The silk curtains blew into the bedroom of the palazzo like the billowing skirt of a woman’s ball gown mid dance. Nicky laced his work boot, looping it across at the top and tying it snugly with a double knot. He stood up and marched in place. The boots felt secure, not too tight, one more trick he had learned in the army that had held him in good stead ever since.
He walked over to the curtains, securing them behind a hook. He opened the French doors out onto the balcony and went outside. The sun was cresting over the mountain to the east. He imagined the cobalt blue waters of the Adriatic beyond the mountain and smiled. How different this journey had been from his visit after the war. Peacetime had an elegance, a courtly manner that only a soldier who had been in a brutal war could appreciate. A teaspoon of honey on hot bread might as well be gold. Icy water from a stream unpolluted by sulfur and shrapnel was an elixir. Air, in its purest form, where wind made the sound of silk as it grazed a woman’s skin, was a delight.
Italy had changed Nicky Castone for the better.
He stretched his arms over his head and inhaled deeply. The war had built the muscles in his legs; laying stone in Roseto Valfortore had built his arms. His penance had empowered him, as true contrition might. The sinner sheds his selfish intent, and when he does, his true purpose reveals itself.
Nicky leaned against the iron grid of the scrollwork fence of the terrace. His biceps now possessed the chiseled grooves of a Michelangelo sculpture. His back had broadened, his waist had whittled, and his mind had been cleared. With the road near completion, it would soon be time to return home. He wasn’t anxious to leave Italy, but he was determined to take what he had learned here and change his life.
The annual fig harvest on the hillsides of Roseto Valfortore was nearing its end. Autumn in Apulia was a race to prepare for the winter, as the Rosetani cured meat and made hard cheese that would last through the long months of barren cold. Folks had gathered their baskets and were scattered across the hills that morning, plucking the trees clean of what remained of the figs. Some would be sliced and eaten now; Nicky savored them, tossed in fresh greens with a bit of lemon juice and salt. A few bushels would be made into jam for each household, and the rest would be dried, cut into small wheels, and saved in cheesecloth bags, to be baked into pastry or layered with cured meat for a meal when the skies turned to snow.
There was a soft rap at the door. Nicky called out.
“Finalmente.” The ambassador stood in the doorway of Nicky’s room, with a look that was both happy and sad, if there were such a thing.
“Will you walk the road today?” Nicky asked him, partly in words, partly in mime. “Andiamo Spadone!”
“Si.” Carlo marched in place: Every step, he indicated.
Carlo Guardinfante and Nicky Castone had been thrown together under the strangest of circumstances, but they had an affinity for one another that neither of them could explain. Perhaps both men had secretly longed for a brother and when they met, they recognized one another. Whatever the case, their affection for one another had grown over these months, surprising them.
The Rosetani in Italy thought that their connection was mystical. Gemelli!—long-lost twins, reunited over a vast ocean. For the Italians it was a spiritual manifestation of God’s hand on earth. On the American side, it was a con. Nicky had played a part, a vaudevillian type, and when the real guy showed up, so did the cops. It was hilarious until it wasn’t. It’s only a great story if you can get away with it, blow town before you’re discovered. That’s the American way.
To the two men, it was something more. Nicky’s Italian hadn’t improved, nor had Carlo’s English, so they communicated as children do, mirroring behavior, checking for cues, and making each other laugh. They developed an empathy for one another that became their language. There was an undeniable solidarity when they walked together during la passeggiata; the Rosetani observed their bond with admiration. Loyalty, the deep river of sympathy whose currents flow on the understanding that one brother would give his life for the other, was the center of every Italian family. In that sense, Carlo and Nicky were brothers.
The ambassador was dressed for the trek to the bottom of the new road in work boots, a chamois shirt, and wool pants. Nicky grabbed the straw palmetto hat with the bandanna on the brim off the finial of the chair, motioning that he would follow Carlo out.
Below the piazza, down the mountain, at the entrance of the road to Roseto Valfortore, the band of American workers from Roseto, Pennsylvania, hurried to finish the job. They had worked side by side with the local men to build the road, and as they were in America, they were in Italy. Their skills and stations crossed the Atlantic. Therefore, Rocco Tutolola was the leader.
Rocco had been elected chief burgess in a landslide, and there was good reason. He had a natural way with his people, knowing what they needed (plumbing, parking, and roads), devising a plan, executing the work while encouraging them to use their talents to achieve the goal. He was a good man, but he had a wanderlust that could only be satisfied off hours by the attention of women at the Stone Crab Bar in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. But after months away from Cha Cha, working in the sun, his hands in the dirt, laying stone, he made the decision to reinvigorate his commitment to his wife, which unleashed a passion in letters that he wrote and sent, which she read week after week as she hiked the steep hill of Garibaldi Avenue in tears. Up and down she went, working through her feelings while reading her husband’s thoughts, described ardently in navy-blue ink on onionskin paper.
Rocco would return home to the sweet girl he married. Cha Cha’s figure had returned to its former glory, along with her attitude, but now she had the benefit of experience under her tightened grommets, which gave her an edge. She knew how to make Rocco happy. His letters assured her that he was ready to do the same for her.
“Hey, Funzi!” Rocco hollered as he headed down to the bottom of the road. He had checked the gutters on either side of the road from the top to the bottom, installed to handle any flooding of the Fortore River in the future. These drainage channels had been time-consuming to put in, adding two months to their stay, but the Americans would leave knowing the road was secure.
Funzi stood up, wiped his hands on the bandanna in his pocket, and looked down at his handiwork. He motioned for Rocco to join him and showed his boss the flat curbing of the road. “What do you think? Not bad for a janitor.”
Rocco looked down and smiled. “What do you think the ambassador will say?”
“What can he say? It’s done.”