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“Home to Italy.”
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Our house in Ozone Park was so close to JFK airport that I could look out of my bedroom window at night and see the plane lights above me in the sky.
Now I was one of those lights, shining in the inky darkness above the city.
“Lola.” Nonna clasped my hand as she peered out from the window seat. “Look how big it is. It goes on for ever!”
Nonna had never seen New York from above before.
“When I arrived from Italy, I came by boat,” she told me. “I remember I had just enough money to buy a third class berth. The meals were free, thank goodness, because I didn’t have any money left for food.
“When I got off the boat at Ellis Island they asked me all these questions and I was so scared they would put me on the boat straight back to Italy again, but I was strong and healthy and I could speak a little English, so even though I didn’t have a cent to take care of myself they let me through.”
“Were you all alone?” I asked. I knew the answer to this question before I even asked it. Nonna had told me the tale of how she arrived in New York many times. But I loved the story and I made her tell it again and again, always prompting her in the right places.
“I didn’t know a soul,” Nonna confirmed. “And I had no idea where to go. New York was a very big city, even back then. I asked the man at the immigration counter where I could find horses. Well, he said I should go to Aqueduct because it was the finest racetrack on the East Coast and right here in this very city!
“You wouldn’t have recognised it, Lola. Aqueduct was a beautiful place back in those days, so elegant! All the stables were brand new and on race days everyone in the grandstand was dressed in their best clothes like ladies and gentlemen.
“I went down to the stables and I asked around for horses to ride, but they were shocked that a sixteen-year-old girl wanted to be a jockey. None of the trainers would employ me. So I took the only job I could get, at the clubhouse as a waitress. On my first day, in front of everyone, I dropped a whole tray and all the cutlery and the coffee cups went flying and this nice young man bent down and helped me pick it all up. He introduced himself as Alberto and that was how I met your grandfather.”
“Was he working there too?” I asked.
“No,” Nonna said. “He was an apprentice jockey. We got to talking and he told me they needed someone to ride trackwork at his yard. He took me to the stables and gave me some silks to wear. We tucked my hair out of the way so that no one knew I was a girl and I mounted up on this big bay Thoroughbred and rode out on the track like I’d been doing it all my life. The head trainer saw me ride and it didn’t matter that I was a girl any more, he gave me the job …”
“Ma’am?” It was the flight attendant. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”
Nonna looked up at her. “Young lady,” she said. “How long is this flight going to take?”
“New York to Rome is eight hours exactly, ma’am,” the young woman said.
My nonna looked amazed. “It took thirteen days last time!”
“When was that, ma’am?”
“1945,” Nonna replied. “I haven’t been home since.”
The attendant smiled at me. “And is this your granddaughter, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Nonna replied. “Do you know she’s never been to Italy before?”
“I’ve never been anywhere before, Nonna,” I pointed out.
“Are you staying in Rome?”
“Oh no!” Nonna said. “Rome is too busy – a crazy place. We’re going to my town, to Siena. Have you been there?”
“No,” the attendant replied. “But I hear it’s very beautiful.”
“It is. The most beautiful place in the world,” Nonna said softly, and I felt her grip tighten, like a child who suddenly panics and strengthens their hold on their mom’s hand at the edge of a busy intersection.
“It has been a very long time since I went home, Lola,” she murmured.
The attendant brought me an orange juice and a little bag with two tiny sweet biscuits as well. I wanted to eat them, but I decided to put them in my bag to take home. I had kept my boarding pass too. I was gathering souvenirs. I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to Italy. Mostly I couldn’t believe that Dad had agreed to let me go.
Dad is overprotective of me. Nonna says it’s understandable because I was only four when Mom died. But I’ve always had Nonna to look after me.
Dad refused at first, but Nonna wore him down. “Why not?” Nonna said. “Lola’s got no school. What else is she doing for the next month, Ray?”
“That’s not the point,” my dad said.
“Why can’t Nonna take me too?” Donna whined.
“Don’t you get involved!” my dad snapped. “Anyway, you’ve got beauty school exams.”
Donna glared at me. “I don’t see why Lola gets to go. She gets suspended from school – and her punishment is a trip to Italy?”
“Lola is coming to help take care of me,” Nonna said. “I need a companion.”
“Loretta.” My dad rolled his eyes. “You don’t need anyone to take care of you!”
“I’m an 85-year-old woman,” Nonna shot back. “And you want to send me off halfway across the world on my own?”
“Mom,” said my dad, sighing. “What’s the hurry all of a sudden? Why don’t you wait? We can all go together. It’ll be a family holiday, maybe at Christmas …”
“Christmas is too far away when you are my age, Raymond,” Nonna said. “Besides, we can’t all go at once. You know someone has to stay with the horses.”
Dad began to grumble, but Nonna was stubborn, there was no way she was changing her mind. “All I want is this one last journey home,” she told him. “And I want my Piccolina to come with me.”
I am a New York kid, so all the people and traffic didn’t make much of an impression on me. Rome was just another busy city like back home. What knocked me out though was how pretty it all was, all the monuments and statues. Everywhere you looked there were sculptures of naked gods and chariots and horses, some as big as buildings, made out of smooth grey stone.
I stared out the window at the gods as we drove to the railway station. Nonna was rattling off instructions to the cab driver, her hands waving wildly. I can speak a little Italian, but Nonna talked so fast I couldn’t make out a word. At the station she hustled us through the crowd, bought our tickets and guided us through the terminal and onto the right train. That first train took us through the dingy suburban outskirts of the city and then we were clear of the buildings and in the countryside. Two hours later we changed to a different train and soon the view became nothing but rows of grape vines and hillsides of olive trees zipping by.
By now we had been travelling for almost a whole day and I had barely slept so I was exhausted. The jetlag made me feel weird, too, like there was an ocean tide inside me, ebbing back and forth, making me almost seasick. By the time we got off the train at Siena and into a taxi I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Are you sleepy, Piccolina?” Nonna gave me a cuddle. “Don’t worry, we are almost there …”
I must have fallen asleep in the taxi because the next thing I knew, Nonna was shaking me softly by the shoulder.
“Piccolina, wake up … We’re here.”
I opened my eyes. We were in the middle of an olive grove, bumping along a narrow gravel driveway. Ahead of us, I could see a row of tall conifers forming a sentry, and as we drove past them our destination came into view.
It was an old stone villa, two storeys high, with shutters on the windows and overgrown yellow roses smothering the arch of the front doorway.
“Is this a hotel?” I asked.
“No, Lola.” Nonna Loretta’s voice was quiet. “This is my home. My family have owned this land for centuries.”
“You used to live here?” I peered out the taxi window at the villa. It looked kind of rundown. “Who lives here now?”
“Nobody,” Nonna said. “It’s been empty a long time.”
Nonna got me to lift our suitcases from the trunk while she counted out money for the cab driver. They were speaking Italian and I think they must have argued about the tip because he barely waited for me to get the last bag out before driving away, dust flying up from his tyres.
“Look underneath the geranium, Lola,” Nonna instructed, pointing to the bright red flower in the terracotta pot on the doorstep. “The key should be there.”
I tilted the pot. There was the key, just like Nonna said: black iron, covered in dirt.
I held it out to her, but Nonna shook her head, almost like she was reluctant to touch it. “You do it, Piccolina.”
The door was arched, made of solid wood with these big wrought iron hinges, like an old-fashioned gaol. I put the key in and tried to turn it.
“It doesn’t fit,” I said. I felt like we were breaking into someone’s house. But if it wasn’t her house then how did Nonna know where the key would be?
“You have to jiggle it in the lock to make it work sometimes,” Nonna said.
“It must have been locked up for a long time,” I said.
“It has,” Nonna agreed. “No one has lived here since my mama died.”
I had just about given up on making the key work when something in the lock clicked, the key turned at last and the door swung open.
You know how a jewel box will look quite plain on the outside and then you open it up and there is a shock of pink silk? The villa was like that. All grey stone outside, but when I opened that door the sunlight flooded in on an entranceway full of colour. The floors were patterned in the most brilliant blue and turquoise Moroccan tiles and to the left the tiles continued up the staircase where the wall had been painted emerald green with a mural of a giant tree, tangles of black branches covered in pink roses spreading out in every direction all the way to the landing. The other walls downstairs were painted in a mind-bending harlequin pattern of brilliant orange, black and white diamonds, although the pattern was barely visible because of all the oil paintings hung on top. There were loads of them – all different sizes, some in gilt frames and others in plain wood. They were daubed in thick, richly coloured oil paint and nearly all of them were of horses. In between the paintings there were framed black and white photographs, also of horses. A massive glass trophy case filled up most of the back wall, its shelves crammed with even more photographs, rosettes and tarnished silver cups and trophies and medals.
There were swords crossed on the wall beside it, real ones, and at the foot of the stairs a suit of armour stood sentry draped in an orange, black and white flag.
“Nonna! Are you serious? Look at this place! Is this really your home?”
Nonna didn’t reply. I looked for her and realised she hadn’t entered the house. She was still standing on the doorstep, as if some invisible force held her back.
“Nonna?” I walked towards her and took her hand. She squeezed her fingers tight around mine and then she took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold.
“I haven’t stood in this room for almost seventy years,” she said looking around in amazement, “and yet it is all the same, just as I remember. A little smaller maybe …”
She let go of my hand and walked straight up to the suit of armour so that she was standing face to face with it, raised her tiny fist, knocked on the helmet then prised the visor open. “Good day, Donatello, I am home!” she said.
She turned to me with a smile. “My brother tried to climb inside him once when we were very little and got his head stuck. We had to use olive oil on Donatello to get him out. Mama was furious!”
“Donatello was your brother?” I asked.
Nonna Loretta laughed. “Donatello is the armour! My brother’s name was Carlo.”
I knew Nonna had a brother, but she had never said his name before. She hardly ever said anything about her family. She loved to tell stories, my nonna, but they always began from the day she arrived in New York with her duffel bag at Ellis Island. Whenever I asked her about her old life in Italy she had always claimed that she was too young to remember any of it.
“It is lost in the mists,” she would say dismissively if I pestered her. “Who can remember what happened so many years ago? And what does it matter anyway?”
The one thing I knew for sure about Nonna’s brother was that he had died in the war. My dad told me once that Nonna was very sad about her brother’s death and that was the real reason why she never liked to talk about Italy.
Nonna creaked the visor shut on Donatello and rearranged the flag that was draped over his shoulder. Then she turned to me. “Fetch the suitcases would you, Piccolina?” she said.
I struggled up the stairs with our luggage, stopping on the landing to drop the bags and rest. Up close, the painted tree was slightly terrifying, the way the tangle of black branches seemed to reach out of the wall to grab at you.
“Was this picture on the wall when you lived here?” I asked.
“The tree?” Nonna said. “Yes, my mama painted it. It is strange, when I look at it I can feel her presence so strong, even though she is gone.”
“What was she like?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, she was my mama,” Nonna said, as if that explained everything.
“Was she an artist?”
“She was good with her hands, painting and cooking and sewing. She cared very much for Carlo and me, but she was a very opinionated woman and obstinate too …” Nonna gave a chuckle. “I could be speaking of myself, couldn’t I? Perhaps that is where I get it from!”
Upstairs the paint along the hallway had begun to flake off and the plaster beneath it was crumbling. A thick layer of dust covered everything. We would have to get the place cleaned up, but at least it was liveable. Nonna opened the linen cupboard and began to pull out pillows and duvets from under a dust sheet, while I washed in the bathroom and discovered that the taps only ran cold and not hot water because there was no electricity.
“You will have my old bedroom,” Nonna told me. It was the first one at the top of the landing, with walls painted in dusky pink with crimson stripes. The budding bough of a tree bloomed out of one corner of the room and a white peacock perched on the bough with its tail spread out beneath it.
“Mama painted it pink with stripes and then I asked her to add the tree and the peacock,” Nonna said. “She never got the peacock quite right. You see how his head is too big?”
“It’s amazing,” I said. “It must have been the most incredible house to grow up in.”
“It was,” Nonna said. “I was very happy here.” But her eyes didn’t look happy at all. They were shining with tears.
“I’ll fetch you another blanket. You must be tired, Piccolina,” she murmured. “We’ll make the bed up and you can get some sleep.”
The jetlag that had begun to set in at the train station was like nothing I had ever felt before and despite the fact that it was still light outside I was suddenly too exhausted to stay awake any longer.
I must have fallen asleep thinking about that mural above the stairs, because in my dreams I was walking through a forest, only the trees weren’t real, they were painted ones, and when their black branches touched my skin they clung to me like seaweed. I was trying to navigate my way through when I realised that I wasn’t alone. There was something in the woods, stalking me. I began pushing my way through the trees, my heart pounding, and the creature sensed my fear and gave chase. I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth right behind me and I was running, but it was like my legs were stuck in treacle, a low animal growl growing louder, gaining with every stride.
I looked back over my shoulder, hoping that I would see nothing, but the creature was right there, monstrous and bristling, cold grey eyes fixed on me.
It was a wolf. A female with two little cubs at her feet. They followed her obediently, although she ignored them because her focus was completely on me.
I ran harder, my breath coming in frantic gasps. The grey wolf was gaining, I could hear her closing in, smell the hot animal stench of her.
Suddenly, in the middle of the forest, a stone building rose up right in front of me and I had to turn so fast to stop from running into it that I fell. I dropped to my knees on the ground which I realised was not a forest floor at all but hard, cold tiles, the same as the turquoise and blue ones downstairs. I was trying to get up again when the wolf leapt on top of me. She knocked me flat to the floor, sprawling me out on my back, her paws on my chest pinning me down and her great, grey menacing head hanging over my face so that I could see the saliva dripping from her teeth.
And then she spoke.
“Loyal are the people of the Wolf. Bravest of all the seventeen,” she growled. She came closer so that I could smell her fetid breath on my face. “You will need to run faster than this to win little one. You must prove yourself worthy to bring home the banner.”
She was crushing me. I could feel this enormous weight on my chest and I struggled with all my might to get her off me. I was shouting and screaming and the branches were alive and tangling around me. Then I realised they were not branches at all but bedsheets and I opened my eyes. The wolf was gone and I was wide-awake and starving.
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