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Thursday, November 7, 2024
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Night Journey

In my dream, it is night. I sit on a balcony.   I find myself in the place that as a girl I called the land of my dreams. In the darkness of the night sky, I see the outline of the mountains as they stretch around the valley and roll gently into soft peaks.

The orange flames of the bonfire in the land opposite cast a warm glow onto the terrace of the neighbour’s house where a family sits, drinking wine and playing cards.

 A swell of sound – laughter, mixed with the melody of the strong southern accents and the steady cacophony of crickets – rises to my ears as I sit on the upper balcony of what is our family villa, taking in the landscape transformed by nightfall.

I am in Italy.

 Suddenly, the dark is transformed into sunlight and the expanse of land beneath the balcony can now be seen in fine detail.  I am now experiencing the sweltering midday heat of a southern Italian summer’s day. I feel the sweat on my skin, my head heavy from the humidity.  I am sitting in the shade of a very old fig tree.

I see an old woman before me, it is my nonna, my paternal grandmother.

My eyes follow her careful, rhythmic movements  as she goes about the sacred art of cultivating the produce of her ancestral land. Dressed in her light blue grembiulo, her long grey hair fastened neatly back in a braided bun, she moves steadily through the field, like her ancestors before her, reaching out to delicately  handle and inspect herbs, grapes, tomatoes, figs and whatever else catches her expert eye.

After completing a round of her land, she drifts slowly towards me, taking a small plump fig out of her grembiulo pocket. I notice her weathered hands. Pulling up a chair next to me, she opens up my resting hand and softly places the fig in my palm.

Then, a pensive look spreads across her face and without uttering a sound, she takes back the fig and carefully peels open the skin to reveal its bright pink flesh. It glistens in the sunlight.

‘Mangia’, she says, placing the fig back in the palm of my hand. ‘I know you don’t have all of this where you live.’ She smiles and watches me savour the sweetness of the fruit.

‘You don’t have all of this.’

Indeed, I realise, in the capacity of sleeping witness to this dream, that I had none of this, neither the figs, nor the stilnness, nor the love.

Insight, knowing, washes over me. This remembering, the simple beauty of her daily ritual of presenting me with the tree’s best fig, fills me with the certainty that I was, that I still am LOVED and a warmth spreads throughout my body.

 I continue to sit with my nonna under the fig tree when it suddenly becomes dark again. I  leave the safety of the tree and before me, I see a girl who is about seven years of age and is half asleep in the back of a car. I recognise her. She is me. It is not clear who all is in the car as it winds its way through the twisting mountain top roads, but her father’s best friend is driving.

Suddenly, the car comes to a halt, the sound of the hand break waking the child from her slumber, and she is lifted out of  her seat by a strong pair of arms into the cool night air of the mountains.

It is pitch black and there is no artificial light, only the light of the moon and the stars. The people in the scene are high up on the mountain side and the lights of houses twinkle like tiny gems in the deep valley down below.

The profound silence of the night is punctuated  by the sound of crickets, a soundtrack to so many of these dark summer nights of my lockdown dreams. And then, a voice, excited, on the verge of tears –

‘Open your eyes, Toni and see – This is your father’s land. You are here now’.

I then return to the shade of the fig tree.

…………………………………………………………………………….

This is what I have, what I remember.

Nothing more than fragments of a southern Italian night, the next few weeks of that period are missing. I can only wait patiently and hope that one day, my body will release what followed, and I can travel further in the car, further in the land of my dreams. 

Italian/English Glossary
Grembiulo – apron
Mangia! – Eat!
Nonna – grandmother
***
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Toni de Luca
Toni de Luca
Reading and writing are and always have been how Toni de Luca makes sense of the world, herself and others.
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