Under a Sardinian Sky

by Sara Alexander

  The hairs on the back of Carmela’s neck prickled. Franco’s trysts, though exciting, never brought her this rapture. This heightened passion could only ever exist in song, surely, those fables of poetic love. This was not the real feet-in-the-dust, earth-in-your-hands love that Carmela could expect from joyful married life. A good wife would be rewarded with life’s honest pleasures—food on her plate, babies with fleshy thighs at her breast, and wine to drink to her family’s health.

  The singers closed with a glissando and a final rich, hummed chord that hovered, golden, in the air. Then the night erupted with applause. Carmela listened to the hands pounding with pride, but her eyes couldn’t tear themselves from Franco. She remembered how it felt when his salty mouth had made her heart pound and his body felt like an unchartered universe to touch, taste, and discover. Like the choir’s song, at once stirring yet distant, this boy, with his cherry and wild fennel kisses, felt like someone she once loved in a dream.

  CHAPTER 2

  The cottage on Carmela’s family’s farm stood camouflaged against the boulders of the surrounding hills. A low wall made up of roughly chipped rocks undulated from the house over to the near distance where it gradually broke off, stone by stone, till there was no wall at all. In the middle of August the grapes on the hundreds of vines—lines of gnarled soldiers—grew plump with juice but remained green, awaiting the ripening autumnal sun. Dozens of tomato plants hung heavy with their second round of lustrous red, plum-shaped fruit. Beyond those were the almond, cherry, and plum trees. The cherries had long since been devoured, sold, or bartered in exchange for staples such as sugar or coffee. The June harvest of nuts had been dried, toasted, ground for marzipan, and then rolled into coin-shaped sospiri—bite-sized sweets dipped in white icing. They stored well for months and were given as gifts on feast or saint days. Only the plums remained to be picked. Their sweet, jamlike flesh, destined to fill hundreds of jars as preserve, would glaze the family’s breakfast breads throughout the winter.

  Carmela’s father, Tomas, and his younger brother, Peppe, joined forces on the farm. After the war, and the division of land that followed, the two had found themselves owners of this narrow idyll. There was produce to feed their respective families and enough left over to barter for anything they didn’t, or couldn’t, grow themselves.

  The two brothers had built a roof over the ruins of the home they found there, using mismatched terra-cotta tiles salvaged from crumbling villas on the outskirts of town. After several months of sweaty work, they had converted the stones into this two-room cottage. One room had the skeleton of its original hearth resurrected. This was where Carmela’s mother, Maria, performed her culinary spells when the women joined them from town to help. The other room had several cots for sleeping, though it was usually only the men who would stay there overnight. The women would return to their Simius homes, where their day-to-day lives were anchored and the children schooled.

  Tomas paced the stone floor, hot in the middle of a rant, his sun-parched skin creasing into sharp lines. “Fire-and-brimstone-thunder-lightning-heavens-and-hells!!!!” The two-year diet of sugar, lemons, and bananas during his time in Africa, building roads for Mussolini, had left him with a mouth of rotting teeth that caused him considerable pain. “Cross-the-devils-heavens-above!” he cried, stomping his dusty boots and clenching his fists. The bronzed muscles on his wiry forearm bulged.

  One end of a thread was tied tightly around the metal door handle and the other around the culprit. Maria stood beside him, her alabaster face serene, unruffled by the frantic tirade of her husband; her black eyebrows didn’t furrow, and no worry creased her forehead. Maria’s white skin, unlike the tawny olive of her siblings, had earned her the nickname of Spanish princess. Genetic surprises were not uncommon in Simius. Maria’s cousin was born to a small, dark woman with thick, black locks but grew to be almost six feet tall, topped with a mass of copper hair and bright blue eyes—a nod to the area’s Norman, rather than Spaniard, history. The tone of Maria’s skin was set off by the jet black of her hair, the color and sheen hinting little to her forty years. Only on rare occasions did Carmela spy it liberated from the bun wrapped in a tight knot at the base of her mother’s head, cascading in thick, natural curls down to the middle of her back.

  Carmela had inherited the same lustrous locks, though hers were less cooperative. They fell in erratic waves by her shoulders, creasing into tighter curls depending on the weather, or sometimes, she supposed, her mood. She gave up trying to tame it into a bun and swept it off her face with a scarf tied around her head instead, or a pin or two clamped around a few strands as an afterthought. Carmela’s skin was several shades lighter than her sisters’ also but had little of her mother’s porcelain quality. Where her mother guarded her thoughts and feelings, Carmela’s every emotion rippled across her face despite any attempt at concealment, the deep ochre of her eyes revealing each flickering thought. On certain days, Carmela noticed marbled flecks of her father’s green in hers. Piera swore this happened only when her sister was trying not to lose her temper, or if she’d cut a pattern wrong or burned the garlic.

  Carmela sat at the wooden table before the wide stone hearth and stopped kneading the dough for fresh gnochetti. She admired the tender stoicism her mother radiated, the way her soft wrinkles underlined an innate wisdom, especially when her father was mid-fury. It was an occurrence Carmela would have wished unusual, for her mother’s sake. If it wasn’t a painful tooth, Tomas ranted about the onion being cut incorrectly for red sauce—eventually Maria placed it in whole for the duration of cooking and removed it before serving—or that the cauliflower had boiled too long and fumigated the house with the smell of sewer. It was a blessing that he had found someone as exacting as he was but who managed to keep her attention focused on minutiae with apparent ease.

  Maria’s sister-in-law, Lucia, sat on the opposite side of the table and shifted her glance from her baby, asleep in his wooden cot at her feet, oblivious to the drama. Tomas took a breath, gave the door a defiant slam, and let out a guttural growl.

  The familiar tinkle of a dead tooth tapping on the wood restored a short-lived peace.

  Maria wrapped a strip of old sheet around her two fingers and dipped it into an enamel bowl of water. She held it out to her husband. He flicked her hand away.

  “Water’s for washing!” Tomas whistled through the new gap. “Give me the bottle!”

  “Tomas,” she implored, “you need to clean it first.”

  He stomped over to the wooden dresser and yanked out the aqua vitae from the lower cupboard. The women watched him rip a fat strip off the old sheet in one motion and douse the frayed material in the alcohol. His mouth opened wide. Tomas stuffed the sodden cotton inside. His jaw clamped down. He winced. Then he straightened, his cheek bulging with cloth.

  Carmela saw the steely determination for which he was infamous flash in his green eyes. Her father could plough through agony of any sort like no other. A dogged stubbornness marked everything he turned his hand to. Tomas could dig his entire farm without stopping, not even for a sip of water. The first time the younger hired hands had worked at the farm, they raced ahead of him, ridiculing his grandfather speed, as they called it. An hour later, they succumbed to paralyzing hunger and thirst. Under the relentless sun that day, they guzzled their water and inhaled Maria’s homemade bread and cheese. Meanwhile, their eyes fixed on their swarthy, bare-chested boss, twice their age. They gawked at him with admiration as he lifted and dropped his pick into the rich soil with slow, mechanical movements, an unyielding ox, till the pink sun dipped down into the hills, its fading rays streaking in through the branches of the cork oaks. They never teased him again.

  Tomas threw the door wide open. Carmela looked out of the small window of the hearth room, watching her father charge back out to his fields. Beyond the ploughed earth, the yellow grasses swayed in a breeze, offering little respite from the midsummer sun. Inside, the stone rooms allowed the women to work in the c
omfort of the cool temperatures, unless it was cheese-making day, like today, in which case the milk simmering on the wood fire in the hearth raised the temperature.

  Beyond Tomas and his younger brother, Peppe, sweating over the long rows of tomato plants, Franco’s family’s parched land lay dotted with cork oaks. Their trunks had already been stripped. The cork bark hung, maturing, in one of the two adjacent huts, later to be boiled, flattened, and sold.

  These two circular huts were the oldest structures on the farm, left by solitary shepherds, whose century-old footprints, some said, could still be found, untouched, on the floors of virgin forests where autumnal gatherers dug for truffles. One hut was used for drying out cork and cheese, and the other, with a fire pit dug into the center of its earthen floor, was used to smoke their homemade sausages, which swung high above the flames, suspended from the conical thatch. It was here that Tomas, his brother, and any occasional worker would gather at the end of the day to sip their pungent wine out of tiny ridotto glasses. As night fell, they would grieve for times gone by and argue over whether America’s sidewalks were truly covered in gold or if all of God’s riches were right there, under their noses, among their beloved Sardinian wilderness.

  Carmela loved the light, space, and fresh air of the farm, a world away from the cool darkness of their town home. The latter was built with the small fortune with which Tomas had returned from Africa. In its inception, he had favored size over finesse. He cared little for fancy fixings or elaborate plaster moldings. Where his neighbors had ornate columns that upheld covered terraces on the top floors of their narrow, old homes, his new creation had a veranda closed in with large, square glass panes. He erected a practical construction large enough to keep his family warm and dry. Tomas chose not to paint over the stark gray of the concrete with the pastel earthen hues of the homes that surrounded it. To his mind a house served a purpose, no more. It was neither an extension of his artistry nor something to gawk at, admire, or covet. He grew up shoeless, darting along the dirt alleys before his family’s one-room cottage. Now his children had a large terrace of their own, granite stairs, concrete walls, and a kitchen with a table that sat twenty. Tomas sweated several times his own weight in Africa for it; his pride was justified and unabashed.

  On the farm, it seemed like everything and everyone grew. Carmela attributed this, in part, to the fact that Nonna Icca, her father’s mother, never joined the women there. She preferred to remain in town and guard the house. In Nonna Icca’s mind, the walls had hidden chinks through which all the towns’ gossips would peer at their lives like vultures, waiting to peck at scandal.

  She had lived in the house since Carmela was born on a stormy Christmas Eve night in 1930. Icca’s screams overpowered her daughter-in-law’s as she cried out to God to forsake them from the oncoming apocalypse. Although thunder rumbled the house, the first sounds Carmela heard were that of her grandmother banging her bony fists on the wooden doors to ward off what she deemed to be Lucifer’s battalion. Being surrounded with four hard-working sons, a manicured daughter who was spared manual work of every sort, and a gaggle of, mostly, obedient grandchildren did not allay Icca’s bitterness. She sat, day after day, atop her raffia stool by the front entrance of the house, strategically placed to witness all incoming and outgoing human traffic, clutching the rosary in one hand and her broken heart in the other. By now, she ought to have been in the Promised Land. Instead, her husband had returned from the Americas, gold in his pockets, Panama Canal dirt under his fingernails, whereupon death visited him with appendicitis. A month shy of their departure for New York, he was playing cards with the angels while she bit back her tears.

  Carmela tore her gaze away from the window. Lucia had begun industrious production of gnocchetti from the lump of pasta dough, big enough to satisfy several herds of farm help.

  “Icca’s a tyrant and that’s the end of it, Mari’,” Lucia began, as she pinched tiny pieces of the dough and rolled them over a corrugated metal plate. It left circular indentations over the small pasta shapes. “She can stick her snide remarks where the sun don’t shine—and I don’t mind saying that to her face, dried-up old sow.”

  Maria never commented on gossip, neither admonished nor agreed. This morning, however, as Lucia preached, Carmela noticed her mother’s white cheeks flushed the pale pink of crushed rose petals. Maria heaved the oversized copper milk pan off the wood fire. Carmela stood up and grabbed one of the round handles from her. They placed it down on an iron stand in the middle of the room to begin preparation of salted ricottas.

  “I told Peppe,” Lucia continued, flicking the little pasta shapes that dropped onto a floured tray like raindrops on a tin roof, “I didn’t marry you to be anybody’s serving girl. I’d go to a lady’s house and get paid for that. Six children he has from me. Six little piglets that need feeding. Who in Jesus’s name is supposed to do all that and look after mother hen up at yours as well?”

  “Lucia . . .” Maria interjected, as a feeble courtesy. On the subject of Icca, Lucia would never have her opinions altered.

  Carmela brought the wooden cheese molds to her mother, and together they soaked their forearms in a bucket of water and patted them dry with care.

  Lucia went on. “We move to our own house, and Icca’s asking me to do her washing! ‘Too many dirty sheets coming out of your and your daughter’s quarters,’ I says. ‘Stained sheets have no place in a spinster’s house.’ Unless, she shits herself in her sleep? Don’t know how you stand for it.”

  Lucia’s baby squirmed into a hungry cry. “Jesus, that child is never satisfied, greedy like his father.” She pulled him up and, in one brisk motion, flipped up her shirt and attached him to her ample bosom. The room tipped into silence but for the contented suckling of his tiny lips. Carmela and Maria dipped their hands into the warm whey till it reached their elbows. They filled the small, bowl-sized mold and gently raised it to the surface. Carmela had performed this ritual with her mother since she was a child. Working alongside Maria set a high standard for becoming a wife herself. Carmela’s discipline supported her well—any dress she made would be finished with impeccable precision and an eye for detail.

  Lately, though, the force with which her imagination swept over her, and her inability to settle on one task for too long, unsettled her. She attributed her distracting daydreams to wedding flutters and tried her best to think little on it. Over the past few weeks, at her godmother’s studio, where she had apprenticed since she was thirteen, she was bombarded with ideas for dresses and trousseaus. The pictures flashed in her mind as clear and colorful as those in a high-gloss magazine spread. Her hand could barely keep up with the pencil careening over her notebooks. It raced across the page, trying to manifest those visions, with the frantic energy of a child leaping to catch the swinging string of a beloved balloon before it floats up into the clouds, forever out of reach.

  Carmela looked back down into the pan, lifted out the full mold, and squeezed out the excess liquid. Then she placed it upon the stone ledge by the back wall and topped it with a circular piece of sanded wood and a slab of granite to press the ricotta down into shape.

  “Love a man with appetite, Mari’!” Lucia boomed, breaking into laughter. The fat of her arms jiggled. “I could feed half the town with this left tit. Given up on the right, the little devil almost bit her off, I told him straight—you bite me one more time and I’ll bite you like the wickedest donkey on the farm and you’ll know it, all right.”

  “He’s two months old, Lucia. . . .” Maria said, reaching back down into the warm pan.

  “You got to be strong to a man, Mari’, or he’ll walk all over you. Mark my words, Carmela—you fill a shirt and have a waist as narrow as a new olive—best listen to your Zia Lucia before your fiancé fills you with ideas!”

  To Carmela, Maria was strength personified. Her mother never tired but devoted herself to the work of providing for her family with a very private, near religious ardor. There was not a minute in t
he day when her mother’s hands lay idle. Even in the deep quiet of the afternoon, her fingers would be racing over some skirt or shirt to be mended. From the time the sun rose, her mother glided from one task to the next with a grace that Carmela could not even begin to imagine imitating. When Tomas exploded over the hot topic of any particular day, Maria listened, unswerving, letting his rancor wash over her like water, suffusing his steam with wordless patience, neither intimidated nor defiant. If that was not strength, then what was?

  Lucia threw her head back when she laughed, sung like no one was listening, cared little for what anyone thought of her. She would jump up and twirl at the first sound of music; life danced through her. She told Peppe what she thought and could scream into a fight at the slightest provocation. She drove her truck to and from the local markets, unafraid of the rough roads, happy to roll up her sleeves and fiddle with the engine as needed. She appeared to be her husband’s equal. Her childhood began in the orphanage, but Lucia refused to let life swallow her up. She was a survivor.

  But was all this passion, this vociferous philosophizing over the battle to be won, a testimony to strength? Wasn’t finding the beauty in the everyday rhythms of life, committing with an open heart to one man and the children he helped a woman bear without jostling for control, true strength? Wasn’t this the faith that everything was built on? After all, Carmela thought, how ridiculous it was for humans to fight off God’s plan, succumbing to the illusion of control. Why then, in that very union of marriage, made under God’s eyes, was control so important? Was not this grappling ungodly? Sinful, even? How far could love take you if, in the end, it was a battleground? Few years had passed since everyone agreed that the futility and horror of war was not to be forgotten or repeated. Why, then, invite it into your own home?