Under a Sardinian Sky

by Sara Alexander

  Who was Carmela to judge now? Hadn’t she just stepped out of a doctor’s office much like her aunt did the spring before? But Carmela had a promise. She had a lover who counted the days to take her away to a new place. Across the street, she watched a young couple take a sedate stroll, stopping to look into the attractive shop windows. Franco filled her mind, and the knot in her stomach tightened. The woman slipped her hand into the man’s. Carmela watched them, feeling that time, like the fine sands of Chia, was slipping through her fingers, shifting underfoot. A cold panic rippled from her abdomen to the tips of her feet.

  She began marching toward the piazza. This child would not slip out of her into a cold farm cottage, lie deep in the earth, unwanted, unloved. She could hear her feet pound against the hot pavement. This child would feel the heat of Carmela and Kavanagh’s unconditional love. Her soles scuffed. Then the thought of giving birth far from her mother sent ice through her veins. The idea of wading through those first forty days with a newborn and no one to cook hearty broths and warm drinks, like every mother in Simius would do for their daughters, made her breath catch. No matter, she tried to comfort herself. Hadn’t Maria mothered without her own to watch over her?

  Carmela thought about Piera and the joy with which she would have set about caring for her sister and a new nephew or niece. Carmela was robbing her family of the finest moment of her life. But this child was conceived out of wedlock. This child was illegal. This child would be blighted with more than original sin. Her family could never love it. This baby would be an American. German even—an enemy’s child.

  Carmela’s heart ached. Nausea swelled inside her stomach. Here she stood, a stranger in a stranger’s city, trying to pant away the panic. Her palms were clammy. Her breasts ached.

  She headed across the piazza toward the depot. The bus pulled up. Carmela stepped inside. Franco’s younger brother was sitting toward the front. She started. He looked up as she walked past him. “Carmela?”

  She turned, feigning pleasant surprise. “Ciao, Luca, how are you?”

  “Better now. Mamma sent me to here to buy a suit for the wedding.”

  Carmela gave a feeble smile, not knowing what reply to offer.

  “She’s fussing over Franco like he’s the first boy to get married!” He flashed a wide, youthful smile. Luca’s features were much like Franco’s, only softer. His eyes were a lighter chestnut and sparkled with a bright, endearing energy.

  “Luca, I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to sit toward the back. I’m not feeling too good.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. You got the jitters too, eh? Franco’s stomping around like a bull. Mamma’s cooked him his favorite meal every night. Bet I won’t get the same treatment when it’s my time.”

  Carmela gave a polite nod and took a seat on the hot plastic several rows back.

  As the bus pulled into Simius’s Piazza Cantareddu, the market was charging into life. There were bellows about artichokes and almonds and salt cellars. Thuds of axes crunched nougat and shanks. Insults were hurled among the men playing a heated round of murra, the ancient street game in which two participants stand head to head and call out the sum total of their own, and their opponents’, fingers. All this is done while flinging digits into the air between them at implausible speed. Frantic steam from the espresso machines in bars lining the square sent wafts of coffee that smudged into the cheese stall’s pungent aromas. Carmela’s nausea piqued.

  Sun-wizened sellers, fresh off their farms, were held to account by the fat-fingered, fanatical cooks hunting for the best anise they could sniff, the juiciest tomato they could pinch, or the sweetest apricot they could try. The cacophony would evaporate in a couple of hours, when the streets would be deserted and even the most loquacious tongue silenced as inhabitants ensconced themselves in the relative cool of their stone bedrooms.

  Strands of Carmela’s hair clung to the wetness on the back of her neck. She wound in and out of the crowds and walked uphill, leaving the piazza behind her. She stepped into Yolanda’s studio.

  It wasn’t long before the noise of the other seamstresses’ chatter and activity began to ricochet in her head. Carmela leaned on her desk, licked the sore on her lip. The peeling paint on the window frame caught her eye; its age looked just like that today, tired. She met Yolanda by the fabric-cutting table. “I’m taking an early lunch,” Carmela said, rubbing her forehead. “I will stay late.”

  “None of the girls are taking lunch today,” Yolanda replied, cool.

  “I see.”

  “We can’t get these trousseaus completed without you. You know that.”

  Carmela’s eyes glazed with involuntary tears.

  “Whatever’s the matter?”

  Carmela shook her head. Yolanda took her by the elbow and led her into her tiny office. They stood in the cool dark for a moment. The clock ticktocked the day away in the corner. Yolanda searched her niece for clues, but Carmela was determined to offer none. “You’re under a lot of pressure here. Perhaps I’ve asked too much of you after all.”

  “Zia, my work has nothing to do with this. I love my work.”

  “You are a nervous bride. That much is clear.”

  Carmela looked at the closed window behind her godmother, wondering how to navigate the conversation. For a moment she felt like offering her the unadulterated truth. Then terror gripped her throat and the words refused to surface. “I’m not sure of very much just now,” she said at last.

  Yolanda straightened. “Carmela, I won’t stand here and offer you a shoulder to cry on, because that will do you no good. This is not the time to let personal feelings drag you away from your commitments. A month from now you’re going to be one of the most influential women in town. But right now, this business has to come first.”

  Carmela shifted, wondering why it surprised her that Yolanda tackled personal feelings with the same steel she did her business.

  “We need all your energy directed here now, do you understand? We’re several girls down too. Many are the youngest girls whose heads are turned at the slightest distraction. I always thought you different, made of stronger stuff. I see my younger self in you, Carmela, I always have, to be frank. Perhaps I was wrong.” Her face hardened. “It’s because I didn’t waste my youth that I stand here today. Could I have done that if I had let my mind flitter? Did I feel the sweet flush of adolescent love for your late godfather when I walked up the aisle under the eyes of God? No! Because those tender kisses of childhood don’t build a life, Carmela. You don’t marry the boy who first kissed you. You marry the man he will become.”

  Carmela nodded. She had said too much. “I’ll complete my assigned trousseaus. You can be sure of that.”

  Yolanda kissed her cheek. Carmela’s throat tightened, clamping the hidden tears. Yolanda walked past her, back to the floor. Carmela stood like a nervous customer at her first fitting, and hating herself for it.

  A wild knock at the door ripped Carmela out of her reverie. As she opened it, a breathless Vittoria stood yelping before her. “You have to come now!”

  “What’s happened? Who’s hurt?”

  “No one! You have to go to the post office! A phone call, Carmela!” She panted in between words. “Urgent, they said! Came to the house looking for you! Mamma sent me here.”

  Carmela swung around to Yolanda. Her godmother gave her a reticent nod. The sisters flew down the steps out into the street. The uneven cobbles poked as their feet pelted the hill to the main square, with the urgency of two gazelles fleeing the clutches of a hungry lion. It was Carmela’s first-ever telephone call. Only two families out of the five thousand people of Simius had phones in their homes; one belonged in Franco’s uncle’s house, the other to the Mayor.

  Carmela and Vittoria reached the heavy door of the post office. Their cheeks were flushed. They entered. A couple of people in the line looked up, shadow ghosts, as Carmela’s eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness of the room.

  “Miss Chirigoni?” the
clerk asked, sweeping a critical eye over Carmela’s tousled demeanor. Carmela nodded. The glaring eyes of the other customers were now visible. Her cheeks flushed a deeper crimson.

  Carmela was led into the gloom of what appeared to be a forgotten back room. She took Vittoria’s small hand in hers, feeling her fingers tighten. As the clerk closed the tall, wooden door behind them, the last whispers of the folk outside faded into silence. They stared at the phone in the center of the desk.

  “It’s not going to answer itself,” a voice snapped.

  Carmela looked to the figure behind the desk. Of all the people in Simius, there was no one she wanted to avoid more at this moment. Her heart sank. Agnes. “Pick it up, then—you’ve kept him waiting long enough,” she continued with a snarl.

  Carmela picked up the receiver and placed it to her ear, tentative.

  “Carmela Chirigoni?”

  The clipped voice of the operator caught her somewhat off-guard. “Sì.”

  “Please hold. Signor Joe Kavanagh is on the line.”

  There was a click, then the faraway sound of his American voice. “Carmela? Urgent news.”

  “Are you all right, Joe?”

  “I am fine.” He paused. Carmela felt her stomach tighten. “Casler is sending me to the mainland tonight.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Business in Rome. I can’t talk about it now. It’s only for a week. You must meet me this afternoon. We have to discuss our plan.”

  “Yes,” she replied, trying not to think about Yolanda, or Franco, or Agnes, or the butterfly heartbeats of their tiny baby, floating between her hips, swimming to nowhere.

  “Meet me at the Roman bridge at three o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Carmela, repeat what I said so I know you heard right.”

  Carmela hesitated. Agnes’s beady eyes pierced her like sharp pinpricks. Carmela’s thoughts spun in concentric circles. What if Agnes could make out the time and place of their meeting? She wouldn’t know it was today. She couldn’t deduce anything from a time and place. How would she know it wasn’t part of a military visit for which she needed to translate?

  And yet.

  “Carmela? Are you there? Please copy.”

  “Yes.” How naïve Carmela felt, having imagined she would have been offered privacy. She couldn’t leave this town soon enough. “Three o’clock. Roman bridge.”

  “Thank you. I love you, Carmela.”

  She longed to utter the same words in reply.

  “Only for a week, Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t they ask someone else?”

  “They’re using me as much as they can before we head up north, darling. Don’t worry. Everything is in place. I’ve secured our new home. I have your ticket. I want to give you everything today just in case. I’ll explain everything when I see you. I have to go.”

  “Joe . . .”

  “Yes?”

  A dull tone pierced her ear, sending his voice into the past. She listened for a moment, pretending he was still there. Wondering whether to say a formal good-bye, appease her mistrust of Agnes. She could, perhaps, fabricate something to make the appointment seem more official. Instead her hand slipped down from her ear, lank. Carmela tried to muffle her anxiety by imagining what he had been wearing. If his right cheek had smirked into dimples. What story she would have read in his eyes. The pictures faded fast, with each fresh wave of panic, like feeble twirls of steam.

  “Another holiday, is it? Or just an order for one of your famous picnics?”

  Carmela gave a polite smile and replaced the handset. “I’ll see you later, Agnes. Yolanda expects everyone to work late.”

  Agnes raised an eyebrow. “Nice to have friends at the base though, isn’t it?”

  “I’m an interpreter.” Carmela felt her voice quiver, then her legs hollow.

  “I’m surprised you find the time for it all. Franco must be very proud of you.”

  Carmela was a fly on a sticky web, thankful for Vittoria beside her to stop herself from wiping the sneer off Agnes’s face with one swipe. “We aren’t all lucky enough to have mothers who work in post offices and give us shift work,” Carmela said, immediately regretting her sarcasm.

  Their eyes locked for a breath.

  “See you at the studio.” Carmela took Vittoria’s hand and made their escape. As they stomped out, the tail end of a discussion at the counter reverberated around the main hall.

  “What do you mean you have no stamps?! This is a damned post office, you imbecile!” yelled an overheated customer.

  “I don’t know when our next delivery is,” the clerk said.

  “I’ll go to the tabacchi then!” the man yelled, brushing out past Carmela.

  “It’s supplied by us, Signore.” The clerk sighed, world-weary sweat glistening on his brow.

  Carmela looked down at her sister, her young eyes wide with excitement. “Go home and tell Mamma it was a phone call about work. I must get back to the studio now, and I will stay there late to finish some trousseaus. Do you understand?”

  Vittoria nodded. Carmela watched her disappear up the hill in the direction of their house and then headed to Antonio’s bar.

  “The traveler returns!” Antonio looked radiant. His tables were out for the first time since the winter and occupied with the kind of ladies who spent their husbands’ money well.

  “What are you doing at two-thirty today?” Carmela asked.

  “What I always do.” His voice dipped into a private whisper. “Having a lie down, hoping to dream of someone who embodies perfection.”

  Off Carmela’s serious expression he straightened. “What’s happened?”

  He caught sight of Carmela’s lip. “Franco?”

  Carmela looked at him, nothing more to say. She shrugged, silenced by her numbness.

  “Shall we go somewhere private?” he asked.

  “Nothing private about our fight on the street, so what should I care now?”

  Antonio reached for her hand.

  “Kavanagh came back,” she said, meeting his eyes.

  “I know.”

  She watched Antonio intuit a world of unspeakables. “He’s leaving tonight, for one week. I must see him.”

  “Where?” he asked, without judgment.

  “Roman bridge.”

  “I’ll meet you in the piazza at two-thirty. I know a wonderful taxi driver in town. He might be there waiting.”

  She stiffened.

  It hurt to hold the truth from her most treasured friend. It ached not to tell him about their plans for Munich, about the baby, about the whole new world that had just opened up at her feet, but it had to wait. If she had any hope of slipping out later without incurring Yolanda’s wrath, she would have to make up significant time now. “Thank you, Antonio.”

  Carmela tried not to watch the clock. She sewed through a mountain of dresses and their finishing touches. She worked tirelessly, her fingers deft and nimble racing along the fabric. Every stitch inched her toward Kavanagh.

  She hung the last dress on a wide wooden hanger by the fitting area. There were nearly twenty outfits beside that one—another woman’s new life draped before her. Carmela’s eyes traced over the trousseau. What would she be doing as this woman slipped into her yellow summer dress? As this newlywed closed the clasps of her evening gown to delight her new husband, what streets would Carmela be strolling with Kavanagh? At summer’s ebb, while this customer donned her demure navy two-piece, how would Carmela be spending her autumnal evenings in Germany? She felt pleased with her work and took a moment to wish the woman well.

  Then her thoughts crashed back to Franco and Luca. While Kavanagh was on the mainland she might reveal her difficult news to her family. It felt safer to wait until Kavanagh’s travel arrangements were all in place. She wanted to feel the ticket in her hand. She wanted to know her new address. All the things he had assured her of, which now would have to be delayed at least a week or so. No,
it was impossible; her new life must be kept secret until she was safe, beside Kavanagh, in their new world.

  She clung to the meticulousness of her work to keep her mind from dashing around memories and doubts like a faulty missile. The sense of being in complete control of her tools, which her work delivered, was satisfying. Yet standing before this fine collection, Carmela felt the powerful realization that very little was under her control after all. She had grasped at this futile need for so long now, in her every action, her speech, her work. But it was only now, having given in to the one thing she could never have controlled, that the world had been set alight. She would return one day, dressed in her new life, filled with stories she would be happy to share. Then she pictured Yolanda’s face, aged with betrayal. A bolt of guilt skidded across her waist.

  Her lip smarted. Franco spitting with anger filled her mind. The disappearing adolescence that Yolanda spoke of didn’t apply here. Its failure to develop was at the root of the problem. Yet Carmela didn’t want to leave with hurt in her heart. She convinced herself she wasn’t running away. She brushed fear aside, which frayed the edges of her every thought. Fear was simply another hurdle to leap over to earn her freedom.

  More than all this, she longed for Kavanagh not to have to leave. A military wife’s life would be tougher than she had thought. There would be three in the relationship after all. The trepidation about Virginia’s shadow gave way to the understanding that their lives would be puppeteered forever by Kavanagh’s seniors. Even a captain would be answerable to someone.

  The clock struck two.

  “Zia,” Carmela began, walking toward her aunt, “I’m going out to buy some new thread.”

  “There ought to be plenty, Carmela. Agnes brought in a box this morning, before her shift at the post office.”

  “It’s not quite the right shade.”

  “Don’t be long.”

  “Of course.”