“Miserabilismo,” Antonio says. “It’s stupid. They strike and strike, but they don’t even ask for anything. Just enough to survive. Bread. Lousy little scraps, as if they work all their lives and that’s all they deserve. Me”—he glances down at her and smiles—“I told my brother, I told Piero, he deserves more than bread. He deserves roses, too.”
Bread and roses. Angela sees a round loaf beside blooms, swollen and warm in the sun.
“Piero wants me to go,” Antonio is saying. “He can’t tell Papa, but he wishes he’d gone. Or at least tried. I keep telling him it’s not too late, but he won’t listen. What about you?” Antonio asks, and although he is not looking at her now but back at the letter he is washing, Angela nods.
“Here,” she says, telling him what she cannot tell Barbara. “I want to get a place here.”
“Why?” He glances down at her over his shoulder. “There’s the whole world.”
Angela starts to say, Because I can’t leave my father. Because I’m worried about the books and the cloud. Because without me, he would vanish into nothingness. But Antonio’s concentrating on the sign again. As he finishes the last block of shiny black beyond the A and begins to back down the ladder, she says instead, “I’ve been watching you. I mean,” she adds quickly, “playing football. I’ve seen you.”
Antonio jumps down the last rung. He stands facing her, so close she can see where he’s nicked himself shaving above his upper lip. It’s everything she can do not to reach out and touch the tiny cut.
“I know,” he says. “I’ve seen you.”
The air is hot and close and his eyes on her face are like fingers on her skin. Angela realizes she is holding her breath. Antonio smiles. He puts the bucket down. His hand reaches out. The pad of his thumb presses her chin.
“We should change the water,” he says. “Or it will just make the window dirty.”
Later, when Angela looks back on that day, it feels like it’s trapped in glass. Preserved. Perfect and sparkling, like something hidden in the back of a drawer.
Antonio helped her wash the big front window. They changed the water, and again she held the ladder while he finished the top. Then they stood, side by side, swiping the bottom half of the glass with the dripping sponges, their arms waving back and forth like seaweed.
While they did this, Antonio talked about his father. And about his brother, Piero. He talked about their jobs in the factory, and about the lives they had that he did not want. He was going to be a professor, he said as they wiped the last slow slides of suds.
Then, while they rinsed the sponges, he told her about the farm north of Ravenna where he had been born and that his grandparents and their parents and their parents before them had owned. He talked about living there before his nonno died and it had been lost and his father moved them to Ferrara. He told her about the flatness of the fields and the herons that stood in the irrigation ditches, still and white as flags on a windless day. And about his grandfather’s dog that slept by the well, its yellow coat fluffed with heat, its paws scrabbling a dream his nonno said was of rabbits because all dogs dream of rabbits, although this dog had rarely seen one and was used only for hunting ducks. He told her about the wind at night. And about how he and Piero had lain in their room at the top of the house listening as it snickered through the reed grass.
The words unspooled like threads kept in the dark because they are too fragile to bear the light of day. Angela rode the rhythm of his voice and said nothing, because what flowed out of him was not something you would interrupt or reply to any more than you would interrupt or reply to music.
“Some people think it’s ugly.” Antonio had shrugged as he emptied the dirty water into the gutter. “They say it’s empty. That there’s nothing out there anymore. But I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.” He’d taken Angela’s sponge from her, dropped it into the empty bucket. “It’s not far from Pomposa,” he’d added. “You could see the tower from my nonno’s farm. Hear the bells. There were still monks there, then. They’d give us things. Honey, sometimes. Teas they made. Herb stuff. Have you ever been?” he’d asked. “To Pomposa?”
Angela had shaken her head. She had almost been there once, to the great abbey that sat on the edge of the marshes, a place of pilgrimage hung between land and sea. The school trip had been scheduled, then canceled because of snow.
“So,” Antonio had said a minute later as he’d collapsed the ladder. “I’ll take you.”
He’d helped her put the things away, carrying the ladder around the corner one-handed and propping it against the wall of the storeroom. Then he’d stepped back into Via Mayr, and picked up his gym bag, which was spattered with drips, and slung it over his shoulder.
“To Pomposa,” he’d said. “I’ll take you someday. It’s beautiful.”
After he’d walked away, Angela stood outside the shop. She watched the wet prints of his shoes on the pavement as they dried in the sun and the last plume of the soap as it caught in the drain, the bubbles popping one by one. Then, finally, she went inside and sat at her place behind the cash register, and unlocked the big drawer, and took out the accounts and order books she was supposed to be working on. But the numbers made no sense. They kept shifting, rearranging themselves into pictures of Antonio’s face. And of the span of his back under the white shirt. Of his arms, brown below the rolled-up sleeves. His foot on the rung of the ladder.
The street was almost empty because it was a Sunday in midsummer, but every time a car went by the roll of the tires sounded like his voice. I’ll take you to Pomposa. And she wished, more than anything, wished with a desire so deep it made her stomach hurt, that she had run after him. That she had grabbed his arm, and made him tell her, When?
* * *
It’s barely two weeks later, on Ferragósto, when she sees him again.
The holiday falls on a Thursday. By Wednesday afternoon there’s barely a car on Via Mayr. Everyone who is leaving town has left, and everyone else has already stocked up for the weekend. The shop has done better than expected. For once they were so busy that Angela had to serve behind the counter, lifting out the soft round lumps of roasts, feeling their cool dead weight in her hands. She has selected slivers of veal, and plump pimpled legs of chickens. Cutting waxed paper off the big rolls, she’s laid them out, these dead parts, and sprigged them with parsley before wrapping them up and sealing the ends, tying the packages with snow-white string and a bow of ribbon so they look like presents. At two o’clock, when her father decides to close the shop for the weekend, he takes an envelope out of his pocket and hands it to her.
“Here, Kitten,” he says. “For all your hard work.” He reaches out and tousles her hair, his big hand resting, momentarily heavy, on the top of her head. “Buy yourself something pretty. For Saturday night.”
On Saturday night there will be fireworks at the castle and a dance in the piazza. A band from Bologna is playing, and flyers plastered over the city promise there will be a street fair. No one knows exactly what this means, since Ferrara has never had one, at least in living memory, but there’s a general air of excitement.
Even so, as her father shoves the envelope toward her, Angela begins to protest. With Barbara gone, she has no one to go with. Some of the other girls from school will be there, of course. But that isn’t the same. She starts to hand the envelope back, but her father presses it into her hand.
“Buy yourself a dress,” he says. “Go dancing. Have some fun.” He closes her fingers over the cheap paper. “There’s not much point.” He nods at the interior of the store, at the scrubbed marble and newly mopped and sawdust-sprinkled floor. “There’s not much point in all this, if I can’t buy my daughter a dress.”
The dress is blue and green, and blotched with huge flowers. Angela spends half the money on it and puts the other half in her savings account, and even then she almost doesn’t go to the dance.
Standing in front of her mirror on Saturday night, her dark hair
corkscrewing in the heat, the material already sticking to the backs of her legs, she feels a burst of shame. The dress is a halter top. In the store it looked pretty. Alluring, even. Now her small breasts feel like they barely fill the cups. Even with a cardigan on, which makes her look like an old lady, she feels scrawny and exposed at the same time, as if she’s about to go out in her underwear.
She’d take the thing off, put it back in the box, and slide like a snail back into the shell of her jeans and old flowered blouse, spend the night curled up with her book, except for the fact that her father is in the sitting room pretending not to, but waiting for her all the same. Waiting to see her step out of her bedroom door—not his slightly bedraggled, pale-skinned “Kitten”—but a princess. A Cinderella transformed by a wad of lire. By an envelope of notes worn soft as chamois, each earned with the chop and slice of a butcher’s knife.
She picks up the pink lipstick she’s bought and rims the edge of her lips. Then she fills in the space with gloss, rolling it back and forth across the faintly chapped skin the way Barbara has showed her. They read an article about it, about how to achieve what the writer called “That Just Bitten Look.” Bitten by what? Angela had asked, and Barbara had rolled her eyes. She puts the cap back on the gloss, which smells strongly of peaches, like something you pour on ice cream. Through the open window she hears footsteps on the street, and the sound of laughter.
The music started at eight, a high-amped blast of bad imitation Doors. According to the school friends Angela met up with, the band was known for its repertoire of American hits. Every Saturday night at a cavernous club in downtown Bologna they pumped out Jefferson Starship and mispronounced covers of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Now the statue of Savonarola in Corso Libertà raised its hands in horror as Jim Morrison set the night on fire. Or possibly in approval. In the swirl of lights, it was hard to tell. A troupe of mimes performed in front of the Duomo. Crowds milled around them, eating food from the stalls on the Piazza Trieste while pigeons fluffed their wings and stamped up and down along the ledges.
After an hour of watching the swing of the colored lights and giggling at the couples brave enough to dance, Angela grew tired of the group she’d met up with. Looking at them, with their huge hoop earrings and colored plastic bangles, she had the strange thought that they had always been there. That underneath their long dresses and bright eye shadow, they were not young at all, but ancient and decaying—a gathering of medieval court ladies in outlandish costumes who had been dead for years. She turned away, haunted by the possibility that the past might smear into the present until the two were indistinguishable. That the silent mimes and howling band were no different from the jesters and freaks, the monkeys and misshapen dwarves that had always been kept for amusement and still haunted the dark corners of the Castello.
A crafts market has been set up in the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale. All the women keeping the stalls have long hair and headbands and gypsy dresses. The men wear leather jerkins. Peace medallions wink from tangles of chest hair. Someone has hung a banner that says NO TO NATO on the Municìpio stairs. Angela glances at her watch. She is not particularly interested in crafts, but it’s barely half past nine. Her father is having supper with the Ravallis. If she comes in now he’ll hear, and worry that her dress wasn’t expensive enough, or that she’s not popular and no one wanted to dance with her. One more hour, she thinks, and the men will go to the taverna. Get to their feet, hiking up their trousers, and wander out in jovial packs, puffing cigars while their wives and sisters—and in some cases still, mothers—watch them leave with a mixture of hurt and relief before congregating in the Ravallis’ kitchen to boast and complain about them. Then Angela will be able to slip through the door. Swim under the current of gossip and clatter of dishes, and make her way upstairs and into to the apartment without anyone noticing. Now she has time to waste.
The crafts stalls are made up mainly of wooden toys, horses and trains on wheels, and of ceramic bowls the color of mud, and incense burners shaped like Indian goddesses. Some feature purses and belts made of what look like leftover strips of leather. She wanders, picking things up and putting them down, measuring her steps like a man on a mechanical clock.
The air is heavy with the smell of grilling sausages and patchouli oil. Angela sneezes and stops for a string of people who dance by waving their arms and shouting “Where have all the flowers gone?,” the English rolling awkwardly off their tongues. Out by the Castello the band begins to play “Stairway to Heaven.”
“Are you hiding?”
She is standing beside a jewelry stall, fingering a blue-beaded bracelet, when she hears his voice. This time, she laughs.
“Good,” Antonio says. “So am I.”
He is wearing the same white shirt, the same jeans. His sleeves are even rolled up again. He nods at the bracelet.
“That’s pretty,” he says, and before Angela realizes what he’s doing, he digs into his pocket, pulls out some notes, and hands them to the thin girl who sits behind her display of chokers and earrings threading beads onto fishing line. A baby lies at her feet in what looks like an old dresser drawer. It squirms, lets out a red-faced cry, and lapses into silence as Antonio takes the bracelet out of Angela’s hand and slips it onto her wrist.
“Happy birthday,” he says.
“It’s not my birthday.”
Angela closes her free hand over the beads as if she’s afraid that, once he knows this, he’ll take them back.
“Well, you have a birthday don’t you?”
He’s smiling at her as she nods and wonders why, exactly, she’s finding it so difficult to speak.
“In May,” she manages, finally.
“May what?” He reaches out and touches her hair as if he’s touching a leaf or a petal.
“May eleventh.”
“So how old are you, now?”
“Sixteen.”
In the last hour the light has faded and the crowd has thickened. Antonio takes her arm. They dodge a juggler and another line of dancers whose shadows twist and writhe. One of them staggers, then falls in slow motion and lies laughing on the floodlit cobbles.
“I’m going to the university,” he says. “To Padua. Tomorrow, on the nine o’clock bus. So you have to dance with me.” Angela is aware of his fingers kneading her arm through the cheap nylon of the cardigan. She shakes her head.
“I’m a terrible dancer.”
“So what?” Antonio grins. “I helped you wash your window. You have to. That’s the price.”
Her tongue is cottony, reluctant to make words, so instead she nods. He guides her across the piazza. As they reach the mouth of Via Garibaldi, a figure jumps in front of them. As tall as Antonio, his hair is wild. Crimson face paint streaks his cheeks.
“Surrender!” he shouts. “Surrender the princess!”
Angela starts backward, but Antonio laughs. He lets go of her arm and punches the boy in the shoulder.
“Shut up, you drunk!”
For a moment they wrestle, their arms twining around each other, heads butting. Then they stop. Antonio grabs the boy’s ear, and still laughing orders, “Apologize to the lady.”
To her surprise, the boy does. He makes a low, swishing bow.
“At your service,” he says, still grinning.
“Angela,” Antonio supplies.
“At your service. Angela.”
The boy takes her hand and kisses it.
“Don’t be an ass.”
Antonio cuffs him around the head, then they both start to laugh and suddenly, seeing them side by side, with the same wild hair, same black eyes and sharp noses, Angela realizes who this is.
“Piero.” Antonio puts his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “You’ll have to forgive him,” he says. “This is my stupid older brother, Piero.”
“And this,” Piero says, “is my clever little twerp, Antoni-on-io.”
They stand there, in front of her, so alike they might be reflections of each othe
r. Piero’s face paint has smudged the arm of Antonio’s white shirt. The lines on his cheeks are smeared from wrestling. They look at each other and laugh. Then Piero reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a silver hip flask. He hands it to Antonio and punches him on the arm.
“Have fun, little brother,” he says, as he bows again to Angela, and spins away, whirling into a stream of people who are running around the corner toward the castle.
“Sorry.” Antonio looks faintly sheepish, but the grin doesn’t leave his face. “So that’s my brother.” He takes her arm again, laughing and shaking his head, and Angela realizes she is laughing, too, and that she had expected Piero to be older. Older and stern and worn down by working in the factory instead of a lithe, clownish boy with face paint and espadrilles.
“I love him,” Antonio says suddenly. “More than anyone in the world. I wish I could take him with me. I wish he wasn’t staying here.”
They are standing below the arch that leads to Via Garibaldi. A group runs past them. Squeals of laughter snag the music. When Antonio kisses her, Angela is surprised at how warm his skin is, how his lips move over hers as if they belong there. His tongue runs along her teeth, then slips into her open mouth. He has one hand on the small of her back. The other cradles her head. She reaches for his shoulders and thinks he tastes of something. Grappa. Cherries. When he stops and looks at her, his fingers are laced through her hair.
“Butcher’s Daughter,” he says. Then he traces his thumb down her forehead, and across the tip of her nose. “Come with me, to the Montagnola.”
Behind them, the people in the street bark laughter, stumble, and clutch each other, their silhouettes lit by shop windows. The Montagnola is on the ramparts, at the far corner of the walls, beyond the Angels’ Gate. Grass-sloped and furred with undergrowth, it looks down over the Certosa and the darkness of the cemetery. Angela has heard the joke that is probably not really a joke, has heard Signora Ravalli say more than once that half the babies born in Ferrara are conceived there. Antonio runs his thumb down to her chin. He leans forward, his lips dabbing the gloss that smells of peaches. She tastes him again, then kisses the soft hollow of his neck, amazed by the softness and the slight pulse she can feel under her lips.
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