by Maria Riva
also by maria riva
Marlene Dietrich: The Life
You Were There Before My Eyes
A Novel
Maria Riva
For all immigrants and those left behind
You were there, before my eyes,
but I had deserted even my own self.
I could not find myself, much less find you.
—St. Augustine
1
The morning her mother died, Giovanna gave up on God. The protective loving Shepherd had become a fraud. No more kneeling on cold stone, begging Him for impossible things. He never listened! Even the Madonna, so beautiful with her deep blue cloak and carmine mouth, was, after all, only a plaster lady, painted compassion, pretending Divinity.
Tall for her age, spindly thin yet exuding a skeletal strength, at the age of eight Giovanna now looked at life with disenchanted eyes, their brown velvet softness already coarsened by too much reality seen too soon.
The widows of the village, come to prepare her mother for burial, assigned her the task of “the washing of the feet.” Carefully, Giovanna poured wine onto the white linen napkin, its lace border instantly stained red as it soaked up the dark liquid. Gently, she began washing between her mother’s rigid toes, as the wine dripped catching it in a special basin encircled by a crown of porcelain thorns.
Like blood, the child thought. Giovanna bent to her serious task, Cold … Mamma was always cold, even when she was half-well … icy when the Demons possessed her … once when the village priest tied Mamma to their strongest chair … how she screamed and kicked—but he was a big man, the knots he tied held her for three whole days …
Giovanna remembered those days, especially the smell of them, as it had been her duty to wash down her mother’s legs whenever she relieved herself. Funny, washing Mamma … always washing Mamma.
The attending widows respectfully drew back into the shadows, murmuring amongst themselves the platitudes required for such tragic occasions. “What a blessing! … A divine blessing! … At last, the Angel of Death has released this poor tormented creature from the Devil’s possession!”
Giovanna watched the midwife place tall candles on either side of her mother’s still face. Their light flickered across the inert form on the long wooden table. Hardly moving, Giovanna stood, tensed, waiting. Not that she expected to actually see anything materialize, but the nuns had taught her of the special wonder of all beings having a soul that must rise, leave what was newly dead, and although she knew this particular soul would not, could not, desert her mother—still, she felt compelled to wait out its required time to do so.
“Look! The child is standing vigil!” the widows whispered, impressed. Giovanna heard them as faint background to her concentration. Hugging herself, her eyes fixed on her mother’s body, she tensed, ready to catch her soul, push it back, protect it from the flames of Hell she was so certain would be waiting to consume it.
“Giovanna! Go!” Her father, scrubbed newly clean, the smell of lye and brilliantine mingled with the scent of warmed beeswax. “Go, I said go!”
But Papa won’t know what to do if it appears! A soul can’t be easy to see! Her eyes pleaded. Maybe Papa won’t even try! But she went, did as she was told, obeyed his order.
As an only child, she had a room all to herself, an envied treasure that set her apart from her schoolmates. Tonight, it seemed especially forlorn. Not lighting her bedside candle, she climbed onto the small trestle bed. Fully clothed, thin arms crossed upon her chest, she lay like her mother below and cried. Throughout her life, Giovanna would grieve in this way, without moving, without sound, in silent sorrow.
By seventeen she had a spinster’s body; flat-chested, angular, soft flesh absent from too much work and not enough meals. In her somber wool, her shrouded frame all bone and sinew, she resembled a young crow. Even her eyes were birdlike, dark, intense, focused beyond her immediate visual range as though searching far horizons. Too tall to be considered a true “romantic,” Giovanna thought her carriage “regal” and liked it; her small breasts quite sufficient, different enough from those of her amply bosomed friends to give her the distinction of difference she courted. Being motherless had added to her distinctiveness. The nuns especially were forever praying over her, sometimes even marking her copybooks with a better grade than she knew she deserved. There had been moments over the years when she missed her mother, not from any special attachment or feeling of love—for the memory of madness was ever sharp. Of actual mothering? Vague, defused by time. An aloneness had been a part of Giovanna, long before her mother’s death. A sorrowing childhood begets emotional voids that remain to haunt. But as most assumed a young daughter’s lingering grief to be the obvious reason for Giovanna’s unusual remoteness, she let them. At an early age she had found people liked to believe they alone knew things no one had actually ever given them the right to know. Sharing feelings, confiding one’s inner emotions, the way other girls did, blushing and giggling, whispering in hushed tones with many furtive glances, irritated her. Giovanna’s longings were her own, as unattainable as were miracles. It was the summer of 1913, and her life was about to begin.
Perched within its alpine range, the village of Cirié smoldered in the intense summer heat. Behind faded shutters, women loosened their stays, lay in homespun shifts, hoping for rest. In the piazza, men in shirtsleeves and broad suspenders, the brims of their black hats pulled low, drank cellar-cooled wine in the mottled shade of the taverna’s vine-covered canopy. Up in the orchards, peasants left their tall ladders to seek refuge beneath the laden trees. Women shifted shawl slings from their backs to suckle their babes cradled within, while their men ate, slept—waiting for the cooling of late afternoon.
In their convent’s subterranean chapel, white-robed nuns knelt in unified prayer, fingered ebony beads. In the Benedictine monastery above, the male counterparts of their illustrious order did not stop to rest, for this was July—their busiest season! No time for languid Reposas, not even prayer. The fame of their delectable Cherry Cordial depended on their devotion to vats, casks, secret formulas, and vigilant pressings! As the diligent Sisters ran not only the village school but everything else they considered worthy of their administrative skills, the busy Fathers had, long ago, relinquished their expected dominance to them, in their consummate need to nurture, bring to fruition the glorious ruby-red elixir they adored, which depended on them so. The village of Cirié, enormously proud of its chemist monks, forgave them whatever shortcomings arose in their most holy duties.
As had been their custom since their First Communion, Giovanna and her friends, Camilla, Teresa, and Antonia, brought their high-backed chairs to the village square to sit and work lace in the dense shade of its mighty chestnut; a tree so ancient no one was left who could vouch for its beginning.
It was only when Father Tomasso Innocente proclaimed that the Holy Virgin Mother herself must have surely commanded the mountain winds to blow—to carry the seed of their glorious tree to nestle amidst the granite, there to take root for the sole purpose of bringing comforting shade to her beloved flock of the village of Cirié—that everyone had finally acepted this Holy Dictum.
Regardless, the four girls were grateful for the mighty chestnut’s welcoming shade. Small work pillows positioned securely on their laps, they began fashioning lace. Each rapid movement, studied and precise, their practiced fingers flipping bobbins, pinning, twisting, knotting the fine cotton threads over and under, back and forth, they formed the intricate patterns of delicate lace indigenous to their region of Piedmont, which would later be sold in the elegant city of Turin, down the mountain path onl
y six hours away on foot, even less if one rode a mule or had the luxury of a horse-drawn cart.
Camilla, pink, plump, and pretty, liked little glass beads to weigh her bobbins. Whenever the gypsy peddlers came to the village, she searched through their leather pouches for hours, hoping to find some in her favorite colors of leaf green and palest rose. Once tied to her bobbins in little bunches, the tinkling sound they made when she flipped them was pretty, and their colors in motion delighted her.
Antonia, a cool Madonna with passionate eyes, preferred bits of bleached bone, delicately carved into animal shapes by her father’s surgeon hands.
Teresa, a docile girl, already the designated nun of her large family, used weights her mother found when she was seventeen during an exciting summer journey down to the sea; fragile shells, curled and spiraled, with tiny holes just right for thread.
Giovanna made do with small buttons. They did the job, even jingled softly like the others.
Their weighted bobbins bouncing, playing their individual tunes, the girls worked in accustomed companionship. Sitting so straight on their high-backed chairs, glossy dark heads bent in determined concentration, their classic profiles as though chiseled from finest marble, they looked like an artist’s rendering of what they were—four Italian virgins fashioning lace at the beginning of their womanhood and their century.
A drawn-out snore drifted across from the taverna. Somewhere a baby cried, a dog rooted through his coarse hair searching for fleas, teeth clicking in excited anticipation, a cart-horse, head down, dozing, flicked flies with a matted tail, a woman in a red flowered wrapper, one buttock balanced on her windowsill, sat fanning herself, looking nowhere in particular.
Ever curious, Camilla was the first to interrupt their bobbins’ rhythm.
“Where are the sisters?”
Their friends Gina and her younger sister, Celestina, were always referred to as a unit. They were so perfectly matched, they reversed each other. Where one was confident, the other was uncertain; one bubbled, never far from laughter, the other brooded, suspicious of good fortune. Sometimes they switched characteristics, as though to better understand each other, but mostly they were content within their perfect counterbalance. As Gina grew into what the village believed would become a possible beauty, Antonia, who had known her since they were babes in arms, decided she had never really liked her even then. She now answered Camilla, “Probably she has gone with their mamma on one of their errands of charity. Whenever these three appear, it’s like the Holy procession … the saintly old goose, followed by Gina, the strutting peacock, and, bringing up the rear, Celestina, the giggling chicken.”
The picture was so perfect, they all laughed, even Teresa, who quickly recovered, ashamed of herself, reprimanded Antonia for being unkind. Antonia’s eye’s blazed; Camilla, who hated confrontations, jumped into the breach. “Did you hear? He’s back! Did you see him? … Well, did you? What do you think? … I think he’s too short to be really handsome … but he is strong! Really strong! Even under his city coat, I could see his muscles—rows and rows of them! Mamma even noticed them! Then she saw me looking and got angry and told me not to stare and made me go back into the house but she stayed outside, sweeping the stoop that I had just been sweeping for hours!” Camilla giggled, looked expectantly at her three friends.
Teresa, fussing with a tangle, trying to correct a mistake she had made in the pattern of her lace collar, was too busy to offer a comment. Giovanna remained silent. Antonia, very pleased to be given a really good reason to stop working, looked up with interest.
“Who? Who has muscles? Camilla, what are you talking about?”
“The sisters’ brother, Giovanni. He had that big fight with his papa about … Oh! I don’t know WHAT it was … My papa told my mamma it had to be something again about machines … something about ‘always those damned machines … Fight, fight, fight! All the Ricassolis are nothing but stuck-up trouble,’ Papa said. Anyway, he’s back and … guess what? He found work! In l’America! Just like he said he would.” Camilla stopped to fan herself—even in the shade, it was just too hot today for all this accelerated talking. Antonia, having decided the weight of her hair was bothering her, removed the long pins from the knot at the nape of her neck, splayed its beauty with her fingers, and began plaiting it into two thick braids instead. “Why isn’t he handsome then? If he has muscles, has work in America, and is rich … short isn’t so bad!”
“Once I saw a real fistfight at the fair. My brothers let me watch … it was awful! One man got a broken nose … the blood poured out and …”
“Teresa, what has that got to do with what we are talking about?” Antonia asked in that tone of aristocratic annoyance she used whenever she felt something was about to elude her.
“Well, if you ever gave someone time to finish what they are trying to say, you would know without having to ask in that superior way!”
Antonia stopped her braiding and glared.
Teresa continued, uncowed, “As I was GOING TO SAY, when I saw this fight at the fair, I noticed that one of those sweaty men—the one who broke the nose, not the one who got it broken—he had short legs AND THEY WERE BOWED! So, I can tell you—I know! Short legs are not handsome … not handsome at all!” Having said her piece, handed on her superior knowledge, Teresa felt all had been said that could, or at least should, be mentioned by innocent maidens on the subject of male anatomy. She picked up her bobbins and resumed her pattern at the point where she had left off.
“I have never heard such nonsense!” Antonia’s tone was worthy of a real principessa. “Really! If you saw some of the illustrations I have seen in my father’s books, you would probably have hysterics for weeks. Swoon dead away! … Of course, I am absolutely forbidden to look inside those books … but I sneak into my papa’s study whenever I know it’s safe … and see things you couldn’t imagine if you tried for a thousand years!”
“Antonia,” Camilla asked, just a little breathless, “do you know what makes babies? I once asked Mamma and she sent me to my room, without supper! When I asked my brothers, they laughed at me, said I was stupid and told me all I had to do was ‘watch the animals and find out everything.’ Well, I did … and … it is—ugly! Really, really UGLY! That can’t have anything to do with making sweet little babies! Can it? … I don’t dare ask Sister Bertine … she’d be so shocked I would be kneeling for weeks!”
Everyone giggled, self-consciously half-afraid of being overheard in what would surely be interpreted as mocking the Church!
Giovanna asked quietly, “So? Did you find out why he came back?”
“Who?”
“Giovanni … the Ricassoli boy! Weren’t you all just talking about him?”
“Oh, him! Giovanna, that was hours ago! Weren’t you listening?” Camilla could sound like her ever-exasperated mother without even trying an imitation.
“Oh, Camilla … Really! Don’t be silly! I’m hot, my eyes hurt from working in this darkness. I still have to lay the fire, bake bread, cook Papa’s meal, iron his Sunday suit, and blacken his shoes for church before I can come back here, draw water, carry it back for his bath. All I asked was a simple answer to a simple question!”
“Well, really! We all draw water from the well … What a big fuss! You’d think you were the only one!” Camilla sniffed, offended.
“That does it!” Giovanna secured her bobbins, preparing to leave.
“I don’t think Camilla really knows why he’s back, Giovanna.” Teresa liked everyone to be nice to each other.
“Anyway, she was too busy swooning over his bulging muscles to ask!” Antonia chuckled, fluffing out the ends of her sumptuous braids.
“You’re mean! You’re all mean! I AM GOING HOME!” and, picking up her chair, cushion, and pride, Camilla stormed off.
Undisturbed, Antonia remarked, “I think that the old grandmother Ricassoli is sinking. I heard
Papa say something about being called in and that it is now ‘only a matter of time.’”
“That must be it!” Teresa caught fire. “Only yesterday my mamma said, ‘Mark my words! There’ll be a funeral soon … I felt a cold shadow hovering over my left shoulder … then my polenta burned without a reason. I was there, the whole time, every second—I was stirring, yet my polenta scorched! A sure sign—the Angel of Death is near!’” Teresa always committed to memory whatever her mother said. For some reason, at an early age she had convinced herself that it was very important to do so. No one had figured out why, least of all Teresa’s mother, who, at first flattered by her daughter’s habit of absorbing her every word, now that she had turned seventeen and was still doing it, had become slightly apprehensive.
“Well, then that must be the reason Giovanni came back.” Giovanna had her answer, and the girls picked up their chairs and went home.
After Mass on Sundays, when the village square became a bustling meeting place, the girls usually met by the tall clump of oleanders that shadowed the low stone wall bordering the terraced path that wound its way down from the monastery above. Dressed in their Sunday best, starched white shirtwaists and long black skirts, they perched like swallows, surveying the sloping meadow of alpine flowers at their dangling feet. Work pillows ready on their laps, they sat, enjoying the beauty spread before them. The toll of church bells drifted up from the valley below, the faint echo of tin bells drifted down from above as sure-footed goats searched steep crags for their favorite bitter herbs.
As usual Camilla was late. Confession always took up a great deal of her time. Giovanna, who resented the ritualistic dogma of Confession, avoided the confessional whenever possible. Besides having nothing of real importance to beg forgiveness for, it made her uncomfortable in taking up the busy priest’s time. She knew her friends looked forward to those sequestered moments amidst the scent of sandalwood and incense, especially if, when they finally emerged, their given penance took up most of their remaining day, by its very length giving proof to all of their blossoming maturity. Just once, Giovanna wished she could have something really shocking to confess—see what stirred her most, the Prayers of Contrition or the sin that had fostered them.