Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (8 page)

"Stay down," I hissed, and then rose with my basket to see the top of Giuseppina's head coming up over the rise. I waved and hurried toward her, brushing the grass from my hair, my back.

"Are you crazy to wander off by yourself! Never again, do you hear me!" She vented the fear she must have felt when she woke to find me missing." You look flushed, feverish," she observed as I came nearer. "You've been too long in the sun." She saw the mound of flowers in my basket. "That's enough for today. The fright you gave me has worn me out."

We set off down to the vil age. I didn't turn to look back.

But that night I couldn't wait to return to the dance and Vito's arms. Those hours contained everything my mother had tried to keep me from. I danced barefoot, like the daughters of Tomasino the goat herder, feeling the earth, damp with dew, between my toes. In the early hours of morning, when I returned in exhaustion to Giuseppina's, I poured water into the speckled washbasin and thoroughly scrubbed my feet before slipping back between the sheets of my bed. Giuseppina might not have seen the smudged evidence, but she would certainly have smel ed the loamy traces stil clinging to my skin.

But my ablutions were not enough to hide my secret life.

Mario Cucino's cousin Clara betrayed me. Clara had watched Vito and me al summer from the corners and the shadows, a skinny, sal ow-faced girl who was always chewing on a strand of her hair and did not know how to laugh.

She shrewdly enlisted my brother Aldo as her accomplice. Aldo had embraced his position as Papa's favored son after Claudio left us. He postured in front of the hal way mirror, mimicking Papa's elegant style of dress. He passionately remade himself in Papa's image, taking meticulous care not only of his wardrobe but also of the wagons and horses. He polished, he groomed. He seemed determined to earn Papa's respect, eagerly volunteering for the hardest routes, even passing up the usual entertainments of the other boys in the vil age to pore over the ledger books late into the night. Papa rewarded him when he turned eighteen, entrusting him with the busy Avel ino route.

Aldo had never ventured to Cucino's. He had never experienced the need to break free of the confining Fioril o name— not as Claudio had by leaving Venticano altogether, nor as I had, in my own fledgling way, by dancing, by dreaming. If he knew about Cucino's, he'd chosen to ignore it, until Clara, recognizing in Aldo a younger version of Felice Fioril o, whispered in his ear one day. My little brother Sandro, who sometimes tagged after Aldo, witnessed that encounter and later told me about it.

Clara had been invisible to young men, especial y young men like Aldo. But then, Clara realized she had something Aldo might want, something that would earn him more favor with the father he seemed so intent on pleasing. She pushed that perpetual y loose strand of hair behind her ear, smoothed her dress and approached him.

"You're Giulia's older brother, aren't you?"

Aldo nodded, but eyed her quizzical y. "How do you know Giulia?" he asked, the surprise in his voice undisguised.

Clara smiled disingenuously "She comes dancing at Cucino's sometimes. Weren't you aware? I had heard she was hiding it from her grandmother, but I thought she might have trusted you. You must know about Vito?" She looked at Aldo, offering her sympathy to the shocked brother. "Oh, no, I haven't said too much, have I?"

"Not at al . I'm grateful to you, Signorina."

Very few young men had addressed her as Signorina.

That night, Aldo waited under Giuseppina's mulberry tree and watched me lower myself over the ledge of the window. When my feet touched the ground he sprang forward and tackled me, knocking me breathless into the flower bed. I shrieked and kicked, not knowing it was my own brother. Our scuffling, of course, roused Giuseppina, who threw open her shuttered window, muttering and cursing the disturbance until she saw who it was and—more pertinently—how I was dressed. I was no longer in the nightgown I'd been wearing when I'd said good night to her an hour earlier, but rather in my flounced skirt and bodice, with no blouse underneath.

My arms and shoulders were bare. My hair, now unbraided, tumbled loosely down my back, somewhat unkempt thanks to the tousle with Aldo. As Giuseppina took in my appearance and realized what it meant, she began to wail and keen as if it were my stiff and lifeless corpse lying beneath her window. It might as well have been, given the catastrophic aftermath of Giuseppina's discovery.

In the midst of her lamentation, she ordered me into the house. But she could not prevent Aldo from running to fetch Papa. I cursed at his retreating footsteps. Papa arrived from his card game in a frenzy.

"You whore," he roared and slapped me twice, once on each cheek. "I forbid you to go to Cucino's again. If you disobey me, I swear I'll bring you back to my house and keep you under lock and key."

I spent the rest of the night in Giuseppina's bed with her. When she final y fel asleep, I crept over to the window. Not to escape again, but merely to catch a glimpse of the night and hope that Vito was hovering somewhere in the shadows.

The next morning my mother made her entrance. (No one had dared wake her the night before.) Her outrage was focused not so much on the dishonor that had provoked my father's anger as on the company I had chosen to keep and the manner in which I'd chosen to keep it.

"Dancing in the mud with a Cipriano! Haven't I taught you to expect more? Wil you throw your life away to bear the squal ing babies of an uneducated peasant, just because you admire the shape of his buttocks?" she shrieked at me. Then she quieted and narrowed her eyes as a question—more a demand—formed in her head.

"Are you pregnant?"

"Mama! I've only danced with him!" I protested quickly, knowing that dancing alone was enough to anger her, hoping it was enough to keep her from suspecting more.

"Wel , thank the Blessed Virgin for that."

My mother did not know—and I did not reveal to her— what I felt when I danced. She could never have known the force of the yearning and urgency that propel ed me. She shifted her fury to Giuseppina, not for failing to guard me or seal me in, but for making me susceptible to the night.

"It's you who've cultivated this wildness in her! You've encouraged her to befriend these people, to partake in their primitive pleasures. You let her go off into the hil s alone to gather your weeds and look what she brings back! She should've been reading books, not mixing potions for the lovesick."

Giuseppina was no less upset with me than my mother was, but for other reasons. Giuseppina understood the longing. She had taught me the power of the feelings, the dreams that burned inside of people. She believed that to disown what you felt made you sick—sick at heart, sick in the head.

Over the years, most often in arguments about me, Giuseppina and my mother had done their own dance around each other. This time was no exception. My mother, normal y decorous and contained, unleashed her words, her pitch, her pace. She brimmed with uncontrol able passion. Giuseppina, on the other hand, became impassive, impenetrable. My mother shril ed her words as if they were fists beating, hammering in futility at the wall of Giuseppina's silence. When my mother finished her tirade, Giuseppina dismissed her with the peremptory gesture of impatience she reserved for the truly stupid with whom she wouldn't even deign to speak. Once again, my mother was forced to retreat.

When she was gone, Giuseppina said, "Before you find yourself pregnant, come to me first."

She turned away from me without her customary penetrating glance. I was expected to understand; she would protect me, as she'd been unable to protect me the night before from Aldo's spying and its consequences. She was angry with me for exposing her lapse, for making her look like a fool and for taking risks with my reputation. But she was also letting me know that she forgave me.

My parents, however, were not ready to forgive. My mother, especial y, was determined to protect me in her own way from the dangers she saw lurking behind the eyes of every young man in the vil age, and within my own emerging womanhood.

Her solution came quickly.

My sister Pip had made a rash promise to a young man in Pano di Greci. She was nearly twenty, but she had no experience of men, as I did. Her embroidery stitches were neat; she fol owed al the rules at the convent of Santa Margareta; she would make someone an obedient, if foolish wife. But not this someone in Pano di Greci, my mother decided. Not knowing her own heart, Pip was relieved at my mother's intervention. She floated this way and that, always doing what she was told. The family of the young man, however, was enraged, raining curses and threats upon Pip's empty head.

My mother and father conferred noisily, Papa at first resisting my mother's radical suggestion. Ever since Claudio had left, Papa had refused to even read any of the letters from America, let alone respond. But my mother, summoning al her emotional power, prevailed. A letter was hurriedly sent to Claudio.

Pip, in the meantime, was kept at home, not even al owed to go to the market for fear she would be kidnapped in broad daylight crossing the piazza.

To al outward appearances, life in the Fioril o households— my parents' and my grandmother's—remained as it had been, except for Pip's and my confinement. But my mother's days had taken on a kind of silent intensity as she worked out in elaborate detail what she considered to be the rescue not only of Pip, but of me and Til y as well.

She told none of us, for fear of alerting the enemy in Pano di Greci or arousing the rebel in me.

She did not tel me, in fact, until she had the passage booked, the steamship tickets in her hand, my father's horses practical y bridled and ready to drive me to the pier.

"Aiuta me!" I wailed to Giuseppina when my mother marched to her house and ordered me to pack my trunks.

Help me.

"She cannot help you this time. Your sister will be kil ed or worse if she remains here, and she can't go alone.

She and Til y can't manage such a journey by themselves. You re the only one with enough sense to see you al safely to Claudio. Venticano is no life for any of my daughters, but believe me, Giulia, it is especially no life for you. You are going now, before you're ruined by what you have clearly never learned to control."

She stood over me while I gathered my belongings together. The tears flooded my cheeks, spil ing over onto my clothes. Giuseppina wandered around the house, muttering her incantations, burning incense, tucking her blessings among my possessions as I packed.

"You'll leave before sunrise tomorrow, on your father's normal run to Napoli, so as not to arouse suspicion.

The boys will come this evening after dark to take your trunks to the house, and you will come with them. You'll sleep with Til y in her bed tonight. I forbid you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especial y Cipriano or any of the Cucinos. If you do, you threaten not only your sister's life, but your own as well."

My mother's voice was taut; her face revealed the sleeplessness and strain of the last few weeks. But just below the surface of her exhaustion, her rigid instructions, I thought I saw a kind of rejoicing—that she was going to be successful in getting us out of here, this vil age and this life that had been such a trap for her. And I hated her for it.

"I don't want to go!" I screamed at her. "What about Giuseppina?

Who wil help her?"

"Don't make me laugh! You don't want Giuseppina's life any more than I do! I know you, Giulia. Giuseppina may have taken you from my side, but she can't take me out of you. You are my blood. Your tears are not for Giuseppina, but for something walking around out there with bulging pants. Believe me, you'll find a hundred just like him in America. And—like your brother Claudio—they wil have money, they will have a future, they will have a life to offer you."

Giuseppina's mutterings became louder, more intense.

My mother simply could not understand my heartache. I didn't want a hundred other boyfriends. I wanted Vito.

When my trunks were packed, my mother had no patience to listen to my sobs for the rest of the day. She locked the trunks herself after she was satisfied that they contained everything I'd need in the life she was sending me to. She took the keys and added them to her own ring of household keys, tel ing me she'd return them to me before we departed in the morning. What did she believe? That I would forget them? That I would add unsuitable items to the trunks after she left—talismans and powders from Giuseppina's trove? That I would dump the contents of the trunks in the mud of the piazza in a fury of final rebel ion? Perhaps that was it.

But I felt her taking the keys is another slap.

The trunks sat al day in the middle of my bedroom as an affront, an immovable reminder of my mother's resolve.

I could not stop my tears. At times they were simply silent streams, slick on my cheeks, trickling down my neck. At other times they were wild sobs, engulfing my entire body, starting in some place so deep inside me that I'd never felt it before— deeper even than the longing that had entered me this summer when I'd danced with Vito. I did not know myself. Did not know I could feel such sorrow, such fear.

Giuseppina fed me broth at midday, holding me in her arms like a baby, spooning the warmth into my mouth where it mingled with the salt of my sorrows.

She put me in her own bed at siesta to keep my emotions from being heightened by the massive trunks near my bedside. She lay with me, murmuring the words of her simplest spel .

In her bed, awaiting the evening and its further agonies, I didn't think I'd be able to let go of the thoughts crowding my head. But her words washed over me until they were no longer words. Her hands stroked at the pain until they were no longer hands. I fel asleep.

When I woke it was nearly dusk. Giuseppina was gone from the bed and I heard her in the kitchen, clattering pots and pans. I smel ed the extraordinary smel s of roasting lamb and freshly cut oranges. I went into the kitchen and then helped Giuseppina in silence, slicing tomatoes and unwrapping the mozzarel a. A smal bowl of figs sat on the table. She must have walked down to the orchard to pick them in the afternoon, while I'd slept. She was now trimming the shank of prosciutto, shaving thin slices from the cut end. The kitchen was stifling from the fire in the oven, combined with the oppressive July heat. No one cooked like this in summer.