The Good Left Undone(3)
Perhaps Matelda felt blessed having dodged the virus that had hobbled Bergamo to the north—after all, a virus that targets the elderly certainly had her number. She was sanguine about the situation because she had no choice. Fate was a wrecking ball. She didn’t know when it would swing through to do its damage; she was only certain, from experience, that it would.
The habit of examining her conscience, instilled by the nuns when she was a child, hadn’t left her. Matelda reflected on past hurts done to her and took stock of those she had perpetrated on others. Tuscans might live in the moment, but the past lived in them. Even if that weren’t true, there were reminders tucked in every corner of her hometown. She knew Viareggio and its people as well as she knew her own body; in a sense, they were one.
The mood turned grim in the village as the revelry of Carnevale ended and Lent began. The next forty days would be a somber time of reflection, fasting, and penance. Lent had felt like it lasted an eternity when she was a girl. Easter Sunday could not come soon enough. The day of relief. “You cannot have the joy of Easter Sunday without the agony of Good Friday,” her mother reminded them. “No cross, no crown,” she’d say in a dialect only her children understood.
The resurrection of the Lord redeemed the village and set the children free. Black sacks were pulled off the statues of the saints. The bare altar was decorated anew with myrtle and daisies. Plain broth for sustenance during the fast was replaced with sweet bread. The scents of butter, orange zest, and honey as Mama kneaded the dough for Easter bread during Holy Week lifted their spirits. The taste of the soft egg bread, braided into loaves served hot from the oven and drenched in honey, meant the sacrifice was over, at least until next year. Matelda recalled a particular Pranzo di Pasqua with every member from both sides of the family in attendance. Papa constructed one long dining table out of wooden doors so the entire family could sit together at the meal. Mama had covered the table in a yellow cloth and decorated it with baskets of her fresh bread.
“We are one,” her father said as he lifted his glass. Soon, the cousins, aunts, uncles, and siblings raised their glasses with him.
There had been many happy moments in Matelda’s life, but that particular Easter Sunday after the war was significant. If her memory ever failed her completely, Matelda was certain she would still remember her family in the garden under a glittering sun as they broke the fast together. When Matelda was young, she chased time to get what she wanted. Now she chased time to hold on to it.
The wooden slats of the boardwalk creaked beneath her feet as she walked down the promenade. She turned when she reached the midpoint of the pier and looked back at the wide gray runway. Why had it seemed endless when she was a girl?
Matelda recalled a summer evening on the boardwalk when she was a girl and walked beside her brother’s pram during La Passeggiata Mare. Nino was born in 1949. (She retained numbers—bookkeepers usually do.) The war was over. Her mother wore a dress of apricot organza, and her father wore a straw boater with a wide band of raspberry silk. Matelda placed her hand on her heart as the details came together in her mind’s eye. Soon the ghosts joined her on the walk, filling the drab boardwalk with color. She imagined men wearing taffy-colored suits and women preening in hats spiked with peacock plumes. Her mother slowly twirled a linen parasol bleached white by the sun. When Matelda stopped to rest on a bench, she closed her eyes and swore she could hear her mother’s voice. Domenica Cabrelli had taught her daughter to love the sea by her example. Matelda could feel the warmth of her mother’s presence whenever she walked along the water under the coral sun.
Matelda wondered why it was so easy to return to her childhood in particular detail, and yet she struggled to remember what she ate for dinner the night before. Maybe Ida’s probiotics would help! She’d have to ask her doctor. When her husband took her to her last appointment, the nurse conducted a memory test. There was not a single question about her past; instead, the doctor and nurse were obsessed with the here and now. Who is the prime minister of Italy? What day of the week is it? How old are you? Matelda longed to respond “Who cares?” But she knew better than to get on the wrong side of her doctor. The doctor assured her that her visions and dreams of the past were normal but completely irrelevant when it came to the current assessment of the health of her brain. “The past and the present aren’t connected in the human brain,” he had explained to her. Matelda wasn’t so sure.
She crossed the boulevard and approached the original storefront of her family business, now a dress shop. It gave her a sense of pride to see Cabrelli Jewelers still painted on the building, even though the letters were faded. It had been twenty years since her husband moved the shop to Lucca, a bustling small city just a few miles inland from Viareggio.
Matelda shaded her eyes and peered into the shop through the wide storefront window. She could see that the door to the back room was open. The workroom that housed the bruting wheel where her grandfather cut the gems was now filled with racks of clothing.
The shopkeepers on the boulevard were busy taking down the decorations for Carnevale. They lowered the garlands, loosened festoons, and took down strings of lights while another man balanced on a ladder and unhooked red, white, and green bunting along the route where the parade had passed. The grocer swept confetti into the gutter and nodded a silent greeting as she passed.
Matelda cupped her hands and sipped the icy water that flowed down the mountain to ancient cisterns. The spigots were attached to the hands of carved angels whose faces had been worn away by time. The water was loaded with precious minerals that shored up the people who drank it. Matelda thought of her mother as she dried her hands on the handkerchief she kept in her pocket. Not only had Domenica Cabrelli insisted her children drink the water for their health, she also taught Matelda how to count as they passed a series of angel fountains on her way to school. Viareggio had also been her first primer.