Lambrusco by Ellen Cooney Page A

getting worried, the spotlight in the rafters like a big blind eye.
    Stubborn boy! He’d hold his pencil like a dagger, aiming it at his chest. “Mama, I’d rather stab myself than do these lessons.”
    I had wanted him to go to university in Bologna. I’d daydream of taking the train to visit him, then strolling beside him down narrow old streets and under splendid vaulted arches, nodding pleasantly as he greeted fellow students in bright scarves and loose jackets in need of repair, like the male characters of
La Bohème.
    It wasn’t written in stone that Beppi had to grow up to run a restaurant. I imagined him reading philosophy, literature, history. I pictured him at medical lectures, in a laboratory, in the white coat of a scientist—or a future physician, like Ugo.
    All those wishes. I’d pester him until he wrote the required composition, worked out the necessary equations, translated Latin verses of some poet he only felt sorry for, for being so pompous and dull.
    Maybe I should have listened to him when he told us he wanted to be a carpenter. He was good with his hands. The first thing he ever got excited about learning was a sentence in a science or maybe mathematics book that said, “The four basic tools of humanity are the lever, the pulley, the wedge, and the inclined plane.”
    â€œMama, look at these beautiful drawings. Look at the little wheels on the pulley. Look at how the shapes are.” He’d been awestruck.
    The inclined plane is a close relation to the wedge, I remembered. The secret of the inclined plane is in the path of least resistance.
    â€œLucia, talk to us. Even if you can’t see us, we’re here. We’re all right. So are you. It’s very, very important that you stay calm, until we figure out a way to free you.”
    Voices. I could understand the words, but the voices calling to me sounded far off and muffled, with strange reverberations. I felt I heard them underwater. One male, two female. Whose voices they were, I didn’t know.
    â€œLucia, I hate to say it but I told you so! I
told
you what would happen! What were we standing around talking for? Why did you make me keep talking? We should have been safe in the cave, and now you’re partially buried alive! I’m going out of my mind!”
    â€œLucia Fantini, please listen to me. Say you can hear me. I will kill myself if anything is wrong with you that can’t be easily repaired, and I mean what I say, as I’ve been thinking about it anyway, now that they’ve blown up my factory.”
    Four voices, not three. Two male, two female.
    I made no effort to answer. I had no memory of what had happened to me, but I didn’t care. I felt no curiosity. A childish feeling of guilty pleasure had taken hold of me, as if I’d done something wrong on purpose.
    I wasn’t sorry for it, whatever it was. But it might have had something to do with this position of mine. Surely there’d be consequences for hanging about with my feet against a ceiling of air, and my head resting so very comfortably like this, so very gently.
    The voices stopped.
    I shut my eyes, and when I opened them a moment later the sky was over my head, gray and empty and still. It appeared to be the dusty sky of twilight.
    Time to go to work?
    â€œRoosters crow at sunrise, and Mama sings at the end of the day,” Beppi would say, like a law, like the fact of the tools of humanity. “Roosters are the opposite of Mama.”
    I was looking up at the sky, it seemed, from a window. The restaurant?
    Yes. Aldo’s office. Everyone waiting for me, as if my body were a kettle of water on the stove, and they knew how long it took to reach a boil. That was how casual they were about it. Steam rose up from boiling water; the singer’s voice rose up from her throat.
    Time to go on, Lucia.
Four, sometimes five, sometimes six times a week, plus Sunday afternoons.
    How lucky I was! How