Carmela’s father, Tomas, and his younger brother, Peppe, joined forces on the farm. After the war, and the division of land that followed, the two had found themselves owners of this narrow idyll. There was produce to feed their respective families and enough left over to barter for anything they didn’t, or couldn’t, grow themselves.
The two brothers had built a roof over the ruins of the home they found there, using mismatched terra-cotta tiles salvaged from crumbling villas on the outskirts of town. After several months of sweaty work, they had converted the stones into this two-room cottage. One room had the skeleton of its original hearth resurrected. This was where Carmela’s mother, Maria, performed her culinary spells when the women joined them from town to help. The other room had several cots for sleeping, though it was usually only the men who would stay there overnight. The women would return to their Simius homes, where their day-to-day lives were anchored and the children schooled.
Tomas paced the stone floor, hot in the middle of a rant, his sun-parched skin creasing into sharp lines. “Fire-and-brimstone-thunder-lightning-heavens-and-hells!!!!” The two-year diet of sugar, lemons, and bananas during his time in Africa, building roads for Mussolini, had left him with a mouth of rotting teeth that caused him considerable pain. “Cross-the-devils-heavens-above!” he cried, stomping his dusty boots and clenching his fists. The bronzed muscles on his wiry forearm bulged.
One end of a thread was tied tightly around the metal door handle and the other around the culprit. Maria stood beside him, her alabaster face serene, unruffled by the frantic tirade of her husband; her black eyebrows didn’t furrow, and no worry creased her forehead. Maria’s white skin, unlike the tawny olive of her siblings, had earned her the nickname of Spanish princess. Genetic surprises were not uncommon in Simius. Maria’s cousin was born to a small, dark woman with thick, black locks but grew to be almost six feet tall, topped with a mass of copper hair and bright blue eyes—a nod to the area’s Norman, rather than Spaniard, history. The tone of Maria’s skin was set off by the jet black of her hair, the color and sheen hinting little to her forty years. Only on rare occasions did Carmela spy it liberated from the bun wrapped in a tight knot at the base of her mother’s head, cascading in thick, natural curls down to the middle of her back.
Carmela had inherited the same lustrous locks, though hers were less cooperative. They fell in erratic waves by her shoulders, creasing into tighter curls depending on the weather, or sometimes, she supposed, her mood. She gave up trying to tame it into a bun and swept it off her face with a scarf tied around her head instead, or a pin or two clamped around a few strands as an afterthought. Carmela’s skin was several shades lighter than her sisters’ also but had little of her mother’s porcelain quality. Where her mother guarded her thoughts and feelings, Carmela’s every emotion rippled across her face despite any attempt at concealment, the deep ochre of her eyes revealing each flickering thought. On certain days, Carmela noticed marbled flecks of her father’s green in hers. Piera swore this happened only when her sister was trying not to lose her temper, or if she’d cut a pattern wrong or burned the garlic.
Carmela sat at the wooden table before the wide stone hearth and stopped kneading the dough for fresh gnochetti. She admired the tender stoicism her mother radiated, the way her soft wrinkles underlined an innate wisdom, especially when her father was mid-fury. It was an occurrence Carmela would have wished unusual, for her mother’s sake. If it wasn’t a painful tooth, Tomas ranted about the onion being cut incorrectly for red sauce—eventually Maria placed it in whole for the duration of cooking and removed it before serving—or that the cauliflower had boiled too long and fumigated the house with the smell of sewer. It was a blessing that he had found someone as exacting as he was but who managed to keep her attention focused on minutiae with apparent ease.
Maria’s sister-in-law, Lucia, sat on the opposite side of the table and shifted her glance from her baby, asleep in his wooden cot at her feet, oblivious to the drama. Tomas took a breath, gave the door a defiant slam, and let out a guttural growl.
The familiar tinkle of a dead tooth tapping on the wood restored a short-lived peace.
Maria wrapped a strip of old sheet around her two fingers and dipped it into an enamel bowl of water. She held it out to her husband. He flicked her hand away.
“Water’s for washing!” Tomas whistled through the new gap. “Give me the bottle!”
“Tomas,” she implored, “you need to clean it first.”
He stomped over to the wooden dresser and yanked out the aqua vitae from the lower cupboard. The women watched him rip a fat strip off the old sheet in one motion and douse the frayed material in the alcohol. His mouth opened wide. Tomas stuffed the sodden cotton inside. His jaw clamped down. He winced. Then he straightened, his cheek bulging with cloth.
Carmela saw the steely determination for which he was infamous flash in his green eyes. Her father could plough through agony of any sort like no other. A dogged stubbornness marked everything he turned his hand to. Tomas could dig his entire farm without stopping, not even for a sip of water. The first time the younger hired hands had worked at the farm, they raced ahead of him, ridiculing his grandfather speed, as they called it. An hour later, they succumbed to paralyzing hunger and thirst. Under the relentless sun that day, they guzzled their water and inhaled Maria’s homemade bread and cheese. Meanwhile, their eyes fixed on their swarthy, bare-chested boss, twice their age. They gawked at him with admiration as he lifted and dropped his pick into the rich soil with slow, mechanical movements, an unyielding ox, till the pink sun dipped down into the hills, its fading rays streaking in through the branches of the cork oaks. They never teased him again.
Tomas threw the door wide open. Carmela looked out of the small window of the hearth room, watching her father charge back out to his fields. Beyond the ploughed earth, the yellow grasses swayed in a breeze, offering little respite from the midsummer sun. Inside, the stone rooms allowed the women to work in the comfort of the cool temperatures, unless it was cheese-making day, like today, in which case the milk simmering on the wood fire in the hearth raised the temperature.
Beyond Tomas and his younger brother, Peppe, sweating over the long rows of tomato plants, Franco’s family’s parched land lay dotted with cork oaks. Their trunks had already been stripped. The cork bark hung, maturing, in one of the two adjacent huts, later to be boiled, flattened, and sold.
These two circular huts were the oldest structures on the farm, left by solitary shepherds, whose century-old footprints, some said, could still be found, untouched, on the floors of virgin forests where autumnal gatherers dug for truffles. One hut was used for drying out cork and cheese, and the other, with a fire pit dug into the center of its earthen floor, was used to smoke their homemade sausages, which swung high above the flames, suspended from the conical thatch. It was here that Tomas, his brother, and any occasional worker would gather at the end of the day to sip their pungent wine out of tiny ridotto glasses. As night fell, they would grieve for times gone by and argue over whether America’s sidewalks were truly covered in gold or if all of God’s riches were right there, under their noses, among their beloved Sardinian wilderness.
Carmela loved the light, space, and fresh air of the farm, a world away from the cool darkness of their town home. The latter was built with the small fortune with which Tomas had returned from Africa. In its inception, he had favored