The things well never ha.., p.11
The Things We'll Never Have, page 11
It does matter. I am trapped, forced to rely on this voice. If I move, I will tread on something and fall, probably causing three whole other bookshelves to tumble. If I stay, I am the laughingstock of the piazza. The people I just growled at will have their revenge.
From the direction of the door, a spoon clinks on china, the reassuring aroma of coffee.
“Olivia, ciao. I will walk back with you.” Armando. My favorite barista, his timing impeccable. I hear him deposit his order on the sales counter, then his hand links around my arm, and he guides me outside. As we leave, the voices reverberate back into place, syllables echo, decibels linger with the poise of those worthy enough to have business there.
He walks me straight across the center of the piazza.
“Why this way?” I ask. I don’t like to cross the center, a barren place where I cannot discern the waves.
“Too many people on that side.” He does not convince me. I wonder if it has something to do with avoiding Ricci’s store.
“I made a mess in the bookstore,” I tell him in case he had not noticed.
“What mess? I didn’t see a mess.” I walk between him and the buildings. I feel him twisting as he passes people coming the other way.
“The books. Not that I give a damn, but I collapsed an entire mountain of them.”
“I didn’t see them. Did you see them?”
“You’re the only person left who can tell a blind joke.”
“Did you find the card you were looking for?” His voice was now compassionate.
“The cards are all Ma has talked about all week, but she has not noticed one missing. She does not detect the slightest irony expecting me to get excited about them.”
“She’s doing her best,” he says, which surprises me, but I do not feel like arguing.
Marta
Everleigh stops to look in the window of Bar Principale. It is for signorile people. In the window are the same tubs of gelato as other cafés but then they add toppings.
Carlo’s shop is directly behind it; the two businesses back onto each other. Bar Principale’s front opens to the piazza. A greengrocer’s shop could never open onto the piazza. You can charge good money for pasticcini—bite-size cakes that take many hours to make—but not so much for produce that grows up from the earth, like the toil of hands is worth more than the toil of nature.
On the next side of the piazza is Armando’s bar, which attracts a different kind of people. The people who go to Armando’s are not signorile, though they are not laborers, either. The morning customers are shop owners, bankers, office workers who take their coffee, espresso, macchiato, cappuccino, and brioche at the counter. Some take a splash of grappa in their coffee to “correct” it.
The daytime customers are the retired versions of the professionals who come in the morning. Occasionally, a member of the nobility who prefers the more real company of the non-nobility. They watch their TV shows and debate the wrongs of the world over full ashtrays and few drink orders.
I no longer come to either of the bars, though once I frequented Armando’s like the rest of the pack. But I see Olivia. She is heading in our direction, and though I cannot quite explain why, a little voice in my head tells me not to let Everleigh see her, and Bar Principale is the only refuge near enough to avoid a face-to-face encounter.
Everleigh
“Go, inside,” Marta points to the café door. “Go!”
I can’t say I have any complaint about that. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such enticing ice cream, all sorts of colors and topped with pineapple chunks, strawberries, walnuts in neat rows. Far more than the standard vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate back home. Oh, and the colors! Even the chocolate is a rich brown, not the pallid khaki we get. One tub has beige-green ice cream in it, the handwritten label says pistacchio, though I’m pretty sure I’d get typing pool points for knowing it should have one only c in it.
The only thing is, once inside, we can’t even see the ice cream. Instead, there is a long glass display case holding the most adorable cakes I’ve ever seen. Each one looks like a finished cake, only itty-bitty.
Marta and Vittorio are having a little debate about something, to choose flavors if I had to guess. I am utterly feasting my eyes on the teeny cakes when Marta says she is taking Vittorio to the bathroom.
She points to a list of ice-cream flavors on the wall near the back of the café and shuffles away between tables to the restroom. It would be easier if I simply pick by color, so I go back to the front end and peer over the display case.
The waiter is crafting a perfect globe of glistening deep-pink, raspberry-topped ice cream with his scoop, but before he can hand it to the woman, she, along with everyone around her stands back, as a road sign appears between them and the ice-cream bar. A moving road sign. It is followed, and held up, by a man dressed very much like the people working in this bar. He rather reminds me of the lollipop man at school, but instead of helping children across the road, he’s leading a girl who is holding on to his arm. She’s wearing the largest black sunglasses I’ve ever seen and is holding out a hand to skim the edge of the buildings. Blind. I am intrigued. You don’t see blind people walking out and about very much, though I’ve seen a few in London. Poor lass, she is also very beautiful.
Once they’ve passed, the gap closes, the woman moves back to the counter for her ice cream, and the waiter turns to me and asks, I presume, what I want. I look desperately around for Marta. Luckily, she is on her way back. Or, rather, she is standing there looking at me. I use the same hand gesture she used earlier to usher her over, and she orders a pist-A-kio for me. Pretty sure it is a ch sound as in cheat, but the waiter understands anyway. Whatever they want to call it, from my first lick, I can safely say it puts every cone from the ice-cream van to the seaside trolley to absolute shame.
“This ice cream is delicious,” I say.
“It’s gelato,” Marta corrects me.
Vittorio and Marta get their cones, and I already have my lira out to pay. I need her on my good side if she is going to help me. My taste buds perform a joyous dance inside my mouth. We leave the café, and I trail after Marta and Vittorio as they turn up a flat cobbled street at the shortest end opposite the cathedral.
Intrigued, I look around for the man with the sign and the blind woman, but instead I see the two men from the station.
“Hey, look! Marta,” I say. If she had just carried on straight, we would have bumped right into them.
Marta turns and beckons me. “Come, we go this way.”
“But look, don’t you see them?”
I turn back and both of the men are looking at me. They have seen me, yet they glance around before turning up the cobbled road to us, as though making sure they aren’t seen.
They each shake my hand and say some hasty words in Italian. One points to my cone, and I can tell he is asking whether I like it.
“Verde,” I say, which means green because Gualtiero was diligent in teaching me the colors. I can’t recall him teaching me the word for delicious.
This starts a little commotion of chatter, and they even look directly at Marta—interestingly, they haven’t said anything to her otherwise. Vittorio holds his head down, like he is in trouble or something.
“You speak Italian?” Marta says.
“Just a few words Gualtiero taught me. He was fastidious about the colors.” I suppose my mention of his name was enough to destroy my credibility because a few short words, and the two men walk away, raising their hands in salute as they go.
Marta
“Well, I suppose they’re off then. Perhaps they said goodbye, and I didn’t catch it,” Everleigh says.
She may or may not want me to tell her why they rushed away from me so quickly, but there is no reason for me to explain. Instead, I ask if she has the letters with her.
“Just one.”
“The gelato, better than English ice cream, no?”
“No. Yes! I mean, yes, it’s better.” She does not seem able to make up her mind. “The men back there, the ones who brought you to the hotel, it looked like they pretended not to know you?”
“You ask too many questions.” That might have been harsh for me to say. Her reaction suggests I should have been kinder.
“It’s a perfectly natural thing to do.” She sounds hurt. That was not my intent.
Everleigh
We turn to go beneath what looks like some kind of entrance to a castle or some other battlement. On the other side is a park, surrounded by stately buildings in the same red brickwork as the entrance we’ve just come under. “What a gem!”
We sit on a park bench, the three of us lost in our gelatos, watching the people stroll by—far fewer than in the piazza but all still going at the same slow pace. On the far side, a crew is setting up what looks like a stage for a concert.
Marta is the first to finish her cone. She pulls a handkerchief from her bag and wipes her hands and Vittorio’s face. “You give it to me,” she says.
“What? My gelato?” I ask.
“The letter. I must see the letter, then I can help you.”
I wipe my right hand on my skirt and pull out the letter for her. It’s the one with the picture of the watermill on it. It looks like it belongs in a fancy picture book of the most charming locations. Marta is impressed because she spends some time just staring at it. Vittorio, too, seems excited about it.
“This cousin, quite the artist, isn’t he?”
She does one of those noncommittal noises and says nothing more as she reads.
Marta
Ever since this girl showed up, my past life with the pack has been pushed under my nose from every direction.
I have come face-to-face—and elbow to elbow—with Gualtiero in his home, I have spoken to Davide, Carlo has had to risk talking to me where his wife might see us, and Olivia has walked just feet away from us, guided by her knight in shining armor and his path-clearing sign, Armando.
This girl who knows no better than to wipe gelato from her hand onto her skirt is dredging up the chapter in my life that landed me here, ostracized, and yet joyful, because it was the chapter that made me a mother.
Now reading that letter there in the open, the carefully selected words, the typical cursive an Italian learns at school, only the a’s have a little quiff on them, and we’re a million miles away from the life I once had with the pack, trying not to stare at the picture of the watermill at the top of the page. This British woman has reminded me more about the past in one week than all the stares and ice-cold interactions of the past five years.
Everleigh
Once she has finished reading, Marta is as nice as pie. Nicer than pie. Finally, she has to believe me.
Even though it’s not top form to be indulgent, I could do with a bit of pity, and so I find myself talking about Dad. Do you ever find yourself wanting to talk about something but it’s so emotionally overwhelming that you end up going off on a tangent about something totally different? And finding that totally different happens to be a topic you would never otherwise talk about publicly?
I tell her about how Dad had gone off to war.
I tell her how he used to call me Foreverleigh. I remember that. At least, I think I do. Sometimes the memory is hazy, sometimes it changes a bit, and I wonder how real it is.
He left to fight in the war when I was five. Not that you can understand at that age what anything means. One day Dad was around, then he wasn’t. Edward and I carried on, the changes in our lives—Dad being gone, Mum telling us we had to be patient because he wouldn’t be home for a while. Fire drills to get down the street and into the Tube station, ready for the bombs to drop. To a large extent, we took it in stride. We hadn’t been in the world long enough to know how it should have functioned in peace.
I don’t recall when I first understood that we needed to be patient longer than Mum had led us to believe and that Dad might not come home at all. That Mum had had no letters from him for several months, that she feared the worst. And somehow I understood that when she received a letter of sympathy from the king, it said he was presumed dead. Presumed meant there was that tiny sliver of hope.
Perhaps I’d remember more and know more if we ever talked about it, but we never had. Sure, we talked about the lighter side of war, Edward and I, that is. We gibe at each other on the rare occasions we’re together—Christmas, weddings, other family obligations—about the silly things we did on the bomb sites after the war. Took ages to clear up, they did. Not a burden to us kids; we couldn’t have dreamed of a better playground. Much more fun than a park, and besides, people were still using the park for growing crops.
The elation after the war was over didn’t last long. The price had been too heavy, though we were all supposed to keep a stiff upper lip, a determination to rebuild what we could rather than dwell on the spilled milk of what we lost. That stiff upper lip that grown-ups acquire when they’ve accepted their nine-to-five roles in life.
Many of the children at school had just returned from the countryside, where they’d been evacuated to stay with strangers. We didn’t really talk about parents. Our only quest seemed to be to reestablish an air of normalcy, but I knew many of their fathers returned. Patched with bandages, limping, some with missing limbs. Not only them, but the blitz had also taken the lives of many of the women and children. Families gone or ripped apart by bombs. It was hard to keep up with what families had been killed and what families had lost their homes and been relocated to live in caravan parks around the coast.
I have to get my hankie out when I start to tell Marta about how we’d watch the letterbox and Mum would make sure she was farthest from the front door when the postman came. I don’t tell her that the lack of news about Dad made the lack of news about Gualtiero unbearable. Then again, perhaps she can figure that out for herself.
Marta
Having to sit there numb, a stranger, a foreigner—telling me someone from our simple little town wrote this letter and mailed it to her and her boyfriend in London. I hear her, but her words are not registering in my mind. She is talking about the war, her childhood, nothing relevant, yet I know she is expecting me to break the news to her of who wrote the letter. How can I answer?
I feel for Vittorio’s hand. It is dutifully on the bench beside my leg. I clench it tight, then give it a little tug to let him know we are going. I say nothing to her, then we are walking—I am walking, Vittorio is tumbling over his feet to keep up. Home. We need to be home. “Time for dinner,” I tell him, and he falls into a steady jog.
Everleigh
I am a little startled when Marta gets up and leaves. I must have overstayed my welcome. Maybe she tried to tell me she had to go, and I didn’t hear. Silly me, droning on. Not a care for the little boy’s supper. Flustering about my faux pas, she is gone before I realize I’m not sure of the way back to the hotel. Nor did I ask if she recognized the watermill or if we can meet again. I stay sitting on the bench, finally taking better stock of my surroundings. The sun is lower in the sky; the battlements are geometric, dimmed by shadow. There’s still a buzz of people setting up the stage, but fewer people are strolling around. Must be a general dinnertime. Yes, that’s what Gualtiero told me. He was determined we’d have a fixed dinnertime once we were married. What an awful thing to yearn for. But then it looks like we might never know who would have to compromise on that one.
What a pickle I have let myself get into. I’ve found nothing more than a few bikes and a fountain. And to say I feel like a fish out of water in that town I thought would bring me such joy was an understatement.
Soon I’ll leave this town behind, go back to England, to my office job, misunderstandings with Mum, occasional jabs with Edward until I am reminded what he chose as an occupation, and a tiny flat on my own. With or without Gualtiero living downstairs. At this point, it seems safe to say I won’t be marrying him. Wouldn’t it be something if we did—patch things up and get married, I mean? Standing at the altar, or the desk because we are being radical and rebellious and planning a civil marriage, leaning in to hear the official, “Do you,” he’ll begin, and I lean in close, rudely close, my ear shoved in his justice of the peace mouth, dying to hear the actual name of the man about to take me as his lawful wedded wife. What a revelation that would be, indeed!
I dab at my face with the hankie. I’ll need to remember to rinse the hankie out before bed. I decide to walk in a circle first. It wouldn’t hurt to explore the place. Good thing, too, because I spot another open archway I hadn’t noticed before. I head right for it, of course. I’m used to being lost anyway, have been since I arrived in town, in more ways than one. Quite incredible. It is a ramp of some kind. Wide, closed brick on one side, covered, and archways on the other side. I lean over one archway and look down. There’s another ramp sloping downward in the other direction below, a zigzag path underground. And, I am pretty sure, the very same archways and walkways are in one of the pictures.
I trace my steps back into the park at the center of the castle grounds, walk the perimeter anticlockwise. The stage builders stop to watch me go by, but I ignore them. Beneath the clock tower, I find steps going downward. It’s not the way we came into the park, but they’re too intriguing not to walk down.
How delightful—they lead back to the piazza. Better still, the view of the piazza is revealed when I’m about halfway down the second staircase. It makes me feel a little less bad about how I talked too much and drove Marta away. Small groups of people are sitting here and there, so I sit, too, on the ancient stone worn smooth by centuries of feet.
