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

by Francesca Scanacapra

  The more I read the more my reading improved, and by chapter four I was gaining some of Gianfrancesco’s expressive skill.

  The story involved Renzo and Lucia, two young lovers from a village in Lombardy. My mind began to wander. I tried to picture Pieve Santa Clara as it would have been in the seventeenth century and I dreamed that the two young lovers were Gianfrancesco and myself. I wondered whether he was thinking the same.

  Renzo and Lucia planned to marry, but an evil nobleman wanted Lucia for himself and forbade the priest from performing the ceremony.

  ‘What do we learn about power here?’ asked Gianfrancesco.

  ‘That a nobleman is more powerful than a priest?’

  ‘Yes! Good! And what else do we learn?’

  ‘That Renzo loves Lucia.’

  ‘Yes. We also learn how difficult it can be to speak the truth. It’s not the priest’s fault that he cannot marry Renzo and Lucia, but he does not have the courage to tell either of them. How does Manzoni make us feel sympathy for the priest?’

  ‘There’s nothing he can do, so we feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Yes, but what device does Manzoni use to express this more fully?’

  ‘Device?’

  ‘He uses humour. He uses irony and sarcasm and makes us feel pity towards him. All those things are devices used in literature. A device is like a tool for a writer. Just as a carpenter uses a plane or a saw a writer uses irony, or humour, or emotive language.’

  By the time we reached chapter nine Lucia had escaped to a convent to hide from the nobleman, but in hiding there, she had to take vows of chastity and renounce Renzo.

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ I asked. ‘She wants to marry, so she goes into hiding, but the place she hides is one where she has to renounce marriage. It makes no sense!’

  ‘It’s a paradox.’

  ‘What’s a paradox?’

  ‘It’s a contradiction, an impossible circumstance.’

  I had hoped for an uplifting love story, but the romance was obscured by strife. Love seemed hopeless and unreachable.

  ‘It’s quite miserable. Everything is so hard for Renzo and Lucia. All they wanted to do was to get married,’ I said. I was no longer imagining Gianfrancesco and myself as the lovers. The whole thing was too impossibly complex.

  ‘Yes, but this is more than just a love story. What good would a book be if two people who wanted to get married just got married and lived happily ever after?’

  ‘I think I would like a book like that.’

  ‘Nobody would read a book if it didn’t contain intrigue or struggle. Good literature makes us think. And the subject of love is fertile ground for any writer. Some of the greatest works of literature are about love and they contain great literary characters. Romeo and Juliet, for example, or Paolo and Francesca.’

  ‘Did Romeo and Juliet get married?’

  ‘Yes, but they killed themselves shortly afterwards.’

  ‘And Paolo and Francesca?’

  ‘No. They were punished for eternity in hell for adultery.’

  It seemed that every word which left Gianfrancesco’s lips taught me something, or made me think. He had read more books by the age of fifteen than I thought it would be possible to read in a lifetime.

  By the end of the lesson my head was spinning and I was so tired that I felt as though my brain had been wrung out. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of having been thoroughly educated.

  ‘I have to go home,’ said Gianfrancesco finally.

  ‘Not in this weather, surely? It’ll be dark soon,’ said my mother.

  ‘My mother will worry, Signora Ponti.’

  ‘She’s probably already worried. You should never have come all this way on a day like this.’

  Gianfrancesco peered out of the window. ‘Thank you for your concern, but it’s all right, Signora Ponti. The clouds have cleared. It’s going to get colder, but it won’t snow again tonight.’

  As Gianfrancesco had forecast, it did not snow again, but it became even colder. The night sky was clear and mauve and scattered with stars. The metre of snow which had settled during the day froze to a glittering, crystallised mass. My mother and I both slept in the bed in the kitchen that night under a pile of blankets and we each wore a pair of my father’s socks.

  By the morning, trees dripped with icy spikes. Sharp spears hung from our eaves and clung to the wires of fences. Everything was rendered rigid with ice.

  The electricity went off and did not come back on again for three days. We ran out of candles and had to improvise by lighting oily rags in jars. The smell and the black fug which smouldered from them reminded me of Ernesto.

  Still, Gianfrancesco came every day. He said that the five-hour return journey did not bother him and that spending four hours in our warm kitchen was delightful.

  ‘It’s so cold at my house that we have ice on the inside of the windows,’ he said.

  We started reading three days before Christmas Eve, and by the Feast of Epiphany, we had finished. Following all manner of misfortunes, including surviving war and famine and contracting the plague, Renzo and Lucia were married.

  *

  At the beginning of term, I returned to school with a new sense of purpose. Gianfrancesco had not just taught me facts, he had taught me how to think about what I was learning. It was as though his intelligence had infected me.

  We were inseparable through our break-times and we met every Saturday and most Sundays to study together. I had convinced him to start taking the school bus. I would always reserve a seat next to me as Gianfrancesco’s stop was after mine on the way in. The boys who had taunted him left him alone. I had been congratulated by numerous children for having subdued Bruno the bully, whose nose had never looked quite the same again.

  As spring bloomed and the days lengthened, so did our time spent studying together. I would do my chores every Saturday morning and after lunch I would ride over to Gianfrancesco’s. We would study for as long as we could as we had to leave time for me to return home before it got dark. He would go through the previous week’s work methodically, testing me with questions and often expanding the topic by teaching me things the teacher had not covered. He would then oversee my homework. Thanks to his help, my grades improved weekly.

  My mother liked Gianfrancesco and was grateful that he was helping me with my studies. Zia Mina, on the other hand, was displeased that I spent so much time at Cascina Marchesini. I think she had quarrelled with my mother about it, but the improvement in my grades and my new lust for learning overrode her disapproval.

  Rita was not impressed, even though she had new friends. One Saturday she was sitting outside her house, bouncing the pram which contained yet another baby sibling. One of her new friends from school was sitting with her.

  ‘Going to see Gianfrancesco?’ she called out in a sing-song voice.

  I nodded. The two girls turned towards each other, whispered and giggled.

  ‘Are you going to kiss him?’ asked Rita’s friend. They burst into peals of laughter.

  ‘No, I am not!’ I protested, then got on my bicycle and sped off down the road, fuming with indignation.

  The fact was that I wished I could kiss Gianfrancesco. It was something I thought about all the time. If I did, what would he do? Would he kiss me back, or would he jump away in horror? And how would I do it? He was quite a bit taller than me. We would have to be sitting down.

  Sometimes as we sat together poring over texts, our faces so close that we could feel each other’s breath, I would lose myself so completely in the thought of kissing him that I would forget what I was supposed to be studying.

  I was madly, passionately and secretly in love.

  *

  On the last day before the summer break, I was handed my report. Each of my grades had risen by at least three points. I had achieved a nine for literature, thanks in part to the essay I had written discussing humour, power and paradoxes in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. My teache
r had noted that I had an ‘insightful approach’. Best of all, I was top of the class.

  I showed my report to Gianfrancesco.

  He was pleased. ‘That’s better. And I can still help you to improve.’

  ‘It’s all thanks to you,’ I said, and quite spontaneously I did that thing I had been thinking about ceaselessly. I kissed Gianfrancesco. It was not a tentative peck, but a heartfelt kiss, delivered directly on his unsuspecting mouth.

  For a moment he seemed disorientated, then he grinned, grasped my face in his hands and kissed me back, saying in a slightly breathless way, ‘You’re welcome!’

  From that moment on we spent almost as much time kissing as we did studying.

  It might seem fanciful to say that a thirteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old boy could be truly in love, but we were. Whenever I thought of Gianfrancesco, which was most of the time, a delicious warmth would bubble though me; and when we were together, that fizzing feeling would fill me to the point where I thought I would burst. Gianfrancesco felt it too.

  As I pushed open the gate and made my way across the yard towards Paradiso with my report card in my hand, a sense of excitement for things to come overwhelmed me.

  My mother was at the door watching my approach. It was unusual for her to be waiting for me like that; she had been so cold and distant since my father’s death. But as she stood on the doorstep beside the missing brick, squinting at the sunshine, I could see that she was smiling.

  She read my report in silence, then held it up with the written side facing the sky and called out, ‘Look! Look, Luigi! You see what a clever girl your daughter is?’

  With that my mother pulled me into her arms and hugged me tightly.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  Francesca Scanacapra was born in Italy to an English mother and Italian father, and her childhood was spent living between England and Italy. Her adult life has been somewhat nomadic and she has pursued an eclectic mixture of career paths, including working as a technical translator between Italian, English, Spanish and French, a gym owner in Spain, an estate agent in France, a property developer in France and Senegal, and a teacher. Francesca lives in Dorset and currently works as a builder with her husband. She has two children.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to my husband, Chris Lowe, and to my children Jake and Nellie Lowe for your unwavering patience, support and belief.

  To my parents – Victoria Scanacapra for your cultural input and historical recollections, and Valerio Scanacapra for your advice concerning all things mechanical.

  To my uncle, Frank Constable, for being my number one reader.

  And to the late Roger Tallack, my brilliant English teacher, who predicted that one day I would write a book.

  Copyright

  First published by Silvertail Books in 2021

  www.silvertailbooks.com

  Copyright © Francesca Scanacapra 2021

  The right of Francesca Scanacapra to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission

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