I lay out a cloth and unpacked the basket. The smell of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto roused her to sitting.
‘I was beginning to think you weren’t feeling well.’
‘So was I,’ she replied, pulling out a scarf from her pocket and wrapping it around her forehead, sweeping her thick curls away from her shoulders. She gazed down at the sea, onyx-blue in the afternoon rays. From way up here its texture was burnt sugar, sunlight gleaming in toasted flecks. My coast snaked out in defiant curves, mountains rising to meet their sky in stubborn peaks.
‘I haven’t been here in too long, Santina. It’s just what I needed.’
I sat beside her and reached into the basket for a peach. I could feel her watch me take a hungry bite.
‘Apetito!’ she laughed.
I wiped the juice from my mouth and echoed her.
We munched in settled silence, she nibbling at some fresh rolls I had cooked that morning before church, me lost in the tangy sweetness of my fruit.
I turned my gaze away from the compelling view of the water stretching out to Capri, the Galli islands rising up out of the water, stories of those sirens luring sailors to their deaths there floating in my mind.
That’s when she started to sob.
‘Rosalia?’ I reached for her hand. She squeezed it.
‘Santina, I should be the happiest woman in town,’ she whispered through snatched breaths, trying to hold back her tears and failing. ‘I didn’t think I had any tears left. Look at me! A stupid mess.’
I watched her drop her head onto both her hands. Her sobs juddered down her back. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. I’d felt her cry like this before, but I knew these tears weren’t for her brother. I held the space, resisting a need for words, for consolation, for questions. I let the waves roll through her, like watching a summer storm blow in from the coast and knowing the rain would disappear just as quick.
Her breaths deepened.
‘I am to be his wife. I’ve dreamed of this moment. I was full of it all. I was bursting with love. Now I know I’m about to start my life as a fiancée with a lie.’
I restrained my confusion. She filled the gap.
‘I can’t face telling him the truth about me, Santina. I can barely tell you. No one knows. Only Mamma, and my eldest sister. They were with me when it happened.’
‘You can tell me. If you want to.’
‘They ripped out my womb, Santina.’
She looked at me square in the face, her despair wrapped around a steel of defiance I’d not seen before. It made my heart ache.
‘You can trust me, Rosalia.’
She took a breath to speak. Her tears cut through the thought, her sudden collapse into painful memories at odds with the startling beauty around us. Perhaps that’s why she wanted to come up here. See our little world for the speck that it was, yearning for the majesty of our mountains to pale her woes into insignificance.
‘I’m sorry, Santina. I wanted to stay strong. Then it all crashed down around me. This is the man I want to grow old with. But I know I will never give him what will make him the happiest man in Positano.’
‘You’re the person who will do that.’
‘No. Not when I start life together with a lie. I can’t tell him, Santina. I can’t tell him the truth. It will break us.’
‘And a lie?’ I asked. The question was a lick of bile. I was in no place to offer such questions. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’
She nodded, then took an unhurried breath. ‘I was sixteen. I thought it was just a really bad cycle. I was doubled in pain. My mother told me to stop fussing, but when a fever struck and didn’t break even by the morning they eventually took me to Sorrento. The doctors found a cyst on each ovary. Any longer and they would have burst and we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.’
Her eyes filled. I watched her clamp down the tears.
‘They operated but weren’t able to save my womb. It’s all gone, Santina. I’m half a woman.’
Her words were ash. She had buried the pain well. I ought to have sensed it. I ought to have intuited that her sunny smile was all the brighter for having felt such brutal loss. It made perfect sense. It made me love her even more.
‘You’ve carried your loss well, Rosalia. Like a warrior. I can only imagine what you must have gone through till now.’
‘Maybe you can. Most girls can’t. It’s like inside I’m an old woman. It’s like the life has been spent already. There’s no glow of the future. I just don’t know if I can tell Pasquale. He’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps I’ll just wait for nature to take its course.’
Her face turned toward the sea. I watched her feel the breeze caress her skin.
‘You are a beautiful, strong woman, Rosalia. Pasquale loves you for that, not for what might be, but for who you are right now.’
‘You and I both know men don’t marry the person in front of them. They marry the person they’ve planned us to become. And maybe that’s romantic, their idealized versions of us as perfect mothers and lovers. I used to believe that. With all my heart. Maybe more so because I had to hide my truth. But now I feel he’s sketched me and I’m a poor impersonator. Like I’ve been wearing a costume of me and dangled an illusion under his eyes. That makes me weak. And cruel. And selfish.’
‘And living the only way you know how. You are more than that illusion, surely?’
‘I don’t know. What do you do all day? Take care of a child. Feed a household. Run it, for heaven’s sake. All these things I will never do.’
I looked into her eyes, glistening with a vulnerability I now understood had been locked away for so long.
‘I can see you are hurting. A great deal.’
‘I’m about to ruin my one chance at love, Santina. Could you do that?’
The question smarted. ‘I can’t be sure there’s one chance. That seems so final. So desperate. Like we have to earn it and grasp it before it slips away. Is love that ethereal? Isn’t that storybook love? I think two souls either fit or don’t.’
Paolino’s kiss flirted into my mind, followed by the whispered silhouette of the Major, of him drinking in the moonlight, reading to me, cooking. The memories tangled like the crispy mess of seaweed wafted to shore along a November bay.
‘I want to believe you, Santina.’
‘I think Pasquale will love you however brutal the truth is. You two are made for one another. I watch him with you and you with him. There’s a haze of happiness, a quiet electric that hums about you.’
She looked at me, willing me on, needing me to throw down an anchor.
‘But it is your choice. Always. You want to keep this from him, then you may. That is your right. But if concealing the deepest secret is going to break you, then you must find the courage to test his love. Lay the naked truth between you.’ I could see Rosalia filled in my sentiments with pictures of Paolino, and I knew I would never be able to tell her that I had learnt this from what the Major and I shared, from our last tender exchange upon the terrace before we lay our memory of that night to bed. ‘I don’t know what is more intoxicating than a lover laying themselves bare, granting permission for another to see their vulnerabilities, whatever the outcome. Isn’t that the greatest expression of love? Inviting your lover to shine light on all those secret crevices you’ve kept hidden? From yourself even?’ I was back on my bed, easing myself open to him without fear, feeling courage score through me, marvelling at my body, at his. ‘And if that doesn’t draw two people together, surely they do not love one another after all?’
‘You speak like a poem, Santina. It’s beautiful. And terrifying.’
‘And that is love, Rosalia. It’s not perfection. It’s nature. Life bursting out despite the random mess and order of things. It’s the plants that grow in shade and those that gasp for sun. You can’t rein it.’
She let out a sigh, an autumn breeze lifting the dead leaves with the first chill of winter.
‘You’re hu
rting now, Rosalia. You have the right to feel that. You have the right to mourn.’
Her lips unfurled toward a teary smile. I smoothed a trickle off her cheek, then squeezed her into me. In the safety of my arms she surrendered to a second wave of grief. I felt her body shake through me, pummelling my chest.
‘I should have left after all. I should have just gone to the convent like they told me to. Never listened to anybody. Now look at this mess!’
‘You are braver than that, Rosalia. You didn’t let them crush you. You’re terrified now. That’s normal. But my Rosalia is strong enough to feel the pain and smile like it was the best day of her life. I know she isn’t scared to cry and shout and grieve and know that joy and sorrow are woven of the same thread.’
She straightened.
I’d never seen her so beautiful.
There was something compelling about her vulnerability. The apricot light glinted her hair with a halo. She was luminous: bare, true, fierce.
‘How did you get so wise?’ she sighed through a wet smile. ‘It’s like you’ve lived a whole life before you came to town from the mountain.’
I knew it was the Major, not my start in the mountains, who’d unravelled my life, drawn me to its molten center, then ushered me back to the cool, blistered yet bolstered.
‘I could say the same about you, no?’
‘I wanted to tell you for so long, but I didn’t want you to share the burden.’
‘Your secrets are your truth. I’m inside you now. And you, me.’
‘I love you, Santina. There’s no one else here I could have even thought about telling. Sometimes I believe just thinking something sets gossips’ tongues clicking.’
‘You may be right,’ I said, with a smile she mirrored. I reached for her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m here. Always. You know that, don’t you?’
She nodded, tears pricking her eyes that she refused to let fall.
‘You promise me something?’
‘What’s that, Rosalia?’
‘I don’t want you to stop yourself sharing the gory details when you and Paolino make babies, just because of me.’
I shook my head with a smile.
‘You can’t go all bashful now, Santina. Not after the way you just said your little sermon about love. I know he’s a catch, but I never thought Paolino would make a girl speak like that! Those words from someone who’s been whisked away by a sheer force of nature. Something you’re not telling me, signorina?’
‘You’re twisting my words now.’
‘I’m saying you spoke like a goddess – I didn’t know you had it in you!’
‘There’s Rosalia!’
She grabbed my chin and squeezed it, planting noisy kisses on each of my cheeks. She smelled salty.
I watched her flop back onto the grass, legs and arms wide with abandon.
‘And then there’s the sky,’ she said, her voice a dance again. ‘All this whirrs around and inside, but the sky? It changes. It threatens us with storms. But it never goes away.’
I rolled back onto the grass beside her. The earth rose up to meet our bones. I let the weight of me sink deeper into the grass, dizzy with my friend’s anguish, the tired quiet after tears. We watched a cotton fray of cloud lazy across the blue above us.
‘Only one saying that will save me now, Santina.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, turning my head to face her.
She looked back at me, squinting, tear-stained, luminous like the glint of a dark crystal. ‘Always look up.’
I returned to the villa satiated with fresh air, my friend’s tears and laughter. The familiar quiet enveloped me like an embrace. Despite the stillness, the distinct energy of the house being once again full dipped the silence into a welcoming ochre rather than purple shadows. I placed the basket upon the kitchen table, knowing that there was little time before the Sunday sitter would leave after settling Elizabeth to sleep.
I reached the vegetable garden. Amongst the crunched arches of cavolo nero and the proud spiked leaves of the artichokes I saw a crouched Adeline. She looked up as I approached. She started. I would have liked to shake the sense of disturbing a young deer in the woods.
‘Good evening, signora.’ My voice powdered like confectionery sugar; I hoped she wouldn’t receive it as patronizing, the help condescending as if she were a wild animal to be lured away to safety.
Her blue eyes bored into me. Languid pools where once lights shone. If I looked at the world through her prism I might once have seen shards of red and orange in there, if, as she had tried to persuade me, the vision of colour was as much about the feeling a subject elicited than the actual shade the naked eye saw. It had taken me a while to understand this concept, but as I watched her now, her auburn hair tumbling in distracted waves down to the middle of her back, her nightdress hanging on limp strands over her bony shoulders, I could only see her painted in swirls of blues and greys, struck through with purple bolts.
‘It is heaven here, Santina! These leaves. I can’t stop touching them.’
I watched her fingers reach for the base and caress them up to the tip, as if she were stroking a cat’s chin.
‘We can pick some, for dinner. If signora would like?’
‘I would. Don’t call me signora.’
I nodded and walked to the potting counter for some secateurs. When I reached her again, she was wandering around the proud sprigs of chard. The Major had insisted we plant all colors, alternating them in a pattern of purple, yellow, then white. Something that wasn’t lost on the arched humor of my brother.
‘And their smell, Santina. It’s like wet earth and vanilla. Iron and sugar.’
I watched her bury her face into them, hoping she wasn’t bruising the leaves, one of the Major’s many pet peeves.
I reached down and began to snip at the base, sensing which were the most mature, mindful of leaving the smaller leaves at the center to grow further. With careful incisions the plant would keep sprouting throughout the summer and into early autumn. She walked over to me and snatched the secateurs from me. My hands itched.
‘I can taste them already,’ she said, snipping with haphazard strokes, leaving the plants butchered. I trailed after her, trying and failing to judge the appropriate time to ease the tool from her. She spun around to me with a sudden movement, the tip of the secateurs almost skimming the front of my blouse.
‘And how would you cook them then, Santina? How will you make it even more delicious for me?’ She waved her hand around with the open blade.
‘I would begin with a little garlic, I think,’ I said, trying to still her erratic movements along the patch by holding her attention. ‘No, I would warm a pan with the cavolo and chard in a little bit of water, a vapore, signora, steaming them. Just as they start to wilt, I’d pour in some olive oil and paper slices of garlic, you know?’
I edged closer to her with each description, slowing my language to lull her away from her unpredictable harvesting. When I felt her ease to stillness, I crouched beside her. ‘Here, may I show you how they like to be cut best?’
I reached a gentle hand toward the base of the tool but she whipped up to standing at the same time, splicing the blade across my finger. I looked down. It wasn’t until I saw the thin strip of my blood that I felt the sting.
‘Oh Santina! You are hurt! You’re bleeding!’ I could sense the panic bubbling beneath her words, which forced me to stifle my own.
‘It’s fine, I will see to it,’ I said, walking toward the water spout.
‘No, not fine!’ she called back, trailing in my shadow, ‘do let me cover it, we must wash it, we must disinfect it, there’s all manner of deadly things to catch from blades. This is awful, this is just awful. I’ve hurt you, haven’t I? It was me, wasn’t it?’
Her words switch-bladed across one another as she swirled her tool in the air. I wished it away from her paper skin, the faded beauty of her face, a marble bust at the cemetery, features worn from weather, smoothed and fa
ded with an age of elements and neglect, frozen in a faraway soulless expression.
‘Please give me the secateurs, signora.’
She froze. Her eyes darted down to the blade. A thin outline of my blood traced the tip.
‘A crushed pomegranate red,’ she said, looking down at it with the hot gaze she once reserved for her painting.
‘I will wash them, signora. Please may I have them?’
‘A bleeding heart. A garnet in the dark. Squashed blackberries in my hand.’
I reached out and wrapped a firm hand around the base of the tool. Her grip loosened. I ignored the pounding in my chest. My arm hooked into hers. I felt the empty weight of her thin arm rest upon mine. We began to retrace her steps back up to her room, her bare feet imprinting an earthy trail up the steps to the terrace and onward through the house, leaving the rugged pile of snatched leaves to soften in a purple-orange dusk.
CHAPTER 22
Adeline and I stepped into her room. The double doors that led onto her end of the upper terrace were open wide, the full-length wooden shutters swinging back and forth on the intermittent breeze. Wires ran across the space, hooking onto the wooden cornice, webbing above us like the washing lines down in the vicoli. The draught wafting between the open window and the doors on the adjacent wall lifted the ends of the paintings that hung along the wire. The space above our heads was a blaze of color. Frantic explosions of hues, hurried splats, scrawls of charcoal created a noise that together with the bold vermillion, ochre and cerulean of the painted wooden ceiling above made the whole space sing, a choir’s furious crescendo.
Off my look Adeline stopped short. ‘Yes, Santina, I have been busy these past few days. Does it terrify you so?’
‘No,’ I stumbled, stripped by her arrow of truth, ‘I’m glad signora is painting again.’
‘So is signora. Do stop calling me that foul name, my dear, it makes me feel like I’m living on a plantation. Or worse, one of those ghastly women who swan about in India sipping gin all day.’
My eye darted to her wash table and the three glass tumblers where day-old ice cubes of her gin and tonics had melted over crushed limes, browning at the edges in the heat.
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