Under a Sardinian Sky

by Sara Alexander

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Sometimes a family’s deepest silences hide the most important secrets. For Mina, a London-based travel writer, the enigmatic silence surrounding her aunt Carmela has become a personal obsession. Carmela disappeared from her Italian hometown long ago and is mentioned only in fragments and whispers. Mina has resisted prying, respectful of her family’s Sardinian reserve. But now, with her mother battling cancer, it’s time to learn the truth.

In 1952, Simius is a busy Sardinian town surrounded by fertile farms and orchards. Carmela Chirigoni, a farmer’s daughter and talented seamstress, is engaged to Franco, son of the area’s wealthiest family. Everyone agrees it’s a good match. But Carmela’s growing doubts about Franco’s possessiveness are magnified when she meets Captain Joe Kavanagh. Joe, an American officer stationed at a local army base, is charismatic, intelligent, and married. Hired as his interpreter, Carmela resolves to ignore her feelings, knowing that any future together must bring upheaval and heartache to both families.

As Mina follows the threads of Carmela’s life to uncover her fate, she will discover a past still deeply alive in the present, revealing a story of hope, sacrifice, and extraordinary love.

Release date: April 25, 2017

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

Seven years had passed since the roars of V-Day before the Sardinian town of Simius flung off its ashen veil of world war and threw an Assumption Day fiesta full of spectacle and hope. Children squealed beneath the strings of lights that rendered the stark, dusty central promenade unrecognizable. The narrow houses that lined the square, crushed together like skinny matriarchs pushing against one another for attention, boasted long strips of red and green fabric hung beneath their weary shutters. Benevolent, rosy-cheeked men butchered nougat. Farmers sold their pungent pecorino. Women flogged slabs of bitter almond brittle. And yet the Simiuns would never throw their hands in the air with the abandon of the singsong Neapolitans or caterwaul into the night with the joie de vivre gesticulation of the Romans.

Carmela looked over at the portly accordion player, who squeezed life into his instrument and bellowed a ballu tundu, a traditional dance performed in a circle, heralding the start of the festivities. A troupe from a neighboring town, south of Simius, swarmed the piazza. They interlocked arms in a tight line and began to dance. The accordion player’s fingers raced up and down the keyboard as the tune whirled into a fast ditty.

Carmela admired the female dancers’ costumes, and not simply because she and her colleagues at her godmother’s tailoring studio had made them. Their starched white headscarves were wrapped around their heads in a complicated crisscross pattern, held in place with gold pins on either side. The scarves framed their faces, drawing attention to the dark twinkle of their almond eyes, much like a Spanish mantilla or the veils of Arabian princesses; historic invaders from both places had left their mark on her island’s history and traditional dress. They wore billowing white blouses with intricate laced cuffs and collars. Over these were very tight-fitting, sleeveless bodices in bright red satin with gold embroidery, which cinched in their tiny waists. The neckline was cut low to allow the ruffles of the collars to show. Their plain, long black skirts with angular creases were topped with narrow aprons festooned with vibrant needlework depicting flowers, birds, and patterns in primary colors as bold and joyous as their expressions were inscrutable. Around their necks were velvet chokers from which coral and turquoise crucifixes hung. In their ears, garnets and cornelians, with intricate gold settings as delicate as fine lace, swung as they bobbed into their steps. At the yoke of the neckline each dancer had a brooch, made from two flattened, golden conical shapes, like tiny Bronze Age shields, set with coral or turquoise at their centers.

The men, dressed in long black woolen waistcoats despite the balmy August evening, glided in white shirts with sleeves that ballooned toward tight, starched cuffs. The black tunics below flared out like skirts, reaching down to the middle of their thighs, where the tops of their white cotton trouser legs underneath puffed over the rims of their high black boots. The length of their velveteen black hats flopped over to one side, like a hare’s ear.

The dancers stared out into the distance, their shoulders perfectly level, as their feet shuffled, syncopated and synchronized. Despite the joyous melody, their expressions were cool with indifference, as if their feet moved involuntarily. Their torsos were held bolt upright; they wove in and out of formations like ornate planks. Carmela would have liked to lose herself in the colorful beauty of the display but couldn’t help dissecting their costumes with the mathematical eye of the seamstress who had crafted them over the past year. Each autumn brought a slew of commissions for the numerous summer festivals in which the dancers would perform. As she tried to commit any improvements she would make to memory, there was an urgent tug at her elbow. “We’re a girl down!” Carmela’s sister Piera was flushed with panic. It made her look wirier than she was already.

“What?”

“Ripped her ankle. You’re on!”

“Nonsense!”

“Here’s her costume,” Piera said, shoving a mass of color in front of Carmela. With that she grabbed Carmela’s arm and dragged her down into the warren of darkened streets in a frantic search for an abandoned doorway to change in.

“This is ridiculous!” Carmela cried out, trying to catch her breath. Piera cut a sudden turn downhill, passing their Zio Raimondo’s shoe shop. Then she jerked to a halt beneath the arches of The Old Spanish House, a high-walled diminutive fortress left by the sixteenth-century Spaniard invaders her islanders were so proud of.

“Just ask one of the Nugheddu girls!” Carmela said, trying to fight off her sister’s quick hands scrambling over the buttons on the back of her dress.

“I’m not asking any of those trollops from the next town!”

“Then tell the dancer’s partner to sit it out too, for goodness sake!” Carmela snapped, quickly reaching to catch her own dress as it fell over her slip toward the cobbles. “Piera!” she gasped, seizing her sister’s hands. “Have you lost your mind?!”

“I let you out of my sight for two seconds and you’re down an alley getting undressed!” a voice called out. The spidery silhouette of Carmela’s fiancé, Franco, crept round the corner. She yanked her dress up high over her front, covering as much of her body as she could, though the warm night air still brushed over her bare shoulders.

“Perhaps you can knock some sense into my sister!” Carmela cried.

“Impossible,” Franco replied. “She won’t let any man in spitting distance.” He leaned against the wall of the house that flanked the steps.

Piera didn’t mirror his grin. “Carmela’s got two minutes to save us from disaster,” she huffed, stuffing Carmela’s feet into the black underskirt and yanking it up. “Turn around!” Piera ordered, spinning her to face the wall, throwing a blouse over her head, and beginning to squeeze her into the bodice.

“This dancer’s half my size,” Carmela muttered.

“Not everyone’s been blessed with your curves. Take this shawl,” Piera replied, throwing it over Carmela’s shoulders and knotting it at the base of her back, “It’ll hide the gap at the back.”

Franco stood watching. Carmela felt her cheeks flush.

Piera whipped a scarf around Carmela’s head and began fastening it at the back of her neck. Franco looked her up and down. “I’ve never liked those old-fashioned head things till now.”

He sauntered down the last few steps and planted his lips on Carmela’s before she could brush him off.

“Franco . . .” she said, smoothing the embroidered apron Piera was wrapping around her so it would lie as well as it might.

“Piera’s almost my sister-in-law. Not the last time she’ll see me kiss you.”

“Not if I can help it,” Piera piped from the hem of Carmela’s skirt, where she crouched down to pick it out from under her square heels.

Franco smirked. “Tomboys make fine spinsters, Pie’.”

“That’s enough, you two!” Carmela said, feeling the heat of embarrassment and increasing nerves.

“Franco! Vieni subito!” a voice called.

The three looked up toward the steps.

“Cristiano?” Franco yelled up to his cousin as he came panting down toward them. Franco pulled away from Carmela. “What in God’s name?”

Cristiano stood, breathless and giddy with liquor. “You must come—the boys have got the Americans in a drinking competition. We’ll lose if you’re not there!”

Carmela willed Cristiano’s eyes to tear themselves away from her body.

Franco gave him a shove. “Where’s your manners, you cretin? That’s how you look at my fiancée?”

Carmela winced. She felt like a gormless mannequin wearing the wrong clothes.

“Come on, you imbecile,” Franco said, giving his cousin a kick as they set off. “You watch this, Carmela,” he called back with the malevolent bristle of an adolescent, “we’ll show those G.I.s what Sardinians are made of!” With that they bounded around the corner to inebriation.

Before Carmela could take a breath, Piera grabbed her wrist and led her in a gallop back up through the alleys. Their footsteps ricocheted off the thick walls of the houses, which huddled along the viccoli barely wide enough for a loaded donkey. They reached the main square just as it was time for the local troupe to begin their performance. The injured dancer’s partner moved toward Carmela and wrapped his arm around her waist. Before she could compose herself, she was spun around like a top, shuffling into the middle of the long line of dancers, hoping she didn’t look as much the deer before a hunter as she felt. She adored creating the costumes, and her deft work attracting admiration, but being the center of attention in this way was something Carmela loathed. The entire dance was spent holding one side of the skirt down with her thumb so that it wouldn’t ride up to her chest.

Carmela had watched every rehearsal, using the time in between choreography calls to give each of the performers their fittings, adjusting their costumes accordingly. By tonight, she was as familiar with the routines as threading a needle, though she had never planned to perform them. During the bridge, the dance mistress had chosen a few measures for the now-fallen dancer and her partner to perform alone while the remaining members of the troupe jigged upstage in a line. It was a scandalous departure from the military patterns of these traditional dances, and one Carmela had hoped to enjoy from the safety of a crowd.

Now she found herself led this way and that. The world whirred. She aimed to stare at a spot directly in front of her, to maintain balance in the fog, just as the dance mistress had instructed the dancers during rehearsals. Her eyes couldn’t focus with the sea of faces ahead of her. She lost her footing. Her partner would have almost spun her horizontally had he not had the forethought to shunt them into a retreat and rejoin the line—a measure too early. The troupe, counting in their heads, was thrown off beat. The remainder of the dance was a ramshackle version of what they had spent months preparing for. Carmela could feel the hot glare from the dance mistress on the sidelines.

As soon as the accordion wheezed its closing chord, Carmela fled the square, grabbing her own dress and retreating to the secluded changing spot. She didn’t wait for Piera. It was too painful to look anyone in the eye, even her own sister.

In the quiet, Carmela began to slip out of the costume she had spent hours making and back into her own. She brushed away embarrassment with each stroke of her ruffled hair. Why should she care what she looked like anyway? A betrothed woman had no place worrying about her appearance. Her job was to prepare for marriage, to portray a wholesome image to the world. To look good enough for a fiancé to invite her to be his wife, she supposed, but not so much that it would seem she chased attention elsewhere.

“Everything all right, ma’am?”

Carmela twisted around to the American voice, grasping the top of her dress and pulling it up to cover as much of herself as she could.

“Apologies, ma’am.”

She squinted up toward the steps, at the unfamiliar silhouette. The man’s voice was clear and warm, silky even, very different from the timbre Carmela was accustomed to hearing from the soldiers. Or perhaps it was her comprehension that had improved.

“I caught you running. I wanted to make sure I needn’t be chasing after someone on your behalf,” he continued, with a polite turn of his head away from her, signaling that he had noted her state of near undress. What must he be thinking of her skulking in the shadows this way? The fading light from an oil street lamp streaked across his eyes for a brief moment. “You can’t be too careful at these fiestas.”

“Yes,” Carmela replied, struck by something more startling than the blue of his eyes. She was half dressed down a darkened alley speaking English with a perfect stranger. He was a soldier, no less, and they weren’t well known for their manners. Despite all of this, she felt something peculiar in the presence of this man she didn’t know: safe. It was more disarming than fear itself.

Carmela recalled how she and her sisters, as young adolescents, had run down to the piazza when these corporals had arrived eight years ago. She imagined that those V-Day hero cheers from the mainland were still ringing in their ears as they swaggered into her town, victorious. They liberated the island from the decay of war with gum and smiles. The shoeless poor still ambled the white roads of neighboring villages, farms crumbling in the crags of the ancient valleys inland, and for many, hunger was entrenched in quotidian life. But the fatal sting of malaria had finally been eradicated, thanks to the Americans, and this alone was cause to celebrate. Carmela and her sisters had returned home that day with their pockets bulging with hard squares of pink, covered in wrappers they couldn’t read, to be pummeled with their grandmother’s vitriol against those devils incarnate. She had confiscated their loot, placing it into the glass urn filled with candy reserved for visitors.

“I’m fine, really,” Carmela said at last, feeling as if she owed a decent reply to a genuine concern for her safety. “It is a long and silly story.”

He smiled. “Your English is better than my Italian. Compliments.”

“I work with people from London sometimes,” she said. The little English she knew, she had learned from an adventurous London family, the Curwins, who took residence in a Victorian villa every summer since the war ended. Carmela and Piera worked for them as seasonal domestics. Because of the eradication of malaria, Simiuns had felt the first blushes of tourism.

The soldier stepped back into a shaft of light, casting his shadow through one of the arches and onto the stucco wall beside him. He had an open, handsome face. Carmela had seen many handsome faces since the foreigners settled. Their tall, pale beauty was so different from the small, dark men most girls were promised to at a young age. It made the soldiers somewhat of a novelty, one that many local girls chased after but that always left Carmela cold.

She realized she must have been staring straight up into the light, because he had morphed back into a silhouette. Carmela shifted and grasped the tip of her dress tighter to her chest.

“Good night now,” he said, breaking the silence.

With that he placed a cigarette onto his lips, turned on his heels, and climbed back up to the fiesta. She watched his smoke spiraling up into the night air.

After securing every button on her dress and clutching a carefully folded pile of costume, Carmela began her ascent toward the piazza. She placed the dancer’s costume on a bench by a neighbor’s sweet stall, relieved to find everyone’s attention directed toward a new event taking place in the center of the piazza. She joined the throng, bristling with anticipation ahead of a live performance. The audience surrounded a smaller, impenetrable circle of an all-male choir. No danger of being asked to substitute this time.

Carmela noted the starkness of their expressions, that characteristic Sardinian stare that would not let on whether it loathed or loved what it saw. For a fleeting moment she perceived that hard, diffident shell for which her islanders were infamous, but also the molten center that it protected. Maybe this is what it felt like to stand close to a range of volcanoes.

Her eyes drifted over the American soldiers, dotted among her neighbors. For a split second she thought she caught sight of the alley soldier. She squinted. He was fair-haired, with the same white skin flushed with a rosy pallor. But even from this distance, she could see that the way he moved as he spoke with his colleagues was jerky and juvenile. He was a blond pup, with none of the understated grace of the man in the viccolo. She brushed away the futility of the thought without taking her eyes off the young soldier. Instead, she considered how different the Simiuns were compared to the prim Milanese, the refined Turinese, or the girdled girls who these young American men might have left behind before their journey to her craggy, crystalline-coved isle.

There was a rumble from the bass singers. A hush fell, so swift, so thick, that the night sky itself seemed to grow darker and the scatter of shimmering stars glistened brighter. Carmela couldn’t remember the last time such a great number of Simiuns were so silent. Even in church, there would always be the echo of stray toddlers exploring the side chapels, followed by the tireless footsteps of their mothers, or older men who thought their whispered gossip couldn’t be heard from the back pews.

The singers upheld the silence.

Finally, the bass singers took a breath, in perfect unison, as if they shared a set of lungs among them, and intoned several measures of percussive humming. Their voices rose as if from the earth underfoot, trembling the crust of the land, like the first warning of an impending earthquake or the distant rumble of a thousand wild horses thundering toward Simius from the parched plains that surrounded it.

Carmela could feel the vibrations on her chest from where she stood. Now the other singers joined in. A column of sound rose. The ancient harmonies mesmerized the crowd. Carmela allowed the honeyed notes to wash over her, as rich and deep as the burnished red of the naked trunk of a stripped cork tree. The melody was sonorous, full of loss and longing, somewhat at odds with the unadulterated joy of the surroundings.

The music described a long-lost antiquity. The chords crushed together, dissonant almost, sweeping Carmela back to a time when the Neolithic settlers sheltered in those caves carved into the rocks on the outskirts town. Where those peoples once saluted the sun and venerated pagan gods of fertility, her family now celebrated May 1, with picnics of homemade cheese and bread. She and her sisters would gaze out over the valley that looked like an enormous emptied lake. They ate, sat upon that same stone, smooth with an age of travelers’ steps. She pictured those Neolithic men now, beneath fat moons, wrapped in animal skins, singing these same melodies into the night. Carmela lived for these stolen moments of pleasure, a respite from arduous monotony, transported by the music in churchless worship.

Her eyes landed on Franco, on the opposite side of the outer circle. She watched him, glancing over the milieu, giving half nods to any of his father’s compatriots at the town council office. His eyes returned to rest on her. He smirked, mischievous, then peeled the dress off her shoulder with his gaze. His smile was unchanged from the adolescent chimp she had acquiesced to during the cherry harvest in the early summer of their sixteenth year. Her breasts had had a growing season of their own, something that hadn’t escaped the attentions of a young Franco. He was the son of one of the most influential landowners—a heavyweight on the town’s council—a burden Franco carried with neither ease nor grace. Carmela watched him run a hand through his thick black hair, sharing a joke with his cousins, who shifted about him like the hungry stray cats that skulk along Simius’s narrow viccoli.

A solo tenor’s voice lifted up and over the group as he recounted the Sardinian tale of the deer woman who could settle for no man. The lyrics were plaited with fierce longing. He wailed his highest note, consumed with his song, as if this deer woman he sang of were his own lost love. It pierced the inky night, a lost sheep’s bleat down a starlit valley.

The hairs on the back of Carmela’s neck prickled. Franco’s trysts, though exciting, never brought her this rapture. This heightened passion could only ever exist in song, surely, those fables of poetic love. This was not the real feet-in-the-dust, earth-in-your-hands love that Carmela could expect from joyful married life. A good wife would be rewarded with life’s honest pleasures—food on her plate, babies with fleshy thighs at her breast, and wine to drink to her family’s health.

The singers closed with a glissando and a final rich, hummed chord that hovered, golden, in the air. Then the night erupted with applause. Carmela listened to the hands pounding with pride, but her eyes couldn’t tear themselves from Franco. She remembered how it felt when his salty mouth had made her heart pound and his body felt like an unchartered universe to touch, taste, and discover. Like the choir’s song, at once stirring yet distant, this boy, with his cherry and wild fennel kisses, felt like someone she once loved in a dream.

The cottage on Carmela’s family’s farm stood camouflaged against the boulders of the surrounding hills. A low wall made up of roughly chipped rocks undulated from the house over to the near distance where it gradually broke off, stone by stone, till there was no wall at all. In the middle of August the grapes on the hundreds of vines—lines of gnarled soldiers—grew plump with juice but remained green, awaiting the ripening autumnal sun. Dozens of tomato plants hung heavy with their second round of lustrous red, plum-shaped fruit. Beyond those were the almond, cherry, and plum trees. The cherries had long since been devoured, sold, or bartered in exchange for staples such as sugar or coffee. The June harvest of nuts had been dried, toasted, ground for marzipan, and then rolled into coin-shaped sospiri—bite-sized sweets dipped in white icing. They stored well for months and were given as gifts on feast or saint days. Only the plums remained to be picked. Their sweet, jamlike flesh, destined to fill hundreds of jars as preserve, would glaze the family’s breakfast breads throughout the winter.

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 sor. . .