by Toni De Luca
I find myself in the place that as a girl I called the land of my dreams. I am sitting on a balcony. Night has fallen over the valley, the outline of the mountains just about visible under the moonlight. The orange flames of a bonfire in the field across from me illuminate the terrace of an old farmhouse where a family sits around a table playing cards and drinking wine from small tumblers. The air is filled with the sound of laughter and the rise and fall of southern Italian accents. I catch snippets of conversation through the high-pitched chirping of invisible crickets.
Suddenly, sunlight transforms the landscape. I am sitting in the shade of an old fig tree, beads of sweat dripping from my forehead. My head feels heavy. I see an old woman wearing a light blue grembiule, her long grey hair neatly fastened in a bun. It is my Nonna.
My eyes follow the rhythm of her gentle, steady movements as she makes a round of her ancestral land. She treads carefully as she moves towards the grape vines, lifting her feet to avoid grazing her legs on the sharp sun-bleached grass. She takes bunches of the grapes in her hand, examining them. Then she turns to the tomatoes. She plucks a few from the vine and tucks them into the front pocket of her grembiule.
Now she is standing before me, her tanned weathered hands reaching for mine. She places a purple fig in my palm. Her brow creases and she takes the fig back and peels off its skin. Tiny pink crystals glisten in the sunlight. Mangia! She says, placing the fig back in the palm of my hand. I know you don’t have all of this at home, she says softly in Italian. A smile spreads across her face as I bite into the fig. Warmth runs through my body. I feel safe, as if nothing can hurt me. She fetches a wooden chair, and we sit together under the fig tree.
Then the sunlight turns to darkness, and I am no longer under the fig tree. I see a child asleep in the back of a red car. I recognise her. The child is me. I watch the car thread through the winding mountain roads. My father’s friend is driving. There are others in the car, but their faces are blurry.
The car comes to a halt, the sound of the handbrake waking the child from her slumber. The man unclips her seatbelt, lifts her out of the car and raises her high into the cool night air. Her eyes half-closed, she tips her head to look down at the twinkling lights of the houses in the valley below. The heavy silence of the night is pierced by the sound of chirping crickets. Tears run down the man’s face, his voice shaking: Open your eyes, he tells her. This is your father’s land. You’re here now.
The child opens her mouth as if to speak but the scene disintegrates before me. Night once again turns into day, and I find myself back in the shade of the old fig tree, my Nonna’s chair empty.
Italian/English Glossary
Grembiule – apron
Mangia! – Eat!
Nonna – grandmother
About the Author:
Toni De Luca is a Scottish-Italian poet, writer and integrative therapist based in the west coast of Scotland. Her work has been published in English and Scots and explores themes of grief, identity and belonging and our relationship with ourselves and others.