Under a Sardinian Sky. Sara Alexander

      Carmela recalled how she and her sisters, as young adolescents, had run down to the piazza when these corporals had arrived eight years ago. She imagined that those V-Day hero cheers from the mainland were still ringing in their ears as they swaggered into her town, victorious. They liberated the island from the decay of war with gum and smiles. The shoeless poor still ambled the white roads of neighboring villages, farms crumbling in the crags of the ancient valleys inland, and for many, hunger was entrenched in quotidian life. But the fatal sting of malaria had finally been eradicated, thanks to the Americans, and this alone was cause to celebrate. Carmela and her sisters had returned home that day with their pockets bulging with hard squares of pink, covered in wrappers they couldn’t read, to be pummeled with their grandmother’s vitriol against those devils incarnate. She had confiscated their loot, placing it into the glass urn filled with candy reserved for visitors.

      “I’m fine, really,” Carmela said at last, feeling as if she owed a decent reply to a genuine concern for her safety. “It is a long and silly story.”

      He smiled. “Your English is better than my Italian. Compliments.”

      “I work with people from London sometimes,” she said. The little English she knew, she had learned from an adventurous London family, the Curwins, who took residence in a Victorian villa every summer since the war ended. Carmela and Piera worked for them as seasonal domestics. Because of the eradication of malaria, Simiuns had felt the first blushes of tourism.

      The soldier stepped back into a shaft of light, casting his shadow through one of the arches and onto the stucco wall beside him. He had an open, handsome face. Carmela had seen many handsome faces since the foreigners settled. Their tall, pale beauty was so different from the small, dark men most girls were promised to at a young age. It made the soldiers somewhat of a novelty, one that many local girls chased after but that always left Carmela cold.

      She realized she must have been staring straight up into the light, because he had morphed back into a silhouette. Carmela shifted and grasped the tip of her dress tighter to her chest.

      “Good night now,” he said, breaking the silence.

      With that he placed a cigarette onto his lips, turned on his heels, and climbed back up to the fiesta. She watched his smoke spiraling up into the night air.

      After securing every button on her dress and clutching a carefully folded pile of costume, Carmela began her ascent toward the piazza. She placed the dancer’s costume on a bench by a neighbor’s sweet stall, relieved to find everyone’s attention directed toward a new event taking place in the center of the piazza. She joined the throng, bristling with anticipation ahead of a live performance. The audience surrounded a smaller, impenetrable circle of an all-male choir. No danger of being asked to substitute this time.

      Carmela noted the starkness of their expressions, that characteristic Sardinian stare that would not let on whether it loathed or loved what it saw. For a fleeting moment she perceived that hard, diffident shell for which her islanders were infamous, but also the molten center that it protected. Maybe this is what it felt like to stand close to a range of volcanoes.

      Her eyes drifted over the American soldiers, dotted among her neighbors. For a split second she thought she caught sight of the alley soldier. She squinted. He was fair-haired, with the same white skin flushed with a rosy pallor. But even from this distance, she could see that the way he moved as he spoke with his colleagues was jerky and juvenile. He was a blond pup, with none of the understated grace of the man in the viccolo. She brushed away the futility of the thought without taking her eyes off the young soldier. Instead, she considered how different the Simiuns were compared to the prim Milanese, the refined Turinese, or the girdled girls who these young American men might have left behind before their journey to her craggy, crystalline-coved isle.

      There was a rumble from the bass singers. A hush fell, so swift, so thick, that the night sky itself seemed to grow darker and the scatter of shimmering stars glistened brighter. Carmela couldn’t remember the last time such a great number of Simiuns were so silent. Even in church, there would always be the echo of stray toddlers exploring the side chapels, followed by the tireless footsteps of their mothers, or older men who thought their whispered gossip couldn’t be heard from the back pews.

      The singers upheld the silence.

      Finally, the bass singers took a breath, in perfect unison, as if they shared a set of lungs among them, and intoned several measures of percussive humming. Their voices rose as if from the earth underfoot, trembling the crust of the land, like the first warning of an impending earthquake or the distant rumble of a thousand wild horses thundering toward Simius from the parched plains that surrounded it.

      Carmela could feel the vibrations on her chest from where she stood. Now the other singers joined in. A column of sound rose. The ancient harmonies mesmerized the crowd. Carmela allowed the honeyed notes to wash over her, as rich and deep as the burnished red of the naked trunk of a stripped cork tree. The melody was sonorous, full of loss and longing, somewhat at odds with the unadulterated joy of the surroundings.

      The music described a long-lost antiquity. The chords crushed together, dissonant almost, sweeping Carmela back to a time when the Neolithic settlers sheltered in those caves carved into the rocks on the outskirts town. Where those peoples once saluted the sun and venerated pagan gods of fertility, her family now celebrated May 1, with picnics of homemade cheese and bread. She and her sisters would gaze out over the valley that looked like an enormous emptied lake. They ate, sat upon that same stone, smooth with an age of travelers’ steps. She pictured those Neolithic men now, beneath fat moons, wrapped in animal skins, singing these same melodies into the night. Carmela lived for these stolen moments of pleasure, a respite from arduous monotony, transported by the music in churchless worship.

      Her eyes landed on Franco, on the opposite side of the outer circle. She watched him, glancing over the milieu, giving half nods to any of his father’s compatriots at the town council office. His eyes returned to rest on her. He smirked, mischievous, then peeled the dress off her shoulder with his gaze. His smile was unchanged from the adolescent chimp she had acquiesced to during the cherry harvest in the early summer of their sixteenth year. Her breasts had had a growing season of their own, something that hadn’t escaped the attentions of a young Franco. He was the son of one of the most influential landowners—a heavyweight on the town’s council—a burden Franco carried with neither ease nor grace. Carmela watched him run a hand through his thick black hair, sharing a joke with his cousins, who shifted about him like the hungry stray cats that skulk along Simius’s narrow viccoli.

      A solo tenor’s voice lifted up and over the group as he recounted the Sardinian tale of the deer woman who could settle for no man. The lyrics were plaited with fierce longing. He wailed his highest note, consumed with his song, as if this deer woman he sang of were his own lost love. It pierced the inky night, a lost sheep’s bleat down a starlit valley.

      The hairs on the back of Carmela’s neck prickled. Franco’s trysts, though exciting, never brought her this rapture. This heightened passion could only ever exist in song, surely, those fables of poetic love. This was not the real feet-in-the-dust, earth-in-your-hands love that Carmela could expect from joyful married life. A good wife would be rewarded with life’s honest pleasures—food on her plate, babies with fleshy thighs at her breast, and wine to drink to her family’s health.

      The singers closed with a glissando and a final rich, hummed chord that hovered, golden, in the air. Then the night erupted with applause. Carmela listened to the hands pounding with pride, but her eyes couldn’t tear themselves from Franco. She remembered how it felt when his salty mouth had made her heart pound and his body felt like an unchartered universe to touch, taste, and discover. Like the choir’s song, at once stirring yet distant, this boy, with his cherry and wild fennel kisses, felt like someone she once loved in a dream.

CHAPTER 2

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