Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Read Free Page A

I cleaned up after breakfast.

    Giulia looked me in the eye, put her hands on her hips, and said, "Absolutely not. Don't think I don't know what's going on in your head. He's a married man. He stays in his house and eats what his wife left for him, and you put your daydreams in the garbage where they belong."
    And that was that. I spent the day sulking at the lost opportunity and marveling at Giulia's ability to sense even the most subtle vibrations of sexual attraction. She was the watchdog at the gates of my virginity, the impenetrable shield that would keep me from becoming a tramp.
    Now I gathered up Giulia's possessions and stowed them in the zippered tote bag I planned to take onboard the plane. After a final glance around the room, I shut the door and headed down the stairs and out to my car. I pul ed away from the curb and the memories and headed for the airport and Italy.
    CHAPTER 2
    Journey to the Mezzogiomo
    The cacophony of the Naples train station assaulted me as soon as I stepped off the express train from Rome. Announcements of departing trains reverberated across the vaulted space; mothers scolded misbehaving children; whistles shrieked; a group of yellow-shirted boys kicked a soccer bal near the far end of Platform 22.
    As I adjusted the strap of my bag, I also adjusted my mental state—from efficient New York manager and organized mother of four—to Italian. It was more than recal ing the lyrical language that had surrounded me in Giulia's house. I knew I had to pour myself quickly into the fluid, staccato pace of Campania in August or I would be trampled—by the surging population, the Vespas leaping curbs, the suspicion of strangers and by my own sense of oppression.
    I knew this because I'd been here seventeen years before, a bright-eyed high-school art student who'd spent the summer in the rarefied atmosphere of Florence, living in a cinquecento vil a, painting in the Uffizi on Mondays when it was closed to the hordes of summer tourists, reading Dante and Boccaccio. I had believed that I knew Italy. But then I had come south, to visit Zia Letitia.
    I had traveled by rail then as wel , through Rome to Naples. A stifling heat had encroached on the overcrowded train as it journeyed farther south, toward an Italy that I didn't recognize. The blue-greens and purples of the Tuscan landscape, warmed by a honeyed light, had given way to an unrelenting sunshine that had seared the earth to an ocher barrenness.
    Everything I saw seemed to be the same color—the rough- hewn cliffs, the crumbling houses, the worn faces.
    When I'd arrived at midday in Naples—sweaty and cranky—I felt myself to be in a foreign country. For the first time in my life, I had felt menaced—by the drivers in minuscule Fiats who ignored traffic signals, by the barricaded expressions of the people massing and knotting around me, by the heat and clamor and stench that had so unraveled the beauty and civility of this once-splendid city. The life of Naples was in the streets—
    raw, intemperate, flamboyant—and to the eyes of strangers, emotional y closed and hostile.
    That day seventeen years ago, I had escaped on the two o'clock bus to Avel ino, arriving two hours later in front of a bar named the Arcobaleno. In contrast to the press of humanity in Naples, a melancholy emptiness greeted me here. In the bar, where I bought a Coke and sought a telephone, I was the only woman. Two old men in the corner interrupted their card game to stare openly; the younger men, playing pinbal , were more surreptitious but watched just as closely.
    I cal ed a phone number given to me by Giulia to make arrangements with a distant relative who could take me to Letitia. But the woman who answered was irritable. She had no time and could not help me. I would have to manage on my own. Take the bus, she barked. Just tel the driver you need to go to Venticano. And she hung up.
    Shaken and feeling increasingly alone, I'd found a bus that could take me up the