Chapter 11
Her life with Johann was in constant motion as she wrangled four children under five.
With the help of her family and other women in their weaver community, Allegra managed to juggle home and the byssus.
Johann took it all in stride, relishing the chance to be a father.
His time in the Great War had imprinted on him gratitude for the simple pleasure of home and children, and he never failed to bounce his sons on his knees or rock his daughters to sleep.
Many days, he brought the boat in a little early to allow them time to gather shells on the beach or venture inland to climb the strange rocky ruins and laugh at the antics of the wild ponies.
In the first weeks of June, they’d walk to the wetlands that stretched behind the beaches to watch the crooked-neck flamingos alighting in clouds of pink.
Some weeks, depending on the weather and the season, Allegra had less time at home as she harvested the sea silk.
When she could, she’d bring the children with her, strapped to her body or pulling them along in a wagon as she gathered plants or seaweed for processing.
She taught them early to respect the water, never venturing out past their toes.
By the time they were three, they could name many of the plants she collected and much of the sea life they found in tide pools.
As they grew, Lev and Avi naturally spent more time with Johann, and by the time the boys were seven and eight, they could quickly scrape the scales from a fish, cast a net, and haul in the clay jars that trapped octopuses.
They adored their father and copied everything he did.
Allegra marveled at the way they shared his confident walk and how they fell asleep with one arm flung above their heads, just like Johann.
Marta and Dahlia, younger but no less capable, spent many hours beneath Allegra’s loom, playing with shells or stones or dolls made of carded wool. They were attuned to colors, and Allegra listened to them chattering to one another as she wove golden patterns.
“Yellow is glad,” Marta said in her schoolteacher voice. “Red is exciting and warm, like fire.”
“And blue is cold,” Dahlia volunteered. “Sometimes sad, but not always, like the sea.”
Allegra’s fingers plucked at the threads on the loom, straightening and rearranging them until they lay how she wanted. “Did you know, girls, that blue is the rarest color in the world? Can you tell me some of its shades?”
“Indigo,” shouted Dahlia.
“Turquoise,” came Marta’s answer.
“Cerulean,” Dahlia said after a moment, getting the pronunciation wrong.
“That’s a hard one,” Allegra admitted. “All correct.”
“Woad,” said Marta. “That makes wool look like grass, and then, by magic, it goes to dark green and then blue.”
“You’ve been paying attention,” Allegra said, impressed that Marta’s keen eyes had picked up on the dye process.
It pleased her to no end that her daughters seemed to take so naturally to the skills she taught them.
It was as much their joy as it was her own.
There was never a day they weren’t excited at the prospect of swimming together, gathering plants on long walks, and even the sometimes tedious process of rinsing and cleaning the byssus threads.
They made it a game and laughed with their heads bent together over the pans.
Their closeness reminded her of her own sisters, and watching them together, whispering and laughing, eased some of her ache for Ella and Lora.
It was the end of September 1927 when Allegra felt a familiar tenderness in her breasts that she hadn’t expected to feel again.
She was collecting the children from school when Dahlia hugged her tightly.
A hint of a thought flashed through her mind, but she dismissed it as nonsense.
Her youngest was six. She was thirty-five, and their family was complete.
A few weeks later, when the smell of drying octopus tentacles set her stomach roiling, she knew better, and her heart rejoiced.
A new baby! She couldn’t wait to tell Johann and her mother.
The following summer, the baby came unexpectedly on an afternoon when they’d ventured inland for a rare day off together.
This one, a daughter they named Zaneta, was bent on surprising her mother at every turn, it seemed.
With four older siblings doting on their new baby sister, Allegra had no shortage of help as she managed their home and spent time at her mother’s studio, sorting, dyeing, and weaving the byssus.
Hopeful young women dropped by, shyly asking her for a blessing and braided rope of byssus, believing Zaneta, this surprise daughter after such a long time, to be a harbinger of fertility.
Allegra laughed, reminding them she’d been unable to carry a child herself for many years.
She told them it was her oath to the sea, a promise she’d made when her husband had been called to war, that had finally brought them the blessing of children.
True? Who could know? But she didn’t want her little Zaneta, her unexpected joy, to carry others’ burden of so much hope.
She generously tied byssus bracelets on their wrists, knowing exactly how their hearts’ yearning drove them to try anything if it might mean the promise of a child.
Zaneta sat splay-legged on the tiled floor, playing happily with spools and bits of fabric, oblivious to her mother’s dealings.
At the end of the afternoon, Allegra scooped her up and carried her on the short walk to the school, where her boisterous brothers and sisters spilled out into the lane, full of chatter and bounce.
Sometimes, depending on the day, they’d walk to the quay to wait for their father’s large blue skiff to appear from around the island’s bend, and when they saw him, they jumped and waved as if he’d been gone for weeks.
Allegra’s eyes always stung a bit when she spotted Johann piloting his beloved lampara, its nets looped and piled high behind him.
She whispered a quick word of thanks, remembering a time when the odds were against him returning.
Time on their island passed in much the same way as it had for generations before.
Allegra and her mother worked together to weave a tapestry.
An ambitious creation, it featured the sea at night, with a golden moon casting its shimmering path across the water and the creatures below.
Jellyfish, schools of reef fish, and in one corner, seagrasses nestling the Pinna nobilis and a passing sea turtle.
Allegra wove the turtle herself. She’d never forgotten her encounter with the mother turtle that morning long ago.
Since the harvesting and dyeing of enough thread to create even a few inches took almost two weeks, this particular tapestry was something the two of them had been working on steadily for nearly a decade.
When it was finished, it would measure only two square feet.
Allegra let her daughters add stars to the night sky by embroidering byssus into the dyed fabric.
Marta and Dahlia were so particular about it that they spent almost an entire week one summer lying on their backs on the beach after sunset, memorizing the positions of the constellations.
Although Zaneta was too young to actually contribute anything to the work herself, she added her imagination readily enough.
“How about a falling star? Its tail streaked with gold?” she suggested. “Or shade the dark side of the moon with a deeper gold?”
Marta, unable to resist her little sister, stitched as she bid but drew the line at sea monsters lurking in a deep-sea trench.
“We’re meant to show beautiful things with the byssus,” Allegra reminded her daughter. “Its purpose is for lifting up and adding to the world, Zaneta. That’s our job, too. There’s enough sadness and darkness without us creating more. Whatever made you think of such a thing?”
“Yes, Mamma,” her daughter replied. Allegra smoothed Zaneta’s dark hair back from her face.
Her heart held such hope for these children of hers, gladness that they hadn’t had to live through the hard wartime as she had, gratitude that she’d lived through their entrance into the world and had been able to see them grow up.
Hope that their days would be unencumbered by sorrow.
They lived truly blessed lives here on the island.
Simple pleasures of sand, sun, and a belly full of bread and fish, laughing around the table with the family and greeting their many friends in the streets in town.
Allegra prayed then and there that this quotidian life might be all they’d know, and that the work they did with their hands—casting nets, weaving, baking bread, and making a meal—might always be enough.
Some of the islanders talked of leaving Sardegna and heading for America, where they wouldn’t have to mine coal or scrape by for scraps, but Allegra couldn’t imagine such an ambition.
Although their family wouldn’t leave much money or property to their children to inherit, the knowledge and experiences they’d imparted to their children were a more important inheritance than coins that could be quickly spent.