Italy 1972
A lba’s heart was full. Spring in Incantellaria was the most beautiful spring in the world. Small birds hopped on the tables and chairs outside the trattoria and the sun bathed the sea below it in the gentle, translucent light of morning. Alba wiped her hands on her apron. She wore a simple wraparound dress imprinted with blue flowers, and flip-flops. She had painted her toenails with pink varnish she and Cosima had bought at the dwarfs’ shop. She had painted Cosima’s too, which had taken far longer than it should have, thanks to her moving her toes and giggling. Alba ran a hand across her forehead. It was hot there in the trattoria and she worked hard, buying supplies, setting tables, serving customers. She had even learned how to cook. She had never believed herself capable of preparing delicious meals. Even Immacolata was impressed. Beata congratulated her in her quiet, dignified manner, telling her that cooking was in her blood, that she’d carry on the Fiorelli tradition and its good name long after they had all passed on.
She put a hand in the pocket of her apron and pulled out a used tissue and a white card. She turned the card over and looked at Gabriele’s name engraved on it. She stared at it for a moment, there by the window, overlooking the beach. After a while she put it back. Her hair had grown a little. It was now long enough to tie into a short ponytail. It wasn’t that she wanted to grow it, simply that she couldn’t be bothered to cut it. She lifted her hands and drew it back into a ribbon. As she did so, she heard the distant motor of a boat. She raised her eyes to the wall, by the door.
There were three sketches in simple wooden frames. The first was of a woman’s face. It was gentle, innocent, with a smile full of secrets and an indefinable sadness behind the eyes. The second was a mother and child. The expression of love on the mother’s face was naked and unguarded, free of all secrets, save those of a mother’s desires for her child. The third was a reclining nude. In this final portrait Valentina was flushed and sensual and wanton, embodying all the vices of earthly pleasure and always as mysterious as the sea. Yet no one but Alba noticed those portraits anymore. They blended with the walls of the trattoria like the hanging onions and garlic, ornamental plates, and religious iconography. Often she walked past them without a sideways glance.
The sound of the motorboat grew louder. It rattled into the silence of the sleepy cove, disturbing the air, sending the birds into the sky. The sense of excitement quivered in the atmosphere like a pebble thrown into a smooth pond, sending ripples far and wide. She walked outside to stand beneath the awning, a wicker basket of apples hanging on her arm. A wave of anticipation began to expand in her heart, slowly at first and then with increasing speed, until she was hurrying across the sand, carried along by the swell of it. The ribbon fell out of her hair, leaving it to fly about her face and shoulders like threads of fine silk. Then she stood breathing heavily so that her breasts rose and fell, accentuated by the low décolletage of her dress. Her face was clear and perfect, like the night sky when one is in the middle of the ocean. She smiled, not the broad, bovine smile of the townsfolk who now emerged from their homes to see who had come, but a gentle curling of the lips that reached her eyes and caused them to narrow slightly. A mere whisper of a smile. So subtle that it made her beauty almost hard to swallow. The boat drew up and a young man descended. His eyes met the strange pale eyes of the woman with the basket. She stood in the crowd yet seemed to have a space of her very own, as if she remained a little apart. Her loveliness was such that her image seemed more pronounced than the rest. It was then that he lost his heart. There on the quayside of the small fishing town of Incantellaria he let it go willingly. He didn’t know then that it was gone forever, that he would never get it back.