Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  He waited before beginning these remarks for Marta’s complete attention. She hadn’t put on her blouse again. With her back turned to him she was pouring water into the pot to boil up for the coffee. She looked as she bent down over the gas-ring like a half-peeled pear, the upper half shadowed down the deeply grooved spine, pale, but not very succulent.

  ‘Marta,’ he said, ‘I’m in love. I shall get married. I shall get married for love. I shan’t be able to see you again.’

  The words surprised him as much as if someone else had spoken them, never mind, they had been said and would have to do. There would be time later for the more reasonable remarks he had prepared. Marta was still watching the coffee-pot whose tin lid had begun to chink slightly as it rose with the steam.

  She said, ‘Well, but aren’t you always telling me that you don’t hold with the old conventions and the old way of doing things?’

  Salvatore wondered whether it was possible that he had made part of his prepared speech to her on some former occasion. He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.

  Before he could go on Marta said, ‘But what about the money? How will you manage?’ Seeing him stupefied, she explained, ‘After all, you’re not so very well off.’ She used the old-fashioned term, ‘not in easy circumstances’ and added that she’d seen him taking his own suits to the cleaners.

  ‘Do you mean that you’ve been following me?’ He realized now that women might be murdered for very trivial causes. Marta had perhaps followed him by some means or other as far as the Ricordanza when he had pressed his forehead against the cold pattern of the iron gates. But it was almost equally infuriating to be spied upon at the dry cleaners. Of course, in the first instance, he had naturally followed Marta, or rather he had said, when he first spotted her, ‘May I see you as far as your house?’ How had she looked then? Reasonably pretty, short-sighted even with her glasses, not quite middle-aged yet, biddable, pliant, a ready listener, quite unreluctant, except that the first call on her room was for clients’ fittings. And that, after all, had been three years ago.

  Marta told him that she’d watched him at the dry cleaners in order to understand him better. She went on commiserating with him, in a loud, firm voice. She had seen an article in a magazine about the disgracefully low salaries of hospital doctors in Italy. They could hardly hold up their heads, this writer had said, in comparison with professional people from the rest of Europe. ‘Italian doctors, poor wretches,’ she repeated more gently, shaking her head a little. ‘You know how it’ll be, you’ll have to start married life sharing with your wife’s relations, and that’ll mean a lot of give and take.’

  ‘I haven’t come here to discuss my own future arrangements,’ said Salvatore, ‘I don’t require your advice.’

  ‘Of course, it’s better if you’ve got two kitchens, or even a gas-ring like this one.’

  Bitterness or jealousy would have been tolerable and indeed quite in place, but no-one could mistake her genuine sympathy.

  ‘It’s not as though you had any family of your own in the city, they’re all somewhere down south.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘Somebody must have told me. Yes, Signor Gentilini told me.’

  ‘Have you been out with him?’ That was beyond belief. But Marta, it seemed, had been waiting in the rain one Friday evening at a bus-stop and Gentilini had given her a lift in his car. He had recognized her from seeing her at Frizzi’s. The revelation that these two could have talked about him when he wasn’t there confounded Salvatore. Traitors both. Grasping at what he could remember of his speech, which seemed to be standing by him as his one reliable friend, he began at last on the topic of Italy in 1955 and the need for a new concept of woman’s place in the social structure. Marta confronted him with her arms folded four-square, as though ready for a long conversation with the neighbours on the price of fish.

  ‘It’s the women who hang back, as if they were afraid to give up their subservience. Women! If the world was in their hands we should still be living in caves.’ He had the impression that he was repeating something said by someone else. ‘As long as you agree with an assumption, it will continue to dominate you. Refuse your consent, and you’re free.’

  ‘Like Ingrid,’ said Marta.

  She was looking at the wall just behind his head and he felt compelled to turn round and look at the highly-coloured tear-out of Ingrid Bergman with Roberto Rossellini and their twins.

  ‘If they’d been married the twins couldn’t have been more beautiful,’ Marta said.

  ‘Have you been listening to me at all?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ said Marta. ‘You’re finishing with me, but you don’t want me to take up with anyone else.’

  ‘That wasn’t my meaning. You can’t have thought that was what I meant.’

  Marta turned off the gas under the coffee-pot and sat down heavily in one of her armchairs, letting her head fall sideways so that her face was hidden. He could see the nape of her neck with the thick shining hair, as though she was reaching for him blindly through the back of her neck. The attitude was familiar and Salvatore felt relieved. The money was in its envelope and she had never accused him of being ungenerous, only of being badly-paid. No Frizzi tonight, no struggling in the terribly inconvenient narrow bed in the fitting-room, best to kiss her once firmly on the neck, that will leave both of us with a good opinion of ourselves, she’ll think I couldn’t restrain myself and I shall believe that I’m not a hard man. Marta sat up, put both hands to the back of her head to tidy her hair and asked for a cigarette.

  ‘How old is she, the woman you’re marrying?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Salvatore reflected that she would know soon enough, it would be a matter for the newspapers, and that nothing in heaven or earth would stop his going ahead. There was also the luxury of repeating the name.

  ‘Chiara Ridolfi.’

  ‘Oh, the Contessina. I know her.’

  ‘You don’t!’ Salvatore shouted.

  Twenty-one years earlier Marta had been taken on at Parenti’s for a period of training. Later she had been given a part-time job. Two of the girls she had worked with were still there, one in charge of the staff washroom, the other, who had done much better for herself, a head machinist, and Marta still did a bit of sewing and pressing there at busy times. She had been there on the day of the Ridolfi visit and had seen aunt and niece depart together. It was one of the excitements of the workrooms that the Commendatore might, without giving warning, refuse to ‘make’.

  ‘They walked away together. We could see them in the street. The young girl was crying bitterly.’

  ‘How could you see at that distance?’

  ‘I could tell.’

  ‘Have you the least idea whether she was crying or not?’

  ‘No.’

  Salvatore knew nothing about Parenti except that he now felt an impulse to visit the establishment and fling the aged Commendatore down the stairs.

  ‘You have to take life as it comes,’ she said.

  He gave her the cigarette and the envelope containing the money, to which he had added enough for the last fifteen instalments on her new machine. Marta counted it through twice.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘You’re a good man, doctor. Don’t go for just a moment. My sister will want to say goodbye to you. She must be back by now. She won’t want a good man like you to leave the house without saying a word to him.’ Salvatore was appalled. Why not call them all in, the sister’s husband and children, the friends and acquaintances from Frizzi, the clients, the hairdresser, the tripe-seller from the corner of the street, Gentilini, let it be a farew
ell in style.

  ‘Good bless you and your work,’ said Marta in a deep, serious tone, ‘you will know what I mean by that.’

  ‘I don’t know at all.’ Evidently she was not going to cry, as when she felt like doing so she always took off her glasses. ‘You can cry a little, if you like.’

  ‘That would be boring,’ said Marta. ‘When I first met you, you told me that to be boring was the unforgivable sin.’

  Good God, thought Salvatore, does she think she’s never bored me? The door trembled, and Marta’s sister, broad and highly-coloured, advanced, without knocking, into the room. Salvatore had always been her hero because of his defence of the Inconsolabile. She was violently anti-clerical and thought of him as her ally against the machinations of the priests. Now she flung down a copy of the Nazione, folded at Mimi’s advertisements, seized both Salvatore’s hands, and noisily kissed them.

  ‘Miracle worker, you honour our house.’

  Salvatore told himself that he hadn’t controlled the situation in the way that he had planned because his energies had become fragmented. This in turn was due partly to Marta’s unaccountable reactions and partly because of the image she had left with him of Chiara walking down the via delle Caldaie in tears. Impossible, with an idea like that in one’s mind, to conduct a reasonable conversation with another woman, let alone two others, one of them waving a newspaper at him like a maniac.

  Later that evening Gentilini asked him: ‘How did you get out of the room in the end?’

  ‘I don’t know. Backwards, perhaps.’

  ‘Exits are the most difficult part of life. Still, Marta wasn’t a bad sort. There are a good many worse women than Marta.’ He saw that Salvatore couldn’t as yet have seen the announcements in the Nazione, but thought he would wait a little while longer before mentioning them.

  42

  When Aunt Mad had written her letter to the Monsignore she drove out again to the Ricordanza. Apart from any other concern, the Azienda Autonoma di Turismo had just notified the Count that they were considering the villa for next season’s tour of the most beautiful houses and gardens. This, like Mad’s lost fingers, seemed a tax only to be expected. It was the Count’s business to confer with the gardener and the gardener’s family as to what kind of a front could be put on things. Maddalena only had to prepare them a little.

  She arrived, however, to find only one subject of conversation still. The entire neighbourhood had come to the conclusion that since the Vespa, on the remembered sunny afternoon, had never been seen to go on to Florence, and since it had come from Lo Scampolo, it must certainly in the end have gone back there. The man in question, then, the violator, must have been Toby Harrington. Signor Toby had a black Vespa, no question about that. As a result the Harringtons, who had hoped to live and entertain their friends in a land of smiles, found themselves looked at with resentment and could scarcely get served at the crossroad grocers.

  This fortunate turn of affairs proved to Aunt Mad that she had gone the right way about things. Good intentions, she had always known, justify themselves. In due time, also, it led to the Count’s visit to his nephew, and to Cesare’s message: Let Chiara’s wedding be at Valsassina, but no caterers, and not the Harringtons.

  Part Two

  1

  Cesare had said that it would suit him best to have the wedding in February, before Lent, and before the ploughing and dead-wooding began. Perhaps he had not expected sunshine, but the day was so fine and windless that although there was still snow on the hills they were able, once the fires were lit, to leave the front door open so that the guests could walk in and out of the house as they chose. The almond trees were in full bloom already. Sometimes you do get weather like that in February.

  The battered little church below Valsassina was too small for all the guests to be asked to the wedding and the nuptial mass. It was crowded out, then emptied, and left with a bewildered and dishevelled air, its one bell swinging against the blue sky in its open wooden belfry. From the church and from the Sangallo road the cars streamed up to the farm. Like defending troops the lines of bottles stood ready. Champagne was not served, only the last year’s Reserve, probably the best ever produced at Valsassina.

  So many of these people knew each other, and approached each other, dressed to the nines, at high pitch, that Cesare saw that his first duty was to look after any strangers. Inside the house, in the passageway, he found the enormously tall English girl, strong enough to shoulder a sack of grain, to whom he had been introduced outside the church. She was standing by herself, looking at the painting of a mythological subject on the cassone.

  ‘You’re interested in these paintings, signorina?’

  ‘No, not a bit,’ said Barney.

  ‘Well, we shall soon be sitting down to lunch, then there’ll be no need to look at these things.’

  Barney looked at him sombrely. ‘This is your place, isn’t it?’ Cesare nodded.

  ‘You’re the cousin?’

  With an effort he replied, ‘Yes, I’m the cousin. Today everyone must enjoy themselves.’

  ‘I can’t see why,’ said Barney. ‘I’m not at all sure that Cha ought to marry this man. What do you think?’ He said nothing and she repeated, ‘What do you think?’

  2

  Looking at the photographs of a wedding taken nearly thirty years ago one can’t believe that so many, who now look as they do, once looked like that. This is particularly true of the pictures taken from one end of the tables, down the whole length of them, the guests leaning forwards, most of them with their best faces ready, a few unawares, thinking about something else except themselves. The unselfconscious are likely to be caught in strange attitudes which can now no longer be explained. Professor Pulci, for instance, seems in one of the pictures to be earnestly holding out some dish or other, as though taking up a collection for charity — this was the Professor Pulci who, in 1944, sat gravely checking his catalogues of missing objects, working among broken sewers and gas-mains and after midnight in the candle-lit rooms of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, ignoring both the American Commission for the Protection of Cultural Treasures and its British counterpart, ignoring also the German positions a few hundred yards away in Forteza da Basso. Half of everything she knew about pictures Chiara had learned from him as she grew up without realizing it, seeing him in this house or that, frowning, pointing or explaining. He had been one of her true educators, so too had been the head teacher from her primary school, embittered now because the free school dinners were to be abolished — she was perhaps best avoided by anyone who didn’t feel like discussing this matter — but in the photographs even she looks radiant and is therefore practically unrecognizable. One arm is raised and she seems to be on the point of grasping Bernadino as he waits to serve in his white cotton gloves.

  At another table, the smiles are more controlled. It can be seen that Monsignor Gondi is now on good, if stiffish, terms with Salvatore. The parish priest, a little deaf, is smiling with great geniality. He refuses, however, to be impressed, and wouldn’t have been if a Cardinal or an Archbishop had come to solemnize the marriage. At the opposite end, among the guests from America (though not Chiara’s mother) and from England (though not Aunt Mad’s husband), Mad herself looks unexpectedly cloudy, like one of those images in a ‘spirit’ photograph which is later explained as a fault in the negative. Giancarlo always photographed well, he would have been ashamed not to. He bends towards Signora Rossi, Salvatore’s mother, agreed not (from this angle, at least) to look much like her son. And then Chiara, evidently without a care in the world, so lucky in that she always looked at her best in white, no jewellery, though, not even those small diamonds.

  3

  Annunziata had brought the tablecloths and the best napkins from via Limbo, causing offence to everyone at Valsassina except Cesare, but creating long and narrow spaces of pure starched whiteness, seeming to invite stains, which soon appeared. The fault lay with the generosity of the Tuscan food, with its wealth of
meat and of one sauce only, the salza rossa, as though Abundance was running to meet Need, careless of appearances. Mimi Limentani was asked, ‘Surely you’re forbidden to eat meat?’

  ‘They’ve forbidden me to eat everything, cara. By this time I don’t know what’s going to kill me.’

  4

  Lady Jones had come in default of Barney’s parents. They were escaping in the winter elsewhere. ‘The Count is quite delightful. And his sister, too, of course.’ She looked round restlessly. ‘If only it was Rome, there would be somebody one knew from the Embassy.’

  5

  From Mazzata, only Salvatore’s mother had come. The brothers, the sister, the shoemender, had declined the invitation. Salvatore had expected this, knowing that they would be mortally offended at finding that he had told them the truth. If they had known it was the truth they would have offered him even less for the part-share.

  To his mother he had sent quantities of money for travelling expenses, suggesting that she should ask Sannazzaro to come with her and look after her. This was quite implausible, and as a means of paying Sannazzaro’s fare without hurting his feelings it had evidently failed completely, for the old man had not even written. In church and at the lunch Signora Rossi was being looked after first by the Count, then by Gentilini, and now more successfully still by his wife. The Gentilini children had disappeared to make a nuisance of themselves on the farm. The two mothers, old and middle-aged, recited their trials and sorrows. Sons were so much more trouble to bring up than daughters, yet the reward was greater. Strange to think that there were so many human beings born into the world, millions every day, and yet no two were alike. A mother would always know her own. The more suffering he caused her, the more she would recognize and welcome him. A man has only to look honestly at his mother and he knows himself a child again.