Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (2 page)

After lunch, when the dishes were dried and put away, I had remained at the table, my back against the warm wall, and watched and listened as women from the neighborhood came for my grandmother's magic.

We cal ed it the "eyes"—her spel s to ward off headaches and stomach cramps; to bring on a late period; to counteract whatever curse had been set upon the suffering soul knocking at my grandmother's back door.

It wasn't just the immigrants who came. My own mother, my aunts, women who worked in banks and offices and got dressed in suits and stockings and high heels every day, made their way to her kitchen. There she'd lay her hands on them and dispel the pain with her incantations. When I was sick, the fever and nausea and loneliness flew from my troubled body into my grandmother's open and welcoming arms.

Later in the afternoon, she always went upstairs to sleep, exhausted and without words.

I would retreat to the living room, knowing it was time to be quiet, and watch "The Mickey Mouse Club" until my father came to pick me up at the end of the day.

My afternoons with Giulia were an arrangement put in place because my own neighborhood had no Catholic school. Sending me to kindergarten in a public school was not an option in our family, so I spent the first year of my education in Giulia's parish until my family moved uptown. Everyone seemed happy with the solution, especially my mother, home with two younger children and relieved of the burden of getting me to and from school every day.

I finished my water, careful y rinsed and dried my glass and replaced it in the cupboard. My responsibilities in the kitchen were fulfil ed, and I walked slowly up the stairs to the back of the house, where Giulia's bedroom overlooked the backyard and the garden. On her dresser were propped more images of saints. In front of them were three smal red glass pots holding votive candles. It was the first time I'd been in the house when Giulia wasn't there, and it was a disturbing reminder of her absence that the candles were unlit. I pul ed out Giulia's list and began to open drawers, tugging at the wood swol en with August humidity. Her checkbook and accounts ledger were in the top drawer, as expected. I had to hunt for the sweater she thought she'd need now that the evening air in the mountains was beginning to chil with the approach of September. A few more smal articles of clothing were easier to find. The last item on the list was identified simply as a "cigar box" that was supposed to be in the bottom drawer under some bed linens. I was expecting another set of the flower-sprigged percale sheets and pil owcases that were on her neatly made bed, but these bed linens were heavy white cotton, elaborately tucked and embroidered with Giulia's large and graceful monogram. I had never seen them on her bed. Smal packets of cedar were scattered in the drawer and the pungent smel indicated to me that the drawer had not been opened in a long time. I lifted the linens and found a box-like shape wrapped in another embroidered cloth. When I unwrapped the cloth, I saw that I had indeed found the cigar box.

It was papered in garish yellow and brown with the portrait of some nineteenth-century barrel-chested tobacco mogul on the cover, and a Spanish label. The box had once held Cuban cigars, but I was sure it wasn't cigars I was bringing to Giulia.

I sat on the floor and careful y lifted the cover. Inside the box were stacks of letters on pale blue notepaper, each stack tied with a thin strand of satin ribbon. I could see that the letters had been written in a flowing hand in Italian and signed Paolo, the father my father had been too young to know, the grandfather whose red hair I had inherited.

I closed the box, feeling I'd already gone too far, that I had violated the privacy of a very private woman. Why she would want me to remove these letters from what appeared to be a hiding place and carry them across the Atlantic to her was both perplexing and intriguing. The woman who was asking me to do this was not the woman I knew my grandmother to be— the matriarch of our very large family, who had not only her sons and daughters, but her nieces and nephews, grown men and women in their fifties and sixties, listening to her and deferring to her as if they were stil children; the businesswoman who'd asked me to col ect her mail as wel as her checkbook so she could manage her real-estate investments from her hospital bed; the woman who could be counted on to have a sharp opinion and directive about everything that touched the lives of her children and grandchildren.

Perhaps because I'd been a baby when her husband Salvatore had died and I had only known Giulia as a widow, I could not fathom her ever being in love. I knew, of course, that she'd been married before Salvatore to Paolo Serafini. But that had been long ago, and whatever traces of him remaining in her memory were wel hidden. We did not even have a photograph of Paolo.

Giulia had never seemed to have much use for love. She had warned me away from romantic entanglements more than once when I was a teenager.

"Stay away from Joey Costel o," she told me one evening as we were shel ing peas on her front porch. I was thirteen; Joey lived next door to her. He was a year older, ful of the swagger and bravado of the good-looking Italian teenage boy. But he had noticed me and was paying attention to me in ways that I, bookish and reserved, found thril ing.

"He's nothing but trouble. You don't need to be hanging around the likes of him. At the very least, you'll get a reputation, like that putana of a sister he has. And at the worst, he'll break your heart as soon as somebody who can sway her hips better than you walks by him. You're too smart, Cara mia. Don't waste your time on boys like that."

Later, when I was sixteen and spending a week with her while my parents were away, I developed a crush on a neighbor who lived nearby, one of her tenants. He was married and in his twenties, with two smal children.

But he did chores for Giulia around the garden and the house, so he was around to talk to as he fixed a faucet or dug up some rosebushes she wanted to transplant. He was cute and funny and attentive and, in the short time I'd been there, it seemed to me he was finding quite a few things to do for Giulia. When his wife went to visit her mother with the kids, I suggested to my grandmother that we invite him to Sunday dinner.

"Phil's al alone today. Wouldn't it be nice to ask him to eat with us?" I was trying to sound like the gracious lady of the manor, bestowing kindness on the hired help, rather than the infatuated teenager I was, looking for any reason to be in his presence. I was nonchalant, mentioning it as an afterthought as she and I cleaned up after breakfast.

Giulia looked me in the eye, put her hands on her hips, and said, "Absolutely not. Don't think I don't know what's going on in your head. He's a married man. He stays in his house and eats what his wife left for him, and you put your daydreams in the garbage where they belong."

And that was that. I spent the day sulking at the lost opportunity and marveling at Giulia's ability to sense even the most subtle vibrations of sexual attraction. She was the watchdog at the gates of my virginity, the impenetrable shield that would keep me from becoming a tramp.

Now I gathered up Giulia's possessions and stowed them in the zippered tote bag I planned to take onboard the plane. After a final glance around the room, I shut the door and headed down the stairs and out to my car. I pul ed away from the curb and the memories and headed for the airport and Italy.

CHAPTER 2

Journey to the Mezzogiomo

The cacophony of the Naples train station assaulted me as soon as I stepped off the express train from Rome. Announcements of departing trains reverberated across the vaulted space; mothers scolded misbehaving children; whistles shrieked; a group of yellow-shirted boys kicked a soccer bal near the far end of Platform 22.

As I adjusted the strap of my bag, I also adjusted my mental state—from efficient New York manager and organized mother of four—to Italian. It was more than recal ing the lyrical language that had surrounded me in Giulia's house. I knew I had to pour myself quickly into the fluid, staccato pace of Campania in August or I would be trampled—by the surging population, the Vespas leaping curbs, the suspicion of strangers and by my own sense of oppression.

I knew this because I'd been here seventeen years before, a bright-eyed high-school art student who'd spent the summer in the rarefied atmosphere of Florence, living in a cinquecento vil a, painting in the Uffizi on Mondays when it was closed to the hordes of summer tourists, reading Dante and Boccaccio. I had believed that I knew Italy. But then I had come south, to visit Zia Letitia.

I had traveled by rail then as wel , through Rome to Naples. A stifling heat had encroached on the overcrowded train as it journeyed farther south, toward an Italy that I didn't recognize. The blue-greens and purples of the Tuscan landscape, warmed by a honeyed light, had given way to an unrelenting sunshine that had seared the earth to an ocher barrenness.

Everything I saw seemed to be the same color—the rough- hewn cliffs, the crumbling houses, the worn faces.

When I'd arrived at midday in Naples—sweaty and cranky—I felt myself to be in a foreign country. For the first time in my life, I had felt menaced—by the drivers in minuscule Fiats who ignored traffic signals, by the barricaded expressions of the people massing and knotting around me, by the heat and clamor and stench that had so unraveled the beauty and civility of this once-splendid city. The life of Naples was in the streets—

raw, intemperate, flamboyant—and to the eyes of strangers, emotional y closed and hostile.

That day seventeen years ago, I had escaped on the two o'clock bus to Avel ino, arriving two hours later in front of a bar named the Arcobaleno. In contrast to the press of humanity in Naples, a melancholy emptiness greeted me here. In the bar, where I bought a Coke and sought a telephone, I was the only woman. Two old men in the corner interrupted their card game to stare openly; the younger men, playing pinbal , were more surreptitious but watched just as closely.

I cal ed a phone number given to me by Giulia to make arrangements with a distant relative who could take me to Letitia. But the woman who answered was irritable. She had no time and could not help me. I would have to manage on my own. Take the bus, she barked. Just tel the driver you need to go to Venticano. And she hung up.

Shaken and feeling increasingly alone, I'd found a bus that could take me up the mountain. Later than I'd hoped, the driver cranked the door closed and began the laborious climb out of the val ey. He'd brought the bus to a halt in a deserted piazza and thrust his chin at the door to announce my destination. Within seconds I stood alone in the road, facing shuttered houses and an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Why had I even considered making this journey? I had naively traversed half the length of Italy expecting to be welcomed in my ancestral home but instead the doors were locked and no one was willing to acknowledge me as their own.

With only Zia Letitia's name—no address—I had approached a woman darning in the doorway of a nearby house, whose wary eyes had been upon me since I'd descended from the bus.

"I am looking for Signora Letitia Rassina," I had explained, proud of my flawless High Italian, the only thing that stood between me and panic.

"You come from the north." It was a statement, spat out in distrust and contempt, not a question requiring confirmation.

"I studied in Firenze, but I come from America. I am the granddaughter of Signora Rassina's sister."

Unwittingly, I had uttered the magic formula.

The guardedness and suspicion fled from her face. She took me by the arm.

"Come, I'll show you where the signora lives."

As we turned to walk down the hil , I saw faces appearing at suddenly unshuttered windows and heard voices cal ing out to the woman. Within minutes, nearly thirty people crowded around us, jostling for a glimpse of the Americana as we arrived at Letitia's house.

The house—ancient, once elegant—presented a silent facade to the tumult in the street below. No one responded to our energetic knocks and shouts.

"She must be sleeping. Giorgio, go around and get Emma."

"Emma takes care of your aunt, and she has a key to the house," she explained to me.

A few minutes later, smoothing down what seemed to be a hastily donned black dress, a middle-aged woman had hustled breathlessly after Giorgio with a key ring in her hand.

"No one sent me word from America that someone was coming!" She was both suspicious and injured to have been left out of the preparations for my visit.

Horrified that I'd been al owed by my family to travel alone, she was nevertheless satisfied that I was indeed Giulia's granddaughter.

With a shriek of pleasure, she inserted an iron key into the massive arched doorway of the house.

Inside was a musty vestibule, lit by the late-afternoon sun streaming through a window on the rear wall where a stone staircase led to a landing on the second floor. Emma led me up the stairs. Behind us came the rest of the vil agers.

Once again, our knocks were met by silence. Emma cal ed out Letitia's name in a loud voice. "She's old. She doesn't hear so wel anymore," she murmured to me.

Finally, the door opened and a woman appeared, her face marked by confusion. She stared uncomprehending into my face. I stared back at a woman who could have been my grandmother's twin. Letitia's confusion receded as she listened to me identify myself, ignoring the commotion that surrounded her. Then she reached out and stroked the opal hanging from my ear. It was Giulia's, and she'd given it to me on my sixteenth birthday. I'd been wearing the earrings al summer, and they had become so much a part of me that I'd forgotten their origins.

"Giulia's earrings," she whispered. "You are my blood."

Letitia had pul ed me into the apartment, embracing me with the mingled old-woman aromas of garlic and anise and must. She sent Emma down to the shop to purchase ingredients for dinner and told the vil agers lining the stairs to go home to their own kitchens. Alone together, we sat with a glass of very strong wine as she hung on every word I brought her of her distant family.