It’s incredibly annoying.
The thing is, when I’m with Luca, it’s so overwhelming that I feel swept away, as if I’m struggling all the time to keep my balance. It never occurs to me when we’re together that he isn’t asking for my phone number. But it means that afterward, I can’t expect a text or a call from him. There’s no way for him to get in touch and make plans for us to meet again. It’s really unbalanced. He knows where I am most of the time—at Villa Barbiano, doing lessons, hanging out. And if we do go out in the evening, to a party or to the bar in the village, all he has to do is get Leonardo to let him know, and then he can drop in and see me if he wants.
Or not, if he doesn’t want.
I sigh. It feels incredibly unfair. I’ve lived in London all my life, in the center of a big city with Tubes and buses and bike lanes. Parties, going out, hanging out with friends are all so easy that I’ve taken it completely for granted. I never gave a moment’s thought to people who live in the countryside or who aren’t old enough to drive, or can’t afford a car, and are completely dependent on friends for their social life. How do they manage? If you lived somewhere like the place we went last night, gorgeous as it was, how do you get around and see people? Maybe they have Vespas. But how old do you have to be to have one of those? At least sixteen, I’d think. Maybe even older. And they can’t be cheap.
Luca has a Vespa, of course. And a car. Maybe he shares the car with his mum, like Leonardo does with Catia, but I can’t imagine the principessa goes out much. He can nip around as much as he likes, while I’m stuck pretty much in one place.
Okay, that’s enough self-pity, I tell myself. Concentrate on memorizing imperfect conjugations. Kelly and Kendra probably know theirs backwards already. It’s the afternoon, a glorious sunny day, and we’re by the pool, Italian grammar books in our hands. Well, everyone has them but Paige, who’s given up even pretending to study and is flicking through magazines. If you’re stuck somewhere, there can’t be a better place in the world for it. Don’t be spoiled. It’s gorgeous weather, and although I’m being careful to use sunblock, I’m getting a lovely tan. Golden and healthy.
Like an Italian girl. Not one with a Scandinavian mother and a Scottish father.
I bite my lip. Coming to Italy, wanting to find out the reason that the girl in the portrait in Sir John Soane’s Museum looks like me, has tangled me up much more painfully than I thought it ever could. I thought there could be secrets buried in my family that I might not want to know about. I never thought about the secrets in the di Vesperi family, how my resemblance might affect them. I never expected that they might see the likeness in me. That definitely never crossed my mind.
How could I possibly have expected that generations down the line I’d meet and feel this way about the son of the family? And what’s more, that he would be attracted to me …
Thank goodness, I’m leaving all that well alone. What do I care if I saw my own face looking back at me from an eighteenth-century portrait? I have a mother and father who love me, and a really good life. I tell myself that I should be glad Luca doesn’t have my phone number. Because if he did, then I’d be on tenterhooks all the time, checking constantly to see if he’d texted, or if I’d missed a call from him. It’s better this way. I can actually get on with things here that I care about without being perpetually distracted by the possibility of him getting in touch.
Yes. It’s much better this way.
I huff a sarcastic laugh. I am appallingly bad at lying to myself. I look around the pool area: Kelly, wrapped in a towel—she’s still very uncomfortable at being seen in a swimsuit—is immersed in one of the textbooks we all had to bring with us for the course, the same one that’s lying on my lap. Its cover is shiny and cheerful, stripes of white, green, and red, but its subject, Basic Rules of Italian Grammar, is dry as a bone. Still, Kelly’s reading it as intently as if it were a torrid vampire romance, her lips moving as she recites irregular verb conjugations to herself, and Kendra, not to be outdone, is scribbling notes in her own copy.
“How do you say ‘love and kisses’ in Italian?” Paige asks, absorbed in her texting.
“Amore e baci,” Kelly and Kendra promptly reply, and cast jealous glances across the loungers at the speed of each other’s response.
“Who are you writing that to?” I ask curiously.
“Everyone!” Paige says. “ ‘Hi boy, love and kisses!’ I’m writing that back to all of ’em. I can’t even remember which one’s which. Ciao ragazzo, amore e baci.” She types it in, sends it, and clicks on another message. “Ooh, what does this mean? ‘Sei una favola, bambola mia’?”
“ ‘You’re a fairy tale—’ ” Kelly starts, looking smug.
“ ‘My doll,’ ” Kendra finishes for her. “ ‘Bambola’ is doll.”
“Huh. ‘You’re a fairy tale, my doll’? That’s weird,” Paige says. “Maybe just kisses for him. No love. And what’s ‘bonona’? Is that like another doll?”
I prick up my ears, remembering the word from the party: a boy said it watching Kelly walk across the room.
Kelly blushes. “It means a girl with curves. It’s a good word. Like a compliment.”
“You’re kidding!” Paige sits up straight, looking over her sunglasses at Kelly.
“No, honestly,” Kelly assures her. “It’s a mash-up of the words for ‘big’ and ‘good.’ But in a really good way.”
“Like big is beautiful?” Paige starts to giggle. “I could be eating more pasta, then! And to think I was looking at all those Italian girls at the party and envying how thin they are! When the boys really want a nice curvy girl! ‘Bonona,’ ” she reads out from her phone. “I don’t get all of this message, though. He keeps putting sixes in for some reason.”
“Oh, that’s ’cause they use the number six in texting to mean ‘sei,’ ‘you are,’ ” Kelly explains. “ ’Cause six is ‘sei’ in Italian. It’s like us using the number two to mean—”
“Got it,” Paige says with satisfaction, scrolling through the message. “Hey, now this actually sort of makes sense! You’re super-smart, Kelly.”
“It’s pretty obvious, really,” Kendra snaps. “I worked it out ages ago.”
Kelly turns a page in her textbook. “You didn’t mention it, though, did you? And you didn’t say it just now.”
“That’s because you’re always jumping in first,” Kendra says with an audible sneer. “You’ve just got to be teacher’s pet, even when there isn’t a teacher around.”
I catch my breath, worried that this very obvious attack will devastate Kelly. But I’ve underestimated her.
“I have to be teacher’s pet,” she says calmly, not even giving Kendra the satisfaction of raising her eyes from her book. “My family’s not rich like yours. I have to use my brain and suck up to the teachers to get scholarships so I can make something of myself.”
Wow, I think at this body blow to Kendra. Well played, Kelly. I realize that she must have had to deal with this kind of accusation before, from other girls jealous of her cleverness, and learned exactly how to deflect it.
I should say something to cut the tension, but Paige gets in there first.
“Jeez, I completely forgot!” she exclaims. “There were three guys called Riccardo at the party! I called ’em Riccardo One, Two, and Three. Look!” She waves her phone around. “That’s how I put their numbers down. Hilarious!” She looks thoughtful. “I sort of remember Riccardo Three having a hissy fit, but hey, it wasn’t my fault I met him third, was it? But maybe it was Riccardo Two.” She pulls a comical face. “I’ve got a few memory blanks about the party.”
Catia was surprisingly blasé about Paige’s coming home staggering drunk and sobbing about My Little Pony not being pretty enough; in the next morning’s house meeting, she was going through the motions rather than laying down the law. Considering that neither her own daughter or son had yet to return from the party, and that Leo, who’d taken us, hadn’t bothered to bring us back, even with Paige i
n that state, Catia wasn’t starting from a highly elevated moral perspective. But I honestly don’t think she’d have cared much anyway. Catia limited herself to telling us firmly again that Italians don’t drink to excess—something I’d noticed myself—and she wants us to behave like the locals while we’re here.
She added something a bit pompous about hoping that our experience here will encourage us to go back home and show people there that you don’t need to get horribly drunk to have a good time. (I’d have been crosser about that if I hadn’t had to admit that she might have a point.)
Catia concluded by saying that she knows we’re all young, and young people like to go to parties and have fun. We’ll have to learn how to moderate our drinking and be sensible, and she’s pleased to see that three of us already managed that with no problem at all. Paige and Kendra were goggle-eyed: they were definitely expecting to be read the riot act. Things are clearly a lot laxer in Italy than America.
I realize my gaze has drifted sideways, beyond the rosemary bushes, to the cypresses that line the parking lot, hidden down below the stone wall that borders it. I’m remembering two nights ago, standing there with Luca, still wearing his jacket, kissing him, our hands twined together, and my heart turns over in my chest. I jump off the lounger and walk over to the edge of the pool. It does me no good to turn pictures of Luca over and over in my mind. Especially as I don’t know when I’m going to see him again.
Kelly and Kendra have subsided into silence, their heads buried in their books. I shudder to think what kind of atmosphere we’re going to have in tomorrow’s Italian class; they’ll be fighting to show off how much they’ve learned. Oh well, at least it’ll take the pressure off me and Paige. Because, to be honest, I’m finding it really hard to do homework with my thoughts so full of Luca.
I’m overheated from the sun; my brain is cooking. I need to cool down, and then maybe I can learn at least the past imperfect. I stand on tiptoes, about to dive into the pool.
“Oh, Violetta!” calls a voice from the terrace above, the one outside the dining room. Not Catia; she’s out doing errands. I teeter, catch my balance, and manage not to belly flop into the blue water.
For which I’m extremely grateful when Elisa emerges into view, leans her slender arms on the stone balcony, and calls again:
“Violetta? You must come with me. I just get a message from Mamma. She say she is at the Castello di Vesperi, with the principessa, and they want to see you.” She sighs theatrically. “You cannot drive, so I must take you. It is very, very boring for me.”
Don’t go, Kelly had said immediately. I really don’t think you should. We agreed you should stay away from the castello.
How could I not go? My curiosity is much too strong. It brought me here all the way from England; it can’t conceive, now, of being so close to the castello and refusing a summons to visit, on my own. Singled out. It would be like doing a marathon and stopping after the twenty-fifth mile.
Besides, as I pointed out to a worried Kelly while I quickly showered and pulled on a dress and sandals, it’s not like Elisa’s kidnapping me. Both her mum and the principessa are going to be there—we heard Elisa say that, all four of us. They are witnesses. And then, at the castello, the principessa and Catia will be together; it’s too far-fetched, even for our lurid imaginings, to picture them ganging up in some bizarre plot against a girl. My resemblance to the principessa’s sister-in-law may be freaky, but it’s much more likely that they want to discuss it with me in private.
You got really sick there once before, Kelly said, her voice rising anxiously, so I agreed that I wouldn’t eat or drink anything I didn’t keep my eye on the whole time and that other people weren’t having too. But I still find it really hard to think that I might have been deliberately poisoned; it’s like something out of a novel, too unreal to take seriously. The more time passes, the more that the memory of being sick fades, the more I look back and think that I must have caught a tummy bug, or had a bout of food poisoning, and that Kelly and I, overexcited by being in a foreign country, where you’re always more likely to imagine mystery and intrigue, got carried away and saw lurid conspiracies where there was nothing at all.
And of course, the castello means Luca. The closer I get to it, the more chance of seeing him. I’m honest enough with myself to admit that the Luca factor alone has me putting on some makeup, climbing into Elisa’s little Fiat, and sitting there as she bumps it down the drive and along the road that leads through the village and up to the castello on its high hill.
I sort of expect Elisa to launch into a screed of unpleasantness, and have braced myself accordingly. But actually, she doesn’t say a word until we turn between the high stone gateposts and into the long, winding private dirt road that leads up to the castello. It’s dark, shaded by the cypresses that grow close together on either side, one of those drives that you can see from far away across the olive groves and vineyards, even from the village, a double line of tall, narrow trees like tapering black candles signaling a road that rises to an important house. I imagine all the bats folded up inside the cypresses, hanging inside the densely packed branches, protected from the sun by the thick foliage, waiting for night to come so they can unfurl their wings and fly out to hunt for dinner.
“You are learning Italian?” Elisa finally says.
I consider this, debating my response, and reply:
“Yes, a little. We’re all studying hard.”
“From my mother,” she says, sneeringly. “She is a good teacher of Italian?”
“I don’t know,” I say simply. “I haven’t got anyone else to compare her with.”
I’m wondering if Elisa is trying to lure me into saying something that she can repeat to Catia and get me into trouble. I’m not going to fall for that trick. Having been to an all-girls’ school has made me very familiar with it. I know, from talking to people who go to mixed schools, that it’s different there. But the single-sex aspect of St. Tabby’s means that you develop very close friendships, cliques, and rivalries, and it’s not just among the girls; the teachers get sucked into it too, or even, in some cases, drive it. There’s a handful of teachers at St. Tabby’s who definitely have their pets and their hates, as we call them, and the girls who are the pets play it for all it’s worth, sucking up to the teachers and even bad-mouthing other girls to win more approval.
“Do you think she has a good accent?” Elisa says snarkily, jerking the car around a tight ascending curve, its engine whining at the high gear it’s in.
I honestly don’t know how to answer this. I turn to look at her, not understanding what she wants from me. And I realize that instead of keeping her eyes on the road, she’s staring straight at me; I let out an awful little embarrassing whinny of horror and jerk my gaze back to the windscreen again, hoping desperately that she’ll follow suit before she drives into one of the drainage ditches on either side of the road, or into one of the cypresses.
“You don’t know very much about my mother,” Elisa says with great pleasure, her voice full of malice. “She likes to pretend. She is so fasulla. False. Everything about her is false.”
I’m dying to ask what she means but I bite my tongue, because I sense that the more silent I am, the less I seem to care, the more she will talk.
“My mother, she is not Italian,” Elisa says, dragging the wheel around to take another curve. “You don’t know that, non è vero? My mother is American.”
“What? Are you joking?” I blurt out.
Okay, she’s got that much satisfaction from me. I couldn’t help the exclamation of surprise. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Elisa’s lipsticked mouth narrow in pleasure.
“Si,” she says, delightedly stepping on the accelerator. The Fiat bounds over a bump in the road, and I shove out my foot, bracing my leg against the interior wall of the car, not wanting to let her see me grip the seat to steady myself.
“American,” Elisa continues. “But she never says that. Her name is Catherine
, but she change it to Catia because that is Italian. It is so sad, tragic. She want to be something she is not. And because she is not a real Italian, she does not know how to keep her Italian husband. That is why my father leaves to live in Florence.”
I’m genuinely taken aback by Elisa’s revelation. Never in a million years would I have guessed Catia wasn’t Italian.
“She meet my father in Florence, she is studying art and the language, like all of you foreign girls,” Elisa says, with a nasty twist to the last few words. “She leave everything in America behind, she marry him and immediately she decide she is Italian. No more America. She hate it when I say she is American, or I tell her she say a word wrong in Italian. She did not want to teach us English. English would be useful to me and Leonardo. Just to know. But no, she teaches Italian to stranieri—foreigners. It’s stupid, no? She never go back to America, she never take me or Leonardo to meet her family there, she forget them all. She care only for herself.”
I stare at Elisa as she continues contemptuously:
“She is stupid and ridiculous. No one else care that she is American but her. Even my father, he think she is ridiculous. He have an Italian girlfriend now. A real Italian, not a false one like my mother.”
We’ve reached the top of the drive now. Elisa doesn’t turn into the parking area, however; with a squeal of brakes and a groan from the gearbox, she snaps the Fiat into a ninety-degree turn and sends it between the walls, through the gateway, in a tight scary loop till she comes to a halt sideways, on the cobbled courtyard where the family leaves their cars.
“Ecco,” she says. “Here you are. And now you know.”
I simply don’t know how to respond to her stream of angry revelations. I’m reeling from this new information.
It makes Catia seem what Elisa’s called her, fake. She’s deceived us, effectively, and that makes me feel really weird, insecure. It makes me feel sad for Catia too. Why should she pretend so hard to be something she isn’t, and alienate her own children in the process? I’m overwhelmed with confusion. I wish Kelly were here so I’d have someone to share the surprise with. Paige and Kendra, as Americans, will be even more freaked out, I imagine.
Flirting in Italian Page 24