Sacred Time (20 page)

She likes to turn corners, to come upon the unexpected, to observe faces. Shopkeepers have set out crates with vegetables and fruits. She loves hearing the Italian words. In high school, she and Victor felt embarrassed by their parents' accents, and it wasn't till they both had children that they valued the Italian customs, the language. Holding the produce in her hands makes her think of her mother, who is a goddess with food, a priestess with food; whose hands move gently, precisely, while she rhapsodizes about soaking chestnuts in red wine, skinning broccoli, separating cloves of garlic. Who becomes poetic, brilliant.

“It's where your mother's soul lives,” her father likes to say.

Victor, who has inherited that gift for food, knew he wanted to have a traveling restaurant, as he called it, when he was still in grammar school and watched two women cater his parents' tenth anniversary. At seventeen, he began working for a caterer in Throgs Neck, and he had his own catering business before he was thirty.

A scrawny woman is shouting at three boys who're playing kickball around her vegetable stand. Her ankles are frail, unsteady, and whenever the ball gets too close to her, she shakes her cane at the boys as if she were a conductor trying to prevent her orchestra from escaping. Quickly, Floria positions herself between the woman and the boys, lingers while she buys a handful of dried figs, but when she gets nudged by the cane and the woman yells at her, she walks away, eating her figs as she passes a fish market. She walks beneath washlines strung between windows, sagging with sheets and towels and underwear, all white, except for one red blouse. As a girl, Floria wanted a blouse like that.

A man comes toward her with a tiny dog on a leash. “Rat on a string,” Victor would say. He's quick to notice rats in parks, in subway tunnels; compares them to squirrels, to tiny dogs; to pigeons: flying rats. He hates the small park near their parents' house, where people toss bread crumbs to the pigeons despite his warning that feeding pigeons attracts rats. In winter, when the weeds have shrunk to the ground, you can see the rats in the petting zoo. That's Anthony's name for the park. Usually he's so quiet, but if he makes a joke, it's bizarre. Petting zoo. You just stare at the ground till you see it moving, and if you clap your hands, rats scurry away, and the dead plants shiver long after the rats have passed. It's almost like dropping a stone into a pond and watching the water ripple outward from that point.

Some of the streets don't have sidewalks, and she has to share the pavement with cars and motor scooters. When a bus advances, she presses herself flat against a shop window. Inside, on a satin cushion, lies a cameo brooch that resembles her own profile, as if she'd come across a lost ancestor. She hesitates. In Italy—so she has been warned—shopkeepers expect you to buy once you enter. Still, she goes into the shop. Buys the brooch for herself. Pins it on her collar, amazed at her extravagance. Enters other stores, as though buying the brooch had melted all frugality. Buys shampoo that smells of apples. Fresh mimosas wrapped in cellophane. Lotion three times as expensive as what she usually pays. An oval platter in a pattern of terra-cotta and dove-gray.

In the window of a shoe store, she notices elegant black pumps and asks to try them on. Though even the largest size is too tight, the saleswoman tries to force Floria's right foot into the stiff leather, her flying hands suggesting in some universal language that Floria can cut a few slits into the leather—there and there and there—to make the shoes fit.

“No,
grazie.”

But the woman is already undoing the straps of Floria's other sandal, ready to crush that foot, too.

“No,
grazie.
” Floria is certain the woman would cut off a toe or two to make those shoes fit. She can see her
motioning toward the back of the shop. “Come into our special fitting room.” Positioning her in front of a basin stained with blood where previous customers were fitted.

“No,” Floria says and gets away, her sandals loose, flapping around her. She bends to tighten them, and as she heads downhill, she values the solid connection to the ground her feet give her. To think how it used to bother her that her shoe size is larger than Malcolm's.
No more.

To find her route back to the hotel, she aims for the open sky above the bay, where sounds of pigeons and motors don't get snagged as in narrow roads but travel upward. From the bay, she can orient herself by walking along the promenade, and through the side street by the
farmacia
that leads to the hotel, and to the signora with the elusive pout that's there as long as she doesn't speak and remembers to laugh with her mouth closed.

From outside the hotel window, the ginger cat stares at Floria while she bathes. Even with cats back home—smaller specimens than these Italian cats—Floria is never quite at ease. Cats, it has seemed to her ever since she was a child, have the potential for danger that flexes beneath their sleek manners, beneath their speed that's only matched in intensity by their stillness. Whenever Bianca and Belinda begged her for a kitten, she told them cats hunted other pets—especially chicks and parakeets.

As Floria opens her new bottle of lotion, she feels watched. She glances toward the window, where a black cat crouches, as if the ginger cat had been transformed. Its black fur is long and spiked, like the hair of the American students who arrive here with backpacks after hiking the cliff path between the villages of Cinque Terre, who eat their bread and cheese on the church steps or on benches along the boardwalk.

In New York, it's still too cold for that; but here you can walk along the harbor without a coat.

And sit on ancient stone steps warmed by sun.

Or decide that tomorrow you'll hike up to Nozarego.

Floria avoids the auto road, walks uphill on ancient footpaths that weave past the back doors of farmhouses. Built of stone, some of the buildings are set into the hillside. Feeling like an intruder, she follows overgrown paths that lead into steps, steps that lead into paths that haven't been used lately, though they've twisted for centuries through these hills above the sea.

The air is tinged with the smells of salt and earth. She feels limber and strong as she hikes along terraced olive groves and vineyards. From her father she knows that the soil is rocky, hard to work. Without these stone walls it would surely wash down the steep flanks of the hills. From close up, she can see the irregular pattern of the stones set into these walls, but whenever she looks up, she sees the green hillside sectioned off by toothlike borders. Below her: the glint of the sea and the tile roofs of the simple buildings she's passed. In an olive grove, sun streaks through the trees, settles on something shiny on the path. Beads of water? A spider's web? No. As Floria bends, scents of rosemary and thyme rise toward her. Silver…a ring. No, two rings…smooth, worn. One a wedding band. The other a band of four woven knots, tarnished on the inside. Someone must have lost them here, someone with small hands, because they're too tight for Floria's ring finger.

She wants to return them to their owner, or at least leave them within the village.
The priest. The priest will know.
To keep from losing the rings, she slips them on the little finger of her left hand and, instantly, is aware of someone else's unhappiness and joy next to her skin. Still, she keeps them on her finger as she follows the path toward the church. Huge and still, a bell hangs in the opening of the tower. In front of the church is an intricate mosaic of pebbles—white and black and gray and reddish brown—that form a circle with a crown at its center, surrounded by larger circles with diamond shapes, and within those diamonds are small circles. A huge circle of white stone blossoms borders the pattern. Floria has seen mosaics like these outside several churches, each one unique and yet simple. Taken from what the land has yielded, they've been laid with skill and patience, and they're far more exquisite than mosaics assembled of gold and precious stones that impoverished the parishioners.

Eight panels, tarnished brass and flashes of amber, make up the church door. But it's locked. And there's no priest. In back of the church rises the cemetery where she has promised her father to go. Perhaps that's where the priest is. Touching the rings—
someone else's unhappiness and joy, not mine
—Floria starts up the stone path, counts twenty steps till she reaches a landing. The rest of the steps are deeper. Thirty-nine. Then three more to the side, where a gate is set into the cemetery wall.

Inside, watering cans hang from a rack next to a faucet. Floria pictures mourners in black coming here alone to visit a dead spouse or child. Filling those cans from the faucet and carrying them to the niches for the dead that are built into the walls, sealed cubicles identified by plaques and photos of the dead: a woman whose lips are thin and whose white hair is pulled into a severe bun; a man in a black suit and a tall hat sitting on a horse; a woman in her fifties who looks like a good-time girl. Quite a few of the dead have photos that don't match the years they've been alive: unlined faces and full hair, yet a lifespan of seventy or eighty.

Though some of the flowers are fresh, most are fake, their petals so faded by weather that they seem wilted, real. A few cubicles are still empty, long enough for a body.
That cavity waiting for you. Not in the earth like Bianca. What is worse, to be buried or to be sealed off? Darkness, either way. Confinement. Do you buy these final cells ahead of time, the way you buy burial plots back home? Do you visit your still-empty cubicle, staring inside whenever you climb up those steps to visit your already-dead? Do you pick the photo you want on your plaque once you're sealed within? Which one of Bianca's pictures would you choose? So hard to separate her from Belinda. Always together: in your womb; in the crib; touching each other as they sleep.

Most Sundays, Floria takes the train to Gate of Heaven and sits on the stone bench across from Bianca's grave. Malcolm goes seldom, Belinda almost never, though she used to come with her.

A bare-chested man grins from his plaque, an aging gigolo type with a golden chain on his tanned chest.
I'm the only one here who is alive. No mourners. No priest.
She stops in front of a plaque with photos of an old man and a young man—both named Giulio Mastino. Although one Giulio was born in 1891 and the other in 1945, their death years were the same: 1972. A grandfather and grandson? Did the two Giulios die together one day? In an accident? From the same illness? Or did their deaths merely occur the same year? And if so, then, who died last? It's crucial for Floria to know. Because of her father and Bianca. Because it's far more tragic for a grandfather to live through his grandchild's death. She hopes the Giulios were spared the loss of each other, that they died together.