Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Read online

  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 vesti
bule, 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.

  After dinner a group of young women from the vil age had arrived at the door to take me for the evening passeggiata—a walk around the vil age. Letitia had shooed me away with them. Severia, the young woman who’d been my tour guide, was the schoolteacher in the vil age. I was stunned when she told me she was only twenty. Like Emma, and nearly every other woman in the vil age, she was dressed in a severe black dress that extended below her knees. She wore her hair in the style of my mother’s generation.

  The vil age was a grid of two or three streets clinging to the side of the mountain. Only the main road from Avel ino that continued farther up the mountain was paved. Few of the stone buildings had electricity, and al of them showed the ravages of centuries of wind and earthquake. Dust swirled at our feet as we crossed the meager piazza, shared with a goatherd leading his scraggly flock back to a lean-to for the evening. Severia had pointed out with pride the smal schoolroom where she taught from first through sixth grade. If parents wanted more schooling for their children, they had to send them down the mountain to Avel ino.

  I had recognized that what I was seeing and the lives that were enclosed here were little different from what Giulia had experienced as a girl. In that instant, I had understood that it might have been my life as wel .

  “Thank God,” I had whispered to myself. “Thank God that my grandmother got out.”

  The next morning I left, as I had come, on a dusty bus that had stopped when Emma flagged it down. She’d packed me a cloth-wrapped sandwich of bread and pungent cheese, with some tomatoes and figs from the garden behind Letitia’s stone house. She had clucked and worried about the long trip ahead of me to Milan and my flight home and had given me stern instructions to speak to no one on the way to Naples.

  “Girls alone disappear,” she had said.

  As the bus pul ed away, I had looked out the window. Letitia stood waving from her balcony. She had changed from her morning housecoat to a green silk dress. In her hand was a lace-trimmed handkerchief that she dabbed at her eyes.

  I stood now in the rotunda of the Naples Stazione Centrale, about to make the same journey. This time, instead of depending on SITA buses to get me up to the mountains, I had reserved a car. But before picking it up, I detoured to the flower shop, hoping to find something that would survive until I reached Avel ino. The saleswoman recommended a potted hydrangea and wrapped it extravagantly in layers of purple cel ophane and a massive bow, wishing my grandmother buona sante as she handed me the gift with a nod of approval.

  Armed with a map and directions outlined for me by the clerk at Avis, I located my Fiat in the parking lot, took a deep breath and plunged into the late Sunday afternoon traffic, keeping an eye out for the Autostrada symbol and signs for the A16, the east-west highway that connected Naples with Bari on the Adriatic. About a quarter of the way across the ankle of Italy’s boot, I knew I’d leave the highway and head south into the mountains and Avel ino.

  I was tired and hungry. My jetlag was catching up with me. A part of me longed to stop at the Agip motel on the broad avenue leading toward the entrance ramp of the Autostrada. Its familiar sign, a black, six-legged, fire-breathing mythical creature on a yel ow background, beckoned like a McDonald’s Golden Arch, promising a cheap, clean room. But Giulia was expecting me at the hospital Sunday evening, and even though there’d be little I could do for her at that time—no surgeon to confer with, only a night nurse on duty—I pushed myself past the fatigue to be at my grandmother’s side.

  The highway had not existed seventeen years ago, and I was astounded that I was able to cover the hundred kilometers to Avel ino in under an hour, compared to the nearly three hours it had taken the bus on my last trip. When I exited the highway, a sign welcomed me in four different languages.

  When I drove onto the grounds of the hospital of San Giuseppe Moscati, the doctor saint of Naples, it was nearly sunset.

  I grabbed the hydrangea and my tote bag from the back seat and headed into the hospital, moving from the bril iance and shimmer of light and heat that had surrounded me al day into shadowed dimness. Everything in the lobby was in shades of brown, like the sepia tones Renaissance artists used to create the sinopia, the preliminary sketch under a fresco. The highly polished linoleum, the wooden paneling that climbed three-quarters of the way up the whitewashed walls, the tattered seats in the waiting room, even the habit of the Franciscan nun sitting at the reception desk, created an aura of subdued and quiet sanctuary.

  She looked up as I approached. When I asked for my grandmother, she jumped up.

  “Oh, we’ve been expecting you! The signora was tel ing everyone that you were coming. Let me cal Reverend Mother. She can explain your grandmother’s condition before you go up to see her.”

  Within minutes, Reverend Mother, an energetic and ageless woman and the director of the hospital, swooped into the lobby and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Can I get you some tea, my dear, while we talk about your grandmother? Come, let’s go to my office.”

  I sank into the chair she offered and grateful y accepted the hot cup of tea that she produced within a minute.

  On her desk was a file on which I could read my grandmother’s name. I was beginning to feel—with some relief, given my fatigue—that Giulia had things under control here, if she had the hospital so well prepared for my arrival.

  “Your grandmother is quite a formidable woman, as I’m sure you know. She was very busy the last two days keeping us al informed of your coming. I believe she feels a need to protect and watch out for you. But I must tel you, my dear, she needs you to watch over her, although she’d be the last to admit it. She’s in a weakened state because of the night she spent alone after her fal —we’ve been replenishing her fluids with an IV, but at her age, even twelve hours of dehydration can be damaging. She was disoriented when she got here. She has recovered her faculties enough to issue edicts and lists, I understand, but I have to caution you that your grandmother has a long road ahead to recover from this fal . In many cases, with patients of this age, we would not even be considering a hip replacement.”

  I absorbed Reverend Mother’s report in silence, gradual y comprehending the gravity of my grandmother’s condition.

  “I hadn’t realized how serious this fal was,” I murmured. “I naively believed I was asked to be here as a companion to her.”

  “I’m not trying to overwhelm you and burden you so soon after your arrival, but I felt it was important for you to understand the severity of her injury and to warn you before you see her. She’s quite bruised and also very angry with herself for fal ing. We’ve also had to increase her morphine dosage because of the pain, so she may begin to drift.

 
“The surgeon wil be in tomorrow morning at eight o’clock and can give you the details about her operation.

  More than likely he will operate on Tuesday morning.”

  I nodded, understanding that I would need to be an advocate for my grandmother.

  “May I ask you if you’ve booked a place to stay? If not, I’d like to encourage you to stay here with your grandmother. We can have a cot set up in her room. In my opinion, it would be a blessing for her to have you so close.”

  I set down my teacup because my hand was shaking. With four children, I’d seen my share of emergency rooms, and my youngest had been hospitalized for four days with pneumonia, so I was no stranger to the emotional fragility caused by il ness and the need for a family member to be close at hand. But despite my confidence in Giulia’s ability to control even this situation, Reverend Mother had quickly and authoritatively set me straight.

  I leaned my elbows on her desk and put my head in my hands. I felt the adrenaline of the last two days seeping out of me and tears of exhaustion and doubt well up. Reverend Mother came around her desk with a handkerchief and put an arm around me.

  “Everything Signora D’Orazio has said about you convinces me that your family has sent the right person.

  Why don’t I show you where you can wash your face and then let’s go see your grandmother.”

  Once again, she whisked me down the hal , this time to the ladies’ room. When I was ready, we took the elevator up to the orthopedic floor. As we passed open doors, I saw and heard clusters of people gathered around patients’ beds, family members taking advantage of the Sunday-evening visiting hours, and was relieved that now Giulia would have someone at her bedside, too, even if what I could offer was simply a voice and a face from home.

  Reverend Mother knocked at a partial y opened door.

  “Signora D’Orazio, she’s here! Your granddaughter is here!”

  I willed a smile to my face and walked into the room.

  “Nana,” I said. “It’s me, Cara.”