Signorina Giuseppina - an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript called Turn Left At The Ocean

This particular excerpt is special to me because, although nothing in this book is based on my parents’ life, whenever I think of it I feel a tightening in my chest. I suppose it could be the father’s (Nikos) speech patterns, or possibly subconscious memories of my Italian grandparents. I had no intention of digging it out of my hard-drive today because I was busy working on my current WIP. But somehow I got side-tracked, sucked into it, and ended up fiddling with old words for a couple of hours. Which is probably just a waste of time, really. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did, because it brought me a wonderfully soothing feeling of nostalgia. Signorina Giuseppina is not the title of the manuscript, just the name of one of the minor characters in the story who nevertheless plays an important role. I had set out to write a sweeping, epic, romantic love story set between England, Sicily and Ithaca, Greece. The manuscript currently lives in a drawer. Once I’ve finished my current WIP I might go back to it… I don’t know.

Maybe you’ll enjoy this excerpt. Let me know.

This is a scene on a beach in Sicily.

******

Reading between rondos of hand movements and invocations of the Madonna, we eventually learn that the lady’s full name is Signorina Giuseppina Santini. Proudly expressing herself in a self-taught English strongly flavoured with Italian, she informs us that she’s seventy-three, that she’s my mother’s cousin and that she’s been waiting fifty years for this moment.

“Che meraviglioso,” she exclaims, her shrill voice a menace to our eardrums, her arms rotating like windmills, her mouth stretching like Plasticine. Then she embarks on yet another round of hugs and kisses. Overwhelmed, we give in to her affectionate pummelling, smiling like imbeciles.

“Venite ragazze!” she says, encouraging her black-clad lumpy girlfriends to move in a little closer and check us out. “Madonna! Ma che fantastico! Che sorpresa, such a surprise! I am a watching you all morning on the beach. And I am thinking me, madonna, those people, I know them. Is it possible? But then I tell myself, ma no, ma Giuseppina, ma hai perso la testa? Have you lost your head? Nikos Prasinopoulos, his Angela and her friend Tessa here in Santo Stefano without Allegra? Sei pazza! Completely crazy! So, then I think my eyes are making the tricks on me. And, insomma, to know people when you only see them on the photographs, well, is not la stessa cosa, not same thing. Molto difficile. Molto. But then I hear Nikos speaking the English, hear him say the name of Angela and I think my heart is explode with the happiness. I say me, is miracle! Is them!”

Her soft bulbous body bobs up and down like an old cooking apple. Her rubber mouth is all over the place. Oh God, I think she wants to kiss me.

“Angela!” she exclaims. “Bella! Bella bambina!” She grabs my cheeks between her thumb and her fist and squeezes hard, shaking my head back and forth as though I’m a chubby six-year-old. Her dark eyes then flit towards Tessa, who grins at her while warily backing up a few steps.

 “C’e anche la Tessa! Tessa here too! I hear much about you. I know all things about all of you. Incredible. E davvero una giornata benita di Dio! A day blessed by God!” She whirls around, her cellulite ravaged thighs shuddering as she beholds my father with adoring eyes.

“And Nikos…” Giuseppina stops to catch her breath, a labyrinth of blue veins mottling her gelatinous bosoms. She leans towards him and sighs. “Caro Nikos, still so handsome! You naughty boy! Mascalzone! You break my heart when you run with my cousin Allegra.” She waggles a finger at him, her dark brown eyes sparking all sorts of mischief, then she throws her head back, cackling with delight at his bewildered expression.

Tessa nudges me, softly humming the four infamous notes from the Twilight Zone soundtrack. We’re trapped, encircled by Giuseppina’s cronies who stand with their stumpy legs splayed, swollen hands resting on lumpy hips, beaming at us. I can tell that my father is mentally ransacking each nook and cranny of his brain, searching for the slightest trace of this eccentric old lady.

Giuseppina shifts her weight from side to side, eyeballing him. “I not make impressione on you!” she says with an accusatory pout. “You no remember me? I save your culo, your bottom, many times. Mio zio, my uncle, he furious when he find out about you and Allegra. He want come after you for many years. I know where you were. I know all things. But I keep my mouth zip,” she concludes proudly, chin up, miming the motion. Hands on her hips, she looks around at her friends, willing them to acknowledge her honourable achievement with thunderous applause.

“Sorry,” says my father, thoroughly perplexed. “What you know?”

She rolls her eyes and throws her hands skywards. Plainly, my father is an idiot. “Sapevo tutto io! I know everything! I know you are in England. I have your address! My cousin, your wife, she write me. Always. Every month. She send me photographs, tell me all the news.”

I notice my father tense slightly, but Giuseppina pats his arm. Her mouth pulses. “Calma! Don’t worry, I keep quiet. Always. Never say nothing to no one. I hide letters in box of wood in my cupboard.” She slaps him, cackling gaily. “You safe. And now the bad persons all dead,” she adds, making the sign of the cross. “Now tell me. Where Allegra? She no here?”

My father flinches and absent-mindedly picks flakes of paint off the old wooden sunbed. “Allegra died last month. We bring her ashes back to Santo Stefano. It’s what she wanted. Now she is here forever.”

Giuseppina gasps. “Oh Dio!” Her hand jumps to her mouth. “Mi dispiacce. I very sorry. A big traggedia, no? She write me little time ago. Vediammo, what she say?” She frowns, thumbing her lower lip, trying to remember. “A si! She worry about Angela.” She turns to me, her mouth pintucked. “Your mother worry about you go to the Americas,” she says accusingly. “You find nice man in the Americas?”

This woman knows more that British intelligence, I think with amusement. “No,” I say, smiling. “I didn’t meet anyone.”

“And you sell business?”

Incredulous, I nod. “Yes, actually. We did.”

“Hmm.” She frowns, considering this. “Get good money?”

I chuckle. “I suppose so.”

“Brava,” she says, her whiskers twitching with approval. “Is good for woman to be independente. Me, I be independenteall my life. No man ever tell Signorina Giuseppina what to do. I am a, how do you say? Yes, I am a feminista in Sicilia.  Giusto raggazze?”

“E!” the ladies agree, hairy chins wagging in unison.

“What did you do?” wonders Tessa, nibbling on a coconut slab.

“I selled underclothe,” she says, proudly hitching her humps. “Very success. People need always underclothe. And I also selled, how do you say it in English, costumi da bagno?”

“Swimsuits,” I offer.

“Swimsuits! Certo!” She sits up a little straighter, puts her hands on her hips and jiggles her over-generous flesh. “I first girl in Santo Stefano wear bikini!”

“Opa!” My father blinks, reeling at the image.

“Yes,” Giuseppina continues proudly, plonking herself on my father’s sun bed. “And I first woman speak the English. Learn myself. I watch movies – America movies.” She giggles. “I also have America boyfriends! I like America men! And America men, they like very much Sicilia lady. And love my underclothe.” She waggles her torso from side to side, like a Sicilian Mae West. “Ha! I trap them likes zanzare! Like mosquito! Clak!” She slaps her thighs, wheezes a little, spits thick gloop into the sand. “I never marry. Terrible bad reputazione in Santo Stefano!”

“My God,” gasps my father, hitching his swimsuit nervously, his blue eyes as big as serving platters. He’s about to say something else, but she beats him to it.

“Santa Madonna! Is lunch! You be very ‘ungry. You come back my home. I cook real Sicilia food. What you say? Come eat my Maccheroni alla Nonna. I cook the sauce all the morning.”

“That sound… that sound very nice,” stammers my father. “Err, what time we come?”

Groaning, Giuseppina heaves herself onto her tumescent feet. “Eh! You follow. That way you no lose my home!” She giggles. “I am sure you not run away! Ah, Nikos! How my heart bang when you near! Ufa!” She fans herself theatrically, as though sizzling at the memories. “Let’s go. Get up. Come,” she urges, starting to lumber down the beach with her friends in tow. They’re all babbling at once as they head towards their parasols and pack up their beach gear.

My father mops his brow. “Thee mou! What I have done?”

“Do you remember her?” I ask, while vigorously shaking sand off my towel.

“Maybe…” he says, putting on his socks and sandals. “The name, it is ringing a bell. But I didn’t know that your mother she writes to somebody in Sicily. For so many years. Is crazy. Allegra, she never say anything about this, but this Giuseppina, she knows everything about my life.”

“I think she’s a trip,” shrugs Tessa, lying back on her towel and wriggling into her shorts. “And she clearly knows all kinds of other interesting stuff.”

I nod, wondering what the other interesting stuff might entail.

But my father is increasingly unsettled by this encounter. “This is meaning that, all this time, your mother she knows what is going on over here. And she never tells me. Why she doesn’t tell me? Why?”

Tessa discreetly pulls a concerned face at me as picks up her bag. “Err, well, maybe she didn’t want you to think she missed her family.”

“Yes, but…” He shakes his head. “Why she never says to me that she wants to come back and visit? Many times I ask her, always she say no. But we could come. Twenty, thirty years later, her father is not going to jump out from behind a palm tree with a Borsalino and a machine gun.”

“Forza ragazzi! You come?” Giuseppina, way down the beach, is getting impatient.

“We’d better go,” I groan, dreading it.

“I guess she didn’t want to come back here for the same reasons you didn’t want to go back to Greece,” Tessa suggests as we slowly head towards town.

But my father only grows more agitated. “No! Is not the same! Is different. I have nothing to go back to. My life there, it is destroyed by the earthquake.”

Tessa shrugs. “You could have gone back on vacation years later. You could have visited old friends.”

“What friends? Everyone is dead!”

I make big eyes at Tessa, silently asking her to drop it.

“And I am happy in England,” continues my father. “And we are busy. We have children. A business.”

This is the excuse he’s always spouted whenever anyone broached the subject of going back to Ithaca. I’ve never known why, and until now, I never really cared. “But you often talked about Ithaca. You’ve had loads of opportunities to go back there, not necessarily when we were kids, but it would have been easy in the past few years. Why did you never go back? I mean, it’s kind of crazy if you think about it; I’m half Greek, and yet I’ve never set foot in the country.

“Then why you didn’t go? We never told you not to! Your mamma and me, we have not the money to go,” my father hisses angrily, suddenly standing still in the middle of the dark, narrow street. Tessa glances at me, and I shrug. We keep moving, letting my father slightly fall behind.

Minutes later we enter Giuseppina’s dark, dank little house, and know right away that her Maccheroni alla Nonna will be amazing. The recipe is simple: thick slabs of eggplant are grilled golden, then simmered for hours in a tomato sauce with a sharp, herby kick.  Her pasta is homemade al-dente perfection, and as soon she’s put it together and added a sprinkling of peccorino cheese, I know without a doubt that I’ll be clamouring for seconds.

Giuseppina shows us a series of photograph albums in which we all feature at various stages of our lives. I find the experience disturbing, as though we’ve all been watched through a double-sided mirror, the minor and major events of our lives played out in secret to a stranger thousands of miles away. After dessert – a homemade Cassata Siciliana – Giuseppina delves into the depths of a dark, chiselled wood cabinet and extracts the wooden box containing my mother’s letters. “Ecco!” she says, tearing off the thick rubber band holding them all together. “Is all here. Your lives.”

“Can I see?” I ask, then immediately change my mind.

She hands me the pile. “Caffé per tutti?” she asks, scurrying off through the heavy curtains that separate her ornately decorated dining room from her kitchen.

I start to push the letters towards my father, but he turns away. “No. Is between your mamma and this woman.”

He’s right. It would be like reading my mother’s diary.

The smell of coffee precedes the bubble-hiss of the Bialetti percolating on the gas stove. We can hear the old woman fussing around, piling things onto a tray. She reappears, tongue wedged between her front teeth, fine china balanced precariously on a melamine tray. “Here we are!” she says cheerfully. “Un buon’ caffé! And have some Amaretti. These are being made close to Santo Stefano. Veramente deliziosi!” She pushes a plate of the famous almond biscuits, individually wrapped in brightly coloured paper, towards the centre of the table.

We drink and munch in silence for a while as Giuseppina finally seems to have run out of steam. Then, suddenly, she says, “Oh, Nikos. I near forget. Two years before, lady come to Santo Stefano. She speak the English, I think she say she from America. She una vecchia signora, an old lady, but molto elegante, very elegant. Very, err, how you say? Ah, si. Very distinguish.”

She takes a breath, hesitating. “This woman, she look for you. For Nikos Prasinopoulos.”

I glance at my father, but he’s just sipping his coffee, his eyes firmly on the table.

“Do you know why that woman was looking for my father?” I ask her.

“I not know,” she says, frowning. “But she spend long time in Santo Stefano, ask questions, try to find out informations. The post office send her to Signorina Giuseppina Santini. They know Santini know Prasinopoulos at post office.”

“What did she say?” asks my father, unwrapping another Amaretto and popping it into his mouth.

“She ask if I know where she find you, if you still alive. I tell her I know you alive, but I don’t want give her English address.”

I pour myself another coffee. “What was her name?”

“Angelika. She say her name is Angelika.”

My father’s cup slips through his fingers, crashes onto the table where it breaks into dozens of tiny pieces. Thick brown liquid seeps into the antique yellowed lace cloth, as,  choking, he spits the partially chewed biscuit into his hand. “Angelika!” he murmurs, ghostly white.

Tessa and I glance at each other.

I lean towards him, place a hand on his knee. “Baba, what’s the matter? Who is Angelika?”

But my father doesn’t answer. He leans onto the table with his head between his hands. When he looks up, there are tears in his eyes. “Angelika from Ithaca.” His eyes flick back and forth between the stained table cloth and me.

“Who is Angelika?” I ask again in the smallest of whispers, squeezing his hand.

He closes his eyes. “She was my first love.”