The Last Promise - Rilegato

Evans, Richard Paul

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0525946969 ISBN 13: 9780525946960

Casa editrice: E P Dutton, 2002

Riassunto

Having followed her new husband to his native home in rustic Tuscany, Eliana distracts herself from her marital disappointments by caring for her asthmatic son and finds herself reevaluating her life when she meets a fellow art lover, American Ross Story. 450,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Richard Paul Evans is a number one New York Timesbestselling author. The Last Promise is his seventh novel.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

CHAPTER 1

"Ogni cuore ha il suo segreto."
Every heart has its secret.
-Italian Proverb

TWO YEARS EARLIER. JULY 1999.
TUSCANY, ITALY.

Eliana released the clasp on the cedar shutters, then unlatched one side of the wood-framed window and pushed it open, welcoming a rush of fresh air into her second-story painting studio. In the window's thick glass she saw her own pale reflection. Her umber hair, still unwashed, was pulled back and bound with elastic. Her usually beautiful eyes were puffy from another hard night. There are more beautiful things to see in Tuscany at six in the morning, she thought.

From between the two large cypress trees that flanked the window, she could see the neatly lined trellises of the Chianti vineyards, faded in the distance by a morning mist. Sembra una cartolina, she thought. Just like a postcard. She had thought the same thing when she arrived in Tuscany almost six years earlier, only then her thoughts had been in English. In spite of her hardships, the country had not lost its beauty to her. She was grateful for this. It was one of the joys life had not stolen from her.

As difficult as the previous night had been, she was ready to start again. She had learned to live this way, discarding the past each night and starting each day anew-picking joy where she could find it-like hunting for mushrooms in the Chianti forests. Sometimes her own endurance astonished her.

The fifteenth-century villa where she lived was two-storied and horseshoe shaped, enclosed with a front wall, forming a sizable courtyard. Her family's apartment was the largest in the villa and took the entire east wing. While she was a new bride still living in America, her groom, Maurizio, had told her that their apartment in Italy was part of the new section of the restored villa. It was only after she arrived in Italy, three years later, that she realized that "new" is relative in an old country: the "new wing" was only two hundred and seventy years old.

The villa's center apartment was smaller than Eliana's by half and was occupied by her sister-in-law, Anna, who had lived in the villa since her husband left her five years previous. The western wing of the villa was used for storage and there was also a small apartment there that was rented out. An arched, wrought iron gate in the center of that wing led to the villa's garden.

The other buildings on the property were nearly a quarter mile away, surrounded by vineyards: a small, stucco home where Luca, the winery manager, and his wife lived, next to the three-story, ochre cantina where the grapes were processed into wine, aged, bottled and shipped.

Eliana's painting studio was rectangular in shape, with white stucco walls that slanted slightly in toward the center of the house. It had a high, vaulted ceiling supported by heavy, wooden trusses that had been hewn by an axe. The room was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and the only room in the villa where one could see both the inner courtyard and the world outside the villa, depending on which side of the room one stood in. The space was larger than Eliana needed and she had only moved into one half of the room, piling the other half with blank canvases and unframed paintings.

Eliana had wondered if the room was haunted. The first few weeks after she had moved in, she came in each morning to find six of the seven paintings she had hung on the walls tipped to their sides. Each day she checked the paintings' hooks and wires then righted them, only to find them all tilted again the next morning. All of the pictures except for one.

"All villas in Italy have fantasmi," an old man wearing a bloodstained apron in the butcher shop had told her. Actually the phenomenon was little more than a curiosity to Eliana, and after two weeks, when it stopped, she was disappointed. Fantasmi or not, she liked the idea that she wasn't alone. Against the far wall of Eliana's studio was a gray, cast iron stufa that she used to heat the room in the late fall and winter months when the thick outer walls of the villa turned cold with the season. Above the stove was the only picture in the room not of her own hand, the one her ghost had left alone-a portrait of the Holy Blessed Mother, her hands lifted in adoration, her heart revealed. It hung above an icon where Eliana kept her rosary beads and a score of stout candles in shallow glass dishes. She was a devout Catholic, though it had been some while since she had attended mass. This was not by choice. Her six-year-old son, Alessio, was severely asthmatic, and the priest at the small church near the villa used copious amounts of incense in his worship, which was too much an irritant for her son's lungs, setting off an asthma attack almost immediately upon their entering the chapel. As much as she craved to worship in the company of others, it was unthinkable for her to ask the priest to desist, for it was an old church, an old priest and an old congregation, and nowhere is tradition and religion so interwoven as in the Italian countryside. She had tried other churches in the area and found them all to be the same, their chapels reeking from centuries of incense even without lighting new.

She attended church only when her husband was in town, which was rare on weekends, so Eliana mostly worshipped in solitude, pausing before the picture in her studio each morning, crossing herself, then lighting a candle to carry her petitions heavenward. She had many. The Holy Mother was the patron saint of mothers. She would know Eliana's heart. More than anyone else, the mother of Christ would understand; for she had suffered what Eliana feared most-losing her son.

Alessio had manifested the first signs of his asthma at the age of two, just thirteen weeks after their coming to Italy. One summer evening as she was putting him to bed, he suddenly began gasping for breath. It would have been a frightening moment for any mother, but Maurizio was out of town on business when it happened, leaving Eliana alone in a foreign country where she didn't know who to call or where to go in an emergency, even if she could speak the language. It was the most terrifying moment of her life. Not knowing what else to do, she prayed for help. Almost immediately there was a knock at the door. Anna and her husband had decided to stop by for a visit. They rushed Alessio and Eliana to the hospital.

It was the beginning of a new life. Every year since, Alessio had suffered from attacks severe enough to send them running to the nearest emergency room.

After she finished her daily rite, Eliana would go to the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot ginger tea which she brought back to the small round table next to her easel. Then she would turn on her music. On the counter behind her easel were a CD player and a wooden case that contained CDs by mostly Italian artists-Pavarotti, Bocelli, Battisti, Zucchero-her collection diversified with a few country-westerns, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Clint Black, an album of Gregorian chants and a Barbra Streisand album that now seemed to her a thousand years old.

This morning she chose Pavarotti, inserted the disk and turned on her stereo. The music started too loudly and she quickly turned it down. Just two doors away from her, Alessio was still asleep. With any luck he would remain so.

The two of them were alone in the house. Maurizio was away on business. As usual. He had called sometime during the night, woken her, to say he'd been delayed. He'd be home Saturday or Sunday, she didn't remember. She didn't care that much anymore. She wondered why he'd bothered to call. He hadn't thought to ask how Alessio was or why her voice was so hoarse. He didn't know that she'd been up half the night as their son struggled to breathe.

After he was breathing regularly and had gone back to sleep, she lay on the couch next to him listening for each breath and quietly crying until sleep silenced her. As distant as she and Maurizio had grown in the last seven years, in spite of all his lies and infidelities, she had wanted him then. She wanted him to hold her. For just ten minutes she wanted to be weak.

She put on her painting smock, then sat down on her leather-covered stool, unscrewed the lid of a tube of white oil paint and squeezed a large circle of it onto her palette. Italian girls dream of marriage. Italian wives dream of love, an elderly Italian woman had once told her. What, then, do American women who marry Italian men dream of? She could speak only for herself. She dreamt of home. Home in a small town no one in Italy had even heard of. Vernal, Utah. Back where they still called her Ellen and where her mother still fretted over her raspberry bushes all year long, then spent days putting up bottles of jam in wide-mouthed Kerr bottles just to give them away to her neighbors.

After six years in Italy it was sometimes hard for her to believe that such a place as Vernal still existed-a pinprick on a map in a different world. By comparison the Florence countryside made Vernal look as drab as a lunar landscape. But, be it ever so humble, it was still home. And better a warm cottage than a cold castello.

Eliana's friends in Vernal still spoke of her fairytale life-the hometown girl who made good, swept off her feet by an Italian lover and taken to a beautiful foreign land, where the language was spoken like poetry and the food was their daily sacrament. A land where immortals like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Botticelli had gilded the lily of a country God Himself had already painted. She understood their fantasies, clichés and all, as the fantasies had also once been hers.

Back in Vernal they didn't know how things had changed: how her "lover" was usually away from home six days out of seven; the lonely times she called her husband on the road only to have the phone answered by some strange woman, followed by a covered mouthpiece and muffled talking. They didn't know about the days and nights of solitude spent caring for her son, Alessio. She was the lucky one, they still said of her, the one that got out. -

She c...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: E P Dutton
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0525946969
• ISBN 13: 9780525946960
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320