Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (4 page)

I imagined Mamma crouched on straw, chained. “He went for Lucia,” she said flatly. “You saw him. The pig.”

“And he had Mamma in that chair,” I added. “He tortured her.”

“I only threw—”

Paolo held up his hand. “Teresa! Lucia! There was blood, a decanter thrown at your master’s skull, a knife drawn. No judge in Naples would excuse this. Come with me. Hurry.” We followed, my head pounding. So suddenly we had become criminals, exiles from our sunny villa.

These were the dark quarters of the very poor. Doorways bulged with men and women catching faint light for their trades. Children’s black feet had gone without shoes all summer. Their skin wept with sores. Even in servant dress, we seemed out of place. Three boys ceased a game with pebbles, silently drawing closer, mouths open like young dogs surrounding a weaker prey. Was this a bitter fairy tale? Would we be abandoned without a trail of crumbs to find our way home? And where
was
our home now?

Paolo barked crisp words and the boys drew back. He stopped us. “Listen, Teresa,” he said slowly, as if to a child. “You can’t stay in Naples. At the
least
you’ll be delivered to Galuppi for his experiments. It will be of absolutely no consequence to him or Count Filippo whether you survive. Or you’ll end your days in prison as a warning to other servants. There is no place safe for you in the city.”

My mother’s face crumpled. Her lips moved without sound. I spoke for her: “Paolo, you saw what he did. Can’t you talk to the countess, like other times? Can’t you explain?”

“Lucia, this isn’t ‘other times.’ Your mother attacked a nobleman. I told you, the countess can’t save you anymore. You must save yourselves.”

“Where can we go, what can we do?” Every other fear I’d faced, hard waves heaving me against rocks, rats in the garden, or rough men on the street, was nothing to this. The world was a black, swirling pit about to consume us.

Paolo wiped his brow with a handkerchief that blazed white in the dim street. “You have to go to another city far away. Rome is too close. Perhaps Milan or Venice.”

Mamma looked dazed. “I was born here. How can I leave?”

“We’ll go to America,” I announced. Both of them stared at me, and even I was stunned. Where had the word
America
come from, like a shaft of icy wind on a steaming summer day? Yet certainty shot through me, more strongly than ever in my life: “They wouldn’t look for us in America. They won’t think to do that.”

Mamma shook the thought away. “How? We can’t pay the passage, and I want to stay in Italy.”

But Paolo was already considering. “America, yes. You could borrow enough for the tickets and provisions from Countess Elisabetta and then pay her back when you find work. My cousin Rosanna has a boardinghouse in Cleveland.” He turned to me. “Now Lucia,
you
could stay. You only witnessed the crime. We might convince Count Filippo to keep you if Teresa goes. Or the countess could find you a post in another city. I always said you could rise in a great house.”

For an instant Mamma’s fate dimmed in the glare of my possible future: me in leather shoes and a fine, lace-trimmed housekeeper’s dress, gliding down perfectly clean marble stairs that I never scrubbed, wearing white gloves to check for dust. Then I saw Mamma, her face etched with fear. I saw her on her knees as I’d passed her with the countess. I saw her sickened from the torture chair, yet gathering strength to save me.

Paolo shook my shoulder. “Lucia, decide.” Mamma was staring at me, immobile.

“We’ll go together.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“You understand that means
two
fares to repay.”

“I’ll work in a factory,” Mamma announced. “Lucia can go to school.”

School? This was a new thought. To sit at a desk, reading. To write instead of scrubbing floors. All the fairy tales of America, the streets paved in gold and opportunities dangling like ripe fruit, were nothing beside a pen in my hand, the raw chafe of my knees and winter cracking of my fingers slowly healing as I turned my life to books.

“You’ll need documents to emigrate,” Paolo was saying. “But if the count suspects you’re leaving, he has powerful friends to block you.”

Mamma wilted. “So—we can’t go?”

Paolo wiped his long face. “Papers can be forged. Authorities can be paid.” He was moving again, and we hurried after him. “Meanwhile you’ll stay with my cousin Ciro.” We threaded farther. Some streets were beaten dirt, others paved in basalt, black as the smoke-soaked buildings above them. We stopped at what seemed an alcove scooped from stone, a mattress maker’s shop. Paolo spoke in dialect to a lean, stooped man with his own long cheeks, transferring a small purse with a gesture subtle as a handshake.

“This is Ciro,” he told us briefly. “He’ll keep you until your papers are ready and make sure nobody tells the police. I’ll come back and take you to the ship.”

“We won’t see the countess again?”

“Lucia, try to understand: Count Filippo will ask if she’s seen you. Do you want her to lie? Do you want to risk being seized by the police? I’ll say I chased after you and lost you in the city.”

Memories of the villa tumbled through my mind: afternoon light pouring into the sitting room, the garden and orchard, the sea, Vesuvius, our rock where Mamma sang, Nannina’s kitchen and gruff kindness. Most of all, Countess Elisabetta’s gliding presence and many interventions for our sake, her calm voice and white hands on mine, teaching me to write and to read aloud, her patience when I stumbled. I’d never see her again, never hear that gentle voice? Now America seemed like exile.

“If you write to her, I’m sure she’ll write back.”

“She will?” Nobody had ever written to me. A
countess
might write “Dear Lucia”?

“Of course she’ll write, but think, now. I’ll bring your clothes. What else do you want from the villa?”

“My Leopardi book, it’s under the bed,” I ventured, ashamed to add another task.

“I’ll bring it. I’ll arrange everything. But you must stay hidden.”

Ciro hurried us inside. His home was a
basso,
two rooms, one behind the other. Only the first, his workshop, had a window to the street. Bales of wool and rolls of stiff cloth filled the hot, tiny space, leaving only a clearing for the stove, small table, and three stools. Ciro’s wife wordlessly handed us hunks of bread. We ate nestled against a wool bale. Surely we were safe here, deep in the entrails of the city. Who would think to look in a mattress maker’s shop?

“Nannina’s sister went to America,” Mamma reminded me. “She used to be a chambermaid. Now she makes silk flowers in her own shop. Finish your bread, Lucia. Don’t leave any for rats.”

I wanted to talk about the villa and all that we’d miss, but Mamma’s frozen face said to ask no questions. So in the stifling late-afternoon heat, I watched snowy threads of wool and cotton float by. Ciro and his wife, working not three paces from us, were wrapped in fog.

“Mamma, what’s Cleveland like?” I ventured finally, when our silence grew unbearable.
Cleveland
—even the word tasted foreign in my mouth.

“It must be a city like Naples. Don’t think about it.”

How could I
not
think about a change so sudden and huge that I’d made in our lives? But I was young, and dreams bore me onward like a ship. Everything was easy in America, many said. Perhaps they were right, I thought drowsily. In the hot, close air, pressed into the wool bales, I slept.

When darkness came, Ciro called us to the doorway. Languid breezes stirred. Men were coming home with peddlers’ sacks and wooden carts. Waves of smells lapped past us: beans and pasta boiling, chamber pots, garlic, rosemary, onions and fish, hot oil, wine and cut lemons, the tang of wet stone, and everywhere the sweat of those who worked hard in the sun and slept in their clothes.

Soon the street was lined with stools, old chairs, and mounds of rags for nesting babies. Ciro’s wife had made pasta with lentils, onions, and chunks of lamb, evidently bought with Paolo’s purse, and many turned curiously to sniff. She passed a plate of
struffoli,
little balls of sweet fried dough in sugar syrup. Old men played cards on boards held between their knees. Shouts and talk ran up and down the street.

“We could live here,” Mamma whispered dreamily. “We don’t have to go to America.”

“The count would find us. He’d give you to the doctor.”

She closed her eyes. “I suppose so. Everything will be different in America. New songs—”

“Yes, of course.” She would shed her old demons like snakeskin. I’d go to school. We’d be happy forever.

The music grew louder, thicker, fueled by more voices. Mandolins, tambourines, and a guitar appeared. A song began, “Te voglio bene assai.” When Mamma joined the chorus, weaker voices fell silent around the trio: a man, Mamma, and another woman, their voices leaping back from the walls, soaring over a bed of clapping, strings, and flutes. Children danced between us. As stars slowly filled the slice of sky overhead, other songs ran up and down the street like rag balls kicked by boys: ballads, love songs and mockeries of love, sea chants, and aches for the beauty of Naples.

In the loudest songs, under clapping and tambourines, I even dared to sing. Mamma always said my voice was like a crow’s. “You’re not even trying!” she accused me, no matter how I strained to catch the notes or hear when I’d fallen flat. But nobody noticed now or complained about my voice.

Wine was passed in jugs. Slowly, singing faded into patches of talk. Many spoke of America. One man had just returned from Pittsburgh, where iron was melted like butter in cauldrons as big as a
basso
. “Flesh can melt there too,” he said, showing his calf with skin gouged out nearly to the bone. “I came home before I lost my strong arms as well.”

A young woman pulled him close. “And now you’ll never leave again, Totò.”

“Don’t worry. That man was born unlucky,” Ciro whispered to us. “Not everybody gets hurt, even in the mills.”

“What’s America like?” I asked.

Totò waved at the street. “Nothing like this.”

“Did you learn English?” I asked eagerly.

“How? I lived in a boardinghouse with Italians, worked twelve hours, ate, slept, and worked again. Every fourteen days, they worked us two straight shifts. A man could die then and never know it. Why learn English? You’re just pieces of their machine.”

“Breathe,” Mamma muttered. I did, slowly calming myself. Our life would be nothing like Totò’s. I’d go to school; my mother would never work in a steel mill. As the moon rose overhead, weary breezes climbing up from the sea brought hints of cool. Dingy cats roused themselves to wander, wary of any touch. One by one, children curled in their mothers’ laps like sleeping kittens were scooped up and taken inside. Up and down the street sounded the refrain,
“Buona notte, sogni d’oro,”
good night, golden dreams.

Ciro had made us a bed in loose wool. As guests, we had the front room; his family crowded into the breathless cave behind us. “You hear him coughing?” Mamma whispered. “He’ll die early. Mattress makers always do.” We listened to the coughs, cats and children crying, and distant scratch of rats. Wine and heat had made me groggy, but I’d never spent a night so far from the sea. New fears lapped over me, and I tugged at Mamma’s sleeve: “Will Count Filippo blame the countess if he can’t find us? What if she gets her headaches and we’re not there? Are you listening?”

“Stop worrying. She’s rich. And the headaches might stop if I’m not making problems for her.”

“Totò said everything’s different in America. Suppose we don’t like it?”

“Do you
want
everything the same?” she demanded fiercely. “Should we be servants again? Should we go back to the doctor?”

“No,” I whispered. Guilt squeezed my chest and I brushed fluffs of wool from her sweaty face. “No counts, no doctors. We’ll be free.”

“Yes, free. Try to sleep now.”

But I couldn’t. My mind rolled back. Had our troubles truly started with the octopus and Maestro Toscanini? Or earlier, when I cried too much as a baby? The count was cruel, but was there something in us that provoked him? Would bad luck cross the ocean with us? Were there doctors like Galuppi in America? “Stop moving,” Mamma said. “You worry too much.” Pushing down a rise of wool between us, she sang “Santa Lucia,” each verse more slowly until she’d sung us both to sleep on our slick of sweat in a gently heaving woolen sea.

I woke coughing in the morning. It was the wool, Ciro explained. Since I couldn’t go outside and risk being seen, I sat by the window, wheezing, inventing number problems for myself or reciting poetry I’d learned from the countess.

“Amazing,” said Ciro politely, “all those pretty words in your head.”

Paolo came in the afternoon, elated. The duchess had arranged our documents; a ship was leaving in the morning. “Count Filippo is furious he can’t find you. He says that servants attacking their masters was how the French Revolution began.”

“The police are looking for us?” I asked anxiously.

“Yes, but not at the port. He knows you don’t have money for passage or family to help. Tonight we’ll give him laudanum to sleep late. I’ll come before dawn. Be ready.”

How could I sleep? I sat in Ciro’s doorway, breathing my last Naples air. In early-morning darkness we slipped through the quarter’s silent streets. Our trunk had been stowed. Paolo gave us third-class tickets and a purse from the countess to begin life in America. We must stay in the crowd of passengers, ready to board at noon.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll pay back the countess as soon as we’re settled.”

Paolo’s clean, groomed hand patted my shoulder. “I see our Lucia’s growing up.” He took out a carefully written card. “Here’s my cousin Rosanna’s address in Cleveland. I sent her a telegram to expect you and you should send another from New York.”

Morning light caught the long face I’d seen every day of my life. Now I’d leave that grave and kindly presence, the nearest I’d had to a father. He was clear water untroubled by Mamma’s moods, a shielding rock against the count’s cruelties, a mirror to my deep affection for the countess. He never once mocked my struggles to read or called me
bastardina.
Now when I threw myself in his arms, he took out a crisp linen handkerchief to wipe my eyes and his.