Under a Sardinian Sky. Sara Alexander
terraces on the top floors of their narrow, old homes, his new creation had a veranda closed in with large, square glass panes. He erected a practical construction large enough to keep his family warm and dry. Tomas chose not to paint over the stark gray of the concrete with the pastel earthen hues of the homes that surrounded it. To his mind a house served a purpose, no more. It was neither an extension of his artistry nor something to gawk at, admire, or covet. He grew up shoeless, darting along the dirt alleys before his family’s one-room cottage. Now his children had a large terrace of their own, granite stairs, concrete walls, and a kitchen with a table that sat twenty. Tomas sweated several times his own weight in Africa for it; his pride was justified and unabashed.
On the farm, it seemed like everything and everyone grew. Carmela attributed this, in part, to the fact that Nonna Icca, her father’s mother, never joined the women there. She preferred to remain in town and guard the house. In Nonna Icca’s mind, the walls had hidden chinks through which all the towns’ gossips would peer at their lives like vultures, waiting to peck at scandal.
She had lived in the house since Carmela was born on a stormy Christmas Eve night in 1930. Icca’s screams overpowered her daughter-in-law’s as she cried out to God to forsake them from the oncoming apocalypse. Although thunder rumbled the house, the first sounds Carmela heard were that of her grandmother banging her bony fists on the wooden doors to ward off what she deemed to be Lucifer’s battalion. Being surrounded with four hard-working sons, a manicured daughter who was spared manual work of every sort, and a gaggle of, mostly, obedient grandchildren did not allay Icca’s bitterness. She sat, day after day, atop her raffia stool by the front entrance of the house, strategically placed to witness all incoming and outgoing human traffic, clutching the rosary in one hand and her broken heart in the other. By now, she ought to have been in the Promised Land. Instead, her husband had returned from the Americas, gold in his pockets, Panama Canal dirt under his fingernails, whereupon death visited him with appendicitis. A month shy of their departure for New York, he was playing cards with the angels while she bit back her tears.
Carmela tore her gaze away from the window. Lucia had begun industrious production of gnocchetti from the lump of pasta dough, big enough to satisfy several herds of farm help.
“Icca’s a tyrant and that’s the end of it, Mari’,” Lucia began, as she pinched tiny pieces of the dough and rolled them over a corrugated metal plate. It left circular indentations over the small pasta shapes. “She can stick her snide remarks where the sun don’t shine—and I don’t mind saying that to her face, dried-up old sow.”
Maria never commented on gossip, neither admonished nor agreed. This morning, however, as Lucia preached, Carmela noticed her mother’s white cheeks flushed the pale pink of crushed rose petals. Maria heaved the oversized copper milk pan off the wood fire. Carmela stood up and grabbed one of the round handles from her. They placed it down on an iron stand in the middle of the room to begin preparation of salted ricottas.
“I told Peppe,” Lucia continued, flicking the little pasta shapes that dropped onto a floured tray like raindrops on a tin roof, “I didn’t marry you to be anybody’s serving girl. I’d go to a lady’s house and get paid for that. Six children he has from me. Six little piglets that need feeding. Who in Jesus’s name is supposed to do all that and look after mother hen up at yours as well?”
“Lucia . . .” Maria interjected, as a feeble courtesy. On the subject of Icca, Lucia would never have her opinions altered.
Carmela brought the wooden cheese molds to her mother, and together they soaked their forearms in a bucket of water and patted them dry with care.
Lucia went on. “We move to our own house, and Icca’s asking me to do her washing! ‘Too many dirty sheets coming out of your and your daughter’s quarters,’ I says. ‘Stained sheets have no place in a spinster’s house.’ Unless, she shits herself in her sleep? Don’t know how you stand for it.”
Lucia’s baby squirmed into a hungry cry. “Jesus, that child is never satisfied, greedy like his father.” She pulled him up and, in one brisk motion, flipped up her shirt and attached him to her ample bosom. The room tipped into silence but for the contented suckling of his tiny lips. Carmela and Maria dipped their hands into the warm whey till it reached their elbows. They filled the small, bowl-sized mold and gently raised it to the surface. Carmela had performed this ritual with her mother since she was a child. Working alongside Maria set a high standard for becoming a wife herself. Carmela’s discipline supported her well—any dress she made would be finished with impeccable precision and an eye for detail.
Lately, though, the force with which her imagination swept over her, and her inability to settle on one task for too long, unsettled her. She attributed her distracting daydreams to wedding flutters and tried her best to think little on it. Over the past few weeks, at her godmother’s studio, where she had apprenticed since she was thirteen, she was bombarded with ideas for dresses and trousseaus. The pictures flashed in her mind as clear and colorful as those in a high-gloss magazine spread. Her hand could barely keep up with the pencil careening over her notebooks. It raced across the page, trying to manifest those visions, with the frantic energy of a child leaping to catch the swinging string of a beloved balloon before it floats up into the clouds, forever out of reach.
Carmela looked back down into the pan, lifted out the full mold, and squeezed out the excess liquid. Then she placed it upon the stone ledge by the back wall and topped it with a circular piece of sanded wood and a slab of granite to press the ricotta down into shape.
“Love a man with appetite, Mari’!” Lucia boomed, breaking into laughter. The fat of her arms jiggled. “I could feed half the town with this left tit. Given up on the right, the little devil almost bit her off, I told him straight—you bite me one more time and I’ll bite you like the wickedest donkey on the farm and you’ll know it, all right.”
“He’s two months old, Lucia. . . .” Maria said, reaching back down into the warm pan.
“You got to be strong to a man, Mari’, or he’ll walk all over you. Mark my words, Carmela—you fill a shirt and have a waist as narrow as a new olive—best listen to your Zia Lucia before your fiancé fills you with ideas!”
To Carmela, Maria was strength personified. Her mother never tired but devoted herself to the work of providing for her family with a very private, near religious ardor. There was not a minute in the day when her mother’s hands lay idle. Even in the deep quiet of the afternoon, her fingers would be racing over some skirt or shirt to be mended. From the time the sun rose, her mother glided from one task to the next with a grace that Carmela could not even begin to imagine imitating. When Tomas exploded over the hot topic of any particular day, Maria listened, unswerving, letting his rancor wash over her like water, suffusing his steam with wordless patience, neither intimidated nor defiant. If that was not strength, then what was?
Lucia threw her head back when she laughed, sung like no one was listening, cared little for what anyone thought of her. She would jump up and twirl at the first sound of music; life danced through her. She told Peppe what she thought and could scream into a fight at the slightest provocation. She drove her truck to and from the local markets, unafraid of the rough roads, happy to roll up her sleeves and fiddle with the engine as needed. She appeared to be her husband’s equal. Her childhood began in the orphanage, but Lucia refused to let life swallow her up. She was a survivor.
But was all this passion, this vociferous philosophizing over the battle to be won, a testimony to strength? Wasn’t finding the beauty in the everyday rhythms of life, committing with an open heart to one man and the children he helped a woman bear without jostling for control, true strength? Wasn’t this the faith that everything was built on? After all, Carmela thought, how ridiculous it was for humans to fight off God’s plan, succumbing to the illusion of control. Why then, in that very union of marriage, made under God’s eyes, was control so important? Was not this grappling ungodly? Sinful, even? How far could love take you if, in the end, it was a battleground? Few years had passed since everyone agreed that the futility and horror of war was not to be forgotten or repeated. Why, then, invite it into your own home?
It seemed to Carmela that striving to put a