Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea

by Sara Alexander

  I fought with several pans, finely chopped as many of the vegetables I could find that would not be good for selling the following day, dropped in a fist of barley, lentils, and parsley, and, eventually, there was a broth that would fill our stomachs. A little thin perhaps, and lacking in salt, as Signora Cavaldi was so quick to point out, but it was hot and reminded me that I was not on the mountains any longer.

  I slept in a thin cot placed in the short hallway between Signora’s room and her son, Paolino’s, room. It was drafty but nothing like the limp damp of our stone mountain hut. I didn’t hear my father’s drunken snores—that was a degree toward comfort. Nor could I hear the soft breath of my mother, or feel Marco’s fidgety feet scrambling against mine through his dreams. Silent tears trickled down my face. I felt the droplets inside my ears. I let the wetness dry there, hoping my prayers and love would reach Marco up in Nocelle, a thin line of golden thread. After a time I must have given in to sleep because the next thing I remember is Cavaldi blowing down her nose at me with strips of sun fighting into the hallway from her room.

  The days merged into one, each as laborious as the one before. I was sent on deliveries, some as heavy as would warrant a porter and his donkey, but Cavaldi would not hear of it; if I had been sent down for her to look after, then it was my duty to earn my keep. I built quite a reputation amongst the porters in town, who ferried supplies up and down the steep alleys around the village. They called me Kid, alluding to my climbing skills as well as my age. It made me think of my mother. I was growing, at long last, and I noticed my muscles becoming more defined and strong. Sometimes the young boys would laugh at me for doing men’s jobs. The local women were not so kind. The Positanese knew mountain people when they saw them. We had the outside about us, the air of the wild, a fearlessness which I’m sure was disconcerting. We lived closer to death than they.

  When I turned sixteen, Paolino, who till then had paid me as much attention and courtesy as one might their own shadow, began speaking to me. It started in the spring, as we placed the first harvest of citrus in the crates. I liked to arrange them in an attractive pile, but Cavaldi always admonished me for trying to make art not money. I had a large cedro in each hand, what Americans always mistook for grapefruit. He called out to me, “Watch how you hold those fruits, eh, Santina? You make a boy have bad thoughts!” I looked at him, appalled, more for the fact that he had spoken directly to me than the inappropriate remark. I couldn’t find an answer. I longed for my mother right then, to whisper a fiery return, but none came. I was mute. I had been silenced for the past four years. The sudden realization stung. I considered lobbing the fruits at him but channeled a pretense of calm. My cheeks reddened, which I know he mistook for paltry modesty, or worse, encouragement, then I fled back into the shop.

  I don’t know whether it was my nightly prayers, the incessant daydreams of life elsewhere, the relentless beckoning of my sea and its daily promise of potential escape, or the simple hand of fate, but three years later, on the afternoon of Friday, May 25th—venerdi, named after Venus, harbinger of love and tranquillity—two gentlemen entered my life and altered its course.

  Mr. Benn and Mr. George were art dealers from London. They wore linen shirts in pastel shades, hid their eyes behind sunglasses, and spoke without moving their mouths very much. Mr. Benn was the smaller of the two and always held his head at a marginal incline as if he were trying to hear a song passing on the breeze or decipher messages from the shape-shifting clouds above. Mr. George was very tall and looked like he would do well to eat more pasta. His movements were slow and deliberate; his voice full of air. They admired the dancing shimmer of our emerald sea, the yellow of the mimosa tree outside Cavaldi’s store, and knew that cedro fruits were for making exquisite mostarda, a thick jelly sliced thin to accompany cheese. I was easily impressed in those days.

  During their stay in Positano, they made daily trips to the store, and I was happy to serve them because they always stopped to stitch together a frayed conversation in their limited Italian. They tried to tell me a little about life in London, while touching every cherry before judging which ought to be included in their half-kilo’s worth. Their words spun another world before me, crisp, colorful pictures of a life I craved. I listened as Mr. Benn offered a steady commentary on what Mr. George was well advised to buy. It was a wondrous thing for me to witness lives that could afford a month’s stay in a tiny Italian town. All sorts of fantasies seared my overused imagination when I served them, underscored with a restlessness that pounded louder for each day I remained within Cavaldi’s prison-like walls.

  Every morning, they would stop by and ask what they ought to cook with the fresh zucchini, whether the flowers were better in risotto or fried? How long I’d char an eggplant for and which olive oil would be best for sofritto—finely cut celery, onion, and carrot—and which would be best for drizzling over finely chopped radicchio? I began to look forward to their visits, a beacon of beauty amidst the relentless purgatory of life with Cavaldi. The obvious pleasure they took in enjoying our food made me feel proud. Their enthusiasm about our tomatoes made me wonder whether us locals appreciated the miracle of our bounty, as well as what on earth London art dealers must eat throughout the year to make our simple groceries so compelling?

  As we approached the end of June, I had shared most of the recipes I knew, and sometimes, part for folly, part for necessity—as my repertoire was running thin—I’d invent ideas on the spot, improvising appropriate vegetable pairings, hoping they might work in real life too. I remember them arriving at the store, and I prepared myself for a tour of the day’s deliveries. I’d been hatching a few ideas for light summery lunches that I had an inkling they’d enjoy when they asked me something unrelated to anything we’d spoken about before: Would I consider working for them in London in return for papers to America?

  I will never forget that day. The way the sun bleached their white faces and lit up their pale yellow collars—they often wore the same shade. Their smiling faces are etched in my mind. Behind them, the ever increasing surge of tourism strolled past the shop. I remember watching the crowd smudge into a sun-kissed blur, the feel of the cold dark shop behind me, and that compelling stone path out of this town, away from this miserable life and the battleaxe for whom I would never be any more than a mountain-girl lackey. They must have known I would have said yes before they’d even finished the invitation. Perhaps I ought to have asked more questions, known what would have been truly expected of me, but the craving for freedom, for air, was too powerful. I think if I’d been even bolder I might have thrown off my apron there and then and walked with them straight onto their ship from the Bay of Naples with nothing but my smock. As it turned out, that was not so far from the truth. On July 1, 1956, I became part of the Neapolitan throng shuffling along the streets of London, in search of gold.

  Chapter 2

  It took six weeks of the purgatorial British drizzle before I surrendered to my first bout of homesickness. At first, the terrifying otherness was the exhilaration of a splash of spring water on a hot day; the sounds of murmured clipped vowels, the way people’s hands stayed by their sides when they spoke. The way the young girls seemed to be talking out the sides of their mouths, whirring a string of incomprehensible sentences, each word looping onto the next, whirring out of what sounded like chewing gum–filled mouths. I wanted to be them. I wanted my hair pinned, curled, and set. I wanted to walk down the street with my arm linked in my best friend’s, surefooted, heels that knew they belonged and where they were headed. But after just over a month of this giddy daydream, the stream of possible lives blurring before me, offering heady futures just beyond my reach, reality hit. I had no one.

  Mr. Benn and Mr. George had lost the laid-back sunshine swagger of their holiday. Back in North West London they had become different people. Or rather, they had settled back into the lives they had paused. The gentlemen owned a large Georgian terraced home set a little way back from the main Heath Stre
et that led into Hampstead. The bohemian suburb attracted a vibrant palette of artists, many of which came to call at our house, each more peculiar than the previous. Mr. Benn and Mr. George ran an art gallery on one of the back streets behind Piccadilly. I navigated my way there on my first day off. I stood upon the wooden slats of the tube carriage of the Bakerloo line, turning in a pitiful performance of confidence. Truth was, I could barely read the map in time to work out which stop was mine, so thick was the tiny carriage of others’ cigarette smoke. It reminded me of my father.

  When I did arrive, I was too embarrassed to step inside. I remained on the pavement, ignoring the rain. I stared at the painting in the window. Giant swirls of yellow with flecks of turquoise stuck to the canvas in stubborn blobs. Angry spurts of red protested across the central spiral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Nothing before me could, in my opinion, be judged as art, yet the image was intimidating in the compelling way it hooked my gaze. The artist and frame had had a fight, and I couldn’t decide who had won.

  I left the stalemate and found a tiny booth in the sweaty New Piccadilly Café, sandwiched between the Piccadilly theater and a number of salubrious shop fronts. It was hard to decipher the goods on offer, but I had a hunch it had a lot to do with the young women huddled nearby. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I had understood every word of what the proprietor said to the waitress. Before I congratulated myself on my progress in English, it dawned on me that the dialect I had tuned into was Neapolitan.

  “Signori—you from the old country, sì?”

  I looked up at the man, unsure of what my answer ought to be. “Positano.”

  “I know a Napoletana when I see one!”

  He scooted around the counter, leaving the blaze of short-order cooks whipping up omelettes behind him.

  “You’re not long here, am I right, Signorina?”

  I had an inkling to suggest that I’d never met a Neapolitan man who ever thought he wasn’t right about anything, but thought better of it.

  “You working? Lavori?”

  “Yes,” I began, realizing how much I’d cherished my anonymity up till this interrogation, how the incessant Positanese prying was very much part of my past, not present, “for two gentlemen. In Hampstead.”

  His eyebrows raised and his head tilted.

  “Hey, Carla!” he yelled over to the waitress zipping between tables with egg-smeared plates balanced just the right side of equilibrium, “this signorina is up with the Hampstead crowd! Not one gentleman! Two! Not bad for a fishing village girl, no?”

  I was back on my narrow streets, gossip climbing cobbles. I took a breath to speak without knowing what I wanted to say. He quashed my indecision before I could. “Listen, if it doesn’t work out with the lords up there, you call me, sì? Wait—two men you say? Together in one house? Brothers?”

  I shook my head. His eyebrows furrowed. I wasn’t convinced that he didn’t mutter something to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

  “I always have work for a paesan.” I didn’t want to be a paesan. I wanted to be a Londoner. “This Soho,” he continued, twiddling his fingers in the air like someone sprinkling parmigiano, “this patch belongs to us italiani. Out there we’re immigrants. But in Soho we help each other—capisci?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t. Or didn’t want to.

  I tried to let go of the vague sense that his approach was more of an offensive than a welcome. Wisdom and scrawled number on limp paper imparted, he turned and walked across the café waving singsong arms at an English couple who were sat at another Formica booth, dipping their rectangular strips of toast into soft-boiled eggs. I took a final sip and left, all remnants of homesickness hanging in the sweaty tea-smudged air of that café.

  My attic room is etched in memory. It was clean and simple. My routine was described to me in great detail and it didn’t take me long to adjust to the gentlemen’s habits, which, it would seem, never altered independent of the day. To her credit, Signora Cavaldi’s terse grip had stood me in fine stead for London life.

  I hadn’t meant to, nor planned to, but on my sixth visit to the police station the first cracks appeared. Small, but prominent, fissures. I was the tenth in line to have my Certificate of Registration stamped. I held it in my hand, trying not to let my nerves crease it too much. At the top was my number: 096818. And below the words: ALIENS ORDER 1956. Every other visit, I had felt like it would only be a matter of time until I would no longer be alien; I would belong, click into the puzzle, be that final missing piece. But that day, as the drizzle left a damp trail on my hair like half-dried tears, I felt the sting of being the outsider. It was the first time I’d noticed the sideways glances of the people going about their regular days. Or perhaps they had always looked at us like that. I was used to being alone, I told myself. Life here was a world better than the one I’d left behind. I almost convinced myself.

  Autumn and winter trundled by, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mr. Benn and Mr. George were not impressed by my work. There was nothing major I could pinpoint about the shift in our day-to-day lives. A wave of frustration drew in, a little snatched remark here, an almost imperceptible roll of the eye; the toast being overdone, underdone, too early, not early enough. Minutiae of small failures tripped into an impressive collection, the way insignificant disappointments ferment into resentment between lovers till they can no longer bear to be together but cannot define exactly what pressure has pushed them apart. All three of us knew that I would not be working there much longer.

  One morning in early May, the bell rang of a Saturday afternoon, a surprising sun casting boastful rays across the black-and-white tiles of the wide hallway, as if it too had joined in to celebrate my imminent termination of employment. I knew it would be my final weekend here, and I would, against my better judgment, give the owner of New Piccadilly Café a call after all. I turned the latch and opened the door.

  Upon the step stood a man and a woman. She had a mane of strawberry blonde locks cascading in defiant curls past her shoulders. They bounced over the deep purple of her full-length woollen cardigan. Her long red chiffon slip beneath danced on the spring breeze by her bare feet, slipped into simple Roman sandals. His beard was a thing to behold, waves of thick blond tuft with streaks of red. A wide-brimmed leather hat perched on his head at an angle. His heavy leather boots stamped a few times upon the mat, scraping off imaginary snow or the memory of yet another wet day. At once, they reminded me of the painting in the window. Only this splash of color and verve came with its very own halo surround, courtesy of the bitter white sun.

  I noticed I was staring just before they did and stepped aside to let them in. The woman flashed me a wide smile, flicked the hair off her face and removed her shoes, before floating into the front room where Mr. Benn had insisted I light a fire. She wrapped her arms around him, and I pretended not to notice when she kissed him on the lips and sat on his knee. So did the gentleman who accompanied her. He, rather, shook Mr. George’s hand, who then nodded for me to open the wine.

  I filled four glasses with prosecco and handed them out. Mr. Benn and Mr. George carried on talking. The man and the woman thanked me. I returned to the tray and lifted the small bowl of nuts Mr. Benn had asked me to prepare. As I placed them upon the low table before the fire, the woman reached out her hand. “Santina, aren’t you?”

  I nodded, wanting to avoid conversation.

  “Henry,” she began, turning to the man who had accompanied her, “this is Santina, darling. Oh she’s a pip. You’re like a Mediterranean stroll in the sun—you know you’ve found a beauty, don’t you, boys?”

  Mr. Benn and Mr. George smiled, one lip each.

  “Santina, it’s a pleasure,” she continued, while I squirmed. “We’ve heard a great deal about you. How exquisite to have a slice of Positano right here in North West London. Henry darling, it fills me with a great deal of hope. It’s like a ray of sun through the fog.”

  “That’ll be the morning sun actually d
oing what it’s compelled to do,” he answered, “quite naturally.”

  The woman rolled her eyes and jumped up from Mr. Benn’s lap.

  “Quite right—I’m not thinking straight at all—thank God for that! Who’d live a life through logic’s narrow lens, for crying out loud?”

  “I’ll drink to that!” cried Mr. George and the four of them stood and clinked.

  “Go easy with the wine, Adeline,” Henry, who I had assumed was her husband, replied. Though in this house, when guests appeared, it wasn’t always clear who belonged to whom. The boundaries I had become accustomed to back home were the suffused haze after a spring shower.

  The woman’s hand slipped down to her abdomen, “Good heavens, I almost forgot! Yes, we’ve got some marvelous news, haven’t we?”

  “Indeed,” Henry replied, catching my eye as he did so.

  “I shall be creating more than paintings this year, gentlemen!” she cried, flinging her arms up at such a speed that she almost lost half her glass’s contents onto the Persian rug underfoot. “I am now producing humans also!”

  It was hard to follow the conversation with accuracy, especially since I hadn’t been allowed into or out of it. I could understand that the willowy figure before me was pregnant. As she stood up, it became so obvious that I wondered how I hadn’t noticed before.