The Girls of Piazza D'Amore (9 page)

“You're going this one time,” she told him, “but don't think that you're going with them every week. I know what you're like. You never look before you leap.”

Mother shouldn't have worried about Luigi making a habit of the beach, for when he returned in the evening with a sour, sun-burned face and a welt on one cheek, he swore he never wanted to go with such a bunch of show-offs again. He blamed both the sunburn and the bruise on Tommaso, who was known to have a quick temper. First, Luigi recounted, they insisted on stopping for an espresso in the bar at Amato, and stayed there for almost an hour to show off the new car. Then, once at the Lido, they parked the car within sight of the beach but far enough away from it that what Luigi could see of the sea was only a thin, undulating blue-green line. Once the young men changed into their swimming trunks, they asked Luigi to sit on the pavement next to the car to make sure that no one touched it and to wave at them if any
carabinieri
came by. They promised that they would take turns relieving him, but he sat steaming with impatience and heat for what seemed like hours until he couldn't take it any longer and he waved wildly towards the beach. Tommaso, perspiring and as red as the Fiat, came running towards the boy and, seeing no emergency or
carabinieri
in sight, landed a heavy slap on the side of Luigi's sun-sensitized face, leaving his hand-print. Luigi cried and complained that he was hungry and thirsty and needed to go to the bathroom so badly that his stomach hurt. Tommaso dragged him to the beach, pushed him into the ocean, shouting at him to pee as much as he wanted, and called him a
cretino
for tricking him like that, when he could have pissed anywhere along the bushes that bordered the parking spot. If it weren't for Totu, who jumped into the water to help him, Luigi said, Tommaso would have left him alone to sink. Mother was livid at her cousin, but seemed almost satisfied that Luigi had had a bad time.

She told him, “What did you expect to find away from your house? Don't you know that things always sound better than they really are?”

Alfonso knew that even after his sister received the visa papers from Rome, she and Totu were seeing each other again on the sly. He upped the ante and made another revelation that would hurt not only Totu, but his family's reputation and Don Cesare's interests as well.

Everyone in the village simply took it for granted that Aurora's mother, Paola, slept with her employer, Don Cesare. And who could blame him? His wife, Donna Rachele, looked like a rolled ball of yarn, while Paola had the body of a statue. Her husband Micu drank himself into a stupor whenever he wasn't working.

From the very beginning of his married life, Micu had been made to feel as if he had horns on his head – the cuckolding type of horns the villagers liked to make fun of, so long as no one in their families carried them. Paola may have been a peasant like himself, but she spoke and carried herself like a city woman compared to the costumed village housewives. Micu had responded to the gossip with a shrug. “I don't believe any of it,” he told his friends at the bar. “I'm with Don Cesare all the time. All he cares about is his land and olives.”

But Micu was blinded by rage when rumours spread that his daughter Aurora had tried to kill herself because Don Cesare's nephew, Totu, had seduced her. He had raised his daughter like a lady, never expecting her to work on the farm, but she still ended up like spoiled goods, taken advantage of by his boss's nephew. And when Totu fled to Rome, Micu would have shot the pampered little “lord” on the spot – had he found him.

Micu's anger, however, had been appeased by his wife and daughter, who had pleaded with him for days not to do anything crazy. After the family's honour was salvaged by Aurora's marriage, Micu returned to spending long nights at the cantina. Paola had expelled him from her bed years before.

Alfonso was his frequent companion there, especially after he negotiated his sister's marriage to Pasquale. Micu and the other men followed the goings-on between Lucia and Totu like a soap opera.

After his sister's engagement, Alfonso's head was full of ideas about his future business dealings in America, where there was real wealth to be made. Alfonso had the land, the olives, and the olive press, but no one to make it all work for him, so he spent hours pumping Micu's head too. He needed his arms and experience in oil-making. Why should Micu keep on caring about Don Cesare's arid orchards when he was treated like a gopher for Don Cesare's right-hand man, the
l'Amatise?

Alfonso rode his Vespa around the province like a madman, looking for deals for home-made salami and goat cheese, and had Don Cesare laughing when he started working on getting an olive press to compete with him. Alfonso was wasting his money, Don Cesare told everyone. The young man simply didn't have the experience, and most importantly he lacked the contacts needed for selling the oil.

One night at the cantina with Micu, Alfonso came up with a different twist to the stories that had circulated in the village about Paola and Don Cesare. While working in the farmhouse, he had observed the goings-on at Don Cesare's
casale
not far from there, and he agreed with Micu that all the gossip about Don Cesare and his wife was false. It wasn't Don Cesare at all who met his wife there. Alfonso had watched for months on the days when Micu was sent left and right to pick up materials and deliver oil or wheels of crushed olives. On a day when Micu was dispatched to deliver an order in Catanzaro, Alfonso convinced him to follow him to the farm instead.

They hid behind a tree and watched as Gennaro, the
l'Amatise
– Don Cesare's devoted brother-in-law, Totu's father, the serious quiet widower who was too busy to get re-married – paid Paola a visit. The two men waited patiently all afternoon and even saw Gennaro sit on the porch, shirtless, sipping an espresso, and then patted Paola on the behind as she came out to shake a tablecloth. Micu couldn't contain his anger at that sight, but Alfonso forced him to stay quiet. With Micu fuming, they sat behind that tree till late in the afternoon when Gennaro, his shirt back on, left the farmhouse. No wonder Gennaro had interceded for Paola and her children with Don Cesare. Whose children were they?

Micu was ready to get his hunting rifle again, but Alfonso talked sense into him.

The best way to get even with Gennaro and Don Cesare, Alfonso convinced Micu, was to leave them eating dust, leave them to do their own dirty work. Let Gennaro look for another lackey and someone else's wife. Alfonso promised Micu a share of the profits in the new company if he left Don Cesare's employment and went to live in the farmhouse by the river. There, he would have the power to cut Don Cesare off from the flow of water – and Gennaro from his wife's favours.

Alfonso made sure that the trysts between Paola and Gennaro were made public. The implications went beyond Paola and Gennaro. Totu's past shady encounters with Aurora, which Alfonso swore were real, smelled of incest, as she was probably his half-sister.

After this last revelation, Totu didn't fight back. He became despondent. He cursed his uncle and father and the village and vowed to get out of Mulirena and never set foot there again. To spite Alfonso even more, his friends convinced him that there was still one last card left for him to play. Together they concocted a foolproof, old-fashioned course of action that would keep the couple together and derail Alfonso's plans to become an American millionaire.

Things were moving fast by the end of that summer. Totu walked straight past Piazza Don Carlo on his way to the bar, but he still slipped candies into my hands in exchange for delivering letters to her. Then he sped up and down Via Roma on his Topolino like a crazed mouse. Alfonso's Vespa scooter provided the only motorized competition to the Fiat, but the scooter had an advantage over the car – its ability to race through the narrow alleys and uphill cobblestone streets that led to Piazza Don Carlo and to Lucia's window, now out of bounds to the revved-up Fiat and to Totu.

Peppino's bar had also brought in the first ice-cream maker. Until then, for a summer treat, we kids had had to settle for sucking on an ice cube, unless we walked to Amato for a gelato. In the evenings, instead of going to the Funtanella for water, the young people had taken to going for a
passeggiata
and a gelato in the piazza. We girls changed into our best clothes and walked up and down Via Roma arm-in-arm, acknowledging the other girls with a “
Ciao
,” but ignoring the boys.

Since Tina had left for Canada, Lucia had no one to go out with, so she expected me to accompany her on her evening walks. She held me by the hand as if she were taking me for a walk until my friends Rosetta and Bettina joined us. Then the four of us would buy our ice cream and accompany Lucia back to Piazza Don Carlo.

The women who sat on their doorsteps frowned at Lucia, an engaged woman now, for parading herself up and down like that, and criticized her family for permitting it. “If Lucia's in-laws lived in the village,”
they said, “Rosaria wouldn't be so lax.” The woman was too easy-going and too busy caring for her sick husband to notice that Lucia was taking liberties. The only family member who still had control over Lucia's movements was Alfonso, but, in the evenings, he was usually away in the nearby villages, riding his scooter.

Some of the older women even objected to unmarried girls parading up and down the piazza, but
nonno
Luigi, rather than disapproving of us, had actually entertained us one evening. He bought each of us lemon-flavoured
granite
and a glass of wine for himself and spoke of his own days in America.

“You're lucky to be going to Montreal,” he repeated more than once. “New York is a hell of a place.”

My evening
passeggiate
with Lucia ended after the feast of Santo Francesco, which was celebrated in Amato in the middle of August. On the Sunday evening of the feast, our piazza was quiet, since most of the younger people had gone to the celebrations. Surprisingly, Lucia didn't seem interested in going. After our usual ritual of walking to the piazza, Lucia decided to pick up our water jugs and go to the Funtanella for water. We filled the ceramic water jugs and then, instead of walking back to the village, she insisted we walk toward the Timpa. There, we sat on a stone for a long time. It was as though she were waiting for someone. It irritated me that Lucia didn't talk to me. Since her engagement, she had become closed in with her own thoughts, and acted as if I weren't even there.

The sky turned to dusk, and the cypresses of the cemetery at Amato were discernible only as tall shadows against the twilight. I felt uneasy there. I was never comfortable walking by the Timpa, even in
daylight. The sheer size of the scooped-out mount, with its exposed rocks jutting out all around, made me feel small and helpless. I asked Lucia to take me back home before it got too dark, saying that Mother would be alarmed by our absence.

Before she responded, we heard a car's engine, and Lucia straightened up. The car sped past us, then doubled back and parked on the side of the road, the engine still running. Two of Totu's friends stayed in the car, while Totu walked towards us and took Lucia
by the arm. She turned to me and speaking quickly in a whisper, told me, “I have to go with Totu, so sit here and wait a while before making your way back home, then walk slowly and try not to go home before an hour. And if anyone asks about me say that we went for water together and then on our way back we met some people and we spoke for a while and then I decided to go with them to the feast, and if they ask you who these people are, tell them you don't know them.” Lucia spoke so quickly, I hardly understood what she was telling me, except that I would have to walk home alone in the dark. All I could say was, “What about your jug? Won't they think it's stupid for you to be going to the feast with a jug of water?”

“Don't worry about the jug. I'll leave it here and get it back tomorrow morning.”

I called back, “Tomorrow? You're only coming back tomorrow morning?”

Totu tried to reassure me. “We're not sure when we'll be back. Caterina, just go home and say that you left Lucia at the Funtanella talking with some people from Amato and you don't know where she is.” He squeezed me on the shoulder, and then touched me gently on the cheek, affectionately, as if he understood my fears.
“Maybe we'll drive her home first.”

Lucia pleaded, “Alfonso can pop up any time. We need at least a couple of hours before they look for us. Caterina is not a baby. She knows her way home.

Totu and Lucia got in the car and drove away, but the car seemed to stop after only a couple of minutes, probably near the cemetery. Alone in the semi-darkness, I sat on a jutting rock and prayed that maybe they would change their minds and return. I waited as I had been instructed and listened for any movement, but all I heard was the sound of crickets coming from the ravine. After what seemed like an eternity, when they had not returned, I started walking slowly towards the village, going over in my head all that Lucia had told me. I was almost halfway to the piazza when I realized that I had also left my own water jug behind. I couldn't go home without it and tell the story I was supposed to tell. Crying in frustration, I started running fast towards the Timpa. I could hear the first explosions of fireworks from Amato and I cried because there I was, all alone in the dark, far from my house, because of Lucia, while other people were having fun at the feast. Then the jerky vroom-vroom sound of a scooter coming from Amato drowned out all other noises, and, as it neared me, it filled the air with what seemed a crescendo of doom. I wanted to hide, but Alfonso rode by me almost instantly and then stopped. I was shaking with fear.