The Making of Christina

by Meredith Jaffe

  Fetching another barrow load, Christina remembers a later time when they were preparing for the trial. Bianca said, ‘Jackson knew you too well, Mum. He knew you would not want to believe it was true. I kept trying to tell you. That time at the stables? That wasn’t pony slobber on Jackson’s jumper.’

  ‘Oh, Bianca.’ Christina tried to embrace her but Bianca pushed her away.

  ‘All those times Jackson was teaching me to drive,’ Bianca hooked her fingers in the air, ‘and I kept saying I didn’t want to go and you said I had to learn to drive, that it was a life skill. Remember how I begged you to come with us, to teach me yourself. And you laughed, Mum, you actually laughed and said Jackson was a way better teacher than you were.’

  Bianca’s words slapped Christina in the face. It felt so physical she clutched her cheek in response to the pain. She did remember. But what she remembered thinking was that Bianca was making a fuss over nothing. Being a typical flouncy teenager. ‘You could have told me why you didn’t want Jackson to teach you.’

  Tears rolled down Bianca’s cheeks. ‘Wasn’t it enough, Mum, that I asked you to teach me? That I made it so obvious that I didn’t want to be alone with him.’

  Again Christina reached for Bianca, desperate to hold her daughter against her, to comfort her. And then Bianca said those terrible, terrible words.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ her voice swollen with betrayal.

  ‘Tina?’ Rosa touches Christina’s arm. ‘Why are you crying?’

  Christina wipes her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Nothing, Mama.’

  Rosa picks up a potato. ‘Potatoes make you cry?’

  Her bottom lip wobbles. ‘No, Mama, not the potatoes. I was thinking about the present. What possible present can I give Bianca that she’d accept from me?’

  Rosa finds a cotton hanky tucked inside her sleeve and passes it to Christina. ‘The human race is full of people who have made terrible mistakes, Tina. None of us are perfect.’

  Christina blows her nose. ‘I can’t think of one thing you or Papa ever did that was terrible.’ Compared to what she did to Bianca, her parents’ slights were small.

  Rosa worries the knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other. ‘Awful things happen in life. You have to find a way to be better.’ Her face hardens.

  Christina squints up at her mother, sees the lines crack and deepen across the planes of her face as if the earth has shifted and revealed its hidden core. ‘Is that why you came to Australia, Mama? Were you running away?’

  Rosa raises her eyes heavenwards and whispers, ‘I promise Massimo I never tell you while he still alive.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Why we left Italy to come here.’

  Alarm cautions Christina to remain silent. She can see that Rosa is fighting an internal battle over the decision to speak. When the words do come, it is as if each one is the weight of a brick. ‘I met your papa when I was fourteen. He lived in the next village but there was only one church and that was in our village. So I saw him every Sunday and holy days. He was a very handsome young man. A bit older but very proper. My parents thought it was a good match.’

  There is an old photo of them on the sideboard in the dining room. There are few from those days but her mother is right, Massimo was handsome. He had hair styled in burnished waves, eyes the colour of wet pebbles and a strong brown jaw. Next to him was a more slender version of the tiny Rosa with a tilt to her chin and a cleverness about her.

  ‘I worked in the palazzo of a big man. Us girls from the village, we did the cleaning, the washing and cooking as the señora was too good to lift a finger in her own house.’ Mama sniffed and set her chin, all but flicking her fingers in the direction of the rich family she served.

  ‘One day, Señor Cavallaro, he comes to the laundry. He smiles and talks about this and that. He make me nervous. There’s no one else around and he has no business being there. Before I know it he is on top of me pulling up my skirts. I try to scream but he put his hand over my mouth. There on the stone floor, my head jammed between the wall and the tub, he did his business with me,’ Rosa snarls in disgust.

  Christina cannot speak. Rosa looks away from her, across the garden, into the past, her hand kneading one of the tomatoes she has picked for dinner. The story pours out of her like she is letting blood.

  ‘He left me there on the floor with not another word. I cried for days and days. I couldn’t see Massimo no more because now I was no good. Every Sunday morning he came to our house, every Sunday morning I told Mama to send him away, but he never stop coming.

  ‘One day I was bringing in the washing. I unpegged a sheet and there he was. Tears pouring down his face like someone had tipped a bucket of water over his head. It broke my heart all over again. I couldn’t turn him away. We sat in the long wet grass and when I told him what happened, he said it didn’t matter. He wanted to marry me anyway.’

  Christina could see Papa’s kind face in front of her and her heart swelled with love. He was too good a man to have ever deserted Rosa.

  ‘Then I found out I was pregnant. It was shocking and I felt,’ Rosa wound her hands in tight circles searching for the word, ‘infected. Si, like he had given me a disease. Massimo could not marry me when I was pregnant with another man’s child. I had brought shame on him and my family. I had no choice but to leave my village and go up into the mountains and hope I find someone to take the baby.’

  ‘But surely they wouldn’t have rejected you? It wasn’t your fault.’ Christina is shocked that this is her history, that her poor mother had to endure the blatant hypocrisy of a mountain village.

  ‘Things were different then. You talk about sfaciade? My parents had another daughter to think of, my younger sister Julietta. My shame would have been her shame. It was best if I left without making any fuss.

  ‘I went to the nuns. Every single day they told us we would rot in hell and our babies would never be clean of our sin. They made us scrub floors and bake bread and pull weeds all day long. Some of the girls lost their babies because they were not strong enough for the work, but they were already shamed and had nowhere else to go, so they had to stay. Once I heard a girl screaming and screaming all night. As the sun came up, it went quiet. She died and so did her baby, but you know, the nuns they never even call a doctor for her. How could these women say they are married to Jesus and show no compassion?’

  ‘Why didn’t you run away?’

  ‘I did. I knew I would die if I stayed in this sinful place any longer. I crept out whilst the nuns were at matins and followed the fields down to the valley. I walked fifteen miles to Massimo’s village with only a loaf of bread and a skin of water I stole from the kitchen.’

  Rosa holds the tomato to her lips, inhales the scent of summer. Thunder rolls across the sky. Christina feels a fat drop of rain fall on her shoulder but she dare not interrupt her mother.

  ‘I hid in the shed and waited until Massimo came to fetch his bicycle to ride out to the fields. Full of fear, I whisper his name. “Massimo! Massimo!” He can’t see me, so I stand up.’ A smile reminiscent of young promise spread across Rosa’s face.

  ‘He cried and I cried. He insists we marry straight away. He say, “The child is a part of you and we gonna raise it as our own.” He would tell everyone he was the father.’

  Christina closed her eyes, felt her eyelids pulse as the blood roared through her body. Her mother’s terrible words coursing through her system like adrenaline. She wants her mother to stop talking, to take back this monstrous secret, but the shocking reality is that now everything makes sense. This is why she and her mama have always clashed. Señor Cavallaro is her real father. What a burden for her mother to have carried all her life. How Massimo must have adored her to raise her as his own child.

  Rosa tests the tomato with her thumb. It splits and the seeds drip onto the ground. ‘But the village was small. People k
new. We had the baby and, one month after she was born, we went to the church as husband and wife to have her christened by the priest. The nuns’ words rang in my head. There was no way I was gonna have my baby condemned to hell. But when we reached the threshold, the women of the village they blocked the way in. They say we’re not welcome. Massimo says, “It’s our church. We belong here. We will come in.” They say no. And through a gap in the crowd I see Señor and Señora Cavallaro and their three children sitting in the front pew. Señora Cavallaro is smiling like she win and then I know.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t you stand up to them?’

  ‘Because Señora Cavallaro, she knew the baby I was holding was her husband’s and she didn’t care. How many bastardos had he fathered that she could sit there being so superior to me, just a girl, knowing her husband had raped me? You shoulda seen her face, Tina. So smug, so privileged. She had the title and the beautiful house and the bambinos. Nobody was gonna take that away from her, especially some village puttanesca.’

  It is like Rosa has peeled off her skin. Christina studied her own arms, the trail of flaming broken flesh a constant reminder of painful truths. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We moved to another village near Trieste where my sister Julietta lived with her new husband Carlo. She had a little girl the same age and she would look after the babies when I went to the factory to make blouses.’

  Rosa turns on her heel and heads down the path to the rose garden. Christina follows.

  ‘Lucia was a pretty little girl with golden ringlets and round brown eyes. Cecilia, Julietta’s girl, was big and loud. Lucia made friends easy but people didn’t like Cecilia so fast. Julietta was jealous that me, the ugly sister, I had the beautiful bambina, and she, the pretty one, she had the ugly baby. But beauty, hey?’ Rosa flicks the skin of her cheek.

  Christina grabs her mother’s arm. ‘Lucia? I thought you were talking about me.’

  Rosa’s face creases with confusion. ‘You? No, Tina. I’m talking about your sister. You came later.’

  ‘So Papa is my papa?’

  ‘Si. Who did think was your father?’

  ‘Señor Cavallaro.’ Isn’t that why her mother is telling her this story? It explains, doesn’t it, why she is so fundamentally flawed.

  Rosa’s eyes widen in alarm. ‘Oh no, no, Tina. Massimo is your father.’

  Christina is hopelessly confused.

  ‘Every day, all the mamas and nonnas would meet in the piazza to gossip over coffee. The children played near the fountain.’ Rosa breaks the bruised tomato in half and flings it to the geese.

  ‘They tell me later the children were playing hoops, rolling them along with sticks. Lucia’s only three you know, she can’t roll the hoop with the stick so good. It got away from her and bounced down the hill. She chased after it and didn’t see the scooter coming around the corner.’

  Mama stares ahead, ignoring the raindrops signalling the beginning of the storm. Christina is speechless with unanticipated grief. A sister she never knew she had. She the late only child. Her hard mother, her forgiving father.

  Rosa sighs. ‘After she die, we couldn’t even take her to church for the funeral.’ Rosa swings around to face Christina, beseeching her to understand. ‘She’s not baptised. They won’t let her be buried like a proper person even though she just a baby.’

  Christina can see it, feel it, as if it were Bianca. The physical pain so familiar. She’s been so caught up in what she has done to Bianca, so busy heaping the blame upon herself, carrying the twin burdens of self-pity and guilt, that she has failed to see what this fresh tragedy meant to her parents. A pain that struck her poor father down, that has blurred her mother’s sight.

  Rosa has not finished. It is as if this story, buried inside her for decades, must be excised. ‘We didn’t know I was pregnant again, but the week after Lucia died, I lost the baby. Those God-fearing churchgoers killed my babies.’

  Rosa beckons to Christina and they walk to the rose garden. Her mother sits on the wooden bench and continues. ‘So we left to make a new life in a better place. When we buy this farm, straight away I plant this garden. All the way over on the boat I planned it.’

  Mama plucks a yellow rose and hands it to Christina. ‘This is Lucia’s rose. It was the first one I planted.’

  All through summer and autumn, Mama fills every spare jar, vase and bottle with these golden yellow roses. Filling the house with the scent and colour of Lucia.

  ‘Over there, over the archway to the chickens, is the baby’s rose. And this one,’ Mama plucks a coral-coloured rose bursting with petals, ‘this is yours. It’s covered in thorns and only flowers if I give it lots of attention.’ Mama laughs, a rare and unfamiliar sound as light as a summer dress.

  Christina takes it and adds it to the yellow rose. Her head is in a whirl. So much about her mother now makes sense. Her toughness, her refusal to be bowed comes from this place of pain. She wants to hug her mother but she can’t recall the last time they did. Instead, she says, ‘I didn’t know you had a rose for me.’

  Rosa smiles. ‘I have a rose for everyone I love. You are all here, in my church.’

  Rosa’s Folly. All these years Christina has mocked her mother’s obsession with this garden when in reality it contains all her love.

  The tears come. ‘Oh, Mama. I’m so sorry.’

  Mama pats her hand. ‘It’s all right. You have a good cry. You’ve always been soft-hearted like your papa.’

  Christina cries for her mother, for her father, her dead siblings, her lonely childhood, and for Bianca. She is not the brave woman her mother is. Rosa left everything she knew behind to start a new life in a new country with the man she loved by her side. It was Rosa’s choice. Whereas Christina had to flee and she had nowhere else to go but home to the farm. It is here she treads water, not wanting to go back, unable to move forward. There is no ocean for her to sail across. She can mulch potatoes and pick beans all day long but this is not her life. It’s Rosa’s life.

  Thunder rumbles in the distance. The air is intense with anticipation. The birds are fleeing to the safety of their nests and hollows. Lightning fragments the horizon. The storm front is coming.

  chapter twenty-one

  After emptying her pain into the kitchen sink, Christina returned to Bianca’s room to find the door locked. She’d tapped, begged Bianca to let her in, but was met with resounding silence. Mrs Hardcastle offered her a bed in the sick bay and, thinking she’d at least be close by if Bianca changed her mind, Christina accepted.

  At some point before dawn she fell asleep. The sound of the school bell calling the children for breakfast brought her screeching back to consciousness. The easy clean surfaces of the room’s benches glowed in the feeble light and Christina detected the faint smell of bleach. She sat up, disorientated. Then she remembered why she was here and the weight of it pushed her head back into the pillow. She lay there, eyes jammed shut, piecing together the events of last night, feeling the nausea roil in her belly again. At the second bell, she turned towards the light and noticed a note under the water glass on the bedside table. It was from Mrs Hardcastle. It said the police were interviewing Bianca this morning, that it was informal and that Bianca had requested her mother did not attend. Christina crushed the note and threw it in the bin. If she was not there, who was?

  She drove straight to Kitchener police station but when she got there she realised the police were not about to allow her to burst in and rescue Bianca. So she lingered outside and watched the constant parade of people going in and out of the wire-embedded doors. A yawn overtook her. As she stretched, she felt the ache in every muscle, every bone, every breath. Her shirt pulled where it stuck to her arms. Yesterday’s red welts had blistered and burst. The itch of them raged across her back and down her thighs. For some reason, this astounded her. That grief and guilt would find a physical expression.
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br />   Her mobile phone bleated. The battery was going flat. Digging it out of her pocket, she stared at the screensaver. It was a photo of Bianca and Jackson clowning for the camera. She slid her thumb across his face. Bianca had not spoken to her since she disappeared into the shower last night. Christina had not spoken to Jackson. She wanted to; words boiled inside her, seething and hissing, dying to escape. She pressed her hand across her mouth, containing them, saving them. Not one of them was up to the task of expressing her anger or the searing pain of betrayal. Best not to go home either, where the phone might ring or the enormity of the lies she must confront might crush the life from her.

  The facts were that Bianca was inside Kitchener police station, alone, with officers extracting her story. Christina chucked the phone in the glove box. Yesterday she would never have dreamed there would ever be a reason for her to enter a police station. Today was a different reality.

  The first thing she noticed upon entering the station was that the central heating was set too high. The nylon carpet stank of stale sweat, and from somewhere behind the front desk, the tinny monotone of a dispatch radio crackled in loud bursts.

  The duty constable looked up from his paperwork and registered her presence. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m here to see Detective Sergeant Anne Rushmore.’

  ‘Take a seat.’

  There was a vacant plastic chair between an old woman in a grotty orange coat clutching an overstuffed tartan bag and a young man with a mullet stabbing the buttons of his mobile phone. Christina chose instead to stand in front of the noticeboard where she pretended to read the posters from victim support services and the missing persons notices. She wished the police had spoken to Bianca at school and not brought her here. The atmosphere was suffocating.

  ‘Ms Clement?’

  A round woman filled the doorway. She had maybe five years on Christina, dark hair cut short, simple cream sweater and sensible shoes.