Under a Sardinian Sky

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 the 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?

It seemed to Carmela that striving to put a man in his place was a refusal to acknowledge that different members of a household had different roles. Although Tomas would scream and shout over the tiniest detail, it was Maria who held the domestic reins. It was she who saw that everything ran like the well-fitting cogs of a flour mill. A church was not built with two steeples. Was the tiny gold crucifix upon the altar any less important than the tall spire? A family, like a church, is built over time, each new member drawing and feeding strength to those who came before, like the construction of Simius’s gold-tipped cathedral, which rose up toward the stars, brick by brick, over decades.

Carmela did not want to think she’d ever stand up to her fiancé, Franco. The playful anarchy of Lucia’s home was entertaining and joyous, from afar, but Carmela longed for the delicate treasure of a home and a marriage honed with care, gentleness, and devotion. How could she stand beside Franco at the altar if she believed the reality of their life together would be a constant wrangling of wills? Lucia lived for this, fought hard for the thrill of winning every little argument with her husband.

Carmela had never played like this with Franco. Their love began in a blush. A sideways look from beneath the mottled shade of a cherry tree. Carmela and her siblings were helping her father with the harvest, along with several aunts and uncles. That June’s heat had lacked the oppressive beams of August or the scorch of July. A breeze blew. The children and adults sang, making the plentiful work light. Against the cloudless blue of early summer, Franco caught her eye. Of course they had known each other since they crawled the dirt of their farms, but that day it felt as if they had met each other for the first time. His face had creased into a mischievous grin. It was as if he could read the playfulness inside her, which she denied herself. The firstborn, studious apprentice to her godmother had little time for distractions. And yet.

Later that afternoon, as they waddled the weight of the luscious red berries in their heaving baskets, he’d spoken to her about his dreams. He had ambition. His eyes lit up when he talked about his soon-to-be burgeoning empire. He spoke like a prince, not a whisper of doubt in his voice about his trajectory toward wealth and responsibility. That’s how it had felt that day, when his eyes lingered on hers past the end of sentences, between thoughts, in the silences percussed only with the crunch of their feet on the hot earth. To a sixteen-year-old Carmela, it was all she could do not to think that he had just met the most beautiful woman in the world. In his eyes she saw the future. It was bright. Filled with possibility. And freedom—an intoxicating promise of something beyond her own world.

Floating through these memories now felt like a half-remembered dream. Her thoughts hovered in the narrow space between sleep and waking. It was nearly impossible to know if any of them had happened at all. Perhaps Franco had only been that sixteen-year-old for one day. Perhaps it had taken all these seasons since for Carmela to realize that he might never have been that boy at all. Like her aunts always said, “Sun and fruit remove sight.”

She had felt as if he once had the power to offer her something different from the certainty of small-town life. But as the days passed, it became harder to ignore the little voice in her head whispering that this was little more than her own brittle illusion, stitching made in haste without a knot at the end of the thread. Over time, his ambition had begun to curdle into a stubbornness of someone beyond his years. His excitement about the future ebbed into a subtle paranoia that he may not have the responsibility and riches gifted to him. There were other siblings whom his father adored more. In place of his breezy swagger germinated the near imperceptible seeds of bitterness and jealousy. He was a slightly bruised cherry—altered but little, yet marred nonetheless. Carmela wiped a tiny wisp of hair from her face with the back of her hand, and with that these fruitless shoots of thoughts.

Lucia rolled the last squeeze of dough into a final gnocchetto. Her impatient hands rested for a moment, till the one that wasn’t cradling the baby swirled through the air to punctuate her speech. “One good thing about milking—I don’t have to put up with the curse every month.”

Maria looked up from the pan. Her cheeks had returned to their vanilla white.

“Tit’s out again!” Peppe exclaimed, striding in to fill a glass with water from a terra-cotta jug.

“Just jealous it’s not for you,” Lucia answered, without missing a beat.

“They’re the mismatched mountains of the North.”

“You and me, more like!”

Carmela watched her aunt and uncle chuckle, wondering if she too would dance around her husband like this after six children and uneven, milk-laden breasts. Is this the kind of wife she would be? It was hard to imagine Franco teasing her like this, almost as hard as it was to picture him stamping his feet over rotting teeth. Carmela took her sudden impatience to know where her life would take her as another painful reminder of her immaturity. A wise woman like her mother never let her thoughts race headlong into anything.

Another wave of energy bubbled up inside. She dropped a second mold into the whey, dipping her hands into white warmth. As she lifted it out of the pan, Carmela felt the liquid streak down her forearms. All her simmering thoughts evaporated into the milky air.

The sun began to hit the height of afternoon when the clatter of a vehicle brought everyone out from the back of the house, where lunch was drawing to a reluctant close. It wasn’t a sound any of them were accustomed to hearing there. A cloud of dust rose from the dirt track leading to the farm, which was set back almost a kilometer from the main road. The family would travel the three kilometers from town on foot or in Lucia’s fruit truck. The brothers paused to scrutinize, squinting into the near distance. As the vehicle reached the rusted gate, it stopped.

The engine fell silent.

Tomas marched over to the driver.

The family’s distrustful Sardinian glares scissored across the scorched earth. A serviceman got out of the jeep with one lithe jump. Nothing about the crisp white of his shirt, or sweat-free brow, suggested he had traveled from the base in a roofless vehicle under the unforgiving August heat. Tomas shook his hand and gave him a welcome pat on his back. Everyone shifted.

“L’Americano! Venite! Gather round!” Tomas called out, as the two turned and began their walk toward the group.

“And that,” Lucia muttered under her breath to Carmela, “is what tourists call a breathtaking view.”

Carmela flashed her aunt a disapproving frown.

“What? You don’t make babies sitting on the back pew.”

“This,” Tomas announced, “is Lieutenant Joe Kavanagh. He’s from the base.” He gestured to the mob. “Got a bit up here,” he said, tapping his temple. The officer flushed.

“He’s promised to help me get my hands on some equipment. Wants to see how we do things.”

The bashful lieutenant smiled as if he had understood every word of Tomas’s Italian. Although he appeared to hold substantial rank, judging by the appendages on his jacket, there was something about the way his knowing eyes swept over the land that suggested he was no stranger to farming. Carmela glanced at the faces around her but gathered little from their inscrutable, unblinking expressions. Tomas reached a warm arm around the soldier. “Is this how you treat a guest?” he called out to everyone. “Pour the man a drink!”

Maria, Lucia, and Carmela hurried back to the house as the men joined Tomas. Maria covered a tin tray with ridotto glasses and a green bottle of garnet-colored wine. Carmela placed a slab of pecorino onto a chopping board, uneven and scarred with scratches from years of use. Then she filled a basket with roughly torn strips of pane fino, the large circular flat bread for which the town was famous, along with a handful of small paniotte rolls she and her mother had baked that morning.

Tomas led the visitor toward the long wooden table under the shade of a gnarled vine canopy at the back of the cottage. Its legs were made from two wide oak trunks, a rugged altar at which feeders worshipped Maria’s cooking.

“This is the man you told me about?” Peppe whispered to his brother, as they sat down.

A handful of local young men, hired for extra help that week, straggled behind like a pack of dogs salivating for a treat.

“Play our cards right and we could do very well,” Tomas replied.

Tomas gestured for the American to sit. Carmela noted the lieutenant’s posture. He seemed so at ease, or else created an impeccable performance to that effect, even among this group of strangers intent on force-feeding him and making him drink into a fog. The men took their places on the benches and thrust a glass into Kavanagh’s hand, filling it to the rim with Tomas’s wine. Their glasses raised skyward. “Saludu!” Tomas called out.

“Salute,” the lieutenant replied.

That silken voice unlocked a memory.

Carmela stood by the door that led into the house, hovering between participation and service, the chopping board and basket still in either hand. She watched as the men coerced him into drinking in one gulp so they could refill. Peppe signaled to Carmela to pass the pecorino, made from their own sheep’s milk. She walked over to him and placed both board and basket before him, allowing him the honor of slicing the cheese. He carved out a generous slab, wrapped pane fino around it like a blanket, and bellowed across the table, “Tieni! Take it, Americano. God bless our sheep! God bless America!”

The men clinked to America and long life. Kavanagh was fed a sample of their ricotta too, and several slices of their homemade sausage, fragrant with fennel and thyme, balanced with just the right amount of salt. The group made easy work of polishing off three of them. When four bottles stood empty and the lieutenant still appeared intact, Tomas called down to Maria at the other end of the table. “Got ourselves a professional, Mari’. Bring out the hard stuff!”

She disappeared into the house, followed by Carmela and Lucia.

“Going to take more than wine to make this one dizzy,” Lucia whispered, frisky. “I’m going nowhere until that collar is undone and I get myself a look at more skin than just a neck. And those eyes, no? Clear like the Chia coves.”

Maria reached into the bottom of the wooden dresser and shook her head with a reluctant smile. She passed up glass bottles of homemade liquor to Carmela, for the tray; aqua vitae and Tomas’s fragrant mirto, an aromatic, potent after-dinner drink made from their native myrtle berry.

“Give it here!” Lucia exclaimed. “I’ll do the pass with the mirto, Mari’, get me a closer look!” With that she whisked the bottles out of Carmela’s hands before she could get them onto the tray. Carmela followed Lucia as she flew back out of the door, laying out fresh ridotto glasses before each man.

“Oh, here she goes,” Peppe said, as Lucia sidled up to the table. “Why must you always nosey about the men, woman? You stay in there and I’ll stay out here, and we’ll all go home happy!”

“Someone’s got to protect her beautiful nieces from you lot!” she replied, flashing Kavanagh a toothy grin.

The men laughed at the couple’s familiar repartee, which accompanied the end of most meals. Peppe fidgeted in his seat.

“Americano! Which one for you?” Lucia asked.

“Mirto, per piacere.”

A stunned pause fell over the merry group. His Italian impressed them. Mumbled surprise rumbled into clinking glasses. The men slurred wishes of good health as the initiation fast approached completion. The afternoon trickled through another bottle of each digestif, alongside plentiful servings of Maria’s seadas, thin pastry-encased slices of cheese, pan fried till crispy on the outside and oozing on the inside, topped with a drizzle of the neighbor’s acacia honey.

The setting sun cast its ruby glow over the men as they cajoled in a soup of half languages that everyone appeared to understand. The Americano started to gesticulate in Sardinian. Carmela noticed his hands were worn, those of a man accustomed to hard physical work. The way they moved smoothly through the air, however, was more akin to an artist describing a new work than that of a worker discussing the fluctuating prices of milk and cheese. His sleeves were rolled up now, exposing his muscular forearms, much to Lucia’s delight.

Tomas looked over to his daughter and signaled for her to bring out yet another bottle. She moved to clear the empty ones first, when her father took her hand. “Americano!” He hiccupped. “You’ll forgive me, I haven’t introduced you to my daughter. This is my eldest, Carmela. Not just a pretty picture—inherited my brains too!”

Kavanagh’s eyes widened, his head cocked slightly. “Actually,” he replied in English, stretching out his hand, “I think we’ve already had the pleasure.”

Carmela flashed a brief half smile in return and gave his hand a perfunctory shake.

“She speaks English too, you know?” Tomas began.

Carmela stiffened. She was no stranger to being put on the spot by her father after he had drunk too much. Her face reddened in spite of herself.

“Go on, Carmela, say something!” Tomas cried, swinging his arm up like a ringmaster announcing the headlining act.

Carmela felt the glare of a dozen eyes. What was this fixation with her knowledge of English? It was a skill, but she was not an acrobat who lived to hear applause for her tricks. Carmela had a heightened sense for when her father would perform such turns and now berated herself for failing to escape in time.

“Attenzione, everyone!” Tomas called out, “My firstborn is going to speak like an English!”

The blood thumped in her ears.

“Please, don’t put yourself on the spot on my account,” the lieutenant said, undoing the top button of his collar. The blue of his eyes deepened. Carmela would have liked the warmth that shone in them to relax her, but it only made her unease swell. Her eyes darted up and down the table, scanning the remnants of the food, a gourmet graveyard. She raced around in her mind for something simple to say, but it was like a bare white room. Her eyes lifted. They met her mother’s, reminding Carmela it would be no great pain to humor her father. She found her voice.

Carmela muttered something about welcoming the lieutenant to Sardinia and the Chirigoni farm, but the applause drowned out the end of her sentiment. Her eyes flitted over a sea of sun-cracked smiles. Kavanagh flashed her a grin, as warm and wide as hers was taut.

She beat a swift retreat inside.

The cicadas serenaded a fat moon by the time the group bid each other reluctant good nights. Carmela stood in the shadows of a cork oak beyond the house, scraping food off the plates and into a trough for the pigs. She looked up as her father and Peppe creaked the gate shut. The lieutenant strolled to his jeep, jacket swung over his shoulder, a satisfied sway to his walk.

She watched his taillights zigzag into the blackness of the hills.

CHAPTER 3

The long windowpanes of Yolanda’s dressmaking studio reached up to fresco ceilings, but its clouds were cracked, and the sanguine putti—happy harp-playing angels—now had several bare plaster patches where rosy cheeks once grinned or chubby thighs bent into flying arabesques. The business took up the entire third floor of Palazzo Grixoni. The building ran almost the length of the narrow street, Via Santa Lucia, a brutal incline from the main Piazza Cantareddu ending at Fontana Grixoni. This marked the center of town. From here, Simius sprawled up and around like a funnel. The icy mountain water gushed out of the marble lions’ mouths, ensuring Simiuns had access to fresh water, unlike some of the neighboring villages. Its Victorian black-and-white marble base, topped with busts of the Grixoni family, who had commissioned it, flanked Palazzo Grixoni. In the halcyon days of the mid-nineteenth century, when the valley had been christened with the proud title of Logudoro, land of gold, Palazzo Grixoni had been home to the wealthy merchant family of the same name. Now, as Simius blew away the ashes of war, buildings like these had been divided and rented out as separate quarters.