‘There was a fire early this morning,’ he said. ‘The house was completely gutted before we arrived. Nothing we could do.’
‘But the family? Where are they? Who did this?’
‘We don’t know that yet, signorina. It’s too soon. We only know that there were no survivors. Investigations are under way. Pazienza.’
I looked at the stairs and the side of the front door that was still standing. The brass door knocker that Fabio’s mother used to polish so religiously was blackened with smoke.
I saw one of Fabio’s skis near the stairs. It lay like a broken spear. Once ordinary, now nightmarish.
I couldn’t believe it.
I pushed my bike back along the street. I tried to think about Fabio’s face the last time I saw him, what I should have said, where I could go – but it was all a jumble, and made no sense.
The only thought that kept hammering in my head, over the din of every other thought, was that if my parents hadn’t locked me in I could have been with Fabio now. I could have saved him. We could have been hugging and laughing and kissing, maybe in the mountains somewhere, far away, huddled together, warm against the cold.
I left my bike in the garage and went up to the apartment. Mamma wasn’t there, I supposed she had gone to the markets. I didn’t care. I never wanted to see her or Papà again.
I packed a bag with warm jumpers and pants and my new woollen overcoat. It would be cold in the mountains. And I knew I would be there for the winter.
For the last time I looked around the room, at Cornelia’s bed and mine, at the rosewood wardrobe and the little desk. I went over and traced the L loves F with my finger, and now a piercing sadness like the point of an icicle plunged through my body. Fabio’s face and eyes and smell flooded my mind, and there was only emptiness ahead.
I bit down on the sadness and strapping my bag to my back I ran out the door. I wanted to keep running, running forever away from the emptiness, and the hate. I decided to go north, to Limone, where there was snow and mountains and no one I knew. That was where I would have taken Fabio.
I looked at the ring on my hand and the tears welled up again. I couldn’t live with it on my finger, as if our love was still alive. When I got to Limone I’d bury it, in a spot only I knew about, perhaps under a chestnut tree. I’d put flowers over it and say a prayer, a song of love. It would be our grave.
I walked the two kilometres to the station. My body was heavy. I dragged it along like an old suitcase. Where there used to be light and wind and sun there was now only the cold. I shivered, and the frozen hatred sat in my heart like a lump of dirty ice.
chapter 5
ROBERTO
I had just about finished packing my bag, so I sat on the bed for a moment and looked around for the last time at the room where my mother grew up. We were going to stay in the Tuscan house in the country where Mum and Lucrezia, Nonna and Nonno had spent their summer holidays.
I was interested in seeing the country – Nonna had told me a lot about it, about people like old Maria who keeps the place for them while they are away, who says ‘Bless me, that’s an incredible thing’ every five minutes, and not much else.
But I felt sad about leaving this apartment. Living here, in the intimacy of this small space with the white tiles on the kitchen walls where Mum had (daringly) drawn her first cat. Nonna told stories after dinner, about Mum, and I was seeing a new part of her that I couldn’t have imagined before. I had posted a letter to her yesterday, and somehow I’d wanted to write something close and new, but I ended up just asking her for a cat when I got home, seeing she knew how to draw them so well.
I really liked Nonna. She had a sparkle, a kind of mischievousness that I hadn’t expected to see in our family. She laughed at my jokes(!), even the rude ones, and could she cook! Her speciality was the bugie, little pastries that were so light they melted on the tongue and after you’d eaten ten it was as if you’d only just started. I guess that’s why they are called ‘little lies’. Nonna played tricks on me sometimes and once, when we were out, she threw a snowball that hit me right on the back of the neck. (I got her on the ear for that.) It was hard to understand how Mum could have grown so serious, after living with a person like Nonna.
And it was hard to understand how she could have ever left this place, with all its treasures. In this one week we’d visited the Medici Palace, where Lorenzo the Magnificent was born, the Uffizi Art Gallery and the house where Michelangelo had lived.
And I had seen Michelangelo’s ‘David’. Wow. As I stared up at the five-metre giant, I felt the tears coming into my eyes. Imagine having someone like this living just around the corner! I guess it was the pure beauty of him – the satin finish of his skin, the strength in his face. (And he didn’t even look as if he did weights.) I was dying to stroke the marble, he seemed so real that under my fingers he might wake up and smile. And yet the power of him was more godlike than human – I thought a lot about that, and decided that perhaps this is what Michelangelo’s art was about, showing us what we can be, not just what we are.
Nonna said that Mum came here often to visit ‘David’. They used to joke that he was her only boyfriend, but she said one day she would find a man just like him and marry him. I couldn’t help laughing at that, thinking of poor old Dad in his grey cardigans and the bald patch at the back of his head. Maybe Dad does have a certain air of authority, I’m thinking of that quelling glare he gets when someone has hidden the TV guide.
‘Roberto, sei pronto, are you ready?’
Nonna is the fastest packer I’ve ever seen. All the food she was taking was gathered like a small mountain on the kitchen table this afternoon – chilli peppers in jars of oil, huge hunks of parmigiano cheese, sun-dried tomatoes as wrinkly as walnuts and home-made biscuits. It all stood in boxes now near the front door, waiting to be carried out (by me). How we were going to load all this onto the bus was a mystery, but I decided to look on this as my weight-training in Italy.
‘Take that new overcoat, Roberto, it will be cold in the country,’ Nonna called out. ‘No central heating there!’
She went on about the weather again, how she’d never known it to plummet like this in Florence till it froze the water in the taps. It seemed that this was all anybody talked about here – in the streets people walked rigidly, as if any extra movement might let in a sudden rush of cold air, and Nonna laughed when I told her that they looked just like stoccafisso, the stiff, dried fish that hung in the alimentari shops in town.
At night, even with central heating, I slept with a jumper on over my pyjamas and woollen socks on my feet. It was strange, it seemed to be getting colder if anything, and Nonna said that if the weather didn’t break soon, they would have to drop food by helicopter to villages that were snowed in.
Personally, I quite like the cold. It makes this place seem even more different from home, even more of an adventure. But I wouldn’t tell that to Nonna and her chilblains.
‘Come on, Roberto, sù, check you haven’t left anything, and let’s go. The bus won’t wait for us!’
I took another quick look around and spied the photo of Lucrezia. Quickly I stuffed it down the bottom of my suitcase. I took Mum’s (or Lucrezia’s?) ivory comb and the perfume, too, and put them with my bathroom things. I reckon I’m entitled to own something of my mother’s past. Especially as she’s never really told me anything about it.
The bus was full when we arrived puffing and laden with our bags and boxes, but no one seemed to mind as we pushed past. I guess we didn’t cause as much trouble as the man sitting in front of us whose old dog was taking up two seats and every now and then made dreadful smells, especially when we went over a bump.
We soon left the city behind us and headed into the hills of Tuscany. The road became rocky and narrow and we bobbed about on our seats like loose buttons. Nonna let me sit next to the window so that I could take in the view. I pulled up the window every now and then to get a blast of fresh air.
The countryside looked so neat, with its pocket handkerchief fields rolling out over the hills. Pinned at the edges were small mustard cottages, the old terracotta roofs chipped like broken teeth. I saw soft patches of snow and gnarled old olive trees with backs bent against the cold. And lined along the top of the slopes were rows of cypresses, black-green and sombre, like monks guarding the secrets of the hills.
I suddenly realised that I hadn’t thought about any of my usual problems for at least half an hour. It was strange how travelling plucks you out of yourself, like a nut popping out of its shell. All the loud thoughts about familiar things fade out of earshot and new things flood their way in. It was good to not have to listen for once to how worried I was about growing up to be as boring as my parents, or why Mum never told me about the power, or if Virginia Westhead, with all her calamitous facts, ever got as depressed as I did. When you only have familiar things to look at, like the same row of houses and old Mr Denton sitting on the porch in the afternoons when you walk home from school, you tend to ignore the view outside and look only at the scenery inside.
Only the cypresses led me back now and then to my old anxieties. There was something menacing and secretive about them, I don’t know, they were so dark and closed-looking, almost religious in the way they pointed unswervingly at the sky. Like some sort of dark reminder they appeared regularly along those hills, exclamation points warning you to ‘beware, beware!’.
I don’t want to go on about it, but those cypresses really chilled me. They made me think about the dark of the catacombs, the tramp I’d seen, the old woman selling chestnuts. It’s as if they held secrets inside them, and like mushrooms they were nourished by mystery, and the dark.
Nonna’s house sat in a small valley with a hill rising sharply behind it. Snow covered the fields that Nonna had described and settled like a fat white eiderdown over the peaks of the roof.
Someone had cleared the snow from the crooked path leading up to the house, leaving the wet stones gleaming in the twilight. As I looked at the path and the rough stone walls of the house and the silent white fields all around I felt as if I’d stepped into one of my fairy tales. Hans Andersen’s Snow Queen, perhaps, when little Gerda travels through snow and witchcraft to find her friend Kay hidden deep in the ice palace of the Snow Queen. Now, more than ever, that tale seemed important to me – maybe it was just because of the snow, and the cold.
I thought of Gerda, and how scared she must have been, alone in the forest, and I wondered if I could ever be that brave, when it counted.
We trundled up the path and plopped all our boxes and bags onto the big wooden table in the centre of the room. Nonna switched on the lights and I saw that the fireplace and the kitchen and the lounge were all in the same huge room, making it cosy and crowded. There was a smell of coffee lingering in the air and I noticed, next to all our food on the table, two small espresso cups with a smear of browned sugar crystals at the bottom.
Nonna saw them too, and she sniffed the air like a hunting dog on a trail. Her eyes widened, as if in alarm, and then she looked at me and forced her mouth into a tight polite smile. I hadn’t seen that smile on her since Rome, when she’d dismissed my story about Pig and the fire as ‘one of my fairy tales’. I suddenly realised that Mum often looked like that, too, in fact it was a habitual expression of hers. A faintly disbelieving look, it was, but courteous, as if she had to put on a mask. I felt suddenly uneasy and looked about for something to do.
‘I’ll just pack these things away, and then I’ll show you the rest of the house. Why don’t you light the fire, va bene, Roberto?’
Nonna bustled about, putting jars in cupboards. We didn’t take our coats off, it was freezing inside. A pile of wood sat next to the fireplace but when I went over I saw two black logs in the grate reluctantly smouldering. Old Maria hadn’t done a very good job this morning. I kicked the logs hopefully but they gave off a damp, acrid smell and very little heat.
The stone walls seemed to soak up the small domestic sounds we made and there was a sense of waiting, as if something was going to happen. It didn’t feel as if we were alone in this big room.
Just then, over my shoulder, I heard a footstep. I swung round and peered up into the darkness of a stone stairway. Someone was coming down, slowly.
Out of the gloom a man appeared. He had thick white hair and a silver moustache, perfectly combed. His face was smooth and olive, like the sepia of an old photograph. Nonno Natino.
‘Natino, what are you doing here?’ Nonna said sharply. ‘I thought you were in Padua! Are you alone?’
Who else would there be? I had a sudden picture of Lucrezia, with her long black hair and white lashes at the corner of her eye. But her hair would be grey now, like Mum’s, and anyway, I guess long-lost relatives with dark pasts only reappear in plays, or fairy tales.
‘Roberto, well, well, at last!’ Nonno Natino strode across the room and gripped my shoulders. ‘Let me look at you!’
He stood back and gazed at me, as if I were the view at Portofino. So I stared, too. I noticed his big shoulders, still broad for a man of his age, but his pants hung loosely. I sighed. He had the family’s skinny legs.
Nonna stopped fiddling with her jars and said to Nonno, ‘What happened with your business in Padua? When did you arrive?’ Her voice was cold and tense.
‘I finished early, cara. And I couldn’t wait to see my nipote here.’ He put an arm around my shoulder, and tweaked my ponytail. ‘You’re a fine-looking ragazzo, but I’m not sure about the hairstyle, eh?’ And he gave a hearty laugh. ‘Come on, let’s build up this fire or we’ll freeze to death before we’ve even been introduced!’
We scrunched up newspapers and added some kindling. Nonno lit a match and we sat back to watch the flames leap up, dazzling the room.
In the crackling silence I watched Nonno and Nonna. There was a tension between them, like dogs circling each other, and Nonna’s open smiling face was pinched, and wary.
‘Roberto,’ Nonno said my name like an announcement, ‘there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
I heard Nonna’s sharp intake of breath. ‘Now? What are you doing?’ she hissed. Nonno just raised his hand, like God in one of Michelangelo’s paintings. I was beginning to think he must be hard to live with.
Nonno got up and disappeared into the stairway. In a minute he came back, followed by a tall, slim girl.
As she walked into the circle of firelight I felt all the breath rush out of my body. My mouth fell open and for a moment I felt dizzy, as if I might faint. I was looking into a mirror. There, on this girl, was my long nose and pointy chin, with a dimple in the middle, just like mine. Her chest was narrow, too, but softened by two small breasts that rose like tiny hills under her blue jumper. Her legs were what you’d call slim (skinny, I realised, was okay on this girl) and her ankles were as fine as a race-horse’s. It was like looking at a female version of myself. And this version, I thought, looked better than the original.
‘Roberto,’ Nonno said now, looking from me to the girl, ‘I hope this will be a pleasant surprise for you. We have been waiting for this moment for many years. I would like to introduce you to Angelica – your twin sister.’
‘What?’
The girl’s face was quite calm. Her mouth smiled.
‘What are you talking about? How could I have a sister?’ I felt cold and in shock, as if I’d been in some kind of accident.
Suddenly the room grew boiling and hectic, and everything pressed in on me till I couldn’t breathe.
I rushed outside and took a lungful of icy air. It cut across my chest like a knife and I looked up to see the sky measled with stars. There were too many, and the sky looked too huge, as if it would come tumbling down hard as concrete any minute, and smash everyone below.
‘Roberto, come back inside, you’ll catch your death out there.’ Nonna pulled at my jumper and I stumbled back into the house. She stroked my cheek, and she looked so sad, that even with all this confusion I
wanted to comfort her, without knowing why.
‘We’re going to have dinner now,’ Nonno said briskly. ‘And over our meal I will tell you how it was.’
Angelica sat next to Nonno at the table, and I sat facing her. I couldn’t stop looking at her, it was such a weird sensation. She still hadn’t said anything, and that small smile was still on her mouth as if she’d tacked it up there for politeness’ sake, like a ribbon to go with her dress. Her eyes were lowered demurely onto the table, as she passed the bread and the napkins.
No one spoke until Nonno had finished his pasta. A drop of sauce clung to the end of his moustache, and when he’d neatly wiped his mouth, he began.
‘You and Angelica were born, Roberto, on a cold and wintry day in the apartment you’ve just left at Firenze. Your mother, Cornelia, had been living across town with your father, but she came back to us to have her babies, to be with her mother at this important time. We all rejoiced when she produced two black-haired healthy babies. Your father smoked his first cigar, and he coughed like a coal miner, poor man! Then we toasted your health with an excellent ’49 port. Ah yes, you babies were as alike as two peas in a pod.’
‘But Roberto’s hair was a little lighter,’ Nonna interrupted.
Nonno glared at her, and she was silent. He was beginning to get on my nerves.
‘To continue the story,’ he said loudly, looking around the table. ‘Life went smoothly for your mother and father, Roberto, in those first years. You twins seemed connected in an extraordinary way. When one of you awoke, so did the other. If one of you stirred in a dream, the other moaned in his sleep. You began to speak at the same time and when you could walk your mother would find one of you in the morning, curled up in the other’s bed. And then, when you were both three, something terrible happened. Something we were all dreading, and hoping would never come true.’ Nonno paused and a log exploded in the fireplace, making me jump.
‘What? What happened?’ He was like the ancient mariner, making sure his audience were all suitably attentive. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘just tell me, will you, and leave the drama. This is my life you’re talking about. Our lives!’ I looked across at Angelica, silently pleading with her to agree or make some sign. But she just stared back at me, that half-secret smile on her lips. She was beginning to annoy me as much as Nonno. She might look like a sister but she sure didn’t act like one.
Power to Burn Page 5
