Home > From Sand and Ash(2)

From Sand and Ash(2)
Author: Amy Harmon

Camillo, my very patient father, would tell me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. I realize now how the pattern never changed. I danced around him for years, trying to get his attention, wanting only to see him smile. Wanting only to be near him, wanting only to love him and be loved by him. I was rebelling even then, pushing back against the fear, though I didn’t recognize it. Rebellion was always my biggest ally, though sometimes I hated her. She looked like me and hurt like me, but she wouldn’t let me give up. And when fear took my reasons for fighting, rebellion gave them back.

My father told me once that we are on earth to learn. God wants us to receive everything that life was meant to teach. Then we take what we’ve learned, and it becomes our offering to God and to mankind. But we have to live in order to learn. And sometimes we have to fight in order to live.

This is my offering. These are the lessons I learned, the tiny acts of rebellion that kept me alive, and the love that fed my hope, when I had nothing but hope itself.

Eva Rosselli

1929

CHAPTER 1

FLORENCE

“Santino has a grandson. Did you know that?” Eva’s father asked.

“Nonno has a grandson?” Eva asked.

“Yes, Nonno. Though he isn’t really your nonno. You know that too, don’t you?”

“He is my nonno, because he loves me so much,” Eva reasoned.

“Yes, but he isn’t my father, and he wasn’t your mamma’s father. So he isn’t your grandfather,” her father explained patiently.

“Yes, Babbo. I know,” Eva said crossly, not at all sure why he insisted. “So Fabia isn’t really my grandmother.” It felt like a lie to say such a thing out loud.

“Yes. Exactly. Santino and Fabia had a son, you see. He left Florence and went to America when he was a young man, because there was more opportunity for him there. He married an American girl, and they had a little boy.”

“How old is the boy?”

“Eleven or twelve. He is a couple of years older than you.”

“What’s his name?”

“His name is Angelo, like his father, I think. But, please, Batsheva, listen for a moment. Stop interrupting.” Eva’s babbo only used her long name when he was growing impatient, so she listened and held her tongue.

“Angelo’s mother died,” he said sadly.

“Is that why Nonna was crying yesterday when she read her telegram?” Eva had already forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to interrupt.

“Yes. Santino and Fabia want their son to bring the boy to Italy. He has had some medical problems, an issue with his leg, apparently. They want him to live here. With us. At least for a while. Santino’s older brother is a priest, and they think the boy can go to the seminary here in Florence. He is a little old to start, but he was in a Catholic school in America, so he won’t be too far behind. He may even be advanced.” Her father said this as if he were thinking out loud, rather than communicating anything Eva actually needed to hear. “And I will help where I can,” he mused.

“We will be friends, I think,” Eva said. “Because we have both lost our mothers.”

“This is true. And he will need a friend, Eva.”

Eva couldn’t remember her mother. She died of tuberculosis when Eva was little. Eva had a vague memory of her lying very still in bed with her eyes closed. Eva couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she could still remember the height of that bed and the elation of success when she pulled herself up and over the side while clutching her tiny violin. She had wanted to play a song for her.

She had crawled to her mother’s side and touched her feverish cheek, the high, red color of a consumptive making her look like a rouged doll. Her mother had opened her lids slowly, her eyes glazed and drugged, furthering the comparison. It had frightened Eva, the almost lifeless figure with glassy blue eyes staring up at her. Then Eva’s mother had said her daughter’s name, and it crackled and broke between her lips like old paper.

“Batsheva,” she had whispered, the word followed by a cough that had racked her frame and made her body shake. The way she said the name, the rasping whisper, the way she sighed through the syllables like it was the last word she would ever say, had made Eva hate her name for a very long time. When her father would call her Batsheva after her mother’s death, she would cry and cover her ears.

That’s when her babbo had started to call her Eva.

That was all Eva remembered of her mother’s life, of their very short life together, and she had tried to forget it. It wasn’t a memory she cherished. She would much rather hold her mother’s picture, pretending to remember the lovely woman with the soft brown hair and porcelain skin, holding Eva in her lap, sitting next to a much younger Camillo, no gray in his black hair, his face serious beneath smiling brown eyes.

Eva had tried to remember being the infant in the frame, the tiny girl who sat in her mother’s lap and gazed up intently at the woman who held her. But hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember that woman. Eva didn’t even look like her mother. She just looked like her father, Camillo, with paler skin and rosier lips.

It was hard to love or miss someone you didn’t even know.

Eva wondered if Angelo, Santino’s grandson, loved his mother. She hoped he didn’t love her too much. Loving someone and then losing them would be much worse than not having them at all.

“Why are you so sad?” Eva asked, pulling her knees up under her long nightgown. She’d found Angelo watching the storm in her father’s library, the doors opened to the balcony, the rain falling heavily onto the pink flagstones below. She didn’t think he would answer. He hadn’t answered her yet. He had been living in their villa with his nonno and nonna for three months, and Eva had done everything in her power to make him her friend. She had played the violin for him. She had danced for him. She had splashed in the fountain in her school uniform and gotten scolded just to make him laugh. He did laugh sometimes. And that kept her trying harder. But he’d never talked to her.

“I miss my mother.”

Eva’s heart lurched in surprise. He was talking to her. In Italian. Eva knew Angelo understood when he was spoken to, but she had expected him to speak in English, like an American.

“I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was four,” she said, hoping he would say something else.

“You don’t remember anything?” he asked.

“My father has told me some things. My mother was Austrian, not Italian like my babbo. Her name was Adele Adler. Beautiful name, isn’t it? I write it sometimes in my very best penmanship. Her name sounds like an American film star. She even looked like one a little. My father says it was love at first sight.” She was babbling, but Angelo was looking at her with interest, so she didn’t stop.

“The first time my babbo saw my mamma, he was in Vienna on business, selling his wine bottles. Babbo has a glass company, you know. He sells his bottles to all the wineries. Austria has very good wine. Babbo has let me taste it.” She thought Angelo should know how sophisticated she was.

“Did she play the violin too?” Angelo asked hesitantly.

“No. Mamma wasn’t musical. But she wanted me to be a great violinist just like my grandfather Adler. He is very famous. Or so Uncle Felix says.” She shrugged. “Tell me about your mother.”

He was silent for several seconds, and Eva thought he was going to revert to silence once again.

“Her hair was dark like yours,” he whispered. He reached out slowly and touched her hair. Eva held her breath as he fingered a long curl and then dropped his hand.

“What color were her eyes?” she asked gently.

“Brown . . . like yours too.”

“Was she beautiful like me?” This was asked without guile, for Eva had always been told how beautiful she was and accepted it with a shrug.

The boy tipped his head to the side and reflected on this. “I suppose. To me she was. And she was soft.” He said the word in English, and Eva wrinkled her nose at this, not sure she understood. “Soft? Soffice o grassa?”

“No. Not grassa. Not fat. Everything about her comforted me. She was . . . soft.” The answer was so wise, so specific, so old, that she could only stare.

“But . . . your nonna is soft too,” she offered eventually, trying to find something, anything, to say.

“Not in the same way. Nonna fusses. She tries to make me happy. Nonna wants to give me love. But it isn’t the same. Mamma was love. And she didn’t even have to try. She just . . . was.”

They sat watching the rain then, and Eva thought about mothers and lovely, soft things and the lonely way the rain made her feel, even though she wasn’t alone.

“Do you want to be my brother, Angelo? I don’t have a brother. I would like one very much,” she said, her gaze tracing his profile.

“I have a sister,” Angelo whispered, not answering her, not looking away from the rain. “She is still in America. She was born . . . and my mamma died. And now she is in America, and I am here.”

“Your father is there with her, though.”

He shook his head sadly. “He gave her to my aunt. She is my mamma’s sister. She wanted a baby.”

“She didn’t want you?” Eva asked, confused. Angelo shrugged as if it didn’t matter.

“What is her name . . . your baby sister?” Eva pressed.

“Papà named her Anna after Mamma.”

“You will see her again.”

Angelo turned his face toward her, and his eyes were more gray than blue in the shadow of the small lamp on Camillo’s desk.

“I don’t think I will. Papà said Italy is my home now. I don’t want Italy to be my home, Eva. I want my family.” His voice broke, and he looked down at his hands like he was ashamed at his weakness. It was the first time he had said her name, and Eva reached for his hand.

“I will be your family, Angelo. I will be a good sister. I promise. You can even call me Anna when we are alone if you want to.”

   
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