Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  When she got home she poured herself a medicinal glass of Fernet Branca and fetched a packet of cigarettes. She wished she still had the letter from the girl’s mother. It would have provided the address and, perhaps, telephone number but she distinctly remembered putting it in the bin after she had typed her reply. She stood at the kitchen window, blowing smoke at the pale vests and bloomers hanging in the gloom on the neighbours’ line. They often left their washing out overnight. They either didn’t know or didn’t care about the ghosts who would enter such abandoned clothes in the witching hour and haunt their wearers by day. Or so Chiara’s mother had always warned.

  She sipped the syrupy liquid. The idea of a shape-changing ghost sliding between sleeve and flesh, snaking under her armpit, curling around her ribcage, tightening its grip, made her skin prickle.

  The parcel she had put in the junk room jumped into her mind. Perhaps it was only the envelope she had thrown away and she had put the letter among his things. There was no bulb in the light fitting. She hooked the hanging that concealed the door over its pole and groped about in the half-light from the hall. She took the parcel back into the kitchen with her and spread the contents out on the table. The letter wasn’t in the package. She had known it wasn’t.

  She buried her face in his leather jacket. The lining used to hold his scent, but she must have sniffed it all out long ago. She left the trivet there on the table and carried the jacket to the lobby where she hung it up, draping her own coats and jackets over the top. She took the photo to her bedroom and slid it back into position behind the one of her grandparents. The frame was starting to come loose. She pushed it back together, pressing her thumbs on the little pins that held the backing in place. She returned to the kitchen, folded up the brown paper and put it away. That was brief, she thought, that period of ­relative equanimity.

  She sat at the table and tried to picture the letter from Cardiff. What came to mind, though, was the first of the letters that Daniele wrote to his mother. He had made five copies and they posted four of them in secret places around the ghetto. The fifth, the one Chiara had retrieved, he left at the Anita Garibaldi monument. She knew it off by heart.

  Dear Mamma,

  The lady gave me a chicken. His name is Cluck.

  She had them still, all those letters. She used to pore over them, thinking they would provide a clue. They were in a box somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. Probably at the back of the junk room.

  The phone rang, and Chiara leapt. It was only Simone.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ she said.

  Chiara assured her that she was.

  ‘Something will turn up,’ Simone said.

  Chiara didn’t know what she meant. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘And if it doesn’t, you can always sell off another bit of your flat.’ After a moment in which neither of them spoke, Simone added, ‘That was meant to be a joke.’

  Chiara realised that Simone really thought she was worried about money and work. Better that way, she thought. She tried to join in.

  ‘Or I could take a lodger.’ She winced.

  ‘You haven’t really got room for a lodger, have you? You’ll have to find yourself a rich paramour instead.’

  Chiara chuckled obligingly.

  ‘I told Silvia and Nando you’d got a secret lover,’ Simone said. ‘And they believed me.’

  An image of Daniele walking hand in hand with a blonde girl along a walled lane flashed into Chiara’s mind. The girl swooned into him as they walked, and she knew they were lovers. She wondered whether she had seen them together one time from a bus.

  ‘You haven’t, have you?’ Simone said.

  ‘Haven’t what?’

  ‘Taken a lover.’

  ‘You’ve found me out,’ Chiara said, then lowered her voice. ‘I’d better go now. He’s waiting.’

  She thought of Carlo again, the jut of his jaw, his high serious brow. Forever young. If he had lived, he would have been sixty-five years old by now. He might have had white nostril hair, dentures and a wrinkly bottom. They might still have loved each other dearly. She pushed the thought of him away.

  She imagined this new lover in the bedroom. She made him younger. He might be in his mid-fifties perhaps–not too dauntingly young. She gave him a thick head of greying hair and a solid, warm body. She climbed into bed without switching on the light so that she couldn’t see that he wasn’t there, but it made no difference to the crushing absence.

  After a while, she got up once more and padded down the hallway to the entrance hall without putting on the light. She located her new glass bowl on the shelf and carried it into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of water, sat down again at the table and lit a cigarette, one of tomorrow’s quota but needs must. The bowl would make a handsome ashtray.

  She had had the kitchen modernised in the early sixties when the apartment had been divided in two. A refrigerator had replaced the zinc icebox, and an electric water-heater had been put in instead of the old charcoal burner. But the layout was unchanged, and the table was the same as in 1943. She pictured Daniele there, standing on the other side. Not Daniele the teenager who had been so much in her thoughts since the girl phoned, nor Daniele as he might be now, a man of nearly forty, but the little Daniele whom she had picked up that day and brought home.

  FOUR

  Chiara is making an early lunch to sustain them on their journey into the hills, to Nonna’s house. She has thrown some pasta into a pan of boiling water and is examining the available ingredients–the end of a cooked ham, a couple of onions–working out what she can concoct. Cooking always provides respite, whatever else is going on. She can descend into the calm of food preparation and provision. It is the one thing that she owns to inheriting from her mother. She is looking at the pink pieces of ham. He doesn’t eat meat from a pig, she thinks. But then, he has to eat. She glances at the windowsill where she grows herbs in pots. It is October, though, and the pickings are thin. The sage has wilted and is dry to the touch. All the juice is squeezed out of everything these days. They live in desiccated times. She feels the soil. It is like dust.

  The child is staring at Cecilia who is circling the table, round and round in her stockinged feet, asking him questions, talking in a babyish voice as if they are both little kids getting to know each other in the playground.

  ‘What’s your name? My name’s Cecilia,’ Cecilia asks the boy as she swishes past and he watches her, goggle-eyed. ‘Ce-ci-li-a,’ she says again, stretching the syllables, opening out her arms and greeting an imaginary audience.

  Chiara can detect the imprint of her own fingers, red and mottled, on Cecilia’s cheek. She had to stop the screaming, she tells herself, but she can still feel the shockwaves from the blow. A stinging in her palm, a burning heat in her own cheeks as if she too has been struck.

  ‘I don’t want it. Take it back,’ Cecilia had screamed on being told that the child was to stay with them and, before Chiara had known it, she had found herself on the other side of the room, her hand had flicked out and she had slapped her sister’s pale cheek so hard that Cecilia’s head had swung sideways and a loose hairpin, flying out, had pinged against the wall.

  ‘Not an it. A he. A little boy,’ Chiara had said.

  Swivelling away, her fists bunching as if spoiling for more, she had hurried from the room, gathering up the child cowering in the doorway, pulling the door to behind them to dampen the gasping sounds Cecilia was now making, bustling the boy along with her here to the kitchen, as if by her haste in fetching him away from the scene, she could lessen its impact. She had pulled out a chair for him, told him to take off his coat and sit, but he remained standing, his arms at his sides, his fists curled as tightly as her own had been a moment earlier.

  As she stepped away from him, fetched cutlery from the drawer, filled the pan with water, there stirred within her the near certainty that this child had witnessed and experienced more violence in this last two hours than ever in
his life before. Despite the privations, despite the laws that had made him and his family into second-class citizens, he came from a home where kindness and respect prevailed, and hands were not raised in anger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when Cecilia came in a few minutes later. ‘I’m sorry that I smacked you.’

  But Cecilia, who had pulled out the remaining hairpins so that her hair hung loose and wild, took no notice and embarked on her ungainly sliding waltz instead.

  There is a lightness to the onion in Chiara’s hand that tells her it will be mushy inside. The magnitude of what she has done washes over her again, and she stands there, at a loss. The face of the boy’s mother comes into her mind. She clutches for the name that was on the tag that she tore out with her teeth.

  ‘Signora Levi,’ she pronounces and nods at the boy who looks up at her with luminous eyes, ‘your mother, Signora Levi, asked me to look after you while she is away. She said you were a good boy.’

  Cecilia flows about the kitchen, opening out her arms and closing them as if she is swimming. Chiara keeps her focus on the boy as Cecilia brushes past.

  ‘Take off your coat and sit at the table now, like a good boy,’ she says.

  And he does.

  ‘Now,’ she says, encouraged, ‘we will pretend that your name is not Levi any more, because the bad soldiers are looking for all the people called Levi.’

  She stares at him, wondering how much he understands. He stares back.

  ‘Just for now, your name,’ she casts about, ‘is Gaspari.’

  It was her fiancé Carlo’s surname. As she articulates Carlo’s name, she pictures him leaning out of the window of the bus that took him away into internal exile for anti-fascist activities. She sees him again, kissing his hand and blowing the kiss to her, and she has the fleeting sensation of that kiss finally reaching its destination.

  ‘Oh,’ she says and runs her onion-tasting fingers over her lips, trying to catch and hold the feeling.

  ‘I’ll be back before you have time to miss me,’ he had said.

  But he had been wrong. If they had married before he left instead of just getting engaged, if she had been with child, then their son would have been more or less the age of this little boy, who now turns from her and resumes his examination of Cecilia.

  Usually, it gets on Chiara’s nerves when Cecilia behaves in this baby-girl fashion, but now she’s grateful, because it seems that Cecilia is making an effort, reaching out to the child. Perhaps, unlikely though it seems, Chiara was right to slap her. Perhaps she should have done it years ago.

  She lowers her gaze to the chopping board, picks up her knife and slices sharply through the first onion. Inside, as she expected, it is soft and half rotten. Cecilia undulates by, holding a hand now to her scorched cheek, chanting her own name to the tune Chiara invented twenty years ago or more.

  ‘Cecilia Teresa Ravello, tra-la-la-la-la,’ she sings as if mocking, but her sister lacks that kind of guile.

  Chiara chops the onions carefully, cutting out the soft brownish-green parts and throwing them away but not wasting even the tiniest sliver of what is usable. There is no oil. There will be oil up in the hills, she thinks, but stops her mind from floating off there. There is the journey to manage first. She throws the onion pieces in with the pasta, just for the last minute, to soften them. She drains the pasta and tosses it with the pieces of ham. She snaps off some sage leaves, crumbles them in to add flavour. There are plenty of dried chillies left, but do children eat chillies? She doesn’t know. She won’t risk it.

  The boy is mesmerised by Cecilia. ‘Daniele,’ he whispers.

  ‘How old are you?’ she says.

  ‘Nearly eight,’ he says.

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. That is seven,’ she says.

  ‘Seven,’ he repeats.

  ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ Cecilia says.

  She pauses beside Chiara, leans in and sniffs the cooking pot. Her thick, black hair hangs down, masking her face. Chiara can smell her sister’s hair, perfumed and dark.

  ‘Two little sisters,’ the boy says. His voice is louder this time. ‘Another one coming soon,’ he adds as Cecilia curls away and swishes round the room again.

  And it seems that perhaps, after all, it will work like this. That Cecilia and the boy, both mistreated and manhandled by Chiara, will become allies.

  And Chiara, what will her role be? Of course, she will be the wicked stepmother, half-provider, half-tyrant, and they, her two misfit children, will gang up and comfort each other, whisper secrets and turn their stony faces towards her when addressed. And she will have to bear it and find her comfort elsewhere if she can. Or do without.

  Cecilia pauses and takes hold of the chair-back opposite the boy. She does a clumsy plié and then lifts one foot, pointing it out to the side. She used to be a good dancer when she was little, before the fits.

  ‘My mamma is dead,’ she says sweetly. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’ She leans towards the boy, her face an inch from his, and says, ‘What about yours?’

  Chiara’s heart seems to stop for a second. She stands holding the two-handled pot in front of her, the steam rising and with it the pungent scent of the sage, so that she is wreathed in a herb-infused mist. Through this she observes the other two.

  The boy’s mouth opens but no sound emerges. Chiara doesn’t know what understanding shivers through him in that moment, but she sees it enter his jaw and stiffen it, clamping his teeth together. The silence inflates, occupies the corners of the room and travels up to the ceiling.

  Then Cecilia punctures it. She starts to hum a tune. It’s that song from the musical she likes, about the path through the wood.

  They leave Rome the following day. On the first train Cecilia dozes and the boy stares out of the window with watchful, uncomprehending eyes. Chiara has given him his own bag to carry, her cloth one. The strap is too long for him and the bag, stuffed with an old blanket and a picture book dated 1921, hangs down almost to his knees when he walks. It lies on his lap now and on top of it is a hat with earmuffs that she found in a chest of drawers in her grandparents’ room. An ancient hat that might have belonged to her own father when he was a child. She planted it on his head.

  ‘To keep your ears warm,’ she said. He snatched it off.

  Cecilia too holds her hat on her lap, a felt hat with a brim that matches the grey tailored suit with navy piping that she is wearing and that she herself made.

  Chiara looks at the face of her sleeping sister, so innocent and unblemished. The mark on Cecilia’s cheek where Chiara slapped her is still faintly visible. It puts her in mind of the time Cecilia had a fit of such violence that it knocked a picture from the wall that struck Chiara as it fell. It was the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that used to hang over their bed when they were children and lived with their mother and father in the apartment in San Lorenzo.

  In the picture, Jesus wore a white robe with a red cloak slung over one shoulder. His right hand, the wound from the nail clear to see, was held up in blessing; his left hand pulled back the folds of his cloak to reveal his radiant heart, surrounded by a crown of thorns, like a thicket, or a cage of barbed wire. Above his sacred heart was a golden cross, the same colour as the border of his white robe as well as that of the emanations, like rays of the sun, from the white glow of his halo. His brown and wavy hair came down to his shoulders. His brow was smooth and untroubled, and his cheeks were pink like a girl’s or a very young man’s, but he had a beard and a moustache. He wasn’t in an actual physical place, merely floated in goldenness and light.

  One night, a sharp blow to the face woke Chiara to tumult and chaos as if she were in the middle of an earthquake. She remembers screaming and people coming running. Their maid, Anna Lisa and Nonna, who must have been staying, and another figure she can’t identify although she remembers grey hair–one of the great-aunts on the maternal side, was it, one of those old ladies that got left behind when the family emigrated
. And these women were all making shushing noises, but doing nothing to rescue Chiara, marooned on the jangling island of their bed.

  Then their father was there, the pipe smell of him, his voice cutting through the clamour, calling for calm, calm, for the love of God, leaning over the frothing, fitting creature that had taken Cecilia’s place and plucking Chiara up to tuck her, still shrieking, against his shoulder.

  Beyond him stood their mother who must surely have been the first to speed along the passage but who had frozen there on the threshold while the others had pushed past her into the room. Her long black hair in the lamplight, her white nightie bunched in one hand, her mouth open in a scream that echoed and amplified Chiara’s own, she slumped in the doorway like a stupid, useless girl and not like someone’s mother at all.

  And then Chiara was put in her nonna’s arms, while their father tended to Cecilia.

  There was blood on the sheets, and her mother thought it was the blood of Jesus, his sacred heart bleeding.

  ‘Antonella, look, look at Chiara’s face,’ Babbo said, ‘the frame must have hit her as it fell. It has cut her cheek.’

  But it made no difference. For their mother, Chiara’s face might be bleeding, but Jesus had bled too.

  ‘He turned His face away,’ their mother whispered. ‘It’s the devil in her that hurts Him so.’

  Chiara heard them in the kitchen while Anna Lisa was dressing her wound. Her babbo forbade Mamma from taking Cecilia to the priest, from having this thing done, whatever it was.

  ‘I won’t have it,’ he said. ‘Superstitious nonsense,’ he said. ‘The child has enough torment without that. Give the medicine a chance to work.’

  Their father was going away on business. Anna Lisa had laid all his clean, pressed shirts on the bed, and he was choosing which ones to take. Chiara was helping. She was rolling his ties, furling them like snails, the dark-green one with the red diamonds, the grey one that she preferred.