Lambrusco by Ellen Cooney

I had purely, simply loved.
    All those years ago. How old was Beppi when I first sang those songs?
    He’d seen a puppet show in the village, the usual thing, a castle, a king, a queen, a prince, a princess, and the minute he came home he went to work on us with demands that we produce a baby sister. He cried his eyes out when Aldo explained that Papa was too old for babies and Mama didn’t want one, as I was satisfied, most of the time, with the one I had. Beppi felt that we’d plotted together to break his heart. “I need a princess! I need a princess!”
    â€œYou already have one, and it’s Mama,” Aldo had said. “Come and listen to the new songs. She learned them only for you. There’s a girl named Cinderella. She’s in a wretched situation, which we hope will improve.”
    Early-primary-school age. Beppi had been six or seven, around the age of Carmella and Mauro’s second set of twins. The American, who’d been quiet, was scanning the area hopefully. She must have been waiting for those kids to appear at the station like a rescue party.
    It wasn’t going to happen. The Pattuelli family had been banished some years ago from San Guarino: the hill outside the village was the closest they’d go.
    Mauro was the son of a carpenter, but he’d not followed in his father’s footsteps. He’d been working in the factory kitchen, and met Aldo and Beppi on one of their buying visits. Having taken one look at his long, sad-clown face, which even then was heavy with feeling, they saw the potential; they talked him into coming to the restaurant.
    Mauro had inherited his family’s house in the middle of the one street. The Pattuelli Eight, as they were called—Beppina was only a toddler then—would only play among themselves. They did not attend school in the next village like the rest of the San Guarino children, but instead took the train to Mengo to be in classrooms with other waiters’ children. This was something San Guarino objected to, having objected in the first place to their numbers, as if Mauro and Carmella were two rabbits in a hutch in their midst, breeding like crazy.
    And their house and everything they owned smelled like fish. There was just simply too much fish.
    One evening, after hours, the crew boss of the came-from-away laborers who lived on the factory’s top floor discovered the Pattuelli Eight with the workmen in their private quarters—jumping on cots like trampolines, climbing on bureaus, being chased about by homesick Sardinians, and talking in dialects they’d picked up, probably filled with profanities.
    If they had been anyone else’s children, the crew boss would not have decided to have them officially charged with trespassing. And the older boys had slingshots made from materials they’d taken from the scrap heap on the side of the building, which made them thieves.
    The village had never been suitable for that family anyway. Banishment was what everyone had agreed upon, instead of a very large fine, or consignment in a permanent way to a Fascist school, which had been threatened.
    I knew all this because Beppi had told me about it, the whole story, including the part about the curse.
    The fisherman grandfather of the children, Galto Saponi—“This is what happens to people who complain that my family is fishy”—had commissioned one for San Guarino from a fortuneteller who was another fisherman’s wife, and a genuine witch, people said, who had once cursed French archaeologists for raiding a burial site near San Marino. On the way back to France, their ship sank. They were stranded on a raft for a week and would never recover their health, but their plunders were safe, at the bottom of the sea.
    â€œBanishment or not, never go past the little hill before the train station, or you’ll step on cursed land, and nothing can protect you,” Galto had instructed the children,