The Shoemaker's Wife(11)
Throughout the day, she pictured her father as he came up the mountain, imagining each curve of the road, the rest stops where Cipi ate oats and Papa enjoyed a smoke. She imagined each clop of the hooves that led her father safely back up the pass, one after the other, like the consistent ticking of a clock. In her mind’s eye, she willed Marco home to Schilpario, safely, surely, and without incident, and with the promised three lire in his pocket that would get his family through the long winter.
Enza knew how lucky she was, and how sad it was that everyone on the mountain did not share that luck. Her papa had done a good job, and he had been paid. For now, all was well. When she dreamed that night, she would imagine the young widow who suffered the loss of her husband and now her sons. Poverella, she thought.
Chapter 3
A SILVER MIRROR
Uno Specchio d’Argento
Six winters had passed since Caterina Lazzari left her sons at the convent.
The terrible winter of 1909–10 finally came to an end, like a penance fulfilled. Spring arrived, bringing a daisy sun and warm breezes, thawing every cliff, trail, and ridge, releasing rushing streams of clear, cold water down the mountainside like flowing blue hair ribbons on a girl.
It seemed that all the residents of Vilminore had come outside and taken a moment to lift their faces to the apricot sky, absorb the warmth of it. There was much to do, now that spring had arrived. It was time to open the windows, roll up the rugs, wash the linens, and prepare the gardens.
The nuns of San Nicola never rested.
When Caterina did not return for them the summer after she left them at San Nicola, her sons had learned not to count on her promises. They let the disappointment wash over them like the waterfall showers they took in the lake above Vilminore. When they finally received a letter from their mother, cloistered in a convent without a return address, they stopped begging Sister Ercolina to let them go to her, since that was clearly impossible. Instead, they vowed to find her as soon as their time at San Nicola was done. No matter how long it might take, Eduardo was determined to bring his mother back to Vilminore. When the sisters told them Caterina was “getting better,” they believed she would. They imagined their mother in the care of the nuns in some faraway place, because Sister Ercolina assured them this was true.
Besides the upkeep and care of the convent and church of San Nicola, the sisters ran the local school, Parrocchia di Santa Maria Assunta e di San Pietro Apostolo. They were responsible for the housekeeping of the rectory and providing meals for the new village priest, Don Raphael Gregorio. They also did his laundry, maintained his vestments, and took care of the altar linens. The nuns were no different from any of the working people on the mountain, except that their padrone wore a Roman collar.
The Lazzari brothers, now teenagers, were as much a part of convent life as the nuns themselves. They were aware of all they missed, but instead of grieving for their father and pining for their mother, they learned to use their emotions to fuel their ambition. They learned how to fend off sadness and quell despair by staying busy like the sisters of San Nicola. This life lesson, learned by the sisters’ example, would carry them through.
The Lazzari brothers made themselves indispensable to the nuns, just as Caterina had hoped. Ciro had taken over most of the chores assigned to Ignazio Farino, the old convent handyman, who, at nearly sixty, was looking for a pipe, a shade tree, and an endless summer. Ciro rose early and worked until night, tending the fireplaces, milking the cow, churning the butter, twisting fresh braids of scamorza cheese, chopping wood, shoveling coal, washing windows, scrubbing floors, while Eduardo, the scholar with a gentle nature, was chosen to work as a secretary in the convent office. His artful penmanship was put to use answering correspondence and placing marks on report cards. Eduardo also hand-printed the programs for holiday masses and high holy days in elegant calligraphy. Eduardo, certainly the more devout of the two brothers, also rose at dawn to serve the daily mass in the chapel and ring the chimes in early evening to summon the sisters to vespers.
Ciro was a strapping fifteen-year-old, having grown to nearly six feet tall. The convent diet of eggs, pasta, and wild game had made him robust and healthy. With his sandy brown hair and blue-green eyes, he made a vivid contrast to the dark, regal Italian natives of these mountains. His thick eyebrows, straight nose, and full lips were characteristic of the Swiss, who resided just over the border to the north. Ciro’s temperament, however, remained pure Latin. The sisters had tamed his quick temper by forcing him to sit quietly and say the rosary. He learned persistence and discipline by their example, and humility from his desire to please the women that took him in. There wasn’t anything Ciro wouldn’t do for the sisters of San Nicola.
Without social connections, opportunities, or a family business to inherit, Ciro and Eduardo had to create their own luck. Eduardo studied Latin, Greek, and the classics with Sister Ercolina as Ciro maintained the buildings and gardens. The Lazzari boys were convent-trained in every respect, their excellent manners learned at the table with the nuns. They had grown up without the benefit of close family, which had robbed them of much but also bestowed a certain self-sufficiency and maturity.
Ciro balanced a long wooden dowel draped with freshly pressed altar linens on his shoulder as he crossed the busy piazza. Children played close by as their mothers swept the stoops, hung out the wash, beat the rugs, and prepared the urns and flower boxes for spring plantings. The scent of fresh earth troweled into window boxes filled the air. The release after months of isolation was palpable; it was as if the mountain villages exhaled an enormous breath, finally free of the bitter cold and the layers of wool clothing that came with it.