Chapter 11 - Tuscany in May
As the weeks skipped past, Angela blossomed. Her middle aged body, not long before, was plump and sagging. The winter had left her with a pale complexion. That and so many years living as a recluse. Hidden in her home. A prisoner in Piazza Rimazza, away from the sun and light, existing in her own darkness. Even her beautiful long brown hair, once so shiny and fresh, had for too long been kept up in a bun. Wound as tight as a ship’s rope. She rarely made herself up and she had stopped looking at herself in the mirror. She was too afraid of what she would discover.
The woman that Angela had become had almost nothing to do with the girl she once was. But the part she could never even imagine was the most pitiful of all. Her big brown, oval eyes, that always shone so bright, like the northern star, tingling in darkness and in light, had dimmed. Her eyelids were heavy, her eyebrows too bushy and her pupils spent. It was as though there was no life left in those eyes. Not even for Giuseppe. Not for anyone. And her parents saw it, but never said a thing. Not even to each other. Giacomo also saw it and instantly recognized it. So he knew he was beating her. That son of a bitch. But Giacomo also did nothing. He had stopped fighting his brother a long time before.
But as April turned into May, in that short month, as Tuscany went from Spring into summer, so Angela rediscovered her womanliness. And what a fine woman she was becoming. For the woman that wandered Girotondo in the beautiful month of May stunned everyone. Her curves were returning. Those high hips found their swing, swaying from side to side, mesmerizing in the early summer heat. Her hair was loose again, swinging in the sun’s rays. Her long brown mane, glistened, the most perfect hazelnut. She had it cut and colored so that it remained off her wonderful face and yet always rested on her angular shoulders.
And her skin was no longer pale. It became tanned and taught in the early summer sun. Even her belly that never recovered from carrying her two children now shrank. It curved in from her hips and flattened around the belly button. But this she had worked on. For Angela had rediscovered the sea.
Bruno had always despised the seaside. Angela would tell herself that he was a farmer at heart. A farmer with no farm, but nonetheless a farmer. And so he hated the sea. He would stop them from going because he said it would be too crowded, too full of common people. And he was nearly a Conte after all. So, the beautiful seaside resorts, a mere hours drive away were kept from them. They may as well have been on another continent.
And so, two weeks after Bruno died, Angela got in their car and drove to the sea. She felt as though she was taking this journey for the first time. Given how long it was since she had last taken it she may as well have. But the trip from hillsides to seaside was the better for it. It was a beautiful day. She left at around 11am, just as the sun was heating up. The sky was hazy and pale blue. The flowers were out. Purples and reds and blues merged into each other along the roadside. Then they blended with beige cornfields and green pastures that wove into budding vineyards and young, green olive trees. The road wound all the way down the hills until it cascaded onto the seas edge.
Angela gasped as she saw Talamone again. The long bay swept up to the old seaside fort that hovered protectively over the smallest fishing port, just large enough to take ancient warships. After all they were not very big in those days. A dirty beach, perhaps two miles long, sweeps around in a semi circle and then ends with the fort. And there stands the proud village of Talamone. Now home to a few locals and more weekenders from Rome or Florence or Perugia. Villa’s dot the outskirts, surrounded by cliffs and brush and rocky soil. But walk in Talaomone’s miniature square and you see it all. You see the islands and the dirty old beach and the Tuscan hills behind and Monte Argentario in front.
And when Angela breathed in the air, as she drank her coffee at the little outdoor café nestled under the town’s walls, she smelt the sea. The Mediterranean sea that smells of salt and fish and wind. A warm wind that travels up Italy’s western coast all the way from Africa. As if it carries the vast sub Saharan expanses with it. And sometimes it does. Sometimes the wind carries Africa’s desert sand all the way to Tuscany, sprinkling it on her beaches like a blind man accidentally littering the road. As she inhaled the aroma’s of the Mediterranean sea mixed in with that of her dark Italian coffee, the stark contrast made her nerves tingle. She sat more upright than she had for a very long time and she breathed more of these smells in and she saw more of her surroundings than she could ever imagine.
And she watched the locals go about their lives with a passion. Her eyes acting as cameras filming everything. Leaving out no details. Examining fishermen and yacht handlers and old woman and wild cats nervously out hunting. She saw the policemen walking out of their miniature police station right next to the port. Three of them marched together like old school friends, confident and cocky, chattering incessantly until they disappeared behind her table, to stand at the bar and to shoot down an espresso and position themselves to admire Angela from behind.
She could not hear them as they exclaimed her virtues and jested with each other over who should chat to her first. But, she didn’t give them the chance and instead took herself back to the car and to the beaches surrounding Monte Argentario. Monte Argentario is even more special than it’s name describes. This is a mountain perched in the sea, connected to the Tuscan mainland by two long slithers of land, with sea in the middle and long sandy beaches either side. And this mountain reminded her of her own Monte Amiato, perhaps it’s cousin, now living by the sea, sitting proudly and looking out over the islands of Gianutri and Giglio and Elba and ultimately even to Corsica.
Angela smiled to herself as she walked the northern beach of Gianela. Staring up to Talamone and Western Tuscany, she felt instantly younger as she walked barefoot along the soft, golden sand. It was mid week. There was no one else on the beach. So Angela got to be on her own, free, alive, flowing in the wind. At lunch she would strip herself to a bikini, comfortable that no one would see, so she could tan herself and exercise her middle age excesses away. Sit ups on that empty beach through the early warmth of April gave her back her curves and her colour and herself.
In the early afternoon she would write her stories down. She would write about a life beyond the horizons to the West of Italy and imagine island tales and African adventures and Andalusian fables. She even wrote as far as her western horizon could possibly take her, to the gangsters of New York. The Italian gangsters now settled in this new country, with women as her heroines, fighting to survive on the streets and in their bedrooms.
And her writing changed. Her life’s secret hobby was somehow no longer secret, even though she never shared her stories with anyone and she always hid them in the walk in freezer. Yet, now she could write about what ever she wanted to and she could write on the beach. In the open air, in her bikini, with the sun’s rays warming the arch of her back. So her stories spoke of grander and grander heroines achieving greater and greater journeys. Going way beyond the norm. Testing the female spirit to the utmost. Revealing a kind of woman almost unheard of in Italy or even Europe, yet born of Angela’s mind and new found strength and resolve. So she wrote and she wrote and she wrote. And the more she wrote, the stronger and freer she became. Her writing became her passion and her soul.
And as the early afternoon sun drifted and the sea breeze rose, Angela would dress herself and pull out her camera. She had spoilt herself one day, when she was in a nearby town window shopping. She spotted this state of the art, semi-professional camera and she remembered her old school hobby. Once she even won a school prize for her photography of the vineyards and olive groves and fields with Monte Amiato as the permanent backdrop. She called it “the many colours of my favorite mountain” and everyone gasped at her pictures. They were breath taking. So now she photographed Monte Argentario too. The mountain and her many moods. The mountain surrounded by sun, blue sky, wispy clouds or hazy fogs. And she even stayed once for the sunset. The deep red Tuscan sunset that surrounded Monte Argentario as though a dark red wine had been decanted over it. It was as though a heavy Brunello now stained the mountain for good, glowing brighter in the dying sun. Heating the rocks and drowning the houses. Leaving the inhabitants hung over the next morning. Maybe that’s why the locals get up so late. It’s the blood red Tuscan sunset.
And so it was that Angela rediscovered her writing and her photography. And that was how Angela rediscovered herself and how she rediscovered the many faces of Tuscany. So as April skipped into May, Angela and her surroundings blossomed.
Day by day it became easier and easier to conduct her charade. She got better and better at living her lie. She changed skins like a desert snake and her forked tongue mesmerized her neighbors and her family. And as her confidence grew, her role changed. As her body and face returned to it’s former beauty, she became both the female temptress and the male. She managed Bruno’s affairs. She represented him at family events. She socialized with the locals as a Grimaldi should, more landlord than neighbour. And she even read Bruno’s latter works at his reading circle. She would shudder sometimes at how awful his writing was. No wonder the critics hated him. Yet dutifully she would read.
And daily Angela spun her tale of Bruno’s recovery or lack of. Daily she came up with little stories to feed her neighbors and family members with, as if she were throwing bread at pigeons. And they took her tit bits in and waited hungrily for the next morsels. She successfully deceived them all. That is, nearly all of them. For Angela’s father and Giacomo knew deep, deep down that there was something terribly wrong. That things were not as Angela made them out to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment