Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Read Online Free

been my tour guide, was the schoolteacher in the vil age. I was stunned when she told me she was only twenty. Like Emma, and nearly every other woman in the vil age, she was dressed in a severe black dress that extended below her knees. She wore her hair in the style of my mother's generation.
    The vil age was a grid of two or three streets clinging to the side of the mountain. Only the main road from Avel ino that continued farther up the mountain was paved. Few of the stone buildings had electricity, and al of them showed the ravages of centuries of wind and earthquake. Dust swirled at our feet as we crossed the meager piazza, shared with a goatherd leading his scraggly flock back to a lean-to for the evening. Severia had pointed out with pride the smal schoolroom where she taught from first through sixth grade. If parents wanted more schooling for their children, they had to send them down the mountain to Avel ino.
    I had recognized that what I was seeing and the lives that were enclosed here were little different from what Giulia had experienced as a girl. In that instant, I had understood that it might have been my life as wel .
    "Thank God," I had whispered to myself. "Thank God that my grandmother got out."
    The next morning I left, as I had come, on a dusty bus that had stopped when Emma flagged it down. She'd packed me a cloth-wrapped sandwich of bread and pungent cheese, with some tomatoes and figs from the garden behind Letitia's stone house. She had clucked and worried about the long trip ahead of me to Milan and my flight home and had given me stern instructions to speak to no one on the way to Naples.
    "Girls alone disappear," she had said.
    As the bus pul ed away, I had looked out the window. Letitia stood waving from her balcony. She had changed from her morning housecoat to a green silk dress. In her hand was a lace- trimmed handkerchief that she dabbed at her eyes.
    I stood now in the rotunda of the Naples Stazione Centrale, about to make the same journey. This time, instead of depending on SITA buses to get me up to the mountains, I had reserved a car. But before picking it up, I detoured to the flower shop, hoping to find something that would survive until I reached Avel ino. The saleswoman recommended a potted hydrangea and wrapped it extravagantly in layers of purple cel ophane and a massive bow, wishing my grandmother buona sante as she handed me the gift with a nod of approval.
    Armed with a map and directions outlined for me by the clerk at Avis, I located my Fiat in the parking lot, took a deep breath and plunged into the late Sunday afternoon traffic, keeping an eye out for the Autostrada symbol and signs for the A16, the east-west highway that connected Naples with Bari on the Adriatic. About a quarter of the way across the ankle of Italy's boot, I knew I'd leave the highway and head south into the mountains and Avel ino.

    I was tired and hungry. My jetlag was catching up with me. A part of me longed to stop at the Agip motel on the broad avenue leading toward the entrance ramp of the Autostrada. Its familiar sign, a black, six-legged, fire-breathing mythical creature on a yel ow background, beckoned like a McDonald's Golden Arch, promising a cheap, clean room. But Giulia was expecting me at the hospital Sunday evening, and even though there'd be little I could do for her at that time—no surgeon to confer with, only a night nurse on duty—I pushed myself past the fatigue to be at my grandmother's side.
    The highway had not existed seventeen years ago, and I was astounded that I was able to cover the hundred kilometers to Avel ino in under an hour, compared to the nearly three hours it had taken the bus on my last trip. When I exited the highway, a sign welcomed me in four different languages.
    When I drove onto the grounds of the hospital of San Giuseppe Moscati, the doctor saint of Naples, it was nearly sunset.
    I grabbed the hydrangea and my tote bag from the back seat and headed into the