show you.’

  I was enjoying the feeling of being an expert.

  ‘If they are, we might need new rubber seals. If we can’t get them we can use some paraffin wax.’

  ‘Come and see,’ he said.

  We made our way to the house, chattering excitedly about our project. Gianfrancesco asked more questions than I knew how to answer, but I promised that I would consult my aunt about anything that was uncertain.

  The kitchen was no different to the way I remembered it. Spinning blizzards of dust caught in the smoky light. Gianfrancesco led me through to a back kitchen, and through again to a store room.

  I had been expecting to see a few jars, perhaps a few dozen or so. So I was astounded to see shelf after shelf of empty glass jars, vessels and pots rising from floor to ceiling. They were covered in a thick layer of dust. It was a sight that would have sent my aunt into a frenzy. She was always short of jars.

  ‘They haven’t been used for years,’ said Gianfrancesco. ‘Not since long before my father died.’

  We spent an hour sorting through the most appropriate containers. We carried the best of them to the kitchen and set them out on the table. The array was quite daunting.

  ‘It’s going to be a long day’s work,’ I said. I sounded like my aunt.

  During the following week of school we spent every moment of our break-times planning. Gianfrancesco noted everything down in his jotter. His mother had given permission for us to carry out our pear project, albeit reluctantly at first. My mother took a little more convincing, but I knew that the promise of pears would be enough to gain her approval in the end.

  The following Saturday I arrived at Cascina Marchesini at 8 a.m. sharp.

  The kitchen stove was enormous, just like everything else in the house. It was four times the size of ours and sat within a deep stone fireplace. As directed, Gianfrancesco had filled several saucepans with water, which were already simmering when I arrived. He had washed the dust off the jars and lined them up on the table ready for sterilisation. The shards of light which squeezed through the gaps in the louvres hit the glass, bouncing half-moons of coloured rainbows against the walls. A pile of clean cloths was set neatly beside them.

  ‘Right!’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘You’re the expert here. You direct me.’

  I had brought along one of my mother’s aprons, which I felt gave me an added air of professionalism. I was the expert, after all. I wanted to look the part. As soon as he saw me put it on, Gianfrancesc
o went to find something similar. I had never seen a boy in an apron before. His long skinny legs and big-booted feet stuck out underneath. It made me laugh.

  ‘What do you think?’ He posed, spinning around and grinning. ‘It’s Fiorella’s apron, but I don’t think she’ll mind.’

  I checked the water on the stove, which was starting to boil.

  ‘It’s ready,’ I said. ‘We need to put a cloth in the bottom of each pan to protect the glass.’

  Carefully, we began to transfer the jars into the saucepans.

  ‘How long do they need?’ asked Gianfrancesco.

  ‘About twenty minutes. We can start peeling the pears in the meantime.’

  It soon became clear that I was rather more experienced at fruit-peeling than he was. I had helped my aunt and my mother prepare fruit so often that with a single incision of my knife and the careful turning of the fruit in my hand I could remove the skin in a single, elegant coil. Gianfrancesco fumbled with the knife, hacking off little chunks and far too much pear with the peel.

  ‘Use your knife more lightly,’ I advised. ‘You’re wasting a lot of fruit.’

  He stabbed at his pear and laughed as I produced yet another graceful spiral of skin.

  By the time the jars had boiled sufficiently, we had a good amount of fruit prepared. We carefully set the jars to cool on the side.

  Gianfrancesco had procured the largest sack of sugar I had ever seen. It was so heavy he had to drag it across the floor.

  ‘Where on earth did you get that?’ I asked.

  ‘From the bakery in Mazzolo. I swapped it for three chairs. But my mother doesn’t know.’

  ‘You swapped it for three chairs?’ I was amazed.

  He nodded. ‘The chapel’s full of chairs. I don’t think they’ll be missed. The baker even gave me lemons and asked if we were going to use cinnamon or nutmeg. I didn’t know but I took the cinnamon and nutmeg anyway.’

  ‘That’s enough for a massive amount of pears,’ I noted, looking at it all.

  ‘Perfect, because we do have a massive amount of pears. And we also have a massive number of jars.’

  ‘Maybe we should just start with what we’ve got here.’

  ‘Yes. Best to do things properly in smaller amounts.’