by Derek Hansen
At the age of sixty-five, with near accentless English and a stable of friends whose knowledge of Italy was almost solely acquired from cookbooks, Colombina had every reason to feel she had escaped her past. Indeed, she never even thought to distance herself any more. There was no need.
But Australia hadn’t become haven and home just to the victims of the war, but to some of its villains as well—those clever enough to escape retribution and convince authorities of the validity of their newly assumed identities. To her horror, Colombina was soon to discover that not all the shadows of her past had been laid to rest. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, the Italian passion that she’d kept dormant deep within her flared and took shape and form.
What she felt was pure hatred.
Chapter Three
Colombina was born Cecilia Ortelli, third child and eldest daughter in a family of seven children. Her father, Primo, worked a small plot of land one kilometre uphill from Ravello. He maintained that the house and land had been given to one of his forefathers in return for services rendered during the Napoleonic wars. Primo was never exactly clear which side his illustrious ancestor had actually fought on, nor what the services were that justified the reward. But if the land was a gift, Primo had every reason to question the motives of the giver. The rough-hewn stone and timber house that occupied the land had been there for as long as anyone could remember and, even new, would have been considered poor payment. As for the land itself, it would always struggle to support them.
Primo did his best and the whole family contributed any way they could. Yet every day, every week and every month of every year was a battle. They kept sheep and sold the lambs and the wool. They kept goats and made cheese. They kept cows and sold the milk and made more cheese. In spring they sold calves. They kept chickens and sold their eggs. And every year they harvested almost enough fodder to feed their livestock through winter.
But their problem was one shared by peasant farmers throughout Europe. Their land was simply not sufficient to support a family. So, in addition to running the household, supervising the cheese-making and raising seven children, Cecilia’s mother was forced to find paid work.
In the long hours while her mother was away washing other people’s linen and cleaning other people’s houses, Cecelia became mother to her two sisters and four brothers. By the time she was nine years old, she washed and cleaned and prepared the evening meal as a matter of course, ever grateful for any assistance her mother could give her.
In the beginning her two elder brothers, Alfredo and Elio, exercised their right as males to order her to wash their clothes and clean their shoes, but they soon learned that things got done a little sooner and a little better if they just kept out of the way, and left her to it. Gradually Cecilia assumed responsibility for running the household, without anyone except her mother being aware of it. Cecilia accepted her lot calmly and worked methodically. She never seemed tired, she never got angry, and she was never too busy to help anyone who asked. Accordingly, she was taken for granted, as most mothers are and always have been. But Cecilia was still barely nine years old.
The only time her workload was lightened was during school hours and on completion of the evening dishes. Then her mother insisted that she study or read books. It didn’t matter what she read as long as she read.
‘Promise me you will not waste your life as I have,’ Maddalena would urge her eldest daughter when they were alone together. ‘You are special. But if you don’t have an education the world will never come to realise this and you will never escape. You must read books, Cecilia. Imagine you are in a castle, in a prison, and you are digging a tunnel under the wall so you can escape. Every book you read is another bucket of earth, Cecilia. Every book you read takes you further away from these walls.’
Sometimes Cecilia read school books, sometimes bedtime stories to her younger brothers and sisters. On the only occasions she read for pleasure, she read aloud. She even had to share her one pleasure with her family. But, the fact was, she didn’t mind. On the contrary, she read stories out loud to her family whenever there was an opportunity. Cecilia knew she could work her fingers to the bone and that would change nothing. The reading was something else. It gave her power, respect and an identity. She became not just her mother’s favourite but the whole family’s favourite because she read to them. She became their entertainment, their radio, their movies, their theatre and their magazines.
Cecilia had a good voice and her mother encouraged her to cultivate it. She adopted the enunciation and cadence of her Milanese school teacher, and his sense of drama and timing. Over time, she began to sound less and less like a peasant girl and more and more like an educated city girl. The change was so gradual that her family assumed it was the way she had always spoken.
When she sat down to read, she had a cushion to sit on and a pillow to rest against, rare luxuries brought by a family eager to hear the latest instalment of whatever story she was reading. Her brothers turned up the wick of the single oil lamp she read by. They all crowded in around her except Maddalena, who took the opportunity to iron or fold washing while she listened. Cecilia took them away from the crowded stone cottage and the monotony of their days. She transported them to other lands, and filled their heads with adventures and romance. Sometimes she’d leave her audience weeping, other times with eyes bright from excitement and begging for more. This was the gift Cecilia gave her family and why they loved her. She was the glue that helped keep the family close, and helped them forget those nights when Primo came home drunk.
This was the family shame though, in fairness, they were not the only family in Ravello or any other village for that matter to be shamed this way. Cecilia could not remember a time when it had never happened. Probably the shouting and the crying had wakened her as a baby. Probably, until she had learned to turn a deaf ear, she had cried along with her mother. It was a fact of life she’d learned to live with, however unhappily.
Primo was Cecilia’s father and so she loved him. She hated what he did to her mother when he was drunk, but he was her father. Love is not always a matter of choice. Even battered children protest when the authorities come to take them away from their parents. Besides, her father was always so distraught and ashamed in the morning. He was the one who needed love and consolation, comfort and forgiveness, and Cecilia gave him all those things. His victim was left to lick her wounds, and bear the indignity of her bruises and swellings before her neighbours.
Primo was not a bad man. In the main he was a good father and loving husband who worked hard to support his family. His short, nuggetty body showed that he did. His skin was tanned by too many hours in the sun and the veins in his arms stood out like knotted rope. He worked hard and none could doubt it. But when he went drinking, he would return and stand before the crude cottage and know that, no matter how hard he worked or how hard he tried, life would give him no more than the little he already had. His disappointment would give way to anger, and his anger to rage.
On these nights, Maddalena would resign herself to the inevitable, and try to lose herself in Cecilia’s story so that she would stay calm. On the one occasion she’d ever cursed him and fought back, he’d beaten her senseless. She learned not to resist or show fear and tried hard not to cry out in pain, because that only served to enrage him more. She also learned to blot out the pain and whisper soothing endearments when he forced himself upon her afterwards. Maddalena always prayed nothing would come of these couplings. Whatever would become of a child conceived this way?
Cecilia may have loved her father, but she was devoted to her mother. She flattered herself to believe she was also her mother’s closest friend. Her mother spoke to her and shared confidences in a way she never did with any of her other children. But her mother would never discuss the beatings or allow her to be critical of her father, even when Cecilia was bathing her bruises or rubbing away soreness.
‘You see what will happen to you, Cecilia
?’ was all she would say. ‘You see why you must read books? Don’t throw your life away. You are too good for this sort of life. Look at me. I am nothing. I am old and tired before my time. Promise me you won’t throw your life away.’
Cecilia promised. She never cried for her mother. Either she’d inherited her mother’s stoicism or she’d learned it. She seemed to accept the beatings in the same way she accepted her endless household chores. But was it an inner strength she showed, or the symptom of a child who had put away her deepest feelings, tucked them away where they couldn’t intrude upon the reality of her life?
On those nights when her father failed to come home before dinner, she would stay up with her mother long after the storytelling had ended, cleaning and tidying so there’d be fewer things for her father to find fault with. She’d put his nightshirt by the fire and make sure there was warm water for him to wash in. Then she’d flee to the bedroom she shared with her brothers and sisters as soon as she heard her father’s heavy footsteps on the path outside. Sometimes all the preparations worked and her father’s anger would dissipate for want of fuel, but most times the effort would be wasted. Then Cecilia would lay awake wondering what she’d overlooked that had unleashed her father’s anger; or what else she could do to soothe it away. That—and the reading—was how Cecilia tried to help her mother.
Primo did not come home drunk every night or even every week, or at any specific interval. No one knew what it was that made Primo decide to go down to the café in Ravello and exchange however much money was in his pocket for cheap, fiery grappa. But on average, once a month he’d wander down the hill and join in whatever debates were taking place. Sometimes the men would discuss football, other times women, but always they ended up arguing over politics. Primo loved the political debates, anxious to discover a party or leader who could provide him with a better life. For a while he supported the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity. He liked their Utopian vision, but gradually realised that a vision was all they offered. They would not change his life. He shifted his allegiances to the Italian Communist Party. The idea of everyone having an equal share in the common wealth appealed to him. The idea of the strong helping the weak and the fortunate helping the less fortunate seemed only fair and just. As one of the less fortunate he would undoubtedly benefit. If anyone could improve his life, it would be the PCI.
But the PCI had its power base in the cities and in the trade unions, and Primo had the peasant’s deep distrust of city people. He heard how the PCI organised strikes and disrupted industry the length and breadth of Italy and failed to see how that could possibly help him. Indeed, every time there was a strike, the papers talked of massive losses suffered by the industries involved. It seemed to Primo that the communists were destroying the very wealth they’d promised to share. How could that possibly help him? Then one night, Primo heard Mussolini on the café radio, and it seemed that the leader was speaking directly to him. That night, he went home preoccupied and forgot to beat up Maddalena.
It could be argued that Mussolini was responsible for the break-up of the Ortelli family, the catalyst that caused the glue to become unstuck. Primo adopted the cause of fascism, and the more ardent he became the more often he took himself off down the hill to argue, debate and get drunk. The beatings began to happen once if not twice a week and the children could no longer turn a deaf ear.
Cecilia blamed herself for the change in her father and for her mother’s suffering. Her father loved listening to the stories she read as much as anyone, and whenever a good story had him in its grip, there was no way he’d risk missing an instalment by going to the café. Then Cecilia would milk the story. She’d do whatever she could to make the story last longer and keep her father from going down to Ravello. She’d read more slowly and more dramatically, and finish reading as soon as they came to a suitably suspenseful part. What made these moments even more delicious was the knowledge that her mother knew what she was up to, and they’d exchange little glances of complicity.
Her talent did not go unnoticed. At the age of eleven she was already the best in the school at reading aloud. In scripture lessons she was invariably chosen to read the selected passages and she made the ancient words come alive in a way that none of the teachers or Father Michele were able to. Even the dullest and most reluctant of students could not resist her spell and listened as raptly as any. That, according to Father Michele, was a miracle worthy of Cecilia’s elevation to sainthood. Of course her teacher did everything he could to encourage her precocious talent, and begged and borrowed books for her.
So when her teacher gave her a book on Mussolini to read and she discovered her father’s interest, naturally she used all her skills to sustain it. When she spoke of the march on Rome, she made Mussolini sound like the saviour of their nation, a hero come to rescue Italy from the grasp of a corrupt, incompetent government. When she told how he’d disbanded and outlawed the communist trade unions, Mussolini became the one man who could save the country from industrial anarchy and put it on the road to prosperity. Then there was the other matter of his North African conquests. Just why Italians felt they needed to own large chunks of inhospitable country was never made clear, nevertheless the bright lights of triumph reflected upon all Italians. It wasn’t difficult for Cecilia to impart such a rosy image of Mussolini because the book was blatant propaganda, a product of Mussolini’s own ministries which had been distributed to schools. Nevertheless, Cecilia brought the words to life and gave the lies the ring of truth.
Primo could see that Mussolini was the man who could change his life, who could make Italy a rich, powerful and proud nation in which all would share the spoils. The book confirmed his beliefs, and the more his friends in the café argued against Mussolini the more committed and angry he became. No one suffered more from his commitment than Maddalena.
Primo lost interest in Cecilia’s stories. All he wanted to hear about was Mussolini. He told her to bring more books home from school, but if there were more books on Il Duce, they hadn’t yet found their way to the small school in Ravello. So Cecilia and her brothers and sisters scoured the village for discarded newspapers and fascist pamphlets, anything at all that had stories about Mussolini. Cecilia read everything first, and quickly discarded any story which voiced criticism or contrary political views.
Primo, who resented spending any of their precious money on school clothes, now insisted that all his sons had new cadet uniforms so that when the Balila, the Italian Fascist Youth, paraded, his sons would stand out and bring him credit when they marched and saluted the flag every Friday. Maddalena obliged, even though it took every last lira she’d hidden away for emergencies.
If the family hoped their efforts would keep Primo from the café, they were soon disappointed. News simply didn’t happen fast enough for him, and the stories Cecilia would read from one newspaper were often repeated in others. He got bored. The family did their best but all they succeeded in doing was arming Primo with more facts with which to regale the anti-fascists in the café. He’d argue his belief that Mussolini would make Italy rich and powerful, and that everybody in the café would share in the wealth. Il Duce was the one man who could change their lives. He filled the café with his vision and his conviction, gathering converts to the cause. One night he caught the eye of a Fascist Party organiser. If God himself had reached out his hand to Primo, he could not have been more overwhelmed.
But his passion brought little joy to his family. The beatings increased until there were days when Maddalena could no longer get up and go to work. This incensed Primo even more for it meant there’d be less money for him to spend in the café. Cecilia called her two older brothers together and told them it was time they did something to protect their mother. They refused. They didn’t enjoy lying in the dark listening to Primo beat her, but he was their father and they wouldn’t go against his will. Besides, their father’s position in the Party and their new uniforms had won them both promotions in the Balilla. They enjo
yed the little power it gave them and were proud of their father.
Fortunately for Maddalena the weather turned, and the morning wind from the north, the tivano, announced the arrival of autumn 1938. Primo was now the local fascist organiser, but the blood of generations of farmers also ran in his veins. The time had come to harvest and store the winter feed, and repair the holes in the sagging roof. For a while he became the Primo of old, and the family did everything to convince him that he should stay that way. Alfredo rallied to the cause and became his right-hand man while Elio and his younger brothers gathered, cut and stacked firewood. They fussed around him in the evenings and Cecilia would read the sort of stories he once loved. For a while, Primo succumbed to all the attention, and seemed to enjoy the role of dutiful father and husband. Then the man who had approached Primo in the café sent for him, and the cycle of beatings began all over again.
On her twelfth birthday, Cecilia decided she would no longer stand by while her mother was slowly and agonisingly beaten into her grave. When Primo went down to Ravello, she stayed up with her. She watched her mother as she folded the washing and sat down to mend the clothes that had torn or needed patching. But her tired fingers couldn’t pick up the needle, and when Cecilia handed it to her, she couldn’t see the eyelet to thread it. Frustration compounded her exhaustion, and her aching, battered body finally gave in. Her shoulders sagged and her head fell forward onto her arms. She began to sob, great heaving sobs which robbed her of what little strength she had left.
Cecilia took the needle and thread from her mother and began to sew. She sewed as she always sewed, calmly and methodically. She sewed until her mother’s sobs died away and she composed herself.
