by Maria Riva
Deciding to avoid being a witness to such a very deplorable and probable confrontation, Giovanna rolled up her bobbins, slipped off the wall, and strode down the winding path towards the village. Antonia and her latest conquest didn’t even notice she had left.
The next day, Giovanna was so filled with remorse for having had such shocking thoughts about one of her dearest and oldest friends that she marched up the hill towards the oleanders, determined to make amends. How exactly she was going to manage that when Antonia didn’t even know the thoughts she was wanting to make amends for, Giovanna didn’t know … but surely something appropriate would come to her, once the right moment presented itself. Out of breath, full of good intentions, she arrived to find the wall deserted, except for the figure of Giovanni stretched out on the grassy knoll above it. Well, might just as well get him over with too; her thoughts about him had been just as mean, she really owed him a little atonement as well.
Not knowing how to begin, what to say, she stood looking down at him, hoping he was asleep. Raising his hand to shield his eyes, he looked up at her, his face expressionless. Giovanna hesitated, tongue-tied, suddenly shy. He reached up, caught her wrist, and pulled her down beside him.
“What’s the matter, little one? A raven got your tongue?” His strong hand kept its hold on her thin wrist.
“Don’t make fun of me!” she snapped.
“NOW what have I done wrong again? I’m not making fun of you!”
“Yes, you are … I’m not ‘little’! I’m tall … lanky and spindly. In school Sister Marie-Agnesia always called me the Fishing Pole. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I never heard that one … but I wasn’t thinking of the way you look … I don’t know why I said ‘little’… It just came out!”
“Then I am sorry. I shouldn’t have made a fuss.” Giovanna moved away from him and settled herself on the wall. “I know I must seem terribly touchy about absolutely everything, but I’m really not. Everyone always says how quiet I am, how controlled, practically unfeeling … Sister Bertine shakes her head over me constantly … She is very concerned about what she calls my ‘complete lack of fervor’! Of course, she’s alluding to religious fervor. Still, she has a point. I do try, I do … all the time … but …” Giovanna stopped, aghast! She was prattling! Saying anything that came into her head—and to a man—practically a stranger! Thoroughly shocked with herself, she fussed with her cushion, unrolled her bobbins, and, lips tightly compressed, took refuge in her lace.
Eyes half closed, he watched her in profile. High forehead framed by its chestnut brown hair, center parted, pulled back, secured with many pins, stationed on a neck so long—rising from a spine so straight—it had a military carriage. Maybe it was this that interested him, her bearing—it kept reminding him of a soldier he had once met, who’d told of battlefields, all the while appearing unaffected by his anguished tale. She had his same air of sad detachment that had moved him, had impressed itself onto his memory. He came to sit beside her.
“Friends?”
“Yes, thank you.” Nice of him. A man never needed to ask permission of a woman for anything. “Please, before the others come, would you tell me some more about America?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you do there?”
“I build motorcars!”
“Oh … horseless carriages. Those are only for the very, very rich.”
“In my factory, we build thirty every day!”
“Are there that many millionaires in America?”
“Daimler, the German, he builds his motorcars for the rich—but we, we know how to build them so that even the common man can afford to own one.” Giovanna, lace forgotten, hung on his every word. “Already in the big cities we have some surfaced roads that the invention of the bicycle brought, and soon there will be more.”
“It did? I have seen one. When Papa had his bad chest, I had to travel down to Torino to deliver our lace and I saw a street all smooth like that. But I didn’t know those came about because of the bicycle. It must be exciting to ride on one of those.”
“The cycle has its uses, but it takes human energy. It is slow … solitary transportation. But a motorcar—that is true liberty! It makes any man who can own one the master of his time and destination. Only the rich had such luxury of choice, until my boss made his dream come true. ‘I shall build an auto for the masses,’ he vowed and we did! It’s not sleek—no racing lines, no ornamentation. You can’t even say the design is beautiful, and since last year, only black can be its color … but you should see that little car go! Nothing stops her. Climbs the steepest grade like a mountain goat, then comes down just as sure-footed. She is so light, rides so high on her special chassis, impassable country roads, mud, ice, snow—nothing stops her. She can even cross rivers without getting bogged down. She’s more dependable than the best horse ever born! That’s why the first men to buy her were country doctors. They knew that nothing could stop her once she made up her mind!”
“Why do you say ‘she’?”
“We all do. She’s ‘our girl’! Something about it just seems alive, as though it has a heart. It is strange how she makes you proud and not just us who build her but the everyday people who own her. She’s America’s Sweetheart!”
“What’s that?”
“An American expression … it means a girl your heart likes.”
“Do you have one?”
“Someday I will—and I’ll take her everywhere. But first we must find a faster way to produce her! We are working on it to meet the huge demand.”
Giovanna thought to correct him, then thought better of it and asked, instead, “But the horses—what will happen to them?”
“Oh, they have already disappeared from the big cities and their stinking manure with them! They still work the land and are the aristocrats’ playthings, as they always have been.” Her eyes had not left his face. What an extraordinary new world he believed in. Still, she just had to ask and so ventured a hesitant, “You’re not making all this up, are you?”
“No. It has happened and I … I am part of it.”
He said it like a vow and she believed him. He sat looking across the valley as though alone. Hardly breathing, not wanting to disturb the moment, she watched him.
After a while he remembered she was there. “The men that I work with say, ‘Never get John Ricassoli started on his love affair with Tin Lizzie’!”
“Who’s that?”
“She’s now so famous, people give her names.”
“You mean your wondrous motorcar is made of TIN?”
“Of course not! They only say that because she is so light—we use a special steel. The Americans like to joke!”
“It all sounds very exciting, what you do,” Giovanna, newly awed, said, adding, “your landlady, the one who owns the … no, no, don’t help me … I’ll get it …’izz boite.’”
“Pretty good! What about my landlady with the marvelous wooden boite?”
“You live there, in her house?”
“Yes, I rent a room and take my evening meal downstairs with the other lodgers. She’s a good woman. She likes me … ‘So tell me … what is my Italian baby boy up to?’ she always says. I’m her youngest lodger—so she calls me her baby. Her husband brought her with him when he came over from Germany. He and I work together … that’s how I found a place to live.”
Giovanna felt relieved. For a young man alone, it was so much more fitting to live under the roof of a married lady whose husband was also in residence.
Streaks of orange glowed across the fading sky, touching mountains turned silhouette, a tiny bat flitted by on its first twilight foray; an awakening owl announced the beginning of its darkening day. Giovanna rolled up her bobbins. “It’s late! I must go! Papa gets angry if his meal isn’t ready waiting for him. And I haven’t done my lace
… and now I won’t be able to finish it in time and Papa expects the money! I’ll have to work on it after he’s gone to sleep … I must hurry …”
Giovanni slid off the ledge and reached up to help her down.
“Will you come tomorrow?” he asked, not knowing why he did.
“Yes,” she answered, not knowing why she wanted to so badly.
She had rushed and the sauce had not had enough time to thicken properly, so her father had been angry. Of course, he had had every right to be, for it was her fault for being late.
She banked the embers in the iron stove, moved the candle over to the low sideboard, began wiping down the long wooden table … seeing her mother’s form as it lay upon it. This happened every evening. Over the years she had come to terms with it—accepting it as one of the hurting things that belonged to her.
She rolled up the threadbare rug, knelt, dipped the brush into the leather pail, began scrubbing the stone floor when suddenly she remembered her father’s cup. In the summer, he drank his coffee outside their door, and tonight she had forgotten to collect it! He must be wondering what was wrong with her. Wiping her hands on her apron, she hurried outside to fetch it.
His chair tipped against the rough stone of his house, black hat cushioning the back of his head, her father’s scarecrow frame sat balanced, smoking his pipe. Knowing how he hated being disturbed during what he called his “interlude of digestion,” she looked for the cup, but being a moonless night, she couldn’t find it in the gloom and had to ask, “Papa—the cup?”
“On the ground, by my foot! Eyes are for looking!”
“Sorry, Papa.” She bent to retrieve the small cup and turned to take it inside.
“Wait!” He spoke without removing his pipe. Over the years, it had become a part of the configuration of his stone-cut face. “Why was my meal not ready on time? What were you doing?”
“I said I was sorry when I explained about the sauce …”
“You seem to be ‘sorry’ about a lot of things tonight! Well? Out with it, girl. Answer me!”
“I walked up to the oleanders to do my work … the Ricassoli boy … the one who ran off to America and now has returned … he was there waiting …”
Her father’s jeer stopped her. “For you?”
“No, of course not me … for Antonia.”
“So, he’s after our saintly doctor’s pretty daughter, is he? She’ll make him dance to the Devil’s tune! Runs off to be a fancy man in America but when he needs a wife, he comes scurrying back!”
“Oh, no, Papa! It is said the old nonna, the grandmother’s illness brought him back.”
“No, the only reason that young rascal came back here was to find himself a good Italian wife to service him—in more ways than one.” Chuckling behind his pipe, he rocked his chair with the heel of his boot.
A sharp crack startled him. “What the Devil …”
“I’m sorry, Papa—I dropped it.” Giovanna gathered up the pieces of the broken cup and went inside.
They met by chance the next day; he stretched on the grassy knoll, Giovanna on her way down from the convent above. Hoping he was asleep, she didn’t stop. “You weren’t here today and now it’s too late to talk,” he said, making her turn, ignoring Giovanni now an impossibility.
“Oh … it’s you. I didn’t see you! No, I couldn’t today. Once a week I sew for the Sisters. Mend sheets and re-hem habits for those who have rheumatism and can’t. Well?” she said, her tone impatient.
“Well, what?”
“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about—or one of the others?”
“Who said I wanted to talk?”
“You did … just now you said …”
“Oh, forget it.” He got up, turned looking across the darkening valley. He was close enough to touch and yet seemed not there at all.
She should have left, instead remained, unable to come to a decision to leave. Suspended silence stretched between them into discomfort. Purple-rose stained the evening sky. The call to Vespers sounded.
“It’s late,” he said.
“Yes,” she murmured, turning to leave.
“Don’t go.”
“Why?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you love questions?”
“No, but I suppose I do. It’s a way of learning and knowing where one stands.”
“Giovanna, sometimes you speak like a man.”
“I am a motherless child, reared by a father who never liked her.”
“It isn’t proper for a girl to speak in that way!” Surprise and censure colored his tone.
“I know. I have real trouble being what I know I am supposed to be. Most of the time, I feel I am very different from other girls.”
“Camilla is a real girl,” he mused, as though he were alone.
“Giovanni, they say you returned to find a wife to take back with you. Is that true?”
“None of your business!”
“Is it true?”
“Yes!”
“Take me!”
Shocked, he backed away from her. Now that she had started, unable to stop, Giovanna advanced towards him. “TAKE ME! Please, take me! I can cook, clean, and sew. I’ll take good care of you! I’ll never interfere in your life, never be a burden to you. I swear I’ll never ask for anything more! Just take me, TAKE ME WITH YOU TO AMERICA!”
“You’re crazy! As crazy as your mother!”
With a snarl she jumped him, steel fingers gripped his throat. “I’m NOT! Damn you! I am NOT like my mother!”
His fury matching hers, he tore her hands from his throat, slapped her across the face and strode down the hill. Giovanna, stunned—more by her shocking loss of control than his blow—watched him disappear.
The next day, the chestnut sheltered only three. The sisters, excited about their brother’s sudden decision to declare his honorable intentions to Camilla’s father, couldn’t even think of working lace, and, now that Camilla’s future was being decided, her proud mamma had forbidden her virgin daughter to venture from within the protection of her father’s house until Giovanni’s actual proposal and her papa’s certain consent.
Teresa, always brought to fever pitch by anything remotely suggestive of romance or ritual, now that the immediate future might hold the melding of both, was breathless with anticipation.
“Antonia, do you think he will marry her here? Well, he’ll have to … they can’t travel together without being man and wife. Just think—a marriage feast here! And our Camilla the lucky bride! Isn’t it exciting? I asked my mamma if I can please, please wear my hair up for such an important event and you know what she said? She said, ‘Yes!’ and that she would even allow me to borrow her ivory comb. Do you think Mamma might let me dance? I am going to wear my flowered skirt—you know the one, but maybe with a new sash and dance with Mario Rossini. He looks nice now—his hair has grown back and Mamma says it is alright if I enjoy myself just a little before I renounce all worldly pleasures and give myself to Christ.”
“You can rattle on longer than anyone I know,” Antonia snapped. “If there ever is a wedding feast and your mamma does let you dance, which I doubt, don’t do it with a Rossini twin—or you’ll find yourself twirling in the bushes. Anyway …” Antonia continued in her principessa tone, “this morning my father spoke to Father Innocente to ask his opinion of all these goings-on and our saintly Abbot didn’t know anything about it! And we all know that he of all people would be the very first to be informed if a nuptial was being planned.”
A faint breeze rustled the broad chestnut leaves, joining the jingle of their busy bobbins.
“Oh! One of my shells has split!” Teresa, lips trembling, picked at her bundle, ready to weep.
“Well—just ask the Virgin to send you down another,” retorted Antonia, which made Teresa’s lips tremb
le even more.
Giovanna worked in silence.
“No … I don’t think it’s split all the way through.” Teresa rolled the tiny spiral shell around in her palm, examining it, making sure the disaster she had first expected had been spared her. “Antonia, you must not take the name of our Holy Mother in vain—no matter how upset you are. It is a sin, Sister Bertine says so.”
“You and your eternal prattle about your precious Sister Bertine! Why don’t you just go into your convent right now, take the veil, lock yourself away and be done with it!”
Giovanna looked up. “Antonia, I think this time you have gone too far! You owe Teresa an apology.”
“How dare you speak to me in that superior tone—I have never been so insulted!” Looking every inch the enraged aristocrat, Antonia marched off, dragging her chair behind her.
Teresa sighed, “Poor Antonia! She is so very disappointed Giovanni didn’t choose her … but who knows … even Mamma said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. Nothing is ever what it seems—even if the foxes cry, Spring can be late in coming!’ I don’t know what she means by that but she always says it. My mamma’s sort of partial to fox sayings … One of her favorites is ‘Hens and boys beware of a vixen seen in the light of a new moon!’ … I don’t know what that one means either but she says that one all the time … and then there’s …”
“Teresa,” even Giovanna could take just so much of Teresa’s mamma. “Do you really believe Camilla’s father will give his consent?”
“Why not? Millionaires don’t come along every day.”
“Giovanni isn’t a millionaire!”
“Well! Don’t you think, with five daughters still left to marry off, wouldn’t Camilla’s papa be overjoyed to welcome any acceptable suitor who comes to his door?”
Giovanna sighed, tucked her work pillow under her arm, picked up her chair, and, shoulders drooping, stepped from beneath the comforting shade into the white glare of midday. Teresa watched her friend go, the compassion in her gaze belying her untried youth.