Books by Rosanna Chiofalo
BELLA FORTUNA
CARISSIMA
STELLA MIA
ROSALIA’S BITTERSWEET PASTRY SHOP
THE SUNFLOWER GIRL
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
The
SUNFLOWER
GIRL
ROSANNA CHIOFALO
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dedication
PROLOGUE - The Sunflower Girl
CHAPTER 1 - Anabella
CHAPTER 2 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 3 - Dante
CHAPTER 4 - Anabella
CHAPTER 5 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 6 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 7 - Dante
CHAPTER 8 - Anabella
CHAPTER 9 - Dante
CHAPTER 10 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 11 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 12 - Anabella
CHAPTER 13 - Dante
CHAPTER 14 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 15 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 16 - Dante
CHAPTER 17 - Anabella
CHAPTER 18 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 19 - Anabella
CHAPTER 20 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 21 - Dante
CHAPTER 22 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 23 - Anabella
CHAPTER 24 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 25 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 26 - Anabella
CHAPTER 27 - Maria Rossi
CHAPTER 28 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 29 - Maria Ferraro
CHAPTER 30 - Signora Ferraro
CHAPTER 31 - Anabella
CHAPTER 32 - Dante
CHAPTER 33 - Anabella
CHAPTER 34 - Signora Ferraro
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Rosanna Chiofalo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-940-8
eISBN-10: 1-61773-940-5
ISBN: 978-1-6177-3939-2
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While I drew from historical facts for this novel, I also took creative license for the purpose of developing the story. For instance, I made up FAF—Florentines Against Fascism—the Resistance organization that Franco and Maria belonged to, but it was loosely based on the actual Italian Resistance movement called CLN—National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale). The other Resistance organization I mention, GAP—Gruppi di Azione Patriottica—was an actual Resistance organization.
There were several books that were instrumental in my research for The Sunflower Girl: Italy’s Sorrow by James Holland (Harper-Collins, 2008); The Other Italy by Maria de Blasio Wilhelm (Norton, 1988); and Partisan Diary by Ada Gobetti, translated and edited by Jomarie Alano (Oxford University Press, 2014). In addition, I got the idea of the birdcage that Maria places in the window of her apartment as a sign for Franco to let him know that there were no guards at their home making inquiries or standing guard outside from Partisan Diary, the published diary of the late Italian Resistance fighter Ada Gobetti. Ada’s neighbor employed the use of placing a birdcage in his window to alert Ada if it was truly safe for her to return home.
Per mia madre, la mia migliore amica e il mio eroe.
For my mother, my best friend and my hero.
PROLOGUE
The Sunflower Girl
Siena, Italy, 1970
Dante was dreaming about her again.
She was running through the same field of sunflowers he had seen her in the last time she visited him in his dreams. Her long, chestnut brown hair bounced along her back, mimicking the motion of the sunflowers that swayed to and fro as she brushed past them. As she ran, she dropped roses in the most vivid hues behind her. Every few seconds, she looked over her shoulder to make sure Dante was following her. She would laugh and then turn away, running even faster. This time, Dante was sure he was finally going to catch up to her. But just when he was within reach, he would wake up startled.
The dream was always the same. Sometimes, a few of the details changed, like the dress she was wearing. She never seemed to wear the same color dress. This time, it had been a vivid scarlet hue. It was almost too bright. The sunflower field and the roses were always present. He wondered why the flowers didn’t change, only her dress, and, sometimes, she didn’t run in her dreams, but walked ahead, always heading away from him. But though she walked, Dante could still never catch up to her.
As long as Dante could remember, he hadn’t really cared for flowers and hadn’t understood why people went crazy for them, especially when they were given as gifts since they didn’t last long. But now he was seeing them in a whole new light and couldn’t believe that as an artist he had never paid that much attention to them before. When he rode his bike to the small towns outside of Siena, he often passed sunflower fields, which were abundant throughout the Tuscan countryside. He could see the beauty in most flowers like roses, gardenias, or lilies, but he’d always thought sunflowers were ugly with their gangly height, pointy petals, and large dials. And yellow was his least favorite color. Their only feature he’d ever liked was the edible seeds. Every August, when he was a child, he and his friends would pull the ripe sunflower seeds and eat them. But now whenever he was riding his bicycle by the fields, he’d never had the urge to stop and take a few of the sunflower seeds.
Dante had begun dreaming about the mysterious woman six months ago. Shortly afterward, he decided that if he couldn’t catch her in his dreams, then he would have to capture her in his paintings. Dante sat up in bed and let his eyes wander from painting to painting, each depicting the beautiful, almost ethereal woman. He was beginning to feel obsessed with her, but he wasn’t worried. Obsession was good for an artist, and ever since he began painting La Ragazza del Girasole—The Sunflower Girl—his work was selling faster than he could produce it.
Although he felt his paintings of the sunflower girl were among his best, he’d only brought a few to Siena’s Piazza del Campo, where he displayed and sold his paintings. He had attempted to take the entire collection with him on several occasions. After all, he needed to make money. But he’d always felt a strong pull urging him to leave the paintings behind, even though he had taken photographs of them so they wouldn’t be completely erased from his memory once they were sold. She had become a constant companion to him in his shabby little loft apartment that sat above a bread shop, and he wasn’t ready to completely let her go—at least not yet.
He was distracted from his thoughts by the aroma of bread baking. At least the aromas from the shop all day disguised some of the paint fumes he was always breathing. And the owner, Signora Fiorucci, who was also his landlady, g
ave him a large loaf of ciabatta every morning, convinced he would starve if she didn’t do so. The old lady wasn’t too far off in her suspicions. There were days when he would forget to eat, and, even when his stomach was growling furiously, he would ignore it when he was in the middle of his painting. His friends, most of whom were also aspiring artists, teased him all the time.
“Dante doesn’t need a girlfriend. He has his sunflower girl,” as his best friend Luca often loved to say.
“Why don’t you give her a real name, Dante? Isn’t it about time after all these months? Surely, you don’t whisper ‘ragazza del girasole ’ as you make love to her.” Paolo, a former art school classmate, snickered.
“All joking aside, why haven’t you given her a name yet? She looks like a Maria Magdalena to me,” Luca said.
“The former prostitute in the Bible?” Paolo asked, then broke into laughter.
“Basta! Enough!” Dante yelled. “You are both artists. Haven’t you ever been touched by your own personal muse?”
Almost as soon as he was done uttering the words, he knew he’d set himself up for the next joke.
“Of course, we’ve been touched, but our muses are real—they are present here in the flesh,” Paolo said, elbowing Luca, as they laughed once more.
“Forgive us, Dante. We are just having fun with you. Actually, we’re jealous because ever since you started painting your special girl, your work has been selling like crazy, while Paolo and I are still lucky if we sell one of our paintings a week. If only we could have dreams that inspire us as much as yours do you.”
Dante ran his hand through his long bangs, which always hung over his eyes. His hair was getting too long, but instead of wasting time—or the money—to get a haircut, he tied it back in a ponytail. Neglect had become commonplace in his life, whether it was his diet, his grooming, or replacing his wardrobe, which was beginning to resemble the tattered clothes the beggars in the piazza wore. His work was the only aspect of his life that he devoted himself completely to, and though he used to function on only a few hours of sleep, he’d begun sleeping a full night, in hopes that his sunflower girl would visit him. For when he woke up after a night of dreaming about her, he would feel invigorated and inspired to begin a new painting.
“So getting back to my earlier question, Dante, why don’t you give her a real name?” Luca asked.
Dante shrugged his shoulders. “Not every artist has given his female subjects Christian names. Why do I need to?”
“Vero. That is true, my friend. And calling her ‘the sunflower girl’ further adds to her mystique, no?” Paolo offered.
“I suppose, but that isn’t why I haven’t named her. It’s just . . .” Dante’s voice trailed off. They would think he was crazy if he told them his reasons.
“What?” Luca prodded.
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right. That’s all.”
After that day, Dante had often thought to himself that perhaps it was time to name the woman in his paintings something else. But the reason he hadn’t, the reason he was afraid to tell his friends, was that a part of him couldn’t help feeling she was real and that she existed somewhere other than his dream world. It was crazy. He knew it. He just couldn’t bring himself to name her.
Sighing deeply, Dante pulled back the bed covers and got out of bed, stretching his aching back. Yesterday, he’d been hunched over all day as he painted his latest work. This one was much different from the others. He was going to paint a series in which each work would be one feature of the sunflower girl’s face and body. He was starting with her eyes—the eyes that had captivated Dante as they teased and urged him to chase her through the field. The next painting would be her nose and lips. Then he would proceed to her body. He packed up three smaller paintings; each of these represented his muse in a different stage in life—child, adolescent, and young woman. He would try to sell these today.
Opening the door to his loft, he found Signora Fiorucci’s daily loaf of ciabatta, wrapped in a clean dish towel, waiting for him.
He kissed the loaf. “God bless you, Signora Fiorucci,” Dante whispered, smiling as he placed the bread in his satchel.
As he drove his shabby Fiat to the piazza, he passed a neighboring house with a small garden of sunflowers adjacent to the home. He shook his head. The flowers didn’t look right at all and looked as if they had been plopped absentmindedly into this small plot. He noticed the seeds of the flowers looked ripe and realized they would be since it was now mid-August. For some reason, he decided to stop today and snip one of the sunflowers, making sure no one from the property was standing behind the windows witnessing his transgression. Getting back in his car, he rode down the road and pulled over to the curb. He stared at the sunflower as fragments of his recurrent dreams flashed through his mind. Perhaps on the way back to his apartment, he would snip more flowers and keep them in a vase with water in his room.
Once he arrived in the Piazza del Campo, he set up his easels and canvases. Sitting on the ground, he was waiting for the usual throng of people to make their way across the bridge when a woman came into his line of vision.
“Scusi, signore. Quanto costa?” A young man was asking Dante how much his painting of the sunflower girl depicted as an adolescent cost. But Dante ignored him.
His eyes followed the woman. Her hair was the same chestnut hue as that of the woman from his dreams. And her body. He swore the same perfect hourglass figure he’d admired in his dreams was now standing a mere few feet away from him. And then, the woman looked up, her gaze meeting Dante’s. He froze. It was her. She offered a shy smile, then turned her attention back to the woman by her side—an older woman, perhaps her mother, no, maybe her grandmother. The older woman had her arm linked through the younger woman’s arm as they walked slowly toward a flower vendor. He then noticed the younger woman carried a large straw basket in her free hand. When she and her companion reached the vendor, she took out a large bundle of roses—all in different colors. Dante almost gasped out loud. The details were just like those from his dreams. He began walking slowly toward her. He had to see her up close and be certain that she really was the same woman from his dreams.
The flower vendor paid the woman for her roses. Dante was now just a couple of feet away from her when suddenly he felt himself lifted and thrown forward. Hard objects hit him in the head and the body. Sitting up, he saw he was covered in apples. An old man was hurrying to pick up the apples that had fallen from his cart as he yelled to Dante, “Scusi, signore!”
Dante got to his feet and frantically looked to where his sunflower girl had stood with her grandmother, but she was gone. He strained his eyes to see if she was up ahead or perhaps had gone in the opposite direction, but the crowds were even denser that day than usual, making it more difficult for him to find her. He hurried over to the flower vendor.
“Where did those two women who were just here go? The younger one sold you all those roses.” Dante pointed to the flowers that the vendor was now separating and tying with ribbons.
“How should I know?” He shrugged his shoulders before adding, “I guess they went back home.” The man shook his head in annoyance and returned to organizing his bouquets.
“Do they always come here?”
“Si, their roses are the best I’ve ever laid eyes on. My customers snatch them up right away. Would you like to buy a few for a special woman?”
“So she grows roses?”
“She and her mother have a rose farm in the countryside.”
“Which town?”
“I don’t know. I’m a businessman. I don’t have time for pleasantries.”
“That woman was her mother?” Dante asked incredulously.
“Si, si. I know she looks quite a bit old to be her mother. I thought the same thing when I first met them. She must have had her when she was older.”
“Are they always together?”
“Not always. Why all the questions?”
The vendor
looked at him suspiciously. Dante pointed to one of the rose bouquets that the vendor had already tied with a ribbon.
“I’ll take that one, the one with the red roses.”
The vendor was pleased Dante was actually buying flowers and not merely wasting his time.
“What is the young woman’s name?” Dante looked at his money, trying not to sound as if his life depended on learning her name.
“Ah! I see. You have a thing for Signorina Ferraro.”
“No, no. I’m an artist and need models to pose for me. She has the right look. I would like to hire her.”
The vendor arched his brow. “I see. Well, she is not that type of girl.”
“No, no, you misunderstand me once again, signore! Of course, I can tell she is not that type of girl. She would be clothed. I don’t paint nudes.”
“Hmmm.” The vendor still did not believe him and began busying himself with tying the rest of the roses Signorina Ferraro and her mother had sold him.
Dante took all of his lire out of his pocket.
“How many roses can I buy?”
The vendor reached for the money, but Dante raised his hand in the air.
“But first, I need to know Signorina Ferraro’s christened name.”
“Anabella. Which color roses do you want?”
“You decide.”
“Va bene. Has anyone ever told you that all of you artists are a strange lot?”
Dante ignored him. “Anabella. Anabella.” He kept silently whispering her name. The beautiful name fit her perfectly. Now all he needed to do was find the woman from his dreams.
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