Giovanna's Navel

by Ernest Van der Kwast

  One of those shadowy shapes was Signora Rinaldi, the mother of a soldier who hadn’t made it back from the war. When she saw Ezio walking down the street, a loud shriek escaped her lips. She ran outside and hugged the half-frozen young man. She cried, and because of the tears failed to see that she was showering a complete stranger with her love. Ezio was too tired, too weak, and too sad to resist the fat arms that squeezed him tight and the wet mouth that kissed him. Before he knew it, he was sitting in the kitchen with a plate of pasta in front of him.

  ‘Eat,’ Signora Rinaldi said. ‘Eat, my child.’

  And eat he did. Ezio ate like a prodigal son. He devoured two plates of pasta and a hunk of stewed meat.

  Signora Rinaldi had become a shadow of her former self. The words Matteo didn’t make it back had robbed her eyes of their glint. Since those words, she spent every day waiting for her son’s voice, staring out of the window for hours on end and, after dark, pressing his pillow to her chest like a baby. Even now that her tears had dried, she couldn’t see it was Ezio who was eating the reheated osso buco. She saw the son who’d finally come home: Matteo Rinaldi, barely twenty, with his whole life ahead of him. He’d joined the army happily enough. He’d seen conscription as an opportunity, as a chance to escape everything familiar and boring. As a boy he’d dreamed of the ocean liners setting off for America, but it was an experience he’d never have. If Matteo hadn’t fallen — a bomb dropped by a US B-17 on 16 August 1943 — he’d have had a career in the army. Years later, he’d have been stationed in South Tyrol as a colonel. He wouldn’t have met Ezio Ortolani, though. As an apple picker, Ezio lived a long way from the attacks and the clashes between terrorists and army. Fate would never have brought them closer than this.

  That night, Signora Rinaldi didn’t get out of bed. Nor did she walk to the front door to see if her son might be standing behind it.

  When, after two days, Ezio said I have to go, Signora Rinaldi walked with him to the station. Her feet darted across the paving stones, and on the platform she didn’t say please stay. She said goodbye — at long last, she was able to say goodbye to her son. And by the time the train was no more than a dot on the horizon, her eyes were gleaming.

  And so Ezio travelled northbound. He got off in Pescara, where he was offered a lift by a milkman. While walking to Tortoreto, he was allowed to hop on a farmer’s cart. And in San Benedetto del Tronto, Ezio took the train to the next city and moved further and further from the south.

  Nights were spent in the houses of people he met on the road. Sometimes he didn’t even have to ask for a place to sleep. The farmer who’d given him a lift had also offered him bed and board. Perhaps people saw the sadness in him. After a week on the move, he’d acquired big bags under his eyes. His dreams, in unfamiliar, hard beds, were frequented by Giovanna, who whispered in his ear, caressed him, and kissed him on the forehead. But as soon as Ezio tried to embrace her, his hands would be grappling with sheets and he found himself kissing the cold bedroom air.

  It was on the train to Faenza that he first uttered her name. Having fallen asleep, he ended up caressing the seat’s upholstery, while his lips were puckering up for a kiss. ‘Giovanna,’ he whispered. ‘Giovanna.’

  ‘No,’ he heard a voice say. ‘Bruno. My name is Bruno.’

  Ezio opened his eyes and looked at the man sitting beside him.

  ‘Tua fidanzata?’ Bruno asked.

  Ezio shook his head. Giovanna wasn’t his fiancée. And this thought upset him so much he doubled up in pain.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Bruno asked in a deep voice, and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘Is the train going too fast for you?’

  Ezio shook his head. It was his heart, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t utter a word.

  ‘Keep breathing,’ Bruno advised. ‘My wife always feels nauseous on the train, too.’

  ‘I don’t feel nauseous,’ Ezio uttered with the greatest difficulty.

  ‘Do you have a headache?’

  Ezio was now bent double, with his forehead resting on his knees.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Bruno said, and began to massage Ezio’s shoulder. ‘Faenza isn’t much further.’

  Faenza was only twenty minutes away, but Ezio couldn’t bear the spasms in his chest a second longer. He wanted to rip out his heart and hurl it out of the compartment window.

  Some boys become men by sleeping with a woman, others by shooting a deer or crashing a car. And then there are boys who become men on a train, bent over with a hand on their shoulder. Ezio felt Bruno massaging him gently, but it didn’t help. It was this thought that made him a man: I’m all alone in the world.

  Ezio woke with a jolt. The letter fell to the floor. He felt his heart pounding in his chest. He was on medication, but didn’t always take it in the prescribed doses. A year more or less, what did it matter? The days were all alike. In autumn he put on a heavy coat, mid-spring he took it off again.

  After he retired, when he couldn’t head up into the mountains anymore and his friends were dying one by one, he began to feel regret. Ezio looked back on his life as a match he’d lost. His younger self was to blame. So now, as an old man, he was stuck, forced to hear every solitary second of time tick away. While others might go on a cruise to Cape Horn or spend the winter hibernating in the Caribbean, Ezio stayed in Bolzano. He listened to the days passing by and eventually reached the conclusion that he’d never met anyone he loved as much as he’d loved Giovanna.

  Ezio had met other women. Most were no longer girls and read books and liked to cook for him. He’d had a brief relationship with a forty-year-old teacher who’d been abandoned by her husband. It didn’t amount to much — a mere echo of love. Her children might be the same age as his, if he’d had any.

  The thought that it had all been in vain could leave Ezio feeling furious, although he never really knew whether to be angry with himself or Giovanna. He imagined her life had simply carried on and that her heart had no qualms about other men at all.

  He often wondered what might have become of him had he stayed in Lecce. He wouldn’t have picked apples. Maybe he’d have gone to work for his uncle, eventually taking over the fishmonger’s in the harbour. Would it have made any difference?

  Ezio stared into the middle distance, trying to picture the grey woman with wrinkles like furrows, but her young girl’s face wouldn’t be disfigured by age. Her arms remained slender, her breasts round and firm. In his memory, it was always summer. He could still smell her, and the thought of her mouth conjured up the taste of salt.

  Ezio was afraid her lips might crack if he kissed her now.

  The long-gone day when the Ortolani brothers lay on San Cataldo beach and Giovanna walked into the surf in a two-piece bathing costume often rained down on the apples Ezio picked.

  Giovanna had been aware of the two young men staring at her, but pretended not to notice. The twenty-year-old donna Pugliese had plunged into the sea, diving down to reach a shell on the bottom. Giovanna could hold her breath longer than three of her sisters combined. She had the lungs of a dolphin. As a child, she’d alarmed her parents on numerous occasions by staying under water long after all the other children had resurfaced. Ezio and his brother weren’t alarmed, though. Mesmerised, they gazed at the water that had swallowed up the woman with the navel, thinking they’d witnessed a Fata Morgana. This was the price to pay for prolonged staring at bathing costumes, and the fantasies that went with it: a woman who dissolved in the sea.

  But then Giovanna emerged from a wave, her long hair falling in strands over her shoulders. Seawater flowed down her smooth belly, gushing over the small hollow of her navel. She was even more beautiful than before.

  The two brothers froze in the sun. The wheels of time seemed to falter and the gears grind to a halt. Only Giovanna kept moving. It was just a split second, but long enough for an everlasting lead. Ezio knew he had to do
something before his brother did.

  Suddenly Ezio leapt to his feet and started running. He ran over to Giovanna. His strides were big and his knees strong; his heart was pounding and his cheeks were red. The blood surged through his veins and his lungs filled with air. But there were no words in the speech centre in his brain. He ran and ran and ran. And then he stood before her, before the goddess from the waves with the gushing navel. He panted and looked at her eyes. Eventually, a thought formed in Ezio’s mind. They’re chestnut-coloured, he thought to himself. Her eyes are chestnut brown. He looked at them and lost his heart.

  ‘Ciao,’ Giovanna said, in her hands the shell she’d just brought to the surface.

  Ezio’s gaze travelled from her eyes to the shell and from the ribbed pink shell back to her reddish-brown eyes.

  That’s when the questions came — a barrage of them. What have I done? What am I doing here? Why did I start running? Where’s my brother? What am I supposed to say? But no answers were forthcoming.

  The waterfall around Giovanna’s navel had all but run dry. What remained was a glistening residue of salt.

  Finally Ezio said: ‘Now that I’m here, do you mind if I kiss you?’

  It was pure swagger, as suggested by the slight quiver in his voice. Ezio had never asked a woman Do you mind if I kiss you? Not even in his dreams.

  Giovanna laughed. Perhaps he could have known then, during those few seconds when Giovanna was laughing, that she’d never love him the way he loved her: unconditionally and solemnly, as if it was a matter of life and death.

  The connection between love and laughter mustn’t be underestimated, but a light-hearted laugh isn’t the same as one seeking to requite love. Perhaps it’s the exact opposite: a laugh seeking to sidestep love, to keep it at a distance, far from the heart.

  Still, she nodded. Giovanna Berlucchi nodded and closed her eyes. She waited, clutching the shell and wondering where the young man with the bright eyes would kiss her: on her right or left cheek? On her forehead? Gallantly on the back of her hand? Boldly on her lips? When she didn’t feel anything after five seconds, she puckered up her lips. She’d decided that he should kiss her on the mouth. But Ezio was gone. Just as he’d run to Giovanna, he’d walked away from her — with great haste and a racing heart.

  Ezio plonked down in the sand beside his brother.

  There was a brief silence.

  Then came the question: ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Meanwhile, Giovanna had opened her eyes and was staring at the empty space in front of her, momentarily stunned. Then a vicious expletive escaped her unpuckered lips. She stomped over to Ezio. Her feet left deep imprints in the sand, her elbows jabbed the air, and her wet hair resembled the tentacles of an octopus. Only her navel seemed oblivious to her fury. Like a sun, it shone in the open sky of her naked belly.

  The first thing she said to Ezio was, ‘You’ve got three seconds to kiss me. Or I’ll scream.’

  Ezio sought help in his brother’s eyes, but those seemed to be rolling in disbelief.

  ‘One.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ezio whispered.

  ‘Two.’

  He tried to find bigger words. Soothing words. Words capable of calming a woman. But he had no idea what to say. Ezio came from a family of men. He had no experience whatsoever with sisters or female cousins.

  ‘Two-and-a-half.’

  He had to act. Ezio had to act really fast now. He got up, but only halfway, and ended up on his knees. It occurred to him that his body and will were out of sync. But it was too late. His mouth approached her warm skin. He kissed her navel.

  This might have been the story — the story Ezio and Giovanna told their children, and their children’s children, too. The story that would bind them together forever. The story.

  But this is a different story.

  Two things happened that day.

  Ezio and his brother fell out. For the first time, they didn’t walk the eight kilometres back to Lecce together.

  ‘Try to understand,’ Ezio pleaded. ‘Please, try to understand.’

  But his brother didn’t understand. He felt betrayed and walked home alone. And with every stone he kicked aside, he cursed ‘the whore with the navel’. The Ortolani brothers didn’t speak for the rest of the summer, and when one grey morning in October they bumped into each other in the living room and Ezio told him he had to go, his brother didn’t stop him. He didn’t try to talk him out of it. They were afraid to look at each other, but their inner eyes saw a definitive farewell.

  After Ezio had kissed Giovanna’s navel — a place that hadn’t crossed her mind, sending a shiver through her belly that unfurled its wings and began to flutter — they walked to the sea together. They sat down in the surf with their feet in the water and their toes in the wet sand.

  They sat without speaking and stared at the horizon. Nothing happened. They felt the warmth that infused the sand and the shells, and this warmth was all they wanted. Yet Ezio had the peculiar sensation that his body was about to erupt, as if its contents were fermenting, its molecules moving faster and faster. Something inside him was trying to find a way out. He felt a hot surge of energy rush from his belly up through his chest, where it collided with a bone that was too hard to crack. The energy was propelled to Ezio’s neck and squeezed through his windpipe, up to his larynx. Here, the surge was converted into rapid vibrations that bounced every which way inside his mouth. Finally, it burst open.

  He asked her to marry him.

  Giovanna didn’t answer. She placed the shell she’d brought to the surface against Ezio’s left ear. She let him hear the sea.

  But Ezio was solemn, even then, and he repeated his question.

  Giovanna was different. She loved being alone; her heart was fearless and undaunted. Maybe she was ahead of her time, the way her swimming costume was ahead of its time. She didn’t think she could ever love just one man. She wanted to be free.

  She rose to her feet and waded in up to her waist. Maybe she only loved the sea, in which she could remain submerged for so long — longer than anyone else.

  She plunged in.

  Ezio watched the ripples left by Giovanna and felt a resinous gloom take hold of his body. And unlike the surge of energy that had caught him unawares moments earlier, this gloom didn’t try to find a way out. It would sink deeper and deeper and would eventually take root in his body.

  Under the water, Giovanna waited for Ezio. She knew he’d come looking for her. Her father used to dive in after her, too. It was a game. He was aware that she had the lungs of a dolphin and wasn’t drowning, yet he’d always jump in and lift her out of the sea. Giovanna was older now, no longer a child, but that didn’t stop her from playing the game.

  Ezio ran into the water and dived down to where he’d last seen Giovanna. When he spotted her, he grabbed hold of her waist and swam back to the surface. It flashed through his mind that, having saved her life, she had no choice but to marry him. But before she’d even taken her first breath, Giovanna had already burst out laughing. The sadness, which tried to move down a level in Ezio’s body, could be halted just in time. Because this, too, happened that day: Giovanna pressed her bubbly, laughing mouth on Ezio’s, and their lips came together.

  He keyed in the phone number at the bottom of the letter, underneath her name. It took a while before he heard a female voice. He didn’t recognise it, as it seemed suffused with a rustling sound. The woman spoke softly, yet her words possessed the same strength as those Giovanna had spoken to him as a girl. He was delighted to finally hear her again. The last time he’d heard her voice had been at Lecce station.

  ‘I’m coming to see you,’ Ezio said.

  Some sort of shiver went through him, one of joy rather than fear. It felt as if he was on his way to her already, as if he’d always been on his way to her: in the
apple orchard, in the Petersberg cowshed, in his small apartment in Rencio. Even while he was moving away from her on the train, he’d actually been on his way to her.

  Now, at long last, he was going to arrive. The young man who’d left would return as a grey old man. He’d been on a journey, an odyssey, much like the scientist who’d ventured into the jungle for research and ended up living among chimpanzees for more than twenty years.

  Giovanna asked him to tell her a little bit about himself.

  Not knowing where to start, Ezio began by saying he didn’t have children. She listened to his voice, which had grown deeper and which faltered occasionally, as if some of the words had to get used to the space they were suddenly granted.

  Ezio fell silent.

  He didn’t want to have a conversation over the phone, not after sixty years. In the evening, he’d pack a suitcase with a shirt and trousers, a pair of socks, and underpants. He’d go to bed early — he always went to bed early — and the following morning he’d walk to the station and board the train to Lecce. Her address was on the back of the ripped-open white envelope. It was a street he’d passed through countless times as a boy. He remembered a bakery and the smell of almond croissants. Ezio would take a taxi to her house and press the doorbell. Then the door would open slowly and they’d talk and find out everything there was to know about the long lives they’d lived so far apart.

  But Giovanna began to cry. He heard her sob. And so he said, ‘It’s okay. I’m not angry.’ He took a deep breath. And because he didn’t know what else to say, he repeated, ‘I’m coming to see you.’ He felt tears of his own well up. He wanted to hold her hands in his, and he wanted it so badly he almost cried. But he fought back his tears. He’d always fought back his tears.

  Giovanna asked him when he’d be coming.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Ezio replied. ‘I’m leaving in the morning.’