Designs of the Heart

by Renee Ryder

  The vehicle was blatantly outdated—she was no expert but could tell that after having seen scooters around Porto Loreno, some of which looked like small spaceships. Their helmets were open in the front, without visors, which didn’t seem to offer much safety. There was no trunk box nor handles at the sides of the flat seat, leaving her only Nico’s body to support herself with. Reluctant to wrap her arms around his waist, she tried gripping the sides of his T-shirt, careful to avoid pressing her chest against his back. As the scooter had no back footrests, she had to place her feet on the sides of the floorboard just behind his heels. And yet these discomforts only enhanced the pleasure of cutting through the streets in this new way, threading between the slow cars and traffic with the breeze on her face.

  “Everything ok?” Nico asked her.

  “What?”

  “Everything ok?” he repeated, shouting.

  “Yes, I’m fine!”

  Understanding him while he was driving proved problematic from the outset. She could lean forward close to his ear and speak loudly, like in a nightclub, whereas his voice went forward and was lost on the wind.

  They entered a small town and she began to have trouble staying on the seat. He went slowly like she’d asked, to the point that they barely needed to lean into the curves. But the continuous bouncing from the street, which seemed paved with river rocks, made her cling more tightly to his shirt so she wouldn’t slide off the back.

  “How much longer to arrive?”

  “Just outside of this town, there’s a street that goes up the hill. It’s five kilometers.”

  “Okay. And what does that mean?”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know kil— know about kilometers.”

  “Oh. It’s three miles. Give or take.”

  “You know about miles?”

  “I’m familiar with a marine mile. It’s just under a land mile. Why, are you uncomfortable? You want us to stop for a minute?”

  “Actually, yes. I feel that I’m falling off.”

  Nico pulled over as soon as he spotted an opening in the line of parking cars snaking along the narrow one-way street that wound along between the two rows of buildings. He stopped between a clothing store and a pharmacy.

  She slipped down to the sidewalk, keeping to the edge so as not to block the flow of foot traffic. Then she released the chin strap and pulled off her helmet while he pushed down the kickstand.

  “You look nice with the braid.”

  “Thanks. I did it because I knew the helmet and the wind would do a mess to my hair.”

  She stretched her legs, realizing that the refreshing wind they’d felt on the ride had only been made by the Vespa. Now she felt trapped under the smothering blanket of heat and humidity.

  “What’s wrong?” Nico asked her from the scooter.

  “The sett paving. I kept jumping on the seat, moving backwards.”

  “Yeah, these streets are beautiful ’cause they keep that ancient look, but for vehicles it’s a disaster.”

  While listening to him, she noticed something that warmed her heart.

  “Anna?”

  “…”

  “Anna?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, nothing. You zoned out, there.”

  “Look. There,” she said, entranced.

  “Where?”

  “All those clothes hunged!” She exclaimed, eyes taking in the clothes on the balconies above, marveling like a child seeing Santa Claus.

  “And …?”

  “Sorry. I know that you canno— can’t understand how I feel, but for me it’s incredible!”

  “The hanging clothes?” He frowned.

  “Yes. You know, Americans use the dryers. We don’t hun— hang our clothes. But I do. I hang some of my clothes, but inside the apartment because I can’t have a line outside the window.”

  Nico looked perplexed. And this made her want even more to share her feelings with him. With an Italian.

  “When my friends came over as I started to live by myself, they teased me because I had the clothes hanging in the room. They did not insult me, but made me feel strange since none of them did that in their homes. Yet, I continued to do it, above all when I washed only few things, because it’s a waste of electricity to use the dryer in that case. But if someone knocked on the door, I took immediately them down. I don’t want to hear any more jokes about my habit.”

  “I’m sorry, Anna. I’m not following you.”

  “Wait. You have to know that my grandma Julia was used to hanging the clothes in our living room. She had a line from one wall to the other that she hooked up only after the laundry. Know why she did that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what they did in her house when she was a girl. And her parents did it because they were Italian and they had the good sense to put their money only towards necessary things.”

  “Seriously?” he sounded surprised and now interested. “Your family was from Italy?”

  “Yes! My grandparents did no— didn’t know each other when they were living in Italy. Then they both left by themself to the United States. They met at New York and in the end they got married. They had some Italian traditions, for example hanging the clothes, and Grandma grew up in this environment as if it were normal. So also I thought so.”

  “And in America that’s not the normal thing to do, right?”

  “Exactly! Now you see why it’s so great for me to stay in a place where is normal to hang the clothes?”

  “It’s proof that you’re not weird, hahaha!”

  “Too, that. But the incredible thing is how these Italian habits survived in our family through the generations beyond our intention. Because we were not trying to keep it alive. It’s simply that I felt to do it … Sorry, I am realizing this right now and is so difficult to explain in Italian.”

  “No, I understood. It’s like when you’re completely lost in thought and end up where you meant to go without remembering how you got there.”

  “Oh, thank you!” She sighed in relief, happy for having successfully communicated what she’d had in mind. “So my question for you is … since to hang the clothes is normal in Italy, why I don’t see any in Porto Loreno?”

  “I believe ’cause it’s a tourist place. The people say it’s ugly for the tourists to see all those ‘colored rags’ outside the balconies. Seeing them on the buildings is like a punch in the eye.”

  “But why?” she asked, remembering the meaning of this idiom but disagreeing with the idea. “It’s such a beautiful scene with all these colored rags!”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. In the building where I live, we put them on the terrace.”

  “A terrace?”

  “Yes. Above the buildings there are open spaces where people put TV antennas and hang their clothes.”

  “So also you do it at Porto Loreno. But not on the balconies, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s a tourist town, compared to this one where people just live and work. They don’t worry about the appearances. In fact, at night it’s like a mortuary. There’s no—”

  “Mortuary?”

  “Yes, like a cemetery. The few people who you see around here after seven are just going home. When people here want to take a walk or go out to eat, they come to Porto Loreno.”

  She would never forget the village festival.

  Leaving the Vespa in an enormous field being used as a parking area for the visitors, she and Nico headed towards the booths that flanked both sides of the main thoroughfare of the hill town.

  They inched forward, their voices getting absorbed in the ever-increasing din of the crowd’s chatter. The crush of people thickened with every step, making her feel like a sardine that swam from the open sea straight into the famous can. She had felt similarly in Porto Loreno’s historic downtown, but here they really didn’t have the ability to choose their direction or modulate their pace. The b
arriers for vehicles were superfluous because not even a cyclist would be able to squeeze onto that road. She almost lost Nico; she turned towards him and found only a short, heavyset woman with disheveled gray hair and a trace of a moustache. Panic began to well inside her. She tried to stop and look back, but the tide washed her forward. Then she spotted him only a few yards to her right, near a counter selling homemade bread. Purse held tight under her arm she made her way over to him with a flurry of “excuse me’s” and smiles at the people who let her by.

  And the stands! All in a row, one after another like two stationary trains winding along the street; the people walked between them, admiring the hanging cured meats and cheeses, cases of fruits and vegetables, smells of fried and roasted foods wafting through the air and tempting the appetite, cotton candy and popcorn machines, and unrivalled deli counter displays.

  Given the abundance of foods, she and Nico agreed on a booth for lunch that offered a full prix fixe menu, served with plastic plates, silverware, and glasses. They both opted for the pasta al forno in the region’s typical style, with locally-raised pork chops, a large piece of the dry cheese from one of the cheesemakers that supplied shops around the province, a bottle of mineral water, and a glass of red wine from a small, nearby winery. She would have liked to tell him to order them each different meals, so they could share their food and taste more variety; but she didn’t in case he had a reason for it. They had to walk around for a few minutes, trays in hand, to find a place to sit together at the long tables set out for the customers.

  Sharing the table and bench with other people was uncomfortable, but, if that was the price of immersing themselves in an atmosphere of solidarity—everyone suffering the same discomforts together—and celebration, it was worth it.

  They were eating, so what better time to add to her vocabulary of Italian foods? Interpreting between Nico and Roger about fish had made her realize that it was difficult when the subject got too technical; she mixed in the useful with the pleasant while they talked.

  The savory flavors were new for her. The piece of oregano bread that came with the tourist menu was only mediocre, but still somewhat exotic. Her favorite was the bread that Nico had picked up at the other stand, with its crunchy, yet not hard, crust, a soft, white inside that didn’t flake apart when you split it in two, and air pockets throughout like Swiss cheese that made it look very filling when it wasn’t at all.

  The soft, white inside, mollica. Do we even have a word for that in English?

  For dessert, they each had what looked like a Twinkie; she only ate half, partly because by now she was stuffed, and partly because it wasn’t so different from blueberry muffins back home.

  They spent another forty minutes walking among the booths, admiring the wares and buying the ones they could easily carry back home to eat—her with the Corwins and him with his dad. Nico aimed for the cured deli meats and she went for the fruits and vegetables; as for that incredible bread, they each bought a loaf.

  Once they had passed through the downtown area, the crowd thinned and they were finally able to walk more easily together. They’d jammed their purchases into Nico’s backpack so tightly that they couldn’t have squeezed in a toothpick, so she carried a plastic bag with strawberries, blackberries, tomatoes, and soft caciottina cheeses to make sure they didn’t get smashed.

  “Now what? How do we return to your Vespa?” she asked as they left a cafe where they’d had a quick coffee.

  The idea of having to make their way back through the sea of people separating them from the parking area with the burdensome loads of their purchases filled her with dread.

  “We’ll take the long way back. From here, we can take a path that cuts through a woods of oaks and hits a small piazza. After that it’s only about five more minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “The path is a ways away, though. If you’re tired, we can turn back.”

  “Oh God, no. I loved the festival, but at this point I have need of space.”

  “Now you get why in the beginning I was thinking of just me and you coming?”

  “Yes, I understand. I’m not sure about Roger, but definitively Sue doesn’t like the crowded places.” She remembered Susan’s recommendation about not visiting that island on the weekend.

  She didn’t miss the face Nico made, and then when he kept silent she felt curious.

  “What is it?” she asked, as they headed up a sloped street without any booths, just other people walking. “Why you made that face?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Come on, spit at it,” she insisted, taking the chance to show off one of the idioms from her list.

  “Hahaha! It’s ‘spit it out.’ ”

  “Okay, then. Spit it out!”

  “It’s not a big deal. Just strange that you call your boyfriend’s parents by their first names.”

  He looked calm. Not annoyed at all by the subject. It cheered her up, because she really liked having him as a friend. From riding on the Vespa to strolling among the crowd to sharing lunch, she felt at ease with him; she was enjoying their day out and wanted it to go on without any tension from the overanalyzing at the beach.

  “Why, how do you call your girlfriend’s parents?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend right now.”

  “Well, you probably had one in the past.”

  “I called her mom ‘Signora.’ And her dad, ‘Signor Piero.’ ”

  “I will never call him Sir Roger.” She started to laugh. “It would sound like a nobleman from England. Maybe ‘Mr. Roger’ … Nah. Still too formal.”

  When Nico asked, “Quindi, ci vai molto d’accordo?” she had to think for a minute.

  “There’s that ci again. You mean ‘with them?’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, I get along well with them. Although, I only have known them three times before this trip. I had so much anxiety when we left, especially because their son wasn’t with us. But I discovered that they are very friendly.”

  “And how many days have … Hang on a minute.” He stopped to adjust the backpack.

  “It’s too heavy?”

  “No, a strap just got twisted and was digging into my shoulder.”

  “You want to take out some stuff and put it in my bag? Like the cucumber or the eggplants? Maybe the apricots?”

  “But you didn’t buy a cucumber!”

  “Sure I did.”

  “A cucumber wouldn’t even fit through the opening of this backpack.”

  “What you’re talking about?”

  “Well, you saw them at those stands. They’re this big,” and he held out his hands like he was about to catch a basketball.

  “Come on, it’s not that long. Besides, it’s thin.”

  “Thin? How?”

  “Thin,” she said, trying to use gestures to explain.

  “Wait a minute. What do you mean by cucumber?”

  She could see in his question that he was thinking they’d fallen into another linguistic trap. So she pulled out her phone and started tapping the screen, the handles of the plastic bag sliding to hang from the crook of her elbow.

  “This,” she said simply and showed him the picture of a cucumber.

  “Oh! That’s a cetriolo! Hahaha!”

  When she Googled cocomero and saw the image of a watermelon …

  “Oh man!” she exclaimed in dismay. “Why in the world do you guys call it cocomero when you have melone d’acqua?” she asked him, glowering to show her opinion of how crazy Italians were.

  “I dunno. But I know a joke about a watermelon. Wanna hear it?” he asked when they started walking again.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. An American comes to Italy and catches a taxi. They pass by a fruit stand and the American goes, ‘What are those?’ The taxi driver says ‘grapefruits.’ The American laughs in his face and says, ‘In America the grapefruits are this big.’ ” With his hands he
mimed the size of a bowling ball. “You follow me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. After awhile, another fruit stand. ‘What are those?’ the American asks. The taxi driver’s embarrassed now, but says, ‘Artichokes.’ The American laughs at him like before and goes, ‘Our artichokes are like this!’ and humiliates the guy again.” Nico demonstrated the size of a bowling ball once more. “Well, now the taxi driver is pissed off and offended. So they go past a third fruit stand filled with big, round, watermelons and the American, still just as arrogant, asks, ‘What are those?’ and the taxi driver says, ‘Peas!’ ”

  “Hahaha! Peas. That’s funny!”

  “It’s great to see you laugh.”

  She had lowered her guard and relaxed, so the comment reddened her cheeks. Not the comment itself, as much as the compelling way he said it and the intensity when he looked at her. She thought of a way to get off the hook.

  “As you saw during our conversation at lunch, and with cucumber as well, I have always problems with saying Italian foods. For example, the names of fruits and their trees. In English, we say ‘peach’ and ‘peach tree.’ It’s the same with every fruit. Lemon and lemon tree. Apple and apple tree. Easy! Why must you guys make it so complicate?”

  “It’s not complicated at all. The fruit ends in -a and the tree ends in -o. Arancia and arancio. Banana and banano.”

  “Pera and pero?” she guessed, still skeptical.

  “Exactly.”

  “Pesca and pesco?”

  “See how simple it is?”

  “Papaya and papayo?”

  “Hahaha! No, wait. I’ve never heard papayo. It sounds as bad as Prosperina … I think it’s still papaya.”

  “Then how do you know if I’m talking about the fruit or the tree?”

  “We say papaya tree. Or papayas tree … I dunno. Now you’ve confused me.”

  “Then it’s like in English!”

  “Now that I think about it, yeah. There are some exceptions, like for lemon. Or mango.”

  “See? It’s too complicate!”

  “You’re right, maybe we have too many exceptions,” Nico conceded. “You know, now that you told me about your family, I understand where your passion for our language comes from.”