Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  The file containing all the scant documents she had relating to his family was hidden between the mattress and the springs of her bed.

  ‘I’ve been exploring my Jewishness,’ he said.

  She nodded dumbly, afraid to speak.

  ‘How come we never go to the ghetto?’ he said.

  ‘Why would we?’ she managed to say, as lightly as she could.

  She went to check that the file hadn’t been moved. Until she heard his voice at the door, she hadn’t realised he was behind her.

  ‘What have you got there?’ he said.

  There was nothing she could do. She had always intended to tell him, sooner or later, when the time was right. That was why she had kept the file. She wouldn’t have chosen this moment, but it seemed the moment had chosen her. She had thought he had some notion already, and she owed it to him or what was it, she couldn’t really remember now her reasoning and justification, but anyway, the time had come. Perhaps she just wanted to unburden herself of a secret.

  He sat beside her on the bed and he seemed all right. He said he was. The relief was immense.

  Then he went out to the shop for her, to buy some pasta, and he didn’t come back for two days.

  He had been lying there in darkness until they had blundered in and switched on the light, she and Simone, not knowing he was there, that he must have come home while they were out searching.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Simone had said. ‘Why didn’t you at least telephone? We’ve been out of our minds with worry.’

  He shrugged, then made a dismissive noise, indicating that he wasn’t going to tell them where he had been; that it was no business of theirs.

  ‘You’re an ungrateful little shit, sometimes, you really are,’ Simone said to him.

  ‘Yes, that’s me. Ungrateful piece of shit,’ he had replied and he had raised an eyebrow at them both as if he didn’t care at all.

  And Chiara had never explained to Simone, either at the time or afterwards, what it was that had sparked his disappearance. She had let Simone think whatever she thought, that he was just wayward.

  She should have destroyed the file and kept her mouth shut.

  She shook her head. She searched for some happier Simone–Daniele moments and an array presented themselves: the nuns, the chicken on the balcony, the gladiator shield, the jigsaw, that day in the park. They were all from early on. She remembered the very first time they had met, Simone and Daniele. There, on a street in Trastevere in 1944, waiting in a line outside the horse-butcher’s. She and Daniele back in Rome from the hills, two little scavengers in a city of scavengers. They had eaten risotto bianco together, and a slow-cooked horsemeat stew.

  The memory of that day, of Daniele sitting on Simone’s lap and the way she had murmured something in his ear, reminded Chiara anew of Simone’s capacity for acceptance. Daniele could be difficult, errant, absent, but Simone did not take it personally. When he had first discovered drugs and Chiara had panicked, Simone had turned up with a present for him, a battered second-hand trumpet.

  ‘Perhaps this will keep you out of trouble,’ she had said.

  His first public performance was at a Christmas concert in the pontifical college. Chiara was nervous. She didn’t think he was ready. It was mostly a carol concert, but a short jazz section had been inserted in the middle. Daniele’s solo came at the end of this. He stepped forward. He was fifteen and by then he was wearing his hair slicked back. He kept his eyes down, raised the trumpet to his lips and blew. The noise it emitted was raucous, cacophonous, all the notes jangling. He played with a wild abandon, bending his knees and puffing out his cheeks. Chiara felt her face freeze into a mask of humiliation. Was he deliberately playing the wrong notes? Sabotaging the performance? When he finished, there was a silence in the hall.

  Then Simone leapt up, clapping and shouting ‘Bravo’ and stamping her feet.

  Chiara, after a second’s delay, followed her lead and as the two of them clapped and whistled, a smattering of other people, perhaps thinking that they must have witnessed something avant-garde and not wanting to seem philistines, joined in. Up on the stage, Daniele looked at the audience for the first time and gave a little bow. His face was flushed and his dark eyes shone.

  ‘You liked my improvisation then?’ he said afterwards.

  ‘Breathtaking,’ Simone said. ‘Keep shaking us out of our complacency.’

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Signora Ravello?’ It was the same person as before. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said in her papery voice. ‘I think you knew Daniele Levi.’

  Chiara’s head thumped. She turned so her back was against the wall for support.

  Knew. Past tense. Was he dead then? He must have gone to an English-speaking country, and now he was dead. Of course he was dead. What use pretending that she hadn’t suspected as much? No matter the damage done, he would have contacted her if he were alive. Ten years and never a word. Was it an overdose? Or had he had an accident? But he was dead and this was …

  Who was this? This was the British police or some other official who had traced her. How? Because on his identity card or another document, she was listed as his next of kin. Of course.

  No, that couldn’t be it. Because on his identity card, his name was Daniele Ravello but this person had said Levi. Daniele Levi.

  Her heart trembled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, cautiously.

  There was a great release of breath at the other end of the line. ‘Oh,’ the woman said.

  Let him not be dead, let him not be dead, please let him not be dead, Chiara thought, and the refrain was as familiar to her as a lullaby. Let him have had a different life elsewhere.

  ‘Sorry,’ the woman said and blew her nose. ‘I am trying to find out about him and I wondered if you could help.’

  ‘Why?’ Chiara said. It sounded brusque. And it wasn’t the right question. But the woman’s words weren’t what she was expecting. Chiara wanted answers, not questions.

  ‘Because, I have just recently discovered, just been told… ’ The voice faded away again.

  ‘Pardon? Can you speak more loudly?’ Chiara said. She too sounded tremulous.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t think I’d get through and I haven’t thought properly about what to say.’

  ‘Daniele Levi,’ Chiara said, to help the woman focus.

  She hadn’t spoken that name out loud to another for a very long time. She suddenly grasped that this must be the woman in Cardiff. It gave her a shock. She hadn’t allowed for there being consequences. When she had mailed her letter, it had been a private act, a kind of ritual, reminiscent of when she and Daniele used to climb up the Janiculum hill to their special place where they posted notes to his mother. Like the prayer of an unbeliever and like those long ago notes, the letter had not been sent with the expectation of a response.

  ‘He was your lodger, I think?’

  Chiara bridled at this description of the relationship, but her old instinct around Daniele–to dissemble, withhold, not give anything away–was strong.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He lived here a while. A long time ago.’

  ‘He was my father,’ the woman said, ‘apparently.’

  Chiara put her hand to her chest. She was glad of the closed, solid door of the junk room at her back. Through the wall hanging that covered it, the doorknob was pressing into her spine.

  ‘Signora Ravello. Are you there?’ the woman said.

  ‘What did you say?’ Chiara asked.

  She said it again.

  The other person wasn’t a woman with a young voice, but a girl, Chiara realised. As she struggled to grasp what she was being told, she allowed herself to slide down the wall so that she was sitting on the floor. The place at the end of the hallway, where the lights danced when the afternoon sun shone and where she had thought she might display her red bowl, was dark.

  It was impossible, what the girl was saying. It didn’t make sense. Da
niele couldn’t have fathered a child in Wales.

  And then she thought, with an implacable clarity, even if he had, what was it to her? Hadn’t she done with all that? Hadn’t she closed that door?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

  ‘Do you mean that you don’t think it’s true?’

  An image of the briefcase she used to take to work came into her mind. Calfskin. The click of the catch shutting.

  ‘I don’t see how it could be,’ she said, making her voice dismissive and cold.

  ‘But why would my mother lie?’ the girl asked and started to cry.

  Chiara had no answer to that. She listened to the unknown foreign child weeping. After a while she said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help.’

  ‘Sorry to have bothered you,’ the girl said snuffily through her tears, and hung up.

  Chiara stayed put. Asmaro emerged from the deep shadows at the end of the hallway and stepped delicately into the circle of her lap. Chiara stroked him absent-mindedly, staring at the photograph hanging on the wall opposite, of her mother and father on their wedding day, until her eyes glazed over.

  A conversation with Daniele came into her mind. They had gone out on the hunt for supplies. Some soldiers had come past, and she had tugged him into the antiquarian bookshop in the street behind San Filippino, out of their path. They had gone right to the back of the long, narrow store where there was a fusty smell of old magazines. She had picked up a book of photographs of Rome taken in the first three and a half decades of the century and flicked through it, showing him pictures and naming the buildings. At one point he had put out his hand to stop her turning over the page and mumbled something.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said, but he hadn’t repeated whatever he had said. He had only just started to speak again after three months of silence, but his words were still sparse.

  She thought he had said, ‘Mamma.’

  The photograph was of an imposing statue of a woman on horseback. Chiara read the caption out loud, discovering that it was a monument to Anita Garibaldi, the wife of Italy’s national hero, and that it had been erected on the Janiculum hill in 1932.

  ‘Have you been there?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Shall we go one day?’ she said. ‘You and me?’

  But he had just blinked at her and she saw he had retreated into himself. Quickly, she had turned the page to distract him.

  There was a photograph of the synagogue just after it had been completed in 1904 with great empty spaces around it where now there were buildings.

  ‘Do you know where that is?’ she had said.

  He remained silent. She thought he hadn’t recognised it as the place where he had grown up and lived all his life until very recently, but then he ran his finger across the picture, over the empty spaces.

  ‘All the people have gone away,’ he had said. ‘Except for me.’

  ‘No, no,’ she had said and started to explain that this was a picture of how it had used to be, not a vision of now or the future.

  He had turned to her, not meeting her eye, because he never did at that time, but talking to her solar plexus instead. ‘Are there more people dead than alive?’ he had asked, his tone conversational.

  It wasn’t something she had ever thought about. She did a sort of sum, or pretended to, adding in defunct civilisations, the Assyrians and the Etruscans, trying to make a joke of it and faltering when she realised she was referring to genocide and then rallying when she remembered he was only seven and wouldn’t know. All the time she was conscious of the boots outside on the street.

  ‘Yes, I should think there might be,’ she said eventually. ‘Because if you add together all the people who ever lived before now and who have died, there are probably more of them than there are of us who are still alive. But that won’t always be true, even if it is now.’

  He was just waiting for her to get to the answer and didn’t care about her spurious calculations.

  ‘So dead’s the thing,’ he said. There was nothing in his tone to warn her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He lifted his eyes momentarily to her face and then dropped them again. ‘Dead is the way we are, and living is just for a bit. For now.’

  ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ she said cautiously. ‘God might see it like that.’

  ‘Can I go back soon?’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Back to dead again,’ he said.

  ‘Not bad news?’ Simone said as they walked towards the Farnese cinema.

  Something buzzed in Chiara’s head as if Simone were pressing the bell again.

  ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be an offer of work, but unfortunately not.’ She turned to Silvia. ‘Anything going at the university?’

  Silvia worked in the Economics and Commerce faculty at Sapienza.

  ‘Don’t you prefer literary translations?’ Silvia said.

  ‘I can turn my hand to most things, as long as it’s not too scientific and as long as I grasp the concept. Last month I translated a pamphlet for Motorola on the hand-held portable telephone they’ve developed.’

  ‘The what?’ Nando scoffed, as if she were making it up.

  Nando had done something important at the UN but was now retired. He didn’t usually join them.

  The conversation felt stilted. Chiara couldn’t tell whether that was her fault, bringing a suppressed tension to the group, or because of Nando being there. His presence denied Silvia her usual ten minutes of complaining about him.

  ‘I’ll ask,’ Silvia said. ‘If I can even get in the building. The bloody students are occupying it again.’

  A rich smell of ripe cheese and salami emanated from Ruggeri’s as they passed the corner. The shop was just closing for the day.

  ‘Are we eating afterwards?’ Chiara said. She was ravenous.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll hang around. We’ll just have time for a quick drink and then be on our way,’ Nando said.

  Silvia smiled apologetically and shook her head as if to say, ‘Men, what can you do with them?’

  She was trying to exchange meaningful little glances with Chiara or Simone, an invitation to collude against Nando’s imagined wrongdoings. Chiara didn’t want to join in. If you’re with him, be with him, she thought.

  That’s how she would have been with Carlo, if he hadn’t gone and got himself killed. Even now, after all these years of living without him, she remembered the feel of his hand holding hers when they used to walk in the park at Villa Celimontana. There was a thrill in it, absent when she held her father’s hand, but still, with both, the knowledge of being that other person’s special girl.

  Who will hold my hand now? she used to think, after they died in quick succession, and, How will I walk alone?

  Unannounced, as she crossed Campo dei Fiori with her friends, all Chiara’s dead came crowding in. She turned away from the others as if she were looking in a shop window. She saw Cecilia, face-down in a puddle on a hillside. There was a pain in Chiara’s breastbone and she pressed her fingertips there to try to release the pressure.

  Simone appeared at her side. ‘You and I shall go for a bite, shall we?’ she said, tucking Chiara’s arm into hers. ‘Just the two of us.’

  They walked on behind Nando and Silvia. Leftovers from the morning market, discarded outer leaves of cabbages and lettuces, were strewn outside the shops like a rim of washed-up seaweed. A small boy, contorted at the drinking fountain, was spraying water over the feet of passers-by.

  The film had a far-fetched plot involving extremists kidnapping the president. If it weren’t for the laughter of the others, Chiara would not have known it was meant to be funny.

  The question the girl had posed sprang repeatedly into her mind, despite her efforts to quash it. Why would the girl’s mother lie? And then, she would think again, she didn’t care whether it was true or not. She wouldn’t be made to care. She tried to concentrate on the s
creen, but a hat one of the characters wore reminded her of Daniele’s skullcap and there he was again, lying on his bed with that look on his face that Simone took for insolence. His voice was breaking and when he laughed he sounded like a donkey.

  ‘I haven’t been to the bloody synagogue,’ he said. ‘I found it in that cupboard where you keep stuff. Why would I go to the synagogue?’

  She never found out where he had been that time, but it was the beginning of a spate of absences. He was forever running away and disappearing for days at a time. Later on, after he had gone for good, she discovered that he probably went to Nonna’s abandoned farm, but that didn’t occur to her back then, when he was only a teenager.

  After the film, they went to the bar on the corner of Piazza Farnese, which took them past Chiara’s usual haunt, Gianni’s bar. The others were discussing why so many new films, even the comedies, especially the comedies, Nando said, harked back to the war and the years leading up to it. Chiara lagged behind. A kind of dread had come over her. They sat down at an outside table, but she remained standing.

  ‘What do you think? Nando said, looking up at her. She hadn’t caught the thread of the conversation, but a moment earlier he had said, ‘We haven’t got it out of our system.’

  ‘I think you’re probably right,’ she said.

  In the anonymous dark of the cinema, she had thought perhaps she would mention the telephone call, air it and see what her friends thought, but the idea now made her squirm. This wasn’t the stuff of anecdotes. She had to leave.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten that my author was going to telephone tonight. I must go.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame,’ Nando said.

  Simone was looking at her quizzically. She was going to mention dinner.

  ‘Right now,’ Chiara said with undue vehemence.

  ‘If those Motorola telephones catch on,’ Nando added, ‘you won’t have to go home to pick up a call.’ He laughed, and Silvia belatedly joined in.

  ‘Her secret lover,’ she heard Simone confiding in a stage whisper to the others as she walked away, but for once Simone’s fabrication didn’t make her smile.

  Simone was probably offended, but that couldn’t be helped. Chiara thought she would buy herself pizza on the way back. She made a detour to a place where they sold it by the slice, but there was a short queue, and she couldn’t stand still long enough.