Don't Sing at the Table (18 page)

The young woman looked up and smiled at the little boy in the big clothes. “
Stelline
,” she corrected him, holding up a small piece of dough carved into the shape of a star. She scooped up a pile of the little stars and threw them into a big bowl.

“What are you making?”

“Baked custard.”

“It smells like cake in the hallway.”

“That's the butter and the nutmeg. The custard is better than cake. It's so delicious it pulls angels off their perches. At least that's what I tell the other sisters. Did it make you hungry?”

“I was already hungry.”

The woman laughed. “Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?” He narrowed his eyes. “I'm Sister Teresa.”

“I'm sorry, Sister. But, you . . . you look like a girl. You don't look like a nun.”

“I don't wear a nice habit when I'm cooking. What's your name?” Ciro sat on a stool across from the nun. “Ciro Augustus Lazzari,” he said proudly.

“That's a big name. Are you a Roman emperor?”

“Nope.” Ciro remembered he was speaking with a nun. “Sister.”

“How old are you?”

“Ten. I'm big for my age. I pull the rope at the water wheel in town.”

“That's impressive.”

“I'm the only boy my age who can. They call me an ox.”

Sister Teresa reached behind the table and pulled a heel of bread from a bin. She slathered it with soft butter and handed it to the boy. As Ciro ate, she swiftly carved more stars from the dough and added them to the large bowl filled with a batter of milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and nutmeg. She stirred the ingredients evenly with a large enamel spoon. Ciro watched the creamy folds of custard, now speckled with stars, lap over one another as the mixture thickened. Sister poured the custard into ceramic cups on a metal tray without spilling a drop. “Are you visiting?”

“We've been sent here to work because we're poor.”

“Everyone in Vilminore di Scalve is poor. Even the nuns.”

“We're
really
poor. We don't have a house anymore. We ate all the chickens, and Mama sold the cow. She sold a painting and all the books. Didn't get much. And that money has almost run out.”

“It's the same story in every village in the Alps.”

“We won't stay long. My mother is going to the city, and she'll come and get us this summer.” Ciro looked over at the deep wood-burning oven and figured that he would have to stoke and clean it until his mother returned. He wondered how many fireplaces there were in the convent. He imagined there were lots of them. He'd probably spend every hour of daylight chopping wood and building fires.

“What brought you to the convent?”

“Mama can't stop crying.”

“Why?”

“She misses Papa.”

Sister lifted the tray of custard cups and placed them in the oven. She checked the surface of several other baked custard cups on a cooling rack. What a lovely thing, to work in a warm kitchen in the cold winter and make food. Ciro imagined that people who work in kitchens are never hungry.

“Where did your father go?”

“They say he died, but I don't think so,” Ciro said. “Why don't you believe them?” Sister wiped her hands on a moppeen and leaned on the table so she might be eye to eye with the boy.

“Eduardo read the letter that was sent to Mama from America. They say Papa died in a mine, but they never found his body. That's why I don't think Papa is dead.”

“Sometimes— ,” she began.

Ciro interrupted her. “I know all about it— sometimes a man dies, and there's no body. Dynamite can go off in a mine and people inside blow up, or a body can burn in a fire or disappear down a hole, or drown in a slag river inside the mountain. Or you get hurt and you can't walk and you get stuck underground and you die of starvation because nobody came to find you and animals eat you and nothing is left but bones. I know every which way there is to die— but my papa would not die like that. He was strong. He could beat up anyone, and he could lift more than any man in Vilminore di Scalve. He's not dead.”

“Well, I'd like to meet him someday.”

“You will. He'll come back. You'll see.” Ciro hoped his father was alive, and his heart ached at the possibility that he might never see him again. He remembered how he could always find his father easily in a crowd because he was so tall, he towered over everyone in the village. Carlo Lazzari was so strong he was able to carry both sons simultaneously, one on each hip, like sacks of flour up and down the steep mountain trails. He felled trees with an ax, and cut lumber as easily as Sister cut the dough. He built a dam at the base of the Vertova waterfall. Other men helped, but Carlo Lazzari was the leader.

Sister Teresa broke a fresh egg into a cup and added a teaspoon of sugar. She poured fresh cream into the cup and whisked it until there was a creamy foam on the surface. “Here.” She gave it to Ciro. He sipped it, then drank it down until the cup was empty.

“How's that stomach now?”

“Full.” Ciro smiled.

“Would you like to help me cook sometime?”

“Boys don't cook.”

“That's not true. All the great chefs in Paris are men. Women are not allowed in the Cordon Bleu. That's a famous cooking school in France,” Sister Teresa told him.

Eduardo burst into the kitchen. “Come on, Ciro. We have to go!”

Sister Teresa smiled at him. “You must be Eduardo.”

“Yes, I am.”

“She's a nun,” Ciro told his brother.

Eduardo bowed his head. “I'm sorry, Sister.”

“Are you hungry too?”

Eduardo shook his head that he wasn't. “Did your mother tell you that you shouldn't be any trouble?” Sister asked.

He nodded that she had.

Sister Teresa reached back into the metal bin and took a wedge of bread and buttered it. She gave it to Eduardo, who ate it hungrily.

“My brother won't ask for
anything
,” Ciro explained. “Can he have an egg and cream with sugar too?” He turned to his brother. “You'll like it.”

Sister smiled and took a fresh egg, sugar, and some more cream and whipped it with a whisk. She gave it to Eduardo, who slowly sipped the egg cream, savoring every drop until the cup was empty.

“Thank you, Sister,” Eduardo said.

“We thought the convent would be horrible.” Ciro placed his own and Eduardo's cup in the sink.

“If you behave and say your prayers, I don't think you'll have any trouble.”

Sister Domenica stood in the doorway of the kitchen with Caterina. Eduardo gasped when he saw them and quickly bowed to the old nun. Ciro couldn't understand why his brother was afraid of everyone and everything. Couldn't he see that Sister Domenica was harmless? With her starched coutil bib and black skirts, she resembled the black-and-white-checked globe made from Carrara marble that Mama used as a paperweight. Ciro wasn't afraid of any nun, and besides this one was just an old lady with a wooden cross hanging from her waist like a giant key.

“I have found two capable young men to help me in the kitchen,” Sister Teresa said.

“Eduardo is going to help me in the office,” Sister Domenica said to Sister Teresa. “And Ciro will work in the chapel. I need a strong boy who can do heavy lifting.”

“I need a strong boy who can make cheese.” Sister Teresa winked at Sister Domenica.

“I can do both,” Ciro said proudly.

Caterina put her hands on Ciro's shoulders. “My boys will do whatever you need, Sister.”

Just a few miles up the mountain, above Vilminore di Scalve, the village of Schilpario clung to the mountainside like a gray icicle. Even the dead were buried on a slope, in sepulchers protected by a high granite retaining wall covered in vines.

There was no formal piazza or grand colonnade in Schilpario, no fountains or statuaries as in Vilminore di Scalve, just sturdy, plain alpine structures of wood and stucco that could endure the harsh winters. The stucco was painted in candy colors of lemon yellow, cherry red, and plum. The bright colors were set into the gray mountain like whimsical tiles.

Schilpario was a mining town where rich veins of iron ore and barite were carved out of the earth and carted down to Milan for sale. Every job in the village was in ser vice to the towns below, including the building and maintenance of the chutes that harnessed the rushing water of Stream Vò that was piped down the cliffs.

The farms provided fresh meat for the butchers in the city. Every family had a smokehouse where sausage, salami, prosciutto, and sleeves of ham were cured. The mountain people were sustained through the long winters by the contents of their root cellars filled with bins of plentiful chestnuts, which carpeted the mountain paths like glassy brown stones. They also survived on eggs from their chicken coops, and milk and cream from their cows. They churned their own butter and made their own cheese, and what they could not sell, they ate.

The mountain forests high above the village were loaded with porcini and other mushrooms of all kinds, as well as coveted truffles, gathered in late summer and sold at a premium to middlemen from France, who in turn sold them to the great chefs in the elegant cities of Europe. The family pig was used to locate the truffles growing in the ground. Even the smallest children were taught how to hunt for truffles from a very early age, combing the woods on their hands and knees, a linen sack tied loosely around their waists, searching for the fragrant bulbs nestled deep in the earth around the roots of old trees.

Schilpario was one of the last villages to the north, which lay in the shadow of the Pizzo Camino, the highest peak in the Alps, where the snow did not melt, even in summer. So high in the cliffs, the people looked down on the clouds, which moved through the valley below like rosettes of meringue.

When spring came, the ice-covered cliffs below the peak thawed, turning bright green as mugo pine and juniper trees sprouted new branches. The deep gorge of the valley filled with fields of yellow buttercups. The village women gathered herbs to make medicine: chamomile for tea to soothe nerves, wild dandelion for blood curing, fragrant peppermint for stomach ills, and golden nettle to bring down fevers.

The Passo Presolana was the lone ribbon of road connecting Schilpario to Vilminore di Scalve and down the mountain to the city of Bergamo. It had been built in the eleventh century, a rustic one-way path to be traveled on foot. Eventually the road was widened to accommodate a horse and carriage, but only in warm weather, as it was treacherous in winter.

Marco Ravanelli knew every cleft and curve of the pass, every natural stone overpass that provided shelter, each small village along the way, every farm, river, and lake, as he had accompanied his father, who ran a horse and carriage ser vice, up and down the mountain since he was a boy.

Marco, the coachman of Schilpario, was slim and of medium height, with a thick black mustache that offset his handsome features. As he plunged two long sticks into the ice, he steadied himself on the path between the stone house he rented and the barn that he owned. He was careful not to fall, as he couldn't afford a broken leg or any sort of injury. He was thirty-three years old and responsible for a wife and six children, the youngest, Stella, just born.

Enza, his eldest, followed behind him, plunging her own set of sticks into the ice to steady herself. Enza had just turned ten, but she could do anything a woman twice her age could do and perhaps better, especially sewing. Her small fingers moved deftly and with precision, creating small, nearly invisible stitches on straight seams. Her natural talent was a marvel to her mother, who couldn't sew nearly as fast.

Enza's chestnut brown hair had not been cut, and it grazed her waist in two shiny braids that lay flat and neat like reins. Her heart-shaped face resembled her mother's, full cheeks, skin the color of fresh cream, and perfectly shaped lips with a defined Cupid's bow. Enza's light brown eyes sparkled like amber buttons.

The eldest daughter in a family with many children never has a real childhood.

Enza had learned how to hitch a horse as soon as she grew tall enough to reach the carriage. She knew how to make a paste from chestnuts for pies, pasta dough from potatoes for gnocchi, how to churn butter, wring a chicken's neck, wash clothes and mend them. Whenever Enza found time to play, she used it to sew. Fabric was expensive, so she taught herself to dye cotton muslin to create colorful designs that she would then sew into garments for the family.

When summer came, she picked blackberries and raspberries and made dyes from their inky pulp. She pleated and pinched the coarse cotton, painting the dyes onto the fabric, and then let them dry in the sun, setting the colors. Plain cotton muslin became beautiful as Enza dyed it into shades of lavender, delicate pink, and slate blue. She decorated the colorful fabric with embellishments and embroidery.

There were no dolls to play with, but who needed one when there were two babies in cribs to care for, plus three more children in the middle, one crawling and two more walking, as well as plenty of tasks to occupy the dark winter days?

The stable was cold, so Marco and Enza threw themselves into their chores. As Papa brushed Cipi, their beloved horse, Enza polished the bench on the governess cart. The cart was smaller than a regular carriage, seated only two, and was painted a sophisticated black, to emphasize the graceful curves of its design. Enza dusted the seat with a clean moppeen, careful to polish the trim.

Working people in ser vice to the wealthy must pay particular attention to details. Paint must be lacquered, gold trim must dazzle, every notch, joint, and button of brass must shine. The stature and social position of the customer is reflected in the gloss that results from the servant's elbow grease. It's what the wealthy pay for; it's what they require. Marco taught Enza that everything must gleam, including the horse.