Dolci di Love (20 page)

T
he League's headquarters had never been so silent.

Violetta blinked and waited for someone to say something. No one did. Although the widow Ciacci put the air freshener back on the mantelpiece.

‘I thought…all this time…it's just…' Violetta started to age before their very eyes, her face falling, her shoulders sinking, her glee evaporating into the thin, quiet air. ‘Love,' she whispered. ‘I thought I knew. Luciana was so sure. How can this be?'

It was Fiorella who came swiftly to her rescue. ‘Oh, for the sake of Santa Ana di Chisa,' she said, eyes rolling, of course. ‘What does it really matter?'

‘What does it
matter
?' breathed the widow Mazzetti. ‘Violetta's our spiritual leader! We trusted her. We followed her!'

‘But isn't the reason you do that so you can mend broken hearts?' Fiorella charged her. ‘I just can't for the life of me work out why it matters so much
how
. It's great that you see signs that lead you to the people who most need your help, but actually, you don't have to look far to find someone in that boat. Walk down the Corso and you can spot a half dozen broken hearts between here and the
gelateria
if you're looking for them. They're everywhere! A tingle here, an ache there, maybe that has had something to do with it, but
the point is that most other people don't give a rat's butt. Bottom line, there are fewer broken hearts out there thanks to you noticing them in the first place, so can't we just take that and move on?'

‘But poor Alessandro…' started the widow Ciacci.

‘Oh, poor Alessandro, my elbow,' pshawed Fiorella. ‘There's no escaping he's a looker, and a nice enough guy to boot, but there is the whole daughter issue.'

The widows muttered that this had been much discussed and was considered to be a work in progress, therefore not an impediment to his candidacy for their assistance.

‘Well, what about the fact he's been schtupping the pharmacist's wife for the past eighteen months?' asked Fiorella. ‘And while that doesn't make him a total creep, he's been slipping it to her sister in Montechiello as well, although not on such a regular basis owing to her husband not being hopped up on goofballs all the time—although he does drink lot. Alessandro? Clear conscience? I think not.'

The widow Benedicti looked ready to explode, her face purple with rage as she pointed a shaking finger at Fiorella. This seemed to happen to her a lot.

‘That's a lie!' the widow Benedicti hissed. ‘That's a bald-faced lie.'

‘Your boss sneaks off somewhere around three on Wednesdays and comes back smelling of Aquolina's Pink Sugar perfume, am I right? It's a little heavy on the musk if you ask me but it's our most expensive scent—the guy's not cheap, I'll give him that.'

‘He's mourning his wife, for heaven's sake,' the widow Benedicti insisted. ‘He is kind and generous and polite and good and, and, and…tall!'

But she had noticed the smell of Pink Sugar wafting about him on a Wednesday evening. She knew it for sure because he'd given her a bottle of the stuff for her birthday. And there was the
receipt for the slinky nightgown that she'd found in his pocket while doing the laundry. It was from a shop in Montechiello, as she recalled.

‘I have my suspicions about the woman pruning his olive trees, too,' Fiorella said. ‘Usually when two people get mosquito bites that bad at the same time in the same place it's a no-brainer, that's all I'm saying.'

The olive pruner had had her hooks into Alessandro from the moment she first clapped eyes on him, the widow Benedicti had seen that. And she'd seen her fair share of scratching soon after, but she'd just never put two and two together.

‘I can't believe it,' she said in a way that indicated she could perhaps believe it just a tiny bit.

‘Look, I'm not saying the guy's a total waste of space,' Fiorella said, ‘but he has issues. Sure he's sad, he's super sad, but the ladies love that, don't they? I just don't think he's the guy for Lily.'

‘So you agree Lily is our
calzino rotto
?' Violetta asked.

‘I think she's as good as any other, and then there's that little girl to think of. The one with the wings.'

‘The cheating husband's love child?' The widow Mazzetti was amazed. ‘Well, now I've heard everything. What does she have to do with it?'

‘Hello! She has everything to do with it. That kid needs a mother and our
calzino
needs a daughter. What more do you need to know? Hearts can be mended in a hundred different ways, you know. Maybe this hole is going to be darned with a different-coloured thread.' She actually stopped to wink at Violetta. ‘It gets the job done every bit as well, just looks a bit peculiar from the outside.'

‘But that little girl already has a mother,' said the widow Del Grasso.

‘A mother who isn't all there.'

‘Yes, but…'

‘Yes, but nothing. She wants a month or six at the funny farm that one and—'

‘They're not called funny farms anymore,' the widow Mazzetti interjected. ‘That's politically incorrect.'

‘We don't have politically incorrect where I come from,' Fiorella said.

‘And where is that?'

‘Italy! What are you, asleep?'

‘Now, now, ladies!' Violetta had some of her old chutzpah back and called the group firmly to order. ‘Let Fiorella finish.'

‘All I'm suggesting is that blondie stays here in Montevedova and maybe helps the cheating husband be a father to those children. They're good people, those two, you can tell, despite the mistakes they've made. And who here hasn't made a mistake? Oh, that youngest kid isn't his, by the way. Anyone remember that Scandinavian hunk who came through a couple of years ago? Chlamydia, the stories it can tell. Anyway, how about this for a plan: Eugenia can go off to the politically correct institution of someone-in-a-better-position-to-decide's choice and with a bit of TLC should come right, then she can come back and find true love with someone else, because she doesn't love Lily's husband and he doesn't love her and when everybody's done the math and worked it all out they should all end up in the right arms, plus in the meantime those kids are taken care of. Does it really matter who does it as long as it's done?'

The widows looked at each other. Most of them were a bit confused, but not Violetta—she was looking at Fiorella as if she was a giant gelato in her long-forgotten favourite flavour.

‘That's a lot to ask of poor Lily, isn't it?' someone asked.

‘Any ninny can see she likes the kid, and do we care if she's stuck here making heart-shaped
cantucci
until Eugenia gets her wits together? No, we do not.'

‘She made heart-shaped
cantucci
?' asked Violetta.

Fiorella wiped some crumbs off her dress. ‘We call it
amorucci
,' she said. ‘You could whip some Borsolini butt with that stuff, let me tell you.'

‘It's still a lot to ask of poor Lily,' said the widow Del Grasso.

‘Well, nobody said it would be easy,' Fiorella pointed out. ‘Love's a messy business, after all. You must have worked that out by now.'

‘She just comes in here and tries to tell us what to do,' the widow Mazzetti said to the room. ‘There are rules for this sort of—'

‘Oh, please!' Fiorella threw her hands up. ‘Don't give me rules. What do rules have to do with love? No, it's not fair; yes, it's complicated, but look at me: I was tricked into marrying a total dope and had to watch the man I loved die of a broken heart and I turned out all right.'

‘That's a matter of opinion,' the widow Mazzetti muttered quietly, but not quietly enough.

‘Well, let me tell you this, Signorina Rule Number Six, Clause B, Addendum Two Point Five,' said Fiorella, turning on her. ‘I would go to Montevedova Hospital right now and have every limb removed and my eyes and my ears and my nose as well if it would give me just one day back with my Eduardo. I don't care how hard that would make the rest of my life. If all I got was a minute, a single minute, of being with him again, it would be worth it. That is love, you nitwits. You're supposed to be experts. You don't remember how hard it is? Well, you are in the wrong game. Shame on you. Shame, shame, shame.'

The essence of mass mortification filled the room, giving the air freshener a run for its money.

‘I would go to Montevedova Hospital and have my legs chopped off for another moment with my Antonio,' sniffed the widow Del Grasso into the embarrassed quiet.

‘Me too,' whispered the widow Benedicti.

‘And my ears,' sobbed the widow Ciacci.

‘To be in my sweet one's arms again? Oh! They could take everything!' wept even the widow Mazzetti. ‘Everything!'

Into the middle of these sniffling nonagenarians stepped the tiny Violetta.

‘I think Fiorella has reminded us all of why we are here and how precious our mission is,' she said, but was interrupted almost immediately by the widow Pacini bustling in, her chest puffed with pride, and the rest of her quite puffed as well.

‘Success, success, success,' she crowed. ‘Del Grasso, your grandson couldn't get her into the
gelateria
and Ciacci, yours couldn't get her into the wine shop, but right outside my
alimentare
over today's freshly picked strawberries, our
calzino rotto
met his match!'

‘What happened?' a chorus of voices asked.

‘They drove off into the sunset,' the widow Pacini reported triumphantly before noticing something was amiss. ‘Why the long faces, isn't this what we wanted?'

‘How long ago did this happen?' asked Violetta.

‘A couple of hours ago, I suppose. Maybe longer.'

‘And you waited all this time to come and tell us?'

‘I had to close the
alimentare
and stop at Poliziano for a celebratory cannelloni or two. I know they're Sicilian but they're perfect for such an occasion. Why? What's going on?'

‘There's been a change of plan,' said Fiorella. ‘We're swapping horses.'

‘Swapping horses? Violetta, is this true?' The widow Pacini was aghast. Violetta was the person least likely to swap horses, after all.

‘Yes, it is,' Violetta confirmed. ‘It most certainly is.'

L
ily had forgotten the all-consuming drama of that first deep kiss.

There was nothing else in the world quite like it—that moment of everything else in the universe, troublesome or otherwise, being swept away.

The fine linen curtains billowed into the room on a theatrical gust as Alessandro moved Lily toward the plush sofa, graceful for such a big man, his hands on her so delicate she might have been a prized antique.

He took his time, a practiced lover, slowly unbuttoning her shirt and admiring her body as it was gradually revealed. He spoke in Italian and she could have listened to him forever. With his hands on her neck, her breasts, her ribs, her stomach, her hips, her thighs, it was impossible to think of anything else other than the feel of him, the sound of him, the smell of him.

Her lips burned where Alessandro's touched them, her skin quivered, her hair fell out of its tidy knot. She felt free, impossibly free, as though she were soaring weightlessly in the blue Tuscan sky miles above the sordid wreckage of real life.

It was bliss.

Afterward, she didn't plummet back down to earth with an
immediate thud. She stayed floating in Alessandro's arms as he told her how beautiful she was, how lucky for him he had met her, how sometimes destiny delivered the right souls into the right arms, and how he felt happier than he had in a long, long time.

She wanted to stay there forever, suspended in the heavenly simplicity of it all: two wounded adults enjoying each other's bodies, each other's warmth, each other's comfort. She tingled from head to toe in a way she could not remember ever tingling before.

But destiny, as it turned out, did not want Lily to stay where she was. Destiny had other plans and they involved Alessandro's aged housekeeper appearing in front of them, a look of horror contorting her reddened face. She was holding a metal bucket full of soapy water, which she promptly dropped to the floor with a
clang
.

Lily, beyond mortified, although thankfully partly clothed by then, sprang away from the sofa, buttoning her shirt, swivelling her skirt around the right way, snatching at her underwear, which was sticking out from underneath a cushion.

Alessandro, only recently re-trousered, looked in bewilderment as the clearly flustered Signora Benedicti then held aloft a feather duster like a weapon.

‘I am come to clean,' she announced, and pushing Alessandro out of the way, she picked up the cashmere throw that had been cast on the floor and started to straighten the cushions where the lovers had just been lying.

‘Signora Benedicti, what are you doing here?' Alessandro, remarkably calm under the circumstances, asked in Italian. ‘I thought you cleaned the house this morning.'

‘I am,' she answered in English. ‘But is still very dusty. See?' She brought the feather duster down on the nearby sideboard with such an almighty thwack that Lily, now at least appropriately buttoned and zipped, jumped with fright.

‘But I don't understand. We said goodbye. I saw you leave.'

‘And does the dust take such close notice of this activities?' the housekeeper answered. ‘If you would wish your lady friend to get the allergy and create a big nose and water eyes, I will not arrive, but to keep the beautiful face is necessary for my work to have done and now.'

‘You know, I think I should be going,' Lily said.

‘Not at all,' said Alessandro. ‘I would be very sorry if you left now. Please, just give me a moment. If I've upset you, Signora Benedicti, I am sorry,' Alessandro said, switching back to his native tongue, ‘but this is really none of your business.'

‘I don't have a business,' she answered, also in Italian. ‘Just a lot of dust to get rid of, your ironing to finish, the kitchen floor to mop, and something that smells very unpleasant to locate in your refrigerator and dispose of. I work very hard for you, Alessandro, much harder than that olive pruner you always make such a fuss about, but no matter how hard I work it never seems to satisfy you. Never!'

Alessandro was astounded. Such an outburst was totally out of character.

‘Signora, are you feeling all right?' he asked her.

She looked at him for a moment or two—he really was a kind man, if overly randy—then said that actually she was feeling very poorly and could he please take her into the kitchen and make her a nice tall glass of fresh lemonade with a sprig of mint from the patch growing wild beneath the olive trees, the unpruned ones, out behind the barn a few hundred metres.

‘Please, Lily, I apologise but if you could just excuse us for a little longer,' Alessandro said escorting the widow out to the kitchen.

Lily stood there for a moment, trying to shake her embarrassment. The housekeeper and her soapy bucket and feather duster had certainly put her feet back on the ground. The
dreamily fluttering linen drapes now made an annoying flapping sound, the open doors had welcomed a trio of buzzing flies, it was too hot. Her skin didn't tingle anymore. She had the beginnings of a headache.

She tried to recapture the floaty, free feeling, but it was gone.

A photo on the sideboard that Signora Benedicti had just been dusting caught her eye. Half a dozen other framed pictures had been left lying facedown, but there was one left standing at the front. Lily picked it up. It was a younger Alessandro and his wife, she assumed, Elisabeta—a petite beauty who gazed up at him adoringly—but nestled between them was a teenage girl, the image of her mother, looking shyly into the camera.

Alessandro had a daughter?

She had never asked him if he had children, she hated the question so much herself, yet this kid looked so much like him there was really no doubting it. Had she died too? It was so strange he had never mentioned her.

He was thinner in the picture and his hair was shorter, but mostly what struck her was the lightness about him. He stood taller, somehow, and his shoulders did not bear the weight of his current grief. His eyes, his smile, even the way he held his head radiated happiness, contentment.

They were a happy family, she thought, comparing the photo with the one in Daniel's shoe.

Daniel.

She sank into the sofa, the photo falling from her hand onto the seat next to her, her head thrown back on the cushions as she gazed blankly at the ceiling.

Her husband and Alessandro were opposites in every way. Daniel was fair where Alessandro was dark, chiselled where Alessandro was soft, reserved where Alessandro was impassioned. She could not see Daniel getting wound up about some ancient enemy stealing the
family seat a thousand years ago. He forgave his own parents far worse crimes.

Daniel did not hold grudges. He preferred smoothing the waters to making waves. Shouting at her in the alley was as angry as she'd ever seen him.

What had happened to the husband she knew so well? She had thought he looked the same as always when she first saw him in the piazza, but in the alley with his harsh voice, his hooded eyes, and his obvious fury, he seemed a different man. Older. Older?

Today was Saturday. It was Daniel's birthday.

Lily closed her eyes and felt a tear trickle down her face toward her ear.

A lifetime ago she had planned to spend this afternoon with her husband having lunch at the Museum of Modern Art and meandering around the collections.

Instead she had spent it betraying him in the same way he had betrayed her.

Alessandro, having finally extracted himself from his sickly housekeeper, swept back into the room.

‘Please forgive me,' he said. ‘But I think Signora Benedicti is recovered now. At least she says she can start cleaning again, although I have instructed her to take a rest for an hour or two.'

He stopped when he saw her tears.

‘You are upset, I am sorry,' he said, coming to her.

‘No, I'm sorry,' she said.

He looked at the photo in her hands.

‘Ah,' was all he said.

‘You have a daughter,' she said, holding up the photo.

‘Yes.'

‘You never told me about her.'

‘There is not much to say.'

‘Well, how old is she? Where does she live?'

He seemed angry and she thought for a moment he was going to storm out of the room. The romance was gone, that was clear. Still, he sighed and sat down beside her, picking up the photo.

‘She is twenty-one and she lives in Pienza.'

‘How often do you see her?'

‘I do not see her.' He paused. ‘Sofia.'

‘That's a beautiful name, Alessandro. For a beautiful girl.'

‘She is lost to me,' he said.

‘I can't believe that.'

‘It is true. She has been lost to me for some time. Remember when I told you of the family that cheated us out of this house? She married one of them.'

‘But that was hundreds of years ago!'

‘The same cheating poison still runs in the Mangiavacchi blood,' Alessandro said. ‘This is no secret and she knows it yet still she marries him.'

‘Well, that is what we call cutting off your nose to spite your face where I come from,' Lily said. ‘She's your daughter, Alessandro. And she has lost her mother. She must miss you so much and surely you must miss her.'

She could tell from the set of his jaw that he was about to fight for his position, to defend himself, but in the end he didn't. He slumped back farther into the sofa and sighed again.

‘Yes, I miss her,' he said. ‘Of course I do. And now she has a son, my grandson, but…I have never met him.'

‘Alessandro, that's so sad. Not just for her but for you, and for that little boy. Can't you kiss and make up?'

‘I am waiting,' he said. ‘I am waiting until I am no longer so angry with her.'

‘And how long do you think that will take?'

‘I don't know how long it will take, Lily. I did not think it would take this long.'

‘You have to find a way to forgive her, Alessandro.'

‘I know this, Lily. I know this. Please, can we talk about something else. What of you? Is your face also missing a nose?'

‘Not quite,' said Lily. ‘But I do have a husband.'

‘I see.' He didn't seem that surprised.

‘He has a girlfriend and two children and I only just found out about them, so I came here to find him.'

This he was surprised by. ‘In Toscana?'

‘In Montevedova.'

‘And have you found him?'

‘Well, he's there,' she said. ‘I saw him today.'

‘Ah,' Alessandro said. ‘And then you saw me.'

Lily supposed it really was that shamefully obvious. ‘You must think I am a terrible person,' she said.

‘I think you are beautiful and I think you are sad,' Alessandro said. ‘I have thought that since the moment I saw you.'

She managed a smile. ‘That's funny. I thought the same thing about you.'

‘We are a good pair for this reason, perhaps?' suggested Alessandro.

‘I think that we are not a pair,' she said. ‘I think that what happened just now, between us, was a mistake. A very nice mistake. But still a mistake.'

Alessandro fixed her with his baleful brown eyes. ‘You still love your husband, no?'

He did not know the Lily who had built a fortress around her heart's darkest chambers, so she let him in.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I loved him before I found out he was cheating on me, even if, like you and Elisabeta, we never really talked about it. But now I can't tell if I love him or not.'

‘I think if you didn't love him, you would be able to tell that,' Alessandro said.

‘Why?'

‘You are hurt, Lily. I know this, but I also know that a man cheating on his wife does not always have something to do with how much he loves her. We're men,' Alessandro said as she tried to protest. ‘Don't give us too much credit. We mean our promises when we make them, but we are simpletons when it comes to temptation, you must know this. Us cheating on you is not the same as you cheating on us.'

‘Well, I just cheated on him so I guess we are in the same boat.'

‘And how do you feel?'

‘I feel like I have done something that can never be undone. How do
you
feel?'

‘I feel we made the most of a good opportunity.'

‘Well, you certainly sound like you know what you are talking about.'

‘I'm Italian. Of course I know what I am talking about.'

‘You had an affair when you were married to Elisabeta?'

‘More than one.'

‘And she knew?'

‘She found out about the last one, and until she did I had no idea how much I was hurting her.'

‘But she forgave you.'

‘There was one month at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and a very expensive fur coat and a watch, but yes, she forgave me.'

‘But it's different for me. My husband has had children, the children I could never have myself, with another woman. Could he be any more deceitful?'

‘Excuse me if what I say is not what you want to hear, Lily, but the deceit is the same, whether there is a child involved or not. Would you feel better if you knew of the affair but not the child?'

Oh, but Lily loved the child.

‘It's complicated,' she said. ‘Too complicated. I might still love him but I don't know if I can forgive him.'

‘Yes, I know this. It is the same with my daughter. I love her, of course, she is my flesh and blood, but I don't always feel this love. There is so much else that I feel so strongly in the way.'

English as a second language and still he had encapsulated the knotted core of Lily's predicament. She could not know if she still loved Daniel because there were so many other obstacles in the way. And she wasn't sure if she was capable of showing him enough mercy to remove the obstacles.

‘I think forgiveness is beyond me,' she said.

‘I am the same,' Alessandro agreed. ‘You see, we do make a good pair.'