All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  Frankie defended the idea to Prima. The trip seemed like the right thing to do. They had no other choice; it had the potential to bring joy, transformation, the poetry and crescendo of reunion. The same rationale Prima had once applied to her own cursed family adventure.

  When they reach the olive grove, they take off their shoes and walk through the knotty grass. Frankie takes a photo of Kelly Anne under the canopy of one of the trees, her elbow resting on a branch, her lovely, smooth, tanned bare legs crossed at the ankles. Prima gets a picture of them both in the same spot, then sitting on the grass, then holding hands. She’s Kelly Anne’s number one fan and has pretty much insisted Frankie propose to her before she comes to her senses and dumps him.

  Vito Leone hobbles toward them with his cane. He’s changed into a pair of sagging jeans, a thin V-neck sweater that shows a thick mound of white chest hair, and a wide-brimmed panama hat. Not what Frankie expected from the great love of his mother’s life, but a kind man nonetheless.

  He takes the camera from Prima and snaps a photo of the three of them. Prima’s arm is tight around Kelly Anne. “La famiglia Grasso,” he says.

  It doesn’t feel strange to have Vito lead them around, talking in his broken English. His mind zigs and zags all over the place, switching from one memory of Maddalena to another without transition, and they have a hard time keeping up, connecting the dots, but his English gets better the longer he goes on. Something about him reminds Frankie of Zio Giulio. He puts his arm around the old man’s shoulders as they walk.

  “Follow me,” Vito says. “Something special to see.”

  He leads them down a path toward a darker part of the grove, into the woods. The trees grow taller and closer together and block the sun, which has fallen a bit now that’s it’s almost five o’clock. “Qui,” he says when they reach a clearing. “Here. This was Maddalena’s favorite place.” The girls used to gather in this clearing, he explains, and tell secrets and put on plays. They wrote the plays in their head and somehow kept them straight without writing them down. If she’d had the chance, Maddalena would have made a very good actress. She used to do impressions for her friends. Carolina was the bully and ran the shows, dictating who performed what and when. The girls didn’t know it, but Vito and his friend Buccio used to hide behind the trees over there and spy on them. “Every time Maddalena took the stage,” Vito says, “I cannot breathe.”

  “That’s how you feel about me, right, Frankie?” says Kelly Anne.

  “Ganzo, eh?” Vito asks.

  “Ganzo?”

  “Ganzo means, how you say, cool?”

  “Ganzo, yes, I like that,” says Frankie.

  “Something special else I have for you,” Vito says. “Follow me.”

  ANTONIO WAKES TO a dark room and the smell of anchovies and roasted peppers. It’s five thirty in the afternoon, and someone in the Piccinelli kitchen is cooking the merenda. For the first time in their lives, he and Maddalena have slept through lunch.

  He dresses her and puts back on the clothes he was wearing when he arrived, and together they walk through the empty house. There’s laughter coming from the terrace, and when they walk out into the cool June evening, they find a crowd waiting for them. Carolina is lying on a lounge chair with a wide, blank smile and a glass of wine in her right hand. The woman standing behind her braiding her hair introduces herself as her daughter, their niece, Donatella. Donatella’s brother, Sergio, in his own lounge chair, stands to greet them and introduces his wife, Anna. The teenage boy from the store is there, Ignazio, son of Celestina, and a group of his buddies. An entire family of strangers has gathered in honor of their American visitors. Sergio promises that more will come, and keep coming, for dinner and cards, long into the night.

  On the table is a platter of supplì and peppers and figs and cheese—too much food, in Antonio’s opinion, for the traditional merenda—but it’s been so long since he’s eaten like this at this time of day that he doesn’t question them when they fix his and Maddalena’s plates. Instead they sit on a bench by the railing and eat greedily with both hands and say little, the juice of the figs running down their chins. They refill their wineglasses. He asks where his children and Vito are, but no one knows or seems to be concerned that they haven’t returned from their walk. Donatella turns on the stereo, and Maddalena taps her foot to the beat of an Italian song from the eighties. The next song is a rumba from the fifties. The one after that used to be played by the traveling bands during the war. Antonio can’t help smiling.

  “What is it, Zio?” asks Donatella.

  “One thing I forgot about Italy,” he says. “The years are all mixed together.”

  “Every day is yesterday here,” says Sergio.

  After a while, Carolina comes to sit beside her sister on the bench. They grip each other’s hands and look into each other’s eyes but say nothing. “La Piccinina” comes on. Carolina knows the words, and Maddalena seems to follow the tune, and in this way they sing along. The sun is quickly going down over the mountains. There’s almost a chill in the air. This mountain chill, too, Antonio has somehow forgotten; this and the music of the slamming shutters and the women snapping their sheets out their windows and the ringing of the church bell. He stands at the railing and looks down at the cars and buses and the tourist couples left on the street, thinking, morbidly, how the last Grassos and Piccinellis of his generation are here on this porch, and that soon, very soon, they will be the stories hanging from the trees, stories no one will be interested enough in to tell. Any old person worth his bones knows this, it’s nothing new or profound, but when you see it up close, it’s a shock, it stops you.

  There’s some commotion in the street, and when Antonio looks up, he sees, in the near distance, Prima and Kelly Anne and Vito Leone walking toward them. In the middle of the street, weaving slowly among them and the passing cars, is Frankie, riding a bicycle.

  Antonio nudges Maddalena. “Do you see?” He helps her to her feet, steadies her at the railing. “Look who’s coming.”

  They lean side by side against the railing, his hand on the small of her back, and watch as Frankie pedals toward them on a rickety heap of silver metal with one oversize front wheel and the chain hanging down and two half-deflated tires lumpy on the asphalt. Leave it to Vito Leone to hold on to that jalopy for half a century. Antonio wouldn’t be surprised if he still rode it himself—in the middle of the night, maybe, while Carolina slept, under the moonlight, daydreaming. It’s a wonder the bike moves at all, but here it comes, carrying Frankie up the hill in a tipsy wobble, about to collapse under his weight.

  “Ma!” Frankie calls out. “Hey, Ma! Check me out!”

  Maddalena leans forward to get a better look. As she waves to the handsome young man on the bike, what she’s thinking is, How will I choose? Even from here, she can see the love in the boy’s eyes. He’s offering her his best life. An adventure. She’s tempted to run down the stairs, jump on the handlebars, and say, Take me to Broccostella! and together they’d glide down the hill into the woods, like they did last week. But not only is Maddalena too tired to run, there’s the old man beside her, his strong hand on her back, holding her in place. She feels safe with him. In his eyes, too, there is love. She turns, and everywhere—even in these strangers on their lounge chairs—love stares back at her. The white-haired man lifting his cane at her from the street. The fat lady with the limp. Even the young German girl. They look at her with their big, shiny eyes waiting for her to choose which man she’ll spend her life with. But what if she wants them both? Can’t she have both?

  The boy on the bike comes closer. She’s worried he’ll fall. She blows him a kiss to stall while she tries to decide what to do next. Then the old man whispers something in her ear. It makes no sense, but she considers it. She nods. I don’t know this play, she thinks. But she’s an actress; she can do it. It will be good practice. So she calls out, as loud as she can, to the young man on the bike: “Frankie!” she says. “There’s my Fran
kie!”

  He calls back, “Ma!” and starts waving like a crazy person, almost crashing into a car. “Ma! Ma!”

  The man beside Maddalena whispers to her again, and she calls out to the woman with the bad leg, “Prima!” and then she, too, starts waving back and jumping up and down. You’ve never seen two grown people so excited for something so simple. It’s fun, like being onstage in the olive grove. The old man notices what a hit it is and keeps giving her words to call out and telling her what gestures to make with her arms, so Maddalena goes along, keeps saying the lines—“Frankie! Prima! Come here! I’ve missed you!”—until the young man jumps off the bike and, the woman not far behind, runs up the stairs and onto the terrace and into her outstretched arms.

  THAT NIGHT, THEY walk to the gorge to look at the stars. It’s the highest point in the village, Donatella explains, up a dirt road beyond the church and the graveyard, at the end of a path too narrow for cars. Vito carries a flashlight but doesn’t switch it on. The stars are enough.

  Prima walks with him, her arm looped around his, in the middle of the pack, her father beside her, her cousins in front smoking and talking a mile a minute, Frankie and Kelly Anne behind. Prima can’t stop looking at the sky. She’s never seen it so close and bright and inescapable. It should be scary how it presses down on them, the stars sharp as spears, and yet she feels powerfully enormous, a wandering giant. The top of her head brushes the heavens. She could blame the four glasses of wine she had at dinner, or the thin air, but in fact, neither has had any effect. She blames the sky. Her mother’s sky. Now that she’s under it, she understands how impossible it would be to leave it, how you spend the rest of your life feeling small and strange and far away.

  For a minute today, just one minute, Prima had her back. Her mother called her by her name, and it was a miracle. If the miracle happens again, somehow, before they leave in a few days, and lasts long enough, Prima would love nothing more than to tell her she’s sorry, that she understands now, finally, why she didn’t want to be reminded of this place she lost, where she walked gigantic beside the boy she loved up the path to where the sky began.

  Prima has other apologies to make, starting with Allison Grey. The girl has no sense, but neither did Prima at her age, neither does any woman who loves with her soul. Prima doesn’t pretend to understand how men love, but she suspects it’s from the body and the heart and can’t compare. It’s a kind of poverty, being a man. Arm in arm with Vito Leone, stepping slowly over rocks and wildflowers, it occurs to her that her mother must have loved him with her heart only, the lesser way; otherwise she could never have left him, and their home, for Antonio Grasso. And if that was true for Maddalena, it was also true for Prima and Dante Marconi.

  Now that she knows this, she can apologize to him, too. When she gets home, if she still has the nerve, she’ll look him up.

  At the end of the path stands a stone wall, chest high, that connects two lines of trees. Beyond the wall and the trees is a steep drop to a river thousands of feet down. The river is so far away that they can’t hear or see it, even in the daytime, and yet, her father explains, this is the river where the women used to wash clothes back when he and Maddalena and Vito were young.

  They climb onto the wall and sit, in a long row, legs dangling, facing the drop and the dark valley below. They can see the lights of other villages at the tops of their own mountains, miles in the distance. In English, with his daughter’s help, Vito explains that the wall they’re sitting on is the only part left over from the original church of Santa Cecilia. The church stood in this very spot for hundreds of years before it collapsed in an earthquake. If you notice, he says, switching on the flashlight and running his hands along the side, this is the same stone you see in the new church down the hill.

  “How new is the new church?” Kelly Anne asks.

  “Very new,” says Donatella. “A hundred and fifty years.”

  Frankie laughs.

  “It’s OK,” says Antonio to Vito. “You can tell the real story.” But Vito says nothing.

  There was never a church up here, Antonio begins. There was only the cliff and this one big patch where nothing grew, where people came to look out at the valleys without the trees blocking. For hundreds of years nothing grew in that patch, probably from all the people stomping around and the boyfriends who brought their girlfriends up here to hide from their parents. Then, about the same time Vito said they built the new church, a woman came up here carrying her baby. For no reason at all, she threw herself with the baby into the gorge. Weeks later, after some villagers found them, the woman’s husband, the father of the baby, built the wall with his own hands, stone by stone, so no one else would think to do such a thing. “But of course the wall made it easier to jump,” says Antonio, shaking his head. “And that woman wasn’t the last one to do it.”

  “There are ten stories for every rock in Santa Cecilia,” Vito says. “I don’t like that one. I like better the one my mother told me.”

  “I want to hear a happy story,” Prima says, a chill running through her.

  “We had one today,” says Frankie, from the other end of the wall.

  Because they’re all sitting in a row facing out, it’s as if they’re speaking not to each other but to the gorge.

  “I can tell you one,” says Donatella. “Papà knows it, too.”

  She’s even farther away than Frankie, so far Prima can’t distinguish her dangling legs from Kelly Anne’s, her voice like an echo from the trees.

  “My friend in Avezzano had a friend, an old man who’s dead now, who used to be a pilot. The pilot told him once that if you fly a plane over the valley—the Valle Del Salto here, where we are—and you look down at Santa Cecilia from the air, the shape of the roads and where the trees grow makes the village into the body of a woman.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Frankie.

  “The shape,” Donatella says. “Like the—how do you say—the contour?”

  “I understand what you mean,” says Frankie. “The outline. But how is it a woman? Isn’t it just a person?”

  “That’s the romance talking,” says Sergio.

  “No,” says Donatella. “It’s the trees at the top, where the head is. And down at the bottom, too, if you can excuse me, between the legs, they look like hair. Long hair at the top. This is what my friend in Avezzano told me the pilot told him. The piazza is the head, down by the olive grove the legs. If you think hard enough about it, and you know the village back and forth, it makes sense.”

  “Leave it to the Italians,” says Frankie. “How come you never told us this, Dad?”

  “I’m hearing it for the first time,” Antonio says.

  “Ganzo,” says Kelly Anne, and Vito laughs.

  “Maddalena would think so, too,” says Antonio.

  “She already knows,” says Donatella. “Zia Celestina told her in one of her letters. Zia loved that story, for some reason. She wanted to tell everyone. She believed it was the image of Saint Cecilia herself, painted onto the earth by God.”

  Maddalena never read any of those letters, Prima could say, but she stops herself. Her father and Frankie, too, say nothing. They found all the letters in the basement, tied with a ribbon, unopened. Behind those, letters to her mother written years after she was already dead.

  Prima’s lower back aches, and her leg, her crushed but functional leg, starts to throb. The long day is catching up with her. Her family must be tired, too, especially her father. It seems impossible that just yesterday she was in Wilmington madly packing her suitcase, and this morning she landed in Rome. It was as easy as she always thought it would be to get here, but she takes no comfort in that. She wishes Tom were with her. She wants to talk to him, tell him everything that’s in her heart. It’s surprising—she’s been thinking of him more than of her boys. She’s been wondering what he’ll do for Saturday dinner, which of his T-shirts he’s put on to mow the lawn. She wants to tell him about the miracle of the bicycle, the shap
e of the village, the sky. She wants him to know she picked him for a reason, whether she knew it at the time or not, and has no regrets.

  “Listen,” says Vito. “Keep very quiet. Don’t even breathe. You can hear it.”

  “Hear what?” asks Frankie.

  “The river.”

  THE SAME GROUP gathers two nights later on the Piccinelli terrace. Prima’s glad that Maddalena is with them this time, eating the merenda, drinking the white wine chilled by the creek, wearing sunglasses though the evening light is fading. She’s in a lounge chair beside Carolina, who has become a new friend.

  There are four languages on this terrace, Frankie thinks: Italian, English, the hybrid that Vito stammers through, and the mystery tongue spoken by the sisters. The words are real Italian, of course, but the sentences don’t follow a track. Still, Maddalena and Carolina laugh and answer each other’s disconnected questions, and when one of them mentions a name, the other places it and offers news of the person they’re discussing, something no one else on the terrace can do.

  In the morning, Maddalena will leave and Carolina will stay and they will never see each other again. To Prima, it seems cruel not to tell them this so they can say good-bye, but then again, it’s all been cruel. The years of silence between them. The ocean that kept them apart. Their minds rotting before their bodies.

  It doesn’t take long for Vito Leone—a chatterbox if there ever was one—to again steer the conversation to his favorite topic: when will Francesco propose to this pretty Kelly Anne?

  Prima’s embarrassed for the poor girl, sitting beside Vito in a strapless yellow dress that shows her sunburnt shoulders. She’s a good sport, all smiles through the teasing and his hand on her knee and his asking, over and over, how she can be so simpatica and not Italian. Is she sure her grandfather, maybe, or great-grandmother, didn’t have some Italian blood? To Frankie he says, up close in his face like an accuser, You don’t realize how lucky you are?