Chapter 17 Michael
Michael
Elisa gasps in surprise. That was the last thing she was expecting.
“You . . . how . . . who . . . ?” she stammers, swallowing dryly.
“Belvedere is a small town,” I snap. “All that matters is I know now. You lied to me. I wonder why.”
Elisa keeps her eyes riveted on the toes of her boots. “You didn’t seem like the type of person I should be sharing my private life with. And even less so now.”
“Were you afraid of being judged?”
“That too.”
“Christ, Elisa! I don’t live in the Middle Ages. Do you really think I would have been shocked by the fact that you had a daughter at seventeen?”
“I was sixteen when I got pregnant.”
“Ah, sixteen! Well, that changes everything,” I comment sarcastically.
She shrugs, becoming defenseless in a way I’ve never seen before, dropping the armor she’s worn since the day I arrived.
“Being a single mother in a village of three thousand, two hundred inhabitants wasn’t exactly easy.
Everyone stared at me, whispered, called me a bad person behind their Cheshire cat smiles.
At least many of the mothers were happy to note that there would be one less rival for their daughters’ future husbands. ”
“Why?”
Elisa turns to look at me with a quirked eyebrow. “First of all, I was no angel, and second, I already have a daughter. I’m demanding, very absent, and unappealing. But I don’t care. There’s no one in town whose wife I aspire to become. I don’t aspire to become a wife in general,” she explains.
“But why were you and Linda left alone?”
She lets out a nervous laugh. “Is that an indirect way of asking who the father is?”
“If you want to tell me. Do I know him?” I ask. Maybe he’s one of the guys from our gang of terrors. “Is it Lapo? Or Cosimo?”
“No way! Lapo married Margherita.” Both were part of our daredevil group.
“The girl with the red hair?”
“Yes, her. He’s the village accountant; she works at the post office.”
“And Cosimo?”
“We can’t even mention Cosimo’s name in public. He betrayed all the mothers.”
“How?”
“He came out four years ago: He’s with a man from Fiesole, and they opened an artisanal perfume shop in Florence, in San Frediano.”
“That’s why as a child Cosimo always wanted to pretend to be a seamstress, a hairdresser, a concierge . . .”
“The mothers really had their hopes up over him. It was a real drama.”
“We were talking about you,” I remind her.
“Anyway, you don’t know the father. He was an Australian exchange student we hosted at the estate for a few weeks. He was on a trip to research Chianti production.”
“A long-distance love?” I hypothesize. Although the question is completely harmless, I’m surprised to have a strange fear of the answer.
“Just a summer crush. He was hasty and selfish; I was gullible and superficial. The night before he left, having sex seemed like the natural conclusion to our flirtation. Then, about three weeks later, I realized our connection wasn’t over at all.”
“Did you tell him? Are you still in touch?” The questions come pouring out of me.
“I wrote dozens of emails but never sent them. What could he have done from the other side of the world? And we barely knew each other,” she sighs, shrugging her shoulders.
“So you decided to do what you always do, fend for yourself,” I conclude.
“Yeah.”
At least in this way, Elisa hasn’t changed.
“You always refused to ask for help, even for the dumbest things. Do you remember when that swallow’s nest full of eggs fell from the lime tree during the storm, and you almost killed yourself on the ladder putting it back on the branch?
You must’ve been all of nine. Or when your mother had a frozen back and you worked all night so she wouldn’t have to help you make preserves? How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
“You boiled, pureed, and potted half a bushel of tomatoes,” I remind her.
“And I burned myself.”
“But the worst was when you cut yourself with a billhook during the harvest and tried to sew up the cut with a needle and embroidery thread so your dad wouldn’t freak out.”
“Yeah, that was probably a mistake.”
“A big one: You got an infection and almost lost your hand,” I say, taking her left hand where I can still see the scar from her heroic experiments. “You were never afraid of pain.”
“Maybe now I’m paying with interest for the lack of fear I had as a kid. I learned what fear was from the day that pregnancy test became positive.”
“Was it hard?”
“Giada was the first to know; she took the test with me. She helped me hide it while I decided what to do, but then Mamma found out because she was the one doing the laundry, and she hadn’t found stains on my underwear for two months.
When I uttered the fateful words ‘I’m pregnant’ for the first time, I was so terrified.
I was trembling. Mamma was understanding, but Dad spoke to me in monosyllables for weeks.
I thought about myself, about my future, about the child being without a father, and I decided to terminate the pregnancy. ”
“It seems like you changed your mind, which isn’t very like you.”
“I was very clear about what I wanted for myself: college in Milan, a master’s degree in publishing, working at a big publishing house, and then at the first ultrasound, I heard the heartbeat and was overwhelmed.
I respect anyone who has the courage to end their pregnancy, but I just couldn’t do it.
When Mamma and I got home, Dad gave me a sandwich and said, ‘Here. You and the baby both have some growing to do.’ He already knew. ”
“I always knew Alfio was only gruff on the surface.”
“School, however, was a different story. I no longer had a name. I was just ‘the pregnant one.’ I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I walked through the halls, the buzz spreading through them, the sidelong glances of the parents at the front doors, all of them thinking, ‘Thank goodness that didn’t happen to my daughter. ’”
“Vapid gossips,” I comment, horrified by their cowardice.
“When Linda was born, I realized none of it mattered. I went into labor in the seventh month, at the beginning of July; Mamma was in Sarzana, helping her sister recover from surgery. Giada was on holiday in Lloret de Mar after graduating from high school, and my father, a good man but one who only knew about land and vineyards, had no idea how to handle the situation. There was only me, barely seventeen years old, after an emergency C-section with a sore incision, my nose pressed against the incubator to see a shriveled little bundle weighing three pounds that could barely move. After three days of crying and no one to talk to, I knew I had to steel myself and fight for both of us.”
“If you were anything like the Elisa I know, you had strength for five people.”
“But since then I’ve also been paralyzed by fear of everything.
I look at Linda and not only do I feel guilty for having brought a child into the world in a totally irresponsible way, I feel constant performance anxiety: Am I educating her the way she deserves?
Am I missing something? Does she feel loved enough?
How much does not having a father weigh on her? ”
I look at Elisa, and she seems tiny curled up next to me, her knees up to her chest, and I feel the unstoppable instinct to hug her.
I even make the gesture of stretching out my arm, but before I can wrap it around her shoulders, she gets up and starts walking in circles through the hay.
“I wasn’t able to provide much security, but until now she at least had this house, Mamma, Giada, Donatella, and all the other workers became her family.
Now she’ll lose all that as well. I understand your choice from a business perspective, but as a mother, I can’t help but hate you for the consequences it will have on my daughter. ”
From listening to her, I begin to doubt she knows Linda wants to study abroad, but I don’t think I should be the one to tell her. “I understand,” I reply simply.
“No, you can’t understand, but you don’t have to.”
Dolly lets out a neigh, catching my attention. “Look, speaking of births, didn’t you say that phase one, or whatever the hell it’s called, lasts a couple of hours? Because that passed a while ago, but I don’t think anything has changed . . .”
“Oh shit!” Elisa exclaims, looking at the clock. “You’re right.” She enters Dolly’s box, checks her, and shakes her head, worried. “Her water broke, but she’s having trouble pushing.”
“Is that bad?”
“Enough.” She gestures for me to get up. “We have to intervene.”
“We?!” I blurt out.
“No, the pope! Yes, us. The vet wouldn’t get here in time. Come on, Michael. You said you’d stay to lend me a hand if I needed it. So, great. Now I need it.”
“Okay.” I go stand next to her, but she looks at me impatiently. “Your hand, Michael.”
“My hand?!”
“Yeah,” she says, taking my right hand and pulling the sleeve of my shirt up to my shoulder. “It’s not a figure of speech. I really need your hand. In fact, I need your whole arm.”
A shiver of terror runs down my spine. “Sorry, to do what?”
“This.” She hands me a thick, long latex glove and makes me kneel behind the mare. “Stick your arm in and find the colt’s hooves.”
I really hope she didn’t just say what I think she said. “What do you mean, ‘inside’?”
“You need to check whether the foal is face-first, which is a big problem, or if you can feel its hooves. If you can, just pull it by the hooves when the mare pushes, to help her get it out,” she explains to me politely.
“And why do I have to do that?” I protest, annoyed.
“Because you have more strength and a longer arm. Come on, we can’t sit around, knocking on mussels before we open them.”
I have other complaints to present with a wealth of arguments, but I can’t bear the mare’s pained neighing.
By God, we English may have some deficits when it comes to human relationships, but let it never be said that we don’t care about horses.
Or dogs. Horses and dogs arouse an overwhelming tenderness in us.
“Okay.” I breathe in, steeling myself, and with one eye closed and one open, I stick in my arm up to the elbow. “Better my arm than my head . . . Aaah! Fuck!”
“What is it? What do you feel?”
“Bad, by God! Bad! I think the mare had a contraction and crushed my arm.”
“You’re such a crybaby,” she grumbles.
“You can say that because it’s not your arm.”
“Come on, stop protesting and tell me what you feel.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I mutter, confused.
“Use your imagination!” she exclaims.
I resist another contraction and try to feel the sensations that come to me. “I feel something hard.”
“Are there any holes? Like nostrils, or a mouth?”
“No.” At least, I don’t think. “It’s knobby . . . next to the first there’s another just like it.”
“It’s the legs!” Elisa exclaims. “Thank goodness. Okay, now grab them and pull on the next contraction. As soon as its head is out, I’ll free his nose.”
On the first try, nothing happens. On the second, I risk getting kicked in the teeth. On the third, two dry, oblong hooves slip out, followed by a snout, all covered in a translucent membrane that Elisa tears with a quick gesture.
“Done?” I ask, the hooves still in my hand.
“We still have the shoulders, the widest part. Keep pulling,” she instructs me.
I comply without question, and the colt slides out. The mother welcomes him next to her, smells him, and then bends over him, covering him with her robust neck in a protective gesture.
“She knows it’s her daughter,” Elisa explains to me. “Woe to anyone who touches her.”
I look at the image of the mare and her foal, enthralled. Somewhere in my head, a neuron starts up my mental record player, and I can hear “Love Is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet.
“Now we have to do the enema,” Elisa announces briskly.
“You’re sucking the poetry right out of the moment,” I reply.
She looks at me impassively and hands me an enema bulb. “First the enema, then the poetry.”
“Me again? You could do this part.”
“Meconium—the plug of hard feces formed during gestation—has to be expelled as soon as possible, or the foal won’t eat. Since one doesn’t need particular expertise to administer an enema, you can go ahead—unless you know how to dress the umbilical cord and inject it with a tetanus shot.”
“Say no more.” I take the enema, surrendering. What a day.
While Elisa plays nurse, I’m basically the janitor. I hardly have time to finish the purge before the foal reacts.
“Ugh, gross!” I exclaim.
“What happened?”
“That creature put it right in my hand,” I say, waving it in her direction.
Elisa is not the least disgusted. “It brings good luck.”
“What’s the little guy’s name?” I ask her.
“Little guy? It’s a girl,” she corrects me. “You name her—after all, you delivered her, right? The honor is yours.”
Damn. I am now realizing that I, Michael D’Arcy, financial adviser at one of London’s leading firms, have just delivered a baby horse.
“Splinter,” I say. “Let’s call her Splinter.”
Elisa turns to me with the first sincere smile I’ve seen since I’ve been here.
We had wanted to name our damaged little boat to suggest something slight and agile, but in reality we just ended up with splinters in our fingers. “We used to like doing things together,” I say.
Elisa and I sit next to each other on the hay, exhausted, silently observing Splinter nursing from Dolly. “It’s not that bad, huh?” she asks me.
“What?”
“Doing something good, lending a hand, making a difference.”
“I must admit you have a point.”
“You’re a businessman. I have a deal for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Stay until the harvest is over. Study the estate, look at what we do and try to determine whether we’re a good investment,” she says resolutely. “Then and only then can you properly advise Charles on whether to sell or not. One month, that’s all I’m asking.”
“You seem confident you’ll change my mind.”
“I have no doubt,” she says, staring at me with those shrewd eyes of hers.
“It seems more like a challenge than a deal.”
Her quirked left eyebrow tells me it’s a yes. “What’s the matter, you scared?” she replies.
Me? Never. “Absolutely not.”
“So.” Elisa holds out her hand with a mocking smile. “Do we have a deal?”
I look at her hand, then at mine, which is still in the latex glove covered with amniotic fluid and foal poop. Almost . . . I snatch her bare palm, and before she can escape, I squeeze it. “We have a deal.”