Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  I was three years old, feeling only Giuseppina’s eyes—loving and burning—upon me. Not long after, my mother was confined to bed with the twins she was carrying and everyone was sure she would lose. Giuseppina came that day with her daily infusion for my mother, which she always swallowed reluctantly. Giuseppina saw the state of affairs: my mother exhausted, sleepless, with barely enough will to get herself through the pregnancy, let alone pay attention to the youngest of her six children. My brother Claudio was the oldest, followed by my sisters, Letitia, Philippina (whom we called Pip), and Domitilla (whom we called Tilly) and then my brother Aldo and me. Even with my father’s sister, Pasqualina, helping in the household, this seventh pregnancy was tapping all my mother’s strength.

  “You need more rest and less worry, Anna. It’s Giulia. She’s too much for you right now. The others, they’re old enough, they take care of themselves, they obey Pasqualina, but not that one. You need peace and quiet, not listening with one ear to what’s going on in the rest of the house.

  “I’ll bring Giulia to my house. I can take care of her better than Pasqualina with everything she has to do here. Now close your eyes. Don’t even think about it. In a few months you’ll have your babies and everything will be back to normal.”

  My mother, too drained to fight, acquiesced. That night, Giuseppina took me home with her. My mother delivered the twins—Giovanni and Frankie—early, but Giovanni was sickly and did not survive more than three months.

  My mother’s loss and subsequent depression gave Giuseppina more reason to keep me, and ultimately I stayed for seven years.

  From my very first day in her house, I barely left her side. If we happened to be separated and she wanted me, she never called me. Somehow, whether she was across the room or across the courtyard, a voice inside my head spoke the name Giuseppina and I knew to look for her.

  When I found her, she’d nod and touch my head with her hand, smudged with dirt from the roots of her plants and smelling of garlic and fennel. Maybe it was my nose that led me to Giuseppina. Giuseppina told me I had a “good” nose, that it was important to smell the sickness in order to identify it.

  So many people came to her aching, unable to sleep, unable to eat. She put poultices on their sore muscles, gave them powders to bring on sleep or stimulate their appetites, and coaxed the pains out of their bodies with the touch of her hands. But as she murmured her spells, she was also listening to their stories, the secrets they knew were safe with her. Giuseppina absorbed their suffering, drawing it out of their bodies and taking it into her own.

  Giuseppina’s house was on the other side of the village piazza from my parents’. When they were first married, Papa and my mother had lived with Giuseppina. But my mother, distressed by the constant parade of sick and troubled people through the place, had cried to Papa that she needed her own house. My mother, too, had a sensitive nose, and she could not bear the smells so vital to Giuseppina’s healing ways.

  There were many other things my mother could not bear—untidiness, or inelegance, or ignorance. Especially ignorance. That’s why she sent me to the Convent of Santa Margareta, with all my sisters—Letitia and Pip and Tilly—and took me away from Giuseppina.

  “I let Giuseppina take Giulia seven years ago, but now it is time to reclaim my daughter,” she told Papa.

  My mother wanted us to be educated, to learn to read and write as she did. My Zia Pasqualina, Papa’s sister, did not understand my mother’s influence over Papa. My mother was not a woman who drew other women to rally around her—at least, not other women from Venticano. She came from the city, from Benevento. Every summer, she left my brothers and sisters with Zia Pasqualina, a childless widow, and Zia Teresia, her simple-minded younger sister. For all of August, my mother took the baths in Ischia with her childhood friends from Benevento. Papa’s business provided the family with a comfortable life; he was the proprietor of the only livery stable in the mountains south of Avellino, with carriages that made deliveries and carried passengers. But Zia Pasqualina believed he indulged my mother in “extravagances.”

  My mother and Giuseppina argued about me. Giuseppina could see no use for the nuns and their teaching. She wanted Papa to let me stay in Venticano, but my mother was insistent.

  “Felice, who can teach her here, in this pitiful school?” my mother demanded of Papa one night before he went off to his card game. “I want only the best for our children!”

  Giuseppina, who could not read or write, stalked off from that battle with her head shaking. She told Papa he could bring me to the nuns, but he was a fool if he believed I’d learn anything from them. Papa’s cousin Elisabetta was a sister at Santa Margareta. “Everybody knows how stupid she is,” Giuseppina reminded Papa.

  And so in August of 1900, even though much still needed to be harvested in Giuseppina’s garden, Papa hitched up his best wagon, the one he used in his business for the daily trip to Napoli, and headed south with us to Sorrento. I did not cry as we departed the piazza and Giuseppina turned her back on my mother’s dream. I did not cry as we rode through the gate of the Convent of Santa Margareta and were surrounded by walls twice as high as my head.

  I never cried. Instead, I counted beans.

  Beans like stones. We all took a handful from the bowl by the holy water when we came into the chapel at six in the morning. Sister Philomena watched. My hands were small. One morning, the beans spilled; Sister Philomena frowned and grunted. She was too fat to get down to help me pick them up. The big girls up front turned to frown also, except Pip, who buried her face in her hands, pretending to pray, trying to hide her shame that I was her sister.

  I got on my knees, looking for all the beans. One had rolled far under the corner of the last pew, in the dark near the confessional where the padre sat on Friday mornings. I left it. Perhaps it would sprout in the dirt and the damp, send its tendrils out around the ankle of a sinner.

  I went to my place in the row with the rest of my class. Sister Philomena followed me, watched as I set my beans in two piles on the stone floor and then knelt on top of the beans. Satisfied, she heaved herself into her priedieu and made the sign of the cross.

  The beans were supposed to be a reminder to us of Christ’s suffering on the cross; a small sacrifice to offer up as penance for whatever transgressions we had committed as sinful girls.

  Nobody else wriggled or shifted against the hard white lumps biting into our knees. But I felt them. I didn’t pretend they weren’t there. Sometimes, when Sister Philomena wasn’t paying attention, I scooped the beans into my pocket and stuck my tongue out at anyone who noticed. In the classroom, I was just as fidgety. I hated sitting still to recite lessons or listen to the endless droning of the nuns. To relieve my boredom I drew caricatures of Reverend Mother in the margins of my notebook. The girls sitting nearby would whisper and point and giggle, breaking up the monotony of the day, even if it meant a scolding.

  One morning after breakfast, it was gray outside the high windows of the refectory. In that entire convent, there were no windows low enough to sit by and look out to see the garden, the trees or the hills beyond the walls.

  I cleared away my dish and cup and took the broom from the cupboard. It was my day to sweep. I swept the crumbs from the corners and under the tables and moved toward the door to the loggia. Sister Elisabetta, Papa’s cousin, unlocked the bolt so I could push the crumbs outside. She was supposed to wait and then bolt the door again when I was finished. But there was a crash from the kitchen and the hysterical screams of too many girls, so she rushed off with the keys in her hand and I was still outside, listening to the drizzle beyond the loggia, breathing in air that wasn’t stale with the sleep and whispers of all the girls in that house.

  The kitchen garden was on this side—clumps of basil and parsley and rosemary and oregano, just like Giuseppina’s. It had always been my job to pick the basil for her gravy, parsley for the brazziola and the meatballs.

  I peeked back into the building and saw no
sign of Elisabetta. She was still fixing the disaster in the kitchen. So I dragged the heavy door closed behind me and turned, stepping off the loggia and into the garden.

  The path was brick, slippery from the rain and the snails, but I raced along it, faster and faster the farther I got from the house. I raced past the garden and then off the path through the orchard of oranges and apricots and olives.

  It began to rain harder. The raindrops pummeled my face, washing away the milk that had dried above my lip. Pip always gestured, exasperated, across the refectory, trying to get my attention. She’d pick up her napkin and in large gestures, demonstrate how I was to wipe my mouth like a lady.

  My legs kept moving, carrying me beyond the orchard to the pond. I unbuttoned my shoes and peeled off my stockings and sank into the mud at the edge of the water. A family of ducks rose up squawking. I waded into the water. My dress billowed around me. I leaned back and floated, my arms stretched out, my mouth open to the rain, the clouds in my mind cleared away by the stillness. I was alone. I was free.

  I don’t know how long I floated before Aurelio, the old gardener, came along the path trundling his muddy wheelbarrow, singing hoarsely. He was not bent like the old men in our village, but stood tall and straight. His yellow-white hair stuck out from beneath a brown wool cap.

  He sang his song—a hymn we sometimes sang to the Blessed Virgin—over and over again until he stopped suddenly in the middle of a verse. His hoe and scythe fell to the rocks and his boots sloshed into the water.

  The mud at the bottom sucked at his feet and turned the water into a murky soup the color of lentils. When the water became too deep, he thrashed and pushed his way toward me and scooped me up in his arms. All this time, I had listened with my eyes shut tight against the rain, against this rescue.

  Aurelio carried me through the water and put me down tenderly on the matted reeds near where I’d left my shoes and stockings. He placed two fingers on my neck and bent his ear to listen for my breath. Although I could hold my breath for a long time (I always won in contests with my brothers), I did not know how to stop my heart from beating. So I couldn’t pretend to be dead. I fluttered my eyes and opened them and Aurelio knelt by my side and sobbed. I could see the skin around his neck, rubbed raw by the blackened chain he wore as a penance for some long-forgotten sin.

  “Mi dispiace,” I whispered. I am sorry. I hadn’t meant to frighten him. I had only wanted to be outside. To smell the earth. To feel the water holding me.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out an orange. He peeled it with his fingers, digging into the center to tear back the skin with his thumbnail, broken and embedded with the loam of the garden. When it was all peeled—a single spiral coil—he broke the orange into sections and held them out in his palm. I took one and bit into it, the juice exploding into my mouth and dribbling down my chin. I hadn’t tasted an orange since I’d been at home with Giuseppina. Giuseppina sliced her oranges across with a knife, making circles of different sizes. Aurelio didn’t use a knife, just his hands.

  The rain was coming down harder, filling my shoes and the wheelbarrow, sticking my muddy dress to my back and flattening my curly hair. I was happy. For the first time since I’d been at Santa Margareta.

  In the distance, past the fruit trees, toward the house, I heard the sound of the bell and then the muffled notes of my own name. They were looking for me.

  Aurelio heard it, too. He got up from his haunches and tossed the orange skin onto a pile of rotting weeds. He dumped the water out of my shoes and placed them with my stockings in the wheelbarrow, then piled his tools on top.

  He held out his hand and helped me to my feet. Together we walked back to the convent, leaving the quiet of the rain dancing on the surface of the pond, slowly crossing the orchard toward the clamor and agitation around the house. Up ahead, Elisabetta—her veil drenched and heavy—and Sister Philomena with an umbrella, searched the bushes for me.

  When Elisabetta saw me she gasped, fell to her knees with the sign of the cross and just as quickly rose and ran to me, the key ring jangling at her waist.

  “Thank God! Thank God! You’re safe!” She embraced me, then stepped back and slapped me across the face.

  “Well, this time you’ve gone and done it! I can’t protect you from Reverend Mother now. The house is in an uproar, your sisters are all in tears, no one’s settled down for lessons because of worry over you, and Reverend Mother is pacing the hallways in a fury.”

  Aurelio bent down into the wheelbarrow and got out my shoes and stockings. He passed them to me with a wink.

  Elisabetta finally noticed that I was shivering.

  “Grazie, grazie, Fratello Aurelio, for bringing her back.”

  As we walked back toward the house, I turned to the old man and curtsied.

  “Addio!” I whispered.

  He touched his hand to his hat, lifted the wheelbarrow and returned to the orchard.

  Papa came to fetch me after Aurelio found me. I waited for him in the hallway outside the Reverend Mother’s office, listening to the rise and fall of her complaints. Despite my mother’s hastily worded letter of entreaty and promises of generous gifts to the convent, Reverend Mother refused to let me stay at school with Letitia and Pip and Tilly.

  “I am throwing up my hands, Signore Fiorillo! I can do nothing with the child. Not only does she disrupt classes and—Mother of God—Holy Mass, making the other girls giggle at her antics. But this running away is the limit. For the sake of the other girls, I have no choice but to send Giulia home.”

  Chapter 5

  Signore Ventuolo’s Lessons

  I RETURNED TO GIUSEPPINA’S house after Reverend Mother had sent me away from the convent. Papa had gotten my mother to agree that Giuseppina needed someone to help her. Since she was unwilling to give up either Pasqualina or Teresia, she acquiesced to my resuming my role as Giuseppina’s helpmate.

  Giuseppina greeted me with tears in her eyes the night Papa brought me home. She checked me carefully for fever and other ailments she was certain I’d contracted from the pond. She also examined my head for lice, since no bed was as clean as my own—although we brought our bed linens home from school every week for Teresia to boil and starch before we went back on Monday.

  Then she sat me down at the table by the stove, warm from a day of baking and cooking. She fed me pastina in brodo, manicotti, chicken salmi, rabe and zeppula con alice. All my favorite foods in the same meal. Papa ate with us, but my mother had declined. She was disappointed in me, since I’d displeased the Reverend Mother so much. I had disgraced my family. I knew my sisters were holding their heads high, ignoring the whispers that followed them through the hallways, but inside they were mortified by my shameful disobedience. The nuns now eyed them suspiciously, waiting for any one of them to exhibit the family trait so flagrant in me. Their embarrassment had triggered a renewal of my mother’s headaches. She had one the evening Papa brought me home. I was permitted into her room to greet her upon my return. The curtains were drawn against the late-afternoon sunlight and the air smelled faintly of eau de cologne. My mother lay propped up against several pillows, a dampened linen cloth pressed over her eyes.

  “I cannot say that I am glad to see you, Giulia.”

  “I know, Mother, but I am glad to be back.”

  “In a few days, we’ll talk about this. Now run along and get yourself settled at your grandmother’s place.”

  It took my mother more than a few days to recover and decide what to do with me. So in the meantime, I was just happy to be home in Giuseppina’s house. I took off the scratchy uniform we’d had to wear at the convent and worked barefoot in Giuseppina’s garden, pulling up the stalks of harvested vegetables, turning over the soil, chasing away the crows from what was still left on the vine. At noon, Giuseppina called me in for soup and bread and I washed the earth from my hands in the bucket outside the kitchen door. After siesta, I played with my little brothers and we ate figs from Giuseppina’s tree.
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  Every day I also went to visit my mother, and when she was feeling better she began to question me about what I’d learned from the nuns. I didn’t think it was much. My letters, my prayers, my sums. I recited for my mother, read to her from the prayer book she’d given me at my First Communion, showed her the small piece of embroidery I had begun—blue cornflowers, along a border. She nodded in satisfaction.

  “Well, despite the Reverend Mother’s complaints about how little you paid attention, you seem to have learned something. You are by no means a stupid child, Giulia. And I do not intend that you remain an ignorant one.”

  My mother eyed me firmly.

  “But what did I learn?” I stamped my foot. “It was all so boring and so mean. I would rather be ignorant than go to a school like that again.”

  “To be ignorant is to waste the talents you were born with. To be ignorant is to confine your life to a path no different than the generations before you. We have embarked on a new century, Giulia! Don’t turn your back on the higher things—music, art, literature. When you learn to read, you can read more than the holy words between the black covers of that prayer book. Oh, I know the nuns think those words are the only reason to learn how to read. That’s their job. But believe me, you will be enthralled by what you discover, how big your world will become…. I am simply heartbroken that you have lost that opportunity.”

  I could not comprehend my mother’s heartbreak. Instead, I peered out the window at my younger brothers throwing clumps of manure at one another in the stable yard as they mucked out stalls.

  “Perhaps…perhaps it’s simply that the nuns were the wrong teachers for you. They didn’t bother me as a girl, but you and I are very different, aren’t we?”

  I turned back from the window, surprised by my mother’s understanding that she and I were different. In the past, I’d been acutely aware that she had disapproved of the life I was leading with Giuseppina. But this time, she seemed to accept that she could not force me to embrace the things she held so dear.