THE SCENT OF ROSA’S OIL
LINA SIMONI
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
To my son
To my land
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 1
Genoa, 1910
Madam C was combing Rosa’s hair when a stray gust of wind forced its way into the caruggi, the old downtown streets, passageways so narrow sunlight hardly reached below the level of the rooftops. The three panes of the front window of the Luna, the brothel Madam C had owned for nineteen years, shook lightly under the wind’s attack. Set deep in the labyrinth of the caruggi, five blocks from the harbor, halfway down Vico del Pepe, the Luna spread over three floors of an ancient building of slate and stone that had withstood wars, storms, and the furtive erosion of sea salt. Inside, on the first floor, eight feet from the window, Rosa was seated on a stool in the corner of the dimly lit parlor, her thick, curly crimson hair loose down her torso and her neck bent slightly backward. Behind her, a wide-tooth comb in hand, stood Madam C, long-boned and slender, wearing a loose robe of pale yellow silk tied softly around her waist with a sash. Her hair, raven, with only sparse, barely visible threads of gray, was gathered in two braids rolled about her ears and fastened at the top of her head with a pearl clip. Free of makeup, her eyes had no glow. She sank the comb into Rosa’s curls and gently pulled down. “Ouch!” Rosa yelped.
“Be patient, Princess Rosa,” said Margherita, one of the nine Luna girls. She was ensconced in an armchair at the opposite corner of the parlor, near the front door, slowly turning the pages of an oversized, leather-bound book. She lifted her eyes for a moment, sniffed the air, then shook her head and resumed her reading.
“Rosa’s hair is such a jungle,” Madam C said. “And the more I comb it, the more entangled it gets.”
“You say that every time.” Rosa giggled.
“Your curls have a life of their own,” Madam C continued. “We all know what happened on that Sunday I decided to trim them.”
Rosa’s first and only haircut had become a legend at the Luna and one of Madam C’s favorite anecdotes about Rosa’s life. She’d tell that story whenever a new girl arrived, on birthdays and anniversaries, and every time someone stared at Rosa’s curls in awe. Rosa was born bald, the story went, with a smooth, healthy scalp that shone like a rainbow in the sunlight, and stayed bald for two months before her hair started to grow at an amazing speed. By the time she was eight months old, Rosa had a headful of rebellious red curls. By her first birthday the curls reached below her shoulder blades. On a quiet Sunday morning, while all the Luna girls were still asleep on the second floor, Madam C sat a cheerful, smiling Rosa on one of the parlor armchairs and took a pair of large scissors out of a drawer. “Here we go, little Rosa,” she chanted. “We’ll make you so beautiful no one will be able to stop looking at you.” And then, she cut five centimeters off a strand of Rosa’s hair. At once Rosa began to scream. She screamed, and screamed, and screamed, louder than she had ever screamed before. Awakened by the shouts, several girls came running down the stairs to find Madam C standing like a statue, openmouthed, a lock of red hair in one hand, the scissors in the other. Rosa was still screaming. “You poor child,” Esmeralda said, picking up Rosa and patting her on the shoulders.
“She looks awful,” Madam C noted. “We must finish this haircut, one way or another.”
“I’ll hold her in my arms,” Esmeralda said, noticing that Rosa had calmed down. “You go ahead.”
At that, Madam C cut a second strand of hair. Rosa let out a screech so loud the girls cupped their hands over their ears and grimaced at each other.
“It took three girls to hold Rosa down,” Madam C said the first time she told someone the story. “It took the strength of five girls to keep Rosa from bouncing all over,” she said on a following occasion. In the third version, all nine girls were on top of Rosa while Madam C completed the haircut amidst the child’s heart-wrenching screams. “We’ll let this hair grow as long as it wants to,” Madam C told the Luna girls when finally Rosa’s hair was all even. “Obviously Rosa can feel it, like a skin.” The hair stopped growing when it reached Rosa’s waist. With monumental patience, Madam C had been untangling it once a week ever since.
“Almost there,” Madam C said, noticing Rosa’s edgy motions on the stool, then suddenly lowered the comb and scrunched her nose. She said, “What is this odor?”
“I thought I smelled something a moment ago,” Margherita said, without lifting her eyes from the pages, “but I can’t smell it now.”
Madam C said, “Come here.”
Unhurriedly, Margherita closed the book and set it gently on the floor. It was a book of poetry. Its beige parchment pages contained a collection of famous love poems Margherita had copied in her best handwriting over the years. There were twenty of Petrarca’s sonnets from Il Canzoniere, passages of Dante’s Paradiso where Beatrice appeared, the poem Giacomo Leopardi had written for his Silvia, and many more.
Born into a middle-class family, Margherita had discovered poetry by accident in her late teens, on a Saturday afternoon, while she was strolling along a tree-lined street with her aunt Genia, the austere older sister of her father. At a certain point, Margherita and Aunt Genia came across a man who stood on a bench, reciting words from a booklet in the direction of a closed window. Margherita stopped and listened, moonstruck by the sounds, entranced by the rhythms of the man’s voice. Shyly, when the man stopped talking, Margherita asked him what those words he had recited were, and the man explained that they were ancient love poems written by Francesco Petrarca out of love for a woman named Laura. “There’s a maiden behind that closed window,” he added, pointing up. “I tried everything to win her heart—presents, flowers, music. Nothing worked. Poetry is my last resort.”
The following day, at the end of Mass, Margherita approached Father Marcello, the sixty-year-old priest who had administered her first Communion and assisted her during her confirmation. “Are there any books of poetry in the church library?” she asked.
Father Marcello couldn’t hide his surprise. “You don’t know how to read,” he said. “What would you do with poetry books?”
“I’d like to be able to read them someday, Father. And write, too. Will you teach me? Please?”
Her reading lessons with Father Marcello began the next day, without her father’s or Aunt Genia’s knowledge, both of them convinced that the purpose of Margherita’s daily church visits was to pray. It wasn’t long before Margherita, a fast and disciplined learner, thirsty for the sounds of the poems, was able to sit in the church library and read. She had Father Marcello point out to her the books of poetry and devoured them with the passion of a scholar. The meaning of the verses she read, however, was obscure. “I’ll be glad to help you with the interpretation,” Father Marcello told her, “as long as you help me play a special game.” To explain the game, Father Marcello grazed her neck and breasts with his fingers several times.
Aunt Genia walked into the library one day while Father Marcello had Margherita on his lap and