The Girl Who Rode the Wind Read online

  And so I began to devise a training programme of my own. I would gallop on the track one day and then the next we would go out for a long, slow hack, walking up into the hills, letting them stretch their tired muscles and lengthen their necks.

  Marco always came with me. I needed him to ride Serafina while I rode Stella. We would ride out for three or four hours some days, chattering away about everything and anything while the horses loped along. As the spring arrived and the trees began to bud green, we would try and see how many different species of trees or flowers we could name. Then, when the summer came and the days grew hot, we would hack out over different paths that led to a natural waterfall and we would ride the horses into the water and swim on their backs, laughing and having splashing fights with each other before sunbathing ourselves dry again and riding home.

  Of course I was trying to mix up the training programme – I also had days when I did interval training with Stella, trotting her for five minutes and then cantering for four, then walking for five and so on around the track. My rides with Marco were twice weekly, as my training regime allowed, on a Monday and a Thursday. I didn’t really think about it at first, but one Sunday night as I was getting ready for bed I found myself getting quite excited about the fact that tomorrow was a Monday and that meant I would be seeing Marco, and I spent far longer than usual that night at my dressing table in front of the mirror, brushing and brushing my long dark hair until it shone and then plaiting it in braids on either side of my head, and binding them with ribbons.

  I’ll wear it like this tomorrow, I said to myself. Marco likes it when I braid my hair …

  And there it was. At that moment I realised with a sudden jolt. How had I not noticed it when it was right in front of my face all along?

  I cared what Marco thought. I wanted to look pretty for him.

  That dark-eyed, pale-skinned boy with his quiet smile and his quick wit was no longer simply my best friend. I wanted him to be my boyfriend. I had fallen in love.

  Nonna stopped her story abruptly, her cheeks blushing pink like a schoolgirl. “Oh, poor Piccolina! What am I thinking? You do not want to hear such romantic foolishness from your own grandmother!”

  “No, Nonna!” I said. “I do want to hear about it. Really, please.”

  Nonna took my hand, clutching it tight. “I knew Marco and I were star-crossed from the very beginning, but a young heart beats so strong and so certain …”

  Then she seemed to change her mind and gave my hand a brisk pat and stood up. “Anyway, no more of such nonsense. I have said enough. I am going to make us some pasta for lunch …”

  For the rest of the week whenever I tried to get Nonna to tell me more about Marco she would find an excuse to scuttle out of the room, claiming that she had left the oven on or the tap running. If I had her attention and there was no excuse to get away she would blatantly change the subject. She didn’t want to talk about it any more and my dad always said Nonna was harder to move than a half a ton of horse once she made her mind up.

  At least she didn’t mind that I was spending all my time over at Frannie’s. I would walk over to the castle most mornings at around eight and Antonia, Umberto and Leonardo always arrived not long after me, greeting me in the Italian fashion with kisses on both cheeks. “Always the left cheek first!” Antonia taught me.

  Before we rode, Violetta would bring breakfast down to the yard and we would all sit together on the hay bales, the warm sweet smell of coffee and rolls mingling with the damp undertones of horse manure and sweat, and I would feel like I was one of the jockeys back home in the bodega.

  “All the jockeys in New York ever talk about is how much they weigh and how they got their battle scars,” I told the others.

  “You want to see my scar?” Antonia said, pulling up her jodhpurs so we could see her ankle. “I had this lovely grey horse. You remember her, Umberto? Trieste, her name was. She was a grand prix showjumper. I was showjumping her at the time when this happened. Halfway through the round a dog runs onto the course and Trieste goes straight up in a rear. When I fell off she panicked and came down on top of me with her front legs and crushed my ankle. I’ve got plate steel and six screws in there.”

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “It tingles whenever it rains,” Antonia shrugged, “but it hardly ever rains in Siena, so no, not much.”

  “I broke my collarbone.” Leonardo pulled down the neck of his shirt so that I could see how it had healed crooked.

  Frannie frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

  “It was a car accident,” Leonardo told us.

  Umberto threw his panino at him. “Doesn’t count!” he groaned.

  “Have you ever broken anything, Lola?” Antonia asked.

  Yes, I broke a nose once – only it wasn’t mine.

  “No,” I said, deciding against going into the whole Jake Mayo story, “but my dad has broken loads of stuff.” And I told them about the finger he cut off with the axe, which drew the appropriate cries of horror and disbelief.

  “No way!” Frannie was laughing.

  “It’s true!” I insisted. “You can ask my nonna.”

  I’d always thought that the jockeys at the bodega were trying to out-tough each other with their tales, but as we all sat there eating buttered rolls and charting our injuries, I realised that it was the stories of hot, crazy, difficult horses that were the key to it all. We loved talking about horses in the same way that the kids at school might have talked for hours about skateboarding tricks or what music they were listening to. I would pretend to care about that stuff, but I didn’t have anything to say. Here in Italy, though, they spoke the same language as me – they talked horse.

  Of the four of them, Antonia was the best all-round horseman. She was the one who would poultice a hoof if there was a stone bruise, or talk to Signor Fratelli about making changes to the training regime if she thought a horse was underperforming in his workouts. She always took the lead and set the pace every time we rode out, which is why it was so surprising when she told me she had no wish to ride the Palio.

  “There is no great secret to it,” Antonia said when I asked her why she didn’t want to race. “I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. I like to train the horses, but the idea of being out there with all those other jockeys trying to kill me and my horse, and the pressure and all those people watching us …” She gave a dramatic shiver. “I’m not brave enough. I knew long ago I would not be a fantino. But I love training. One day I would like to have my own stables like Signor Fratelli.”

  Signor Fratelli reminded me of Nonna the way he ran his stables. He knew every horse intimately. Each morning when they were led into the yard he would examine them, feeling their legs as he chatted away briskly in Italian to the riders, asking how their previous workouts had been, whether the horses felt fresh or tired, discussing feeding and supplements.

  He gave very detailed instructions to Frannie, Leonardo, Umberto, and Antonia. I would stand there waiting my turn, but it never came. Signor Fratelli totally blanked me every time. He would walk straight past me and Nico without a single word of encouragement or advice. He would never even look at me and yet there were times when I would be in the yard with Nico and I would get this feeling like the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end and I would look around and see Signor Fratelli just standing there staring at me. It reminded me of the way the Prior had eyeballed me just before he chased me with his scissors in the Via di Vallerozzi.

  “Your granddad doesn’t like me,” I told Frannie.

  “Of course he does!” Frannie said. “His English is poor, that’s all. He lets you ride Nico, doesn’t he?”

  Ever since that first ride when we had overtaken Antonia I had become the only one that Signor Fratelli would allow on Nico’s back.

  I hoped Signor Fratelli hadn’t been watching us too closely on the early workouts. It had taken me time to get used to riding without a saddle. At home we rode in jockey pads,
our stirrups raised right up so that we virtually perched above the horse’s back. It was so foreign to me to have no saddle at all and I noticed that while the others rode with their legs hanging long, I still rode like an American jockey, my knees tucked up high, my torso tilted forward over Nico’s neck. Nico seemed to like this. The way I sat, with my weight above his withers, gave him a chance to let his strides roll and use his back to drive his haunches. The more I rode him, the more I was feeling the raw power of him. It was like he had been holding back that first day, taking it easy on me. Now, with each ride, I could feel him letting go more and more, and I began taking risks, testing the boundaries, pushing him to gallop into the curve of the corner, riding him hard on the straight to see just how much speed he had in him. We were starting to gel, and I knew it was in part because Signor Fratelli had given us the chance to be together exclusively, cementing the bond between us.

  All the same, every time I arrived at the stables I would be anxious until I saw my name beside Nico’s on the white board, just in case Signor Fratelli had changed his mind and assigned my horse to another rider. The white board was hung on the wall of the stables with details on the workouts we were to ride each day. The riders were listed beside the horse chosen for them and my name would always be written alongside Nico’s in green pen. Until we reached August the thirteenth. On this date the green pen was gone and so was my name. Nico was listed without a rider noted beside him and there were words written alongside in the calendar margin. They said: La Terra in Piazza.

  “It means dirt in the town square,” Frannie translated. “It’s the day that they truck in the soil and spread it out over the piazza ready for the Palio.”

  “But I thought the Palio was run on the sixteenth?”

  “It is,” Umberto said. “But for two days beforehand they will have trials in the square. The fantinos come and ride their best horses in the hope that they will be chosen to race for the contradas.”

  “So Nico will be ridden in the square by a real fantino?” I felt as if someone had crushed all the air out of me.

  “It is no better for me,” Umberto sighed. “The best fantinos will step up and get their pick of the horses. Signor Fratelli is the trainer but he is forced to do whatever the Capitano of the contrada demands. They will hand over Dante to another fantino with more experience than me, I am certain. I will get given the second-rate horses to ride – if I get one at all.”

  “I can’t believe you!” It was Leonardo. “Both of you, waiting for the contradas to take your horses from you! Where is your fight?”

  Umberto glared at him. “Seriously. What do you expect me to do?”

  Leonardo looked uncertain, and now it was Frannie who spoke up.

  “We ride the night trial on the fourteenth. All of us. We’ll take the horses to the piazza tomorrow night.”

  “All of us?” Antonia had been ignoring the conversation until this point, but now she had woken up. “I suppose it’s not like a real race,” she said sounding slightly nervous at the prospect.

  “It’s a training race,” Frannie reassured her. “Grandfather is planning to enter the horses anyway, why not let us ride them?”

  “It makes sense,” Leonardo agreed. “Amateurs are allowed in the night trials.”

  “I’m not an amateur,” Umberto said sniffily. “I’m an apprentice.”

  “After tomorrow night you may not be an apprentice any more,” Leonardo said. “If a Capitano chooses you then you might be able to call yourself a fantino at last.”

  “You aren’t hungry, Lola?” Nonna noticed as I picked at my ravioli. “What’s the matter?”

  On the way home from Frannie’s, the grim realisation had set in. Despite all of Leonardo and Frannie’s big talk, the truth was I was no fantino – I was a twelve-year-old kid from Ozone Park. Nico was going to be taken away from me and handed over to a proper fantino to ride.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Lola,” Nonna said. “Something is wrong, I know it. Talk to me.”

  I took a deep breath. “Nonna? You remember how you told me that Stella felt right from the start like she was your horse? Were you ever jealous that someone else was going to ride her?”

  Nonna rested her fork on her plate. “Lola, you have grown up with racehorses. You know how the business works. We devote ourselves to them and care for them, but we can never, ever own them and the decisions over their fate are not ours to make.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s not fair …”

  “No,” Nonna agreed. “It is even worse because often the owners, they know nothing about horses. They watch a race and they don’t understand the tactics or the training or the big picture. If they see their horse lose then they leap to lay blame on the trainer or the jockey and the next thing you know that horse has a new rider and you are on the trash heap. This is the business we are in, Lola. You cannot afford to become attached to a particular horse, only to have it snatched away from you and given to someone else.”

  “Yes, Nonna,” I said. “I know all of that, but –”

  “But,” my nonna continued, “despite all of this, and against all common sense, sometimes you will find yourself a horse that is special, that holds a place in your heart above all the rest. And when that happens you will know in your bones, that no matter what, you are the only person who should ride her. It is as if you are two parts of a whole and you are destined to be joined together.”

  I felt a lump in my throat and I gulped it down.

  Nonna took my hand. “So, are you going to tell me about this horse who has you all tied up in knots then?”

  “It’s Nico,” I said. “He’s a horse at Frannie’s stables. The big chestnut I was telling you about.”

  “I thought you had been given him to train?”

  “I have. But the Palio is in two days now and they’re going to take him off me and give him to a fantino to ride in the race and …”

  Nonna saw the tears welling in my eyes.

  “Oh, my Piccolina! And it breaks your heart just to think of someone else riding him instead of you?”

  I nodded, gulping down my childish tears.

  “Have you ever felt like that, Nonna?”

  My nonna went quiet for moment and then she said. “Once, Piccolina. But that was a very long time ago.”

  “Was it Stella?”

  “It was,” Nonna Loretta said. “Carlo had left her in my care, you see, and I had grown to love her so deeply. But it was different with me and Stella. I never expected her to be mine.”

  “What happened, Nonna?”

  I saw the pain in my grandmother’s eyes.

  “Piccolina,” she said. “I have never spoken of this to anyone, not even to your father …”

  She clutched at my hand and held it tight. “I told you that I had come home to Italy because it was time at last for forgiveness? But can anyone truly expect to be forgiven for causing the death of someone they love?”

  Nonna wiped a tear from her eye. “It was so long ago, but my memory is so clear of the very last time I saw him. It should have been a day of glory. August the sixteenth, 1944, the day of the Palio. Instead, it was to be the day that I lost him for ever …”

  I didn’t know what to do about Marco. How do you tell a boy that you are suddenly out-of-the-blue in love with him? Ever since we were six years old our friendship had been so natural and easy and now I was like a different person when I was in his company. I found myself giggling and preening around him, acting awkward and strange.

  Marco, for his part, was completely oblivious to my feelings. And he didn’t seem to appreciate my efforts to turn myself into a beguiling seductress.

  “Why is your face so pink? Are you hot?” he asked me.

  “You don’t like it?”

  Marco frowned. “Your lips have gone a funny colour too. Maybe you’re getting sick?”

  Out of his sight, in the stables, I rubbed my cheeks furiously with damp fingers to get rid of the r
ouge and bit at my lips to chew off the crimson stain I had so painstakingly applied that morning.

  When I stole some of my mother’s expensive perfume Marco complained that there was a “weird smell in the stables” and that perhaps Ludo had brought in a rat and it had died. My efforts to replace my trousers with pretty dresses caused bafflement.

  “How can you ride in that?” Marco asked me. “Isn’t it uncomfortable?”

  At the time when he asked me this question I was struggling to stay on Stella’s back as my flouncy floral skirt kept flying up and exposing my knickers. I had tried tucking it in under my thighs, but this was impossible and I couldn’t even trot and had to stick to a walk. By the time we got back to the stables after a very unsuccessful training session, Marco was furious with me.

  “You slowed us down out there. I don’t know what’s wrong with you!” he fumed.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I shot back. “What about you? Telling me I smell like a dead rat and that my lipstick makes me look ill!”

  Marco’s frown deepened. “That smell was you?”

  “It was French perfume!” I snarled.

  “Well, why are you wearing perfume to the stables?” Marco snapped back.

  “For you!” I shouted.

  I had turned bright pink and this time it was not make-up. Marco stared at me, open-mouthed, I could see his brain processing what I had just told him.

  “Oh.” That was all he said.

  My humiliation was complete.

  “I need to go,” I mumbled and I turned and ran out of the yard.

  “Loretta!” I heard him running after me, and the next thing I knew he had grabbed me by the shoulders and was turning me to face him.

  “You’ve been doing this for me?”

  “Don’t!” I was almost in tears. “Don’t make me feel more stupid than I already do! I am so embarrassed! Can we please just forget this ever happened?”