“I’m not certain about the quality, but I believe it’s an important step forward.” Bruno sounded subdued. He must regret his decision to leave on the brink of such great success.
Papà raised his glass to Bruno. “A toast to our future,” he said, “and to my most capable and esteemed partner.” The three of us touched our glasses and drank. Bruno isn’t leaving, then. No wonder papà is so pleased.
“I’m honored by your confidence,” Bruno said.
“And I by yours,” papà said. “To our new name, Vino Marcheschi & Orsini.” We drank another toast to the new name. I didn’t yet understand the full significance of this change.
“I want us to consider the possibility of using the south vineyard for the new vines,” Bruno began. “If we age the wine properly, it will cost us less, and we can sell it for more. The profits will support our development of other vintages.”
Papà nodded. “Sono d’accordo.” I agree. I was surprised that papà had changed his mind so quickly. He smiled broadly and drank again. “Ahhh.” He set his glass on the table and turned to me. “Cara, you have so many new ideas. What do you think of this one?”
“I’m not sure what idea you mean, but I think it’s wise to continue to develop new products.” The votives on the table went out, drowned in their own melted wax.
Papà leaned close to my face and spoke with an air of triumph. “Since you say that you are ignorant of this important change in our business, I will tell you what it is: Bruno has honored me by becoming half owner of our new company, Vino Marcheschi & Orsini, and its permanent manager.” Bruno had negotiated well. I knew how much it must have cost papà to make this decision, how difficult it must have been for him to give up full control of Vino Marcheschi. Mamma would never have done such a thing. Instead, she would have paid Bruno whatever it took to persuade him to stay. “Don’t you agree that my idea is wiser than yours?”
“I think you have done a wise thing to make Bruno your partner.”
“Thank you,” papà said in a way that suggested his wisdom did not require my confirmation. “Certainly, none of my children is capable of taking such responsibility.” I knew he was goading me. I kept my anger in check. “Understand, I’ve given Bruno a good reason to remain with us: when we complete our agreement, half of the new firm will be his. Of course, that means that his part of the business will not be yours unless you and Bruno marry. Capisci?”
“Yes. I understand.” He had risked everything. It was a shocking decision. Grazia brought new votives and lit them.
“Good, because there’s more you should know: If you marry Bruno, you and he will hold two thirds of Vino Marcheschi & Orsini together. If you don’t, you’ll inherit one sixth just like Silvana and Raffaele. Capisci?” I understood perfectly: he hoped to coerce me into marrying Bruno, indeed, to make it necessary that I marry Bruno in order to keep our business in the family and to assure my own financial security. He pressed his hands over the carved lion heads on the chair arms and waited for my response.
Bruno turned to me. “I’ll speak only for myself. I would be honored to marry you, Fina, either before or after you complete these studies that are so important to you, but unless we announce our engagement now, I won’t wait for you.”
Papà looked at me. “So, cara, now you have something to think about besides history, which you say is more important to you than your family’s future.” He waved his hand. “Grazia, the strangozzi, per favore. And the bread. More wine, too.” He adjusted the plates in front of him and cleared his throat. “Bruno expects an answer by the end of our dinner, Fina.” My appetite vanished. Grazia returned with a platter of pasta with anchovies, garlic, and black truffles, one of my favorites, and set it on the table. Papà plunged the silver serving forks into the food and filled Bruno’s plate first. “Of course, we must discuss your plans for the south vineyard in more detail, but I believe you are correct that the new production would subsidize our other projects,” he said. He filled his own plate and finally mine.
“Unless we upgrade our equipment, the additional production will be lost to our limited capacity,” Bruno said.
“It’s too risky to make so many large investments all at once. We could easily lose everything.”
“Our arrangements with the Americans will be helpful,” Bruno replied. Papà’s eyes widened. Already, Bruno sounds more certain and confident, as if their new status made them equals. I knew papà was as surprised by Bruno’s attitude as I was, but he and Bruno continued to discuss business as partners naturally would. I broke off a piece of the focaccia, which Grazia always made especially for me. I couldn’t eat it. As soon as papà and Bruno finished their pasta, Grazia served us wild pigeon with cardoons, papà’s favorite. I picked at my meal while Bruno drew up specifications for the new equipment. Afterwards, when Grazia came to clear the table, most of my dinner was still on my plate. It wasn’t until she served the rice budino and the espresso that papà spoke to me. “We are ready for your decision, Fina.”
“Decision?”
“I believe Bruno made you a proposal of marriage.”
I stood up and faced them. “The two of you have already made all of the decisions. Now, you want to coerce me into accepting them.”
“What kind of way is this to talk to your father and your fidanzato?” papà said.
“This isn’t a proposal of marriage. It’s a business arrangement.”
“Santo cielo!” Grazia muttered. “Che sfortuna!”
“Marry each other for all I care,” I told Bruno. “I’m not your fidanzata!” I left the room.
Bruno followed me, held his hand out to me. “Wait, please!”
“Clever of you to take our inheritances whether I marry you or not.”
“Fina, I’m sorry. You’re right. I haven’t asked you to marry me the way a man should ask a woman. It’s my fault for being too proud. Say that you’ll marry me now or tomorrow or when you come back.” He held my hands in his.
I pulled away. “Do you think that money and property are all that matter to me?”
“No. Please, listen to me. Your father needs a manager, and after what’s happened to my family’s fortunes, I need a secure future. So do you. Don’t let a misunderstanding come between us. For both our sakes.”
“I could run this winery by myself.” I left Bruno and papà together in the salotto.
Grazia followed me. “Che tragedia!” She held her finger to her lips and motioned for me to follow her. “I’ll get my cards.” She went to the clock, opened it, and took out the battered tin box that she kept hidden inside. Then, she lit a candle and placed it in the center of the green table. Raffaele had carved a channel in the top of it with his new pocketknife when he was thirteen, and the candlelight danced in it like a bolt of lightening. Grazia sat down opposite me. “Don’t tell Monsignor Enrico. He says the Tarot is ‘blasphemy.’ I don’t want to upset him.” The light from the candle made a hole in the darkness, enclosing us and separating us from the world outside. Grazia took out the cards from the tin box. Their frayed edges had turned black, and their corners were creased and broken. “This table was still in the old villa when your mother bought this palazzo.” Grazia shuffled the cards.
“Tell me about mamma and papà, Grazia. What really happened?”
She laid out the cards. “This house was meant to be a new beginning for them, I think, because they had been so unhappy together after Etto died. At first, Signor Gabriele refused. It had been a meeting place for fascisti. At night the squadriste raided their neighbors’ shops. After Mussolini fell, it became a Nazi commander’s headquarters. You can’t see the crater any more, but an Allied bomb landed just outside the salotto. Signor Gabriele said people had bad memories of this house. He thought it might be cursed. A place of la sfortuna.” Several cards fell on the floor. Grazia leaned over to pick them up. “But Signora Willa said they could change its fate.” Grazia studied the cards. “They argued about it for a long time. Then, just before you
were born, Signor Gabriele changed his mind. I think he believed buying this house would keep the Signora’s heart at home. He didn’t allow himself to see that her heart had already flown far away from him long before.”
“Did papà know mamma had an amante?”
Grazia shrugged and pointed to one of the cards. “Here is the Chariot with the other cards around it.” She looked into my eyes. “It says you’re going on an important journey where you will discover something new… maybe the answer to your question.” She pointed to the Hanged Man. “And here the cards say that you must make an important decision about someone. A decision that could change your life.”
“I think I just did that. What about when I go to Milano?”
Grazia pointed to the next card. “This one is your future. I see many things…some good, some not so good. She held her hand over one of the cards. “This one is a very bad person.” She closed her eyes, the better to view the malign being. “In my mind I can see this person surrounded by teeth. Maybe someone in the place where you’re going. Maybe someone you already know.” She looked up at me. “I’m uncertain.”
I laughed. “Will this person bite me?”
“Maybe bring you harm. Maybe disappointment. Maybe regret. That’s why I see so many teeth. Harm through words, through something someone tells you or says about you. Something false, I think. It looks dangerous. Not all bad, but something, some one thing, very bad. This card I don’t like.” Grazia tapped the card. “Never mind. I’m going to put a curse on this person. I’ll curse this evil one the way my mother cursed them: with suffering, with pains and agonies, with losses of their valuables and loved ones. A curse so strong not even a priest can take it away!” Grazia paused. “Only God.” She rubbed her hands together in apparent satisfaction. “Now, whenever you face danger, you are safe from any harm.”
“And what about my journey?”
Grazia touched each of the cards with a gnarled finger: “Here is the Empress. This means you’ll face many challenges and perhaps gain success, but you must keep your faith and be humble because you are not as powerful as others around you.” I pointed to the last card. “Temperance means you’re going to make a change in the world somehow and have to balance what is good and what is bad. Perhaps forgive something that is very difficult to forgive.” Grazia crossed herself and put her cards away.
Later that evening, Bruno spoke to me again. “Fina. I was wrong not to listen to what you were saying. I want you and I’m willing to wait for you. Say yes.”
I wasn’t ready to say yes yet.
In the end, Papà decided to go with me to Milano himself and make sure I found a place to live. “It’s dangerous for a girl like you to travel alone,” he said. “Cattiva gente everywhere.” Bad people. “Zingari could rob you. Femministe and dimostranti try to recruit inexperienced people like you for their riots. God knows what could happen. You could be arrested and end up in jail!” He said that he wanted us to go to Firenze together first so that he could tell Silvana and Raffaele about his partnership with Bruno. I think he hoped that my presence might prevent an argument with Silvana. However, just a few days before we were to depart, he injured his back when he was working in one of the vineyards and had to stay in bed. He asked Bruno to take me to Milano and help me get settled. Although it wasn’t considered proper for a young, unmarried woman to travel overnight with a man, especially one who wasn’t even her fidanzato yet, papà trusted Bruno. “Your honor will be safe,” he said, “and while you’re in Firenze, Bruno will have a chance to explain our new organization to Silvana and Raffaele.”
13
ORVIETO, SEPTEMBER 1968
When the day of my departure arrived at the end of September, I put mamma’s rosary inside the black velvet bag with nonna’s pearls and her earrings and packed the bag in my suitcase where it would be safe. Next, I took the crucifix down from the wall, wrapped a sweater around it, and put it in the suitcase, too. I ran my fingers over the frame of the photograph of our family. It had always seemed to me that mamma was the most beautiful person in the world, but even at that much earlier time when the picture was taken, she would often look at herself in the mirror and say, “Without my hopes and dreams, I’ve become old and withered.” She didn’t look old and withered at all, but in the picture she seemed out of place, uncertain, as if she might have left the photograph had I not been sitting on her lap.
I felt unmoored, too, my suitcases my only tethers. I wrapped the photograph in another sweater and put it in the suitcase. I looked around at my empty room. It seemed too small to contain my own hopes any longer. I imagined that I was on my way to a larger “room,” someplace where I would become a different Fina, the real Fina. I took the bundle of letters out of my wedding chest and set them next to my suitcase. I certainly didn’t want to meet Michel Losine, much less know him, but keeping the letters made me feel like a voyeur and disloyal to papà. On the other hand, destroying them seemed disloyal to mamma. What would I say to this amante who lived on the other side of my false life?
Looking out my window, I felt as if I were seeing Orvieto for the first time, though its ancient walls and streets held my own history, too. I wanted to hang onto my memories of the sparkling façade of the Duomo with its stone pillars carved like lace; the vineyards and groves, and the green hills extending beyond the horizon. This was where I had always belonged, where I had known myself. I felt the loss of what had once been and was no longer possible there. Although I had sought this change, I did not expect the profound sense of solitude that accompanied it. I was truly glad that Bruno would escort me to my new life. Would my new history be just as mutable?
I took the postcard and the magazine clipping from the compartment in my wedding chest and put them in my suitcase in a way that would protect them. I made sure the money mamma gave me was in my purse. I was packing the bundle of letters as papà came to the door.
“Remember, be very careful about unscrupulous people, cara.” I pushed the bundle into my suitcase. “Stay away from zingari. They’re still around and they’re cunning. Dimostranti and femministe, too.” I tried to close the suitcase, but it was too full. Papà paused. “Those are Willa’s letters, aren’t they? You kept them from me, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, papà. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“You read them?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
I nodded. I saw his sorrow for what I had done.
“Give them to me,” he said. When I handed him the bundle, some of the letters fell on the floor. I helped to pick them up. “I’m glad you’re leaving. I don’t want you to come back.”
“Papà, don’t say that.” As he left the room, one of the letters fell on the floor. I picked it up and followed him.
He waved me away. “Deceitful. Just like your mother. Go live in the gutter with Silvana and Raffaele, where you belong.”
“Papà, don’t make us part this way.” He didn’t answer. I felt inside my pocket, but I had already packed mamma’s rosary. I returned to my room and put the remaining letter in my purse. I wanted to write papà a note, tell him how sorry I was, but I couldn’t find words to bridge the abyss between us. My carta d’identita was still on my bed. I dropped it into my suitcase, too. Grazia came in. “Have you seen papà?” I asked her.
“Signor Gabriele is burning papers. He said not to let anyone disturb him.” She removed a gold chain from around her neck. On it hung a tiny replica of an animal horn, also of gold. She fastened it around my neck. “Gypsies like to kidnap beautiful young girls like you and feed them spiders and mice. Thanks be to God, there aren’t as many as there used to be. My corno will protect you.” Grazia crossed herself. “Never take it off.”
14
FIRENZE, SEPTEMBER 1968
Near the Ponte Santa Trìnita where the Via S. Spirito intersects the Via Maggio, stood the Pensione dell’Oltrarno, a spotless rebuke to Firenze’s San Frediano neighborhood. The concierge, a grayi
ng but still stylish woman, led us along creaky passages wallpapered in tiny blue flowers to the whitest of rooms. After the crowded train, I welcomed the sight of the large bed and its white coverlet, the sink in the corner, and the prospect of a warm bath in the footed tub down the hall. Though we had left only hours before, both Orvieto and papà’s anger seemed distant to me, left behind with my previous life, left behind like the villages that passed outside the window of the train that carried us to Firenze.
Dressed for dinner and wearing the birthday gifts Bruno had given me, I waited with him downstairs in the salotto for Raffaele and Silvana to arrive. Even before we saw Silvana, I felt the change in the room when she entered as though a wave of something foreign and disturbing swept before it all that was ordered and fixed. The low hum of conversation ceased as all eyes turned to watch her. She wore a sheath of bright yellow printed in enormous red peonies, a red hat, and stiletto-heeled pumps, also red. A cartoon goddess bursting from her dress, she swayed before her audience, blooming under the attention she attracted.
“Fina! Tesoro!” Silvana exhaled cigarette smoke and kissed the air next to my cheeks. She waved to the concierge, who was serving the other guests. “Vino, vino in fretta, per favore. A big glass. Now. “I’m so thirsty.” Raffaele, thin and elegant in a pale and wrinkled linen suit, his pink shirt open at the neck, served as pilot boat to Silvana’s steamer. He settled her on the sofa. “Stupide scarpe!” These damn shoes! Silvana said, holding one of her stilettoes. “How difficult could it be to make them comfortable?” She rubbed her deformed and reddened toes.
The concierge appeared with another tray of drinks. Bruno served Silvana first. “Bravo Bruno. So polite,” she said, extending her free hand for him to kiss. Bruno held her hand in his, but he didn’t kiss it. “Perhaps you aren’t even polite,” she added. She gripped Bruno’s hand and pulled him down toward her, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him forcefully on his mouth. Bruno tried to extricate himself from her grasp, but she held him fast. She was drunk.
The Train to Orvieto Page 31