The Road Out Of Rimini by Angela Petch

NOBODY else in the family wanted Nonna’s house. They said it was damp, poky and isolated. You couldn’t drive a car up there through the narrow, cobbled streets.

It would be better to knock it down, they said, and build a modern villa like Mayor Bruni’s on the edge of town.

Elisabetta had breathed a huge sigh of relief at the thought of having Grandmother’s little house to herself.

Friday nights became a highlight. She would grab her knapsack and ride her Lambretta along the road out of town in the opposite direction to the majority of pale, tired commuters.

Through the outskirts she hurried, where monstrous outlet warehouses squatted pink and purple, garishly coloured so everybody would know where to come and spend money they’d taken all week to earn.

Past the straggle of new villas, with neat oleander plants in pots and terracotta lions guarding electronically controlled gates, the road was bumpier as it climbed through olive groves, their trees contorted with gnarled limbs, past meadows painted with buttercups, purple toadflax and deep blue sage.

Finally she made it up to the village of Verrucchio, clinging to rocks that had guarded the plains since the Middle Ages.

If anybody was about (and they were mostly very old or very young because nobody who was of work age lived here any more), she waved a cheery “Ciao” to them.

In the grocery store smelling of sausages, cheese and soap powder, Elisabetta bought bread, a hunk of salami and plump, white mozzarella from Marco.

“Anything else?” he asked hopefully, pressing a couple of juicy peaches into her hand while his father wasn’t looking.

“No, thank you, Marco. This will make a supper fit for a princess. See you later.” She knew he liked her but she had no desire to encourage him.

Outside Nonna’s old house she pushed the Lambretta stand down and turned the key in the oak door. Her grandmother had passed away more than a year ago, but Elisabetta continued with her habit of beating the tarnished brass knocker before entering.

Slipping off her shoes, she padded barefoot over the terracotta tiles. As she entered her bedroom she was already flinging off the smart work trousers, tailored jacket and white silk blouse she was obliged to wear as sales assistant in the expensive clothes shop in Rimini centre.

Today she had dealt with a particularly difficult customer who was large, bossy and extremely wealthy. Elisabetta had modelled a low-cut, silk cocktail dress for this woman.

Blowsy pink roses patterned this season’s “must-have”, but the style was for a younger person and the blooms drew attention to the woman’s ample curves.

After working all week, all Elisabetta wanted to do was head into the countryside . . .

When Elisabetta tactfully pointed her in the direction of a more neutral A-line design, the woman had turned on her, telling her she was insolent.

Stefano had glowered and rebuked her later for the potential loss of a sale which he would dock from her wages.

But Elisabetta thought it best to be honest. If the woman bought the dress, she would look ridiculous and eventually somebody would tell her, and then all her rich friends would never return to buy from Stefano’s shop.

But he wouldn’t listen to her reasoning. Stefano was like a scorpion, like those in Nonna’s wood pile, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting, smaller prey.

Another customer today had been a pleasant young woman from Rome, who had pulled faces at Elisabetta behind the bossy woman’s back.

Later, when she was pinning alterations, the young woman had sympathised.

“You are wasted here and if you ever feel the need for a change, come to see me in Rome. My mother is manageress of a wedding dress boutique. She is always searching for new talent.”

Elisabetta smiled as she remembered the conversation and flung open the shutters. A lizard poked out its head from under the scarlet flowers of geraniums cascading from an old olive-oil can, and she scattered crumbs for his supper.

She’d observed the creature one Saturday morning as she drank coffee at the window. The lizard had caught a scorpion and eaten it all, slowly and daintily; eaten everything save the tail with its forked sting. She would have liked to devour Stefano like that.

But what could she do? Jobs were hard to come by.

Pulling on an old shirt, she set to work on her latest project: scraping paint off her grandmother’s matrimonial bed. The old lady had lived alone for years.

Elisabetta had never known Grandfather Reiner. Nonna talked about her handsome Reiner all the time when they were alone.

Out would come a box from under her bed and a framed black and white photo of Nonna as a young lady in a polka dot dress, arm in arm with Reiner, next to the Trevi Fountain.

“He was so handsome, darling,” she’d say. “He took me dancing whenever he could and bought me coffee granitas in the central piazza. And our two days in Roma were the most wonderful two days of my life.”

Then she would go dreamy-eyed and plant a kiss on the photo of her handsome blond soldier, wrapping it again gently in tissue paper and replacing it in the box.

Nonna had done everything possible to bring up Manuela, Elisabetta’s mother, on her own. She washed dishes in the evenings when her daughter was tucked up in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, and scrubbed floors when all the customers had gone home from the restaurant.

If there were leftovers, she would take them home, lay the table and prepare a special feast.

She took in mending, baked piadine for the tourists in the summer and worked hard to feed and educate her only child.

As a consequence of this thrifty upbringing, Manuela developed a taste for a life filled with modern appliances and gadgets.

In the Rimini apartment that Elisabetta shared with her parents during the week, there wasn’t a single antique, no knick-knacks, no surfaces of polished wood. All was plastic and sheen.

Nonna had painted her bed ends fuchsia pink and Elisabetta was now halfway through scraping the gloss away to reveal cherry wood beneath.

It was painstaking work – if she scraped too hard she could scratch and damage the precious veneer. But she was over halfway through the task now. It was satisfying even though it made her hands rough and chipped the nail polish she wore for her job.

“What have you done to your hands?” Stefano moaned on Monday mornings. “Nobody will buy garments from a girl with peasant’s hands. You’ll catch the threads and ruin my dresses. Have a care, Elisabetta.”

She knew Stefano only kept her on in his exclusive shop because he wanted to seduce her. How her mother would love to brag that her daughter was engaged to Stefano Zagnarelli – the Zagnarelli with the exclusive shop in the piazza.

Her eyes would reflect the glint of her daughter’s diamond engagement ring and she’d boast about their smart new villa with Stefano’s shining red Ferrari parked outside.

Sometimes Elisabetta felt like giving in to Stefano just to keep her mother quiet, but she knew that he wouldn’t want to spend his weekends in Nonna’s little house on the hill. The thought filled her with sadness.

She put down the scraping knife and stared out of the window. Night was falling. Far below, lights twinkled along the coast like strings of Christmas decorations.

In the daytime it was no picture-postcard view, with its great blocks of industrial buildings and lorries lumbering along the superstrada to the port where ships were bound for Greece and Croatia. But at night it was romantic.

She pulled a chair over and ate her supper using the sill as a table, contemplating the vast world beyond her window.

Afterwards, she rinsed her plate and, propping it on the chipped stone drainer, she thought of Stefano and his ideas of perfection; how he would expect a proper supper table, laid with linen and shining cutlery.

She sighed.

****

Next morning, Elisabetta came to the conclusion that to remove paint properly from the bed ends she would need to dismantle them, so she went down the alley to borrow a screwdriver from Marco in the grocery store.

Her nonna kept a photo of her handsome blond soldier

He was for ever tinkering with his Vespa when the store was closed, bending over his old bike, a rag hanging from his pocket, whistling tunelessly as he operated on its oily entrails.

Elisabetta waited her turn in the queue of elderly ladies. It was a good place to exchange village news. If only the hams and sausages hanging from the hooks above the counter could have talked, they’d have filled a gossip magazine.

After he had finished serving the old ladies with their two slices of

prosciutto or paper twists of grated parmesan, he smiled at his pretty friend.

“How can I help you, Elisabetta? More rolls? A tub of fresh mascarpone? You’re too thin, if you don’t mind my saying.”

He looked away, embarrassed at his personal comment.

“No mascarpone, thank you, but can you lend me a screwdriver, Marco?”

“Only if you let me take you for a spin on my Vespa this evening,” he heard his stupid mouth reply.

He turned as scarlet as the San Marzano tomatoes piled high in crates outside the shop. To cover his confusion he turned round to search for the screwdriver on the shelves, when all the

time it was sticking out of his pocket. Elisabetta laughed at his cheek.

“We’ll see,” she said, waiting for Marco to realise where the screwdriver had been all the time.

****

The screws were rusty, so she trickled drops of rich green extra-virgin oil to loosen them. She separated the headboard and bed ends from the frame where the mattress rested and noticed pencil marks on the rough, unpainted section beneath the cherry-wood panels. Looking closely, she made out her grandparents’ names in a scribbled heart and she smiled.

Whilst manoeuvring the headboard to rest against the wall, the bedpost knob rolled off into the corner. Now she would have to borrow strong glue from Marco and accept his offer of a spin on the Vespa.

He was not such a bad fellow, but she relished her quiet time after a week of making polite conversation with customers.

The bed was easier to work on once it was dismantled, and soon honey-gold cherry wood had replaced Nonna’s crazy pink paint.

Elisabetta remembered how her grandmother wore brightly coloured scarves round her head to go to market. How sometimes she wore a man’s silk dressing-gown as a dress, shaping it to her waist with a wide leather belt.

She was oblivious to the ladies in the square dressed in widows’ black who nudged each other as she appeared round the corner to take her double espresso at the bar instead of attending Sunday Mass where they were destined.

“Why do what everybody else does?” Nonna would say. “Why follow the herd?

“There was a time during the war,” she once told Elisabetta during one of their precious afternoons, “when I had to wear a scarf to cover my shorn head, and put up with catty comments from all my so-called friends. They called me a collaborator. But I didn’t give a fig then and I don’t give a fig now. At least I have known passion.”

Elisabetta had asked her mother later what her grandmother meant, but Manuela changed the subject.

****

At seven-thirty that evening she entered the dark grocery store where Marco was counting cents and euros from his till. He couldn’t believe his luck when she told him the reason she was there.

“I would like to go for a ride, after all, and I need to borrow some adhesive.”

She was wearing a favourite pair of jeans, patched with floral material retrieved from Nonna’s mending basket.

Round her head she had tied an extra piece to stop the wind playing mischief with her hair when she was riding on the back of Marco’s Vespa.

He thought she looked about sixteen and not twenty-eight – for he knew her age. He was thirtythree, and in his opinion twenty-eight was the perfect age for a young wife.

Not too young to be giddy with unrealistic expectations of life, and not too old to be able to produce children. If they had children he would have to save for a Fiat 500, for there was a limit as to how many children you could carry on the back of a Vespa.

On television, he watched crazy Neapolitans pile their family on the pillion, but he wasn’t the sort of man to put his babies in danger.

“It would be nice to have a ride up to the top of San Leo,” she said. “I haven’t been for ages.”

Her request brought him back down to earth and he quickly removed his brown overall, slinging it over the counter.

“Elisabetta, I only have one crash helmet. You shall wear it and we will take the back roads so the

carabinieri don’t catch us.” It was a balmy evening, and as Marco steered his noisy Vespa round the bends that snaked up the hill to the fortress, he felt no man could possibly be happier.

Elisabetta had one arm round his waist, and as he took the corners, he felt her body press closer to his, and he had to concentrate hard to steady the bike.

Cicadas sang their summer songs, and as they swept past flower-filled meadows the scents and sounds were intoxicating.

He didn’t want ever to arrive at the top, because Elisabetta would climb off and remove her arms from round his body and he would have to talk to her. He knew his stupid mouth would stammer and stutter and make a fool of him.

He was grateful she did the talking.

“How peaceful it is up here, away from the craziness of Rimini. I could stay here for ever if only I didn’t have to work.”

Marco thought how few women there were who preferred the quiet country life.

“Marry me, Elisabetta,” he wanted to shout, “and live with me up here for ever and ever.”

But this evening his mouth was behaving and he merely smiled, although his heart was bursting to tell her of his feelings.

****

“Let’s go for a walk through the alleyways, Marco, and afterwards share an ice-cream in the square.”

She thought what a kind, sweet man he was, albeit untalkative. It would have been romantic to have her hand held, to have endearments whispered in her ear while they leaned against the warm stone wall, gazing at the view. The countryside below was dotted with olive groves and cypress trees.

In the distance the sea glistened blue and hazy and it made a perfect setting for lovers to start an affair.

On the return journey Marco seemed to choose the longer route home, perhaps reluctant for the moment she would climb off his Vespa. He drove faster so she had to press against him.

“Thank you, Marco,” she said when they arrived back at Verrucchio. “That was a lovely evening. Now, please may I borrow some glue?”

“Why don’t you marry me instead? Then you can have all the glue you want,” he said, grabbing hold of her hands and gazing at her with puppydog eyes.

It was not the marriage proposal she had dreamed of, and she marvelled to herself how complicated all this borrowing was becoming.

Maybe she would have to buy a screwdriver and a few other tools of her own.

Letting herself into Nonna’s house, she leaned against the door for a few moments, enjoying the darkness and silence.

When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she went over to the bed and traced the heart drawn in the wood all those years ago. She would never know the full story of her grandmother’s life, but she felt close to her in this place.

She undressed and lay down on the mattress on the floor, thinking about the passion her grandmother had experienced. She thought of Stefano and she thought of Marco and she realised that, up until now, she hadn’t found true love; that she was simply dancing around the edges of life.

On Monday she would tell Stefano to find another girl to work in his shop. She would buy a train ticket for Rome and pay a visit to the wedding-dress boutique.

As her eyes closed and she started the lazy, easy slide into sleep, she knew that Nonna’s house would wait for her return. n