La Brigantessa Read online

  On the day of the hog slaughter, Tonino finally got up enough courage to ask her to meet him at the river. And now he has made his way there, his heart in his throat the entire way. Tonino catches sight of a shawl-draped figure sitting on a large stone near the riverbank. His heart pounds. She came!

  ALFONSO KNOWS THAT HE AND HIS BROTHER Claudio are about as different from each other as any two brothers can be. If one didn’t know they were related by blood, one would be hard-pressed to find any characteristic that might even vaguely hint at a familial connection.

  Claudio, the eldest by seven years, is as mature as his outward appearance implies. His impeccable clothes and grooming habits befit his superior position as head physician at Torino’s biggest hospital. He is always clean-shaven, save for a neatly clipped moustache with immaculately tapered tips, and his ear and nose hairs are perennially trimmed—he has his wife tend to them religiously every Sunday. His dark brown hair glistens and his nails are clipped to perfection—a crescent of white at both ends.

  Claudio’s face is not ruggedly masculine; it is handsome in a refined sort of way, with its blue eyes inherited from his Visigoth ancestry and a chiselled jawline that carries no pockets of fat around the jowls, like so many of his less-disciplined colleagues. His frame is lean but firm. Keeping physically in form is a priority; he has repeatedly said that he abhors the thought of aiding in the body’s deterioration by eating excessively, drinking excessively, or doing anything excessively.

  Alfonso realizes that Claudio is not-so-subtly trying to suggest that his lifestyle is excessive, and that a few more years of unbridled excess will most surely result in a state of deterioration. Alfonso laughs every time Claudio mentions it. He isn’t at all worried. At twenty-five years of age, his features are solid but not flabby. His hair is flaxen, which his last lover likened to an undulating wheat field in the August sun. His eyes are dark brown with hazel specks. His body suits him the way it is: broad shoulders, a barrel of a chest, sturdy legs. A man of substance.

  Claudio is concerned chiefly with Alfonso’s excessive pastimes, which include women and gambling in Venice. Alfonso smiles. “La Serenissima,” as his favourite city is known, draws him with a bevy of delights that hold him willingly captive with its countless gambling havens and wealthy patronesses who are more than willing to test his skills in their salons and in their boudoirs.

  Occasionally, when Claudio sees that he is indulging heavily in any one area, he does what he has always done since Alfonso was old enough to follow him around and since the death of their father shortly after Alfonso’s birth. He assumes a paternal role, advising if need be, and inevitably scolding.

  Claudio is never mean-spirited even when he scolds. And although Alfonso usually nods in an attempt to seem remorseful, he and Claudio both know that disciplining Alfonso is pretty much nothing more than a ritual Alfonso tolerates.

  “I don’t like that glint in your eye, little brother. It’s going to get you into trouble one day,” Claudio has often told him.

  Alfonso scowls as he ponders how Claudio’s prophetic words became reality this past autumn, shortly after hiring a new chambermaid, the young niece of Antonietta, his cook….

  Alfonso took a liking to the girl, whose plain skirts and cotton blouses seemed to emphasize, rather than conceal, her budding voluptuousness. She had a pretty face and eyes with thick lashes that fluttered like the wings of a butterfly in a mating dance, taunting him with veiled messages, inflaming him with the occasional glide of her tongue over swollen lips.

  “Clara offered me the apple first,” Alfonso blurted when Claudio confronted him with the news of the girl’s shameful condition, revealed to him by the sobbing Antonietta.

  “You didn’t have to take it,” Claudio snapped. “The Fantin name has always been a respected one. Now it is besmirched as a result of your…your…excessive stupidity.” Spittle flew from the corners of his mouth. “A plan has to be concocted before this unfortunate incident becomes public knowledge and destroys the reputation our parents worked so hard to build.” His eyes bore into Alfonso. “This is going to cost you dearly, brother. You can’t keep indulging in the desires of the flesh and never expect your seed to take fruit.”

  Alfonso bit his lip. “It doesn’t have to take fruit. There are ways….”

  “That is not her wish.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your cook came to me, remember? This is just as shameful for her family as it is for ours, especially if word gets out.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Just Antonietta; Clara couldn’t bear to come to you.”

  “Maybe she’ll listen to me.” Alfonso’s voice hardened. “She can’t keep it. I never intended—”

  “To marry her?”

  “Of course not.” Alfonso snorted. “She’s a servant, for God’s sake.”

  “So, you don’t love her?”

  “Love?” Alfonso scoffed. “I never bedded her because I loved her. And I found out quickly enough that Clara’s appetite for bedding had been whetted before me. I wasn’t the first.” He began to pace the room. “Perhaps this was a scheme from the start. Entice your master, have him impregnate you, and then arrange for blackmail money so the news doesn’t leak out to the wrong people.” Alfonso turned sharply to Claudio. “Has there been mention of money exchanging hands?”

  “Cook hinted as much. She mentioned a friend in Lombardy who would take the girl in for a sum that wouldn’t result in hardship for her family, and that Clara would be willing to spare everyone the shame.”

  “Puttana!” Alfonso spat, clenching his teeth. He could feel the vein in his temple throbbing, his face flushing in an unstoppable wave.

  “You have to recognize your part in this,” Claudio said quietly. “This was bound to happen with the lifestyle you insist upon. Did you not think of sheathing yourself?”

  Alfonso snorted. “This was not a planned overture, or yes, I would have, brother dear.” He had always heeded Claudio’s clinical lessons, arranging with the family butcher to supply him pig intestines, and except for the first time with Clara, he always made sure he was well equipped for his amorous adventures. “It must have happened on that first occasion, goddammit!”

  He began pacing again, recalling the events of the night he had stumbled into the palazzo, after a night of successful gambling and celebratory drinking. His missteps in the hall past the servants’ quarters had awoken Clara, who had appeared sleepily at her door in a flimsy night shift. Her hair, usually in a bun by day, cascaded over her shoulders in a thick mass of curls. In his kneeling position, Alfonso had seen the firm outlines of her body beneath the shift, and the solid peaks and dark valleys had aroused the manly desires within him that the effects of his drinking had not been powerful enough to stifle. He had risen clumsily toward her, grinning as Clara pushed her door open invitingly….

  The primitive desire Alfonso had felt for Clara in that first month after his initial entry into her room had waned instantly when he found out that she was pregnant. He had felt angry, betrayed, and regretful that the lustful unions they had shared would no longer continue. Clara, unlike his other partners in the past, had had no modest inhibitions. She had not just lain like a virtuous debutante of the social class he shared, feigning a delicate attempt to protect her maidenhead. No, Clara had been as lustful, if not more, that he. She had strutted around him with no fig leaf to hide her modesty. She had ridden him like a wild bandit, her hair streaming over her ripe breasts and gyrating abdomen, grinding into him until he felt himself explode. Unlike the inexperienced young women who had lain passively in bed after he had feasted on their virginity, still quaking at their first experience but not yet aroused themselves, Clara had been insatiable. There was nothing that Clara had demurred about when it came to bedding.

  And now she had gone and spoiled everything. She had extinguished his ardour as surely as the
candle she snuffed out upon his nightly arrival in her chamber, preferring the light of the moon during their tempestuous relations.

  Alfonso stopped seeking her out immediately and grudgingly gave orders to his personal secretary and advisor for the financial transaction to be made discreetly, and with haste, so that she could be out of his sight before she swelled out. On the one occasion that they crossed paths, Alfonso gave her an icy half-nod of acknowledgement, and her face darkened and twisted.

  “Vigliacco!” she spat, her eyes narrowing. She lifted her hand without hesitation and struck him in the face, leaving him speechless as she flounced away.

  I should have followed her and given her what she deserved for lifting her hand to me, he had thought regretfully on many occasions later, but he ended up consoling himself that the whore and her bastard were out of his life for good. To heal his wounded spirit, he deliberately stayed away from women and filled his time with gambling, the only other activity that aroused his passion. A particularly profitable night at the tables brought him satisfaction a week after Clara’s departure to Lombardy. His good humour restored, he set about making investments and purchasing as much property as he could, as he had done before he had allowed Clara to infringe upon his life.

  His connections with officials in the Piedmontese government—he was good friends with the Minister of Finance—let him in on some succulent deals before they became public knowledge. He was particularly interested in the church properties that were to be expropriated throughout Italy, due to the ruling liberal party’s ongoing anticlerical reforms. Alfonso fancied owning property all over the newly formed nation; it excited him to think of his bourgeoning wealth and prestige.

  Alfonso never attended the auctions himself—he employed others to carry out that task. What he enjoyed the most was the ritual of travelling to survey his recently acquired land. The labourers lined up for inspection by their new landlord. He felt like a youthful monarch as he strode past them, and as they curtsied and bowed, he intuitively looked for signs of diffidence. If it served his interests, he kept them on, working the latifundia and providing at the same time for their families; if he sensed a disgruntled worker—and he delighted in sniffing them out like a hunting bitch—he smiled at them with the merest hint of condescension, sometimes even picking up their small children like a benevolent godfather (“snotty-nosed little beggars,” he’d refer to them afterwards) and then, upon his return to Piedmont, he would give orders to have them dismissed with only a mere pittance, completely indifferent to their plight.

  “I can’t be responsible for feeding everyone,” he reasoned curtly to Claudio when he was reporting the details of a shared investment. “But my employees tell me that the tenants have found work elsewhere.”

  This was a downright fabrication more often than not, but Alfonso didn’t allow himself to feel guilty at all for lying to his brother as he knew it would help ease Claudio’s strong moral conscience.

  My brother’s only character flaw, Alfonso thinks with a fond smile.

  GABRIELLA GLANCES AT HER HANDS. Rough, calloused, the colour almost the same as the burnished terracotta floor in Don Simone’s rectory. Always moving, these hands, from dawn to dusk, and often after that. She sighs. Is it any wonder she has old hands or at least older-looking than her nineteen-year-old face?

  She stares at the bucket of dirty laundry she has brought with her. A young girl, no matter what age, would not be wandering toward the river for no reason, so she has thrown together items that needed washing anyway: her father’s clothes, grimy and stained from working in the fields and with the animals, a pair of Luciano’s torn breeches that look like they might not stand up to another hand scrubbing with the wash-stone, and her own shifts and skirts, their hems encrusted with mud from the last downpour.

  “I’m glad I kept walking. You weren’t at your usual washing place.”

  Gabriella turns slowly and nods a greeting but says nothing. She glances first at Tonino’s scuffed shoes and slowly draws her gaze upward, past the trousers, slowly counting the buttons on his linen shirt before meeting his eyes. It strikes her how handsome Tonino is.

  They have virtually grown up together in the hamlet of Camini, where it seems that just about everybody has a hand in the raising of a child. Rarely does a mother or father panic at the disappearance of a child—there are far too many watchful eyes in the village. If the child isn’t at old Nicolina’s house indulging in an uovo sbattuto—a thoroughly beaten egg yolk with a dash of marsala in it and plenty of sugar—then surely he or she might be in neighbour Betta’s cattoio, scattering the feed to the motley group of chickens and pigeons, or in Francesco Carlini’s garden, a favourite spot for the young to feed on golden plums in the summer, orange persimmons in the fall, plump pears and oranges in the winter, and medlars in the spring.

  The old man always feigns fury at spotting children in his garden, frowning menacingly while attempting a cane-assisted chase through the neat rows of tomatoes, and the children shriek and scurry off like alarmed ants to hide behind the gangly bean stalks, finding this beloved ritual even more fun than the actual picking of the fruit. Secure in the knowledge of Signor Francesco’s benevolence, and the fruitful outcome, they are regular interlopers of the Carlini garden.

  Gabriella can still remember the time when she and Tonino had run off in the usual delirious panic, Tonino successfully finding a spot behind the giant fig tree, and she, skidding on a rotten fig on the ground and landing unceremoniously in a nearby prickly pear cactus. Signor Francesco had to pluck the tenacious thorns from her hands and legs, enduring her shrill howls with patience developed from experience. He had twelve grandchildren of his own, eight of them girls with high-pitched voices that became even more higher pitched in moments such as these. And after comforting her with a beaten egg yolk—fixed with an extra shot of marsala that he thought would benefit her under the circumstances—he sent her home with Tonino as her guardian to make sure she didn’t land in any more thorny bushes.

  “What are you thinking of?” Tonino returns her smile.

  She feels herself reddening, realizing she has been staring. “Signor Francesco…. Do you remember?”

  “How could I ever forget?” Tonino lets out a deep laugh. “I got a venomous scolding from your mother for allowing such a thing to happen, and a strict order to stay out of Signor Francesco’s prickly pears.”

  “Which both of us ignored, naturally.”

  “Naturally, being only eight and ten. It didn’t make sense to stop having fun.”

  Gabriella smiles wistfully, watching the water gushing a short distance from her feet. She and Tonino had a lot of fun as children. And now, here they are, childhood and adolescence over, with a new feeling between them. An awkward feeling. Gabriella can’t deny that there has been something different in the air between them for months.

  Is he aware of it too? Is that why he wanted to talk to her? Gabriella’s stomach tightens in anticipation as Tonino sits down on a flat rock next to her.

  “Gabriella, I want you….”

  She lifts her head.

  Tonino’s dark chestnut eyes are intense.“…For my wife.”

  Gabriella feels her heart jolting uncontrollably. Perhaps deep down she has been expecting a declaration of some sort, a modest expression or show of affection, but this? Realizing that her mouth has opened slightly, Gabriella clamps it shut and bites her lip, not knowing how she should reply.

  She doesn’t pull away when Tonino takes her hand in his. She likes the way his big hands cover hers. They are hard but warm and gentle at the same time, and Gabriella doesn’t know if the pulse she feels originates from him or herself. She allows herself to linger in their warmth, feeling as safe as she has ever felt in all their youthful escapades together.

  “Mi vuoi, Gabriella?” he says softly, his thumb beginning a circular caress on her palm. For a moment, as the river whisp
ers and gushes, she wonders if he has really spoken, but when he repeats the words, she knows it wasn’t her imagination.

  Do I want him? she muses, dazed. She has never dared to think this far. He wants me as his wife….

  “Yes,” she finally whispers, her cheeks aflame.

  When she meets Tonino’s gaze again, she is overcome by the sight of his eyes misting. She takes his hands in hers and squeezes them with all the affection that she has ever felt for him. Her lips quiver at his first tentative kiss, their locked hands held between them as they sit side by side. When Tonino’s lips part from hers, she can see the intensity in his eyes. For countless moments, they sit looking at each other, with only the river and the sparrows breaking the silence. At one point, Tonino walks over to a nearby oleander bush and snips off a few blossoms. He arranges the blossoms in her hair. “For my calabrisella,” he murmurs against her ear. “My Calabrian girl.”

  Long after he has departed, and she is back at the rectory with her laundry washed, scrubbed and wrung out, Gabriella wonders how she shall tell her father and Don Simone when they come home….

  DON SIMONE GIVES HIS MULE AN AFFECTIONATE PAT as he approaches Camini. “Come on, Vittorio,” he coaxes the animal, whose gait is considerably slower than when they headed out earlier. “Forza! Don’t quit on me now. A reward awaits you at home.” The animal neighs in response and kicks up his heels, making Don Simone chuckle at its seeming comprehension.

  Humming a chorus of the Te Deum, Don Simone straightens in the saddle and surveys the triangle-shaped hamlet on the mountainside. Camini…. Home for the last ten years. He smiles wistfully, remembering his bittersweet departure from his home in Friuli in the north at the age of twenty-nine.

  His position as head priest of the wealthy parish of San Bartolomeo was guaranteed; it was just a matter of time before his Superior, Monsignor Brunello, would succumb to the congestive lung ailment that was weakening him from day to day. But Don Simone had been having nagging feelings of doubt. Everything is too easy for you here, an inner voice kept telling him. You need to serve where there is poverty, suffering, devastation. You need to bring light and faith to areas of darkness and despair.