Under a Sardinian Sky

by Sara Alexander

  Carmela stepped out of the studio before her aunt could change her mind. She began the climb uphill using the stairs on the opposite side of the fountain. The sound of clanging pans ricocheted off the walls of the chaotic cluster of homes as the women began their weekly ritual of sauce making, the sweet smell escaping through the heavy shutters. Her nausea shifted to hunger.

  Turning the corner she locked eyes with Gepetto Comida, sitting motionless under the dappled shade of his pomegranate tree like a skinny Sardinian Buddha. The octogenarian’s wrinkles looked sun-dried in the heat, his hands resting atop his knobbly walking cane.

  “Buon giorno, Signor Comida,” Carmela said, in the customary way younger people were expected to greet the elders.

  He squinted in reply, nodding a silent half smile. Carmela wondered if he could read her improbable morning on her face, or if he had simply discovered the secret meaning of life.

  Inside the cool quiet of her bedroom Carmela opened her wardrobe. She pulled out her yellow linen dress and slipped into it. Then she reached in for her favorite maroon shoes that Zio Raimondo had made for her twenty-first birthday. Piera stepped in.

  “You’re home! Vittoria said you wouldn’t be back. What’s this I hear about a phone call?!”

  Carmela closed the wardrobe door. “They needed to reach me from the base urgently.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Of course. I’m just going out for more thread.”

  “In Sunday shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  Piera looked at her. Carmela couldn’t decipher what she read in her sister’s face, but it unsettled her. “I thought the new shoes might refresh me—I’m exhausted. Yolanda’s working us to the bone . . .” She stopped herself just short of babbling.

  The sisters looked at each other for a moment. Carmela promised herself that every evening this week, before she left for Munich, she would take Piera on a walk to the piazza. She would buy her fresh gelato from the Bar Nazionale, an aperitif even. This week without Kavanagh would be the perfect way to devote time to the siblings she wouldn’t see for a while. They would remember this week when they would wake up to their farewell letters. They would let go of their anger, their sense of betrayal, because they would remember the sister who had taken care of them, spoiled them, bought them all the little treats she had always wanted to. They couldn’t hate her. They would only remember the love she showered on them.

  Carmela stepped forward and planted a soft kiss on each of Piera’s cheeks. “I love you so very much, Piera.”

  Piera’s expression shifted between confusion and trepidation. “Are you all right, Carmela? You look . . .”

  “What?”

  “Frantic.”

  “I’ve never been happier in my life, Piera.”

  Piera nodded, but her smile seemed unsure. “I love you too, Carmela.”

  Carmela turned for the door and then closed it behind her without looking back, in case her sister’s expression would prick her conscience any more than it already had.

  The piazza was deserted. All evidence of a market had been cleared away. She thought about the weight of Kavanagh on her, the cool water of the river at her feet, juniper, rosemary, and thyme dancing on the salty air above them. She could see Antonio beside his taxi at the far side. He was leaning against his cab, smoking.

  “I didn’t know we had a date.” The sound of Franco’s voice spun her around.

  He stood leaning against the wide trunk of an old tree. How had she not seen him?

  “You don’t look so happy to see your fiancé.” He stepped toward her. Behind him she saw Antonio look over at them.

  “How do I say sorry, Carmela? How do I tell you that the memories of your hair on my face, your soft skin against mine, the taste of your sweet mouth, keep me awake at night?”

  “Franco, stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  He wouldn’t hurt her here, not in the square.

  “We fell in love before we even knew what it was,” she said.

  She looked down at his wrist. His watch read almost two-thirty. She needed to get to the other side of the square. Fast. “Why are you all dressed up?”

  She hooked a strand of hair behind her ear. Had he seen the slight tremble? “I spilled something all down myself and ran home to change.”

  He stepped toward her, wrapping his wide hands around her face. His lips pressed against hers. “I am going to love you till the day I die, Carmela. We can’t live without each other.”

  His words didn’t match his expression somehow. It was as if they were coming out of a radio nearby and he mouthed along with them.

  “I’ll come and see you tomorrow, Franco,” she said, doubting whether she sounded as relaxed as she would have liked. Just get on your bike and ride away.

  Antonio was in her periphery, signaling to hurry. She couldn’t wait a moment longer. “Antonio’s running me to the shop in the next town for an order for Yolanda,” she said, immediately regretting it.

  “I’ll take you.”

  “No, it’s rolls of fabric. I wouldn’t be able to hold them.” The saying was true after all: It was impossible to tell one lie. She listened to the tales tumble out of her mouth. Who had she become? A storyteller. For a moment she felt dizzy, like looking at her life through the distortion of a shattered mirror. Which parts were real? She felt herself suck air in from deep underfoot, willing herself to feel the ground beneath her.

  Seemingly satisfied with her performance, Franco planted a peck on her cheek, straddled his bike, and rode out of the piazza, waving to Antonio as he did. Carmela dashed across the cobbles. When she reached his taxi, he looked at her with panic. “I can’t drive you now. Not with Franco around the corner, are you mad?”

  “I don’t have time.”

  Antonio looked hesitant.

  “I have to see Kavanagh.”

  Carmela’s eyes pleaded.

  Antonio nodded. He looked sweaty.

  They slipped into the hot taxi. Carmela watched Franco, already several hundred meters away, turn toward the direction of his house. His mother would be wondering why he wasn’t home in time for lunch. What lie would he spin?

  Carmela took in the cloudless blue above as she stepped out of the car. The sun lit up her face. It took her back to the coast of Orosei, inching her toward some semblance of calm.

  “Thank you, Antonio.”

  “I’ll come back for you?”

  “No need.”

  “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  He stood for a moment, as if he wanted to add something. Then he seemed to think better of it and instead slipped back inside his taxi. Carmela watched him drive away toward the hills that surrounded the valley.

  The old Roman bridge stretched across the marshy river below. Its stones were faded by the sun and time. A dozen arches rose from the water, squat and strong. Carmela made her way down the bank and sat by the ancient bricks. Some Roman had stepped here, swum here, made love here. Some Roman had built this bridge, drunk this water. Perhaps some Roman had died here. Right here, beneath this craggy pine, beside these sharp pebbles, in this shallow water.

  The river was still. She thought about the May first picnics that she and her family would have along here when her father was in Africa. Before empty promises and wars. Before studios and patterns and futures and marriages. Before she knew love. She promised herself that she would come here every day this week, to remember the smell of wild fennel and the dried pine needle floor, the scent of her sea, the sun-parched dusty roads, the warm wind of her summers, and the aromatic forests of autumn under a Sardinian sky. The feel of her father’s farm’s earth underfoot, the smell of her mother’s kitchen, the sound of Vittoria running through the house singing—even the sour expression of her grandmother’s face. All this she would commit to memory, carry it with her during the oncoming months and the challenges and joys it would bring.

  She tried to picture Kavanagh’s expression as she
revealed the news of their child. Her stomach tightened. Perhaps he wouldn’t believe it was his. Perhaps it would be best to wait. He would be gone only a week, after all. No sense clouding their move. This would be painful, familiar territory for him. Why had she not thought of all this before? This child would signify everything Kavanagh had left behind. How would he stand by her side when the time came, wondering whether the child was his? He would have nothing but her word to assure him. Was their love sealed with this kind of trust yet? Of course it was. She was ready to walk away from her life in Simius for him, and he for her.

  The sun’s white rays beat down onto her scalp. She was alone. Her future with Kavanagh seemed fragile all of a sudden. How stupid she felt for dancing around in her fantasies of sublime motherhood away from her motherland, when all along this might be the one thing that would send Kavanagh running in the opposite direction. Why hadn’t she been more careful? In all the time she had been with Franco, she had made sure no chances were taken. And yet, for Kavanagh, she had run away on an illicit weekend, silencing all second thoughts. She had fallen into him without reserve. Now he would feel trapped by her. For a moment she considered walking back to town, right then. That way she couldn’t be tempted to keep the truth from him. And what way was that to start a lifetime together? With a lie? Every thought was a little tug on the unraveling thread of their supposed lives: a future born of deceit.

  Carmela tried to summon the excitement she had felt earlier, as she had pouted and twisted into her dress before her flustered reflection back at the house, but the feelings wouldn’t surface. A quiet gray drifted over her, like a fog. Cutting through the haze, a thought reverberated in her mind, clear as a bell: Everyone’s life would be simpler if she wasn’t there at all. What child would want this woman as a mother? She would have no comforting tales of courtship for endless retelling. All her past would be bottled in a secret place, webbed with murky half truths. What way would that be to raise a proud Sardinian woman? And if he was a boy, how would he not reject her when he learned how he’d been conceived, and deceived? She watched the water trickle by her feet, willing her thoughts to slip down into it and be carried far away. Where was her courage now?

  Her family had their sights set on a certain future for their firstborn. Her siblings would have to live with the repercussion of being the ones left behind by a sister who had fled with an American. Her parents would never recover. What kind of business partner had she proven to Yolanda? The woman who had taught her everything she knew, who had rolled out the carpet of success only for her to turn her back on it all. How would she ever be able to return with her head held high, having thrown the opportunity of a lifetime back in her godmother’s face?

  Perhaps Casler would change his mind and keep Kavanagh posted on her island? Then she wouldn’t have to shatter her brittle life. But what of that? How would she walk her streets without shame? There may be no life for Kavanagh and her here, but there was no life for her and Franco either. She tried to convince herself that Kavanagh could face a life of fathering a child even if he would never be sure it was his. But she knew that every time those young eyes would look up at him he would silence doubts. If it was a boy? With dark eyes like Franco? What would stop him slowly growing to hate that child?

  Carmela looked down into the water. No answers to be found there. What solution for the mess she had created? She had drawn the people she cared most about toward certain misery. And for what? For the satisfaction of her own pleasure. Never would she have believed, a year ago, when Kavanagh stepped onto the farm, that she would have been capable of such cruelty, of such shameless selfishness. Charging toward her supposed happiness with Kavanagh, she would leave a trail of destruction. What happiness in that?

  Carmela scooped up some water and splashed her face, as if the coolness might cleanse the feelings of disgust, of dread, of panic. A few drips fell from her chin onto her dress. She looked at the tiny, wet circles on her skirt. A fish rose to the surface. Carmela watched it dive back into the deep. How she longed to lie on the cold mud of the riverbed for a moment. Hidden from everyone, hidden from her own turbulent thoughts.

  The idea of invisibility was seductive.

  But the hiding was over. She had found herself out.

  A sound from above ripped her out of her thoughts. All worry slipped away. Kavanagh loved her. He would take her in his arms and lay her down by the water. He would slip inside her with promises and hot kisses and feet wet with the river.

  She rose, shielding her eyes from the blinding sun.

  A silhouette charged down the bank toward her.

  It wasn’t Kavanagh.

  AFTERWORD

  Simius, Sardinia—June 2008

  Our family home in Simius has only one photo of Carmela. It’s in a silver frame, beside an aquamarine telephone, in what my cousins and I used to call the Dolls Room, on the second floor, here in my grandmother’s house. The bare bulb casts a blue gloom over the peculiar menagerie inside. The afternoons spent with my cousins in here replay in my mind, as I recall the sensation of being fascinated and spooked by the bizarre stuffed animals and trinkets inside the glass cabinets.

  Taxidermy lines the left wall—my clan have a peculiar approach to the deceased. These animals pose in purgatorial freezes. Did my family want to commemorate their passing or existence? Zia Piera’s pet Chihuahua is dressed in a puzzling knitted two-piece. I know from pictures that she used to dress him up this way when he was still breathing too. I can only imagine how that felt to that wretch of a dog in the forty-degree heat. His bulging eyes plead with me to free him from the stand poking his genitals. I run a finger across the coarse hair of the wild boar next to him instead—one of Grandfather’s prized hunts.

  There is a glass-topped table beside the animals. Inside, an array of miniature silver objects has not altered in thirty years. I look over the tiny ornaments: a pacifier, an iron, an elephant, a lamp lighter, and his lamppost. The everyday items are transformed into precious objects by rendering them silver and minuscule. As a child I remember collating them in my mind with elaborate stories. Now they look banal. Is the viewer to admire the craftsmanship, and therefore, in turn, the magnificence of our everyday habits and gizmos?

  My eyes return to Carmela’s photo. After all these years of staring at her image, it’s still hard to decipher her expression. She looks off camera, struggling toward her smile, and though the corners of her lip curl upward, her eyes remain melancholic. A few days after it was taken she disappeared. Only her clothes were found, folded in a neat pile on the bank beneath the Roman bridge. The premeditated actions, police decided, of a troubled woman preparing to take her own life. Most likely, the authorities argued, her corpse had been washed out to sea after she had jumped off the bridge. She was denied formal burial because of it, and for falling pregnant out of wedlock—information uncovered after questioning at the doctor’s office in Sassari. Franco left town in the days that followed, not returning for several weeks. Maria and her brothers demanded investigations that proved fruitless because the body was never found. Carmela’s sisters and brother were asked to leave the church youth group on account of their eldest sister’s sin and ridiculed at school for the same.

  Zia Rosa left for London the following year, after an advertisement in the local paper invited Simiuns to the city to work as either domestic or nurses. She began her training and returned triumphant the following summer. Piera accompanied her on her return to London to take up a post as housekeeper for the Curwins. Over the following three years, one sibling joined them each summer, expanding the domestic team at the Curwins. Tore became their butler, who also gardened and chauffeured. Piera trained Gianetta and Vittoria to be her assistants in the house, until they were old enough to sign up for nurse training. They would visit their parents every summer, with matching suitcases—now stored in the room next to this one—bringing a touch of Brit-chic to sprinkle along the dusty Simius streets where they once lived.

  I c
rank open the bedroom shutters, breathe in the fresh morning air, and take in my Simius. It spirals into the valley, funnel-like, the homes scattered like stony debris. The cathedral spire catches the sun and strikes eight. Later, scooters will charge down the narrow viccoli zipping teenage lovers to secret afternoon hideouts on the town’s periphery. I know because I used to be one of them. A butcher’s son once whizzed me to a pine tree clearing, stuck his tongue too far down my throat, showed me his erect penis, then professed his undying love. The next day he dumped me—in his butcher’s shop, no less. He offered me three photos of him from a plastic bag he kept beneath his counter, as a consolation prize. I was so gobsmacked that anyone would have the gall to dump me, let alone someone I hadn’t agreed to date, that I found myself taking him up on his offer. I chose three snapshots: posing solo in goal, half naked on the beach, and outside his shop. I’ve still got them somewhere. He kissed me good-bye on the mouth when I left, but I was mostly paying attention to his bloody fingernails.

  The psychedelic housecoat of Great Zia Rosa sweeps around the doorway. “Morning, ducky!” she croaks, pinching my cheeks, planting a powdery kiss on each. “Breakfast time, my bubala,” she adds with a wave of her arthritic hand, which she hooks into my arm, leading me downstairs. I’ve always loved the way my Sardinian relatives scatter their broken English with Yiddishisms. Their decade of working as that small domestic army for the Jewish Curwins in 1950s London left its mark. Growing up I became educated on the Jewish holidays by the food Zia Piera would bring home, the perfect balance, in my view, to a Catholic schooling. Yet somehow I’ve managed to escape both obesity and crippling guilt.

  We spent last night going through Zia Rosa’s collection of rings, each with semiprecious stones as big as an eyeball. She retold her stories about traveling solo to the east, on organized tours. After a few hours she had started to slur again and began to warn me about my mother and Zia Gianetta, who, according to her, were itching to steal everything. Her dementia comes and goes like the northeastern maestrale wind, brutal and unbridled.