From Sand and Ash(3)

My father told me once that we are on earth to learn. God wants us to receive everything that life was meant to teach. Then we take what we’ve learned, and it becomes our offering to God and to mankind. But we have to live in order to learn. And sometimes we have to fight in order to live.

This is my offering. These are the lessons I learned, the tiny acts of rebellion that kept me alive, and the love that fed my hope, when I had nothing but hope itself.

Eva Rosselli





1929





CHAPTER 1


FLORENCE


“Santino has a grandson. Did you know that?” Eva’s father asked.

“Nonno has a grandson?” Eva asked.

“Yes, Nonno. Though he isn’t really your nonno. You know that too, don’t you?”

“He is my nonno, because he loves me so much,” Eva reasoned.

“Yes, but he isn’t my father, and he wasn’t your mamma’s father. So he isn’t your grandfather,” her father explained patiently.

“Yes, Babbo. I know,” Eva said crossly, not at all sure why he insisted. “So Fabia isn’t really my grandmother.” It felt like a lie to say such a thing out loud.

“Yes. Exactly. Santino and Fabia had a son, you see. He left Florence and went to America when he was a young man, because there was more opportunity for him there. He married an American girl, and they had a little boy.”

“How old is the boy?”

“Eleven or twelve. He is a couple of years older than you.”

“What’s his name?”

“His name is Angelo, like his father, I think. But, please, Batsheva, listen for a moment. Stop interrupting.” Eva’s babbo only used her long name when he was growing impatient, so she listened and held her tongue.

“Angelo’s mother died,” he said sadly.

“Is that why Nonna was crying yesterday when she read her telegram?” Eva had already forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to interrupt.

“Yes. Santino and Fabia want their son to bring the boy to Italy. He has had some medical problems, an issue with his leg, apparently. They want him to live here. With us. At least for a while. Santino’s older brother is a priest, and they think the boy can go to the seminary here in Florence. He is a little old to start, but he was in a Catholic school in America, so he won’t be too far behind. He may even be advanced.” Her father said this as if he were thinking out loud, rather than communicating anything Eva actually needed to hear. “And I will help where I can,” he mused.

“We will be friends, I think,” Eva said. “Because we have both lost our mothers.”

“This is true. And he will need a friend, Eva.”

Eva couldn’t remember her mother. She died of tuberculosis when Eva was little. Eva had a vague memory of her lying very still in bed with her eyes closed. Eva couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she could still remember the height of that bed and the elation of success when she pulled herself up and over the side while clutching her tiny violin. She had wanted to play a song for her.

She had crawled to her mother’s side and touched her feverish cheek, the high, red color of a consumptive making her look like a rouged doll. Her mother had opened her lids slowly, her eyes glazed and drugged, furthering the comparison. It had frightened Eva, the almost lifeless figure with glassy blue eyes staring up at her. Then Eva’s mother had said her daughter’s name, and it crackled and broke between her lips like old paper.

“Batsheva,” she had whispered, the word followed by a cough that had racked her frame and made her body shake. The way she said the name, the rasping whisper, the way she sighed through the syllables like it was the last word she would ever say, had made Eva hate her name for a very long time. When her father would call her Batsheva after her mother’s death, she would cry and cover her ears.

That’s when her babbo had started to call her Eva.

That was all Eva remembered of her mother’s life, of their very short life together, and she had tried to forget it. It wasn’t a memory she cherished. She would much rather hold her mother’s picture, pretending to remember the lovely woman with the soft brown hair and porcelain skin, holding Eva in her lap, sitting next to a much younger Camillo, no gray in his black hair, his face serious beneath smiling brown eyes.

Eva had tried to remember being the infant in the frame, the tiny girl who sat in her mother’s lap and gazed up intently at the woman who held her. But hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember that woman. Eva didn’t even look like her mother. She just looked like her father, Camillo, with paler skin and rosier lips.

It was hard to love or miss someone you didn’t even know.

Eva wondered if Angelo, Santino’s grandson, loved his mother. She hoped he didn’t love her too much. Loving someone and then losing them would be much worse than not having them at all.



“Why are you so sad?” Eva asked, pulling her knees up under her long nightgown. She’d found Angelo watching the storm in her father’s library, the doors opened to the balcony, the rain falling heavily onto the pink flagstones below. She didn’t think he would answer. He hadn’t answered her yet. He had been living in their villa with his nonno and nonna for three months, and Eva had done everything in her power to make him her friend. She had played the violin for him. She had danced for him. She had splashed in the fountain in her school uniform and gotten scolded just to make him laugh. He did laugh sometimes. And that kept her trying harder. But he’d never talked to her.