by Sally Bryan
But talk about being scared witless.
I was still feeling the anxiety from last night’s encounter and I’ll never know how we didn’t end up smashing through the door and breaking for the hills.
Dayna considered us from over her small cup of coffee. “You met Alessia?” Ah, so she did know.
I shuffled as Arwen turned visibly away to glare at a bird that’d perched on a table outside. “Um, briefly. We came down for a glass of water. She was…”
“You were discussing the Fortezza Medicea di Poggio Imperiale?” There was an odd twinkle in her eye that unsettled me. “She said you were showing an interest.”
Arwen’s face, “the what?”
“My apologies. It’s the Medici fortress in Poggibonsi.”
Arwen gawked and turned back out the window, doubtless looking for signs of the moon.
Dayna shrugged, “her English is abysmal, so maybe she misinterpreted but I’ll show you the place in a day or two. There’s presently summer concerts, opera, stilt walkers, cake stalls, fireworks, that kind of thing. We can all go. Have some bread.” She prodded the plate towards us and I realised Arwen’s foot had been pressing down on mine for a while. “The first time I saw Poggibonsi, I actually preferred it to Lucca. Alessia calls me crazy.” She laughed, which prompted the two of us to laugh nervously along with her. “Orange juice?” She raised the carafe and reached over to find an empty spot on the table, cramming the juice between plates of egg and freshly sliced tomato. “I made it this morning, fresh from the tree in the garden.”
In which case, like the wine, I’d better not say no and I filled our glasses to the top. “Poggibonsi?”
“It’ll be my pleasure. Ham? Coffee? And just so you’re aware, in case you didn’t notice the en-suite … you know … the one in your room,” she made a strange downward inflection on the your, “it has fully functional taps and everything.”
“What?” I asked, my head spinning from so many words too early in the morning.
“You said you came down for a glass of water.” She was definitely one of those annoying morning people and it was hard to tell how much Dayna was enjoying this exchange but more to the point - Our room?
Arwen leaned towards my ear and if she was intending to whisper she failed because it came out more as a croak, “it looks like we now have our base, cos we ain’t ever leaving this place,” and I couldn’t be sure whether Dayna heard or not.
She coughed and glanced at her watch. “Maybe we could do Poggibonsi after breakfast? Ah, damn it,” she shook her head, “I have to drive to Siena to collect the labour,” she made a fist and playfully struck the table, “oh, what a shame. I was a little worried, you know, in case I went into labour but there’s no way out of it. Sorry.” She was looking down into her fruit salad, bottom lip protruding and then her eye poked up from below.
But this wouldn’t do at all, I’d told her only yesterday she shouldn’t be rushing about in her condition. I readjusted myself on the cushion and was about to offer going in her stead when Arwen piped up.
“How about I go for you?” Her face was full of concern, which made me sceptical.
“What, really? You wouldn’t mind?” Dayna stood and when her back was turned, Arwen stuck her tongue out at me and I knew it at once. She’d skilfully avoided having to harvest grapes, which I was sure Dayna was about to rope me into doing.
She approached the kitchen countertop, reached behind the spice rack and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Here’s the address. There are usually three or four men waiting around, the usuals, and they’ll recognise the minivan and jump straight in. When you drive them back, there’s no need to show them how to pick the grapes, they already know how.” How much of this was her sense of humour and how much her crazy? “Oh, and you wouldn’t mind going to the supermarket? The items I need are listed below the address and if you can deliver the wine boxes that are already packed in the van to the address on the other side, that’d be a great help … best get that one out of the way first, I’d prefer having the labour arrive sober.”
Arwen stood to snatch the paper from Dayna’s grasp and momentarily found herself unable to respond. Aye, the girl was literally speechless, which in my experience takes an awful lot of doing and on some levels, Dayna had to be congratulated. Arwen dumped herself back in her seat and began piling cheese, ham and bread onto her plate before finally managing her retort. “So Dayna, got any more tour victims lined up today?”
I cringed at that and this time it was I who pressed down on Arwen’s foot because it had been a little uncalled for and Dayna definitely heard that one. I expected our host come jailer to reply on the defensive because her forehead furrowed and her mouth began to open when instead her tired face softened and her gaze shifted between the two of us and we couldn’t help twisting around to follow her line of sight.
Because Alessia was traipsing towards the table, clutching her dressing gown tight about her body as though it was cold when it was anything but, her exceptionally long brown hair left free to roam down her back, brittle as it looked and in need of some serious care. Her eyes were indeed sunken, which was tragic because they possessed a certain intensity, complimented by a jaw that gave her a hawkish appearance. She might have been beautiful, if not malnourished to the extreme, and I wasn’t sure how happy I was to finally be getting a good look at the mysterious Alessia.
Arwen and I were invisible as Alessia seemingly floated towards Dayna and hunched over to carefully place her arms around the English girl in a warm embrace, no words spoken, and they kissed closed mouthed for a count of three or four.
Arwen’s hand leapt around my wrist and I had to suppress a surprised yelp. I glared at Dayna’s belly, surely only days from delivery, as the shock struck me.
Dayna was a lesbian?
Maybe that explained all the madness around here?
Alessia released her lips and their hands remained together as she trailed away and Alessia again grabbed the sides of her gown as she wandered out through the opened door.
Dayna was quick to call out, “mangia qualcosa stamattina, per favore, Alessia,” her voice was heavy with worry, her face contorted with utter love and feeling. “Alessia?”
“No, non ho fame.” She went farther outside and through the window I watched as she strayed aimlessly down the slope in her bare feet, to stop halfway before the first row of vines.
I pulled myself away in an effort to eat something but there were no tastes, the egg, ham and bread bland on my palate. Something had happened here at the Giordano Vineyard, my guess was it had happened recently and I was both intrigued and saddened.
Dayna had slid her seat to face the window and again, I glanced outside to see Alessia standing in the open, staring into nothing as the small breeze lifted her hair.
It was something that unfortunately I recognised. And the reason I recognised what I was seeing was because my very first childhood memories were so similar.
My mother had so often done the same.
* * *
After my mother had crashed the car and injured my brother, she’d fallen into a depression that had lasted many months. At the time, I was a child of three, my cognition was only just forming and I was slowly beginning to realise I existed in this world. I do recall my mother, vaguely; her lying in bed throughout the day, refusing to speak, to look at me even, of seeing her shape standing in the garden as she stared out into the Highlands that surrounded us. She always wore that long grey gown that was so large for her petite frame that the ends would traipse over the soggy ground from where the mud patches became prominent. I remember seeing my dad cry once and that he’d hastily wiped his face when he noticed me watching.
Depression can strike any person for any reason and can cause symptoms of anxiety, sadness, helplessness, guilt, weight loss, fatigue and in the case of my mother, suicide. It can also offset sleeping patterns, as in the case of Alessia, and although I might not yet possess my piece of paper, I knew exactly
what it was afflicting that poor girl.
It was approaching ten in the morning, the sun was already oppressive and I very nearly had my first full cartload of harvested grapes. Arwen had been gone a couple of hours and the silence of her absence had presented the opportunity for reflection. I finished stripping a vine of its fruit and whistled, hoping to attract the attention of Salvo who’d been in and out of the barn all morning. He looked down and I waved and a minute later he joined me by the cart.
“Ok, I handle.”
“Let me help.”
We both grunted as he pulled and I pushed. The dirt path had been so worn down by countless thousands of similar trips that the earth almost resembled asphalt and as long as we didn’t veer off track and over the less travelled ground then the two of us made easy work hauling the load into the barn and parking it beside the ludicrous grape press.
“Here we remove grape and throw bad grape in there,” he tossed a rotten one over his shoulder into an industrial-sized rubbish bin before expertly stripping an entire stalk into the press. “We make premium wine, which mean bad grape not go in machine. I say that well?”
“Well enough for me to understand.”
He was a friendly looking man with a belly that slightly pushed out his workman’s overalls, was overly generous with the smiles and again wore that red baseball cap that had a miniature flag of Italy on its peak. His face was heavy with stubble and I put him to be about forty years of age. “I thank you for helping Alessia,” he said, gesturing with a hand that I should pitch in with the monotonous but essential task.
I tossed a bad grape towards the giant rubbish bin and missed. “I thought it was Dayna I was helping. It’s her vineyard, isn’t it?”
He laughed and shook his head. “No, not Dayna, Alessia. At least, it is now.”
I stopped and considered that response. Why not, Alessia? Nobody had told me anything. But I decided against shattering Salvo’s vision of the altruistic Freya by telling him we were only helping largely against our will, and still hadn’t come to terms with how that had even happened. But since I was here, and working, apparently pro bono, I at least deserved an explanation as to why I was doing it, for the moment voluntarily, and all whilst my valuable travelling time was diminishing by the hour.
“I’d like to know what happened here. Could you please tell me?”
He hesitated but then after seeing we still had a full cart of grapes to strip for the press, decided there’d be no harm in talking. “A lot happened but mostly Alberto died and everything went to hell.”
“Alberto was their,” I struggled to even come up with a name for the term and found it even harder to say it, “he was their live-in lover?” I assumed that someone, somehow, probably had something to do with Dayna being pregnant but then I gave it a moment’s thought and realised that explanation made no sense. Alessia was the one who’d taken the death of this Alberto far worse than Dayna.
Salvo’s dark brows dipped and I didn’t think he understood my words anyway. “He was Alessia’s father.”
“Ahhhh.” I could occasionally be slow to catch on, was I supposed to be an expert on how lesbians lived suddenly? I only had my own experiences to draw on and they merely involved living nomadically with a woman who could barely bring herself to be touched.
After a second, I realised Alberto had to be the man in the photos and I recalled the small table in the house with the flowers and candles and how it was most probably a shrine. I’d since taken an opportunity to peak behind some of the other photos and found they were all images of either Alessia, Dayna, Alessia and Dayna, or another woman who looked strikingly like Alessia, who I put to be her mother.
Salvo continued to explain how Alberto had suffered a heart attack and died, which had happened only a few weeks before, at the worst possible time, as though there was ever a good time to die, and how those two poor girls had been left with the incredible task of running the family business by themselves, amidst a mass walkout of workers, many of whom blamed Alessia’s lesbianism for a long string of bad luck, even as they were undergoing an expansion.
He needed a long time to explain and by the time he had, we’d finished the task but I wasn’t about to leave now.
“Who’s the father of the baby then?”
He removed the cap and ran his fingers through thinning black strands. “Beh, just one of Alessia’s old friend … used to love her, she didn’t love him and now he have baby with girlfriend of Alessia,” he laughed, “funny world, funny old world.” With his fingers, he drew in the air a crude rectangular outline and pumped his fist and I could only imagine how it was intended. Of course, I knew all about artificial insemination and assumed that was what Salvo meant. “But he live in Switzerland and won’t be part of family from what I know. The girls do family on their own.” He sighed and looked unhappy. “They try anyway.” He replaced his cap and leaned against the wheel that would crush the grapes. “Do I say it right? My English not good.”
“Grammatical errors here and there but I understand everything you’re saying.”
He grabbed ahold of the wheel but delayed turning it. “Alessia, I know her many year but now she don’t speak much … has lots all hope.”
“Lost all hope,” I corrected him.
He shrugged and peered into the trough. “I help best I can. I been here many year and know nothing else, no other trade, only wine. I do everything here now but I’m only one man and production is down seventy percent. Without wine, contracts get cancelled and Alessia lose her home and business. Alberto’s daughter, my friend but what can I do?” He turned the lever, the gushing commenced and he had to raise his voice above the squelching of grapes and squeaking of the wheel to say, “what they need is help, money and a miracle.”
I returned with the cart to the vines feeling justifiably subdued. Life so often had a way of kicking you when you were already down and I had a terrible image of Dayna, Alessia and a baby losing this place and finding themselves on the streets.
I reached for my phone and visited the reviews for the Giordano Vineyard on TripAdvisor, bracing myself for the bad news.
‘The worst tour in Tuscany! They should have their tour license revoked, the brown haired girl wanted to be anywhere else but there, a disgrace. The banging was non-stop, the food terrible, there was too much walking in the dirt and I got sunburned. The wine was ok but ruined by everything else. Did I mention the wine shop was fully functional and operating - Funny that!’
There were several more similar mean-spirited reviews and I took a moment to write my own, praising the tour, the wine, the food, the staff, everything, though what good it would do now, I couldn’t say. But I had to do something and such a small act, dispatched to cyberspace and left to its own destiny felt so futile against such overwhelming opposition.
I was training to be a doctor and knew nothing about business, especially running one and especially not running a vineyard but to be here and to experience this place, to view its scale and beauty, there was only potential, surely. I mean, the Giordano Vineyard had existed for four hundred years already. How much would be needed for the glory days to return?
Twenty minutes later I could see Dayna and Alessia, arm in arm, strolling around the grounds. Alessia was dressed now and wore a pair of grey jogging bottoms with a hoody. At first, they remained near the house, walking around its perimeter five or six times but later they ambled down the grassy section of the slope where no vines were planted. Instead, there were flowers and trees, some of which had oranges hanging from the branches. At the end of the slope trickled a stream and there together they spent a while standing as Alessia’s head rested on Dayna’s shoulder. Then Dayna left Alessia sitting on the bank and slowly made her way through the vines to where I worked.
“You’re toiling very hard and I feel very bad.” She looked larger than ever, to see her down here now, in a bright yellow maternity dress. Her face and arms perspired and she carried her trademark fan that she flapped
a few inches from her face. “I spoke to Salvo.”
I placed down my pruning scissors and gave her my full attention. “He told me what happened and I’m very sorry for your loss, as well as for all the rotten bloody luck you’ve been having around here. I’m sure it was the last thing you needed right now,” she was about to interject but I was quick to cut her off, “and I’d just like you to know that if there’s any way I can help then I’m here to offer you my service.” Did I really just say that? I paused and then nodded, as much for myself as for Dayna. “That’s right. So you don’t need to worry or stress yourself out, at least not over plotting to have me stay because I’m staying, so please relax.”
Her head tipped back and she took a deep relieving breath. “Thank you.” Her cheeks flushed and began to glow like her arms and she had to blink rapidly to quell the onset of tears. “I feel so bad for taking advantage of your good nature, I don’t know what I was thinking, or how I expected it to turn out.” She fanned her face with more vigour and laughed. It was nice to finally speak to the real Dayna, no pretences. “I want you to know that I’m really not crazy but what choice did I have? Two kind-hearted girls turned up at my door and I took your arrival as a gift from God … if he even exists. Alessia no longer seems to think so.”
My head tilted, “how is Alessia, really?”
She gazed over the vines to settle on her broken lover still sitting on the bank of that small stream, her feet dipping into the water and I wondered what kind of a person she’d been only a few short weeks before.
“She took it particularly bad and it hardly helped that Alberto had been in such anguish when he died,” her jaw clenched and I knew not to ask about that though usually, there was only one thing that caused men such pain. “Alessia adored her dad, Alberto was one of the best men you could ever hope to meet but for whatever reason, she’s become convinced he didn’t love her.”
“Why?”
She shrugged and felt her belly, “because she never married and had children, or so she thinks, but it was never true, of that I’m certain. He used to bemoan not having a son but it always seemed in jest to me. Still, a man likes to leave a legacy, to pass down his knowledge, what he’s worked for, his home, and instead, he had a lesbian daughter.”