“After you.”
I find myself seated between Gio and Sophia around a long, beautifully set table, and although it looks formal, the people around it make it anything but. Gio’s sisters are a force to be reckoned with when they’re together, each amplifying the other, and they all take delight in winding Gio up. You’d never guess he wasn’t their biological brother. Partners and children make the numbers up to sixteen, plus me—I know because I do a discreet head count. I can’t even fathom what it must be like to be a Belotti, to spend your good times and your bad ones inside a family like this. Is it claustrophobic? The noise around the table never lulls, multiple conversations overlaid with old family jokes and traditions, laughter and shouting from the kids. Maria often slips into fast Italian, the others too, occasionally. It’s passionate and lyrical to my ear, their speech punctuated with hand gestures, whole arm gestures. They speak with their bodies as much as their tongues, Gio included—he’s more animated tonight than I’ve ever seen. It’s life, but not as I know it. I wonder what it was like around this table ten years ago, and twenty years ago, how the faces and fashions have matured but the people have stayed the same. I should think the room has stayed the same too: leather-spined books filling the cabinets that line one wall; another fireplace, this time filled with fresh flowers. A slender chandelier hangs over the length of the table, delicate glass droppers that bounce light around the walls. Everything about the room looks as if it’s been this way forever, an unchanging backdrop for the Belottis to love, change, and grow in. And now Santo is absent from this tableau, a place still set for him at the far end, a glass filled for him, Gio’s toast for his speedy return to health the most poignant part of the evening. Will I ever get to meet him, I wonder? I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Thinking of him reminds me that my place at this table is temporary, an unwelcome thought I press to the back of my mind tonight.
Maria’s food is a feast, traditional dishes she tells me she learned from her mother back in Naples. She weaves stories of life in the shadow of Vesuvius with the flair of a natural storyteller, evoking the vibrancy and colors of the old city, the winding cobbled streets, the tall, golden stone townhouse she grew up in as the youngest of seven. She speaks to me in the language of food, of spices and herbs, of sweet pastries and bitter coffee, aware I’m sure that she has led me to safe culinary ground where I’m more comfortable.
“Limoncello time, I think,” Francesca announces, standing up. Gio’s eldest sister is very like her mother in both looks and style, glamorous and always on the edge of smiling. She produces a glass-stoppered bottle of spirits and holds it aloft. “Pascal made it this year, so apologies now for your headaches in the morning.”
Everyone groans and her French husband shrugs benignly beside her and raises his wineglass, Leo on his lap. Maria shoos everyone back through to the living room, and I find myself beside Gio on the deep sofa in front of the fire. I have that three-glasses-in wine buzz and quietly decide to go light on the limoncello.
“Bruno,” Gio says, plucking the small dog up on to his lap. He’s some kind of terrier, I think, a small, scruffy furball with kind eyes who turns himself around a couple of times and then settles into a relieved ball on Gio’s lap.
“He’s fourteen,” Gio says. “Missing Papa like crazy.”
“I always wanted a dog,” I say, giving Bruno’s ears a scratch.
“Did you ever have one?”
I shake my head. “It was never the right time.” I don’t add that our lives were always too transitory and finances too unreliable to add a third mouth that needed feeding to our tribe.
Francesca comes through balancing a tray of crystal shot glasses and places it carefully on the coffee table. She hands me one first, as their guest, and I sniff it as everyone else leans in and grabs a glass. Gio shoots Bella a warning glance when she shows interest and she rolls her eyes before sliding back into her spot on the floor by the fire. I pretend not to notice when Maria allows her granddaughter a sip from her own glass, and I’m pretty sure Gio turns the same blind eye.
“Cazzo,” Viola murmurs, spluttering on her drink.
“Viola!” Maria frowns.
I glance at Gio for clarification. “It means fuck,” he says with a laugh.
“Gio!” Maria says.
“Sorry, it’s just so strong,” Viola says, going in for more even though her eyes are watering.
I can only agree—the limoncello is rocket fuel.
Sophia is curled into a deep-green leather button-back armchair, her feet tucked beneath her bum. “What do you think, Iris?”
I feel as if someone just turned a spotlight on me as all eyes swivel my way. “It’s, umm…” I gesture toward my throat—“like drinking lemon fire.”
They fall around laughing, and Pascal shrugs again, as if he cannot be held responsible for his own creation.
“You know what would be the perfect thing to show Iris right now, Mamma?” Sophia throws a subtle wink at Bella. “Some really embarrassing photos of Gio as a kid. You know, the ones of him wearing Fran’s pink overalls after he peed himself at the park?”
“Gio was such a beautiful child,” Maria says, ignoring the context. “You all were. Bella, pass me the album.”
I don’t miss the look of pure sibling insta-hate Gio shoots across the room at Sophia, or the absolute couldn’t-care-less insta-joy on her face in return.
Maria balances the thick old photo album on her knees and opens it, one hand on her heart as she flicks through the first few pages. After a moment she passes it across to Gio, her emotions close to the surface.
“Here, you can show Iris.”
The album is open on a spread of old birthday photographs: Gio’s seventh birthday, going off the cake and the badge pinned to his Garfield T-shirt. It looks like countless other family parties, dated in the eighties by the clothes and hairstyles. Bella perches on the arm of the sofa to peer over her dad’s shoulder.
“You looked like a girl,” she says, laughing at Gio’s curls.
“I couldn’t bring myself to cut it,” Maria says.
“Remember when you let me put it in pigtails?” Francesca says.
“I didn’t let you, I lost a bet,” Gio corrects her. “You know I’ve always been a man of my word.”
He turns the pages: family days out at Coney Island, Christmas trees in the corner of this very room, countless pictures of the kids behind the counter in the gelateria, some of them too small to see over it. This is the first time I’ve seen any other photographs of Santo besides my mother’s single shot. To me, he has forever been that cool guy frozen in the eighties, but of course he wasn’t always. Here I see how his life played out. The lines that bracket his mouth, the receding hairline, and the family he built.