by Francis King
While the boys went round the room, whistling their astonishment, Max unlocked his case, fetched out some Camels and threw them to Enzo. The Florentine clumsily drew out two cigarettes, one of which he gave to his friend, and then returned the packet.
‘‘Keep it,’’ Max said.
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Keep it, keep it,’’ said Rodolfo irritably. Finding his friend slow, he tended to bully him.
‘‘Grazie, grazie.’’ Enzo pushed the cigarettes into one pocket of his shorts but at once they descended down the trouser-leg. Rodolfo guffawed, Enzo blushed and stooped to recover the gift.
‘‘His only pair of pants,’’ Rodolfo explained. ‘‘And he spent all this morning sewing them up. Look.’’ He turned his friend round like a dummy and showed the place where a rent in the seat had been untidily drawn together with a few large stitches. ‘‘Too small for him,’’ he said. ‘‘He never stops growing.’’ Suddenly his eye was caught by the open suit-case, in which lay Max’s passport and a heap of foreign money. He fingered a note:
‘‘French?’’
‘‘No, Swiss.’’
‘‘And this?’’
‘‘A florin.’’
‘‘How much is it worth?’’
‘‘About two hundred lire.’’
Max shut the case and locked it.
‘‘He doesn’t trust us,’’ Rodolfo said to Enzo in an aside which none the less reached the American’s ears. He laughed:
‘‘I don’t blame him, with all that money.’’ He turned to Max: ‘‘You’re rich.’’ It was a statement, not a question, and of course it was true. But Max had never applied that word to himself, being, like most rich people, a little afraid of it. He now shrugged his shoulders, no less embarrassed than if the Italian had suddenly announced, ‘‘You’re good.’’
‘‘Nice stuff.’’ Rodolfo had begun to finger the material of the suit which, an hour previously, had been pressed by Enzo’s mother in the hotel laundry. He rubbed it against his cheek. ‘‘How much?’’
‘‘How much?’’ Max echoed.
‘‘How much did it cost?’’
‘‘Twenty-five guineas. It was made for me in England.’’
‘‘In lire?’’
‘‘Oh, I really don’t know,’’ Max said impatiently. For some reason he had already lied about the suit; it had, in fact, cost forty, not twenty-five, guineas.
‘‘And these brushes?’’ Rodolfo picked them up and began applying them to his hair which, according to the fashion of the moment, had been cut à l’Américain and stood up in a dense, coarse mat, black and slightly scurfy at the roots.
‘‘Please don’t use those.’’
Rodolfo went on brushing his hair.
‘‘I said please don’t use those.’’
When Max attempted to grab the brushes, the boy slithered away, with a giggle, and at once began to brush the hair of his friend. But seeing Max’s displeasure, Enzo grabbed Rodolfo’s right arm and slowly twisted it until the Tunisian squirmed and squealed in pain; the two ivory-backed brushes clattered to the floor. The Florentine picked them up, dusted them between his hands, and returned them to the dressing-table.
‘‘I think you’d better be going now.… And please don’t put your cigarette-end down the wash-basin,’’ Max added irritably.
‘‘Give it to me.’’ The Florentine took the cigarette from the Tunisian, went out on to the terrace, and there ground it beneath his heel. Evidently it had never occurred to either of the boys that the two crystal and gold dishes over which they had whistled when they had first come in, might really be ash-trays.
‘‘What are you doing there?’’ a voice demanded in English. ‘‘ Why are you in my son-in-law’s room?’’
An old woman who had been sleeping in a wicker chair at the other end of the terrace, her straw hat tilted so far over her nose that only her chin was visible, had suddenly awoken, pushed the hat off her face, and tottered to her feet. She was terrifying, and Enzo fled back into the bedroom.
‘‘Max, Max! … Oh, you are here! What was that boy doing out on the terrace? What’s going on?’’
Mrs. Bennett was a woman of over six feet, with large hands and feet, untidy grey hair worn in a bun, and a face whose main features were a long, thin, indeterminately shaped nose, a skin which, except in moments of stress, lacked any of old age’s wrinkles, and a pair of eyes remarkable both for the paleness of their blue and the absence of either lashes or eyebrows. She wore a faded blue cotton-dress, shapeless except for the belt which gathered it at the waist, white plimsolls on her stockingless feet, and dark glasses which dangled round her neck on a piece of knotted twine. ‘‘Who are these people? I was woken up by one of them, on the terrace. He frightened me,’’ she added with a sudden smile.
‘‘I met them on the beach and they asked for a cigarette. I hadn’t any on me so I brought them up here.’’
‘‘Oh, I see. It was silly of me to be frightened,’’ she said, turning to Enzo. ‘‘But I was having such a strange, confused dream, and then I woke with a start and saw you.… Now that I’m old, I’ve become silly about sleep—always a little afraid to go to sleep, in case I don’t wake up, and when I do wake up, I always think that perhaps I may be dead.… You wouldn’t understand that because you’re young.’’
Enzo had not understood it; not merely because he was young, as she had suggested, but because the whole speech had been delivered in English. He was still regarding her with terror.
‘‘They don’t understand English,’’ Max put in. ‘‘But that one speaks a little French patois—he’s from Tunis.’’
‘‘This one? Yes, I’ve been looking at him. Partly Arab, I suppose.… He’s a fine-looking boy.’’
Hearing the word Arab, Rodolfo leapt up from the bed where he had been squatting. ‘‘Me—Arab?’’ he exclaimed in French. ‘‘ Not on your life!’’
‘‘He didn’t like that.’’ She smiled at him, putting one hand on to his shoulder and gently pushing him back on to the bed. Once she had him there, she stared down at him with her strange, faintly blue eyes, and he, with a sullen hostility, stared back, his palms clasped behind his head. Suddenly she bent down and caught one of his wrists. ‘‘ He’ll do. I want to draw him.’’ She began to pull him to his feet and such was her personality, that Rodolfo, mystified and unfriendly, nevertheless rose. ‘‘I’ll take him to my room,’’ she announced, beginning to drag him to the door, and commanding at the same time in an appalling French accent. ‘‘Venez—venez! Venez avec moi!’’
‘‘Mais, je ne comprends pas——’’
‘‘Venez, venez!’’
Enzo began to shamble after them, but she waved him away, crying in English. ‘‘ No, I only want the one. Do explain, Max.’’
‘‘You stay here, Enzo,’’ Max said.
‘‘But——’’
‘‘Stay with the Englishman,’’ Rodolfo commanded. He was not sure what was desired either of him or his friend, but of one thing he was sure; it always paid to do what foreigners asked of one. ‘‘Stay with the Englishman,’’ he repeated.
‘‘But——’’ Enzo began again.
‘‘Stay!’’ Rodolfo shouted. ‘‘Keep the Englishman company.’’
Enzo crossed over to the bed, sat stiffly down on it, and began undoing and doing up the top button of his shirt with one large, clumsy hand. His face was red and he was sweating profusely.
‘‘What are those white scars?’’ Max asked, saying the first thing that came into his head and then realizing that, even to an Italian and a boy of this class, the question might seem personal.
‘‘Football,’’ Enzo muttered, his voice so husky now that it was almost inaudible. ‘‘I play in goal.’’
‘‘It looks as if football in Italy were a battle, not a game.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Oh, nothing.’’ He couldn’t be bothered to repeat it. ‘‘Another cigarette?’’
‘‘No, thank you.’’ Enzo adjusted one of his ankle socks and then, with a deep sigh, brushed a bare forearm across his forehead so that it returned to his lap gleaming with a number of minute, golden beads of sweat.
‘‘Go on.’’ Max held out the packet.
‘‘Thanks.’’ But the boy fumbled for so long that in the end Max had to shake the cigarette into his own palm and then give it to him. ‘‘Thanks,’’ the boy repeated again.
Max rose to his feet. ‘‘ Come out on to the terrace,’’ he said. ‘‘Come.’’
They leant over the balustrade and were silent for a while, watching the crowds sauntering beside the Arno in the last fume of dusk. Max pondered and at last said in an Italian that was vitiated only by his use of the English open o: ‘‘ I suppose you’re unemployed.’’
‘‘Yes, unemployed.’’
‘‘For how long?’’
‘‘Two years.’’
‘‘And your family?’’
‘‘My mother works. Here.’’ He pointed down between his feet. ‘‘In the hotel laundry.’’
‘‘She probably pressed my shirt,’’ Max said. ‘‘ But the rest?’’
‘‘All unemployed.’’
‘‘And you can’t find work—work of any kind?’’
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
‘‘Surely, as a labourer—a farm-worker or a builder or a road-maker——’’ Max pursued, submitting the Florentine to the kind of slow, logical cross-examination which always irritated his wife. ‘‘Surely——’’
‘‘I can’t do very heavy work, unfortunately. It makes my back worse. But even if I could, I’d probably not find anything. My father and my elder brother can’t find anything, and they’re much stronger than I am.’’
‘‘What unemployment benefit do you get?’’
‘‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’’ Max explained and the boy laughed: ‘‘Why, nothing, of course. My brother gets paid by the State, but he’s a mutilato di guerra. Oh, I have this.’’ His hand dived into his shorts and, after a certain amount of scrabbling, he produced a green card marked out in squares with numbers printed on them. He handed it to Max as if, in itself, it were an explanation.
‘‘What’s this?’’
‘‘My food card. I can get three free meals a week with it, not very good meals, just bread and a minestra, but it’s lucky because I’m not allowed to eat at home. Well, I do eat there,’’ he added with a smile, ‘‘when my father is out. But my father says that if I don’t work, I can’t expect to be fed. Not that he works.’’
‘‘And where do you sleep?’’ Max asked.
‘‘Oh, at home. He doesn’t mind that, because I share my brother’s room.’’
‘‘If you can’t do heavy work, how is it that you can play football?’’
A deep flush covered the boy’s face at a question on which he had so often argued with his family, and Max thought: ‘‘Yes, I knew the story was all too glib’’; his attitude suddenly changing from complete credulity to a no less complete scepticism.
Enzo put out his cigarette on the stone balustrade, and then carefully hoarded the stub in the breast-pocket of his shirt, before he answered. ‘‘Football is my only hope,’’ he said at last, with a slow, painful intensity, la mia unica speranza—my unique hope. The grandiose adjective ‘‘unique’’ made the announcement appear even more pathetic in Max’s eyes. ‘‘Perhaps in the end I shall be able to make money with my football—a lot of money. Next Sunday I’ve been picked to play in the Coppa di Toscana—it’s a chance, my big chance. My back hurts when I play, but somehow when I play—that doesn’t matter. I feel it, but I don’t really notice it, if you see what I mean.’’ He added, after a moment: ‘‘My whole future’s in my foot ball.’’
Now, no less abruptly, Max felt his sympathies shift back; he put one hand on the boy’s shoulder, and let it rest there. Then he drew out his wallet: ‘‘Your friend told me that you needed three thousand lire for an X-ray. I’d like to give it to you.’’
Enzo stared at the three notes and once again the deep flush mounted to his face as he attempted, but failed, to say something. He was mystified; that was his predominating emotion at that second. Surely there must be something he should do in return? Something must be required of him? There must be some catch? And it was this feeling, not habit or avariciousness, which led him surreptitiously to examine the water-mark on each note when he thought Max had turned away; but the American had seen, and had wondered, with a sense of extreme helplessness, if he might not have been deceived after all in someone who so blatantly looked a gift horse in the mouth.
‘‘Remember,’’ Max said sternly, ‘‘that’s for the doctor, so don’t spend it on anything else. For the doctor,’’ he repeated. ‘‘For the X-ray.’’
‘‘Yes, yes, signore.… Grazie.’’ Enzo added this first word of thanks in an almost inaudibly husky whisper.
‘‘Would you like to join your friend now?’’
‘‘If you wish.’’
Max led the way along the terrace to the french windows which opened out from his mother-in-law’s room. ‘‘You, Max?’’ Mrs. Bennett said without turning round. ‘‘ He poses beautifully. A bit stiff at first but he soon got the idea. Pity about that shoulder; you’ve probably not noticed it but the collar-bone couldn’t have been properly set when it was broken.’’ Enzo, standing on tiptoe so as not to come too close, had begun to peer at the drawing; then he looked at his friend, and as soon as they exchanged glances, they both began to giggle. ‘‘Now you’ve upset him—and you’re in my light too,’’ Mrs. Bennett murmured, once again in English; Max drew Enzo to one side. ‘‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s stopped going right.’’ She tore off the sheet of cartridge-paper, crunched it in one hand and then, on an impulse, threw it at the Tunisian. At once he picked it up, unfolded it, and began to smooth it under his hands; Enzo hurried across. Again they were both swept with giggles. ‘‘ I agree. It’s extremely funny.’’ Mrs. Bennett began to scratch one of her unstockinged legs, on which the veins were swollen like bunches of small blue grapes. ‘‘Oh, these bites! I suppose they must be mosquitoes. Surely they wouldn’t have bugs in an hotel like this? Would they, Max?’’
‘‘It’s the mosquitoes.’’
‘‘Oh, they look charming like that.…’’ The two boys were lying horizontally across the bed, their legs dangling and their heads propped against a peculiarly ugly dado of woods inlaid in a Walt Disney pattern of reindeer among pine-trees. The fingers of Enzo’s right hand were laced in the fingers of Rodolfo’s left, and from time to time their bodies were convulsed with a brief spasm as one attempted to twist the other into submission. ‘‘Hungry?’’ she asked, and then in her dreadful French: ‘‘Vous avez faim? Faim, faim?’’ she repeated as if she were talking to someone who was deaf.
‘‘Toujours faim,’’ said Rodolfo.
‘‘Give them the chocolate on the dressing-table, Max.’’ But Max had already wandered back on to the terrace where, arms on balustrade and face on arms, he stood looking for his wife’s return with a concentration that excluded all thought of his visitors. ‘‘Where’s he got to? Oh—he’s not there.’’ She got up, threw a slab of chocolate over to them, and then watched, once again scratching her swollen legs, as they broke the slab in two, tore off the paper and began each to devour a half. She was smiling, as she often did when there appeared to be little reason for amusement, and the smile was accompanied by a nervous tic which, fluttering her left eyelid, gave to her whole face a look of almost idiot bonhomie. ‘‘Now be still,’’ she commanded. ‘‘ Restez tranquille. Tranquille.… No, I can’t draw you if you giggle. Stop giggling,’’ she commanded, and attempted to translate the phrase into French. But there was no need. All at once the smile had vanished from her face, the idiot winking of the left lid had ceased, and the strange, gaunt woman, with the enormous hands and feet and the penetrating, faded blue eyes, was once again as terrifyi
ng as when she had first sent Enzo running in panic from the terrace. ‘‘ Oh, but that’s charming.’’ she was murmuring. They could hear, like a finger-nail scratching wall-paper, the decisive strokes of the charcoal, until suddenly she jumped up, caught Enzo’s bare leg, and pulled it out at an angle of forty-five degrees. ‘‘That’s better. You’ve got the better thighs. He‘s too thin, the other; wouldn’t surprise me if he’d had rickets at some time.’’ It was all extraordinary, they had never seen anything like this, never experienced anything such as this, and yet that unconquerable desire to giggle had all at once left them and they felt (yes, each admitted it to his own secret self) curiously alone, unguarded and afraid. The fingers which had been linked so that they could contest against each other’s strength now remained linked because, from that contact, each drew a confidence without which he felt he might suffer some obscure, yet terrible, disaster.
… No, but it was no good. She sighed, put the block aside and replaced the charcoal on the table at which she had been attempting to write letters to her children ever since she had arrived, more than a week ago. The marriage between execution and conception, it never came off. She was too old, she had left it too late; or perhaps the gift had never been there, and what she had all along regarded as a sacrifice—her sacrifice to her husband, the children, and the school—had been a sacrifice of something which, in fact, had never existed. A discouraging thought; for it was true, certainly true, that all those years she had got a secret, slightly shameful satisfaction out of telling people: ‘‘Yes, I used to paint. But I haven’t much time for it now, none at all really.’’ And they would think how plucky she was, running a boys’ school to support an invalid husband and five children, when she had had such artistic gifts. And she herself had believed in those artistic gifts, had never for a moment doubted them. Never, until now—coming out to Florence, with the last of the girls married, the school sold, and an annuity to keep her for the remaining ten or fifteen years of her life. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come; but it was at Florence that, as a young art-student, she had met the middle-aged schoolmaster for whom, with one of those reckless gestures so dear to her, she had sacrificed the life to which she had already made a somewhat naïve self-dedication.… Seven months later they were holiday-making in the Dolomites, in the village to which her husband, on another holiday, was to be brought groaning and screaming on a stretcher (his physical courage had always been scant) with his spine fractured from a fall of something less than five feet.…
