Your
Santina
Some days etch your soul. They leave scrawled scars of marrow-altering memory. Those days where you are tossed like a babe at sea, sensing the power and pull of that daunting watery mass threatening to obliterate. And despite the danger and the choking terror, you manage to wrench yourself towards the troubled sky and steal what little air you need to survive.
Tuesday, 15 November of 1949 was to be a good day. Winter had been kind to us so far. The snows hadn’t left us marooned. We had weathered the Germans and the Allies. We’d felt hunger and skimmed squalor by the meager amount my mother, brother and I could gain from our truffle-hunting up in the damp crevices of the Amalfi coast’s mountains.
Those mountain forests were my home. My mother was a goat; she leapt from stone to stone, fearless, focused and precise. I never once saw her slip, neither lose balance nor plant any seed of fear into my brother or I. We followed her lead, limber and lithe, racing against one another to see who might discover the most. My brother and I were cradled by the scent of damp moss since I can remember. That deep green under-foot carpeted our adventures. We took the view of our dramatic coastline for granted. From up here on our hills, we could see the lower mountains sharpen up and out of the cove of Positano with its viridian water. The tiny Sirenuse islands floated just beyond, haunted by those heartless sirens luring ancient Greek adventurers to their watery deaths. Further in the distance lay Capri, a tiny mound rising up from the water, like the scale of an under-water dragon.
Sometimes we would pass an intrepid party of travellers walking our narrow Path of the Gods, stopping to admire the view as the mountain range snaked into the hazy distance towards the Bay of Naples. Sometimes we might come across them sat upon the occasional grass clearing, a light picnic laid before them. The salty smell of prosciutto and fresh bread made our mouths water. Mother would mutter through gritted teeth to not stare like stray dogs.
We dodged the sharp crags that jutted through the living forest floor, competing to see who could be the fastest. Mother would let us stop and drink the icy mountain water as it cascaded down toward the coast. Whilst we knelt, numbing our hands and washing our faces, she taught us which mushrooms would kill us – I can’t shake the feeling that it was her peculiar way of imparting self-defense. Perhaps one day a venomous fungus would save me from a predator after all? Up in the Amalfi mountains the danger lurking in the dark was tangible to us hill folk. Its name was Hunger.
My father drank most of what we earned. I helped Ma with her laundry runs, watching her knuckles callus against the stone washer troughs in town. After the washing was done and delivered we would climb over a thousand steps back up from the fishing town of Positano to Nocelle, weaving our cobbled journey through Amalfitani woods toward the small fraction nestled in the hilly periphery, and from there begin our scramble to our tiny house. Arriving home we’d either find my brother huddled in a corner by a dying fire with my father nowhere to be seen, or the latter tight with drink. I knew I would be damned for thinking it, but I hated that man. I hated the scars he left my mother with. The heavy hand my brother and I were dealt for the smallest trifle. But most of all for the way my courageous mother, who spoke her mind to all the gossips by the well, who was first to put any man in his place who so much as dared look at her, was reduced to a quiver when my father was in one of his thunders. I ought to have brewed a fatal fungi broth for him and be done with it. Too late now.
That Tuesday – martedì – the sky was full of rancor, like the planet Mars it’s named after. The wind whipped from the sea and blew in a thick fog. Within minutes my mother was a grey silhouette. She slowed her pace a little, ahead of me. My shoes scuffed the damp boulders, dew seeping in through the tiny holes on the worn sole. Several times I lost my footing. Mother called back to us, ‘Santina! Marco! Stay where you are! It’s not safe today – we’ll turn back.’ We stopped, my little brother Marco a few paces behind me. I heard her footsteps approach, tip tapping with familiar confidence. Then there was a ricochet of small rocks. A cry. Marco and I froze to the sound of more rocks tumbling just beyond where I could see. We called out. I heard my mother call back to us.
The silence that followed drained the blood from my face. My heart pounded. I called again. Marco started to cry. I couldn’t hear my mother answer beyond his wails. I screamed at him to stop but it just made him worse. I had little strength to stifle my panic. My brother took a step toward me. He slipped and fell, hitting his elbow hard on the sharp edge of a rock. His blood oozed crimson onto the moss. I yanked him up and wrapped my headscarf around his elbow. ‘We’ll go home now,’ I began, trying to swallow my hot tears of terror. ‘I’ll come back for Mamma when the sun is out, si?’ He nodded back at me, both of us choosing to believe my promise, fat tears rolling down his little cheeks.
We never saw our mother again.
Father’s mourning consisted more of fretting about what to do with the incumbent children he had to feed, than grieving the loss of the fine woman who had fallen to her death. One day he declared that I was to go and live down by the shore in Positano with Signora Cavaldi, the widow now running her late husband’s produce store. In return for lodging and food I was to assist her. I felt torn; delirious with the prospect of escape from the misery of life on the mountainside with this man for a father, and terror at what life would now entail for Marco. The next day, an uncle from Nocelle climbed up to speak with my father. Marco would be needed to tend to his farm. The deal was sealed. We were dispatched to new parents. I try to forget the expression on Marco’s face as he was led away from me. He walked downhill, his reluctant hand in my uncle’s, ripping a piece out of me with each step. I patched over the gaping hole and the fresh wound of my mother’s death with brittle bravado. My father would not see me cry. I wished that would have been the last time I ever saw him too.
Signora Cavaldi’s shop was a cavern carved into the stubborn rock that enveloped the cove of Positano. She held a prime position between the mill and the laundry, minimizing competition. I now wonder whether that had more to do with her careful management of the town’s politics and politicians, or her not so secret connection with the men who protected the trade and tradesmen. I wouldn’t like to guess whom she paid or how much, or indeed how much others paid her, but my instinct tells me her tentacles stretched far and wide. I arrived wearing the only dress I owned, a smock of doleful grey, which matched my mood. She gave me the once-over and pieced together an opinion as deftly as she would calculate someone’s shopping bill. The woman was a wizard with numbers, that took me no time to figure out, but she loathed children.
‘You’re twelve now, Santina, si?’
‘Si, signora,’ I answered, trying to stop my left leg from shaking. It was an embarrassing habit since I had succumbed to polio as a younger child, and my withered calf always revealed too much about what I was feeling at any given time.
‘You’re here to work, yes? I’ll give you two days to learn what we do, and I expect to never repeat myself, capisce?’
‘Si, I understand, signora.’
She set me to work immediately, sorting the produce, laying out chestnuts in baskets, polishing the scales that grew dirty again with the weighing of earth-dusted mushrooms. I cleaned the vats of oil, swept and scrubbed the floor. As the sun dipped she called out for me to light the stove in the kitchen of the apartment upstairs and brew a broth for dinner. At first it struck me as a little out of my remit – I had been told that I would be served food in return for working, and I will admit the idea of having regular meals was exhilarating. However, my own cooking skills
