All This Talk of Love (34 page)

She lays both her hands on Maddalena’s face and looks deep into her eyes. “
Sorella mia,
”
she says, over and over. “
Sorella mia
.”
My sister, my sister.

“Your sister died?” Maddalena guesses. It happens to old people. It’s what they do. “I’m so sorry. What was her name? I’m sure she was very nice.” She looks up, shrugs her shoulders. What else can she say to this woman she met two minutes ago? She decides on, “Can I get you a drink? Or do you want us to leave you alone so you can watch your TV show?”

But instead of eating or drinking or walking to the café, they sit and watch the silly TV show. A half-naked
putana
type is writing in lipstick on the head of a bald guy with a crazy mustache.
Th
e audience laughs and laughs. Maddalena can’t sit still.
Th
e handsome boy sits on the arm of the couch next to her. She rests her head on his shoulder. Francesco, his name is. She likes the name. She feels comfortable with Francesco.
Th
e girl he’s with has a friendly face; there’s something foreign about her, American or German.
Th
ey sit around for such a long time, and Carolina keeps crying and hugging her and kissing her all over her face, talking about her sister, how much she misses her. It’s so depressing. Maddalena feels her own tears coming, even though she didn’t know the sister.

“It’ll be all right,” Maddalena tells her. She dries her tears with her sleeve. “You’ll see your sister again in heaven, you know.
Th
ink of it that way.
Th
ere’s no reason to be sad if you remember she’s up there waiting.”

Good for you, Vito Leone, Antonio thinks bitterly. Your wife’s not so bad off as Claudio made it sound. He can’t stay in this room another second. He hands Maddalena his handkerchief and walks out to the terrace. Claudio follows. Big clay pots overflow with flowers. Claudio offers Antonio a cigarette. Antonio hasn’t smoked in years.
Th
e sun and the flowers are bright on their faces.

“She’s like a stranger,” Antonio says.

“So is Carolina, most of the time. What you saw back there, that’s a miracle.”

Antonio wants to take each of the flowerpots, lift them over his head, and smash them onto the street. Shatter the windshields of the cars parked below.
Th
ere shouldn’t be cars in Santa Cecilia, anyway.
Th
ere should be carriages and donkeys and dirt.

Claudio disappears, and now Prima comes out with Kelly Anne.

“Anything?” Antonio asks.

Prima shakes her head. “We knew not to get our hopes up, Dad. It was a long shot at best.”

“If it doesn’t happen now,” Antonio says, “it’s never going to happen.”

“You don’t know that, Mr. Grasso,” says Kelly Anne. “Not even the doctors said that, right?”

“You should enjoy being back here, Dad,” says Prima. “You’ve been wanting this for a long time. You deserve it.”

“I need to check on her,” he says. “
Th
e three of you, go walk around. Before it gets dark. It’s easy to get lost here.”

“Seriously?” says Kelly Anne.

“He’s joking,” says Prima.

Antonio walks back into the room where his wife is sitting, whispers in her ear, takes her hand, and leads her away from Carolina, without a word to Vito or Claudio.

“
Th
ank you,” she says in the hallway. “What do we do now?”

“I think it’s time for a nap,” Antonio says. “It’s been a long day.”

“No!” she says. “I’m not even tired!” But by the time they reach the end of the hall, she’s yawning and shuffling her feet. “I could rest my eyes a little,” she says.

Her old bedroom is now the guest room where they will be staying the next three nights. Antonio shuts the heavy wooden door, newly fitted with shiny brass hinges. In the window is an air conditioner on high.
Th
ere’s a cordless telephone attached to a fax machine and, in the corner, another TV. Antonio eases Maddalena onto the bed and unstraps her sandals and rubs her feet to help with her circulation. Her toenails are pink, painted by Kelly Anne the day before they left.

He helps her take off her dress and hangs it in the closet. She bats her eyes at him as he buttons the front of her nightgown, one of those flannel old-lady kinds with lace around the neck, nothing stylish. Her hair, which he paid the Michael Christopher Salon eighty-five dollars to make pretty earlier in the week, is going flat. He’ll ask Prima to fix it later before they see more people, the distant cousins in the village who will come calling before long. Maddalena would want to look her best—no witch hair falling all over the place, no bare legs, no ears without earrings or fingers without rings. For now, though, he wants only for her to be comfortable and rested, not to worry how she looks. He tucks her in. He closes the blinds and finds music on the clock radio to help her sleep. He’s about to say good night and step out of the room when he notices the way she’s looking at him.

Something in her face is different than it was just minutes ago, in the room with Carolina, and in the hallway, and on the bed when he was removing her clothes.

“You know me, don’t you?” Antonio says.

“Of course I do,” she says. She smiles. “Antonio.”

It’s the first time she’s said his name in months, since one night in the spring, when she woke up in the middle of the night calling to him. He sits beside her. His heart is racing. “How do you feel,
tesoro
? Do you understand where you are? Are you happy? Can I get you anything?”

“Did you eat?” she asks.

“We all ate,” he says. “You and Frankie and Prima and Claudio and Carolina. All together. And now you’re in your old bed. You know that? You used to sleep right here with your sisters. All four of you on this little mattress.”
Th
e words can’t come out fast enough. He wants to tell her everything.

She closes her eyes. “You work too hard,” she says.

“I’m not working tonight,” he tells her. “We’re going dancing at the Al Di Là.” And there it is, that smile in the corners of her mouth. He hasn’t seen it in so long.

“My shoes,” she says, her eyes still closed. He wishes she’d open them. He wants to see them see clear. “
Th
e gold ones, the heels,” she goes on. “I can’t find them.”

“I have them. Don’t worry.”

“Tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow night we’ll go dancing. It’s late now. Isn’t it late?”

“Yes,” he says. “It is pretty late.” So he takes off his clothes and, in his underwear and shirtsleeves, lies beside her under the covers.
Th
e sheets are cold.
Th
e room is dark.
Th
e air conditioner blows across their bodies.
Th
e drapes ripple like a child is playing a game behind them. Maddalena turns on her side, she lays her arm across his chest, her head on his shoulder, and her right leg alongside his left, and before long they’re both warm.

Th
ey’ve come all this way, and he is the one she remembers. Not her sister. Not Vito. Not even her own children.
Th
at has to mean something. It has to mean—it’s possible, at the very least—that she loves him best, and has for some time. It could mean he wasn’t wrong to take her away from here after the war. It could mean their story was a romance after all.

Th
ey can stay in this room, in this bed, for the next three days if she wants, pretending it’s always night, that they are always about to fall asleep together. Whatever brings her peace. So what if they’ve flown across the ocean? Let Frankie and Prima and Kelly Anne enjoy the scenery, soak up the air, make their own memories. Leave Antonio and Maddalena alone here in their bed for a while. At this moment, there’s nothing and no one else worth seeing.

SANTA CECILIA REMINDS
Frankie of a place you’d take your eighth-grade social studies class: Quebec City or Williamsburg, authentically ancient in pedigree but preserved in a flimsy, manufactured way.
Th
e church charges a fee. Alongside the Italian options, the Al Di Là Café menu lists a hot dog and fries. No old men sit in folding chairs in the piazza, and no old ladies hang laundry, as Frankie saw in the other villages he drove through to get here. Most people, even Vito Leone, speak some English. On the side of the bus that roars by, an ad for
Th
e Lord of the Rings
. In the window of the Pensione Fiorentina, a poster of Michael Bolton.

Th
e sun is strong and close. Frankie takes off his long-sleeved shirt and wanders the streets and the crumbling cobblestone paths in shorts and his white T with Kelly Anne and Prima. Kelly Anne wants him to talk more, to say what he’s feeling, to “share,” but most of what he’s feeling is rage. If he could talk, what would he say?
Th
at he hates himself for getting his hopes up.
Th
at it’s just like him.
Th
at miracles are for people of faith.
Th
at nine times out of ten, what’s most likely to happen, happens. People get old and lose everything and die.
Th
ey leave you bereft and clamoring. Villages and cities and entire countries relinquish what came before them, fall victim to progress and oppression, wipe themselves off maps.

To walk down this road in his ancestral village is a luxury. To reach up and pull a grape from a vine that’s been growing for generations is an extravagance. None of it belongs to Francesco Grasso. He’s a descendant of Santa Cecilia, and of this convoluted country, but not a player, not an actor. He knows little of Italy’s history, of the history of his own family, beyond the romances his mother filled his head with, and his father’s fermented nostalgia. His gut tells him that they shouldn’t be here, he and his girlfriend and his sister, that they are mere tourists in the lives of others.
Th
ey shouldn’t have brought their mother back and experimented on her like nineteenth-century quacks.
Th
ey should have honored her wishes when she was present enough to express them.

Th
ey walk up and down the road for what might be hours.
Th
ey wait in a long line in the piazza to drink from the “authentic natural water” at the spring and drop a few coins in the donation box beside it and take pictures of two Canadian newlyweds on the steps of the church. With a crowd of couples, Germans and Belgians, they watch a young, muscular butcher carve up a pig through the large picture window of a
macelleria,
but even this seems for show.
Th
ere’s too much flourish in his handling of the cleaver. A cigarette dangles Brandoishly from the corner of his mouth. When he’s done, the crowd applauds. Frankie shakes his head.

Where is my village? his father must be asking. You can’t go home again, Frankie should have reminded him when he called from the travel agent’s, but how can you deny your father when he’s begging you, through tears, to bring peace to his wife, your mother, the woman you miss more than you can bear? Bring the Irish girl, he said to Frankie. Make it a vacation. You have the summer off, don’t you? You work too hard as it is—and don’t worry, I’ll pay for the tickets, the hotels, everything.

Frankie defended the idea to Prima.
Th
e trip seemed like the right thing to do.
Th
ey had no other choice; it had the potential to bring joy, transformation, the poetry and crescendo of reunion.
Th
e same rationale Prima had once applied to her own cursed family adventure.

When they reach the olive grove, they take off their shoes and walk through the knotty grass. Frankie takes a photo of Kelly Anne under the canopy of one of the trees, her elbow resting on a branch, her lovely, smooth, tanned bare legs crossed at the ankles. Prima gets a picture of them both in the same spot, then sitting on the grass, then holding hands. She’s Kelly Anne’s number one fan and has pretty much insisted Frankie propose to her before she comes to her senses and dumps him.

Vito Leone hobbles toward them with his cane. He’s changed into a pair of sagging jeans, a thin V-neck sweater that shows a thick mound of white chest hair, and a wide-brimmed panama hat. Not what Frankie expected from the great love of his mother’s life, but a kind man nonetheless.

He takes the camera from Prima and snaps a photo of the three of them. Prima’s arm is tight around Kelly Anne. “
La famiglia Grasso,
” he says.

It doesn’t feel strange to have Vito lead them around, talking in his broken English. His mind zigs and zags all over the place, switching from one memory of Maddalena to another without transition, and they have a hard time keeping up, connecting the dots, but his English gets better the longer he goes on. Something about him reminds Frankie of Zio Giulio. He puts his arm around the old man’s shoulders as they walk.

“Follow me,” Vito says. “Something special to see.”

He leads them down a path toward a darker part of the grove, into the woods.
Th
e trees grow taller and closer together and block the sun, which has fallen a bit now that’s it’s almost five o’clock. “
Qui,
” he says when they reach a clearing. “Here.
Th
is was Maddalena’s favorite place.”
Th
e girls used to gather in this clearing, he explains, and tell secrets and put on plays.
Th
ey wrote the plays in their head and somehow kept them straight without writing them down. If she’d had the chance, Maddalena would have made a very good actress. She used to do impressions for her friends. Carolina was the bully and ran the shows, dictating who performed what and when.
Th
e girls didn’t know it, but Vito and his friend Buccio used to hide behind the trees over there and spy on them. “Every time Maddalena took the stage,” Vito says, “I cannot breathe.”