Fabrizio always stood like he was holding a cigarette, the phantom smoke curling around his head like an imaginary helm on the head of a disgruntled lord. The lines in his face carved deep and smelled of stale tobacco, his hands deft and unforgiving. He spoke with a Tuscan dialect, his language as unforgiving as his hands, no room in his wry humor for mistakes. Luca stood unapproachable, his smile deceptively wide, teeth long and crooked as he sang along to the songs on the laptop. He would ask me if I knew this Italian song or that Italian singer, and I would usually lie and say no just to see him smile that lopsided grin of his. By the end I felt less like an employee and more like their patchwork child. I could never tell when Luca was serious in his reprimands. Sometimes, he or Anna would approach us with some task or misstep that needed righting under the guise of a friendly quip, his long, long smile widening as his displeasure grew.
I remember the dust in the floor mats of his car as he drove me and Nagore up the side of the vineyards and fields to the house, my hand out the window feeling the air as it grew solid in the quick-moving heat. The dust was all-encompassing. My feet, growing darker as the summer ripened, collected residue which never seemed to want to lift.
In the last few weeks when I felt my rope begin to fray, I would walk along the avenues of the olive yards surrounding the grounds. The air would seem to thicken around me, the drone of crickets rising and falling like a tuning radio in the solitary curl of breeze that made its rounds through the sweet-smelling branches. During one of my last walks, I discovered where the squat cathedral of trees opened into a vast expanse of valley, dead yellow grass making the foliage seem purple. I loved when the sky would turn gray, at night when the air was so still you could cut it with a pocketknife and the lighting forked huge rifts through the monstrous clouds, huge silent tendrils of platinum tearing apart the sky.
One weekend they pruned the groves. It smelled fresh and earthy, almost tart, not what you’d expect an olive branch to smell like when cut. The smell sticks, so distinctive and refreshing, grounding. The aroma of fallen leaves wafted through the camp all night. I learned that they make the leaves into an Amaro, which, when poured, is a light, thick green and tastes like how the night smelled.
I only rode a horse once, late in the evening of the fourth week, the pony stumbling beneath me on its final circuit of the day. I hadn’t touched a horse since I was twelve, when I begged my mom for boots and the week at horseback riding camp felt like a visitation from a preteen god. The late July grass was so long it brushed my knees, stretching leisurely over the expanse of slope. Time seemed suspended there, in the gold, a solitary keep on the opposite hill, gilded in the late evening. I loved that place. The kid in the kitchen would make me a crêpe every time I visited, and make friends with the new campers each week. Lucky, one of the horse wranglers, was my favorite. He rode behind me, twitching his reins with the expertise of someone whose horse is less of a separate being and more an extension of themselves, quietly echoing my hums and laughing to himself. He felt like a friend, an ally unspoken. As my horse picked its way through the plains, dust catching the light and the sweet smell of late summer earth on the early evening breeze, I came to understand this was a fleeting experience, a pocket of life I wouldn’t be revisiting. When Katie volunteered to go that Thursday, I realized I’d been right.
The slightly trashy sheen of the Wednesday outings became comforting by the third week, once we’d figured out the timing and knew the lady behind the desk at the waterpark. It always felt like a blessing that the weather was nice, like a wink or a pat on the back from someone way up there, but it didn’t feel the same once Max left and I couldn’t watch the fields go past over his dozing head. I only got a coffee at the bar in the square twice, the first week and the last. It felt right, like a sacred ceremony I’d completed. The streets of Orbetello taste of pistachio ice cream and Hawaiian Tropic. I don’t think there was a single week where I wasn’t late to the bus. One night somewhere in the middle, Yasmine and I slept curled like sisters in the twisted white sheets of the art room listening to the creak of the cheap metal foldout frame. Legs and arms intertwined, heads sharing a pillow, matching cotton pajamas—her hair in one braid, mine in two—sweating in the dry July. The boys in the Terrazzo would call me Capa. My little legion of stowaways, my battalion of hooligans. How I miss those filthy Romans. ▲