Carmela had never been anywhere except her own village and this house, but Mrs. Unwin had no way of knowing that. She pressed a cracked black change purse in Carmela’s hand and sent her down the hill to the local market to fetch carrots and not over a pound of the cheapest stewing beef. Carmela saw walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ocher walls and black licorice balconies. Near the shore, work had stopped on some new houses. One could look through them, where windows were still holes in the walls, and catch a glimpse of the sea. She heard someone comment in an Italian more precious than her own, “Hideous. I hope they fall down on top of the builder. Unwin put money in it, too, but he’s bankrupt.” The woman who made these remarks was sitting under the pale blue awning of a café so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea, small round tables and colored ices in silver dishes. All at once she recognized a chauffeur in uniform leaning with his back to a speckless motorcar. He was from Castel Vittorio. He gave no sign that he knew Carmela. Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and the strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater.
At the beginning, she did not always understand what was said, or what Mrs. Unwin expected. When Mrs. Unwin remarked, “The chestnut trees flower beautifully up where you come from, though, of course, the blossoms are death for me,” Carmela stopped peeling vegetables for the English stew Mrs. Unwin was showing her how to make and waited for something more. “What have I said now to startle you?” said Mrs. Unwin. “You’re like a little sparrow!” Carmela still waited, glancing sidelong, hair cut unevenly and pushed behind her ears. She wore a gray skirt, a cotton blouse, and sandals. A limp black cardigan hung on her shoulders. She did not own stockings, shoes, a change of underwear, a dressing gown, or a coat, but she had a medal on a chain, an inheritance from a Sicilian grandmother — the grandmother from whom she had her southern name. Mrs. Unwin had already examined Carmela’s ears to see if the lobes were pierced. She couldn’t stand that — the vanity of it, and the mutilation. Letting Carmela’s ears go, she had said to her husband, “Good. Mussolini is getting rid of most of that. All but the medals.”
“Have I pronounced ‘chestnut’ in some peculiar way? My Italian can’t be that bad.” She got a little green dictionary out of the pocket of her smock and ruffled its pages. She had to tilt her head and close an eye because of the cigarette she kept in her mouth. “I don’t mean horse chestnuts,” she said, the cigarette waving. “How very funny that is in Italian, by the way. I mean the Spanish chestnuts. They flower late in the season, I believe.”
“Every flower has its season,” said the child.
Carmela believed this conversation to have a malignant intent she could not yet perceive. The mixture of English and unstressed Italian was virtually impossible for her to follow. She had never seen a woman smoking until now.
“But your family are up the Nervia Valley?” Mrs. Unwin insisted. “Your father, your mother, your sisters and your cousins and your aunts?” She became jocular, therefore terrifying. “Maria, Liliana, Ignazio, Francamaria …” The names of remembered servants ran out.
“I think so,” said Carmela.
Her mother had come down to Bordighera to work in the laundry room of a large hotel. Her little brother had been apprenticed to a stonemason. Her father was dead, perhaps. The black and the gray she wore were half-mourning.
“Mussolini is trying to get away from those oversized families,” said Mrs. Unwin with confidence. She sat on a high stool, arranging flowers in a copper bowl. She squashed her cigarette suddenly and drank out of a teacup. She seemed to Carmela unnaturally tall. Her hands were stained, freckled, old, but she was the mother of Tessa and Clare, who were under three and still called “the babies.” The white roses she was stabbing onto something cruel and spiked had been brought to the kitchen door by the chauffeur from Castel Vittorio. This time he had given Carmela a diffident nod.
“Do you know him?” said Mrs. Unwin instantly.
“I think I saw him in the town,” said Carmela.
“Now, that is deceitful,” said Mrs. Unwin, though without reproach. “He knows who you are, because he vouched for your whole family. ‘Hardworking, sober, the pride of the Nervia Valley.’ I hope there is to be none of that,” she added, in another voice. “You know what I mean. Men, giggling, chatting men up in the doorway, long telephone calls.”
The white roses were a peace offering: A dog belonging to the next-door neighbor had torn up something precious in the Unwins’ garden. Mrs. Unwin suddenly said that she had no time to stroll out in pink chiffon, wearing a floppy hat and carrying a sprinkling can; no time to hire jazz bands for parties or send shuttlecocks flying over the hedge and then a servant to retrieve them; less time still to have a chauffeur as a lover. Carmela could not get the drift of this. She felt accused.
“I don’t know, Signora,” she said, as though some yes-or-no answer had been required point-blank.
Where the roses had come from everything was white, green, lavish, sweet-smelling. Plants Carmela could not have put a name to bent over with the weight of their blooms. She could faintly hear a radio. All of that belonged to the Marchesa. She was the one who had said, “Hideous.”
Pollen carried on the wind from the Marchesa’s garden felled Mrs. Unwin in May. She was also assaulted by a large treelike shrub on the Marchesa’s side called a datura; some of its bell-like creamy flowers hung over the cactus patch. Their scent, stronger than jasmine, was poison to Mrs. Unwin’s nervous system. From her darkened room she sent for Carmela. She opened a leather box with a little key and showed her a sapphire set in diamonds and a loose emerald. She told Carmela the names of the stones and said, “I do not believe in hiding. I am telling you where they are and that the key is in my handkerchief case.” Again Carmela felt she had been accused.