Moving Days by Linda Falcone by The Florentine

Moving Days by Linda Falcone

Editing: Cheryl Pappas Editorial consultant: Marco Badiani Cover design: Leo Cardini

ISBN 978-88-902434-7-9 2010 B’Gruppo srl, Prato Collana The Florentine Press Riproduzione vietata 1° edizione: October 2010 2° edizione: December 2010

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

da has wide metallic eyes that easily narrow, and the more slit-like they become, the more open they are to what goes on in this world. When I told her that Tommaso and I were not meant to be together, she had only nodded. Ada isn’t threatened by life change. But she will still look you up and down the way only Italian women can and decide in an instant just what you need warning about. ‘Either stay or go,’ she said finally. ‘Do not do both.’ Her statement, accompanied by a pinch of my forearm, smarted as if it were antiseptic poured on a wound of which I wasn’t aware. It took me six months to take her advice. So, at the end of January, I planned to leave Florence for Venice to stay with her, precisely during what Venetians call ‘the blackbird’ days—the year’s most frigid weekend, when blackbirds hide in chimneytops to wait for better weather. ‘I’m coming home for a while,’ I had told her. ‘Tommaso and I need space.’ Only then did I understand that she thought I was a fool to do it. My godmother, Ada, christened me with water once and has no qualms about pouring it over my head even now,

anytime she thinks I need dosing. ‘Space is for silly people who can’t find room in their hearts,’ she said. When Ada talks, her words are cautiously spent, but when she does finally choose them, they ring with bell-like clarity. After her speech has finished its echo, you find silence there. ‘Are you saying you won’t have me?’ I asked, used to her ways. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll have you. I’ll have you ‘til you wear out the soles of your shoes looking for the next place.’ The words she chose to welcome me back to her house may have been the same she’d said to my mother years ago. Ada had hosted us when mother and I moved to Italy after an American divorce ugly enough to merit ocean travel. Ten years old and with fewer Italian words than clothes in my suitcase, I decided straight off that Ada could be trusted, for though she moved with nerve and speed, her sentences had halting spaces between them, put there especially so I could hear how talk was made in her country. That first year, Ada taught me to speak, and Enrico, her son, taught me all things essential to Venetian living. Mother and I were guests in their spare room, which felt safe and spacious after the sickening thrill of my first plane ride and far more silent than our old house had been. In Ada’s Venetian home you could only hear the sounds of boats knocking together in the canal below. Perhaps it was in search of that quiet that mother had decided to tear the roots of our American life and take me back to her childhood country. My weak-skinned mother, sometimes shrill and sometimes feathery, shared that room with me for five months. Until she decided she didn’t want me anymore and left me with a goodbye kiss that I had been too sleepy to properly receive. And although I can’t say that I sensed her leaving before it happened, a part of me had already pinpointed the moment she decided.

We were sitting at the table, the four of us, listening to Enrico tell a squid-catching story, when she said, ‘Ada is home to you, Emma.’ Her voice was so stony and full of weighted gray that I recognized the sentence as truth. It was her final argument, cold enough to mean she had already decided. Ada found her gaze across the table and did not speak, but I remember the look they shared. A flit of the eyes only. And Enrico, the man of the house, answered instead of me, ‘Not just Ada is, we all are.’ Sometimes he acted boldly and called his mother by her first name like I did, and there was never a time he failed to get scolded for it. This time, his mother did not scold him. That worried me, too. My mother had been right, anyway. Ada never has stopped taking care of me, and as a child, she never reprimanded me less than her own son. Enrico still thinks it shows that not all family is blood-related. Enrico knows how to look on the bright side of things. In fact, he is the bright side of things. Even then I knew it: he was the first naturally happy person I’d ever met. During those first years, and even in the months before my mother left, I was sick often, hungry for all that was familiar and nauseous with the perspiring newness of an ancient city reflected in stagnant green water. Mother was still bruised by marks that no longer showed on her skin, and Ada—well, Ada’s upright melancholy would take me years to uncover—but Enrico was different: a boy, mischievous and celebratory, whose sense of adventure had not a single shadow in it. It would take years to truly appreciate all the reasons why Ada was home to me, but Enrico’s role was self-appointed and far more immediate. He was my education. We were expected to study together, that’s how it started, if studying is what you’d call the great pains he took to distract me from

our books. He could barely read a word for his age and I was equally remedial with more than a decade of American living smelling up my skin and too much English clogging the clarity between us. Enrico knew everything: which fish were lake and which were lagoon, which wrinkled lady squeezed cheeks and which supplied black liquorice drops. Enrico knew how to knot boat ropes and capture sweet clams. He also taught me whom to fear: the loud retarded boy who sat by the well in Santi Apostoli and screamed if you peeked at him, the goatish pharmacy man with cataracts who breathed through rotten teeth. Enrico hated school with the same intensity with which he loved life and Ada fretted often about it. Two years my senior, he’d flunked second and fourth grade, which made his mother constantly search for creative ways to fill the holes in his brain. For this purpose, the stereo became friend to all of us. Ada mostly played opera from it, because she was older than other mothers and only knew music from ancient times. The year was divided into Vivaldi’s four seasons and the Barber of Seville knew everybody’s business. But the real news was that her music was clear to me, clean everywhere language was tangled—its roar, its cloudlike voices, they built a stair to somewhere higher. That music had more of a heartbeat than most hearts ever had and with it she taught that love climbs walls at midnight and that the pursuit of honor is always preceded by the clashing of swords. We had little in common, Enrico and I, except the friendship our mothers had shared and the fact that our fathers had both been permanently stolen—his by death and mine by drink. Though only twelve years old and not at all a man, Enrico understood that right away. As an adult, Enrico only speaks dialect and is seldom expected to express ideas with particular clarity. But his eyes reflect honesty and recognize it. And his actions, not his

ideas, have the firm clarity of one who shouldered the childhood pain of being underestimated. It was Enrico who picked me up at the station the night I moved from Florence, even if the trip had been a mere threehour train ride. With a single bag and the vaporetto still running, I could have very well arrived by public waterbus. But a person who’s grown up in a city with nearly 400 bridges knows that some must be crossed with a friend as witness. So he came for me, to lower my suitcase into his dilapidated boat and talk to me in a calm voice once the canal spray lessened. Enrico found a rotting post near the entrance of his mother’s alley and roped the boat to its parking spot, with hands arthritic from the cold. We would not resist sitting there for more than five minutes, but that boat was the only real sliver of privacy in the whole of the district. Even the stairwell to Ada’s flat echoed conversations straight to the top floor. So, he slid down beside me, leaning against the boat’s flaking insides, swearing at the paint he was supposed to sand one day once the weather turned humane again. I sat and studied my friend, all arms and legs, stuffed like a jackin-the-box in the boat’s bottom. His hair was longer since the last time I’d been home, and it grew in every direction, in untamed curls that were otherwise perfect. His maker had spent many minutes there, twisting each lock, so that little time had been left to perfect the rest of his face. But Enrico smiled so often and his features moved so readily that he tricked women into thinking he was beautiful. The fact that he did virtually nothing with this knowledge actually made it so. ‘So how did the trip go?’ he asked, finally seated, leaning his chin on his knees. ‘Fine.’ ‘Ada said you would look thin.’

I smiled. ‘Has she ever not thought it?’ ‘True,’ he grinned. We were going to freeze to death. Nonetheless, I breathed in Venice in response to his charitable smile, as if the city were air, not land or water. Its smell, like rancid watermelons left out to rot, is the closest thing I have to home. ‘What number is it?’ Enrico asked, the pitch of his question as deep as my breath had been. ‘Of what?’ ‘Of moves.’ ‘Twelve,’ I said. ‘Just counting since coming to Italy.’ ‘Of course,’ he said, giving another half smile, ‘just counting those.’ Then he reached over and touched my knee gently, to get me to look at him squarely. But I was already paying attention. ‘Some day, Blackbird, are you going to build a nest somewhere?’ ‘Oh please, Enrico, don’t make me sick. I just got here.’ He smiled again but not without thoughtfulness. ‘I just mean you’re allowed, Emma. Even though, you know what I think—Florence was only good for very permanent or very temporary people. You’re neither.’ I nodded. I had stayed in the city’s womb for six years. And for me, it’s like that: Italian cities are birthing grounds, not places, and once you’re in, there’s very little you can do to leave, except be born. That said, my leaving Florence had been a cesarean section—a deep, sharp cut along the lower part of my belly, and no amount of reasoning seemed to provide an adequate amount of anesthesia. ‘How did you leave it with Tommaso?’ Enrico wanted to know. ‘In the worst way possible.’ ‘You fought badly?’ ‘Yes. And we love each other still.’

One side of Enrico’s darkened face betrayed his opinion and that side of his mouth flit downwards, the way it always did when he disagreed. ‘You think that distance will bring you clarity?’ ‘I don’t know, Enrico. But I just couldn’t stay anymore.’ I have a face that gives away all of me at once and I raised my chin higher to keep it from happening. He sighed. Enrico’s eyes are the color of lagoon water and capable of looking through to the skeleton of a woman. My friend sees with artist vision that focuses on structure first, noticing color and form only later. He didn’t exactly disapprove of my leaving, but that didn’t change the fact that Enrico was a fan of nearness, not distance. Or the fact that he had already seen me pack too many bags. There was a moment of silence and then the simultaneous decision to go inside. ‘I’m staying for dinner,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the three of us.’ ‘I’m glad,’ I said, even gladder than I let on. Ada would not question me, but three people are better than two, on a night when you can’t think of a thing to say in this world. We were late and Ada was waiting. She doesn’t believe in energy-saving light bulbs and her kitchen was yellow and warm with wasted wattage. ‘Wash your hands, the both of you,’ she ordered as soon as we entered. ‘The risotto has turned to glue.’ That was hello and the reason I most love her. You could be a misplaced person, having just uprooted your whole adult life, appearing after sundown with a suitcase on her stairs—and that was still hello. The rice was not glue, but my mouth still felt heavy with silence. Finally, I broke it, with an announcement that neither of them really needed. ‘Well, I’m 32, without a penny in my pocket and home.’

In response to my announcement, Ada got up and went to the kitchen, returning with a plate and a declaration of her own. ‘I found these artichokes at the store today. Cost an eye from the head out of season, but I bought them. With what he charges, the grocer may as well put money in bread and eat it as a sandwich.’ Enrico laughed and looked at me earnest, ‘Em, I don’t have a penny either.’ I gave a half smile, ‘Believe me, I had no doubts.’ Ada shook her head, ‘Squanderers the both of you.’ No smile softened the statement. But Ada was soft on the inside, where it counted. Enrico winked across the table in case I’d forgotten, but he didn’t need to. I knew.