For Keith, my silver and green
Cast of Characters
Main Characters
Chiara · The owner of Bar Birbo, she therefore hears all the rumors and secrets.
Edo · Chiara’s nephew who works at Bar Birbo
Luciano · A retired schoolteacher.
Massimo · The women in his life are Anna, Margherita, Giulia, and Isotta.
Anna · Massimo’s mother.
Elisa · An 11-year-old girl who struggles in school. She is Fatima’s best friend.
Fatima · A 12-year-old immigrant girl from Morocco. She is Elisa’s best friend.
Magda · Moved to Santa Lucia from Germany years ago with her husband who has since disappeared in Thailand.
Isotta · A transplant to Santa Lucia from Florence.
Fabrizio · A mysterious stranger.
Patrizia · Chiara’s best friend who helps her husband, Giuseppe, in his butcher shop.
Villagers
Ava · Santa Lucia’s guerrilla gardener, perennially unlucky in love.
Bea · Santa Lucia’s source of fresh eggs and fresh gossip.
Giuseppe · Patrizia’s husband and the maker of Santa Lucia’s famous chicken sausages.
Sauro · Santa Lucia’s baker.
Giovanni · The joke-telling owner of the little shop on the piazza.
Concetta · Elisa’s mother, married to Carlo with two sons, Guido and Matteo
Arturo · Older villager who is sure his French wife is cheating on him.
Rosetta · The school principal.
Paola · The owner of the fruit and vegetable market.
Marcello · The town cop.
Dante · The mayor.
Stella · The mayor’s wife and Chiara’s childhood friend.
Vale · The town handyman.
A Note on the Italian
Italian words in the text are followed by the English translation or can be understood by context. For interested readers, there is a glossary in the back of this book.
The Last of September
On the crest of a hill, surrounded by glimmering olive groves, lies Santa Lucia. It is a typical Italian hill town, if smaller than those on the tourist trail. Even if you have never traveled to Italy, you no doubt have seen enough movies with lush soundtracks and sweeping camera work to have an instant picture in your mind—imagine stone arches framing panoramas, exuberant locals fiercely debating the chance of rain, and the scent of rosemary floating high above ancient streets. As you stroll through flower-lined alleys, it is easy to assume that Santa Lucia is as serene as it appears. But life here is like life anywhere, and the town’s idyllic facade masks love, betrayal, scandal, innuendo, mystery, romance, and heartbreak.
Rest easy, none of that will mar a passing visit to Santa Lucia. Those travelers who merely stop by will notice the light before anything else. Of course, there aren’t all that many visitors to a village this removed from Rome or Florence, so rarely will you hear voices raised in wonder at the shimmering air. Only one tourist has gone home and attempted to describe the light: “like sky warping upon meeting land.” He rubbed his temples and abandoned the attempt, as well as his fledgling dream of writing poetry.
The villagers themselves stopped remarking on the heavy, churning light generations ago. Nowadays, their voices intertwine with its fluctuations without their awareness. In the morning, the cadence of their greetings rises with the honeying of the golden air. They pass each other on their way to their jobs as gardener, teacher, baker, and shopkeeper, their voices lifting, “Buongiorno!” The lilt on that second o. They knot together in the street, gesturing at the billboard in the town comune announcing another possible strike, before separating with a staccato, “Ciao! Ciao! Cia-o!” Honestly, they sound like Bea’s clutch of chickens celebrating the approach of a food pail. Meanwhile, the glow pools in alley corners and gleams from the alabaster stones tugged from the Apennine mountains.
The light swells and shifts throughout the day, until it is a rich blue in the late afternoon, almost navy. As if the ink of night were dipped onto a paintbrush and touched to the watery air of Santa Lucia. Conversations mute, as the cobalt sheen sinks into the town. Even when the old women gather on their plastic chairs under stone arches while sorting greens, their voices blur, in time to the gathering blue of night.
Yes, the opalescent light certainly makes dusk a stirring time to visit Santa Lucia, but it must be said that Santa Lucia is at her best, her most tourist-ready, in the mornings. Especially if you stand right here on Via Romana. From this spot you can watch as the painter and the butcher meet in the street and angle into Bar Birbo. As they continue their debate on the proper care of olive trees during this unseasonable drought, they fishtail their hips to create space at the bar. Chatter continues to the beat of shaking sugar packets, with a final plunk as Chiara serves each espresso with a smile and an “Eccolo,” here it is. Her crescendoing welcome twines with the luminescent morning. With a nod, they acknowledge the arrival of white cups of dark and nutty coffee before resuming their discussion. In mere moments, the new arrivals transform into scenery, as the next pair or trio of villagers meet in the street and nod into Bar Birbo.
It is like this every morning. Every morning save Mondays, when the bar is closed. Bar Birbo has always been closed on Mondays, ever since Chiara’s great-grandfather converted the downstairs of their ancient palazzo to serve coffee. What had been a desperate attempt to resolve his family’s financial crisis became the jewel of Santa Lucia (after the falls, of course). Bar Birbo, the villagers crow at any opportunity, had the distinction of being the first bar in the zona. Yet, even though the bar’s giorno di chiusura hasn’t changed in almost 100 years, the people of Santa Lucia still stop and gape, confused, as they propel a friend by the arm toward the waxed wooden front of Bar Birbo, only to find the door shut tight. Their eyes drift upward to the open window of the residence above the bar, where Chiara is undoubtedly making her heavenly pistachio yogurt cake for herself and whatever niece or nephew has come for a visit. Grumbling, the disappointed espresso-seeker shuffles to the tabaccheria, where the coffee lacks the sweet roundness of Bar Birbo’s, and the owner, Cesare, scowls at the once-weekly swelling in his coffee clientele. Mondays lack a certain wholeness for the citizens of Santa Lucia, but one can pick up a giornale to read, and the marca da bollo stamp for whatever piece of bureaucracy has been put off for too long.
And so every day but one, villagers stroll out of Bar Birbo with their minds sharpened by Chiara’s coffee, and their days knit with their neighbors’. Perhaps they no longer notice the light. But on particularly iridescent days, they may pause on the low step leading from Bar Birbo to the cobblestone street. In that brief moment, they take in the sunset-hued stucco buildings’ murmur of color alongside the predominately creamy stone walls, the splash of red geranium-filled flowerpots, and how the children with backpacks as unwieldy as turtle shells race to school, their laughter weaving through the sound of the church bells.
Such are mornings in Santa Lucia. Just as they have been for generations.
“Buongiorno, Massimo, un caffè?”
“Sì, certo, Chiara, of course.” The clustered villagers looked over their shoulders at the man silhouetted against the glowing doorway. With a rustling burble, they parted to allow Massimo to approach the bar, the women twitching their skirts to fall more becomingly. The man ignored the bustle his presence created. He stepped into the opening at the bar, and pulled back his blue-striped shirtsleeve to consult his watch. His grandfather’s watch, really, but he knew the scratches in the
gold and the imperfections in the leather as well as he knew his own hand. He straightened his tie and then gazed over the heads of the other patrons, seeing none of them. He didn’t hear the hushed voices of Sauro, the baker, and Rosetta, the school principal, as they lowered their heads to whisper confidentially.
“Guarda, Rosetta,” Sauro murmured, gesturing with his chin. “It’s Massimo.”
Rosetta fought the urge to smooth down her hair as she cast a quick glance at Massimo, standing like a signal fire over the crowd, his strong jaw echoing his strong brows. “Mmm . . .” she responded, noncommittally.
Sauro watched his friend with a bemused expression. He murmured, “I wonder, will he ever smile again?”
This got Rosetta’s attention. “Massimo’s a serious person. You know that.”
“Sì, but the seriousness, it’s different now. Like he’ll never know joy.”
“Such drama. He was never a cheerful man, even before.”
Sauro paused to consider the foam left clinging to the side of his cappuccino cup, before venturing with a loftily raised eyebrow, “If I remember correctly, that didn’t stop you from tagging after him like Carosello follows a pork bone.”
Rosetta shifted uncomfortably. “So now you’re comparing me to a one-eyed dog?”
Sauro shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
Rosetta decided to glide over the implied comparison to the flea-bitten creature that jogged about town looking for scraps. “Anyway, that was years ago! And besides, it’s not like it was just me. All the girls had crushes on him. But he wouldn’t give any of us the time of day.”
Sauro nodded and said, “Only Giulia.”
Rosetta struggled not to roll her eyes and add a cutting comment as Sauro mused, “I never understood that attraction. Massimo is so tall, so . . . well, you know.”
Unfortunately, Rosetta heard none of this fascinating narration. Her eyes were half-lidded, and her vision trained on Massimo.
Unaware, Sauro stirred his coffee. “And Giulia. She was very sweet, but . . .” Sauro leaned past Rosetta’s shoulder to assess Massimo. His thick, dark hair that waved away from his bronze forehead and then swooped roguishly to the left, past eyelashes as thick as paintbrushes. His broad chest narrowing to a neat waist. It seemed unfair that Massimo had lost none of his good looks. Even after the tragedy.
As Sauro’s elbow brushed her own, Rosetta caught her cue. She said, dreamily, “Comunque, she was a sweet girl. And in love with him since we were children. Besides, you know what they say about Italian men and their mothers. Is it any wonder he chose Giulia?”
Sauro said, “And they never found out what happened to her. So strange.”
Eyes still fixed on Massimo, sipping his coffee with authority, Rosetta said, “Yes, well. Strange things happen. God’s will.”
The conversation shifted back and forth easily. After all, they’d had it at least once a week for the past year. But neither Rosetta nor Sauro seemed to notice the pattern. Only Chiara registered a familiarity with the turns of the dialogue, and that only by smiling to herself, the gap between her two front teeth winking, as she dried a glass with extra care.
Massimo spooned the last of the coffee-soaked sugar into his mouth and stepped to the register to drop his euro on a scuffed copper plate. His smile flashed briefly at Chiara, but it didn’t reach his eyes, which remained fixed to some distant point. He turned on his heel and with military briskness he started out the door looking neither right nor left, but determinedly walking up the hill to one of the two lots where the villagers parked their cars.
He didn’t notice the man pressed against the shadows, waiting for him.
Elisa hurried to school, late. This was unfortunately the standard state of affairs for little Elisa. Always behind, which would cause her no end of heartache. But more on that later.
As Elisa struggled to hang onto the papers wriggling out of her notebook (why, oh, why, hadn’t she organized them yesterday like she’d planned?), she tripped through the piazza, dappled with buttery light, and jogged around a couple that looked to be American judging from their fanny packs. The tourists paused in the middle of the street to take a picture up the wide stone steps to the castle. That abandoned castle never failed to reverberate in Elisa’s imagination, even though she must have passed it thousands of times in her eleven years. On quiet afternoons, when no one would notice her absence, she often peered in the glassless windows, filling her mind with the ghosts of twirling gowns and long tables groaning under the weight of hundreds of platters of pastas and grilled meats and roasted birds, still plumed.
Elisa hastened her steps to force her mind to the task ahead, narrowly avoiding the man striding out of Bar Birbo. Elisa cut her eyes to the flower boxes set against the windows of the gelateria to avoid the look of annoyance that no doubt twisted the man’s face. The morning had already been difficult enough. But she couldn’t avoid his heavy hand on her shoulder. She looked up at Massimo and tried not to cower.
“Piano,” he told her, his voice almost soft. Elisa nodded and focused on reining in her legs’ frantic energy. She peeked up at the familiar face of the Madonna leaning out of her blue niche, but Elisa wouldn’t stop to touch her, no matter how much luck she believed it would bring. After a few dramatically slowed steps, the thought of the school door closing consumed her once again and her steps quickened as she hurried down Via Romana.
The scent of almonds wafted above her as she passed L’Antico Forno, the town’s bakery. She would not allow herself the pleasure of stopping to inhale. Or to check if the window display of baked goods had changed from the late summer design of a sun made of bread and flowers constructed from biscotti, to the boar-shaped cookies the forno always created in honor of Santa Lucia’s autumnal festival of cinghiale.
She wove around parents chatting beside parked scooters and through the blessedly still-open door of the school. The school secretary, who had unhinged the door to prepare it for closing, began reprimanding the latecomer, until she realized it was Elisa. It was often Elisa, but how could she be angry at a child that thin, with eyes that haunted.
Instead she offered an encouraging smile and called after Elisa’s receding back, “Tranquilla!” Be calm.
Elisa gave no sign of having heard her, and instead stumbled up the steps, scurried across the catwalk situated above the dank hole offering glimpses of the Roman blocks below, through the linoleum-lined hallway smelling faintly of disinfectant with a curious cat food muskiness. She paused outside the door of her classroom. Her head darted over her shoulder, and she furtively tucked a strand of her no-particular-color hair behind her ear as she surveyed the jackets stretched down the wall like offerings. No one could see her—did she dare?
At the sound of squeaking chalk, Elisa quickly shrugged off her coat, deposited it on a hook, and ducked into the classroom. She dropped into her seat as Maestra Cocinelli turned away from the board to face the class.
Massimo leaned down to buff an imagined smudge off his relentlessly shiny left shoe. He stood and considered the polished leather before tucking his handkerchief back into his pocket and pulling back his sleeve once again to check the time.
He smelled Luciano before he saw him—the air became ripe with the dinginess of potatoes forgotten at the back of a dark cupboard. Massimo quickened his footsteps. If Luciano was as drunk as usual, Massimo could outstrip him without too much fuss. But the lurch of footsteps gained on him. Before he could formulate an escape plan, Luciano stood before him, shouting and waving his hands.
“You devil! You did this! Of all the games in all the fields you had to befoul me! Mine!”
Massimo rolled his eyes and glanced about to see if there were any bystanders. Only Carosello turned from an alley onto the road, steadfastly trotting toward the school. Massimo noticed that the tuft of fur that covered the dog’s missing eye was coated with coffee grounds.
Luciano continued, crying, “You are not a man! Just a pile of empty, a twisted sack . . . no standing, no morals, you . . . you are mouse feces! Yes, that with the cat and the pile and all the defecation under the couch . . .” The rest of his words collapsed into garbled slosh.
Satisfied that he was alone, Massimo grabbed Luciano’s lapel and pulled him close to his gritted teeth. “No more, old man. You will get out of my sight. You are nothing. You are worthless. You are nobody. Get out of here before I call the police and tell them everything.”
Luciano shivered, whispering, “Everything? What . . . what? But, it was you!”
Massimo sneered, “Who will listen to you? Now get away from me! Vai!” Massimo pushed Luciano backward. The older man’s arms pinwheeled as he fought to keep his balance. Stumbling over the uneven cobblestones, Luciano collapsed, a fall of rags.
Luciano clutched his ears and moaned, “No! It’s unhinging the bell. It’s you.”
“Massimo!”
Massimo’s head twisted. He straightened and uncreased his forehead with an easy smile. “Patrizia! How good to see you. Perhaps you can help? Luciano seems to have fallen and I must get to Rome.”
Patrizia took in the huddle of Luciano. “Why is he crying?” Her gaze narrowed. “Massimo? What happened?”
“Who can say?” Massimo pulled back his sleeve to consult his watch. “He attacked me, running at me with his hands waving, screaming something about mouse droppings under his couch, or some such. Insane, yes? Then he just tripped and fell. A loose cobblestone, perhaps. Anyway, he’s fine.” Massimo stepped around Luciano who was leaning on Patrizia’s arm to rise. As he walked away he called over his shoulder, “I certainly am grateful that you came along when you did. I didn’t want to leave him there, but,” he chuckled, “I couldn’t really see him home either. Please send my regards to Giuseppe. My mother will be by later today for sausages.”
Book One of the Santa Lucia Series Page 1