Chapter 45
Francesca lived near the hospital in an apartment building that took me forever to find because it was situated on a tiny unmarked side street that went straight uphill and was lined with big leafy trees.
Beside the door, there was an intercom, so I rang the bell labeled B.
Moriani, but I got a crackling noise, then nothing.
“Il citofono non funziona,” came a voice from somewhere above my head.
I looked up and saw a middle-aged woman in a bright pink bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head, hanging over the railing of a second-floor balcony. Okay, first floor, technically, since we were in Italy. “I’m looking for Francesca Moriani.”
When I didn’t get an immediate reply, I tried the introduction I’d been practicing. “Mi chiamo Eileen Archer.” But the woman had disappeared.
I was about to try the buzzer again when I heard footsteps on an internal stairwell. The next thing I knew, the woman in the bathrobe was ushering me inside.
“Francesca Moriani?” I said, and while she didn’t confirm that she was Francesca, she also didn’t deny it.
“Mi chiamo Eileen Archer,” I repeated.
She held up a finger. “Lorraine’s friend?”
“Well, she doesn’t know me. But her friend Sheila said you give lessons.” Because I wanted to put my best foot forward, I bulldozed my way through the second sentence I’d memorized in advance of my visit. “Vuoi imparare l’italiano.”
“Voglio.”
“Voglio?”
“Voglio imparare l’italiano.”
I repeated the sentence word for word.
“It’s ‘I want to learn Italian,’ ” she said. “Not ‘You want to learn Italian.’ ”
“Right,” I whispered to myself, then said the words one more time to show her that I had a good attitude and was capable of learning from my mistakes.
She beckoned me to follow her up a set of stairs and into the same apartment where she’d so recently shouted at me from the balcony. Then she told me to make myself comfortable and disappeared into a back bedroom, where I assumed she was changing clothes.
This was the first Italian residence I’d been invited inside, and right away I liked it.
It wasn’t that it was a big place, but it was intelligently proportioned.
There was a combined living and dining room, with a small, sort of out-of-the-way kitchen and a big balcony that felt like it doubled the apartment’s living space.
Down the hall were a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom, but I didn’t spend one second thinking about them because I was too busy taking in the Morianis’ view.
Out the glass doors that led to the balcony, I could see downtown La Maddalena, the harbor, and even Santo Stefano in the distance.
“When did you arrive in La Maddalena?” Francesca called to me from the bedroom, and I tried to refocus.
“About two weeks ago,” I said, in a voice loud enough to carry.
On a little table in the living room sat a collection of crystal animals. Their bodies were like suncatchers, but with the addition of tiny glass ears and noses and tails. I scanned the walls for rainbows but didn’t see any.
“Your husband’s on the Gilmore?”
“In Radiological Controls.”
“Oh,” she said, knowingly. “So you must be following this business with Amendola, then?”
“Amendola?” I repeated.
“Gruppo Ambiente.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was worried that if I admitted to being clueless, she’d clam up.
Francesca emerged from the bedroom wearing a pair of brown slacks and a bright orange polyester blouse. “He makes a good point, no?”
“No, yes.”
“The Japanese are not fools.”
I thought of what Tom had told Paul and me in the lobby of the Excelsior, about how, after Japan kicked out the U.S. Navy’s fleet of nuclear subs, it had left a lot of Italians feeling like chumps. Francesca was clearly one of those chumps.
“We’ve been told a hundred times the subs are safe,” she said. “But if they’re so safe, why won’t Japan let them in?”
I tried to remember what Paul had said to me when I’d asked the very same question. “I don’t think it’s that they’re not safe. I think it’s that Japan doesn’t have the right data. To assess the risk. The numbers are old or bad or something.”
“How is that worse than our situation?” said Francesca. “We have no numbers. None. Zero.”
“Yeah,” I said, growing more uncomfortable by the second. “I have no idea.”
Francesca removed the towel from her head and really looked at me for the first time.
She was maybe fifty, short and curvy, with long gray hair, dark brown eyes, and an olive complexion.
Her skin looked like it had seen too much sun—a common problem on the island.
It was the lines around her eyes and mouth that were the most noticeable, but she also had sun spots that dotted her face like freckles.
All told, I thought her rather striking.
“We need to start standing up for ourselves. CNEN can’t even get funding to monitor La Maddalena. They come every six months, that’s it.”
“I don’t know what CNEN is,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Comitato Nazionale Energia Nucleare.”
“Okay.”
“They’re like your Atomic Energy Commission.”
It was flattering that Francesca assumed I knew what the Atomic Energy Commission was.
“I can go,” I offered, because somewhere along the way it had begun to feel like she wanted me to answer for the sins of the Nuclear Propulsion Program or maybe the entire U.S. Navy, and I just didn’t feel equipped. “I’m sorry for—”
She held up a hand, a signal that I should stay and perhaps she would let the matter rest, at least for now. “Can I make you a coffee?” she asked.
“I’d love that,” I said, and followed her into the kitchen, where she began messing with an aluminum contraption that I’d soon learn was a moka pot. She took it apart, filled it with water and then coffee, and set it on a low flame. All the while, she kept talking.
“Your husband really works in Radiological Controls?” she asked as she removed two miniature cups and saucers from the drainboard. I interpreted the question to mean she was horrified by how little I knew about anything.
“He has a top-secret clearance,” I offered weakly.
She gestured at a newspaper, La Spedizione, which sat folded on the counter. “It’s all right there. In the paper. Nothing secret about it.”
I glanced at the paper, which was—of course—indecipherable to me. “Yes, well, I can’t read Italian, or speak it, for that matter.”
She laughed a little. “I suppose that is why you’re here.”
“I understand you give lessons.” I almost said to American wives but stopped short. She seemed like she’d had it with Americans, so I didn’t want to remind her that I was one.
“It’s three thousand an hour,” she said, which was a good bit more than Sheila had quoted me. I suspected I could thank whoever this Amendola guy was for the price hike.
“That’s fine,” I said quickly. I was desperate for her to take me on as her student and without a house or a car, the lire Paul doled out to me still felt like fun money. “When can we start?”
The pot on the stove had begun to gurgle, and Francesca lifted the lid and stirred the concentrate with a spoon.
When she was satisfied, she poured the espresso into our waiting cups and handed me mine, then led me out to the balcony, where there were a couple of rickety chairs and a weathered teak table. “How about now?”