When We Were Strangers (5 page)

“Watch,” I told Rosanna. I threaded a basting needle with coarse thread and made running stitches in a scrap of cloth. “Now you,” I said. Each stitch crawled, for she poised the needle over the cloth, held a long breath before easing it through and drew out the thread as carefully if it were spider spun. After a fair piece of road, she had made ten tiny stitches, precisely equal. She slept with the cloth that night in the tent we made beneath the cart.

The next day, in Caserta, while Attilio set up his goods in a market square that was larger than all Opi, Rosanna hunched over an old cloth sack I had found for her, working tiny stitches in an intricate tangle. Often she tore out an hour’s work to make a new design that seemed as random as the first, but still with careful, even stitches. She never spoke, but smiled when I brought her a clutch of ripe tomatoes, my first. We ate them all, licking the sweet, seed-studded juice from our fingers.

Attilio was in good humor, for he was doing a brisk business in Caserta. Sewing steadily, I started the last rose and winding, leafy stem. It looked real; even my mother would have said so. Near noon, when Rosanna finally stopped stitching and uncurled her slender fingers, the dark eyes fixed on my needle working the shawl, watching avidly, as if I were spinning gold. Sometimes her mouth moved, but words melted in the dry air. “Here are the French knots,” I said instead, “and here the satin, bullion, back, feather, running and couching stitches.”

“They’re beautiful,” she finally breathed in a gauzy voice so unexpected that Attilio looked up from a haggle over flat-bottomed pots.

“You can make some stitches on the shawl, child,” he said. “My wife won’t mind.”

A customer snapped, “I gave you a fair price, man. Will you take it?”

“Watch me, Rosanna,” I said, taking up her sack. “You make a knot like this. They’ll go inside each rose.” When her practice knots came out as round as pearls I let her make one on the shawl. She gazed at it awestruck, one spindle-thin finger hovering over the flower. “In Naples you’ll learn to sew better than I do.”

She sat rigidly, staring at the shawl, slowly opening the thin, cracked lips. Her voice rasped like a rusty hinge—an aged voice, horrible in a child. “They all died. My grandmother. My father. My mother. My little brother.” She pushed the shawl away. “I tried to take care of the baby but she died too. Everyone. One by one.”

“The priest told us.”

“I knew I’d be next.”

“But you weren’t, Rosanna. We’re taking you to Naples and you’ll be safe there.”

“
Don’t promise
,” Carlo would say. Rosanna slowly stroked the sack as Attilio tried to explain what a fine city Naples was. She turned away, curling around a stack of pots with her head cushioned on my bag and slept all afternoon. She was still sleeping when we lifted her into the cart at dusk, for Attilio said that we must ride all night to reach Naples by daybreak.

“We’ll try to find the uncle first, and then I’ll take you to port,” he said. “Look there, you’ve come a long way to see it.” He pointed west to a long silver line, straight as a needle beneath the red-streaked sky.

“What is it?”

“That’s the Tyrrhenian Sea, which joins the Mediterranean. Further west are the Straits of Gibraltar and then the Atlantic Ocean and then America.” I stared at the line. I knew these names from Father Anselmo who had once showed us a map, but I had never imaged this silver line or the great width of water to cross. The line shimmered like glacier ice.

“Attilio, when someone dies on a ship, what happens to the body?”

“You won’t die, Irma.”

“But if someone does?”

Attilio slapped the reins although Rosso was moving steadily. “It’s buried at sea.”

“Buried?”

“Well, wrapped in a weighted shroud and dropped. With prayers,” he added quickly.

“There’s a priest?”

“Perhaps.” So there was no priest, only a body falling like a stone beneath the waves with no one to know where it lay. Eaten by fishes. I pulled out my rosary. Yes I was healthy, but death could find us unaware, Father Anselmo said. The Lord may claim us in our strength for we are His. Perhaps He had already taken Carlo.

“Look at the sunset, Irma,” urged Attilio, touching my shoulder and pointing to red-violet streaks over the silver line quickly turning black. Save me, Lord, from death at sea. Work, one must work. I turned the shawl over to clip thread ends in the dying light.

“Even the back side is lovely,” Attilio observed. “If the road were longer, you could make a whole bouquet. You could make one in America, you know, with all the flowers you remember.” Yes, I could do that, a year’s flowers in the same bouquet, from the earliest snow crocus to the last yarrow my mother coaxed from her garden.

Attilio sighed. “My wife used to paint bowls and sell them. She could read and write. Catarina did so much—before the fever took her mind.”

“And now?”

“She watches birds. She cleans copper. When I’m home, she’s glad to see me, but if I leave for a morning or a month, it’s the same for her.” His eye fell on dark roses in the dim light. “She still loves beautiful things. She’ll follow every thread of this shawl. Look there!” He pointed south and east.

The moon was blooming over Mount Vesuvius. Stars twinkled like sparks in a night fire as we ate bread and cheese and I tried not to think of the ocean. When Attilio grew drowsy, I took the reins but held them slack, for Rosso kept a steady pace, finding smooth tracks in the moonlit path. By dawn I would see Naples, a city that was already old, Father Anselmo said, before Rome was even founded.

A fox streaked across the road, startling Rosso. I sang him one of my mother’s songs of a shepherd girl in the summer, her face all white and fair. “In summer?” Carlo always snorted. “Shepherd girls turn brown as nuts.” I sang another song that Zia had taught me, of a girl whose lover goes off to sea and marries far away. I said my catechism, pictured the houses in Opi and all who lived in each, the names and habits of our sheep, and then it was dawn and time to wake Attilio.

He fixed blinders on Rosso and took the reins to lead us into Naples. The city was nothing I could have imagined, a maze of narrow streets wedged between stone palaces that cut the sky to ribbons. I saw marble fountains and streets made of stone that Attilio called basalt, sleek and black as a priest’s silk vestments. Even windows towered, not like our square portals a child’s head and shoulders might fill, but tall enough that a standing man could leap from them.

Rosanna was awake now, peeping through a wall she’d made of pots. “Irma, where are we?”

“In Naples, where your uncle lives.”

“All these buildings?”

“And more,” Attilio said. We saw women with goiters hanging like melons from their necks, hunchbacks, dwarves and legless beggars on tiny carts, their hands bound in leather globes to push themselves along. Bareheaded women with red flounced skirts slipped in and out of gentlemen’s carriages. Street boys snatched fruit from carts. I saw two priests talking while a thief picked their pockets. We saw a church made of stone cut in diamond shapes, enough stone in that one church to build another in Opi. Peddlers sang out their wares. I saw balls of mozzarella bobbing in vats of milky water, boiled pig heads, onions and mountains of artichokes, barrels of olives and wine and carts piled with dimpled lemons as big as two fists.

In a clogged piazza we stopped behind a cart from which a friar hawked palm-sized replicas of body parts. Thin silver lungs, hearts, intestines, breasts, throats, eyes and kidneys dangled from posts, flickering in the breeze. A limping woman bought a little silver leg. “She’ll give it to the church and perhaps be cured,” Attilio explained.

“Which one cures malaria?” Rosanna asked.

“Don’t worry,” said Attilio. “The sea air protects you here.” When she looked at him doubtfully, he stopped by a man with a pot of boiling oil. “Watch him, child,” Attilio said. When the man tossed a handful of dough into the pot, it sank and then bounced up, brown and bubbling. He deftly scooped it in a wicker ladle, shook it dry, scattered it with sugar and tossed it up to Rosanna, flipping Attilio’s coin in the air to catch it in his cap. Rosanna gave out a low, cramped “ha, ha” as she jiggled the hot ball in her hands. “Careful,” Attilio warned, but she was already nibbling.

Men sold pasta from great pots, serving handfuls to men who threw back their heads and aimed the quivering strands at their throats. A grown man sang for coins, his voice as high as a boy’s, his cheeks as hairless as mine. Attilio glanced at Rosanna and said briefly, “cut,” making a gesture I knew from watching my father castrate rams.

Rosanna was wolfing her dough, licking each finger. “Why?” I mouthed.

“If a poor family has a boy with a good voice,” Attilio whispered, “they might give him to the church, sell him really, for a sack full of lire. The boy will be cut in hopes he’ll sing like an angel all his life, bringing glory to God. And his brothers can eat.” A shiver ran through me, like the first cold of winter. “We’re in Naples, Irma, not Opi.”

We had come to Piazza Montesanto. Chickens swirled around our cart. Wheelbarrows, fine carriages and peddlers’ carts jostled us. In every doorway someone worked: sewing, filling mattresses, carving wood, weaving cane, painting plates, braiding rope, nursing babies or shelling beans. There were Arabs in robes, Africans as black as the basalt they walked on and travelers from blond northern places. Naples was a city of foreigners, Attilio said. Some great palaces were owned by English and most of the nobles spoke French. When Attilio asked a peddler how to get to the fishermen’s quarters, Rosanna gulped the last of her dough.

“We could go tomorrow,” she ventured. “After we find Irma’s ship.”

I gathered her slight body close. “Let me comb your hair, Rosanna,” I said, longing to promise that she could stay with me if the uncle didn’t want her. But how could I keep a child in America or even buy her passage there? I combed her hair, smoothed her dress and wiped the damp, thin face.

We turned down Via Roma, a great street lined with stone palaces, each with a guard and carved doors broad enough for two carriages. Who knew there was such wealth in the world? We entered a warren of narrow dirt streets and turned south to the fishermen’s quarters, where streets dissolved into twisting lanes and boys clustered around our cart, leaping and calling: “Guide, guide, you need a guide!” Attilio picked a high-jumping boy, gave him the uncle’s name and showed a coin the boy would get if he took us straight to the house.

The boy darted through the crowd, shouting and pushing dogs and children from our path, leaping between puddles and calling, “Come, come,” when Rosso balked. We stopped at a squat whitewashed house between two scrub pines. “Arturo the fisherman lives here,” the boy announced, seized his coin and scampered away. The house was small, but clean curtains fluttered in the window. A handsome, strong-jawed woman sat in the doorway weaving fishnet and did not look up until Attilio stood at her side. His back was to me so I could not hear what he said, but the weaving never stopped. Rosanna peeped from her den.

At last Attilio came back to the cart. “Come,” he said. “She wants you.” I gave Attilio ten lire so the child would not go empty-handed to her new home.

Rosanna waded slowly through the pots. “Here, take your sewing,” I said, pressing the cloth into her arms. She let me kiss her but the glittering eyes were fixed on the woman who was standing now in a swirl of fishnet. As Attilio lifted Rosanna from the cart and walked her to the house, she turned once to smile at me, a thin curve up like a crack in a clay plate, and raised a bone-thin arm to wave. Is this how Zia felt, hearing my footsteps fade as I hurried down our street and out of Opi?

Attilio set Rosanna by the door and offered my lire to the woman, who first refused and then took them. As they spoke, her wide hand cupped Rosanna’s shoulder. The child did not pull away, nor did she look back as the woman drew her into the house.

“Well?” I demanded as Attilio climbed back in the cart.

“Arturo’s still at sea. Their only son drowned last month and she’s past childbearing. They’ll be happy to have Rosanna. The woman said she always wanted a daughter. So it went well, no?”

“It did, yes.” Rosanna wasn’t my blood and I had only known her two days, Carlo would remind me. Yet already I ached for the steady breathing as she made her wild designs, her famished eyes following my hands and the warmth of her body in the little time that I’d held her.

“Well, now let’s find your ship,” said Attilio. “The port’s this way.” I wished it were further, but the packed dirt street quickly became a paved road leading to a harbor thick with shabby fishing boats, elegant pleasure boats and iron-clad ships sprouting smokestacks between high masts. They burned coal to make steam, Attilio explained, and used sails on breezy days. Beyond the ships, the Bay of Naples stretched like a bolt of blue cloth stitched to the sky, beautiful, but the water seemed hardly strong enough to bear the crafts that skimmed so carelessly across it.

“How far is America?” I asked.

Attilio rubbed his long nose. “Two or three weeks.”

Three weeks floating on water! In hard winters our world turned white for weeks, but at least we were on land in a house with our own people around us.

Attilio worked his cart through the crowds to a patch of shade by a water pump. “You stay here with Rosso and the cart. I’ll find you a good ship.” He was gone two hours by the church bells. To pass the time I brushed Rosso, cleaned out the cart and put my documents in order. I watched passing waves of merchants, porters, fishermen, fishmongers, and gaudy women calling to sailors.