Read Online The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store by Jo Riccioni - Free Book Online Page A

like a secret. She watched him run his free hand slowly upwards from the neck to the tail, and the cat seemed to settle. She thought of the press of spine under fur, the stretched sinew of its body, the green eyes glazing as they would when she stroked it. For an instant, the shape of them seemed one and the same to her, camouflaged by the silence and the fading light.
    The cuff of his hand was quick and blunt, strangely unsurprising when it came. She imagined the muted crack of bone, like a twig under leaf litter when she walked in the spinney. He descended the fallow towards the brook, the cat limp across his back, nothing more than quarry now in one practised blow of his hand. She gripped at the handlebars of her bike, feeling disconnected somehow, as if she was the foreigner in her own world, not him. But after a while he was nothing more than a shadow, swallowed up by the huddle of sombre trees at the brook’s edge.

Montelupini
1939
    His mother sat cross-legged on the battlement wall, watching the piazza below. Lucio loved it when she climbed up and sat beside him, cross-legged, her skirts pulled into her lap like a girl. He loved it even when her fingers worried at the fabric of her hems and her lips were chalky and dry, her skin like wax in the glow of the coloured lanterns strung across the fountain. She was supposed to be in bed, resting, not climbing the walls of the old town barefoot at night to see the festival. But he knew that was precisely why she had done it. She rarely did what she was told, and she refused to indulge her illness or become a martyr to it, as so many women in the village liked to do with their own ailments. When she emerged from a seizure, Lucio could sense the physical relief in her, like the quenching of a desperate thirst after being trapped somewhere, scrambling and clawing her way back towards the light. And afterwards, after those deathly sleeps, when he would hold his fingers to her mouth to feel her breath, she seemed to wake doubly alive, the force of her will thrumming inside her, like a plucked string. He wasn’t going to be the one to silence that, to bully her back to bed.
    Below them the village was celebrating the grape harvest. Padre Ruggiero had blessed the crop, and Professore Centini was judging the ciambelle al mosto, made with the harvest’s grape must. ‘Poor Centini,’ his mother said. ‘He looks like he can hardly squeeze one more mouthful into that cummerbund.’ It was true. The mayor, in full Fascist uniform, was puffing along the sampling table from one identical cake to the next, rubbing the waistband that held his gut as fast as a bilge hoop on a barrel. It didn’t help that most of the bland cakes were destined to be scattered to the chickens: even the children in the village ran away when they were offered one. But the same recipe had been made at harvest time for centuries, and for the Montelupinese, tradition was more important than taste. Behind the mayor Fagiolo was playing his bagpipes, their strangled, reedy melody seeming to aggravate Professore Centini’s discomfort.
    â€˜He should let Padre Ruggiero judge the ciambelle — he’s got more room for expansion in that cassock.’ Lucio felt his mother’s toes flex against his leg as she laughed. It entertained him more than anything on the stage below.
    Sometimes he thought his father wanted her to stay at home not to rest, but to be hidden away. Her seizures, when they came, had something animal about them, so debasing that they shocked the villagers, no matter how many times they had witnessed them before. The one that morning had been particularly bad. Padre Ruggiero was giving communion to the departing soldiers when her foot had begun knocking at the pew, the wood trembling with such force that someone shouted, ‘Earthquake!’ Her eyes became lost in her head and Lucio had laced his hands about her as she thrashed, foaming at the mouth