She turned toward the door and reached out her hand. I was glad Reverend Mother had prepared me, but even so, her bruised and swol en face and the black-and-blue marks on her arm appal ed me. She looked as if someone had beaten her, and then I remembered the stone steps in Letitia’s house.
I went to her, put the hydrangea on the floor and threw my arms around her, careful of the IV and reluctant to hold her too tightly for fear of hurting her sore body.
“How good you are to be here!” she whispered.
I sat on the side of her bed and she stroked my hair, by now flying out of its ponytail. She rubbed my bare arms, as if assuring herself that I was truly there.
Reverend Mother left us, letting me know that she was going to order the cot.
Shortly afterward, Giulia’s supper tray arrived. When the nun bringing the food saw that I was there, she said she’d cal down to the kitchen and have them send something for me. In the meantime, I busied myself with cutting meat and buttering bread for Giulia. She waved me away when I lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth.
“I didn’t break my arm, for God’s sake. Just help me sit up a little higher so I don’t dribble al over myself.”
This was the Giulia I knew, and it was a relief to have her scold me.
By the time we’d both eaten, an aide had delivered a cot, sheets and pil ows and made up a bed by Giulia’s side. I went down to my car and retrieved my suitcase and then stole a few minutes to peel off the clothes I’d been wearing for two days and take a shower in a bathroom down the hal from Giulia’s loom that the aide had pointed out to me.
When I rejoined Giulia, she’d had her evening medication, and some of the strain I’d seen in her face was eased. She beamed at me. I was now scrubbed, my hair neatly braided, and wearing fresh clothes.
“Sweetheart, did you bring the things I asked for?”
I patted the tote bag. “It’s al in here, Nana. Do you want anything now?”
She wavered, but then threw up her hands as if surrendering to an irresistible need.
“The box. The cigar box. You found it, where I said to look?”
I nodded and dug it out of the bag. “Here it is, Nana.”
She took the box and stroked the outside of it, tracing the colorful image of Francisco Fonseca. Then she held the box to her breast, cradling it with her eyes shut. At last, she lifted the cover and stared at the stacks of letters before slipping one out from its ribbon binding. She closed the box and brought the single letter to her lips before unfolding it.
For a few moments I watched as she scanned the lines. I thought she was reading, but then she turned to me in restless exasperation.
“My eyes are no good at night. I can’t see the words. Sweetheart, you’ve done so much, just to come, but do this for me. Read to me. Read me the letter.”
She handed me the blue sheet of paper.
I took it hesitantly.
“Are you sure you want me to read this, Nana?”
She looked at me and the letter in my hand, agitation rising in her as she struggled between the absolute sanctity of the message in the letter and the urgency she felt to hear it again.
“I need to hear it tonight, Cara. Go ahead. I trust you.” And so I began to read the words on the page—an elegant, flowing Italian script. At first, my brain attempted to translate silently for myself as I read the Italian out loud, but after a few minutes, I stopped trying to decipher the meaning and simply pronounced the words. I felt as if I were singing a song whose soul and emotion were in the music, not the lyrics.
Dearest Giulia,
Don’t forget what I asked you last night—to find five or ten minutes before noon. I have the most important things to communicate to you. If you only knew how much I suffered this morning, to go to work without even seeing you or tel ing you that I love you.
I am crazy with love. I have never loved with so much devotion. You are the star that shines brightly, a sparkling beam, and you adorn my poor heart with infinite madness. Now that I am writing to you, I believe I have you near me. It seems as if we are talking. How I long to embrace you!
I cover your face with my tears, and dry them with my kisses. Most faithful y, Paolo When I finished, I glanced up. Giulia’s eyes were closed and the agitation that had disturbed her earlier was gone. I gently removed the cigar box from her lap and put it on her bedside table. As I reached to turn out the light; she stirred and touched my wrist. “Grazie, figlia mia.”
I slipped into the cot, the words of my grandfather Paolo echoing in my head.
CHAPTER 3
The Beginning
The next morning I accustomed myself to the weekday pace of San Giuseppe Moscati. Breakfast trays, medication, bath, changes of bed linen. I could see the distress in my grandmother’s face, the tension in her body, as the procession of nurses’ aides and nuns moved in and out of her room. She scolded a cleaning woman who attempted to move the cigar box of letters that I had placed on the bedside table.
“I’ll put it in a safe place, Nana,” I reassured her as the bustle around her continued. “We can read more later, when it’s not so busy.”
The surgeon showed up around ten. He was in his late thirties, a trim, athletic-looking man, wearing a stylish blue shirt under his white coat. His eyes, also blue, conveyed intel igence and compassion. After he’d checked on my grandmother, I conferred with him in the hal , along with Reverend Mother and the sister in charge of the orthopedic ward.
He had scheduled Giulia’s surgery for Tuesday morning and felt she’d need at least ten days of recuperation before I could take her home. He explained the details of the operation and his expectations for her recovery.
I brought up my concerns about her medication and the discomfort I was witnessing, and he agreed to make adjustments, giving the sisters some latitude in monitoring her painkil ers. Within ten minutes he was gone.
Before returning to Giulia’s room, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and considered what I had just heard. Ten days. This was more than I’d bargained for. More than I thought I could handle. I chafed at missing my family and our long-awaited week at the beach; I worried about upcoming projects at work; I wondered how I’d fil the long hours sitting at Giulia’s bedside. But I’d made my choice. I’d said yes, I could do this. I walked back into Giulia’s room.
She turned her head as I pushed open the door and she smiled.
“I was wondering where you were, sweetheart. I thought maybe I’d only dreamed you were here. But then I saw your valise in the corner and I told myself, ‘You may be an old woman, but you’re not a confused one.’”
I glanced at her IV and assured myself that it was flowing smoothly. Then I sat in the chair by her bedside. We talked about what the doctor had told me and I pressed her to be vocal when she was in too much pain.
“Don’t suffer in silence, Nana. He’s written orders to give you more painkil ers if you need them, so speak up.”
“I don’t want to be in a haze, not knowing what’s going on around me. Letitia didn’t even know I was there at the end.”
“This isn’t the end for you, Nana! You have a broken hip, not a terminal disease. Dr. Campobasso can replace it and you’ll walk again, back in your own home.”
“Okay. Okay. But if I start babbling like my crazy cousin Elena, you make them reduce the morphine. I’d rather have a little pain than be seeing visions at the foot of my bed.”
I smiled and promised her as I stroked her hand. As I did so, her clenched fingers released their hold on the bedcovers. “How about a cup of tea and I’ll read you another letter?” She drew my hand to her lips and kissed it. 1 went down the hal to the ward kitchen and poured two cups of tea into china cups and brought them back to her room on a tray. When she was settled, I retrieved the box and passed it to her so she could select a letter. She spent some time sifting through the fragile sheets. None of the letters were dated, and the envelopes had no postage or street address, only her name in a flourishi
ng, emphatic script. She final y pul ed one out and gave it to me. “This one.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes and I began to read.
Adorata Giulia,
I cannot explain in words how my heart beats for you. I dream of you al the time. If you love me as I love you, we would never suffer. We would always be happy. You have become the owner of my heart. I am yours. How can I give back al the love you show me? My love for you grows day by day and nothing can stop it, not even the anger and disapproval of your family. What have I done to these people that they don’t want me?
My heart is ful of love for you. I adore you and want to kneel at your feet. I wil love you always, in spite of what others say. I await your reply. Paolo
I folded the letter again. Who was this passionate, intemperate man whose blood I carried in my veins? I gazed at my grandmother, the woman he had loved so desperately, who had so consumed him.
“Tel me about my grandfather, Nana. Why did he write you these letters?”
“We had secrets in those days, Paolo and I. Secrets we kept hidden, concealed. But that wasn’t the beginning.
The beginning was open and innocent, because I was not aware of what lay ahead—with him or my family. I was just a girl. A girl newly arrived in America who didn’t want to be there. I believed my parents were punishing me by sending me to America. It was kil ing me, breaking my heart, to leave Italy.”
She turned her face to the window; the late-morning light filtered through white curtains. Beyond lay the rock-strewn hil s of her childhood.
“The beginning, the girl I was when I met Paolo, started out there.” She thrust out her chin and gestured toward the window.
“My own grandmother Giuseppina was a maga. I suppose now people would cal her a sorceress,” Giulia began, and I listened.
CHAPTER 4
The Convent of Santa Margareta
Giulia
In my grandmother Giuseppina’s garden grew the plants she mixed into her medicines; in her head lived the magic words she sang to release her spel s; in her fingertips danced the powers she used to heal. She cured the pains and the sorrows of those who came to her, who asked her to speak for them to the saints.
She was known outside our vil age of Venticano. People came from Pietradefusi and Pano di Greci, some even from as far as Avel ino. She turned no one away.
I have a distant memory—sometimes I think it was a dream. In it, Giuseppina, speaking to my mother, raised her very dark eyebrows and nodded in my direction. ‘I’m watching that one.”
I was three years old, feeling only Giuseppina’s eyes—loving and burning—upon me. Not long after, my mother was confined to bed with the twins she was carrying and everyone was sure she would lose.
Giuseppina came that day with her daily infusion for my mother, which she always swal owed reluctantly.
Giuseppina saw the state of affairs: my mother exhausted, sleepless, with barely enough wil to get herself through the pregnancy, let alone pay attention to the youngest of her six children. My brother Claudio was the oldest, fol owed by my sisters, Letitia, Philippina (whom we cal ed Pip), and Domitil a (whom we cal ed Til y) and then my brother Aldo and me. Even with my father’s sister, Pasqualina, helping in the household, this seventh pregnancy was tapping al my mother’s strength.
“You need more rest and less worry, Anna. It’s Giulia. She’s too much for you right now. The others, they’re old enough, they take care of themselves, they obey Pasqualina, but not that one. You need peace and quiet, not listening with one ear to what’s going on in the rest of the house.
“I’ll bring Giulia to my house. I can take care of her better than Pasqualina with everything she has to do here.
Now close your eyes. Don’t even think about it. In a few months you’l have your babies and everything will be back to normal.”
My mother, too drained to fight, acquiesced. That night, Giuseppina took me home with her. My mother delivered the twins—Giovanni and Frankie—early, but Giovanni was sickly and did not survive more than three months.
My mother’s loss and subsequent depression gave Giuseppina more reason to keep me, and ultimately I stayed for seven years.
From my very first day in her house, I barely left her side. If we happened to be separated and she wanted me, she never cal ed me. Somehow, whether she was across the room or across the courtyard, a voice inside my head spoke the name Giuseppina and I knew to look for her.
When I found her, she’d nod and touch my head with her hand, smudged with dirt from the roots of her plants and smel ing of garlic and fennel. Maybe it was my nose that led me to Giuseppina. Giuseppina told me I had a “good” nose, that it was important to smel the sickness in order to identify it.
So many people came to her aching, unable to sleep, unable to eat. She put poultices on their sore muscles, gave them powders to bring on sleep or stimulate their appetites, and coaxed the pains out of their bodies with the touch of her hands. But as she murmured her spel s, she was also listening to their stories, the secrets they knew were safe with her. Giuseppina absorbed their suffering, drawing it out of their bodies and taking it into her own.
Giuseppina’s house was on the other side of the vil age piazza from my parents’. When they were first married, Papa and my mother had lived with Giuseppina. But my mother, distressed by the constant parade of sick and troubled people through the place, had cried to Papa that she needed her own house. My mother, too, had a sensitive nose, and she could not bear the smel s so vital to Giuseppina’s healing ways.
There were many other things my mother could not bear— untidiness, or inelegance, or ignorance. Especially ignorance. That’s why she sent me to the Convent of Santa Margareta, with al my sisters—Letitia and Pip and Til y—and took me away from Giuseppina.
“I let Giuseppina take Giulia seven years ago, but now it is time to reclaim my daughter,” she told Papa.
My mother wanted us to be educated, to learn to read and write as she did. My Zia Pasqualina, Papa’s sister, did not understand my mother’s influence over Papa. My mother was not a woman who drew other women to ral y around her—at least, not other women from Venticano. She came from the city, from Benevento. Every summer, she left my brothers and sisters with Zia Pasqualina, a childless widow, and Zia Teresia, her simpleminded younger sister. For al of August, my mother took the baths in Ischia with her childhood friends from Benevento. Papa’s business provided the family with a comfortable life; he was the proprietor of the only livery stable in the mountains south of Avel ino, with carriages that made deliveries and carried passengers. But Zia Pasqualina believed he indulged my mother in “extravagances.”
My mother and Giuseppina argued about me. Giuseppina could see no use for the nuns and their teaching.
She wanted Papa to let me stay in Venticano, but my mother was insistent.
“Felice, who can teach her here, in this pitiful school?” my mother demanded of Papa one night before he went off to his card game. “I want only the best for our children!”
Giuseppina, who could not read or write, stalked off from that batde with her head shaking. She told Papa he could bring me to the nuns, but he was a fool if he believed I’d learn anything from them. Papa’s cousin Elisabetta was a sister at Santa Margareta. “Everybody knows how stupid she is,” Giuseppina reminded Papa.
And so in August of 1900, even though much stil needed to be harvested in Giuseppina’s garden, Papa hitched up his best wagon, the one he used in his business for the daily trip to Napoli, and headed south with us to Sorrento. I did not cry as we departed the piazza and Giuseppina turned her back on my mother’s dream. I did not cry as we rode through the gate of the Convent of Santa Margareta and were surrounded by walls twice as high as my head.
I never cried. Instead, I counted beans.
Beans like stones. We al took a handful from the bowl by the holy water when we came into the chapel at six in the morning. Sister Philomena watched. My hands were smal . One morning, the bean
s spil ed; Sister Philomena frowned and grunted. She was too fat to get down to help me pick them up. The big girls up front turned to frown also, except Pip, who buried her face in her hands, pretending to pray, trying to hide her shame that I was her sister.
I got on my knees, looking for al the beans. One had rol ed far under the corner of the last pew, in the dark near the confessional where the padre sat on Friday mornings. I left it. Perhaps it would sprout in the dirt and the damp, send its tendrils out around the ankle of a sinner.
I went to my place in the row with the rest of my class. Sister Philomena fol owed me, watched as I set my beans in two piles on the stone floor and then knelt on top of the beans. Satisfied, she heaved herself into her priedieu and made the sign of the cross.
The beans were supposed to be a reminder to us of Christ’s suffering on the cross; a smal sacrifice to offer up as penance for whatever transgressions we had committed as sinful girls.
Nobody else wriggled or shifted against the hard white lumps biting into our knees. But I felt them. I didn’t pretend they weren’t there. Sometimes, when Sister Philomena Wasn’t paying attention, I scooped the beans into my pocket and stuck my tongue out at anyone who noticed. In the classroom, I was just as fidgety. I hated sitting stil to recite lessons or listen to the endless droning of the nuns. To relieve my boredom I drew caricatures of Reverend Mother in the margins of my notebook. The girls sitting nearby would whisper and point and giggle, breaking up the monotony of the day, even if it meant a scolding.
One morning after breakfast, it was gray outside the high windows of the refectory. In that entire convent, there were no windows low enough to sit by and look out to see the garden, the trees or the hil s beyond the wal s.
I cleared away my dish and cup and took the broom from the cupboard. It was my day to sweep. I swept the crumbs from the corners and under the tables and moved toward the door to the loggia. Sister Elisabetta, Papa’s cousin, unlocked the bolt so I could push the crumbs outside. She was supposed to wait and then bolt the door again when I was finished. But there was a crash from the kitchen and the hysterical screams of too many girls, so she rushed off with the keys in her hand and I was stil outside, listening to the drizzle beyond the loggia, breathing in air that wasn’t stale with the sleep and whispers of al the girls in that house.
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 3