Antonia and Her Daughters by Marlena de Blasi

Author:Marlena de Blasi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, book
ISBN: 9781742695259
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VII

A roll of red-striped unbleached linen in her lap, she pulls the fabric out along the length of her arm, holds her finger to mark the place, cuts it at the mark, sets about sewing a thin, rolled hem on either end, pulling the threaded needle from where it was woven inside the pocket of her dress. It’s nearly nine in the evening and Antonia and I are sitting face to face on the veranda. By the still strong light of a late June sun, she is making kitchen towels.

‘The evening always astonishes me. I am far enough along so that to be able to be astonished is—in itself—a lovely thing. I come to sit here on the veranda, to look at the fields, fallow or fat, and I stay a while with a pot of some potion or other concocted from the day’s harvest, tearing bread for the hens and yearning for something, yearning for everything I suppose, though I can never put a name to it. To the longing, I mean. I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia—someone or something I miss—or someone, something I’ve never known.’

Hiraeth. Perhaps it’s hiraeth, Antonia, I say to myself. That Welsh word again . . . yearning, grieving, but for whom? For what?

‘Is it my Tancredi? Do I still wait for him? Hindsight has led me to believe there was a certain fortune in losing him so soon, the risk of disenchantment being the greatest for the one we love best. Is it Ugo for whom I long? Surely it is. Those long legs wrapped around mine for all those nights . . . How I loved the smell of him. I wore his leather jacket until a few years ago when Isa or one of the others locked it away in some trunk. He hunted in it, rode in it and, as though the old soft skin of it had become his own, I could find him there. Cloves and pine and amber, woodsmoke. Without the jacket I can find him still.

‘But more than Ugo and Tancredi, more than my father and all the others whom I loved for a while or forever, I think the longing I feel is to know whether I’ve made a good job of it. Of life. Nothing cloaked or squandered. Aiming for it, I pretend every morning is my last. Once past eighty, I think that game is just. Besides, there’s a kind of thrill in it. Not at all morbid, mind you, but exhilarating, yes, that’s what it is. Moving along that windblown edge where every footfall counts. It’s not that I practise dying but, my stash of days having dwindled as it has, I sidle up closer to its inevitability. Like winter, sooner or later it will come. Wily creature, the Horseman, I’ll meet him head-on, no cringing. It would be a brutal thing to hear his rough whispering, to understand it’s me he’s come for and then to feel my head spinning and tilting with scenes half played, played badly, words not said.

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