The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  Donata hadn’t been paying attention to the notary for some time. She wouldn’t lose her son Vitantonio and she had just gained a daughter, Giovanna. She didn’t care about anything else. She was no longer listening to his speech, which had been going on for more than an hour. Nor did she notice the shuffling of chairs when all the Convertinis stood up, nor did she hear how they said goodbye to Fini, nor did she see that they were nodding at her in farewell. Only the voice of Fini the notary eventually brought her back to reality.

  ‘Let’s go and see what those two are doing in the kitchen, but first wipe away your tears.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it!’ she said, taking the notary’s hands and kissing them.

  Amused, the notary let her do it, adding, ‘Nor can I, Signora Donata. I can’t believe it either. But Francesca insisted and made the whole family accept it. Of course, the prospect of regaining the Martina Franca olive groves and houses must have helped …’

  ‘Who cares about the groves, Signor Fini? The only thing that matters are the children. I thought they would want to take them from me.’

  ‘Well, the only one who thought about fighting to keep them was Lady Angela. She did everything she could to get Francesca to change her mind; she insisted that the grandchildren should live with their family and not with a friend – even a cousin – who had no blood ties to them. The day before she died, Francesca called for Lady Angela and they spoke for more than two hours; then they called for Father Felice, who also considered it an aberration to separate the children from their family. When they finally called for me, poor Francesca had used up the little energy she had left. Even so, she begged me to draw up her last wishes for the twins right then and there and attach them to the will she had dictated the previous evening. Then she had the mayor come and she wanted everyone to sign the documents before leaving the room.’

  Fini the notary stopped. Something was bothering him, and had been since that night. He took a deep breath and continued with his story.

  ‘I don’t know what Francesca said to her, but in the end it was Lady Angela who convinced the mayor and the priest to sign as witnesses. She said it was essential so that no one in the family or the town could question the legitimacy of the will, especially with regard to the custody of Giovanna and Vitantonio. That was the evening poor Francesca died … I don’t know if we’ll ever know what was said in that room before the mayor and I arrived!’

  Donata could imagine it fairly easily. Thinking about her friend, she gave a wide smile. Out of the corner of his eye, the notary saw her smile and couldn’t help but say out loud, as if talking to himself, ‘Maybe someday I’ll understand how it all played out.’

  Donata shrugged.

  ‘By the way,’ he suddenly recalled, now addressing Donata directly, ‘before she relented, Lady Angela added two clauses to the will that you will have to comply with to the letter: every Sunday you must bring the twins for lunch at the Convertini palazzo, and when the time comes to make decisions about their education, she will decide, as their grandmother. And you will have to accept her choice.’

  Donata didn’t argue. What could she say, when she could barely read and write as a child and was only really learning now as an adult? When she lived in Matera and was being courted by a Palmisano from Bellorotondo, she never even dreamt that one day her children would go to school; where she came from you had children to work in the fields.

  In the kitchen, Vitantonio and Giovanna were eating biscuits and giggling. Donata considered Lady Angela’s clauses a very small price to pay for keeping the treasure that Francesca had just entrusted to her.

  Food for the Dead

  AS THE FIRST anniversary of Francesca’s death approached, Donata missed her more and more. On the eve of All Saints’ Day in 1925 she lit candles in every window of the house and after supper she left food on the table in case any of their dead ancestors decided to make an appearance, as was traditional.

  ‘Don’t mention it to your nonna,’ she warned the children, who were helping her. ‘She doesn’t understand these things.’

  And after that year, every All Saints’ Day they would always lock themselves in the kitchen and prepare a big bowl of grano dei morti, cooked wheat that they mixed with vincotto, pomegranate seeds, nuts, sugar and cinnamon, for the Feast of the Dead the next day. When they’d finished, they would light candles in the windows, which in turn illuminated the back of the house and gave the Piazza Sant’Anna a suitably dramatic atmosphere. To avoid Nonna’s disapproval, though, they kept quiet about setting the table with dishes for the dead. Lady Angela may have been a devout follower of religious feast days but in general she distrusted the local traditions, which she considered pagan and superstitious. Donata didn’t believe in them either. In fact, over the years, she didn’t perform the rituals out of any sort of religious conviction, but rather out of her need to feel a link with her ancestors.

  From the first floor of the house, above the square and the church of Sant’Anna, the small family were afforded a privileged view of the cypress-lined avenue that led to the Bellorotondo cemetery. In the first months after Francesca’s death, whenever she leaned out of the kitchen window, Donata thought about Francesca, but she still didn’t have the heart to go to visit her cousin’s grave. She preferred to remember her alive, thinking of her irreverently sticking her tongue into her cheek and bursting out laughing.

  In the autumn, Donata finally made up her mind to go to the cemetery. On the Day of the Dead, almost a year on from the burial, she and the children returned to the Convertini vault for the first time. They went early in the morning, when it was just getting light, and as they walked to the cemetery the children entertained themselves by counting the cypress trees along the avenue. In one row, on the right-hand side of the path, they counted 136; on the left-hand side, there were only 132: a year earlier four had died and had been chopped down at ground height. No one had bothered to replace them.

  Once they’d reached the cemetery, they headed to the Convertini vault, to pray at Francesca and Antonio’s tombs. Then they repeated their prayers on the other side of the grounds, in front of the modest gravestone for Vito Oronzo Palmisano. And that was the first of their annual visits to the Bellorotondo cemetery, which became a solemn fixture on the calendar of family traditions.

  From then on, they always visited Francesca’s grave first, so that the twins could jointly place a bouquet of white chrysanthemums there. Then they turned to the right side of the vault and repeated their prayers facing the memorial to Antonio, the father they had never known. Here, Donata made sure that it was Giovanna alone who delicately placed the bouquet of red chrysanthemums on her father’s grave. Later, at the other end of the cemetery, when they recited the same prayers in front of Vito Oronzo Palmisano’s grave, their zia took Vitantonio in her arms and asked him to place the flowers in the iron container that stuck out from her husband’s gravestone.

  ‘I can’t reach, you have to help me. Climbing is for big boys,’ she would tell him.

  Then the little boy would stretch with precocious pride and place the bouquet of red chrysanthemums in honour of the man whom Donata often spoke about and for whom they felt sorry, because he had died in the war on the same day as their own father.

  The Palazzo

  AFTER LEAVING THE cemetery, the twins would have lunch with Nonna Angela at the Convertini palazzo, an imposing house that dominated the entire southern side of the square, next to the large terrace that looked out over the Itria valley. Their grandmother considered All Saints’ Day to be one of the most important dates in the calendar and, while she didn’t put out food for the dead, she did lay the table beautifully so that the living would properly remember those who were no longer with them. During those special luncheons all the Convertinis would gather, including the families of their uncles Matteo, Marco, Luca and Giovanni, who came up from Bari and Otranto. Aunt Margherita came down from Venice only for Christmas and in the summer, when they all stayed
on the coast.

  Giovanna always felt at home in the palazzo, among the carpets, wing chairs and velvet curtains. She’d always clung to her nonna’s skirt, from a very young age, and her grandmother surprised everyone by letting her sit with the grown-ups. She watched her out of the corner of one eye to correct her and teach her proper manners, just as one would expect of the eldest Convertini granddaughter. But little Giovanna didn’t always pay attention: she often demonstrated, just as naturally as she blended in to the family landscape, the early signs of a headstrong character.

  Vitantonio, on the other hand, seemed stifled by the family gatherings. He was well-behaved and reliable, and as easy to read as he was rough around the edges. But the boy found everything at his grandmother’s palazzo too rigid, and the discipline excessive. Inside the house they weren’t allowed to run, they couldn’t play and they couldn’t shout or even speak in a loud voice. His nonna’s office, the dining room, the sitting room and the conservatory off it were reserved for the adults; children could enter only when they were called in. They were also banned from upstairs, the terrace, the attic and the roof. Before entering the dining room they had to hold out their clean hands and at the table they had to sit quietly and, above all, sit up straight. When they were eating, they had to raise their fork to their mouth, because it was very bad manners to bend over your plate. In the dining room and the sitting room, they could speak only when spoken to by an adult, and even then they couldn’t contradict them or answer too emphatically. Their grandmother kept a very firm grip on the basic forms of polite speech – please, thank you and you’re welcome – and there was no excuse for not employing them. When they were summoned by her they always had to answer, ‘What can I do for you, Nonna?’ If they forgot she pretended not to hear them and would call them again until they used the correct formula.

  Vitantonio was only happy when Lady Angela opened up her office and let him rummage through the promotional calendars of the Austrian companies that supplied wood to the Convertinis. He loved the photos of snowy landscapes: forests of fir trees that looked like cotton; frozen rivers; little wooden houses with flour-dusted roofs and meadows piled high with snow that he longed to roll around in. He also could spend hours watching the electric train set that, according to family lore, Nonna had brought back from Switzerland to celebrate the twins’ birth; it was always laid out in the playroom, ready to travel round the Alpine mountains, fir forests, bridges and snowy stations. The children were allowed to watch it from a distance but only the grown-ups could turn it on.

  When the weather grew warmer Vitantonio spent Sundays in the garden with his cousin Franco, Angelo’s eldest son, who was a similar age and also always came to the weekly lunch at the palazzo. The garden was filled with corners to hide in. They entered it through the kitchen door, which looked out on to two very elegant lime trees, with leaves of the softest green. From there, a path lined with a box hedge led to the service entrance, which opened directly on to the square. The side door, intended for the maid and the shopkeepers to bring their deliveries into the house, was used by the boys when they wanted to escape to play on the terrace, far from the adults’ severe gaze. Along the north side of the house, the wall was obscured by glazed ceramic planters filled with huge elephant’s ear plants, as well as acanthus, ferns and hydrangeas, the only splashes of colour in the coolest part of the garden. At one end of the planters, towards the far west of the garden, just beneath the kitchen window, there was a glazed ceramic well with an iron pump handle. Beside it was a pond that held red fish and pink water lilies.

  In a region where water was very scarce – almost non-existent at times – the well and the fish pond were Nonna’s Venetian eccentricities. She had had them built on top of one of the palazzo’s two small ornamental tanks, which stored rainwater collected from the public square, according to the usage rights of the former owners of the palazzo: Angela Convertini had claimed these just for her garden. As soon as she saw a cloud formation approaching, the Lady would send her maids out to sweep the square clean to make sure that nothing would impede the rainwater as it ran through the channels to her tanks.

  At the back of the palazzo, which overlooked the valley, there was a terrace accessible only from the bedroom of the lady of the house. Wisteria curled around the columns of the pergola in purple pendants and climbed up the balustrade. In September, a vine burst forth with sweet Muscat grapes. Under the pergola Nonna had placed pots filled with bright azaleas: white, pink, burgundy and red. The whole town talked about the Lady’s flowers, because no one else dared grow azaleas in such a dry, hot region. She had stubbornly created a microclimate and she’d managed to maintain it: she watered the plants three times a week and conserved the earth’s moisture by scattering over it pine-bark chips that she had delivered from the factory. She filled the pots with rusty bits of iron, too, adding minerals to the soil. Nonna was proud of the results, especially of the ‘Queen of Bellorotondo’, a deep-red azalea that was so lush and vast that not even three people in a circle could get their arms around it. When it bloomed in April, Angela would open up the garden to the entire town for a few days, inviting the women in to stroll through the ornamental borders of strongly scented flowers, which mingled with the rich perfume of the wisteria on the trellis above.

  To the south, in front of the conservatory, there was a maze garden composed of neatly kept paths of box hedges. Further on, there was a close-knit group of trees: two cedars, a willow, a palm, two limes, a plane tree, three orange trees and an enormous cherry stood together. Marking the boundary between the garden proper and the vegetable patch stood a shed, the clothesline, the main water tank that collected water from the roof of the house, and two almond trees that bloomed in mid-January long before the spring arrived.

  A whitewashed wall protected the garden to the south from neighbours’ prying eyes. It was covered in rose bushes that climbed up and overhung the street side of the wall. On hot summer days, the neighbours passing in front of the palazzo looked up enviously at such exuberant greenery and couldn’t help inventing all sorts of legends about the Convertinis’ private paradise.

  The Month of Flowers

  WHEN THE MONTH of flowers arrived, Nonna was transformed. She spent hours in the garden, planting geranium cuttings or transplanting marigolds and zinnias that she had grown in pots and old cans during the late-winter months, inside a small greenhouse behind the laundry. During those short weeks of May, her mood was transformed too. She relaxed the rules, especially in the garden area outside the palazzo, and allowed displays of affection that, at other times of the year, would have seemed quite immodest. The children couldn’t help but notice the change in their grandmother, and they celebrated May’s arrival as the glorious promise of imminent summer.

  At the start of the month, Nonna organized the gathering of the white flowers, which she then distributed to decorate half the Virgin Marys of the town. She gave bouquets to all the churches, to her grandchildren’s schools, to the asylum, to the nuns at the convent, to her friends and neighbours, also arranging them in all the main rooms of the palazzo. And sometimes she even had some sent as far away as the Franciscans in Martina Franca and the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception of Ivrea in Massafra.

  On the first of May, in the afternoon, she marched out into the garden like a general and gave strict orders to an army made up of the cook, two maids and a couple of workers from the sawmill, who had arrived after lunch armed with ladders and pruning shears of all sizes. Before beginning, they filled all the buckets and basins they could find around the house with water and placed them in a row, beneath the porch, to keep the flowers fresh until it was time to make up the bouquets. Then, they deployed themselves throughout the garden to carry out the Lady’s orders with military precision, as she pointed to the flowers she wanted cut, one by one.

  Nonna herself gathered the water lilies for the palazzo’s chapel, and the lilies of the valley for the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament at
the Immacolata. Then she ordered the sawmill workers, whose hands were calloused from carrying rough planks, to start cutting the best white roses from the bushes that covered the walls. These were reserved for the priests at the churches of Sant’Anna and of the Madonna della Greca in town. Meanwhile, the maids fashioned bouquets of peonies, daisies and gladioli for the other parishes of the town and, when they’d finished those, busied themselves making arrangements of dogwood, viburnum, meadowsweet, lilac and the first baby’s breath of the season for the schools and convents. And while Grandmother’s small army marched out to deliver the bouquets all over town, she was still cutting the first Madonna lilies, so perfumed and laden with pollen that they stained everything they touched. She placed them in a very delicate green glass vase, at the feet of the Virgin Mary in the entryway, and for more than a week, the intense scent of the lilies reminded visitors that it was the month of flowers, and that Lady Angela Convertini was the indisputable queen of Bellorotondo.

  On the first day of May of 1927, the activity around the gathering of the white flowers was unusually intense, both because the April rains had yielded an exuberant garden and because on the last Sunday of the month Giovanna, Vitantonio and their cousin Franco were to be confirmed at the Immacolata by the bishop. A week before their confirmation, they were also to receive their first communion, in accordance with the tradition of having the ceremonies over two consecutive Sundays, when the children were seven or eight years old.