Sybil Fix - The Girl from Borgo

Copyright 2018 by Sybil Fix

All rights reserved

Print ISBN: 978-1-54393-226-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54393-227-0

BookBaby
Pennsauken, NJ, USA

For my parents

For Sabrina and all others in the book who left us during its writing

And finally, for all those who have suffered the loss of home
May we find peace, someday, somewhere, somehow

The Girl from Borgo

A ndrea looks at me and smiles. I see reverie in his dark eyes, and tenderness, too, like hes traveling back to a memory held dear.

Yet, there is a place, recessed and obscure, that stows the soft scarred shadow of an old grief. I still recognize it, under the layers of more recent losses and disappointments, after all these years.

What happened then, I ask.

E poi?

We are standing in the Bar Sport, our old bar, next to the big windows looking out onto Cetonas piazza, and the fountain, trickling on as always. Andreas hair is graying and he has put on a slight belly. He just quit work for the day, a successful woodworking business, and hes dusty. His hands rest in the pockets of his gray cargo work pants and he stands the way I have always known him to stand, feet wide apart like he is bracing for a soccer ball coming at him fast. Its the goalie in him, the goalie he was.

Through his pants I make out the muscles of his thighs, still lean and strong. In my memory I retrace his angular jaw line, his playful smile, and the taut stomach. I see a tangle of gold chains just below his collar bone and I imagine a blue T-shirt like an August sky above our mountain. Three buttons away from bliss.

The way we were.

He looks off somewhere in the piazza, in the stillness, then returns to me and focuses.

Mi ricordo tutto, fino allultimo dettaglio. I remember everything, to the last detail.

That late August at dawn, Andrea and our friend Tullia came to pick me up. The sky was turning a tender pale blue and the slightest of pinks streaked from the east like threads of cotton candy pulled by the fingers of a child, fuzzy and warm.

Across the way, in Citt della Pieve, the sun crested barely above the cobblestone streets, but the air was motionless, suspended as if the day were holding its breath for me to walk out.

Standing outside my house we whispered, I remember. It was like we didnt want to wake the neighbors, but, really, we didnt want to wake ourselves either, to the morning and the shock, awaiting.

Andrea had on pilots Ray-Bans and a lit cigarette in his hand. His thick black hair was slicked back, grazing his shoulders, and he was clean-shaven. The muscles of his back and shoulders stretched his blue cotton T-shirt opening at the collar. He looked neat and decent and heavyhearted.

Smiling slightly, my father shook Andreas hand and quietly thanked him for driving me to the airport. Andrea nodded politely but with reserve di niente , he said.

Dad had on that mask that grown men pull on when they are splintered by emotions but they just cant let them burst through: a mix of apprehension, love, and denial of it all.

And pride, too: I was off to college, in America, where he wanted me to go.

Goodbye, Birdie, he said, hugging me.

My childhood nickname, Birdiebecause I fluttered.

Andrea loaded my two suitcases and we got in his car, a white VW Golf whose soft rumble I could identify from miles away and that through my teenage ecstasy I tracked through the years with the tremulous heartbeat of a bird. The car whose sight in the piazza signaled the unmistakable presence of him. It was the keeper of our secrets, at night, in the countryside, with the crickets pulsing along with us.

We roll down the hill soundlessly under the rising sun, a loaded ball of tangerine in the hazy hot sky above Citt della Pieves sage-green hills, soft in the early morning light.

As the car descends Via Sobborgo, out of Cetona and onto the road of Il Piano, I turn to look at my house, up on the hill, the house where I grew up. In mere seconds the stone tower becomes vaguer and vaguer, and, with it, my bedroom window, smaller and smaller. I can no longer make out the green of the shutters, and then the house itself, and sadness brings a flood of tears to my eyes.

I wipe them away so I can see this place I am leaving and witness my own receding into space, but they flow too fast, and meanwhile we thread under the bridge of the autostrada and turn onto the road towards Ponticelli, moving farther away. Andrea shifts gears, third, fourth, fifth, and in the leaden silence he takes me away.

Then, in a flash of a turn Cetona itself disappears, and the Rocca, too, and the people I imagine waking up now to this pink day, Costanza to feed the pigs, and Unico to sell papers in the piazza. Monte Cetona is now the only thing left in my view, the big mountain I would like to pack in my bag and take with me.

Distance gobbles the details ferociously. I want to scream, please, wait, please stop. Stop everything. Maybe I can still see it, this mountain, this house, this place. Maybe I can grasp it and hold onto it, for one moment longer, this present that is slipping through my fingers and becoming past and future all in the same moment. I look back to search the landscape again, but everything has changed and its all gone.

My hill, my house, my town. It is all gone.

You could stop it. You could ask Andrea to stop and turn back. Like a cartoon moving backwards, you could go back through the fields and up the hill and knock on the door and say, Dad, I dont want to go. I want to stay here, where I belong. I want to stay here in this place whose winds have forged me, whose smells have fed me.

But you dont, you dont. So much has already been done and you dont have the courage to take it back. To face the disappointment, and the immovable walls of the town.

Besides, you cant foresee how much is going to be lost, and how much its going to hurt, and for how long. You dont understand how immutable this is going to be. You cant know how much life will throw onto your path to keep you away, and how, in the passage of it all, home will be lost, perhaps forever.

You are too young to know, and no one tells you. No one understands what it will be like for you.

And so you stick to it, and in a sudden slide of reality you are in a crowded airport, and then a plane, and, hours later, an unknown country a world away, so far away it might as well be on another planet.

Like a fancy red dress put in with a batch of bleach, your life is transformed. A path chosen, another shut.

That was thirty years agopages and pages of life ago.

And yet, the tremor of that August morning still churns my soul to the core.

Because since that day, my every day has been a goodbye renewed.

And since that day, every day I have dreamed of return.

Fall

O ne spring night last year in my bed on Edgewater Park, a teardrop of land on the marshy shores of South Carolina, I dreamt of a beautiful festival taking place in the piazza.

Crowds of people strolled and talked, and stalls and flowers extended from edge to edge. Maybe it was market day on Saturdays as I remember it growing up. In the dream I was walking along with Maria, Ottavia, and Tullia, three of my four or five uninterrupted friendships in Cetona over forty-some years, and as we passed the street leading back toward Piazza Par, right next to the church of San Michele, I saw a cluster of mesmerizing orange trees in full bloom.