“Mi chiamo Eileen Archer,” I repeated.
She held up a finger. “Lorraine’s friend?”
“Well, she doesn’t know me. But her friend Sheila said you give lessons.” Because I wanted to put my best foot forward, I bulldozed my way through the second sentence I’d memorized in advance of my visit. “Vuoi imparare l’italiano.”
“Voglio.”
“Voglio?”
“Voglio imparare l’italiano.”
I repeated the sentence word for word.
“It’s ‘Iwant to learn Italian,’?” she said. “Not ‘Youwant to learn Italian.’?”
“Right,” I whispered to myself, then said the words one more time to show her that I had a good attitude and was capable of learning from my mistakes.
She beckoned me to follow her up a set of stairs and into the same apartment where she’d so recently shouted at me from the balcony. Then she told me to make myself comfortable and disappeared into a back bedroom, where I assumed she was changing clothes.
This was the first Italian residence I’d been invited inside, and right away I liked it. It wasn’t that it was a big place, but it was intelligently proportioned. There was a combined living and dining room, with a small, sort of out-of-the-way kitchen and a big balcony that felt like it doubled the apartment’s living space. Down the hall were a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom, but I didn’t spend one second thinking about them because I was too busy taking in the Morianis’ view. Out the glass doors that led to the balcony, I could see downtown La Maddalena, the harbor, and even Santo Stefano in the distance.
“When did you arrive in La Maddalena?” Francesca called to me from the bedroom, and I tried to refocus.
“About two weeks ago,” I said, in a voice loud enough to carry.
On a little table in the living room sat a collection of crystal animals. Their bodies were like suncatchers, but with the addition of tiny glass ears and noses and tails. I scanned the walls for rainbows but didn’t see any.
“Your husband’s on theGilmore?”
“In Radiological Controls.”
“Oh,” she said, knowingly. “So you must be following this business with Amendola, then?”
“Amendola?” I repeated.
“Gruppo Ambiente.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was worried that if I admitted to being clueless, she’d clam up.
Francesca emerged from the bedroom wearing a pair of brown slacks and a bright orange polyester blouse. “He makes a good point, no?”
“No, yes.”
“The Japanese are not fools.”
I thought of what Tom had told Paul and me in the lobby of the Excelsior, about how, after Japan kicked out the U.S. Navy’s fleet of nuclear subs, it had left a lot of Italians feeling like chumps. Francesca was clearly one of those chumps.
“We’ve been told a hundred times the subs are safe,” she said. “But if they’re so safe, why won’t Japan let them in?”
I tried to remember what Paul had said to me when I’d asked the very same question. “I don’t think it’s that they’re not safe. I think it’s that Japan doesn’t have the right data. To assess the risk. The numbers are old or bad or something.”
“How is that worse than our situation?” said Francesca. “We have no numbers. None. Zero.”
“Yeah,” I said, growing more uncomfortable by the second. “I have no idea.”
Francesca removed the towel from her head and really looked at me for the first time. She was maybe fifty, short and curvy, with long gray hair, dark brown eyes, and an olive complexion. Her skin looked like it had seen too much sun—a common problem on the island. It was the lines around her eyes and mouth that were the most noticeable, but she also had sun spots that dotted her face like freckles. All told, I thought her rather striking.
“We need to start standing up for ourselves. CNEN can’t even get funding to monitor La Maddalena. They come every six months, that’s it.”
