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OK, you don’t need to be scared. It
really doesn’t matter Tsoro . You have changed him and that is enough.
You have helped him taste freedom and his right to live his own life and that
is a gift he will not lose. I also know your heart is bruised – perhaps it
still bleeds fresh in some places – for example I see a bambina about
ten years old. This girl makes you very sad.’
    Angrily I tried
to pull my hand away. She had clearly picked up a lot of information from
Sergio over the last few months. However, she just held me even tighter, and
transfixed by her little ebony eyes I couldn’t speak.
    ‘She is singing to you – I don’t know it – a French song maybe - and you
are laughing. But now I see a road, there is blood on it and you are crying and
there is a man, he is silent, he stands at the window his hands by his side.
And I feel your guilt. It is a demon on your back. I wonder that you should
carry him about for so long. He must be very heavy.’
    Some kind of convulsion wrenched my hand away. ‘How dare you!’ I felt
violated. She looked at me, a little dazed.
    ‘My dear! Don’t be afraid!’ She reached over and stroked my face. The
skin of her hand was soft and floury. ‘There is no need to be afraid of what
has gone! Why do you hold on to it?’
    ‘You have no right.’ I said tightly. ‘Don’t touch me.’
    She took her
hand away and smiled at me. There was something wonderfully motherly about her
shrewd, kind little face, and I was reminded with a jolt of how much I missed
my own mother. There was a hissing in my ears like the sea as it sucks back
across the shingle, and then a great pulse of sorrow convulsed me and I retched
and then started to cry. She stroked my back, I hid my face in my hands.
    ‘Sometimes when you look at the sky, or the sea,’ she said softly, ‘you
feel so overwhelmed by the beauty of it that you find you can’t breathe. When
you were a bambina you crawled after a friend’s tortoise that escaped
from their garden and your mama and papa couldn’t find you for an
hour. Sometimes you rescue worms from the pavement and put them on the grass
because you chopped one up as a little girl and still it makes you feel bad’.
    I looked up at her, I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I felt
light-headed, insubstantial, as if everything that had previously anchored me
to the world had suddenly lost its mass and disintegrated.
    ‘You don’t get angry very often,’ she continued, ‘but when you do it is
devastating and you are scared of it. Once, a little boy who had got lost in a
shopping centre came to you to ask for help because he said you had the kindest
looking face. When you were a young woman you trained yourself to listen to
people by counting in uno, due, tre in your head before you spoke.’
    I sat up, she’d shocked me out of crying, but my face was still slick
with tears.
    ‘I could tell you a hundred things my dear – un mille even, and it
wouldn’t help you in the task ahead. All you can do is look inside and be as
strong as you can be. You can only learn by living.’ She paused and looked up
at the throbbing topaz sky. ‘He is a wise boy,’ she said at last, under her
breath.
    ‘I know.’
    She looked at me
strangely, but then the wise boy himself came out onto the veranda and the
spell was broken.
    ‘ Amore, perche piangi ?  Have you been crying!’
    Nonna patted Sergio’s arm. ‘It’s all right. We were just talking about
Maddie’s mama . I am sorry my dear that it has upset you.’
    Sergio set about
getting our things together and then put his arm around me protectively. ‘Come
Maddie. It has been a long hot day. Let us go home now.’ I leaned gratefully,
exhaustedly into his shoulder. Edera dashed back into the house (very
energetically for a woman of her age) and returned with a wonderful long plait
of onions and garlic. ‘Here my dear, from my own garden.’ She took my hand. ‘ Ciao Maddie. I will see you