My mother settled quickly into the life of the boat. Though it was only mid-March each day dawned warm and cloudless, and the air and sun seemed to bring back to my mother a warm radiance, as if the crisp blue of the sky and sea had seeped inside her. She had soon made a number of friends: Mr. D’Amico, a bent, bespectacled man in the room across from ours who was going to America to visit his son, and who greeted me every morning when we went up to breakfast with him with a ‘Salve, dottore!’ and a hearty salute; a honeymoon couple down the hall who asked every day after my mother’s health, as if nothing could be more precious or fragile than a woman in maternity; a grey-eyed German from first class who spoke only broken Italian but who bought my mother an English grammar book in the magazine store and gave her lessons sometimes on the sun deck or at the side of the ship’s tiny indoor pool. For the first day or two we did not see Antonio Darcangelo again; but then a box of chocolates arrived from the gift shop with the enigmatic note, ‘My deepest apologies for Naples—I had not realized the full extent of the problem. Antonio.’ The next day the ship docked in a small port overlooking a dusty sun-drenched town of white adobe, and Antonio appeared at our door.
‘We’ve stopped to pick up some oranges and the captain has given all the officers four hours of shore leave. Will la signora and her son join me for a Spanish lunch?’
Thereafter we began to see much of Antonio. He’d slip away from his rounds sometimes to join my mother and me on the sun deck, regaling us with gifts of sweets and ice cream; occasionally he came to our table in the dining hall, bringing a special dessert over for me from first class. Around the other crewmen Antonio was always formal and aloof, issuing orders with a crisp precision; but my mother would tease him.
‘Heil, Herr Kommandant! Always so stiff! The war was over more than a dozen years ago, you know.’
She got him once to take us down to the engine room, despite his protest that women were not allowed to go below. We looked down from a high railing into a dim cavern that stank of steam and coal; everything seemed larger than life, as if made for giants, the huge pipes that ran overhead and along the walls, the great outsize boilers that rose up like vast oxen. Below, men in grey overalls stoked coal or watched over gauges and valves. One of them looked up and caught sight of my mother.
‘Oh, signó! Look, the third mate brought his mistress to visit us!’
The other men had turned to look up now.
‘Oh, Andò, you made quick work of this one, eh? Two children! Crist’ e Giusepp’!’
But Antonio had taken my mother by the arm.
‘Let’s go, Cristina. I told you I didn’t want you to come down here.’
‘There’s no need to get angry,’ my mother said. ‘You’re the boss, why don’t you tell them what’s what?’ But Antonio had already hustled us back to the stairwell.
‘You can’t say anything to those men. They live like animals down there.’
‘I don’t know,’ my mother said. ‘One or two of them seemed rather handsome. Why is it that all the handsome men go out to sea?’
But Antonio had flushed with anger.
‘Everything is a joke to you, isn’t it? And the baby you’re carrying, is that a joke? Maybe you know all about men like those down there.’
My mother pulled suddenly away from him, her smile gone.
‘We’ll find our own way upstairs.’
But that evening there was another box of chocolates for my mother, and a bottle of wine; and the next day she and Antonio were laughing together again on the sun deck, while around us the sea lay bright blue and placid, stretching away in every direction, it seemed, to the very ends of the earth.