Her father didn’t understand and his English was good enough that it wasn’t the language barrier that separated them on her decision. He will come around. Her mother had tried to bridge the divide, like she always did, but perhaps she felt like this one was all her fault. Leah didn’t blame her but she didn’t want to stay either. She loved them but it wasn’t enough.
The ferry was back running after the temporary lock-down and she wanted to ride the loop around the lake one last time before she left. Ciao Lia. Andrea was running the boat today and smiled at her as she embarked, waving away her offer the fare. Gratuito. She touched her fingers to her lips by way of thanks. She’d helped out last summer, it had been a good season uninterrupted by any significant outbreak. There’d been a stretch of two months that had almost felt like the kind of summers that her father had told her about; the ones he’d been chasing after when he dragged them back from England. The town had needed the visitors. The subsidies weren’t enough.
The boat was almost empty so she slipped through the door at the stern. Pooled diesel spills on the surface caught refracted rainbows and she stared at them, lost in thought, until they abruptly disappeared in a surge of spray as Andrea gunned the throttle. She inhaled, wanting to hold that smell, rust and oil and the dirty water around the dock, in her memory. It reminded her of when they’d first arrived. An eight year old girl, bouncing in excitement, one hand on the rail, the other clutching her father’s hand as they watched the picture-perfect rows of yellow and orange houses loom larger and larger as they approached their new home. She remembered the mountains framing the town and asking if they were living in a fairytale. Am I the princess, papa? He had ruffled her hair and laughed. Sempre. Sempre. She hadn’t realised he had meant it quite so literally. She rode the ferry across to Varenna, on to Bellagio, and then back.
When she’d told him she thought that her choice of University might soften the blow. He knew Bristol, it was where him and mum had met, they’d even settled there a couple of years after she’d been born. He’d worked as chef whilst mum had juggled looking after her and studying for an accountancy qualification she never finished. They’d always wanted for him to open his own restaurant – I will show them the real Italian food – but it was tough to save in those early years. After the vote in 2016 something changed. Leah never understood why he stopped learning English, why she spent so many evenings lying on her bed listening to raised voices downstairs, or why, one day, her parents sat her down and told her they were going to move. We’re going home. She’d always thought that was an odd thing for her mum to say: she was from Clevedon.
At first it’d been everything her father had promised. He’d taken back on running the family pizzeria, making good on his boast to show off the authentic cooking of his homeland, mostly to tourists but respected enough locally to generate a steady flow of covers even in the off seasons. Leah had gotten used to everyone spelling her name Lia and had quickly picked up Italian. In some ways those first couple of years were the closest her and dad ever were, their conversations running faster and faster as she raced ahead of her mum in her understanding. She even learned to swear in Italian before English, listening to him with his brothers watching Inter on the TV, shouting words she only deciphered by sharing them in the playground to delighted laughter and then explanation. It was the sort of explanation that involved graphic mimes with fingers poked between a circle made with the other hand which, eventually, had meant that her mum had needed to explain a number of other things to her. It was also the end of her being allowed to watch I Nerazzurri. Or, at least, to watch them with her father’s commentary.
It was only after the outbreaks that things changed. The first lockdown in ’20 had hurt the community – they lost friends, the visitors stopped coming, businesses closed – but they’d all assumed it would end. That things would return to normal. The town would bear a scar, they’d always remember, but eventually they would settle back into being the bustling summer hub on the banks of the Como that they’d been before. But then the mutated strains began to appear, each time they thought they’d dampened down the embers there’d be a fresh fire. It was years before the region even settled down into what they now understood as their regular rhythms: open for business, temporary lockdown, open for business, lockdown. At least we are healthy. Her parents put a brave face on it and, somehow, the three of them never fell ill, physically at least, but the staccato patterns of their new existence took its toll on them all.
Leah had decided to leave after the lockdown in ’27. It had been strain 31 or 32, she had given up keeping track, and she’d resolved to take up a place at University in England. In the end she’d deferred for another year, thinking that the promise of helping out in the restaurant and on the boats for one more season might placate her father. It just seemed to make her eventual departure harder, as if he’d read her postponement as a cancellation and felt twice as betrayed when she followed through on her plan to go.
Back from her farewell ferry trip she packed and prepared to leave. He was out and she didn’t expect him back before she had to get the train to Milan. Mum would walk her to the station. The last thing she packed was an old photo of the three of them, taken just after they’d first arrived, down at the front with the lake shimmering behind them. Mum and dad flanked her on either side, the three of them holding hands, smiles radiating in the late summer sun. She kissed the picture and, instead of placing it in her case, she flipped it over, grabbed a pen from her old desk, and wrote on the back of it.
Perdonami, papa. Your princess. Sempre.
42 @ 42 