THEIR MEETINGS BY the river became more frequent and the affinity of their thoughts developed in tandem with that of their bodies. They measured the weeks, days and even hours by the unit of time used by lovers—a unit that would shrink with every encounter and expand whenever they were apart.
It was hard to keep this overwhelming, artless love away from the eyes of their families, but they astutely took advantage of every convenient opportunity and took care not to be discovered: from the fortuitous outdoor excursions the Collus took during the fleeting hour of Mass, to a couple of hours’ darkness they spent in the tool shed at the bottom of the garden, before saying goodnight. They made plans as they made love, but never admitted to them. The fear in their voices every time they greeted each other was mixed with the hope that their union would not come to an end in the near future.
As the months went by, however, terror grew in Maria’s mind at the thought that everything could dissolve. She was sure of her feelings for Vincenzo, but their age difference was nevertheless a danger. His privileged position made him stubborn and confident they would find a way to marry a few years hence, and he was so persuasive that Maria accepted the notion that their meeting might after all not have been a random event.
One day, in the square outside the church, as Maria was bringing the amphora back from the river, she felt faint. The vessel slid sideways off her head and shattered into a thousand pieces, spilling the water. Two women sitting nearby, startled by the dull crash of terracotta, ran to her and walked her home. As soon as she was at the farmhouse, Maria felt a strange nausea rise from her stomach up to her temples. She vomited on the grass, in front of her mother, who’d rushed outside when the women called out.
The girl spent the following days in bed stricken with dizziness, nausea and blood loss; she had no way of seeing Vincenzo but knew, from eavesdropping on her parents’ mealtime conversations, that he was asking after her.
A few days later, alarmed by this persistent illness, her mother called the doctor from the neighbouring village. He nodded frequently during the examination, then frowned and looked at her mother, who was waiting by the door. No sooner had he said goodbye to the family and left the house than Maria felt the rough skin of her mother’s hand burn her cheek with a slap so hard it made her head jut forward.
‘Of all the mischief you could make, you had to pick this! You haven’t finished being a daughter and you already think you can be a mother? You wretch!’
Maria turned, trying to make eye contact with her father, but he stood staring at the floor, incapable of reacting.
‘Do you really think they’ll let you marry him now?’
As her mother continued speaking, she held her arms open wide, like when she recited the Lord’s Prayer. She begged God to grant her the strength not to hurl more of her wrath at her daughter.
Her feet chilly under the white sheet, a hand on her belly, Maria remained motionless, as though shockwaves were going through her body.
‘I told you,’ her mother whispered to her husband with a moan. ‘You’ve always been too soft with her, and now look what she’s gone and done.’ Seeing that he still wasn’t responding, she turned to her daughter again. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re in for,’ she said.
‘Oh, but I do know—very well,’ Maria replied, stopping a tear on her cheek in its track with her free hand and stiffening her jaw in anger. ‘As soon as I’m better I’ll talk to him and we’ll sort everything out.’
Her mother swore in exasperation and her father put his hands over his face.
Maria, on the other hand, grew more determined. ‘We love each other, whether you like it or not. And we’ll get married even without your consent.’
‘Enough!’ her father shouted, banging his fist on the kitchen table so hard it shook. ‘Your mother’s right, we’ve been too soft with you. We gave you freedom, and you squandered it by repaying us with the worst kind of misfortune. From now on you’ll do what has to be done, or you’ll be sorry.’
Maria wanted to scream, tear her clothes off and hurl the chair by her bed against the wall. Instead, she remained motionless, sinking her front teeth into the red flesh of her lower lip until it bled. That night, she didn’t sleep a wink or stop weeping: fear of the disaster her mother had foretold added to the physical distress that prevented her from getting back on her feet.
Over the days that followed, her mother took care of her but remained distant and barely spoke to her, while her father lingered in the fields, gladly skipping meals so he wouldn’t have to see her.
Despite her family’s animosity, Maria had one simple intention: to give Vincenzo the news in person. As soon as she regained her strength, she went around the house looking for him, but he seemed to have vanished into thin air. On the first night after she’d discovered she was pregnant, the idea had flashed through her mind of suggesting they run away, but as the weeks went by, she found it increasingly hard to believe he would follow her.
When Maria was able to resume work, the other servants gave her meaningful looks; the news had already spread through the house, and perhaps even the village. One evening, after dinner, her mother said that Vincenzo had gone on a business trip with Signor Collu and wouldn’t be back for a while.
Maria was in a constant state of agitation. At night, she often dreamt of meeting him by the river: everything was the same as at their first encounter, except for his face, which was no longer inquisitive but worried. When she opened her mouth to speak to him, no sound came out of her throat and her dream would end abruptly. Maria woke up sweaty and panting, terrified by the prospect of falling back to sleep and reliving the nightmare.
When Vincenzo returned—after almost a month—Maria made up her mind to secretly follow him that night. She trudged down the garden, her swelling belly already heavy, and slapped his hand as he held the handle of the wooden gate.
‘Where have you been?’
Vincenzo turned with a start, then sighed and gave a faint smile.
‘You didn’t come to see me.’
He stared at the ground. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly.
Sensing that he’d already been told, Maria was lost for words.
‘What are you thinking of doing?’ he asked, worried.
‘Why don’t you ask me if I’m glad, instead?’ she said.
‘Are you glad?’
‘Yes. And you?’
‘Yes, me too.’
Maria looked into Vincenzo’s dark eyes and found them deeper than usual, but still as she remembered them; she stood on tiptoe and placed a light kiss on the mole between his eyebrows. They smiled, reached out with both hands and held each other tight in the dark, aware that the only true danger, at this point, was to let go.
‘I think we need to get married as soon as the child is born,’ Maria said decisively.
Vincenzo didn’t reply, and looked down again.
‘Do you love me or not?’
‘Yes, I do, but it’s complicated…’ he began.
‘No, it’s not. It’s not a secret anymore, and once the baby’s here we’ll be old enough to become a proper family.’
She looked at him with hope, but, just like in her recurring nightmares, Vincenzo had become mature and resigned: his arms were stronger, his shoulders broader, and a sparse beard covered his chin. The time they’d spent together in that house suddenly seemed like a faded memory, and Maria realised with a pang in her gut that while her heart had fuelled the hope of things working out, her mind had fuelled a greater fear.
‘My parents don’t want me to,’ he said softly.
Maria took a few seconds to respond. ‘And didn’t you try to persuade them?’
‘Yes, but it’s not easy. We have to wait.’
Vincenzo reached out to return the kiss from earlier, but Maria pulled away into the darkness. He told her to concentrate on resting and not get too tired, but she hissed that she didn’t need advice; then she turned and disappeared amid the trees in the garden.
Not once during the pregnancy did the Collus visit her at the farmhouse. Two servant women had the gall to ask her jokingly who the baby’s father was, but, seeing her silent, fierce glare, they quickly changed the subject. Maria worked as hard as she could, obeying her mother without protesting, but at the end of the seventh month, her belly made even the most ordinary movements difficult; bedridden, she felt as though she were reliving the same agony as a few months earlier. She didn’t know any more about her future now than she had then, and whenever she accidentally bumped into Vincenzo, she discerned a kind of apprehension in his eyes, as though the sky had suddenly clouded above him. He’d give Maria’s anxious questions vague replies, and every encounter would end up in a quarrel.
One morning, after seeing the servants running back and forth between the house and the garden with unusual haste, Maria interrogated her mother, who was returning to the farmhouse.
‘Are they expecting guests?’ she asked.
Her mother tried to conceal her hesitation.
‘Signor Schirru, a friend of Signor Collu, with his family. They’ve just arrived and will be tired, so we’re getting the bedrooms ready.’
As Maria showed little interest in this information, her mother cleared her throat before continuing. ‘They’ve also brought their daughter.’
Maria sat up in the bed.
‘Her name is Margherita,’ her mother said. ‘She’s a couple of years younger than you.’
Taking advantage of the silence that had come over the room, she changed the subject, but Maria wasn’t listening.
‘How long are the Schirrus staying?’
‘We don’t know yet. But you must think of the child,’ her mother said abruptly. ‘You can’t leave the farmhouse.’
‘I’ll do what I like,’ Maria replied, annoyed.
‘Your mood’s got worse again,’ her mother said distractedly. ‘It’s bound to be a girl.’
An hour later, her mother returned to the house to make up the rooms. Maria waited in bed for a few minutes, motionless; then, gathering what little strength she had, she crept unseen across the garden, towards the sitting room, impatient to see Margherita with her own eyes. She saw the two families, still around the table in the dining room, and hid behind a freesia bush to spy on them; unable to hear what they were saying, she studied their gestures instead.
The adults seemed to be moving in slow motion: the men elbowing each other between mouthfuls in a friendly way, pouring each other glasses of red wine, the women pointing at the furnishings and laughing heartily at all their husbands’ jokes. The two young people were at the opposite ends of the table, Margherita busy wiping her lips with the white cloth from next to her plate, like a sleepy little cat.
Compared to Maria, she was still a child and, apart from a slight defect in her right eyelid—which left her eye partly closed—she was very pretty. Her hair, as dark as her eyes, was gathered into a tidy braid. Her pink linen dress looked as ordinary as her, until Maria noticed the bottom part, hemmed with red-purple satin, a mark of her affluent background.
But the person who surprised her most of all was Vincenzo. He had also dressed up for the occasion and was wearing a white shirt under a velvet waistcoat and black woollen trousers; he seemed uninterested in what the adults were saying and seldom smiled, occasionally asking their young guest a question to fill the silence. Maria stared at him, unaware that she was smiling: his silent unease proved to her that his heart, awaiting the thrill of becoming a father, was elsewhere.
The meal seemed to go on forever. Feeling mild cramps in her belly, Maria decided to return to the farmhouse. Her face clouded over with every step. She understood now that the Schirrus’ visit couldn’t be just a matter of a fortuitous reunion: their arrival had been planned for a long time and Vincenzo had kept it a secret from her.
While formulating that thought, she felt another pang in her belly, this time more violent. She hunched over with pain and grabbed hold of a wooden beam in the barn, not sure whether to cry for help or wait for the spasm to stop. Until now, she’d thought of the child only as an abstract entity, without gender or weight—surely it couldn’t already be about to come? There was still a month to go.
She instantly realised that she’d been worrying about the wrong things: her body and her mind had been existing independently from each other for months. The stabbing pain wore off shortly afterwards, but less than a minute later there was another pang, followed by a third and a fourth.
Maria knew now that it wasn’t a false alarm and yelled for her mother at the top of her voice. The woman hurried her into the bedroom without asking why she’d gone walking about in her condition. Once she’d realised the urgency, her mother, with the presence of mind of a station master when a train pulls in, called a few servant women to give her a hand.
As the hours went by, the contractions increased and Maria’s bedroom turned into a war infirmary. There were a few clean towels on the bedside table; the rest were strewn on the floor, bloodstained. A damp white cloth had been placed on Maria’s forehead to keep her temperature down, and a basin with warm water sat at the foot of the bed, ready for the newborn’s first bath. Her mother made sure that on top of the chest of drawers—in addition to various candles and a pair of scissors—there was also a Gospel. Several times during labour, she gave the other women a brief nod and asked them to read a passage from the holy book out loud.
Maria gave birth to her daughter with a mixture of joy and an unfamiliar pain so powerful that she collapsed on the bed, exhausted. Once she came to, even before she’d opened her eyes, she heard the child crying in the next room.
‘I told you it was a girl,’ her mother said, stepping back into the bedroom with a bundle of white cloths in her arms. She leaned over the bed and Maria finally saw her child: her half-open eyes and the peach-coloured line of her mouth, puckered from crying, seemed to contain the mystery of a spirit that had learnt to fight even before birth. The Collus were given the news late at night, but the presence of their new guests gave them a further excuse not to visit.
As her mother sat down wearily on the kitchen chair, Maria immediately asked her about Vincenzo. Her mother replied that the Collus had already been kind enough to provide all the essentials for the birth, and they couldn’t ask for more than that.
‘He’ll come, I’m sure of it,’ the girl sighed, addressing herself more than her mother.
‘The birth was the easy part,’ the woman said, raising her eyebrows despondently.
Maria had fallen asleep again by the time Vincenzo came. He had insisted to his parents that he see Maria and the child before he went to bed.
As soon as she opened her eyes and saw him, Maria’s face lit up with joy; she strained to turn on her side and motioned him to draw near the bed. He approached slowly; as soon as Maria pulled down the sheet, revealing the baby’s sleepy face, he held his breath. Then he reached out an arm but immediately withdrew it, scared.
‘You can touch her, she won’t break,’ Maria said with a tired smile. Vincenzo, whose beardless face made him once again look too young to be a father, slowly bent his head and brushed the baby’s cheek with his lips. Then he turned to Maria.
‘What do you want to call her?’
‘Teresa,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Like the saint. Don Elia was talking about her at Mass last Sunday; she was very ill as a child and nearly died, but then lived till she was seventy-seven and was a very important saint. They even declared her a “Doctor of the Church”. Our daughter must be strong and brave, like her.’
Vincenzo nodded with a smile.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you had guests?’ Maria asked without warning, as she sat up and leaned back against the headboard. ‘How long are they staying?’ she demanded, when she realised the young man was dodging the question.
‘They’re leaving in a week.’
‘All three of them?’
He looked away and pretended to adjust the sheet around the baby.
Maria reached out and pulled on his arm. ‘We have to get married. You promised me.’
Her voice was trembling, partly from tiredness and partly from frustration; Vincenzo had never been this distant before.
‘Answer me!’ she shouted, making a fist and punching the blankets hard. The noise woke little Teresa and she started to cry. Maria’s mother came into the room and looked at both of them sternly. Without a word, she took the child in her arms and went back to the kitchen. As soon as she’d gone, Vincenzo looked at Maria with the fear of someone about to use a weapon for the first time.
‘I’ll soon come of age. I’ll have to take care of the house, of the business, and heed what people in the village say. I have to start a proper family. I have no other option.’
At these words, every trace of residual energy drained from Maria’s face. Her forehead turned pale, then her cheeks, her chin and her neck. Unable to reply, she slid under the sheets, like seaweed at the mercy of the waves. The young man kept talking in a monotonous voice, as though he’d repeated these sentences over and over to learn them by heart.
‘In any case, you and your family can stay here, there’s no problem. The child will never want for anything, I promise you. For now, think about resting, building up your strength. It’ll be good for both of you.’
Vincenzo got up from the bed and went to the door, reinforcing the distance created by his words.
‘Do you love me or not?’ Maria asked in a weak voice.
The walls of the rooms echoed with silence for too long.
‘Do you love me or not?’ she asked again, more loudly.
Vincenzo turned at the door. They exchanged a look that seemed to last an eternity; it was as if they were both screaming without making a sound. Maria saw his eyes suddenly moisten, but he turned away before it was too late and left the room.