CHAPTER 47
"I went back to the house where my brother was a prisoner. Everything depends on who walks in with you."
Valentina MORETTI
The crossing to Capri was different this time.
The first time I crossed that sea—months ago, on the yacht, with Luca—we were going to rescue Matteo from the pink house.
I'd dreamed of my brother three times the night before, had carried the dagger in my boot with my heart clenched up in my collarbone the whole way.
This time there was no hurry, no fear. Luca held my hand on the deck, the wind blew through my hair, and the only thing I carried was his child inside me.
The pink house appeared on the climb up the Via Tragara.
The same house. Faded pink walls, windows with green shutters, the bougainvillea at the entrance. The house where my brother had spent two months a prisoner, with Donna Carmela deaf in her right ear and the books Acquaviva brought, faking friendship.
Now it was open, windows wide. Donna Pia at the door, a clean apron, and a smile.
The same house, I thought, climbing the stone stairs. But it isn't the same house anymore.
The nonna was in the garden.
And she was different in Capri. In Posillipo she was the matriarch in black, the cane, the eyes that cut. Here, on her own ground, in the garden of the house where she'd lived her whole life, she seemed lighter.
The shawl on her shoulders, her feet in an old garden clog, the cane propped against a rosebush while she cut rosemary with little scissors.
"Signora," she said, without turning. "You're here."
"Nonna."
I sat on the garden bench beside her.
"Lucia loved it here," the nonna said, cutting the rosemary. "More than Posillipo, more than Mondello. She used to say Capri was the only place where she could forget who she'd married."
"Tell me something about her," I asked. "Something I don't know."
The nonna stopped the scissors and thought.
"She sang while she played," the nonna said. "Under her breath. Not the melody—something else, a Sicilian song her mother used to sing. She thought no one could hear, but I heard. I'd sit in that armchair and pretend to sleep, and I'd hear Lucia singing softly under the nocturne."
"I don't remember that."
"Do you sing?" the nonna asked.
"No."
"You will." She went back to the rosemary.
"When this child is born, you'll sit at the piano with the baby in your lap, and you'll sing softly under the Chopin, and you won't even notice you're doing it.
" She looked at me, and her black eyes were wet, something I'd never seen.
"That's how a mother comes back, signora.
Through her daughter's mouth, without the daughter knowing. "
I took her hand. The old hand, spotted, strong.
We stayed quiet in the garden, the two of us, while the sun went down over the sea of Capri.
The room was the same one from Luca as a boy.
A wrought-iron bed, a white sheet, a four-panel window open to the sea. The jasmine from the yard coming in through the thin curtain, the same as the other time I'd slept there—the night of the separation, when he crossed the sea to see me for one night, on the eve of everything going wrong.
But that night there was no eve of anything.
"Come here," I said.
He came.
He took off his shirt slowly. The body I knew by heart now, and that still took my breath away.
He laid me down on the iron bed with that new care—no longer exaggerated like in the first weeks of the pregnancy, but natural now, part of how he touched me.
The big hand under the nape of my neck, his weight held on his elbows.
"Bella mia. You're different."
"This again?"
"This again. But something else now." He moved his hand down my body, slowly, and stopped at my breasts, fuller, more sensitive these last weeks. I held my breath. "Here." The hand moved lower, opened on my belly, still flat but which we both knew wouldn't be for long. "And here."
"It's your child doing that."
"I know." He kissed my belly. Then he moved up, kissed my breasts, one and the other, with a new reverence. "Madonna, bella mia. You're getting even more beautiful."
I pulled his face to mine and kissed his mouth.
It was slow.
It was the slowest thing we'd ever done. No urgency of an attack, no hunger of a fight, no desperation of a goodbye, no frantic laughter of the day before.
It was something else—pure tenderness, mature, the tenderness of people who chose each other and know they have a whole life.
He explored me slowly, as if it were the first time, as if my changing body were a new body he had to learn again. His mouth on my neck, on my collarbone, moving down.
His hands everywhere, in no hurry at all, and I arched against them and sighed his name softly.
"Luca," I murmured. "Now."
He came into me slowly. And then he stopped.
He stayed still, inside me, his hand open on my belly, his forehead against mine. He didn't move, just stayed—feeling, breathing with me, his hand on the belly where our child was growing.
I put my hand over his, both hands on my belly. The two of us still, joined, in the room in Capri with the jasmine and the sea.
We're three now, I thought, my eyes welling up. In a way, we're three in this bed. Making love became something else when you carry life.
"Bella mia," he whispered. "I never imagined this."
"Imagined what?"
"This." He kissed my forehead, still without moving.
"A woman. A child. A home. Peace." His voice broke a little.
"I thought I'd die alone in one of these wars, bella mia.
I thought that was my end. A Don doesn't get this.
A Don dies young and dies alone." He rested his forehead against mine again.
"I didn't know there was this on the other side. "
I felt a tear slide down.
"There is," I said. "Look."
And then he moved.
Slowly, deep, tender, his forehead on mine the whole time, his hand and my hand on my belly, with the jasmine and the sea and the lighthouse blinking.
There was no hurry, nothing but us.
I had a slow orgasm, with a long sigh against his mouth, my whole body letting go like someone untying an old knot. He came right after, in silence, his face buried in my neck, his body locking once and then relaxing entirely on top of me, carefully, no weight on my belly.
Then he stayed there. His head on my chest, this time—reversed, like that night after Carlo's execution.
I ran my hand through his hair, while his hand stayed on my belly.
"Luca. We're going to be all right."
"I know, bella mia." He kissed the skin over my heart. "For the first time, I know."
I woke before dawn.
I went out to the terrace of the pink house, barefoot, his robe over my shoulders—the smell of his sandalwood covering me.
Luca was asleep. Capri below was scattered lights on the hillside and the black sea and the lighthouse blinking across the water.
I put my hands on the stone parapet and looked at the night.
The girl who played Chopin in Palermo, with the acceptance letter from Bologna in the drawer and the dagger under the mattress, swearing revenge over her brother's casket.
Look where she ended up.
A married woman. Pregnant. Free. On a balcony in Capri, before dawn, with her husband's robe over her shoulders.
Her brother alive. Her father dead. Her mother avenged—not with blood, but with the truth in the papers.
"You don't sleep either," the nonna's voice said behind me.
I wasn't startled. She appeared on the terrace in a shawl and nightgown, the cane, her white hair loose for the first time I'd ever seen it—loose to her shoulders, white as foam.
"No, nonna."
She stopped beside me, looking at the sea with me.
"Lucia used to stand here too," the nonna said. "Before dawn. In this same spot. Looking at this same sea." She rested her hand on the parapet next to mine. "It's good to know the balcony's still in use."
I felt a knot in my throat.
"Nonna. Thank you. For everything."
She didn't answer right away, just looked at the sea a while longer. Then she said, low:
"When you go back to Posillipo, signora, play the whole Chopin." She looked at me. "You never finished that nocturne. I know—you always stopped in the middle." Her black eyes shone in the moonlight. "But now you've settled your accounts. Now you can finish the music."
I went still.
"You think I can?"
"I know you can." The nonna squeezed my hand on the parapet. "A woman who settles her accounts finishes the music, signora. Always."
She kissed my forehead. And went back inside, slowly, the cane tapping on the tile.
I looked at the sea of Capri one last time.
I think I can now, Mamma. I think I finally can.