Giovanna's Navel Read online

  GIOVANNA’S NAVEL

  AND FOUR MORE STORIES

  Ernest van der Kwast is a Dutch author born in Mumbai, India, in 1981. He made his debut in 2005 with the novel Sometimes Things Are Better When People Applaud. His breakthrough book is Mama Tandoori, which became a bestseller in the Netherlands and Italy upon publication, and has to date sold more than 100,000 copies. Giovanna’s Navel is the third of his books (after The Ice-Cream Makers and Mama Tandoori) to be published in English. He lives in Rotterdam.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2012

  First published in English by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Ernest van der Kwast 2012

  Translation © Laura Vroomen 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  9781925322958 (Australian edition)

  9781911617051 (UK edition)

  9781925548686 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia and British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Contents

  Giovanna’s Navel

  The Ticket Inspector

  Summer

  The Kohlern Hotel

  Vineyard

  Acknowledgements

  Giovanna’s Navel

  It was the most beautiful day in the postman’s life. His phone began to beep and buzz just as he pushed a white envelope through the letterbox of Number 5b. Before it had even dropped onto the wooden floor behind the door, the postman had pressed the phone to his ear and heard his wife crying, ‘They’re on their way! Our little sweethearts are on their way!’

  A tear welled up in his left eye and for a moment the postman didn’t know what to say. He’d known this day would come — for eight months and twelve days, to be precise. And for nearly seven months he’d known there wouldn’t be just one but two children. One clear and crisp morning in October, the gynaecologist had told his wife, ‘You’re pregnant with twins.’ Looking at the monitor, the postman had seen two little curled-up creatures, in black and white, sleeping peacefully. He couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Two,’ he whispered. ‘Two.’ For several minutes, two was an inconceivable number.

  That night, the postman had rested his head on his wife’s belly. ‘Sweethearts,’ he’d whispered through her navel. ‘You two are our little sweethearts.’ So from that day on, they referred to the peaceful, curled-up creatures in their mother’s womb as ‘sweethearts’. A room was decorated for them, socks were knitted, and the mothers-in-law were told they’d be getting sweethearts for grandchildren. One of them was so thrilled she baked a chocolate-pear-and-walnut tart that she proceeded to eat all by herself. And for the first time in a long while, she forgot she was eating on her own.

  ‘I’ll come and get you,’ the postman said to his wife, and impulsively slipped the bag filled with letters, bank statements, and bills from his shoulder before hurling it over the wall that enclosed the garden of Number 5. He got into the small white Poste Italiane Fiat and raced home.

  That day, many in the Rencio district of Bolzano waited in vain for the letterbox to rattle. Some people cursed the postal services; others cursed the entire country. And in hospital, the postman’s wife cursed absolutely anyone she could think of. With sweat beading her nose and forehead, her eyes squeezed tight, and a string of ear-splitting expletives, she endured the worst pain of her life.

  Giselle was the first to arrive. Small, red, and slippery, she squealed and flailed her arms about, as if to trumpet her arrival. Then came Fabrizio: likewise small, red, and slippery, but dead quiet and motionless. It wasn’t until the midwife slapped and pinched his hands and the soles of his feet that Fabrizio gave a sign of life.

  He sighed.

  Both babies were placed on their mother’s belly. For the first time they felt the outside of the body in which they’d been bobbing around for so long. The postman looked at his children — at his son and daughter, his sweethearts. Then he looked at his wife, her face tear-stained and the corners of her mouth practically soaring. He felt a way he’d never felt before, a way he never thought he would: complete and content.

  But that’s a different story.

  The letter arrived unscented. The resident of Number 5b folded his newspaper, got out of his chair, and made his way to the front door. He bent down and picked up the envelope from the wooden floor. His name was written on the front in rounded, feminine handwriting: Ezio Ortolani.

  He used his little finger to rip open the envelope. No scent rose up from the jagged edge, no perfume reached his nose, no forgotten atoms urged him to press the paper to his face. The envelope merely contained a letter that commenced as follows:

  Caro Ezio, forgive me for writing and for responding only now. I have written this letter dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of times, but I never managed to send it. The words you’re now reading are old and frail. The ink may be clear, my handwriting unchanged, but the words come from very deep down. They were stuck in my breast and wouldn’t pass my lips, and later, when they were finally on paper, I crossed them out, blotted them out completely. Time and again, I tried not to write. But the longing won through — the persistent thoughts of us.

  This letter has taken a woman’s lifetime to reach you. Please don’t rip it up. Time is running out. The days have become precious. We’re old, Ezio. I’m a grey woman with wrinkles the size of furrows. You’re probably as slow as a snail, or maybe you need a magnifying glass to read this letter. But when I think of you, it’s not an old man I see. I see someone aged twenty-two, twenty-three — a young man in the prime of his life. I see you, Ezio, with your strong arms wrapped around me.

  Suddenly the smells came flooding in, as if a steaming plate of pasta had been placed in front of him. Linguine al cartoccio. Except it wasn’t squid, shrimp, or mussels he smelled, nor tomato sauce with finely chopped parsley and garlic, their flavours brought out by the olive oil. Ezio smelled blossoms. He smelled laundered dresses in the open air. And then he caught the scent of her hair, her neck, and the skin around her navel. It was an intense perfume he inhaled, held, and allowed to swirl around his body. After drifting through his belly and heart, the atoms of blossoms and summer dresses ended up in the gullies of his memory. They triggered a hurried search for the images that went with the scent: for the hair and the neck, the skin and the navel. And gradually, an image formed of a barefoot girl, of a twenty-year-old donna Pugliese, of the irresistible Giovanna Berlucchi.

  Her words continued:

  You were young and you wanted to kiss me all day long. But I also remember your trembling hands. You were scared and you loved me. Dear Ezio, I’d like to know whether your fingers still yearn for my skin, whether your eyes would like to see me, whether you’d want to kiss me now.

  I want to be with you, lie next to you, hear you breathe. The seasons change, but the days are all alike — today smells of yesterday, and yesterday tastes like the day before, and the day before yesterday sounds like any other day. The only thing that sets them apart is the feeling: the longing that in
tensifies, that seems to be growing with every passing day. These are the old, frail words I’ve kept locked in my heart for so long: I love you.

  We haven’t seen each other for more than sixty years. I don’t know whether I thought of you every day, but I do know that I missed you every day. Do you think of me and do you think of summer when you do? Or are you still angry? You wrote that you were afraid you’d be angry for the rest of your life. I’m sorry I can love you only now, Ezio. I’m so terribly sorry.

  I’d like to ask you to forget all those years we didn’t share. Let’s turn back time — stop the clocks and reverse the wheels — back to your bright eyes and my glossy hair. And if we’re strong enough, stronger than the destructive wheels of time, back to Lecce, to a Tuesday morning in October, 1945. Let the train that took you beyond the horizon depart in reverse, so instead of disappearing you appear, and instead of getting on you get off and come to me, rather than leave me forever.

  It’s spring in Lecce. My heart is beating like that of a young girl running across endless fields. Ezio, be angry no more — be strong. Come to me.

  He pressed the letter against his face, the white paper against his flaccid cheeks. There she was: the twenty-year-old young woman with bare feet.

  It was July, the year was 1945. It was a warm day. The air shimmered in the distance. Ezio and his younger brother had gone to the beach. They’d walked eight kilometres and now they were lying on the sand, watching the women in bathing costumes walk by. The war was over, there was no work, and the days were long. What else was there to do for an Italian man but watch women?

  Every day, Ezio and his brother would walk from Lecce to San Cataldo, a walk that could be done in ninety minutes, but sometimes took twice as long depending on the heat and the people they met along the way. Today they’d been held up by friends, aunts, and elderly men with long stories to tell. It was past midday by the time the Ortolani brothers finally arrived in San Cataldo, and now they were lying on the warm sand, their stomachs rumbling, watching the women in bathing costumes as unobtrusively as possible.

  Not that there was a lot to see. The bathing costumes were one-pieces and sometimes even covered the knees and shoulders. The exciting moments came when a woman bent over to straighten her towel or when she emerged from the sea and outran the waves on her way back to the beach. At such moments, you didn’t need the fantasy of a dozen writers to feel a tingling in your belly. You only had to keep your eyes peeled. The rest of the day it was a question of daydreaming and letting your imagination run wild about bathing costumes of all sizes but only a single shape: the one-piece swimsuit.

  It was July 1945 — three months after the liberation of Italy and twelve months before the invention of the bikini. French mechanical engineer Louis Réard had yet to inherit his mother’s lingerie business. He had yet to read a magazine article about the cost-savings of the US military, to be astounded by their decision to introduce low-cut backs to the bathing costumes of women soldiers. And above all: Louis Réard had yet to have the extremely simple idea that a two-piece swimsuit would save a lot more textile.

  And a small group of islands between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii had yet to be bombed. The handful of residents living on this atoll in the Pacific Ocean were told to pack their bags and abandon their huts. For two long years, the families lived on a small coral island where the trees yielded too little fruit and the fish were poisonous, so they were moved once again and accommodated in tents on a stretch of grass beside the airport of another atoll, only to be relocated to Kili Island six months later. But here, too, people went hungry and thirsty and many of their children died, until they were allowed to return to Bikini in 1969 when the atoll was declared free from radioactivity. However, in 1978, levels of radiation were found to be dangerously high after all, and the residents were told to leave their possessions, huts, and islands behind once more and they were evacuated yet again.

  But that, too, is a different story.

  Ezio was nudged by his brother. Nudging was a signal that a woman would come running out of the sea or could burst out of her bathing costume any moment now, or so their wishful thinking went.

  Ezio looked up and his bright eyes scanned the shoreline of the Adriatic Sea. And that’s when he first saw her, although his eyes didn’t actually realise what they were seeing. It was more than a minute before he uttered, ‘I see a navel.’

  His brother only got as far as, ‘Me too.’

  There, in the surf, stood Giovanna Berlucchi. Incomparable. Incredibly beautiful. She was barely twenty, with long dark hair she always wore down.

  That morning, she’d stormed out of the house after an argument. There’d been much yelling and slamming of doors.

  The Berlucchi family was made up of six women — a mother and five daughters — and a much put-upon father. Giovanna was the eldest daughter and had to share her clothes with two younger sisters. Weddings, christenings, and the First Communions of cousins weren’t just days to look forward to, but also days preceded by screeching, scratching, and crying. The three sisters would all want to wear the same item of clothing: a blue flowery dress, a cotton skirt with big pleats and a high waist, the only silk blouse. The father wore the same clothes day in day out and didn’t understand why his daughters kept fighting. But then, it wasn’t uncommon for him to be baffled by his daughters at the best of times. Experience had made him none the wiser; experience had taught him to remain silent as the grave. On one occasion he’d even incurred the wrath of his daughters by saying, ‘If you don’t stop bickering now, I’m going to wear that skirt to the wedding!’

  The girls had looked at one another and forgotten all about the nuptials, the skirt, the bickering. They homed in on their father. It wasn’t his business. He wasn’t a woman. He didn’t know what he was talking about. Why didn’t he crawl back under his rock?

  So when one summer morning there was a fight over a bathing costume and doors were slammed, a week’s worth of dust whirled around the parlour, and the next-door neighbour crossed herself, the father didn’t get involved. He remained tight-lipped, didn’t move a muscle, and never even blinked. He just thought quietly of the son he would have loved to have.

  The bathing costume stretched between Giovanna and her younger sister Francesca like a sheet about to be neatly folded. Neither was prepared to let go. What followed was a tug of war. Giovanna took a step back, Francesca a bigger one. The bathing costume stretched and turned a lighter colour. Giovanna took another step back, and in turn Francesca yanked at the fabric with all her might. The bathing costume was now twice its original length, and had it been quiet the agonised cries of the fibres might have been audible. But it wasn’t quiet. There’s no such thing as quiet in a house with six women.

  ‘Let go,’ Giovanna shrieked.

  ‘No,’ Francesca screeched. ‘You let go!’

  Meanwhile the father thought of a young man, an imaginary son who’d help him repair the roof — a roof that always needed fixing, even in summer, which is when the swallows took up residence beneath the eaves.

  That’s when it happened: the stretchy fabric tore. It happened in a flash, like a whip crack. The sisters fell to the floor, each with a piece of the bathing costume in their hands. Giovanna held the top half, Francesca the rest of the synthetic material. For a while the two sat facing each other, their eyes ablaze. They swore, calling out stronza and faccia da culo. Again, doors slammed, dust whirled around the parlour, and the next-door neighbour crossed herself. But this time the front door slammed as well. Giovanna ran out with the ripped costume in her hands. She was going to the beach. Nobody could stop her, and nothing would get in her way.

  Louis Réard cut fabric measuring a little over seventy square centimetres into four triangles, which he then tied together with two bits of string. Giovanna Berlucchi needed only two knots. Having put on the top and bottom parts of the bathing costume, she tied a knot at the top l
eft and one at the bottom right.

  Twelve months later, not a single model was willing to wear Louis Réard’s two-piece at a fashion show. In the end, only a nude dancer was prepared to don the garment. On 5 July 1946, Micheline Bernardini modelled the first bikini at the Molitor swimming pool in Paris. The newspapers were damning, speaking of ‘moral decay’ and ‘a disgrace for France’. But when Giovanna Berlucchi walked along the beach of San Cataldo in her two-piece bathing costume and the sea air caressed her navel, she cast a lifelong spell over Ezio Ortolani.

  Ezio Ortolani was eighty-four years old and had worked as an apple picker for the best part of his life. He lived alone, and was the kind of man who went to the same bar for his espresso every day. He rarely talked — he preferred to sit back and listen in silence. His friends had either died or were no longer able to get out and about. There was no woman in his life. There never had been. That’s why he was on his own; that’s why he was living out his days in Bolzano, the town to which he’d moved sixty years ago.

  He’d fled.

  At the age of twenty-three, Ezio wanted to close a door behind him and forget all about the room beyond it. But its contents were bigger than the room itself and seeped past the hinges and spilled through the keyhole, were more than willing to be carried on the wind across the silvery green seas of olive trees and vast vineyards, were seduced by a swarm of bees, and travelled in comfort from Carpi to Mantua on the roof of a train. Then again, sometimes they got stuck for days among the walls of a schoolyard, where they made little children miss their mothers. When the wind picked up, the contents of the room were lifted up yet again, over the walls, rising higher and higher into the sky, above the whooping of the children, over the houses, the trees, and the birds, before eventually raining down on an apple Ezio reached for with his right hand.

  Having travelled the length and breadth of Italy, he’d finally ended up in a town where two groups of people were diametrically opposed to one another: Italians versus South Tyroleans. The war may have been over, but here another battle raged on — and had done so for nearly three decades.