Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (5 page)

My legs kept moving, carrying me beyond the orchard to the pond. I unbuttoned my shoes and peeled off my stockings and sank into the mud at the edge of the water. A family of ducks rose up squawking. I waded into the water. My dress bil owed around me. I leaned back and floated, my arms stretched out, my mouth open to the rain, the clouds in my mind cleared away by the stil ness. I was alone. I was free.

I don't know how long I floated before Aurelio, the old gardener, came along the path trundling his muddy wheelbarrow, singing hoarsely. He was not bent like the old men in our vil age, but stood tal and straight. His yellow-white hair stuck out from beneath a brown wool cap.

He sang his song—a hymn we sometimes sang to the Blessed Virgin—over and over again until he stopped suddenly in the middle of a verse. His hoe and scythe fel to the rocks and his boots sloshed into the water.

The mud at the bottom sucked at his feet and turned the water into a murky soup the color of lentils. When the water became too deep, he thrashed and pushed his way toward me and scooped me up in his arms. Al this time, I had listened with my eyes shut tight against the rain, against this rescue.

Aurelio carried me through the water and put me down tenderly on the matted reeds near where I'd left my shoes and stockings. He placed two fingers on my neck and bent his ear to listen for my breath. Although I could hold my breath for a long time (I always won in contests with my brothers), I did not know how to stop my heart from beating. Sot couldn't pretend to be dead. I fluttered my eyes and opened them and Aurelio knelt by my side and sobbed. I could see the skin around his neck, rubbed raw by the blackened chain he wore as a penance for some long-forgotten sin.

"Mi dispiace," I whispered. I am sorry. I hadn't meant to frighten him. I had only wanted to be outside. To smel the earth. To feel the water holding me.

He reached into his pocket and pul ed out an orange. He peeled it with his fingers, digging into the center to tear back the skin with his thumbnail, broken and embedded with the loam of the garden. When it was al peeled—a single spiral coil—he broke the orange into sections and held them out in his palm. I took one and bit into it, the juice exploding into my mouth and dribbling down my chin. I hadn't tasted an orange since I'd been at home with Giuseppina. Giuseppina sliced her oranges across with a knife, making circles of different sizes. Aurelio didn't use a knife, just his hands.

The rain was coming down harder, fil ing my shoes and the wheelbarrow, sticking my muddy dress to my back and flattening my curly hair. I was happy. For the first time since I'd been at Santa Margareta.

In the distance, past the fruit trees, toward the house, I heard the sound of the bel and then the muffled notes of my own name. They were looking for me.

Aurelio heard it, too. He got up from his haunches and tossed the orange skin onto a pile of rotting weeds. He dumped the water out of my shoes and placed them with my stockings in the wheelbarrow, then piled his tools on top.

He held out his hand and helped me to my feet. Together we walked back to the convent, leaving the quiet of the rain dancing on the surface of the pond, slowly crossing the orchard toward the clamor and agitation around the house. Up ahead, Elisabetta—her veil drenched and heavy—and Sister Philomena with an umbrel a, searched the bushes for me.

When Elisabetta saw me she gasped, fel to her knees with the sign of the cross and just as quickly rose and ran to me, the key ring jangling at her waist.

"Thank God! Thank God! You're safe!" She embraced me, then stepped back and slapped me across the face.

"Wel , this time you've gone and done it! I can't protect you from Reverend Mother now. The house is in an uproar, your sisters are al in tears, no one's settled down for lessons because of worry over you, and Reverend Mother is pacing the hal ways in a fury."

Aurelio bent down into the wheelbarrow and got out my shoes and stockings. He passed them to me with a wink.

Elisabetta final y noticed that I was shivering.

"Grazie, grazie, Fratel o Aurelio, for bringing her back."

As we walked back toward the house, I turned to the old man and curtsied.

"Addio!" I whispered.

He touched his hand to his hat, lifted the wheelbarrow and returned to the orchard.

Papa came to fetch me after Aurelio found me. I waited for him in the hal way outside the Reverend Mother's office, listening to the rise and fal of her complaints. Despite my mother's hastily worded letter of entreaty and promises of generous gifts to the convent, Reverend Mother refused to let me stay at school with Letitia and Pip and Til y.

"I am throwing up my hands, Signore Fioril o! I can do nothing with the child. Not only does she disrupt classes and— Mother of God—Holy Mass, making the other girls giggle at her antics. But this running away is the limit.

For the sake of the other girls, I have no choice but to send Giulia home."

CHAPTER 5

Signore Ventuolo's Lessons

I returned to Giuseppina's house after Reverend Mother had sent me away from the convent. Papa had gotten my mother to agree that Giuseppina needed someone to help her. Since she was unwilling to give up either Pasqualina or Teresia, she acquiesced to my resuming my role as Giuseppina's helpmate.

Giuseppina greeted me with tears in her eyes the night Papa brought me home. She checked me careful y for fever and other ailments she was certain I'd contracted from the pond. She also examined my head for lice, since no bed was as clean as my own—although we brought our bed linens home from school every week for Teresia to boil and starch before we went back on Monday.

Then she sat me down at the table by the stove, warm from a day of baking and cooking. She fed me pastina in brodo, maninitti, chicken salmi, rabe and zeppula con alice. Al my favorite foods in the same meal. Papa ate with us, but my mother had declined. She was disappointed in me, since I'd displeased the Reverend Mother so much. I had disgraced my family. I knew my sisters were holding their heads high, ignoring the whispers that fol owed them through the hal ways, but inside they were mortified by my shameful disobedience. The nuns now eyed them suspiciously, waiting for any one of them to exhibit the family trait so flagrant in me. Their embarrassment had triggered a renewal of my mother's headaches. She had one the evening Papa brought me home. I was permitted into her room to greet her upon my return. The curtains were drawn against the late-afternoon sunlight and the air smel ed faintly of eau de cologne. My mother lay propped up against several pil ows, a dampened linen cloth pressed over her eyes.

"I cannot say that I am glad to see you, Giulia."

"I know, Mother, but I am glad to be back."

"In a few days, we'll talk about this. Now run along and get yourself settled at your grandmother's place."

It took my mother more than a few days to recover and decide what to do with me. So in the meantime, I was just happy to be home in Giuseppina's house. I took off the scratchy uniform we'd had to wear at the convent and worked barefoot in Giuseppina's garden, pul ing up the stalks of harvested vegetables, turning over the soil, chasing away the crows from what was stil left on the vine. At noon, Giuseppina cal ed me in for soup and bread and I washed the earth from my hands in the bucket outside the kitchen door. After siesta, I played with my little brothers and we ate figs from Giuseppina's tree.

Every day I also went to visit my mother, and when she was feeling better she began to question me about what I'd learned from the nuns. I didn't think it was much. My letters, my prayers, my sums. I recited for my mother, read to her from the prayer book she'd given me at my First Communion, showed her the smal piece of embroidery I had begun—blue corn-flowers, along a border. She nodded in satisfaction.

"Wel , despite the Reverend Mother's complaints about how little you paid attention, you seem to have learned something.

You are by no means a stupid child, Giulia. And I do not intend that you remain an ignorant one."

My mother eyed me firmly.

"But what did I learn?" I stamped my foot. "It was al so boring and so mean. I would rather be ignorant than go to a school like that again."

"To be ignorant is to waste the talents you were born with. To be ignorant is to confine your life to a path no different than the generations before you. We have embarked on a new century, Giulia! Don't turn your back on the higher things— music, art, literature. When you learn to read, you can read more than the holy words between the black covers of that prayer book. Oh, I know the nuns think those words are the only reason to learn how to read. That's their job. But believe me, you wil be enthral ed by what you discover, how big your world wil become.... I am simply heartbroken that you have lost that opportunity."

I could not comprehend my mother's heartbreak. Instead, I peered out the window at my younger brothers throwing clumps of manure at one another in the stable yard as they mucked out stal s.

"Perhaps.. .perhaps it's simply that the nuns were the wrong teachers for you. They didn't bother me as a girl, but you and I are very different, aren't we?"

I turned back from the window, surprised by my mother's understanding that she and I were different. In the past, I'd been acutely aware that she had disapproved of the life I was leading with Giuseppina. But this time, she seemed to accept that she could not force me to embrace the things she held so dear.

"I must think about this for a few more days, Giulia. Find a solution that does not waste your gifts but doesn't confine you, either. The answer is more difficult, of course, because the school here is far worse than the nuns, and Papa will not al ow me to send you away again."

I smiled to myself at my wonderful Papa, but my joy was short-lived, for my mother solved the dilemma of keeping me in Venticano by finding Signore Ventuolo. She enlisted the help of her lady friends who went with her to Ischia every summer—women she'd known since childhood whose lives revolved around salons and bal s. It was Leonora Esposito, who had known Signore Ventuolo's mother before she died, who suggested him. She made al the arrangements, assuring my mother of both his good background and needy circumstances. And so my mother took her summer money and hired me a tutor from the University of Napoli.

Instead of soaking in the sulfur baths at Ischia the fol owing August, she endured the mountain heat so that I might be educated.

I hated it when Signore Ventuolo arrived in Venticano. The nuns were by then only a bad taste in my mouth—

a kind of suffocating taste, but well behind me. It was January when he first entered my parents' house.

He had ridden home with Papa on the Monday evening carriage, carrying a scuffed and tattered satchel stuffed with books, a copy of the newspaper II Corriere del a Sera and a threadbare shirt.

I watched, sul en, from an upstairs window as the carriage rol ed into the stable courtyard. Signore Ventuolo climbed awkwardly down from the seat, his short, stocky legs stretching tentatively for the hard-packed earth.

Once on the ground, he backed quickly away from the panting, restless horses, who knew that they were home. The climb from the val ey had been accomplished, and their grain bags were waiting in the stable.

For Signore Ventuolo, the climb was stil ahead—convincing my mother that she had invested wisely, persuading Papa that a daughter's education was worth this much trouble, and, most chal enging of al , bringing me down from my angry perch.

I had been summoned from the warmth and familiarity of Giuseppina's kitchen to greet Signore Ventuolo and have dinner with him and my parents. My hair had been freshly braided, my hands were scrubbed, my pinafore was starched. Zia Pasqualina had fed my younger brothers, Frankie and Sandro, earlier, and the older boys, Claudio and Aldo, had found some urgent work in the stables that required their attention (although not so urgent that they couldn't leave it later to peer through the dining-room windows at our unusual guest). My sisters, of course, were al at Santa Margareta on their knees.

Having escaped the horses, Signore Ventuolo grateful y accepted the washbasin offered to him by Zia Pasqualina before greeting my mother, who waited in the parlor, with me cal ed from upstairs to stand by her side. He managed to remove the grime of the journey, but not the beads of sweat that continued to trickle down the sides of his face and onto his frayed col ar. Pasqualina's water likewise had little effect on his unruly black hair and untrimmed beard. Shoving his handkerchief back into a pocket, he final y fol owed Zia Pasqualina out of the kitchen and into the parlor. When he approached my mother, he took the hand she held out and brought it to his lips. Papa had a careful y groomed and waxed mustache, and I watched for my fastidious mother's reaction to the bristling, tightly kinked hairs surrounding Signore Ventuolo's eager mouth.

But I detected no distaste on her part.

"Welcome to Venticano, Signore Ventuolo. I'd like you to meet my daughter, Giulia."

I curtsied quickly, but kept my hands behind my back.

My mother inquired about the journey, the health of Leonora Esposito and the weather in Napoli. By the time my father appeared, I was sure there was no other topic to discuss and was grateful for his presence, which signaled that food was now on the dining-room table. Zia Pasqualina always orchestrated the serving of a meal with Papa's readiness for it, and, sure enough, she was just setting a steaming bowl of rabbit stew on the table as we entered the dining room.

My mother directed Signore Ventuolo to sit at her right. My usual seat when I ate at my parents' house put me directly across from Signore Ventuolo, where I had a clear view of him throughout the meal. Despite his shabby appearance, I recognized that Signore Ventuolo knew how to conduct himself at a table. I realized, to my dismay, that my mother would note his manners positively as wel . The more he did correctly in my mother's eyes, the less likely he would be on the return carriage to Napoli the next morning.