The Secret Legacy

by Sara Alexander

  I leapt out of the bed, dashing to the door. I was halfway down the stairs when I realized I’d run out without a single piece of clothing on me. I dashed back into the bedroom, letting the door swing open with a bang. The Major stirred. I whispered apologies and grabbed my dressing gown. The bell clanged again. I rushed downstairs, swinging open the door before asking who was there.

  Paolino’s expression was one of horror.

  ‘Dio – what’s happened?!’

  ‘Buon giorno,’ I replied, sweeping my hair off my face, the sudden realization of being stood barefoot in my dressing gown in the middle of the morning seeping down like a cold trickle of water.

  ‘You unwell? You look . . .’

  I rubbed my forehead. ‘Terrible headache.’

  ‘You look like you have a fever, Santi.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I stood looking at him.

  ‘Can I take these into the kitchen?’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry, go ahead.’

  He stepped in, unsure. As he reached halfway to the kitchen I remembered the debris we’d left there last night. The Major had refused to let me clean up. We’d left an adulterous dinner for two strewn upon the counters.

  ‘Wait!’ I yelled out.

  Paolino turned. I grasped at fictions and hated myself for it.

  ‘It’s a terrible mess. Please, leave the box here on the front table.’

  ‘I really think you should rest, Santina. You want me to bring some soup for you maybe? I can bring some pasta for the soldier too, save you cooking?’

  ‘No need. I’ll be worse if I do nothing.’

  He placed the box down and stepped toward me. He took my hands in his and lifted them to his lips. I wanted to cry.

  ‘Rest today, my tesoro.’

  I nodded. Then he shifted, took a glance out to sea and straightened.

  ‘Did the English man talk to you?’

  ‘Talk to me?’

  ‘Did he . . . mention anything . . . unusual?’

  My stomach tightened. I longed to be swallowed up into someone else’s reality. My mind dashed to my mountains, to the cool of the forest, to anywhere but here.

  I shook my head so I didn’t have to hear myself lying.

  ‘We’ll talk when you’re better.’

  ‘Grazie, Paolino.’

  He kissed my forehead. We looked at each other. I felt cruel.

  He left.

  I turned back toward the kitchen. Perhaps I could clear away the gnawing inside me with each dish. My guilt was wrapped up like a tumble of prickly sea thistles, thrown on the wind along the rocky bay below. The mechanical motions silenced the tide for a brief respite. When all evidence of what had happened was dried and cleared I set a pot of coffee upon the stove. I took a bowl from the cupboard. A batch of crespelline would force an escape from my awakening. I beat all my worries into those four eggs and milk. I sifted the flour into it, watching the powder snowflake over the liquid. I whisked it all together, each flick of my wrist sending me closer to a place of control. I lit a ring and set a large pan to heat. I watched the butter swirl in the warmth and the picture of the Major stood here but a few hours ago filled me. I ladled a spoon onto the hot iron and flipped it once it had browned. I continued like this until the mixture was used up. They would cool until I was ready with the filling. With each addition to the stack I inched away from the turbulence in my stomach.

  I placed a thick slab of butter into another pan to ooze into liquid. I added flour. Watching the wooden spoon smooth it into a béchamel quietened my mind. I cut a slab of ricotta and slipped it in to melt. I ground a generous amount of salt. Concentric circles of warmth soothed me. Now I sped up, smoothing the mixture until it was an even consistency. I removed the pot from the stove, set it upon an iron pot holder and tipped in a mozzarella, roughly torn, and finely sliced salami. I looked at the mixture and the pile of crespelline. Later I would fill and bake them. Order had been restored. Today was like any other.

  The Major stepped in.

  I turned toward him.

  I wanted to pretend last night was a myth. Yet I ached to touch him.

  ‘Your kitchen is alive, Santina.’

  My lips creased into an unsure smile.

  ‘A glorious torture to wake up to the allure of delicious food. I suppose you’re going to tell me I am to wait until lunch.’

  I stood wordless. His utter mastery of apparent ease left me unsure of what I ought to say. Who was I today? He intuited my shift.

  ‘Elizabeth returns tomorrow,’ he said, steering us toward what we were supposed to be.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, longing for reality to stay stalled somewhere beyond us.

  ‘I’ll take my coffee outside.’

  He lifted a cup from the cupboard, filled it and left.

  Perhaps it was best not to talk about last night at all. Perhaps that was what we ought to do. He spoke of one night. Perhaps I ought to summon the strength to shelve it, sift through it like flour, let the thoughts fall away without effort.

  It was absurd. And impossible.

  The sun was starting to peak. I needed to get water to the garden before it became too hot. I ran upstairs and jerked into my gardening housedress, ignoring the sheets, ignoring our creased shapes of lovemaking, breathing in the scent of us still lingering in the closed room. I found the Major already in the garden, crouched down examining the morning’s crop. Beside him were several zucchini and a small pile of their flowers.

  I didn’t know where I should be.

  ‘You look haunted, Santina,’ he said looking up at me.

  ‘I’m . . . lost.’

  He nodded, reaching into the thick tubular stems for another zucchini. He placed it with the others.

  ‘I don’t know this place either, Santina,’ he said, lifting his face up toward me.

  The dappled light cast lemon shadows over it. He looked radiant.

  ‘Let us just go about our work, shall we? I’d really prefer not to talk just now. If that’s ok with you?’

  I nodded. I couldn’t believe that any amount of words would ever patch over our wrongs.

  I filled a watering can and began on the furthest row to him. I watched the earth guzzle the liquid at the base of our eggplants. I tried to let their lustrous purple skins ease me into normality, like I would of a typical day, hatching what I might prepare, what voyage I might set on in the kitchen. But their luster glared in the sun and filled my head with nothing but the memory of the weight of him. I carried on with each trip to the tap, hoping the perfume of the melon plants might lift me away from the awkward vice around my middle, to no avail.

  Then I felt him behind me.

  I felt his breath on my neck, a whisper of him.

  I stood there, allowing him to unzip my dress. I stood feeling the sun all over my body. I gave in to the maddening sensations as he knelt before me and led me far away from myself and into the heart of me. I relinquished to every touch. I folded into his arms as he lifted me under the shade of the lemon trees. As he pressed me against the trunk. As I welcomed all of him inside me.

  He took my face in his hands. ‘There is only ever now, Santina.’

  He pushed deeper into me. My breath caught. I let the taste of him fill me.

  We were nowhere and everywhere.

  CHAPTER 17

  The next afternoon ebbed toward early evening when the bell clanged and the parcel named Elizabeth was returned. I hadn’t let myself acknowledge how much I’d missed her until I breathed in the oat scent of her hair. The young woman who delivered her looked wan. ‘She was up in the night calling for you. Broke my heart. Then my eardrums. Got a temper for something so small, too!’

  I scooped Elizabeth up into my arms. ‘You wreaking havoc up on the hill, signorina?’

  Her eyes lit up with the sharp blue of her father’s. His face blew into my mind.

  ‘Grazie,’ I began, turning back to the woman, ‘her father is indebted to you. Please, take this.’

&n
bsp; I handed her the envelope the Major had set aside, filled with notes as an extra thank you. Only after my third insistence did she accept it and leave.

  I placed Elizabeth down, and she slipped her hand into mine. I laid her small suitcase by the top of the steps that led down into the garden. We tackled each one with unhurried feet. We reached the ground and she squatted down onto the grass, picking up a stick to trace the blades. The sun was a spotlight on the golden glint in her red hair.

  ‘Cucino la pasta, Santina!’ she exclaimed with a giggle. I couldn’t remember her stringing a full sentence together in Neapolitan before. Her laughter was infectious.

  ‘Welcome home, fanciulla!’ the Major called down from the upper terrace.

  Elizabeth looked up. Her face widened into a grin. She waved both her hands into the air, ‘Papa!’

  She ran away from me and toward the stairs.

  ‘She left a Brit and returned a local, Santina,’ he called down to me. ‘How did you manage that?’

  His smile reached me like a flying ember. His skin was bronze in this light, as he faced out toward the sea, the sun on its final dip toward the horizon. He held my gaze. How were we supposed to navigate these straits? We were still threading through the story we wove. But even in this reassuring light, the ease toward the dusk, the pleasant shift from the scorch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would all fray before I was ready, like parchment on the breeze. All that was left of what happened between us would be an unfinished paragraph, a scrambled ending. I wasn’t ready for that ache.

  We slipped back into a semblance of normality that first night. I fed Elizabeth and laid her to sleep. I could have curled up next to her then and there, tiredness lapping over me. I resisted, prepared the Major a light dinner and laid it on the terrace beyond the kitchen. The evening was balmy, one you could steep in for hours. He stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

  ‘I don’t know where we go from here either, Santina.’

  ‘Nowhere at all, I think,’ I replied, noticing the words tripped out stickier than I had intended, hot liquorice.

  His expression clouded. ‘I have a strong instinct that you deserve a little space. From me. Paolino will come here soon enough. He’ll be expecting your answer.’

  He looked down at his hands for a breath. ‘I suppose in my very clumsy way I want you to know that you must choose whatever is best for you.’

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled. ‘You talk like I should choose between the two of you.’

  ‘Nonsense. I’m trying to explain how I—’

  ‘How you talk of feelings for me and then ask me to give myself to another!’ I replied, not caring that I interrupted. ‘I was a fool to think you wouldn’t need to control everything.’

  ‘I’m trying to say that I don’t want what we did to affect your life. For the worse.’

  My cheeks were hot. I wondered why he chose to broach the subject like this, clumsy strides of thought at odds with the lover I’d discovered last night, the same who’d held me just that afternoon. The change was brutal, a winter storm whipping in from the sea. It made me think of Adeline. My heart was nettles.

  ‘What we did?’ I asked, louder than I’d planned. ‘I thought we gave in to something bigger than either one of us? We didn’t do anything. It took us. I stand here now feeling like you want me to be ashamed of it all.’

  ‘Of course not. If anything, I’m insisting you shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t be.’

  ‘I can’t listen to how you think my life should be. I don’t want to think about anything other than what I have to do in the next hour. Don’t force me to brush everything away. I can’t do that. I won’t do that!’

  He stepped closer to me. I fought so hard to hold on to my resolve. I bit down my tears with all my strength, but the feel of his hands upon me, the warmth of his embrace was more than I could bear. I let go. I was crouched in a tiny row boat tossed on a churning sea. I hated myself for clinging to him, grasping for an anchor.

  ‘I don’t know how to let go,’ I sobbed, horrified at my dismantling.

  ‘I don’t know either.’

  We held the silence, our breaths in unison, softening. I’d never had a sense of the fluidity of time until that moment: the seconds sapped, oozing in different directions. And we stood in the warm mess of it, gazing into one another, answers drowning where breath took their place. One day I wouldn’t be able to stand here like this, inside him a little. One day I would not invite him into this quiet. And the feeling crushed me. How could I ever leave this place?

  It didn’t surprise me to find he had made the decision before I could. I woke to a folded note upon the table inside the kitchen, beside a small package wrapped in tissue paper. Elizabeth and I had revisited her startling dreams somewhere in that mercurial sliver between night and dawn. I’d held her as she’d cried them away, drowning the memories with cold tears until sleep wrapped her up into the dark quiet once again.

  I’d sat there pretending I would give in to sleep, thinking only of the Major on the floor above. I wanted so hard to not behave and feel like a young woman who had just given the most private part of herself to another, caving in to the panic of having laid too much bare. I tried to intuit the strength inside that vulnerability. In all those glorious poems the Major read to me, line upon line searching out the wonders of the world, exploring that powerlessness that makes us all human, this was the thread that those writers returned to time and again. But I lay in my bed, tossing under my sheets, and the feeling of comfort within doubt eluded me. And it made me feel ashamed. I’d thought myself stronger, but it was naive bravado after all. This is what hurt the most.

  That morning as I shuffled through the whisper of dawn, tussled from my lack of sleep, I almost didn’t see that letter. My first thought was that it was my termination of employment. Somehow it was easier to imagine myself hating him for his turfing me out without a second thought, than to sit with the feeling that his passion might indeed last more than our night together. If he turned me away I could despise him at a distance. If he felt love for me I would have a great deal more to turn away from. Joy and loss were tempestuous dance partners after all, smoky silhouettes, entwined, an intoxicating floor show, taking turns to lead.

  Inside there was a poem, his script like spun sugar. Tennyson’s words ran the length of it. We had studied this one together. He’d pored over each line, encouraging me to pull away the words of Ulysses, dive deep into their meanings. My favorite line shone, as it always did:

  ‘I am a part of all that I have met;

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

  For ever and forever when I move.’

  This is the line that he had taken special care over. I’d watched him that afternoon when he’d first presented it to me. I’d listened as he’d drawn a parallel to Ulysses’ restlessness and my desire for a life beyond my bay. And now I let the memory wash over me, that feeling of needing to escape my town, realizing it was never born from hate, but because there was simply nothing here for me. My eyes traced the words again. The ‘untravell’d world’ was closer than I’d thought. Inside me even. Inside him. Which path was the bravest? Following the trail inward or outward?

  On the other side of the paper he explained that he would be away in Naples for several days conducting some business errands and would spend some time with Adeline. There was an envelope with extra money to cover any incidentals, which I was to use at will. He urged me to invite my brother to stay with me rather than remain alone. He mentioned nothing about what had happened. No explicit reliving of that. But his true sentiments were couched inside that poem. He was urging me to map my own course. That’s when tears coursed down my cheeks; no braver expression of love than the desire to set another free.

  Elizabeth and I went to surprise Marco at the height of the midmorning sun, heat rising in zig-zags from the blistering stone beneath
the startling cloudless blue sky. An invitation to the cool of the villa and a refreshing lunch looked like the very thing he needed. We didn’t stay to distract him from his work, and I took the chance to stop into Rosalia on the way back.

  Elizabeth sang to the yellow budgies chirping in their cages along the shaded wall leading to the main door, calling out their song toward the turquoise sea far below. One of her brothers opened the door. Rosalia and Pasquale were sat with two policemen at the kitchen table. Even Elizabeth slipped into silence along with the group as our eyes adjusted to the dark.

  ‘So this is how to contact me, signorina,’ one of the policemen concluded.

  The second, a smaller, rounder, older man, turned and spoke to the whole family. ‘No matter how small. This is the time to find courage. Please don’t keep your doubts to yourselves. We’re taking this very seriously indeed. We wouldn’t have come all the way from Napoli if we weren’t. We know someone in this town must know something.’

  My eyes shot to Pasquale. His expression was as serene as it always was. My heart tightened.

  ‘Grazie, signori,’ Rosalia’s mother said at last.

  The men stood up and shook hands with the family. Rosalia moved around from the other side of the table and squeezed Elizabeth.

  ‘Now that’s the nicest view I’ll have all day, fanciulla!’ She planted a warm kiss on either cheek. ‘Thank you so much for stopping in, Santi, those men have been here all morning. It’s turning into a full murder inquiry. My mother refused to move. She wanted to hear everything. Come on, let me walk with you, I need some air.’

  ‘It’ll cook you out there.’

  ‘I don’t care, Santina. It’s like a prison in here.’

  We climbed the narrow steps up from her door, passed beneath her fragrant lemon and kiwi canopy, then strolled along the white stone alley toward the villa, bougainvillea cascading a celebration over the wall each side from the flanked houses, and beyond, my slate mountains looming up around us, closing in.