The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Giorgio had fallen back to sleep, his lips still around the nipple but slacken, as if at the end of a kiss. The ache remained, and that should have meant that my days of blooming roses would soon be upon me again. But it was not to be because, Patricio, you were to be.

  “Blooming roses” was a phrase of Old Iota’s. I laughed when I first heard her whisper it. One husband, five sons—may her babies all rest in peace—and she still spoke as if she were a virgin.

  You look like a plum, Elesa. Are you unwell?

  Sit back down, my dear. I would not advise that you go on deck right now. During the first few days of a ship’s voyage, you will find yourself slipping on vomit there. Do not make the novice traveler’s mistake. “To take the air” on deck is another way of saying “to empty your dinner” on deck. In a while, you may ring for the steward, Elesa. A pot of tea and a plate of shortbread will settle both of our stomachs, but for now we will continue.

  The roses first came to me when I was seventeen, I told Old Iota. From the beginning, they were accompanied by a moth trapped inside my skirt, its wings fluttering. When I asked Old Iota if it was the same for her, she hid her face with her hands. I had no mother, so I thought that I was dying. When I continued to live and to bloom, my father’s disinterest in me turned into disgust or shame, for what I did not know. Soon that change would darken my life, a cloth over a birdcage.

  My father began by forbidding my brothers from gathering their school friends at the house, not even to complete their lessons in the late afternoon shade of the courtyard. He paused, and he drew an even wider border. “Nor do I want them near the entrances of the Villa Cassimati,” he declared. A “villa” was what my father insisted on calling the house, and to distinguish it from the neighbors’, which were actual villas, he gave it his family name, as though it were another of his sons. My brothers nodded their heads in unison. They did not object because they now had a reason to be elsewhere. Their school friends had been some of the few visitors to the house. I would miss their faces more than I would miss my brothers’.

  Next, my father denied me the half-light of the moon and the stars. The shutters to my bedroom windows were to be kept shut, day and night. “Especially at night,” he restated. My brothers elbowed each other’s ribs. That rough touch was a dagger in mine. It told me that they were privy, yet again, to something that I was not. It told me how alone I was in that house.

  My father then forbade me from ever leaving the Villa Cassimati, not even to accompany Kanella, the cook, on her morning walks down to the marketplace in the center of Kapsali town. “But how will Kanella know what to buy?” I pleaded.

  “There is nothing new there,” my father said. By “there” my father meant the marketplace, but he could have been speaking about all of Kapsali town or the whole of Cerigo Island. “Kanella will buy what she has always bought. She will cook what she has always cooked. We will eat as we have always eaten,” he said, his eyes not once leaving the pages of his book, which even I could tell was always the same one. When my father was not an echo, he spoke in circles, a snake swallowing its tail.

  For the next eight years, my father forbade me everything except for the Villa Cassimati and a church in the Fortezza. I could walk there with my eyes closed. Instead, I could walk there only when accompanied by my father or brothers on Sundays, Holy Days, and Pascha.

  I would come to despise the house where I was born, even its courtyard with the orange bougainvilleas and the sprawling fig tree whose leaves broke the sunlight into pieces of gold. I resented most of all the birds that flocked to the tree when the figs were ripe. The fruits on the uppermost branches, the ones closest to the sun, were the most plump, but Kanella would not bother with them. “We have enough,” she insisted, waving a hand back and forth in front of her face. “Let the birds have them,” she said.

  Kanella was from the countryside, and they all believed that this setting aside was required. Whether it was fruits of the arbors or of the vines, the peasants, as my father and brothers called them, always left some of the harvest as an offering to the birds. In return, the birds gathered and pecked, cawing their hunger and their gratitude. It never took these creatures long to cover the courtyard with their fallen feathers and their sticky pieces of flesh, which upon second glance were the pink insides of the ripened figs, torn apart by beaks and claws. The birds would then lift, a dark shawl picked up by the wind, and disappear.

  I would watch them and cry. After the first year had passed and I understood that the birds were free and I was not, I began to collect their feathers. If I had enough, I could sew them onto my clothes and paste them onto my shoes. I was too stupid and dull at eighteen to dream of flying. I only wanted to wear my dress of drab feathers and lie down and die, a bird that had lost the battle for the sweetest fruits.

  I did not know then that all women bled.

  Do not write that down, Elesa.

  On second thought, please do.

  Patricio should know the body that God gave to women.

  Kanella knew, but she did not tell me. She gave me the cloths. She had them laundered when they were soaked through. She shooed me into my bedroom whenever the back of my dresses showed their blooms. She gathered chamomiles on her daily walks and dried them for tea for when I bowed to the pain. What Kanella never did for me was what I needed most. She did not tell me that my father’s house was not my prison. It was the body that God gave me that was my prison, and within that body there were both the lock and the key. Kanella knew.

  On the morning of my twenty-fifth name day, Kanella informed me that from that day forward I could attend a service of the Daily Cycle at the church in the Fortezza. She specified the Third Hour service, which began at nine in the morning, when Pontius Pilate handed down his judgment against Christ. I was taken aback by what she was saying to me. My father and brothers were never at home in the mornings, which Kanella, of course, knew.

  “But who would accompany me?” I asked her.

  “You can walk there on your own,” Kanella replied. “Your father has given his consent.”

  I stood before her, my mouth agape at the thought of the front doors of my father’s house opening and my body, alone, slipping through.

  Kanella looked at me, her face an empty plate.

  I understood so little about Kanella then. It had not occurred to me that she understood everything about me. Kanella was not an old woman. With her olive-oil-smooth cheeks, she was not an ugly woman. She cooked everyday dishes that were beautiful on our tongues, especially my father’s. I knew these things about her, but I did not know what they, taken together, would mean for me.

  As my father told me it would be, I began the journey from his house to His house. So near to each other, via the street of villas, that four bites of an apple would bring me from one set of doors to the other, but what I saw, smelled, and heard during those solitary crossings would free me from the feathers and from a life of waiting for more of them to fall.

  At midmorning, the aromas, which hung like damp laundry over the street of villas, were the same as those coming from Kanella’s kitchen. Onions and olive oil. The whole island by noon was a pan of sweet onions melting. The midday meals of all Cerigotes began with those two ingredients. When I told this to Old Iota, she said that the onions and oil made Cerigo seem real to her. She often looked at me wide-eyed whenever I would tell her about my island of birth. She looked at me with envy too. Old Iota thought it was brave that I had boarded a ship and sailed away from my family and the rocky soil where their bodies would one day lie. She knew the reason why I had to leave Cerigo. She insisted that I was brave nonetheless. She had never traveled afar. She did not know how easy it could be to leave, how cowards always depart.

  The street of villas also gathered all the aromas that followed the onions and the oil. The thyme and laurel of Kanella’s kitchen, the tomatoes of Villa Lazaretti, the wine of Villa Ve
nieri. Lamb, fish, or cuts of beef would then follow. No one in those villas of nobles, minor and otherwise, went hungry.

  “We trace our bloodlines to the Republic of Venice” was what my father reminded my brothers whenever he heard them “corrupting” their speech with Romaic, the language of the countryside, of the interior lands, and of those who smelled onions and oil and knew that there would be nothing else to add to their pans. “We speak the language of our forefathers,” my father commanded, and my brothers followed.

  Kanella understood Venetian, but mostly she spoke Romaic. I did not know that they were two separate languages as I learned them both during my first years of life. When they untwined themselves, they became the language of the rich and the language of the poor. I grew up with both because I grew up with Kanella as my caretaker. According to my brothers, the house was full of servants when our mother was alive. These servants were let go, one by one, until Kanella became the only. Except for the cook, his sons, and me, my father rid the Villa Cassimati of all the bodies that reminded him of his young wife and of her once bustling household. Death caused most men to grieve. Death caused my father to feel anger at the one who had departed and the one who had stayed. When my brothers were feeling very cruel, they would tell me that a fever ended our mother’s life but that my birth had weakened her first.

  When my brothers were still wetting their beds, they sometimes spoke about our mother. They did this in front of me in the same way that they would later read aloud to each other in front of me, boasting and prideful, knowing that I had no way to join them. They said the following about our mother—when they said “our,” they meant the two of them. She had long black hair. She was beautiful. She was sad. She often hugged them, but sometimes she would slap them with great force and without cause. She sang the same lullaby to them every night until they fell asleep, but they claimed that they had no memory of its melody or its lyrics. My brothers, for all I know, were telling each other lies.

  What I wanted to know was the scent of my mother’s hair. I hoped it was lavender water, as it eased my temples when they throbbed. I wanted to know the color of her eyes. I hoped that they were dark brown and ringed with green, like mine. I wanted to hear her voice, the exhale of her breath.

  What will my blessed second remember about me?

  Patricio, if you are reading this, you must be a bird.

  If my blessed third is a boy—please bring him to me, God, not upon the waters of these seas but let him wait until we reach Santa Maura, the island where his brothers were born—he must be a bird as well. For them, I must imagine flight.

  During my years inside, I had imagined nothing—I woke, I ate, I slept—and my words began to dull and fade. Once they came back to me again, it was as if I were learning their meanings for the very first time. There was the joy of “sunlight,” uninterrupted by leaves and petals. The rays that fell between my father’s house and the church in the Fortezza were sharp needles, pushing themselves into the cloth of my dress and the straw of my bonnet. There was the joy of my own “breath,” my own “pace,” my own “body.” There was the joy of the “bells” of the church beginning to toll, joined moments later by those in the center of Kapsali town. The thick walls of my father’s house had dampened even them. I could feel their ringing with my whole body again, and it felt as if I were surrounded by a back-and-forth sea.

  When I was very young, a pair of hands had dipped my body into the Ionian, let me go, and then pulled me back again. I remember these movements repeated, perhaps many times. I remember that I was left to drift toward the rocks. I remember that I was always just an arm’s length away. I was being taught to swim, I tell myself. I was not being given to the sea. In truth, only the pull of the currents and the opposing strength of the hands have stayed with me with any certainty. I believe this to be a memory of my mother. I never shared it with my brothers because they would have taken her away from me. I believe the memory to be true because those hands were stronger than the sea.

  Patricio, I wish I could have given you the Ionian. After Giorgio went to God, I had thought about bringing you, my blessed second, down to the shore, but Old Iota had worried. She thought that I was still too weak. “Your grieving arms versus the currents?” she scoffed.

  She was right. I was weak. I could barely tug you from the nipple.

  I cannot undo what has been done nor can I do what has never been done. The sea that you have never touched will wait for you, as you will wait for it, Patricio.

  I sound like my father when I say such things. Perhaps I am the snake swallowing its tail now.

  I was twenty-five years old when I was allowed the Third Hour service at the church in the Fortezza, but I was as ignorant as a girl of seventeen, the age when I was first confined.

  There is no need to furrow your brow, Elesa. I am aware of your age, but you at seventeen are not ignorant. You can read and you can write. You are blessed, despite your recent circumstances. With your alphabet, you are feathered for flight. Yes, do smile. That thought is deserving of one.

  I was ignorant, but I was not unchanged.

  My body had burst the seams of my girlish dresses. Their hems were let down, darts and smocking details undone, and scraps of fabric and ribbon were added to lengthen the sleeves and loosen the necklines. These make-do alterations would have continued but for Kanella, who informed me that, also with my father’s consent, I would be receiving additions to my wardrobe. Though she did not say it, I understood that I was being dressed for God. Seamstresses came to the Villa Cassimati and measured me for three day dresses and a fourth with pale gray lace around its high neckline for the Holy Days and Pascha. I was also provided with a corset, six petticoats, and five chemises. A straw bonnet was also added to the order.

  The first seamstress who came to the house sobbed upon seeing me. Kanella was as surprised as I was by the woman’s outburst. “Sióreta Cassimati looks like . . . looks like . . . a twin of her mother,” the seamstress managed to say between her gasps and gulps. I heard Kanella shushing her as the woman was being led toward the back door of the house. Kanella returned and found me in the courtyard lying under the fig tree, my body curled around its trunk like a maggot. I had never heard anyone, except for my brothers, speak a word about our mother. I do not even know, to this day, my mother’s given name.

  Elesa, I can see it in your shoulders, as if someone has pulled them up by a rope. You want to interrupt me, as Old Iota had done, when I told her this story.

  “Where was your mother’s family?” was what Old Iota had wanted to know. To all of her questions about the maternal side of my family, I had replied “Malta.” I knew it to be the name of an island where my mother was born and where her people remained. I did not know much more. I said “Malta” the way other people said “death.” Both meant a breach. Whenever Old Iota heard “Malta,” she made the sign of the cross three times, as if protecting herself from a curse.

  Old Iota then shared with me that, after the passing of each of her sons, she had curled her body around the trees on her husband’s farm. The older the olive tree, the more gnarled its trunk, the longer it had survived in such poor soil, the more she wanted to encircle her body, emptied and slight, around it.

  We will see Malta before the end of our voyage, Elesa. Once we cross the Irish Sea, we will dock in Liverpool for several days. Then the ship will embark on the long southern crossing for Malta, where we will dock again.

  On the voyage out—Patricio, you will not remember that journey because you were only two years old at the time—I learned that we passengers were not the cargo of worth on a Dublin-bound ship. The barrels of red wine and dried currants were. I do not know what goods from Dublin or Liverpool will be making this return journey with us. Rifles, parasols, and saddle soaps, I would think.

  After Malta, depending on the prevailing winds, Santa Maura Island will be only a few days away.

&nbs
p; Elesa, I know you have no memory of Santa Maura, but you will recognize it the moment you see it on the horizon. Your mother was born there, so you already know it in your blood and bones, its outline clearer to you than any map. When Patricio makes this voyage one day, it will be the same for him when he continues southward. “Cerigo,” he will say. “Mother” is what he will mean.

  We are still weeks away. You will have time to prepare, Elesa. We both will have plenty of time.

  First thing I will do is find Old Iota. She will weep when she sees that Patricio is not with me. She will think that he has gone to God, as his elder brother had. I will show her the calotype of him to assure her that he is alive. She will not understand the image on that piece of paper at first, as I had not when Patricio’s grandaunt had given it to me as a departing gift. But Old Iota will learn to see the image for what it is. A little boy, with his father’s large round eyes and caterpillar eyebrows and his mother’s head of dark waves, who at the age of four is standing sturdy, staring straight ahead, as if to say, “Life, I await you.”

  I will have no difficulties locating Old Iota. Everyone knows her and her story in Lefkada town. Her grief is her twin wherever she goes. It grips onto her hand. It clings onto her neck and her stooped back. She is, in this way, never alone. Born of grief, loss, tragedy or shame, such companions often follow the bodies of women. Men shrug theirs off by traveling afar, strangling them in foreign fields or drowning them in deeper waters.

  On the ship from Cerigo to Santa Maura, Charles taught me the English word “gossip.” He told me that in our life together I must ignore gossip and avoid trading in it at all cost. I understood later that by gossip he meant these twins. He said that the inhabitants of my island, and of Santa Maura, indulged in gossip as if they were girls weak for sweets. “They will all sink under the weight of it,” he declared in his stilted, often unrecognizable Venetian.

  Charles was fond of declaring. Perhaps he too was an echoer. He certainly has become a snake.