Lambrusco (8 page)

They had hurt him. I saw that. They were forcing him to be with them as part of the audience. His cousin's restaurant. His cousin's wife as the entertainment. The bastards.

I had never changed a program before. I'd never dared for spontaneity in the spotlight. But I could not go through with my planned songs. This was not a time for portents and mysteries and cawing, sky-wheeling birds, or the
Pagliacci.
How could I have sung the song of a malicious, murderous clown, full of bile and hate and cruelty, as a prelude to a love song—when the real-life stuff was right in front of me?

It would have been inhumane of me. It would have been Fascist of me.

“Please give me an elixir of love.” Gigi had as much as said so outright. Maybe his chances with Bianca were slim. Maybe it was useful to think that love deserved all the help it could get.

Nemorino of
L'Elisir d'amore
is a poor man, in love with a better-off woman, Adina. Gigi had said Bianca was a seamstress. Maybe her earnings were higher than his? That was doubtful. Maybe she'd been born to a prosperous family.

Just in time, Nemorino inherits a fortune and he's a prize catch. Every woman for miles around wants to marry him.

The one secret tear is in Adina's one eye because—why? I took a moment to remember. I often forgot the backgrounds of songs, like looking up at a foggy night sky, where only four or five stars are shining. You can forget that they belong to constellations; they're all involved in systems. They're not just hanging up there on their own. So many plots. So many details.

Jealousy! Sadness! All those women clamoring for the now-rich Nemorino! Adina had been worried that she didn't have a chance. She loves him, all right. He can see it. He says so.

“Here, Ugo, take some coffee,” Marcellina had said, handing him a cup. “Consider this a celebration for telling us Aldo's heart is not a piece of junk, not fully. Now I don't have to go out of my way to be nice to him.”

“
Grazie,
Marcellina. Your coffee is always excellent.”

“I'm going to make you some bread!”

“Superb!”

Taking the coffee cup. A sunny morning in the kitchen. Peace.

The brown sleeve of his suit jacket. The smell of the shaving lotion he wore—slightly medicinal, not male-perfumey like Aldo's. The way he had looked at me.

“I know you're sick of hearing this from me, but you're too political, Ugo,” Aldo had told him. This was just before the listening-to of his heart. “You talk too much to people you shouldn't be talking to. You should be more like me. Mussolini isn't going to last, so you'd be better off ignoring everything he's saying.”

The little tremor in Ugo's hand, holding the coffee cup. He almost spilled some. Ugo's hands never shook. It wasn't because of Mussolini. Aldo said things like this every time they were together.

The way he didn't look at me again.

Time to sing.
I could feel the growing tension through the tables, the unstated questions of all those diners. Was something wrong with the singer? Had she forgotten her lines? Was she ill, was she panicky? Is she going to walk away in silence?

I opened my mouth and started singing
“Una furtiva lagrima,”
patiently, carefully. Not sentimentally, but simply, as if stating a fact.

I changed the pronoun from “she” to “you.” And when I reached the last lines, about sighing and dying for love, I made the decision to eliminate them. I had never altered a song before. It seemed all right.

What more do I seek?

That you love me,

Yes, you love me.

I see it.

Then I paused, and the hush all around me came into me deeply, like something to hold on to with every part of myself. I turned away from the light, looked back, and burst out with some
Barber.

Act One, second scene: Figaro himself, rascally, boastful, on top of the world, unstoppable, un-Fascist—how marvelous life is, how pleasing, for a high-quality barber! Here I am! Figaro! There was never such an illustrious life as mine!

I sang the whole of that long song in what felt like one breath. I was running with it, running faster, and it seemed that a wind had come up at my back, lifting me. I felt that I'd turned into someone you have to tip back your head to see; I was flying; I was air.
Ah, bravo Figaro! Bravo, bravissimo, fortunatissimo per verita! Son qua, son qua…Figaro! Figaro! Ah, bravo Figaro! Bravo, bravissimo!

Under any other circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for an audience at Aldo's to be satisfied with just one song of Rossini's. He was one of their own—Rossini from Pesaro, composer-son of the Adriatic, their own star.

This was different. No one asked for more. They recognized flying when they heard it.

Thunder. Much more than the usual applause. Silverware being clinked against glasses, feet thumping the floor, tables being pounded with fists.

“You'd better be sitting up straight now, Ugo,” I was thinking. “You'd better have really, really heard me.” Then I went home, by myself. I never spoke of what I knew.

Ugo came out of it all right. Around dusk on the following Monday, he was back in our kitchen, with a fading bruise on the side of his forehead, which no one mentioned. He'd come to pick up a fresh batch of bread and take a look at some eczema on the back of Aldo's neck.

“I feel like I'm coming down with leprosy, Ugo,” said Aldo. “So how was your trip to Bologna?”

“Oh, it was good to be back in the city again, talking shop, comparing patients, picking up new procedures for minor surgeries, things like that. It was very successful.”

Everyone maintained the charade. “You wouldn't believe what you missed out on, Ugo,” said Beppi. “Mama sang a Donizetti on Saturday night for Gigi Solferino and now he's engaged.”

“Lucky man!” said Ugo.

“She was magnificent,” said Aldo. “Two songs only, but I'd told her to keep it short. We had people waiting for tables all over the place.”

A balm for Aldo's rash. Ugo taking a tube of ointment from his medical bag. Handing it not to Aldo, but to me.

The one time.

All those years, the one time he spoke privately to me. It could not have taken place if the others, that moment, had not been suddenly occupied with other things.

Marcellina wrapping up the
piadine,
still warm and flour-fragrant. Beppi and Aldo at the same time rushing over to grab some for themselves. There was too much, they cried, for just Ugo.

Marcellina slapping their hands. Ugo bending toward me. “Put this on Aldo's neck twice a day. It smells bad, but it may prove to be effective.”

Aldo and Beppi and Marcellina squabbling loudly over the bread.

Ugo's mouth at my ear, as if he needed to give me further instructions, all medical, and couldn't otherwise be heard. Whispering.

“I know that you saw me, Lucia. I'm fine. I was lucky. They had talked about exile. They were going to send me somewhere inland, to some town. Inland and south. Some awful, dusty, desolate little town. I would not have been able to bear it. I believe that, neither would you.”

“You're right. Put this on his neck twice a day,” I said. “I should ignore the bad smell.”

“I will never forget that Donizetti. As another favor to me, please, will you never sing it that way again? Not for anyone else?”

“I'll do as you ask, Ugo.”

“Thank you for making me feel like Figaro.”

“It wasn't hard.”

“We'll never speak of this again.”

“I understand.”

Always after that, formality.
Ciao,
Lucia, how are you?
Ciao,
Ugo, I am well, how are you? I am also well, Lucia, thank you for asking.

In the autumn of one of those years—maybe it was the same one—Marcellina came rushing home from the village in great agitation because Eliana Fantini had just told her she was pregnant. “That Abruzzi mountain shrine of hers must have worked, at her age! It's just like Elizabeth, old and doddering as she was, conceiving John the Baptist, which I'm sure Eliana thought of herself, she's so religious.”

Marcellina was deeply fond of Ugo's wife. Everyone was. Good-natured, always-acts-kindly, never-raises-her voice, sweet, mild Eliana, with clear eyes as shiny and green as a cat's, with her ink-black hair always pulled back in a braid, knotted up and pinned in place, exactly in the center of the back of her head, like an ancient burl on a tree.

She ran the business part of Ugo's practice and, since she'd had some elementary training as a nurse, she took care of patients with mild, or imagined, symptoms, or injuries that required only basic first aid.

Her touch was gentle, people said. She never made a mistake. She knew of, and used, remedies involving plants and herbs taken out of her garden and carried about in the old basket she'd brought from her mountain home. That basket was always on her arm. She never made anyone feel intimidated, stupid, or guilty, as if their sickness or wound were a fault of their own, like Ugo did, with his fancy education, looking down his nose in an imperial way at the very people he'd grown up with. He'd say things like, “A fishhook is stuck in your skin and you waited all these days before coming to me—are you crazy? I believe the infection you've given yourself may be fatal.” Or, “What do you mean, you fell off a ladder? That homemade piece of junk, made from sticks which were rotting to begin with, is not a ladder. Even a sparrow would know to not step on it. I believe all the bones in your legs, which are broken, will never be right. You'll have to reuse those sticks to make crutches.”

Eliana would say that the fishhook was embedded in the fisherman because Satan had chosen that day to journey out of hell, from an exit at the bottom of the sea; having happened upon that particular boat, the devil animated the hook, or something, so that it leaped from a wave like an evil fish, with unavoidable, terrible teeth. And she would praise the ladder, and warmly describe how the bones were already healing; she'd pray by the bedside and put roots and leaves in the victim's wine.

Ugo had married her in Bologna. They'd met at a hospital there. They'd already been married, and were settled in Mengo, when I arrived with Aldo. But what if they weren't? What if there were no Eliana?

I refused to allow myself to think about it. Eliana and Ugo were Beppi's godparents. There were birthdays, holidays, parties.

Sometimes, too, there were confidences from Eliana, unexpected and never encouraged. “Lucia,” she'd say, “I'd give the world to have a voice I could sing with. You're so blessed!” And, “I'm homesick. The sea makes me unhappy, but don't tell anyone I said so.” And, “I pray every morning and every night for a child.”

It wasn't only the news of the pregnancy that had excited Marcellina. Eliana had made a request for a song at the restaurant. She wanted a window table to celebrate her condition with her husband, and a meal with lots of meat.

Marcellina said Eliana was convinced it would be a boy. The song she wanted was, in her words,
“Mio bambino.”
She wanted to surprise Ugo with it.

Marcellina didn't know what to do. “Lucia!
Gianni Schicchi
! The
babbino caro
! Eliana got it wrong! She thinks
babbino
is
bambino! Bamb,
not
babb
! She only ever heard of the title! She thinks it's about a baby, not a girl who talks to her father about, if her boyfriend doesn't love her, she'll go to a bridge and throw herself into a river! I didn't have the heart to tell the truth! She'll feel ignorant! She'll feel like a hick! She'll never get over it! You know how mountain people are! Think of something!”

“I'll change the words to suit her circumstances,” I said.

In fact, I had a song about Eliana I'd put together long before—a song no one would ever hear me sing.

I hate your basket.

It's tattered and ugly and dirty.

I hate how it swings on your arm.

I hate that braid on your head, like a giant wart.

I don't care if I'm damned forever

For thinking badly of a woman who's a saint.

There was no celebration dinner. The pregnancy was short-lived, and Eliana didn't come to the house or the restaurant for a long while.

I had already begun adapting the
babbino caro
when I learned there would not be a child. I could feel Eliana's heartbreak like a black cloud in front of the sun. I cried for her. Although I often wished she'd go home to the cliff and never return, I had never wished her ill, especially not in that way.

The furthest I got with her request was this:

O my dearest baby,

I love him, he's handsome, handsome.

I sang those words over and over, as if I could send to Eliana some sort of balm, even though she couldn't hear me. If Beppi was home, he'd come over and stand behind me, ducking his head at the back of my shoulders, nuzzling his forehead against me. He'd believed I was singing about him: my own, big baby, alive, strong, well, fully and absolutely himself.

Now here was Marcellina's voice, cutting into me.

“Lucia! Why are you standing there? Are you suddenly a statue? Come at once! We're getting into the car! We're getting out of San Guarino! We're going to a cave!”

Ugo and Annmarie had gone ahead. I heard the sound of a car engine starting up. It was Ugo's, smooth, reliable, gentle.

“Beppino!” cried Marcellina. “Think of your son! He might have gone to the very same cave! He may be there already! Waiting for us! Worrying! Stop being a statue! You're scaring me!”

What cave? Beppi would never go into a cave. He was afraid of the dark. He grew up in a restaurant, in light, heat, noise, abundance, smells of cooking, people all around him all the time. He was afraid of bats, of insects, of close, tight spaces. Dampness made him ill. Any time he'd been near a rocky surface, he'd scraped himself. He hated anything rocky.