Books by Sara Alexander
UNDER A SARDINIAN SKY
FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY STEPS TO THE SEA
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea
SARA ALEXANDER
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Positano Amalfi Coast Italy 2005
1949
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
1976
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Positano 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Discussion Questions
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Sara Alexander
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1549-4
eISBN-10: 1-4967-1549-7
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1548-7
To Stefan, for planting the seed
Positano Amalfi Coast Italy 2005
I ought to be glad I can afford home help. The lady in question takes to my dishes with an Eastern European verve that never fails to convince me that, to her, cooking is punishment. What those blessed vegetables, reared by both our own hands, might have done to her is beyond me. Her impatience is tangible, even from here on the upper terrazzo beyond the kitchen. I can smell it in the bitter aroma of parsley crushed with too heavy a hand and the acidic odor of almost-singed garlic hitting the back of my throat. I’ve lost count of how many times I have pleaded with her to not massacre the pasta, that to feed a Neapolitan woman wet mush will find her in the dock for manslaughter. Bad food kills. It’s loneliness on a plate; dishes made without love are venom. I will not hear otherwise. She’s arguing with the pot now, the water is boiling too fast. It’s overflowed. At the three-minute mark as usual.
Not that my neighbors don’t jump at the chance to come and take tea of an afternoon—every day in fact, since I decided to terminate my treatment. They sit beside me, each one believing they are my true confidante, the sole keeper of my darkest secrets. They think I don’t notice the way they take in the high ceilings above my terraces or the green mist that wafts across them as they survey the riches bestowed to me, Santina Guida, no more than a peasant from the hills. They think I don’t see them wonder how a street urchin ended her life in this palace. I see them picture their lives in this place after I’ve gone; I see it in the way their eyes linger over my lower garden terrazzo, in the masked longing as they drink in the view of the coast framed by the columns supporting the terraces above. The way their hands linger just a little too long upon the waxed furniture. There are those with complicated families, more worthy than I of this vast home, those who have struggled their entire lives just to place bread upon the table, the ones who have been there for me as I trawled through the endless paperwork after the major died. Each and every one of them is worthy of this home—perhaps this is a truth. But whose truth? They think I’m tired because I’m dying. But I am tired of doing what is right, just, expected—so very tired of that.
She and I eat the wallpaper paste disguised as linguine con zucchini. She didn’t drain the zucchini with salt, then wring out the excess water beforehand and thinks I don’t notice. On the contrary, I simply choose not to point it out—for the hundredth time. Even old women get sick of their own voices.
After coffee—I use the term with trepidation, I know few people partial to boiled water with the memory of flavor—she clears up and helps me get dressed. I’m wearing the dress the major had made for me. It still fits. The pleasure of this simple thing has not evaporated. A little vanity is not wasted on the dying. I can see my skin is powder white. I still don’t recognize the whisper of a person in the mirror. I know that if I live only another few days or weeks or months, this afternoon will be the most important hours of my final days.
My solicitor Antonino is waiting for me. He’ll try to convince me to abandon my decision. He’ll blame the treatment, or lack of it, on my apparent sudden change of heart. He won’t know it is a decision I have not had the strength to make for years, a decision eating away at my heart since it all began.
* * *
“You’re quite sure, Signora Guida?” Antonino asks, looking at me with condescending compassion over the rim of his glasses.
I flash him a winning smile. His eyes, even more patronizing, crinkle as if sunk into parchment.
“Antonino, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing such an interest in my affairs.” My sarcasm is so well disguised he will mistake it for genuine politeness; men like him always do. “But I assure you that I have not taken this decision lightly.”
He nods. He doesn’t believe me, that much is clear. I care little for his opinion, but I need to make sure that what he says he’s writing down is my request, not his. He turns the page around to me and hands me a heavy fountain pen—I can see where his greedy fees are spent. I sign below my name, trying to ignore the wash of memories swirling through my mind like a droplet of black ink in water. He passes the document to my Eastern European nurse, who, as my witness, lays down her own scrawl. It is done.
We walk home slowly. I refuse a taxi. I’d like to stifle the presentiment that this is my last climb of those four hundred and forty steps back up to the villa from the shore. We stop beneath the Virgin Mary statue placed inside a carved-out arch into the rock, a little way past the string of boutiques off Via Cristoforo Colombo. Both the votive candle’s flame and I dance the precarious flicker between light and dark. Svetlana grips my arm a little tighter. She can feel my legs ever more unsteady. I nod when I’ve found my last reserves of strength.
Time was I sprinted these stone steps two at a time, like all respectable Positanese. I have no memory of breaking a sweat even, not like these camera-laden Americans who come to commit my town to overexposed memory. Now I am old indeed, with memories charging back to my fishing village, a huddle of homes sparse along the shingle. The fishermen keeping us all afloat until the brutal winters would leave us cut off from neighboring towns. That world almost feels imagined now: the laundry house churning through washing with the water gushing down the streets to the sea, the mill in the center of
town cranking the flour. The sea was the brutal legend of invaders, the undulating history of all those rampant Greek creatures who haunt the tiny islands off our coast. Capri was the ancient seat of cantankerous Roman emperors, not lined with expensive retreats and starlets. Yes, I really am very old now.
We reach the villa and I rest upon the large wicker chairs beneath the bloom of my beloved succulents. Here on my lower terrace, I can view all my terra-cotta urns in each corner with the fuchsia spray of geraniums above the trailing flora cascading down almost to the hand-painted tiles. I can admire the canopy of vines the major and I tended with such care. I can entertain the folly of imagining crushing those grapes for one last vendemmia.
But the page urges me to conclude the business at hand. I sit at the major’s desk in the library, surrounded by his beloved books, those unexpected swirling paths to other worlds, where he bade me follow. The memories of him poring over them each evening float to mind, windswept leaves on the cusp of winter. The hours he spent with me, leading me through these histories of great thinkers, explorers, artists, unfurling my mind like a succulent’s petals at sunset, basking in the nourishing glow of discovery, is the most precious gift he gave.
This will be the last note I write; all the others are already sealed.
By the time you read this, I will be gone. I don’t write this to cast a morose or sentimental light upon my life. It is a fact like any other. You may feel sadness. You may not. You are entitled to feel whatsoever your heart dictates. Then again, I know you won’t need me to remind you of that.
Your new situation will come as a shock to you. I owe an explanation, at the very least—but a woman from the Amalfitani hills could never say it in one sentence alone, however hard she may try. We’re volcanic people first and foremost. Prepared for catastrophe at any moment, with a well of fervor ready to explode and annihilate those in its wake. Of this I am deeply proud, and I hope, someday, you will be too. I, sadly, am not a scribe, but I will tell the truth. And the person I need to know that truth, more than anyone, is you.
Your
Santina
1949
Chapter 1
Some days etch your soul. They leave scrawled scars of marrow-altering memory. Those days where you are tossed like a babe at sea, sensing the power and pull of that daunting watery mass threatening to obliterate. And despite the danger and the choking terror, you manage to wrench yourself toward the troubled sky and steal what little air you need to survive. Tuesday, November 15, of 1949 was to be a good day. Winter had been kind to us so far. The snows hadn’t left us marooned. We had weathered the Germans and the Allies. We’d felt hunger and skimmed squalor by the meager amount my mother, brother, and I could gain from our truffle hunting up here in the damp crevices of the Amalfi coast’s mountains.
Those mountain forests were my home. My mother was a goat; she leaped from stone to stone, fearless, focused, and precise. I never once saw her slip, neither lose balance nor plant any seed of fear into my brother nor I. We followed her lead, limber and lithe, racing against one another to see who might discover the most. My brother and I were cradled by the scent of damp moss since I can remember. That deep green underfoot carpeted our adventures. We took the view of our dramatic coastline for granted. From up here on our hills, we could see the lower mountains sharpen up and out of the cove of Positano with its viridian water. The tiny Sirenuse islands floated just beyond, haunted by those heartless sirens luring ancient Greek adventurers to their watery deaths. Farther in the distance lay Capri, a tiny mound rising up from the water, like the scale of an underwater dragon.
Sometimes we would pass an intrepid party of travelers walking our narrow Path of the Gods, stopping to admire the view as the mountain range snaked into the hazy distance toward the Bay of Naples. Sometimes we might come across them sat upon the occasional grass clearing, a light picnic laid before them. The salty smell of prosciutto and fresh bread made our mouths water. Mother would mutter through gritted teeth to not stare like stray dogs.
We dodged the sharp crags that jutted through the living forest floor, competing to see who could be the fastest. Mother would let us stop and drink the icy mountain water as it cascaded down toward the coast. While we knelt, numbing our hands and washing our faces, she taught us which mushrooms would kill us—I can’t shake the feeling that it was her peculiar way of imparting self-defense. Perhaps one day a venomous fungus would save me from a predator after all? Up in the Amalfi mountains, the danger lurking in the dark was tangible to us hill folk. Its name was Hunger.
My father drank most of what we earned. I helped Ma with her laundry runs, watching her knuckles callus against the stone washer troughs in town. After the washing was done and delivered, we would climb over a thousand steps back up from the fishing town of Positano to Nocelle, weaving our cobbled journey through Amalfitani woods toward the small fraction nestled in the hilly periphery, and from there begin our scramble to our tiny house. Arriving home we’d either find my brother huddled in a corner by a dying fire with my father nowhere to be seen, or the latter tight with drink. I knew I would be damned for thinking it, but I hated that man. I hated the scars he left my mother with. The heavy hand my brother and I were dealt for the smallest trifle, but most of all the way my courageous mother, who spoke her mind to all the gossips by the well, who was first to put any man in his place who so much as dared look at her, was reduced to a quiver when my father was in one of his thunders. I ought to have brewed a fatal fungo broth for him and be done with it. Too late now.
That Tuesday—Martedi—the sky was full of rancor, like the planet Mars it’s named after. The wind whipped from the sea and blew in a thick fog. Within minutes my mother was a gray silhouette. She slowed her pace a little, ahead of me. My shoes scuffed the damp boulders, dew seeping in through the tiny holes on the worn sole. Several times I lost my footing. Mother called back to us, “Santina! Marco! Stay where you are! It’s not safe today—we’ll turn back.” We stopped, my little brother, Marco, a few paces behind me. I heard her footsteps approach, tip-tapping with familiar confidence. Then there was a ricochet of small rocks. A cry. Marco and I froze to the sound of more rocks tumbling just beyond where I could see. We called out. I heard my mother call back to us.
The silence that followed drained the blood from my face. My heart pounded. I called again. Marco started to cry. I couldn’t hear my mother answer beyond his wails. I screamed at him to stop, but it just made him worse. I had little strength to stifle my panic. My brother took a step toward me. He slipped and fell, hitting his elbow hard on the sharp edge of a rock. His blood oozed crimson onto the moss. I yanked him up and wrapped my headscarf around his elbow. “We’ll go home now,” I began, trying to swallow my hot tears of terror. “I’ll come back for Mamma when the sun is out, sì?” He nodded back at me, both of us choosing to believe my promise, fat tears rolling down his little cheeks.
We never saw our mother again.
Father’s mourning consisted more of fretting about what to do with the incumbent children he had to feed than grieving the loss of the fine woman who had fallen to her death. One day he declared that I was to go and live down by the shore in Positano with Signora Cavaldi, the widow now running her late husband’s produce store. In return for lodging and food, I was to assist her. I felt torn; delirious with the prospect of escape from the misery of life on the mountainside with this man for a father, and terror at what life would now entail for Marco. The next day, an uncle from Nocelle climbed up to speak with my father. Marco would be needed to tend to his farm. The deal was sealed. We were dispatched to new parents. I try to forget the expression on Marco’s face as he was led away from me. He walked downhill, his reluctant hand in my uncle’s, ripping a piece out of me with each step. I patched over the gaping hole and the fresh wound of my mother’s death, with brittle bravado. My father would not see me cry. I wished that would have been the last time I ever saw him too.
* * *
Signora C
avaldi’s shop was a cavern carved into the stubborn rock that enveloped the cove of Positano. She held a prime position between the mill and the laundry, minimizing competition. I now wonder whether that had more to do with her careful management of the town’s politics and politicians or her not so secret connection with the men who protected the trade and tradesmen. I wouldn’t like to guess whom she paid nor how much, or indeed how much others paid her, but my instinct tells me her tentacles stretched far and wide. I arrived wearing the only dress I owned, a smock of doleful gray, which matched my mood. She gave me the once-over and pieced together an opinion as deft as she would calculate someone’s shopping bill. The woman was a wizard with numbers, that took me no time to figure out, but she loathed children.
“You’re twelve now, Santina, sì?”
“Sì, Signora,” I answered, trying to stop my left leg from shaking. It was an embarrassing habit since I had succumbed to polio as a younger child, and my withered calf always revealed too much about what I was feeling at any given time.
“You’re here to work, yes? I’ll give you two days to learn what we do, and I expect to never repeat myself, capisci?”
“Sì, I understand, Signora.”
She set me to work immediately, sorting the produce, laying out chestnuts in baskets, polishing the scales that grew dirty again with the weighing of earth-dusted mushrooms. I cleaned the vats of oil, swept and scrubbed the floor. As the sun dipped, she called out for me to light the stove in the kitchen of the apartment upstairs and brew a broth for dinner. At first it struck me as a little out of my remit—I had been told that I would be served food in return for working, and I will admit the idea of having regular meals was exhilarating. However, my own cooking skills were not well honed—Mother and I permitted ourselves a full meal maybe once a week, and meat was scarce. I stood, hesitant, before the stove, in a strange kitchen not knowing where anything might be kept. I was loath to search amongst her things. I went downstairs. She scolded me for lacking initiative: “Look around you, mountain girl! We have a shop, the best grocers in the town. I have a clean kitchen, which you will keep pristine, and I want, thanks be to God, for very little. Don’t let me see you down here until dinner is served.” And with that she turned back toward the broccoli rabe, placing them in neat lines inside wooden crates ready for the following day.
Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea Page 1