Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  My mother wanted no Constanza Bertis in our family.

  “You are not peasants! You are the daughters of Felice Fiorillo.” Her greatest weapon in her defense of our honor was our pride. From the time we were small, she had Zia Pasqualina scrubbing us and dressing us in starched white dresses while the other children in the village ran around barefoot and in tatters. When the money from Claudio began coming, the dresses became finer, and we ordered fabrics from Napoli for the bed linens we were to take to our marriage beds.

  Painstakingly, under the instruction of Zia Pasqualina, I embroidered red silk GFs on the elaborate pillowcases I sewed, festooned with tucks and elegant lace. My fingers cramped from the tiny stitches. My mother held up these beautiful objects to us like Giuseppina’s talismans. If we wanted a life filled with beauty and elegance, a life where we could rest our heads on an embroidered pillowcase, rather than a life spent washing someone else’s pillowcases, then we had to remember that its cost was far more than the silver she’d paid for this linen. How would we be able to put our heads on these pristine objects if we ourselves were soiled?

  My sisters soaked up these lessons without question. They were willing to sit for hours with their needles and thread, gossiping about wedding dresses and arguing over the placement of a flower. They looked at the not-married and the married in our family, in our village, and had decided which side they wanted to be on. I was not so sure.

  I was haunted by Letitia’s heartache. How lonely she seemed! Her husband had no brothers and sisters, and he was often away, leaving Letitia alone with his nagging mother. “No wonder she seeks refuge in the church,” my mother muttered one day.

  The lonelier and more withdrawn Letitia became, the more I began to share my brothers’ growing excitement with each letter from Claudio. I was still young enough to be granted an occasional excuse from the sewing circle, and then I went off with Aldo and Frankie and Sandro to the hills and played “America”—the rules defined by whatever wonders Claudio had described in his most recent letter. The more I learned from Claudio, the less willing I was to do as my mother expected.

  I wanted to laugh, I wanted to dance. I did not want to spend the rest of my life praying to the Blessed Virgin in a village church.

  Chapter 7

  The Spell

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE every year the entire family gathered at my parents’ house to celebrate—my grandmother, Giuseppina; my sister Letitia, her husband and his widowed mother; Papa’s estranged brother Tony, who had begun to talk about following Claudio to America with his wife Yolanda and their son Peppino; Zia Pasqualina and Zia Teresia, who did all the cooking for the feast of seven fishes, the traditional Christmas Eve meal; and all my brothers and sisters who were still at home. In the two years since he’d been gone, my mother had also set a place for Claudio on Christmas Eve, an empty chair she allowed no one else to sit in. She did not set a place for the wife Claudio had written us about in October of that year.

  The house was ablaze with light. Every candlestick in the house had been polished and arranged on the table, the credenza, even the windowsills. My mother and Pip had laid the table with a damask cloth, heavy silver and platters painted with cherubs and goddesses. For one night, everyone put aside grudges and resentments, ate abundantly and then walked across the piazza to attend midnight Mass together. At the end of the service, as the bells chimed “Adeste Fidelis” and the snow swirled around our feet, we bid one another “Buon Natale” and separated.

  After we returned to my grandmother’s house, I started toward my bed, but Giuseppina reached out for me with her blue-veined hand. My Christmas Eve was not yet over.

  “Wait,” she said. “I want to show you something, figlia mia.”

  She gestured for me to follow her to the kitchen, where she stirred the coal embers in the grate and then sat on her chair—the stool where she sat every day when “the parade of the afflicted,” as my mother called them, came for her ministrations and her medicines.

  “How old are you, Giulia?”

  She asked a question she knew the answer to. This was just like Giuseppina. She often asked the simplest of questions, questions whose answers seemed so commonplace, so obvious, that at first you worried she was becoming feebleminded and forgetful. But then, when you answered her question, scoffing, “But, Nonna, you know already!” you found that your answer meant something else entirely.

  “I’m fourteen, Nonna,” I answered, puzzled by what Giuseppina was seeking, by what my answer would reveal to us both.

  “Ah,” she sighed. “Fourteen. Yes, I thought so.”

  Giuseppina did not keep track of time the way my mother did. She could not read the baptismal certificates pressed between the thin pages of my mother’s Bible that recorded our names and the years of our births. She had no calendar hanging on the wall next to the washbasin advertising the granary in Avellino. She had no gold-leaf clock sitting on a mantel that needed winding with a key. Giuseppina measured time by the season. Planting, tending, harvesting. She measured time by the length and warmth of the day. She measured time by the flame in her votive candles.

  She looked at me then and measured another kind of time—one that marks the distance between the three-year-old chatterbox she took under her roof and her wing, and the almost-woman who, cicada-like, filled the silences in her house with words, questions, songs and stories. She eyed me, in my fine Christmas dress, my face still flushed from wine, the walk home in the cold air, the warmth rising up from the stove.

  “When I was fourteen, I had already been promised to your grandfather Antonio,” she mused.

  Has she found me a husband? I wondered. Was that it? I was old enough to be married off? What about Tilly and Pip? Weren’t they supposed to go before me? I wasn’t prepared for this, if this was what fourteen meant to my grandmother.

  “When I was fourteen, I also sat with my nonna on Christmas Eve.” She waved a hand in front of her eyes as if to clear away the clouds that obscured the memory of another old woman and her granddaughter. I was more comfortable with this image. A girl sits at the feet of her nonna, listening and watching.

  “It’s a sacred time,” whispered Giuseppina, “for the maghe.”

  A shiver of recognition rippled its way from my hairline down my spine. I was no longer comfortable, but I was also not unwilling. With relief, I realized that Giuseppina did not see me on the threshold of marriage, as she had been at fourteen. But I understood that she did see me as her heir in something far more mysterious, far more powerful. My heart was pounding.

  “You are ready,” she announced to me, taking my hands in hers. “Ready to learn the first spells.”

  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 all. 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 w
as Giuseppina.

  Then for the first time in my life I began to speak aloud the words of the spell. 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 called 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 fallen 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 fell in the rhythm of my circles. She had fallen asleep, brought to a place of peace and repose by my spell. By my words. I covered her with a blanket, banked the fire and made myself a bed at her feet.

  After that night, she allowed me to do the spell 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 village 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 smells 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 hills to gather angelica when the heat overwhelmed her and she sought refuge in a small grove. I gave her a few sips of water to drink. She leaned back against a tree and fell 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 tall; 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 still 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 all 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 swells 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 hollow right below it. I could smell 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 brilliance of midday, in the presence of Vito, was so surprising and so thrilling that I lost my breath. Then I felt his hands, callused and eager. That my body could feel this way! I reached out for him and pulled 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 still listened for Giuseppina’s snores and I still 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 rolled 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 village. 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 danced barefoot, like the daughters of Tomasino the goatherder, 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 smelled the loamy traces still 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 all summer from the corners and the shadows, a skinny, sallow-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 hallway 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 village to pore over the ledger books late into the night. Papa rewarded him when he turned eighteen, entrusting him with the busy Avellino route.

  Aldo had never ventured to Cucino’s
. He had never experienced the need to break free of the confining Fiorillo 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 Fiorillo, 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, especially 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 perpetually 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 quizzically. “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?”