Then in Rome in March of ‘68 things took a sudden ugly turn. Students had been violently evicted from the Faculty of Letters, locked out of the Valle Giulia. The call came to reoccupy it. Alexei, along with some 2000 students, heeded it. With his Leica, which he carried everywhere in order to document activity, round his neck, he made his way with the crowd to the park in which the building stood. He was armed, like his fellows, with the usual supply of eggs and tomatoes.
Before they even reached the park, something happened which no one had expected. The police charged. Drove jeeps straight into the crowd, threw tear gas.
Sirens wailed. Pandemonium. Alexei ran, aiming his token missiles, angry at their ineptitude. Through the clouds of smoke, he saw a woman fall, saw her hit, dragged. Blood. Her face in the crowd was a replica of Francesca’s, high-rounded forehead, reddened lips, raven hair. A purity. He rushed towards her, but was shoved back. He picked up a stone. Hurled it at the nearest policeman.
Everywhere around him objects were flying. Students were fighting back, tearing up benches, using planks as clubs. A great wave of communal anger.
Resistance.
A few hours later he found himself bruised and beaten in a crowded police cell. There was a mixed mood of triumph and despondency amongst the inmates. Triumph because they had fought back, had not simply fled the onslaught. Despondency because they were in a cell, unequal to the opposition.
Alexei’s mood was sombre. The violence, the blood, had shaken him. He couldn’t get rid of the image of that woman lying helpless on the ground, trampled. Francesca. The thought wouldn’t leave him. But it couldn’t have been her. She was in a convent. In Agrigento. Another kind of cell. He shivered, stood quietly at the back of the cell, didn’t speak.
Giangiacomo came to bail him out the following day. As they left the police station, the cameras clicked and popped in rude cacophony, microphones were thrust in Giangiacomo’s face, in Alexei’s.
His uncle all but dragged him into the waiting car. He didn’t speak. From the set of his jaw, Alexei knew that rage was being forcibly contained.
They didn’t stop at the flat. After a struggle through traffic and round cordoned off streets, he realised that they were headed for Milan.
They drove in silence. Alexei’s head ached. He felt a bump on his forehead he hadn’t noticed before. His body was stiff, sore. He lapsed into sleep. When he woke it was dark. They were home in Milan. He hadn’t been there since the previous summer and he sunk with something akin to gratitude into his own bed. A doctor came to see him. Giangiacomo stood by as he checked limbs and ribs, bumps and bruises. Still he didn’t speak.
The next morning Alexei showered and made an attempt to shave round the bruises and scratches on his face, before going down to breakfast. He wasn’t a pretty sight but he was ravenous.
Giangiacomo was already at the table. ‘Here,’ he thrust a stack of newspapers at him. ‘Now you can feel pleased with yourself,’ he glared at Alexei and strode out of the room.
Alexei looked at the papers. On a series of front pages, amidst images of the streets of Rome, he saw his own swollen face staring out at him, sometimes next to Giangiacomo’s, sometimes alone. The headlines blared. ‘Student riot in Rome’. ‘Industrialist’s son arrested’. ‘Gismondi’s revolutionary heir’. ‘Gismondi heir attacks police’. ‘Gismondi millions take to the streets’.
Alexei’s heart sank.
The evening papers were even worse. They carried details of Alexei’s activities, traced him back to the summer he had spent in one of the Gismondi factories, implied that he had created trouble there, interviewed workers to see whether they backed father or son. There were also lists of the Gismondi holdings. Profiles of Giangiacomo. Profiles of Alexei. One of them mentioned Alexei’s Soviet parentage, implied shady dealings with the KGB.
Alexei was astounded.
‘Well?’ Giangiacomo confronted him over dinner. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’
Alexei shrugged, toyed with his food. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry you’ve been implicated. As for the rest…’ he straightened his shoulders.
‘As for the rest, you’re prepared to attack the police, assault the forces of order. Is that what you’re saying to me?’
‘Attack the police?’ Alexei was incredulous. ‘It was your forces of order who attacked us, attacked us with their jeeps and their tear gas and their truncheons. Fascist pigs.’ Alexei’s voice rose. ‘I was there. All you do is read your right wing papers and think it’s the truth.’
He pushed his chair back abruptly, ‘There’s no point talking to you about this.’
The next morning the letters began to arrive. Heaps of them. Over the next weeks. Letters addressed to him. Addressed to Giangiacomo. Threatening letters. Menacing letters. Letters saying he should be deported, hung, excommunicated. Packages containing dead mice, amulets. Congratulatory letters, addressing him as Comrade. Letters proposing marriage, affairs. Letters with photographs, locks of hair. Letters offering better, more deserving children for adoption than Alexei. Letters asking for money for a variety of worthy causes. Begging letters.
The letters repelled him and fascinated him. He had become the subject of other people’s imaginations.
A public property. But the fabric of those imaginations compelled him. How extraordinary human beings were!
He had had no further confrontations with Giangiacomo. They were polite to each other, civil, meeting mostly over breakfast. The letters formed a kind of bond, a silent conversation. They passed them between each other with a shake of the head, occasionally a chuckle.
Then on the fourth day, a different kind of letter arrived. Giangiacomo’s face grew grim. He passed it to Alexei. ‘This is what I have been afraid of.’
The letter was composed of bits of magazine cut up to form a message. Its gist was that unless Giangiacomo left a million lira at a certain place at a certain time, his son would be kidnapped.
‘Utter nonsense,’ Alexei laughed. ‘A schoolboy prank.’
Giangiacomo looked at him contemptuously, ‘If you don’t value your life, I do. It wouldn’t be the first case of this kind in Italy. I shall alert the police.’
‘But you won’t pay.’
Giangiacomo shook his head. ‘No. But you shall have a bodyguard. And for the next week or so I don’t want you out of the house.’
Giangiacomo was firm, stilling all of Alexei’s protests.
The next day, amidst the plentiful post, there was another letter of a similar kind. This time the implication was that Alexei was complicit in the demand for money which was to go to a revolutionary grouping and that he would aid and abet his own kidnapping.
‘Your friends?’ Giangiacomo asked him sternly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But he began to share his uncle’s worries. He spent his days lying around in his room, pacing the house, sprawling in the inner courtyard where the sun was already hot. There were two orange trees there, planted in large tubs. He gazed at them. Remembered the woman lying in the Roman street, remembered Francesca. Her scent came back to him, the heat of her stolen caresses. She was imprisoned now, trapped in the cell of her nun’s order. Trapped by her family into the cell of church and tradition.
He too was trapped now. Imprisoned in the world of his uncle’s millions. Unable to go out, to move freely.
The irony of it didn’t escape him. But it didn’t lessen the sense of feeling trapped.
He raced round the courtyard, his prison’s very own plush exercise ground. He ran until he was exhausted and then sprawled again. It was while he was lying there thinking about Francesca that the notion of the film came to him. A film which distilled the essence of Sicily. A film about a woman trapped in the sensuous splendour of that island and her own body, fettered by the conditions of her sex and society. He dreamt the film piecemeal. Began to make notes.
The following week the post had dwindled a little. There were the now usual requests for charitable contributions, anothe
r kidnapping threat which made Giangiacomo seethe. And also a different letter. A letter with a neatly typed envelope, somewhat official in character. Inside it another envelope bearing a sheet of handwritten paper, a faded photograph and a small velvet pouch. The letter was in English in a large sprawling hand. Alexei read it with some difficulty.
Dearest Alexei,
By the time you receive this, your twenty-first birthday may have come and gone. But I send you my very best wishes and a small token of the love which should have been yours.
Before it is no longer possible, I wish to tell you that I am your mother. This telling is the last pleasure I offer myself.
Do not ask how this can be so, for I will no longer be here to tell you. It is all already so long ago and lost in the shadows of history.
But know that I have loved you, however briefly, and wished that it could be more.
I have seen that you are well and that is my consolation.
My dearest son.
Yours ever,
Sylvie Kowalska
Alexei read the letter three times. There was no date. No return address. He was mystified. He passed it to Giangiacomo, then gazed at the faded face in the photograph and opened the small pouch. A ring, a pretty ring, inscribed with the same initials. S.K.
He looked queryingly at Giangiacomo.
His uncle shook his head. ‘Another madwoman. Here, look at this one.’
Alexei read the letter his uncle handed him,
‘Dear Signor Gismondi,
I am a widow of youthful age. I have one son of my own who has turned out to be every mother’s dream. I am certain I can accomplish the same miracle for you. Your son needs a woman’s hand to steer him on the right course. I would be willing to meet you…etc…etc…’
Alexei laughed. ‘The mothers are queueing up. But the tone here is not quite the same as Signora Sylvie Kowalska. I wonder…’ He looked at the small black and white photograph again, showed it to his uncle. ‘And she has a Polish name, like my mother.’
‘Your mother was called Hanka Burova, as you know, and she died in a nursing home just outside Lublin a long time ago. You father buried her there with his own hands.’ Giangiacomo stared at the photograph. Alexei saw a tinge of consternation pass over his features.
‘Do you know her?’
Giangiacomo shook his head abruptly. ‘People are very bizarre.’
‘And she sends me this ring. A pretty ring. Strange. I wonder who she is.’
‘I’ll see if I can find out anything.’
That night Giangiacomo came home late, after Alexei had already had dinner. He called Alexei into his study.
‘I have been talking to the police,’ he paced, his burly form too energetic for the width of the room. ‘No, don’t interrupt me,’ he motioned Alexei into a chair and laughed. ‘Yes, those fascist pigs, but it’s funny how when they’re protecting one they acquire a different name. They tell me that all things considered, it would be better for you not to be here, at home, in Milan.’
‘That’s fine, I’ll go back to Rome,’ Alexei was eager.
‘No, you will most definitely not go back to Rome,’ Giangiacomo scowled. ‘That address is equally well known. And I do not want you out in the streets again.’
‘I will do what I must do,’ Alexei flared at the order.
‘You will do what I tell you as long as you are my son,’ Giangiacomo glowered. He didn’t give Alexei an opportunity to speak. ‘You will go on a holiday until all this is over, the publicity, the troubles…’ he waved vaguely. ‘And when you come back, you will come to work with me, and we will let it be known that that is your choice.’
‘That’s preposterous,’ Alexei fumed. ‘I have to get my degree. I…’
Giangiacomo cut him off. ‘You have just spent months telling the world that there is no degree worth getting at an Italian university. It is a strange moment to plead academic duty.’
‘That’s not the point. I have to go back to my life, to Rome,’ Alexei leapt up, looked threateningly at Giangiacomo. ‘I have no intention of coming to work with you. Of being a stooge to Capital. Of cavorting with the Fascists.’
‘You will do what I say as long as you are my son.’ Giangiacomo shouted now.
‘Give your millions to someone else then.’ Alexei blazed back. ‘Get married, make yourself another son. Your own son.’
Silence filled the room. In that moment, Alexei realised that he had overstepped the limit. When it came, Giangiacomo’s voice was very low.
‘Fascists, Alexei? You talk of fascists so easily,’ he laughed strangely, a sound more like a moan. ‘Do you know what the Fascists did to me? Real Fascists? Mussolini’s black shirts? Do you know that I am only half a man? Incapable of having children?’ He sat down heavily. ‘You are the only son I will ever have.’
Alexei stared out into blackness. Murmured. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Forgive me.’ After a long moment, he added, ‘I will do what you ask.’
He went to Sicily for his enforced holiday. He wrote the script that was burning inside him.
Chapter
Nineteen
__________
∞
In the hush of night the boat moored them at the island. Rugged limestone crags etched in moonlight. The fragrance of sun-warmed greenery. The sharper tang of the sea. A score of stone steps leading up, up. Katherine and Carlo, hand in hand walking. Walking through the doors of a castello perched on a hilltop. A Buonaterra Castello on a Buonaterra hilltop on a Buonaterra island. Everything in order. Everything arranged. Just for them.
A honeymoon imagined just for them.
Katherine thought she should pinch herself. But she didn’t want to.
Cool tiled floors. Pale ochre walls. A table set with majolica. Oysters, crusty bread, champagne. Carlo’s eyes. Dark, teasing. Skimming her face, her shoulders, her breasts. Pausing. A kiss, slow, playful, drawing her on, promising, promising.
The bedroom. White. A low wide bed in its centre. Waiting. Her silk nightie already waiting. Waiting for the shape of her body.
‘Mia Katrina. Mia sposa.’ His voice low, enveloping her. Like his arms. Strong. Gentle round her and then bolder urging her body, her lips, so that she was aware only of the texture of him, the shape of head, shoulders, back, the scent of hair and cheek.
‘I want to see you. I have never seen you.’ Fingers, delicate on buttons, the lace of her bra, unfastening, tracing curves and nipples, smoothing skin. A mingled rush of breath. And then lower, stroking, kissing, urging her knickers off. Looking. The palpable sensation of his eyes on her nakedness. They distanced her, from him, from herself. But she read his desire in them.
And then he was kneeling to her, his arms moulding her hips, that dark head buried in her thighs. The flicker of a tongue. A different pleasure. She felt shy, pulled his head away.
‘I want to see you too,’ she said hesitantly, fingering his shirt.
He smiled, undressed quickly, unselfconsciously, his back to her as she perched on the bed. A muscled athlete’s body, smooth bronzed skin.
‘Do I pass?’ he asked as he turned to her. Her eyes fell on that arching penis. He laughed at the focus of her gaze. ‘Does he scare you? He is usually quite friendly.’ He wrapped his fingers round his penis as if he were shaking a hand. His eyes caressing her, grew darker, more sombre. He covered her body.
No, she wasn’t scared of it, of that, the thought flashed through her mind as she curved her limbs to his weight. No, she wanted only to please him. Wanted, too, to obliterate those eyes, her eyes which watched them again from the ceiling. Not frightened, no. Simply distant, curious, watching the kisses which covered her breasts, her belly. Watching her own response, the arch of her body, her hands digging into his back, her lips shaping into a moan.
‘Carissima,’ his breath in her ear, harsher now. And then, slowly, carefully, that jutting penis probing between her thighs. She was ready for it. Not frightened, no. Its entry was sanctioned by the s
ecurity of ‘forever’. Forever desired. Desire forever assuaged.
She opened to him, her knees high. She could see them from the ceiling, see the thrust of his body, and then another thrust, and another mingled with a cry of what was it? Astonishment.
And suddenly, there was the force of his hand across her face. Hitting her, jabbing at her, again and again. His voice raucous. ‘Puta. You’ve cheated me. Putana,’ over and over. She cried out with the surprise and the pain of it, no longer a pair of eyes, but a body, a hot, hurting self.
And in the midst of that pain, the thrust at her face, the lunge at her entrails, her body shuddered, surged against him, heaved, loosened, wave after wave, cry after cry of hurt. And pleasure.
His face as he stood looking down on her was sombre, filled with a dark contempt. ‘Whore,’ the word curled with malevolence round her. He spat emphatically on the ground and strode away, leaving her cowering, alone, in the white room.
Katherine wept. Wept silently. She didn’t understand. Didn’t know what had happened to her. It was all so sudden, the dreaminess of his caress, and then all at once, incomprehensibly, the cruelty, the pain, the contempt. And her body, racked into response. The humiliation of it. She huddled beneath the sheets, like a small child, and curled into a ball of weeping misery.
After a while, she got up and walked on trembling legs to the bathroom. Where had Carlo gone? She wanted to talk to him, question him. Her face in the mirror looked wild, bruised. She washed, wiped herself there where she teemed with their joint wetness. She shuddered. Why had he called her a whore? What had she done? He would have to come back. He couldn’t leave her alone. She wanted him to look at her again with those eyes full of playful adoration. She pulled on the new nightie, straightened the bed, waited. Her face ached. There was a hole where her heart should have been.
Eventually, she didn’t know how much later, he returned. He stood over the bed. Tall, menacing, in a robe of midnight blue. It was as if he didn’t see her. As if she weren’t there. With a savage gesture, he thrust something at the bed.
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