Lambrusco (13 page)

There was instant silence. I could tell from the sound of Marcellina's breathing that she'd gone back to sleep. Good.

“I'll wait just outside for you, Lucia,” said Etto. “I'll walk around and make sure it's safe. I wanted to stretch my legs anyway. The last time I slept on the ground, I swear to God, was never. It doesn't agree with me.”

“It's very kind of you,” I answered. “Seeing as how you won't allow me to stop you.”

“A principle is involved. I'm a principled man, in case you didn't know that.”

“You must be longing for your bed.”

“I don't have one anymore. They blew it up.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “It's no consolation, but it's possible that the same thing happened to mine. Who knows what I'll find when I go home? But in my case, the culprits would be
nazifascisti.
”

“We should hope for the best, even when it's insane of us,” said Etto.

“I'll try to agree with you.”

I was finally up on my feet, having taken what felt like an hour to get the sense that my blood was circulating correctly and that my legs could be trusted to hold me. I refused the arm Annmarie held out to me, but one second later, swaying back and forth, with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, like seasickness—I'd never felt all right on boats—I took hold of it, as if seizing a rail.

That was when the smell of my own body assailed me: the unmistakable, shameful smell, then the sticky dampness, then the realization that, sometime earlier, I had soiled myself. Why hadn't I noticed before that the grove smelled like pee? It was overwhelming, especially in that heavy air.

“Are you all right?” whispered Annmarie.

“I don't know.”

I considered allowing myself to sink back down on the car seat and let my bladder release itself again, like an infant's. And why not, when I was sleepy, weak, and aching, and the pain in my face was growing worse—the waves were faster now, without pause—and my clothes were already stinking wet? Yes, I'd lost my shoes, but if I hadn't, they'd be stinking wet as well.

“My will is gone and it doesn't matter to me. All I want to do is lie down again on Ugo's seat,” I almost said.

I really came close to it. Certainly I had the right to that particular type of surrender. Sink down, let go, and stay put. Even now, the edges of sleep were closing in on me, pulling at me like a tide. I had never in my life been so tired.

But there was Annmarie, holding on to me. “Come on, start walking. If I told you the number of times soldiers piss themselves in bombings, you would never believe me. Or golfers before a tournament, sometimes even an exhibition, when there's not all that much at stake. Do you know what we call golfers who never wet their pants? We call them people who aren't actually golfers.”

It worked.

“Stop trying to cheer me up. It's not working. And let go of me. I can get along without you.”

“That's terrific. We haven't got water for you to bathe in, but when you get outdoors, you can change your clothes. You can wear my habit—well, the dress part, which smells all right, considering what it's been through, and it's dry. It'll be a mile too long for you, but you can bunch it up at the waist, and wear the belt.”

“You want me to be a
Sister
?”

And there was Etto's voice, calling to me from outdoors. “Lucia! I've made you a path for your toilet! Come and see the moonlight!”

“Just wear it like a dress,” said Annmarie. She already had the garment in her hand, and held it out to me, all the yards and yards of it, like a gift. Then she handed me the belt. “Do you want me to come with you and guard you from Etto?”

“You stay here.”

“Watch your step,” said Annmarie.

“Stop fussing.”

“Excuse me,” whispered a boy. It was unmistakably the somber, brainy Rudino. “May I have permission to be exempt from the vow, to say just one more thing?”

“No exemptions,” said Annmarie.

“But I don't want to say it to you. I want to say it to Signora Fantini.”

“Go ahead, dear,” I said. “I'm on my way out, in a hurry, but I'm actually the one in charge here. If Annamaria is a nun, I promise you, I'm her abbess.”

“That's what I thought,” said Rudino. “I just wanted to say, as worried as I am about Mama and Papa and my village, I'm glad you didn't die when the station fell on you, and have a good walk.”

“
Grazie, buona notte.
You can still have your golf lesson.”

“Have a good walk outdoors, Signora Fantini. Can I still have a lesson, too?” Beppina's sweet voice rose up from the ground like a trill: the little namesake, clinging to Marcellina.

“
Ciao, carina.
You can have anything you ask for, but go to sleep now.”

Etto called to me again, more impatiently. “Hurry, Lucia! I'm not kidding about the moon! I thought for a minute the Americans bombed it! But there it is! It's almost full! I never saw it so big! It's almost as good as the spotlight at Aldo's, but not quite!”

T
HERE WAS NO NEED
to make him feel like a country bumpkin, Etto pointed out, a real provincial hick, when all he'd done was ask if I sang from operas of the famous Venetian clergyman-composer Antonio Vivaldi, often called the Red-Headed Priest—not that, after his ordination, he had practiced priestly duties. Plenty of people thought him inferior to someone like Verdi, but what was the use of the comparison? It was like saying that a man is inferior to a god. Italians couldn't all be god-like, or there wouldn't be a country of people.

I didn't think Verdi was a god? Just a very great composer? Ha! He agreed! He'd only said so because he'd thought it was expected of him!

He knew Beppi had been named Giuseppe in honor of Verdi. So it was actually Aldo who picked the name! Hoping Beppi would grow up to be a composer! Which became apparent at an early age would never happen! Ha ha! All those years knowing Aldo—he'd never mentioned that!

No one called him by his given name of Ettore, but he felt it was thoughtful of me to inquire. He was Etto, pure and simple. At the factory, he'd been Signore,
capo,
or just
cap.
Sardinians, Sicilians like ourselves, Greeks, North Africans, and mainland Italians as well, had all sorts of names for him in their dialects. He didn't have to put two and two together to know that, even if they sounded nice, they were not always compliments. It was just as well that he never understood what anyone was saying. The people who worked for him had made fun of him, taunted him, and insulted him, but they'd done it only privately, among their own kind. He found that a sign of respect.

He didn't suit everyone's taste, Vivaldi, with all that baroque high-mindedness. But his life was purely musical and worthy of envy, as was, in point of historical fact, his lustrous red hair, which he'd been vain about. It must have been difficult for him to have undergone the natural process of entering into old age, when vanity can truly be a problem.

He, Etto, wasn't like so many people who thought the aging process was horrifying. In the furniture business, you know that when you age a piece of lumber, remove the layers of junk, and plane it down carefully until it's smooth, bare wood—well, maybe it's not music, but it's art, and it's going to be a lot more valuable, that piece of wood, than it ever was before, in its younger days, as part of a rough, uninteresting tree.

“I don't think you're a bumpkin,” I said.

We walked down the avenue in moonlight toward a house that belonged, Etto said, to a family named Sabatucci: the master carpenter Corrado; his wife, Paolina; Paolina's old mother, who was also Paolina; and two sons, grown-ups, no longer part of the household, who had started out life with so much promise—two decent, handsome boys, wanting for nothing. But the Adriatic youth camps and little-boy squads, and toy guns and fancy parades, and all those banners had really had an effect on them. They were Fascists.

“Were they involved in banishing the Pattuelli family?”

“Lucia, no. Myself, I wasn't part of that, which you're probably wondering. I could have done more to try to stop it, I know. I admit to some culpability, indirectly, but I swear, as much as this is—as this
was
—a factory town, my authority never extended past my gates. By the way, those children who look so angelic were no angels when they lived here. And their parents did well on the sale of that house, especially when you consider that it was not in good shape to begin with, and now it's all gone. There's no need for hard feelings. I believe that very strongly.”

“I don't hold anything against you, now that you've been wiped out, Etto.”

“That's a relief to me. It's strange that the Sabatucci place was the only one more or less spared. It might have been divine intervention, with God feeling bad for the parents and grandmother, for how those boys turned out.”

“I don't believe,” I said, “that God, who is likely not to exist, cares one way or another about anything that goes on around here.”

“I agree with you completely, when you come right down to it!”

The Sabatucci house was located about three-quarters of the way down the avenue from where the train station used to be. Etto had said it looked like a good place to change one's dress and perhaps find water and food; nothing had been saved for tomorrow from the three waiters' picnic.

Annmarie's habit was around my shoulders like a cape, which had seemed to be the best way to carry it. I was beginning to look forward to putting it on.

What the moonlight revealed was the fact that San Guarino was almost fully a village of rubble. But to me, it was a wondrous, rare thing, as if we'd stumbled on a site of ancient ruins, unlisted in the directories, and never seen before by modern eyes.

The waves of pain had lessened to the point where I was barely aware of them. Maybe the walk was good for me.

All was still. The eerie, strangely beautiful silhouettes of still-standing walls, or parts of them, cast shadows here and there along the avenue.

“Granted, my life has been fully occupied with making furniture,” Etto was saying. “But in a time like this I see no reason for withholding a confidence. What I've longed to do is to take up the hobby of my late father and join forces with a composer and write libretti of operas, beginning with, if possible, simple things, then working my way specifically, and I say this with all humility, to the
Orlando furioso
of the great Ludovico Ariosto. Vivaldi himself made an opera of it, which was the only reason I brought up Vivaldi. It's not, in my opinion, very good.”

“I don't know of it.”

“You're not missing anything. Naturally, Vivaldi had nothing to do with the words, but neither he nor his librettist did justice to Ariosto, who was unquestionably a genius and the greatest poet this country has ever produced.”

“What about Dante?”

A shrug of the shoulders from Etto, but then he took a moment to think of a way to explain himself. “He was too stern, and everyone he wrote about was dead,” he said sadly. “This may seem like heresy to you, but I mistrust people who spend all their time obsessed with the afterlife. Where's the art in contemplating souls? I don't care how lofty it is, or how sublime or metaphorical. I would much rather hear about things you can touch with your hands, or feel beside you, living and breathing. And to further my argument, Dante was never bombed. He had problems, but he didn't know anything about hell. It's not a metaphor, if you've been bombed. Perhaps now, not that I'm offering apologies, you'd like to reconsider my hickness.”

“Oh, I don't, but what about Virgil?”

“The Aeneid,”
said Etto, “great as it is, is second in my mind to Ariosto's
Orlando.
I'm not just saying so because he came from these parts. Reggio Emilia, in fact. His blood was pure Romagnan. There was a box in my house containing the attempts my father had made in his lifetime to put some of his cantos into songs. Unfortunately, along with my house, not to mention my factory, his work was bombed and destroyed. And let me say, speaking of bombs, I find it disturbing that I'm the only one wearing shoes. I can't stop thinking about that.”

In the moonlit road were bricks, chunks of wood, heaps of linen from someone's bureau, a child's bicycle, a large kitchen sink, books, pots, broken roof tiles, parts of cars, rakes and hoes and spades and shovels. I soon stopped trying to put an identity to all the shapes.

“I'm all right, as long as we go slowly,” I said.

“No trouble there. I've been slow, Lucia, all my life. I only wish there weren't so many obstacles. I wish it were smoother sailing for us.”

“That's a funny way of putting it,” I said. “Do you like to go out in boats?”

“Boats? Like a fisherman?”

“Any at all.”

“Once, Lucia, when I was a child, I was sent west to some relatives. They lived on the other side of a lake from the train station I had arrived at, so they sent a boatman to fetch me and bring me over. The lake was perfectly tranquil, and the boat was a good one, very sturdy. The weather was excellent. The boatman was skilled and completely trustworthy, especially since he knew it was my first time on water. There was not one element of danger. However, from the instant the oars were lifted, and the boat began to move, I felt in so much peril, it seemed not only possible, but highly likely, I'd fall out, or the boat would spring a leak and sink slowly, with me in it, as if I'd been tied to it, which of course, I was not. At any rate it seemed certain to me that I was going to drown. The poor boatman had feared, by the look on my face, I might have been an epileptic, in the opening phases of a fit. He told me later that I wore grooves into the seat, like wormholes, but wider and deeper, in the shape of my fingers and thumbs, from gripping the edge so tightly. I'd really left imprints, he said. When it was time for me to leave my relatives and go home, they were thoughtful enough to send me to the station in a roundabout way, on the roads, in a mule-drawn wagon, which took three or four hours longer than the boat, but was, to me, worth it. With all my heart, and I'm sorry if this is not the answer you hoped for, and I'm sorry that it took me so long to tell it, I hate boats.”

“Are you in shock, Etto?”

“Do I seem it?”

“You do.”

“I apologize. Did you know I'm a partisan? I've been trying to form a squad. If we had someone like you to broker guns for us, we'd take a big step forward. I don't think we'll accomplish much as we are, with just saws and hammers, not that we've even got those anymore.”

Etto had rolled up his shirtsleeves. The skin of his arms, from just below the elbows to the wrists, looked cool and pale.

“But, oh, you know,” he said, “the Ariosto is simply magnificent. My favorite part, somewhat near the end, is when the wits of the poor, demented hero—Orlando, that is—must be rescued from the moon. Yes, the moon. He's gone mad. It's very dramatic. His sanity is returned to him in an urn.”

“Why did he go mad?”

“It was a case of unrequited love. Look, here's the house. I'm sure it's all right to enter it, as no one's home, and there's no front door. I wonder where it is. It's chestnut. Corrado Sabatucci built it at my factory to replace the original, which had rotted. His two boys carried it down the avenue with a great deal of ceremony, but they weren't completely Fascists yet, and that had been a good day.”

It was a wide, modest, two-story brick villa. The empty space where the door had been was in the middle of two long shuttered-up windows, perfectly intact. An overhanging section of the roof had collapsed, and so had the chimney. Two shutters upstairs were slightly askew.

Etto seemed confident. “I've been in here a thousand times. Every weekend for I don't know how many years, I've had a meal here. Being a bachelor, I appreciate the hospitality of my friends. I know where everything is. In case there's any danger, which I'm sure there isn't, I'll go in first.”

Cautiously, he put one foot forward into the doorway, as if he were standing at the edge of the sea, barefoot, sticking in a toe to test the water's temperature.

As if the two of us had just finished a discussion about a moonlit swim.

Not once in our married life did Aldo have the time for a late-night stroll—not on the beach, not along the village roads, not even in the lane or orchard at home. A beach to Aldo was a place to have your restaurant near. A stroll was what you wanted your patrons to go and take while waiting for a table, sometimes with a complimentary glass of wine in their hands, or one of the free bags of sweets the waiters gave out to good children.

I hadn't been resentful of Aldo. I'd never had the time for strolls, either.

“I found the door,” Etto said, over his shoulder. “I just stepped on it. It was blown inside. It's lying here like a carpet at the entryway.”

“I think you should pick it up and put it back,” I said.

“Right now?”

“Well, with all those years in the carpentry business, I'm sure you know what to do with it.”

“It's not a question of knowledge. I'm strong in normal circumstances, but at the moment—not that I'm complaining—I'm so tired that if you asked me to lift one piece of dust, never mind this chestnut door—which, let me tell you, is as heavy as can possibly be—I wouldn't be able to do it. If a flea started walking up my neck into my ear, I wouldn't have the strength to pick it off.”

“Do you ever say anything simply, Etto?”

“What do you mean? What's the matter with how I talk?”

“I mean—” I said, but then I stopped myself. I didn't know what I meant. I had hurt him.

The air was a little brighter. The moon! It was across the road from the Sabatuccis' house, huge and almost full, and so shiny and bright that the craters and mountains, and all those plains of basalt, appeared only phantomly, like shadings of relief or attractive, white-gray decorations. Etto's face was lit up in a silver way. I saw an exhausted man of my own age, looking elderly, fragile. I hadn't wanted to hurt him.