We were facing each other and she moved closer, so that our knees touched. She then guided my right hand to her forehead and flattened my thumb against her brown and spotted skin, starting my hand in a rotating motion.
“First, you must listen with your skin, your blood. Hear the blood of the other, take in its message through your fingertips.”
My eyes were wide open, staring into hers, looking for what I was supposed to find.
“No,” she said, “not with your eyes.” She passed her hand over my eyelids, brushing them closed. This time I clenched them tightly shut, trying very hard to do what she’d told me. I felt her hand again, hovering lightly over my eyes.
“You are trying too hard, figlia mia. Do not try at al . Do not think. Just listen.”
We sat quietly for many minutes, her hand at first suspended in front of my eyes and then no longer there. I don’t remember the moment when she took it away. In the beginning I heard the hiss of the fire, the rustle of the wind, the banging of a loose shutter, even the braying of the padre’s mule. My hand continued to move in the gentle rhythm she had set for it, across the fragile folds of her aged face. Again at a point I don’t remember, the sounds of the night receded and I heard nothing; and then I heard something. Not words. Not direction, or explanation, or even yes or no. But I know what I heard was Giuseppina.
Then for the first time in my life I began to speak aloud the words of the spel . I had heard them since I was an infant, so Giuseppina did not have to say them to teach or even remind me. But that night they became my words. I said the names in order, the list of the saints and spirits cal ed upon to provide protection and blessing. I made the request for help, for the ring of goodness to surround her. I offered the honor and gratitude for their assistance, and then I repeated the names again, beginning with the least and ending with the Great Intercessor, the Holy Virgin herself.
I was trembling and breathless when I finished. I waited for Giuseppina’s judgment. But it did not come. I cautiously opened my eyes. Her head had fal en forward, her heavy silver earrings resting on the crocheted shawl she always wore draped across her shoulders, her chin pressed into the large cameo at her neck. Her eyes were closed and fluttering under the folds of her eyelids. Her breasts rose and fel in the rhythm of my circles. She had fal en asleep, brought to a place of peace and repose by my spel . By my words. I covered her with a blanket, banked the fire and made myself a bed at her feet.
After that night, she al owed me to do the spel for the colicky babies brought to her by distraught and exhausted mothers, and for the mothers themselves. Soon they no longer waited for Giuseppina, or turned to me reluctantly when Giuseppina was overwhelmed by the numbers seeking assistance. They began to ask first for me.
CHAPTER 8
La Danza
The summer I turned sixteen, a group of us—cousins and friends who had played together since we were children— gathered in the late evenings behind the Cucino brothers’ barn. Mario Cucino had a fiddle, and on moonlit nights, amid the crickets and fireflies, someone would signal with the rhythmic cadence of clapping hands and the music began. We danced. Whirling, wild, joyous, the letting go of winter’s confinement and—for me—my mother’s constrictions.
I lived for those summer nights. For the moist darkness, a reprieve from the scorching heat and the eyes of the vil age gossips; for the feeling of breathlessness and weightlessness that overcame me as I spun in circles, my arms outstretched and my castanets alive; for the smel s of wine, honeysuckle, hay, sweat. For the aching nearness of Vito Cipriano, shirtless, brown from his endless days in the fields. For what I felt coursing through me—new, delicious and forbidden. For what I had discovered with Vito.
One searing day, Giuseppina and I had gone up into the hil s to gather angelica when the heat overwhelmed her and she sought refuge in a smal grove. I gave her a few sips of water to drink. She leaned back against a tree and fel immediately into her customary snoring sleep.
I sat with her for a while, but I was neither hot nor tired, so I picked up my basket and continued over the rise to the meadow where the last of the angelica grew. I was crouched there, cutting the stems with my knife, when I saw the shadow. I turned quickly, my knife ready to plunge, to protect myself. But it was Vito.
The grass was very tal ; there was no one to see us except the hawks. Vito and I had kissed before that day—
sweet kisses on the path back from Cucino’s in the half darkness, hurried and cautious, always listening for the sound of footsteps or a shutter opening as one of the sleepless sought the relief of the night air. But in the meadow was different. In the meadow… I let him touch me.
I knew the length and depth of Giuseppina’s siestas. And I could stil hear her snoring. At first, Vito’s kisses were as urgent as the night and I kissed him back with the hunger that had been building to a frenzy al summer long. But then we stopped for breath. He tilted his head to gaze at me and began to stroke my hair and my face. I have a vein in my neck that always swel s and pumps visibly when I am nervous. I felt it surging, revealing my emotions. He touched it with his fingertips, then buried his face in the hol ow right below it. I could smel the earth on his hands. He had had no time to wash, had come to me directly from the fields when he’d seen me with my basket walking up the rocky path. I felt his hand glide from my neck, along my arm and back up again to the drawstring of my blouse. My hand closed over his as he attempted to loosen the string. “Per favore,” he whispered, begging me with his eyes. I hesitated. He released the string, but then brushed his hand across my blouse, over my breast. No one had ever touched me there before. I hadn’t known how it would feel, had not known the ripple of desire it could set off. I struggled with the warnings and admonitions of my mother. But this discovery was so extraordinary to me, this moment of our unexpected solitude so magical, that I pushed aside the voice of my mother and bent my ear once again to the voice of Vito.
“I want to touch you,” he told me.
“Yes,” I answered.
He undid the string and lifted my blouse over my head, then my camisole. This nakedness in the bril iance of midday, in the presence of Vito, was so surprising and so thril ing that I lost my breath. Then I felt his hands, cal used and eager. That my body could feel this way! I reached out for him and pul ed him toward me and gasped when I felt his own naked chest for the first time against mine. I had watched since childhood the calm and the absolute pleasure on the faces of babies when they nestled against the bare breasts of their mothers, and that’s what I knew when Vito extended his body over mine. For a few abandoned moments, surrounded by the drone of the cicadas, the biting fragrance of the grass crushed beneath us, I was aware only of my longing.
But in the distance, in a place inside my head that stayed apart, I stil listened for Giuseppina’s snores and I stil measured Vito’s every move. I knew I was in danger—from discovery, from desire.
I stopped Vito when his hand reached under my skirt. His face clouded with frustration and anger. I felt a sharp twinge of fear—that I might not be able to hold him back, might not want to. But then we both heard the sound of my name, frantic, wild. He rol ed off me, cursing, staying low, and I grabbed for my clothes and wriggled into them.
“Stay down,” I hissed, and then rose with my basket to see the top of Giuseppina’s head coming up over the rise. I waved and hurried toward her, brushing the grass from my hair, my back.
“Are you crazy to wander off by yourself! Never again, do you hear me!” She vented the fear she must have felt when she woke to find me missing.” You look flushed, feverish,” she observed as I came nearer. “You’ve been too long in the sun.” She saw the mound of flowers in my basket. “That’s enough for today. The fright you gave me has worn me out.”
We set off down to the vil age. I didn’t turn to look back.
But that night I couldn’t wait to return to the dance and Vito’s arms. Those hours contained everything my mother had tried to keep me from. I dan
ced barefoot, like the daughters of Tomasino the goat herder, feeling the earth, damp with dew, between my toes. In the early hours of morning, when I returned in exhaustion to Giuseppina’s, I poured water into the speckled washbasin and thoroughly scrubbed my feet before slipping back between the sheets of my bed. Giuseppina might not have seen the smudged evidence, but she would certainly have smel ed the loamy traces stil clinging to my skin.
But my ablutions were not enough to hide my secret life.
Mario Cucino’s cousin Clara betrayed me. Clara had watched Vito and me al summer from the corners and the shadows, a skinny, sal ow-faced girl who was always chewing on a strand of her hair and did not know how to laugh.
She shrewdly enlisted my brother Aldo as her accomplice. Aldo had embraced his position as Papa’s favored son after Claudio left us. He postured in front of the hal way mirror, mimicking Papa’s elegant style of dress. He passionately remade himself in Papa’s image, taking meticulous care not only of his wardrobe but also of the wagons and horses. He polished, he groomed. He seemed determined to earn Papa’s respect, eagerly volunteering for the hardest routes, even passing up the usual entertainments of the other boys in the vil age to pore over the ledger books late into the night. Papa rewarded him when he turned eighteen, entrusting him with the busy Avel ino route.
Aldo had never ventured to Cucino’s. He had never experienced the need to break free of the confining Fioril o name— not as Claudio had by leaving Venticano altogether, nor as I had, in my own fledgling way, by dancing, by dreaming. If he knew about Cucino’s, he’d chosen to ignore it, until Clara, recognizing in Aldo a younger version of Felice Fioril o, whispered in his ear one day. My little brother Sandro, who sometimes tagged after Aldo, witnessed that encounter and later told me about it.
Clara had been invisible to young men, especial y young men like Aldo. But then, Clara realized she had something Aldo might want, something that would earn him more favor with the father he seemed so intent on pleasing. She pushed that perpetual y loose strand of hair behind her ear, smoothed her dress and approached him.
“You’re Giulia’s older brother, aren’t you?”
Aldo nodded, but eyed her quizzical y. “How do you know Giulia?” he asked, the surprise in his voice undisguised.
Clara smiled disingenuously “She comes dancing at Cucino’s sometimes. Weren’t you aware? I had heard she was hiding it from her grandmother, but I thought she might have trusted you. You must know about Vito?” She looked at Aldo, offering her sympathy to the shocked brother. “Oh, no, I haven’t said too much, have I?”
“Not at al . I’m grateful to you, Signorina.”
Very few young men had addressed her as Signorina.
That night, Aldo waited under Giuseppina’s mulberry tree and watched me lower myself over the ledge of the window. When my feet touched the ground he sprang forward and tackled me, knocking me breathless into the flower bed. I shrieked and kicked, not knowing it was my own brother. Our scuffling, of course, roused Giuseppina, who threw open her shuttered window, muttering and cursing the disturbance until she saw who it was and—more pertinently—how I was dressed. I was no longer in the nightgown I’d been wearing when I’d said good night to her an hour earlier, but rather in my flounced skirt and bodice, with no blouse underneath.
My arms and shoulders were bare. My hair, now unbraided, tumbled loosely down my back, somewhat unkempt thanks to the tousle with Aldo. As Giuseppina took in my appearance and realized what it meant, she began to wail and keen as if it were my stiff and lifeless corpse lying beneath her window. It might as well have been, given the catastrophic aftermath of Giuseppina’s discovery.
In the midst of her lamentation, she ordered me into the house. But she could not prevent Aldo from running to fetch Papa. I cursed at his retreating footsteps. Papa arrived from his card game in a frenzy.
“You whore,” he roared and slapped me twice, once on each cheek. “I forbid you to go to Cucino’s again. If you disobey me, I swear I’ll bring you back to my house and keep you under lock and key.”
I spent the rest of the night in Giuseppina’s bed with her. When she final y fel asleep, I crept over to the window. Not to escape again, but merely to catch a glimpse of the night and hope that Vito was hovering somewhere in the shadows.
The next morning my mother made her entrance. (No one had dared wake her the night before.) Her outrage was focused not so much on the dishonor that had provoked my father’s anger as on the company I had chosen to keep and the manner in which I’d chosen to keep it.
“Dancing in the mud with a Cipriano! Haven’t I taught you to expect more? Wil you throw your life away to bear the squal ing babies of an uneducated peasant, just because you admire the shape of his buttocks?” she shrieked at me. Then she quieted and narrowed her eyes as a question—more a demand—formed in her head.
“Are you pregnant?”
“Mama! I’ve only danced with him!” I protested quickly, knowing that dancing alone was enough to anger her, hoping it was enough to keep her from suspecting more.
“Wel , thank the Blessed Virgin for that.”
My mother did not know—and I did not reveal to her— what I felt when I danced. She could never have known the force of the yearning and urgency that propel ed me. She shifted her fury to Giuseppina, not for failing to guard me or seal me in, but for making me susceptible to the night.
“It’s you who’ve cultivated this wildness in her! You’ve encouraged her to befriend these people, to partake in their primitive pleasures. You let her go off into the hil s alone to gather your weeds and look what she brings back! She should’ve been reading books, not mixing potions for the lovesick.”
Giuseppina was no less upset with me than my mother was, but for other reasons. Giuseppina understood the longing. She had taught me the power of the feelings, the dreams that burned inside of people. She believed that to disown what you felt made you sick—sick at heart, sick in the head.
Over the years, most often in arguments about me, Giuseppina and my mother had done their own dance around each other. This time was no exception. My mother, normal y decorous and contained, unleashed her words, her pitch, her pace. She brimmed with uncontrol able passion. Giuseppina, on the other hand, became impassive, impenetrable. My mother shril ed her words as if they were fists beating, hammering in futility at the wall of Giuseppina’s silence. When my mother finished her tirade, Giuseppina dismissed her with the peremptory gesture of impatience she reserved for the truly stupid with whom she wouldn’t even deign to speak. Once again, my mother was forced to retreat.
When she was gone, Giuseppina said, “Before you find yourself pregnant, come to me first.”
She turned away from me without her customary penetrating glance. I was expected to understand; she would protect me, as she’d been unable to protect me the night before from Aldo’s spying and its consequences. She was angry with me for exposing her lapse, for making her look like a fool and for taking risks with my reputation. But she was also letting me know that she forgave me.
My parents, however, were not ready to forgive. My mother, especial y, was determined to protect me in her own way from the dangers she saw lurking behind the eyes of every young man in the vil age, and within my own emerging womanhood.
Her solution came quickly.
My sister Pip had made a rash promise to a young man in Pano di Greci. She was nearly twenty, but she had no experience of men, as I did. Her embroidery stitches were neat; she fol owed al the rules at the convent of Santa Margareta; she would make someone an obedient, if foolish wife. But not this someone in Pano di Greci, my mother decided. Not knowing her own heart, Pip was relieved at my mother’s intervention. She floated this way and that, always doing what she was told. The family of the young man, however, was enraged, raining curses and threats upon Pip’s empty head.
My mother and father conferred noisily, Papa at first resisting my mother’s radical suggestion. Ever since Claudio had left, Pa
pa had refused to even read any of the letters from America, let alone respond. But my mother, summoning al her emotional power, prevailed. A letter was hurriedly sent to Claudio.
Pip, in the meantime, was kept at home, not even al owed to go to the market for fear she would be kidnapped in broad daylight crossing the piazza.
To al outward appearances, life in the Fioril o households— my parents’ and my grandmother’s—remained as it had been, except for Pip’s and my confinement. But my mother’s days had taken on a kind of silent intensity as she worked out in elaborate detail what she considered to be the rescue not only of Pip, but of me and Til y as well.
She told none of us, for fear of alerting the enemy in Pano di Greci or arousing the rebel in me.
She did not tel me, in fact, until she had the passage booked, the steamship tickets in her hand, my father’s horses practical y bridled and ready to drive me to the pier.
“Aiuta me!” I wailed to Giuseppina when my mother marched to her house and ordered me to pack my trunks.
Help me.
“She cannot help you this time. Your sister will be kil ed or worse if she remains here, and she can’t go alone.
She and Til y can’t manage such a journey by themselves. You re the only one with enough sense to see you al safely to Claudio. Venticano is no life for any of my daughters, but believe me, Giulia, it is especially no life for you. You are going now, before you’re ruined by what you have clearly never learned to control.”
She stood over me while I gathered my belongings together. The tears flooded my cheeks, spil ing over onto my clothes. Giuseppina wandered around the house, muttering her incantations, burning incense, tucking her blessings among my possessions as I packed.
“You’ll leave before sunrise tomorrow, on your father’s normal run to Napoli, so as not to arouse suspicion.
The boys will come this evening after dark to take your trunks to the house, and you will come with them. You’ll sleep with Til y in her bed tonight. I forbid you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especial y Cipriano or any of the Cucinos. If you do, you threaten not only your sister’s life, but your own as well.”
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 6