The Scent Of Rosa's Oil (5 page)

The children in the classroom loved the story. As for Miss Bevilacqua, she showed the governess the essay at the end of class and asked for an explanation. Madam C looked at Rosa with sweet eyes. “You naughty girl. Making up stories again? I can’t believe it.” She turned to Miss Bevilacqua. “This child has the wildest imagination.”

Miss Bevilacqua didn’t buy it. “I’d like to meet her parents, if you don’t mind. They must be back from South America by now.”

Rosa looked at the two women with wondering eyes.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Madam C said, dragging Rosa outside.

“What was that about?” Rosa asked on the way home.

“Never mind, darling. We’ll just have to find you another school. It’s May already, so we won’t have to worry about it until summer ends.”

“I don’t want another school. I want to go on a ship to America.”

“You will someday,” Madam C said, caressing Rosa’s hair. “It may be a while.”

Rosa wasn’t quite sure what had gone wrong with her essay that day. She had told the truth, which is what Madam C always said she should do at all times, but after she was finished reading, Miss Bevilacqua had snatched her paper and said, “
Dio Santo
!” And now Madam C wanted to send her to a different school. That night, in the peace of her bedroom, Rosa struggled to fall asleep. She had this funny tingling in her gut that told her that there was something strange about her life. After reading her story, she had heard the stories the three other children had written, and she had gathered from what they had read that they all had one mother and one father, who lived together in a house where no one came to play games. Then one of the girls in the class had told her during recess that for a child to be born there must be a mother and a father, who are called husband and wife, so her story of ten mothers and no father had to be fake for sure. Three days after her last day in Miss Bevilacqua’s school, Madam C walked with Rosa to the port. While they watched the ships coming and going, Rosa asked, “Who’s my real mother? And where’s my father?”

Madam C sighed. They sat on a bench, facing the blue water. She took Rosa’s hand and said, “I knew you’d ask someday. Now I’ll tell you the story of how you were born.” They spent a long time on that bench talking and crying. When they got up to return home, Rosa knew that she had been born on the second floor of the Luna, in the room Carla had now, that Angela was her mother, that Madam C had been Angela’s friend all her life, that Angela and Madam C had played the game together for years, and that while Angela was dying Madam C had promised her that she would take care of her baby as if she were her own. “I also promised Angela I would give you an education, so come September, you’re back in school, Signorina.”

“What about the girls who live in our house?” Rosa asked. “Who are they?”

“Friends,” Madam C whispered, “who love you very much.”

“And my father?”

“Angela told me your father was a fisherman,” Madam C lied, “who worked on a boat. She said he’d be back soon, certainly in time for your birth. Maybe something happened to his boat. There are storms out there, you know. He would have loved you to pieces, I’m sure.”

“Have you met him?” Rosa asked.

“No,” Madam C replied. “I would have liked to.”

Rosa pondered a little. “So would I.”

“I love you,” Madam C said with soft eyes.

Rosa nodded and held on to Madam C’s hand tight. “Did Angela have red hair like mine?”

“She did,” Madam C lied again. “Red and wild.”

That summer, Rosa’s fantasies about the ships became more frequent, growing richer and longer every time. She imagined that the ships that crossed the ocean went to mysterious lands, where people talked funny languages and the towns were populated by humongous tame animals, trees with rainbow-colored leaves, and little birds with red-and-blue eyes who could talk to the fish in the water. Her father lived there, in a hut by the ocean. He was poor. All he had to eat was his catch, and that’s why he hadn’t come back to Genoa to see her. And then she imagined Angela with her red hair, flying over the hut like an angel and blowing her husband kisses when he was close by. She dreamed while she was at the port and also while she was at the Luna, when she sat at the kitchen table for the
colazione
, when she watched Antonia peel and dice potatoes, and when she stood by the parlor window looking outside. “She’s growing,” Madam C said of Rosa’s long silences and dreamy eyes. “That’s hard to do.”

The girls did all they could to make Rosa smile. They took her along when they went shopping, lent her hats and bracelets, told her all sorts of stories about their lives. One day, while Rosa and Annaclara were buying glass beads to make a necklace, Rosa saw for the first time a casket being carried out of a building and a crowd of teary people waiting in the street. Rosa asked what was going on. “It’s a funeral,” explained Annaclara, who didn’t believe in sparing children the truths of life. “When someone dies, they put the body in that box, a casket. The people you see around the casket must be the dead person’s friends, because they are sad.”

“Where are they taking the casket?” asked Rosa.

“To the cemetery,” Annaclara replied, “which is a large beautiful meadow where all the dead people rest. They lie in spaces called tombs, underground, so they can smell the earth. And then their friends can visit them, so they don’t feel alone.”

That night, when Madam C put her to sleep, Rosa asked, “Is Angela at the cemetery? In a tomb?”

Madam C flinched. “Angela is in heaven, with the angels. And that’s how you should think of her.”

“But if she were in a tomb I could go visit her and make her feel less alone.”

“Angela is not alone,” Madam C said. “She is with you all the time. And with me. And with all the people who loved her. She can see you from up in heaven, and that’s all that matters to her.” She paused. “Dead people are not really dead if you keep thinking of them and loving them as if they were alive.”

Rosa gave a sigh of relief. She hadn’t liked the idea of Angela being locked up in a casket at all. Much better for her to be in heaven, she thought, flying free with the angels, so she could keep visiting her husband in the hut across the ocean. She moaned when Madam C kissed her on the cheek, then fell into a dreamless sleep.

When September came, Madam C enrolled Rosa in a different school. It was larger than Miss Bevilacqua’s home school, with about thirty children divided into four grades based on their skills, not their ages. The school was in Salita Santa Caterina, a beautiful old, steep street that led to a large piazza with trees. To be admitted, children needed a recommendation, and Madam C obtained one from Beppe Marenco, owner of ships and warehouses and a faithful client of the Luna. Based on her reading and writing abilities, Rosa placed in third grade. She sat next to Clarissa, a girl her age, who asked her how she had learned to read. Rosa explained that she had learned at Miss Bevilacqua’s school, which she had to leave because Miss Bevilacqua didn’t like what she wrote.

“Now I know why you look so familiar,” Clarissa said. “My older sister Lara used to go to Miss Bevilacqua’s school. I saw you a few times walking down the hallway, while I was waiting for Lara with my mom.”

At dinner, Clarissa told her parents that one of her classmates, who had long red hair, used to go to Miss Bevilacqua’s school. At once, the parents recognized from that description the girl who had written the essay about the ten mothers. “
Santa Maria
,” the father exclaimed. “Stay away from her. That girl lives in a brothel!”

By the end of the first week of school, all the kids knew that the girl with red hair had ten mothers and lived in a brothel. Most kids didn’t know the meaning of the word
brothel
, so legends began to flourish: that a brothel was a place where one hid from the police, a place where homeless people could sleep on the floor if they helped with the chores, a dungeon guarded by giant spiders. One of the older boys set things straight for everyone one morning. “A brothel is where men go to spend the night with prostitutes.”

“What are prostitutes?” a second boy asked in dismay.

The older boy explained. “They are women who walk around with no clothes, and if you give them money, you can poke at them with your fingers.”

Clarissa said, “Is that what Rosa’s ten mothers are? Prostitutes?”

That was how Rosa earned her nickname, Prostitutes’ Daughter. Before the second week of school was over, all the children called her that when she walked by. “Hello, Prostitutes’ Daughter.”

“Prostitutes’ Daughter!” they chanted. “Prostitutes’ Daughter!”

Rosa didn’t know the meaning of the word
prostitute
, but figured it must be something bad if the kids made fun of her that way. For the first time, she felt scared, and because she felt scared, she didn’t have the courage to ask Madam C or the girls what that nickname meant. She cried often, at the Luna and in school, and when Madam C or her teacher asked her what was wrong, she said, “Nothing,” and turned her face away. “She’s still growing,” Madam C told the girls, who were worried sick about Rosa.

The rumors about Rosa spread quickly beyond the student body. The children’s parents began to talk, as did the parents’ neighbors. Gossip was fueled by Miss Bevilacqua, who over the summer had told everyone she knew about Rosa and her essay, unable to get over the fact that the elegant lady she had thought a governess was in reality a Madam, who had duped her over and over with her stories.

Soon Miss Cipollina, the school’s
direttrice
, got wind of Rosa’s nickname and gave Rosa a note to take home. In the note, she asked that Rosa’s mother (whom Miss Cipollina believed to be Madam C) come to school the following day for a consultation. As she gave Madam C the note, Rosa broke into tears. “I don’t want to go to that school,” she sobbed, “or to any other school. The kids make fun of me. They call me Prostitutes’ Daughter.”

In a fury, Madam C took the note and ripped it into shreds, then ran upstairs to the third floor. The third floor was the Luna’s smallest, with only two rooms—a sitting room and a bedroom. These were Madam C’s private quarters. The walls of both rooms were painted off-white and the windows had pale yellow curtains Madam C had chosen in memory of the dress Angela had given her on that long-ago night. The sitting room had a fireplace that had been out of order for years. On its marble mantel, Madam C kept mementos of her life: a hand-painted vase with a lid that had belonged to her mother, a purple scented candle that had belonged to Angela, letters from old lovers tied gently with a ribbon of white satin, stones she had picked up on the beach over the years. Santina had specific orders not to dust or touch those objects in any way. Next to the fireplace was an iron enameled tub with lion feet where Madam C took hot baths when her nerves needed calming. The second room, the bedroom, was a place once reserved for the Luna’s best clients. Madam C had stopped entertaining men there the moment Rosa had begun climbing stairs.

This day, holding the pieces of Miss Cipollina’s note in front of her, Madam C kneeled in front of the fireplace, which was what she did when she wanted to ask Angela for inspiration. “Angela, dear,” she said, fighting back tears, “there are only two things we can do. One is to send Rosa away from the Luna, to live with a respectable family, so she won’t have to worry ever again about what people say. The second is to keep her here, forget about school, and teach her to be proud of who we are. What do you say?”

Five minutes later, Madam C was back downstairs. She found Rosa in the kitchen, sobbing in Annaclara’s arms. “I’m going to that school and I’m going to chop some of those kids’ tongues off with an ax,” Annaclara said with a wicked grin.

“You will do no such thing,” Madam C stated. “Rosa? You don’t have to go back to school if you don’t want to. But if you decide not to, you must promise me you’ll keep reading.”

“I’ll read anything,” Rosa said, drying her tears. “Just keep me here, please.”

“I’ll go buy books later today,” Madam C said, leaving the room. She stopped at the doorway. “And you,” she told Annaclara, “take this lady out for an ice cream.”

By the following morning, Rosa’s tears had disappeared. “This is a new life for you,” Madam C told her when she got up. She pointed to a pile of ten books. “In the afternoon you’ll read, and in the morning you’ll have chores and duties like everybody else around here. You’ll do the shopping, you’ll go to the fountain with the girls to do the wash, and you’ll help Santina clean the rooms.”

“Does that mean that I can go to the second floor?” Rosa asked, half naughty, half surprised.

“Only in the morning.”

“And you want me to go shopping all by myself?”

“Do you think you can do it?” Madam C asked.

“I don’t know,” Rosa whispered.

“Angela did it when she was your age. She delivered the clothes her mother mended.”

Rosa squared her shoulders. “I can do it.”

“Good. Just stay on our shopping route.”

Rosa brought her right hand to her temple. “
Sissignora
,” she said, giving Madam C a big smile.

She settled into her new routine with ease. She woke up at eight in the morning, helped Santina for an hour with the cleaning chores, had
colazione
in the kitchen with the girls, and then went to see Madam C, who gave her a daily list of things to buy. “Got it,” she’d tell Madam C as she rushed out of the Luna into the street. Her first stop was the vegetable stand, where she picked out fresh vegetables and ripe fruit; then she moved to the fishmonger cart, where she made sure the fish she bought didn’t smell of the sewer; and then she was off to the bakery, her favorite stop, where she stood in line longer than necessary to smell the fresh bread and pastries before buying. She walked back to the Luna slowly, with her shopping bags full and her gait that of a proud soldier on the way home from war.

During her morning missions, Rosa discovered how much she loved to stroll in the
caruggi
alone and that she could do it without losing her way. She had followed Madam C in that maze since she had been able to walk, so that unknowingly she had built a map in her head of all the streets. Sometimes she took detours from the shopping route to go smell the spices at the Sottoripa markets, by the port, with all the ships nearby. She suspected by then that where those ships were going there were no talking birds or rainbow-colored leaves and no hut where her father lived in poverty and fished to survive. It wasn’t that important, she found out. Dreams were dreams, thoughts that lasted as long as one believed in them, and if her dreams of talking birds, rainbow leaves, and a hut by the water had been undone, surely there must be something across the ocean to replace them, something that would make the trip there worthwhile. In those days, she was reading avidly the books Madam C had bought for her. They were mostly books of sea adventures, which scared her sometimes, but also taught her about navigation, stars, storms, and sailors’ lives, making her longing for a sea trip even stronger. In the meantime, she felt so good inside when she could just look at the ships and smell the spices, and then walk the
caruggi
on the way home. “I’m Angela’s daughter,” she said to herself with her head held high.