“Where was I?” she asked.
“Angela Bornemann was good with the locals in Sicily.”
“Oh, right. Well, she was really good. Like served-as-a-go-between-with-the-Santapaola-family good.”
“You’re talking, like, the Mafia?” said Laura.
“That’s what I heard,” said Beverly. “And it doesn’t really surprise me, now that I’ve met her.”
“She’s a ballbuster for sure,” Barb said.
“Anyway, when the navy decided they were going to moor a submarine tender on a rock, smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean, they called up Daniel Bornemann, who was working some dead-end job at the Pentagon, and they told him they wanted to talk to his wife. I guess the thought was that they needed someone to explain what they were doing to the locals. And not just explain it but get them on board.”
“Like a fixer,” said Laura.
“More like a finesser,” I said.
Beverly nodded enthusiastically. “They brought Angela in, and who knows what they said to her, but next thing you know, she’s got her gig, and Daniel’s been made a public affairs officer, which I didn’t realize until recently was even a real job.”
“Do we not like Daniel?” Barb asked.
“He’s fine. He’s got a very pretty face. Just not a lot between the ears.”
40.
BACK IN THE CLASSROOM,Angela covered the metric system. But that was really just a windup to a larger lecture on shopping for clothes. There were several women’s boutiques in town—Solinas, Pauline, and Nella were among the best—but she said that under no circumstances were we to traipse into these stores acting like we owned the place. “These are not American department stores. No touching the clothes. And remember, you will not be permitted to try anything on, so know your measurements—in centimeters.”
Angela was also emphatic that we buy gold in Italy. Bracelets, chokers, rings, whatever we could afford. In the United States, we’d be lucky to buy 14-karat gold, but she explained that Italian gold was always 18 karats and sold according to weight, with no markup. “Be sure your husband knows what you like and where to find it,” she said, which elicited audible squeals from several of the women in the room.
Behind me was a bookshelf stacked high with Italian-English dictionaries, and I absent-mindedly pulled one from the shelf and opened it to a random page. I sounded out the wordspranzo, prassi, andprateriain my head. I remembered playing a game in third grade that my teacher, Mrs. Hallinan, had called Dictionary. She’d give us ten words, and we’d have to look them up as fast as we could, scribbling down the correct definition beside each one. I had been good at the game, and I tried it now. First withgold, then withboring. I didn’t actually write anything down, just tried to get to the Italian word as quickly as possible. The word for gold wasoro. Boringwas weird, because the wordnoiosolooked closer to our word fornoisy.
Siobhan was asking something about European shoe sizes when it occurred to me that I could use the dictionary to translate the flyer, which was still at the bottom of my purse.
I retrieved the flyer, unfolded it, and stuck it between the pages of myhandbook, where no one—except maybe Laura—would be able to see what I was doing.
The dictionary was so much better than my phrase book. It had all the words I needed, even if I had to take a guess at some of the tenses and verb conjugations. I wrote in pencil on the margins of the flyer and kept moving words around until I had some approximation of:
An Italian port given to America
as a present from the
Andreotti-Malagodi administration
THE ISLAND OF LA MADDALENA TRANSFORMED
INTO A SOURCE OF POLLUTION, AN ATOMIC PERIL, AND A MILITARY TARGET.
THIS IS AN ACT AGAINST DIPLOMACY AND PEACE,
A SECRET AGREEMENT TACITLY
STIPULATED OUTSIDE THE PARLIAMENT
AND AGAINST THE WILL OF ITALIAN CITIZENS.
Let Italian ports be ports of peace.
Get atomic bases out of Italy.
