Page 56 of The Tuscan Child
“You have had problems?” I asked.
Renzo shrugged. “I have had my share. Only small setbacks compared to the sufferings of the world, I suppose. Mainly problems of love.” He stopped, frowning again. “I should not bore you with this, Signorina Langley.”
“No, please. Go on. And do call me Joanna.”
“Very well, Joanna.” He shrugged. “There was a girl here when I was eighteen. I was sent to Florence to school, you know, and when I came home I told my father I wished to be a chef. He thought it was a stupid idea. I was going to inherit all this land, the prosperous vineyards. He wanted me to study agriculture, so I had to agree, and did a course on viniculture at the university. Then I came home and fell in love. I thought Cosimo would be happy, but he didn’t like her. She wanted to be a fashion designer, and miraculously she got a place at the fashion institute in Milan. Off she went and of course she never came back. I hear she’s quite famous now.”
He broke off and looked at me. “I don’t know why I’m telling you my life story.”
“Maybe because you sense that I’ve been through similar experiences.”
“You have?”
“Yes. The man I thought I was going to marry dumped me for someone who could advance his career.”
“I was always told that English men were cold and proper,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “But not all English people, I have to admit. I met an English girl once when I was working over there. She was very nice—funny and warm and not at all stuffy as the English are supposed to be. I thought I might stay in London and marry her. But then Cosimo had his stroke and I had to leave her and come rushing home. I feel that any time I fall in love, it is doomed.”
“There is still plenty of time,” I said.
“For you, maybe. I have already turned thirty. In our culture this is a hopeless case. An old bachelor, like my father.”
We had been walking in the shade up the narrow street, and I saw that the little park was up ahead of us. “There is something else I’d like you to see,” I said. “Can we sit in the park and I will show you? Maybe you can help me figure it out.”
We left the houses behind. Renzo followed me along the sandy path to the bench in the shade of the sycamore tree where the old couple had been sitting. He sat beside me and I opened my purse. I took out the cigarette packet on which my father had sketched the woman.
He gasped as I handed it to him. “Yes, this is her. My mother. Exactly as she was. That smile. Did your father draw this?”
“He must have.”
“He has captured her so well.”
There was no sound apart from the cooing of a pigeon in the tree above us and the chirping of sparrows as they pecked in the dust. It felt as if we were alone at the edge of the universe.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Your father gave my mother his ring, which must have been a prized possession. He took the trouble to draw a picture of her. So it is clear that he had feelings for her. And she gave him a medal. That must have meant that she had feelings for him, too. So what happened? What went wrong? Did he leave her and go back to England, so she chose the security of a German instead?”
“There is something else I want you to see—the letter I told you about.” I pulled out the letter my father had written.
Renzo examined the envelope. “Yes, the address was correct,” he said. “That was the house where I was born. And it was posted...after she went. Not at this address.” He sighed.
“Now read what my father wrote.”
He opened the letter. He started it, then looked up. “He wrote good Italian.”
“He studied art in Florence before the war,” I said.
“He was an artist?”
“Not when I knew him. He taught art at a school, but I didn’t know he had painted until after his death when I found some really lovely paintings.”
He went back to reading the letter. I heard the small intake of breath as he came to the part at the end. “Our beautiful boy?” he asked, looking at me.
“I wondered if that meant you, whether you had to be hidden at a time of danger.”
He shook his head. “I told you before. I was never hidden. I lived with my mother and my great-grandmother until my mother left us. Then I continued to live with Nonna until she died soon after the war ended. That was when Cosimo took me in. He took over my mother’s land and he managed to buy the land of those men who were killed in the war. So he became prosperous enough to give me a good education.”
“Is it possible that your mother could have had another child? A child with my father?”
“How could this be?” He shook his head. “We would have known.”
