Lambrusco (9 page)

A distant sound of thunder made me look up. It seemed that a storm was brewing, far out at sea, and might be moving toward us.

“Marcellina, it's going to rain. I think we're about to have a thunderstorm. We should stay here until it passes.”

I'd never been in Ugo's car before.

“Lucia Fantini!” cried Marcellina. “There's no storm! I have a bad feeling! Ugo may drive away without us! If you don't start moving your feet, I'll pull you! Like a cow at the end of a rope! I'm stronger than you are, old as I am! I'll pull you so hard, your arm might come out of its socket!”

Then we saw planes. Two of them. Not German.

“Lucia!” cried Marcellina. “The Americans! They'll bomb us!”

She threw herself into my arms. “It's all right,” I said. “They're not our enemies. We're on the same side now. You know that.”

“I want Beppi.”

“I know, I know.”

“The Americans are still mad at us for Mussolini joining Hitler. They don't forget things like that.”

“You're wrong. They only bomb Germans. There aren't any Germans here.”

“I don't want to die.”

“I won't let you. Don't think about such things.”

Marcellina was trembling, and I held on to her more tightly. “I didn't tell you this before, Lucia. You left the house so early. I dreamed about Aldo last night, and he said to me, ‘Marcellina, everything feels wrong. Why aren't you making a cake for my birthday?' I lied to him and said the only reason was, it was the middle of the night. I had no intention of getting up in the dark to do baking. I didn't tell him we couldn't spare the flour for a cake, because we'd have to save it for noodles. Did you buy it? Where is it?”

“It's a long story. I'll tell you later.”

“We have to
leave.
”

She was right. I couldn't put it off any longer. “We'll go and hide now, even though I don't see the point,” I said. “We'll have a nice lunch and believe me, I'm starving. When we get to the car, I'll let you ride in front with Ugo. Don't argue with me about it. After what you've been through, you deserve the special treatment. And please, try to be nice to the golfer, as I think she's someone you ought to get to know.”

“She's too tall. It hurts my neck to look at her.”

“Try.”

“I can sit in the front?”

“Absolutely. Look, it's all right with the planes. They saw there aren't Germans here. You were smart to think about Aldo. He's up in the sky, right now, and he's going to make sure they do their job the way they're supposed to. He'll make them go to places where there are Germans.”

“Poor Aldo. All that huffing and blowing.”

“He'll be fine.”

The planes had come from the north, a matching pair. It seemed they'd followed the road from Ravenna.

I knew they were American because they were similar to the reconnaissance planes. They let out the same throbbing whir, the same deafening racket. They were blunt-nosed and faster, in spite of their larger size, and as deep and wide as a fisherman's rowboat, with a long tail that looked something like a whale's fluke, and a stick-up-high fin in the center that was just like a shark's.

Newer-model reconnaissances, looking for Germans. When they tipped their wings and glinted in the light, one closely behind the other, it seemed they were up in the air for pleasure only, as if playing a game of tag. Maybe one of the pilots was the owner of the leather diary, as unbelievable as that seemed. Maybe he was looking for his book.

Marcellina clung to my arm as we made our way down the platform toward the dusty little yard on the other side of the station. Up ahead was Ugo's black Fiat; he was behind the wheel, turning to say something to Annmarie in the back.

Just beyond the car was a small, semicircular grove of cypress trees, thick and high and deeply, sunlit green—was the grove still a shrine?

There used to be a box, like an open-front birdhouse, attached to a tree where low branches had been stripped away. In the box was a small, rough, wooden statue of the village's saint, Guarino Guarini, the mathematician theologist who came from Modena, in the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a prototypical Jesuit, all brain and ascetics. He wandered the countryside, solving problems in geometry, certain that his shapes and equations would lead to, if not a direct encounter with God, some sort of approximation.

I knew about the shrine because Aldo and Beppi and I had stopped there all those years ago, on the day we went to Etto Renzetti's factory. We'd stopped because Beppi had to pee. The three of us went into the grove—this was Aldo's idea—to say a prayer to Guarino for Beppi's progress with arithmetic at school.

It was cool and serene in the grove, I remembered. Guarino was said to have gone there one summer to wait out the harsh midday heat, and he'd worked a miracle. Some farmers came by, shuffling in the dusty road, bent low with despair. There'd been a drought; crops were failing; everyone was hungry.

But they stopped to see who the stranger was and what he was up to. They looked at his parchments filled with figures and took him for a madman, although his education and his gentle, monkish austerity impressed them. They described their situation in great detail. As if he minded being bothered, and was having a tantrum, Guarino lifted the page he'd been writing on and threw it into the air. As it fell, it changed to a rabbit. When it reached the soft grass, it changed to two, then half a dozen, then twenty, thirty. The grove turned into a breeding hutch, and the rabbits just sat there twitching their noses, waiting to be scooped up and put into the farmers' bags. When the last one was secured, it started raining; the fields were instantly brought back to life.

“See, Beppi?” Aldo had said. “Good things come from doing well in school.”

“Marcellina, do you know if the saint's shrine is still in those trees?” I said.

She looked at me in a scowling, worried way. She didn't care about a shrine. “What if Brunella is in the hiding place? This is the village she came from. Her dead father was a carpenter and I don't know what I'll do if I find out she's there.”

Brunella was the mother of a waiter, Ermanno Vizioli. Zoli, he was called. Was Ugo blowing the car horn? Were they calling? It was hard to make out sounds with the planes.

Marcellina leaned in closely to be heard. “Don't you remember? At Aldo's funeral she said it was wrong how I was treated like family. She said I should have sat with the help at church. The help! You'll have to go into the cave ahead of me, and come out and tell me if she's there. Zoli is a treasure, he's always been my favorite waiter, but she doesn't deserve him for a son. I haven't said a word to her in four years. If she's in there, tell me the spot where she is, so I can go to the opposite side. In case you don't remember what she looks like, she's ugly. She's all dried up, like a prune. You'll pick her out right away, even if it's dark in there.”

The sound of the planes grew louder. Why were they circling?

“Lucia! Promise me you'll go in first and check!”

“Stop shouting at me.”

Then the bombs began falling.

I
WAS UPSIDE DOWN,
more or less. I took stock of my situation in what I felt was a rational way, and the slant of my body, I decided, was like the figure of an inclined plane in one of Beppi's science books, or maybe the subject was mathematics. Sometimes at Aldo's I threatened to go home without singing unless Beppi put some effort into his studies.

I'd hover over him in Aldo's office while everyone waited for me, Aldo in a fury, the waiters impatient, the customers getting worried, the spotlight in the rafters like a big blind eye.

Stubborn boy! He'd hold his pencil like a dagger, aiming it at his chest. “Mama, I'd rather stab myself than do these lessons.”

I had wanted him to go to university in Bologna. I'd daydream of taking the train to visit him, then strolling beside him down narrow old streets and under splendid vaulted arches, nodding pleasantly as he greeted fellow students in bright scarves and loose jackets in need of repair, like the male characters of
La Bohème.

It wasn't written in stone that Beppi had to grow up to run a restaurant. I imagined him reading philosophy, literature, history. I pictured him at medical lectures, in a laboratory, in the white coat of a scientist—or a future physician, like Ugo.

All those wishes. I'd pester him until he wrote the required composition, worked out the necessary equations, translated Latin verses of some poet he only felt sorry for, for being so pompous and dull.

Maybe I should have listened to him when he told us he wanted to be a carpenter. He was good with his hands. The first thing he ever got excited about learning was a sentence in a science or maybe mathematics book that said, “The four basic tools of humanity are the lever, the pulley, the wedge, and the inclined plane.”

“Mama, look at these beautiful drawings. Look at the little wheels on the pulley. Look at how the shapes are.” He'd been awestruck.

The inclined plane is a close relation to the wedge, I remembered. The secret of the inclined plane is in the path of least resistance.

“Lucia, talk to us. Even if you can't see us, we're here. We're all right. So are you. It's very, very important that you stay calm, until we figure out a way to free you.”

Voices. I could understand the words, but the voices calling to me sounded far off and muffled, with strange reverberations. I felt I heard them underwater. One male, two female. Whose voices they were, I didn't know.

“Lucia, I hate to say it but I told you so! I
told
you what would happen! What were we standing around talking for? Why did you make me keep talking? We should have been safe in the cave, and now you're partially buried alive! I'm going out of my mind!”

“Lucia Fantini, please listen to me. Say you can hear me. I will kill myself if anything is wrong with you that can't be easily repaired, and I mean what I say, as I've been thinking about it anyway, now that they've blown up my factory.”

Four voices, not three. Two male, two female.

I made no effort to answer. I had no memory of what had happened to me, but I didn't care. I felt no curiosity. A childish feeling of guilty pleasure had taken hold of me, as if I'd done something wrong on purpose.

I wasn't sorry for it, whatever it was. But it might have had something to do with this position of mine. Surely there'd be consequences for hanging about with my feet against a ceiling of air, and my head resting so very comfortably like this, so very gently.

The voices stopped.

I shut my eyes, and when I opened them a moment later the sky was over my head, gray and empty and still. It appeared to be the dusty sky of twilight.

Time to go to work?

“Roosters crow at sunrise, and Mama sings at the end of the day,” Beppi would say, like a law, like the fact of the tools of humanity. “Roosters are the opposite of Mama.”

I was looking up at the sky, it seemed, from a window. The restaurant?

Yes. Aldo's office. Everyone waiting for me, as if my body were a kettle of water on the stove, and they knew how long it took to reach a boil. That was how casual they were about it. Steam rose up from boiling water; the singer's voice rose up from her throat.

Time to go on, Lucia.
Four, sometimes five, sometimes six times a week, plus Sunday afternoons.

How lucky I was! How marvelous it must be to be gifted! People said this to me all the time, as if I'd been born with the privilege of breezing through life in an effortless way, when most of humanity had to trudge through endless mud, with a bag full of bricks on their backs.

But getting ready to go out and sing could feel like getting ready to be born all over again.

No Beppi in sight. He wasn't at his father's desk. No schoolbooks this evening, no fighting. Where was he?

Oh, it was a Saturday evening; that explained it. It was the one time of the week he was allowed to be free from books. He was up to his usual Saturday habits, of course, following his father at his heels, arguing with the cooks, monitoring the cash box, greeting customers at the door, bothering the waiters, and all the while, walking about like a prince, beloved and indulged, in a safe, completely unassailable castle.

There was a window seat, like a church pew without a back, cushioned. Aldo had brought in carpenters from Etto Renzetti's factory to build it for me to sit and rest, pre-performance.

As if I could rest, with everyone waiting for me.

But this evening, I felt no agitation. The window seat was where I was, half sitting, half lying back. When I turned my head, I saw that I wasn't alone.

Verdi and Puccini were here, side by side, in chairs they must have dragged over from the other end of the office. They were just to my right.

Verdi was stiff with dignity. His dark beard was perfectly trimmed. His chin was tucked deeply in his high-rise collar, and he looked like a giant bird, all face and no neck: an owl. Puccini's clothes were badly rumpled; it seemed he hadn't had a bath in weeks. He started humming from the first act of
Tosca.

Verdi was silent, pretending not to hear—pretending, I felt, not to be jealous.

Then directly opposite me appeared plump, sparkly-eyed Rossini, with his ink-black hair slicked down, as if he'd stuck his head in a bucket of oil. He reminded me of Etto Renzetti.

He'd pulled up the chair from behind Aldo's desk. I felt the need to address him.

“My dear maestro,” I said, gently but firmly, “as much as your arrival doesn't bother me, I'm afraid you don't belong here with these two.”

“These two? These
two
?” This from Verdi. “I mean no offense, because, my dear lady, where you come from, it's possible you weren't educated properly. As every Italian should know, in music there is only myself. There is only one
sommo,
at the highest of heights, as there is only one summit of a mountain.”

Puccini showed his disagreement. He made motions in the air to indicate not a mountain but a woman's two breasts.

“Your son sent me,” said Rossini. “You know I'm Beppino's favorite.”

Puccini, raising his eyebrows, hummed louder.

“Change your tune, please,” said Rossini to Puccini. “Enough with your Tosca. I'm sure people are correct when they call her heroic, but it's also correct that she's somewhat overly hysterical. Don't take that the wrong way. This is a time for calmness. Don't forget, Tosca's doomed.”

Puccini ignored him. He'd just begun the menacing, boomy part of his opera where Tosca's enemy expresses his desire to have her followed, to have her found, to have her delivered to him, so that he—Scarpia, chief of the secret police, that black-shirted fiend, that sadist—can act out his fantasy of lording it over her. If he can't get her to be his lover, he'll go ahead and destroy her.

“For the second time, enough with the tragedy. Cut it out,” said Rossini. “We need something optimistic. We've got to keep up this lady's spirits. We must fill her with lightness, yes, lightness, even lighter than air itself, which, if you ask me, is the point of all music. It's a sort of buoyancy, I suppose.”

“No, no, no. The point of music,” said Verdi, “is beauty.”

“The same thing, exactly,” said Rossini. “And then everyone goes home at the end of the show with an interest in making love. If they're sleeping alone, at least they'll have pleasant dreams. Pure and simple, and don't look at me like you want to kick my teeth in. What I mean is, this lady must have nothing to worry about.”

Puccini surrendered, but not completely. He covered his mouth with his hands, muffling himself. His humming became a low sound of moaning, as if Scarpia had a toothache.

“How about a few lines from one of my big choral numbers?” suggested Verdi. “Something rousing and patriotic seems in order.”

“I'm sorry to tell you this, but only Fascists are singing those types of things these days,” I said.

Verdi took that calmly, with a sad shake of his head. He must have known already that Blackshirts hummed him all the time.

“Fascists,” said Rossini. “Just what I was thinking about. Tell me, Signora Fantini, about the business I've heard of with the dogs in your village being trained to piss on their boots. I might like to do something with that—in a chorus, perhaps—unless I can think of a way to put a pack of mongrels on a stage.”

Verdi couldn't hide his disgust. “You're so vulgar.”

“You're so smug,” said Rossini, in a friendly, cheerful way. It was astonishing how much he reminded me of Etto. Same hair, same smooth skin, same brightly shiny dark eyes, same plumpness. And Rossini had the air of someone who considers himself purely unique—just like Etto Renzetti.

“As long as we're speaking along these lines,” Rossini was saying, “I must tell you, your compositions lack the simple touch of an ordinary human heartbeat. The plots of your operas, for the most part, are outlandish. I suppose it comes from thinking of music as a mountain. And I also suppose, any mountain of yours would not be volcanic, like the one this lady comes from.”

Puccini had finished Act One. He uncovered his mouth and said, “I love volcanoes with all my heart. In my heart, I am Sicilian.”

“So am I,” said Rossini. “Sicily is the root of all Italy.”

Verdi didn't care about Sicily. He wondered out loud if “outlandish” was an insult. A rhetorical question, he decided. He was uninsultable.

“I'm uninsultable, like Dante,” he pointed out.

“No one's insulting you. I only wanted to identify your problem. You got addicted to lofty grandeur,” said Rossini. “All that magnificence, and no heat. That's not beauty. Why do you think this lady sings your songs just seven or eight times a year, and only when people have begged for them?”

“She sings where people eat,” said Verdi. “You can't have a
sommo
with spaghetti.”

Rossini looked at him with an indulging little sigh. “They put down their forks the minute she opens her mouth. Remember, on the peak of a mountain, it's cold.” He turned to Puccini. “Listen, Giacomo. I know you agree with me. Say something. Back me up.”

“I can't,” said Puccini. “Sorry, but I'm storing up breath for my second act, doomed or not. By the way, I'm honored you called my Tosca hysterical. She is an artist.”

“I have heat!” cried Verdi. “What about my
Traviata,
for example? What about my Violetta?”

“She's dying of tuberculosis, like half the women in Italian operas not written by me,” said Rossini. “Maybe there's a spark there, I'll grant you that. But she has no backbone.”

This could get ugly. “Don't fight,” I said, mother-like. “We've got enough of that as it is. They say in my village it wasn't difficult for dogs to learn that particular trick, as only the Fascists have boots. It was a butcher who taught them. But they have to be untrained, because too many of them have been shot. I don't think it's a good idea for an opera, to tell you the truth.”

“I surrender to your judgment,” agreed Rossini. “But listen to this!”

A moment later, into my head, full orchestra, with a great, wondrous burst, came the opening sounds of
Cenerentola.

“Beppino's old favorite of his favorite,” said Rossini proudly. “I figured you'd benefit from it, right about now.”

I could hear the overture, fizzy and shiny, pulsing with sparks and eruptions…

“What's that irritating noise?” said Verdi.

“It's beautiful music,” said Rossini. “I'm not saying so merely because it's mine. It's the music of shooting stars, a couple of waterfalls, plus waves full of bubbles, all over the whole, wide sea. And also, in terms of the listener, a great deal of pleasure, mental stimulation, and intensive pumping of the blood, so that the veins are nearly bursting. This is lightness! This is buoyancy! I am the best in the world when it comes to an overture, don't deny it.”