The Podestà’s Brooch
By
Corbitt Nesta
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Corbitt Nesta
All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Sian Foulkes at www.foulkesdesign.com
Jeweled brooch designed by Hutton Wilkinson, courtesy of Tony Duquette Inc.
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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The Podestà’s Brooch
I know how these Italians think, what they care about, what upsets them.
The idea came to me the day Mamma Maria asked me to sneak up to the attic to find the Podestà’s brooch. She was secretly going through her photo albums again, up in her room after lunch, while Papà Italo watched the news downstairs. The old lady seemed to be drifting further and further back into her past. She hardly noticed me standing over her while she muttered and turned the pages.
She was twenty years old, and Mussolini was visiting her town near Milan. In her father’s hotel, the Duce met with the local Fascist representative, the Podestà, her very own Giovanni, her husband-to-be. The day Mussolini left, on his way to see Hitler, Giovanni gave Maria his mother’s brooch. I had heard the story a thousand times, always told out of Papà Italo’s earshot. Then she asked me to find the brooch—in the attic, in a red tin box, wrapped in the newspaper announcing Mussolini’s assassination, and Giovanni’s arrest.
“Konstancja, dear, be careful up there. The floorboards are rotten,” Mamma Maria said.
She meant, of course, to be quiet. Mamma Maria and I understood each other and Italian men. The brooch had been kept secret from Papà Italo for sixty years.
What a gold mine the house was! Every nook and cranny hid something valuable…oil paintings, china, antiques. The attic floorboards creaked a little, but I soon found the red box in the mahogany trunk, a treasure in itself. Everything would go to Livio, their son, my husband, and then to Sonia, our daughter. The house itself was nothing much, but it was on prime central property. All of it would be mine, soon.
Except the brooch. Mamma Maria had four cousins, but the brooch would go to Cousin Matilda. Cousin Matilda was refined, ‘una vera signora’, Mamma Maria always said. Matilda had taste, spoke English and French, went to the opera, had fancy tea parties, vacationed in St. Moritz. Matilda, the only relative capable of appreciating the brooch. The story always ended that way.
Inside the box lay letters from the prison, a newspaper clipping about Giovanni’s execution in Milan, her mother’s Bible, and under everything, the brooch. Such a glorious sparkling piece, a six-pointed ruby and diamond starburst! The diamond in the center alone was worth a mint. I was tempted to try it on.
I heard Papà Italo slamming doors in the kitchen, looking for his newspaper. Slipping the brooch into my bra, I headed downstairs. Mamma Maria riffled through the box and its contents. The brooch, I said, was nowhere to be found. She turned red and asked for her oxygen. I clucked a bit, told her I would make her some chamomile tea. When I pulled the door closed, she was crying into her French silk pillow. She’d make a stain with her blubbering, and it would take ages to remove.