Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  She thought that having the desire to be fine and replete and happy was half the battle. There was pleasure to be found in little things. She remembered her red glass bowl. She would move it to the other end of the hallway and see how it looked. She did have the aspiration to be fine, she reminded herself; she had been cultivating it for years. It all seemed very tragic to the little British girl at this moment, but she would get over it. That too would pass. And what could Chiara tell the child about Daniele that would bring her any comfort? Not a single thing.

  She shifted her position on the hot, hard rock. ‘So what’s the gossip?’ she said.

  Antonio told her about a cardinal from Argentina who had come to visit and been lodged in the Franciscan monastery where he did nothing but complain about the standards of hygiene. He claimed there were dog hairs on the carpet in his room, which was ‘a palatial suite’, according to Antonio, ‘worthy of the pope himself.’

  ‘What would our patron say if he could see this?’ the cardinal had asked the abbot, who had refrained from reminding the venerable man that St Francis had been rather fond of animals.

  Chiara wondered briefly about monastic cells and whether they had gone out of fashion, about what Argentina–where she had never been but where she had distant relations–might be like. What if the girl telephoned again while she was sitting listening to Antonio’s prattle? She held still, telling herself again it was for the best. She became so conscious of not moving, of clamping down on the previous night’s conversation, that it was as if she were sitting on a volcano about to erupt. She could feel its heat beneath her buttocks.

  She sprang to her feet and took a step forward. Daniele’s daughter, she thought. He had a child. She suddenly remembered the name from the mother’s letter. Kelly. Edna Kelly.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ Antonio said in his mild way.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said and bent to kiss him. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  At home, she telephoned the international enquiry service. There was a whole page of Kellys in Cardiff. She needed the first initial. No E. Kelly was listed.

  ‘Can you read out all of the addresses?’ Chiara asked.

  She would recognise it if she heard it, she was sure. After all, she had written it on the envelope, and so there must be some trace somewhere in her memory.

  ‘This is a service for telephone numbers, not for addresses,’ the operator said.

  She would wait in, she decided. She could work just as easily at home and she would be on hand to receive the girl’s call, should she phone.

  On the morning of the third housebound day, Assunta arrived to do the cleaning.

  ‘Saints in heaven,’ she exclaimed as she appeared at the kitchen entrance, buttoning up her housecoat.

  Chiara twisted round from the window; she was hanging half out of it, smoking. ‘Good morning, Assunta,’ she said. ‘I’ll be working at home today.’

  Assunta flapped her hand in front of her face and coughed ostentatiously. Chiara quickly stubbed out her cigarette in the tin she was using as an ashtray. It was full to overflowing, she noticed with dismay. She went over to the stove and lit the gas underneath the Moka pot.

  Assunta had taken hold of the door and was pumping it back and forth to create a current of air. The hand-flapping was inadequate to disperse the fug, it seemed.

  ‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ Chiara said.

  ‘But, signora, what has been going on here?’ Assunta said.

  Over the previous days, Chiara had carted the book manuscript about, laying it out in different sites, reading snatches but without taking in the words. She had made sporadic calls to International Enquiries in the hope of finding a more amenable operator, as well as occasional pointless and dispiriting forays into the junk room. Not only had she failed to find the letter, she hadn’t even located the main bulk of Daniele’s leftover belongings. The wooden crates packed with his clothes, books, records, his first trumpet, the paraphernalia that was left in his room when he fled. There was no trace of them at the back of the junk room where she had always confidently imagined they were stored.

  She had taken up smoking again with a reckless and renewed fervour, even getting up in the early hours to pace the flat and puff furiously or lighting up while still in bed so that the bedclothes stank of smoke. In the mornings, when she woke contorted and bound up in sweaty sheets, she coughed as if her innards were going to come out. Still, none of this was any business of Assunta’s.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ she said.

  ‘But, signora, you never smoke in the house,’ Assunta said.

  Sometimes Chiara played with the notion that Assunta was not who she seemed but was really the novelist Elsa Morante. She imagined that Assunta, once around the corner away from the house, would slip off her crimplene jacket and put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Like Morante, Assunta had the same untamed bush of hair cut into a rough page-boy, the same wide cheekbones and the same knowing expression. Assunta’s imperious air was at odds with her status.

  Simone couldn’t see it. She called Assunta ‘Mamma Roma’ and said she was a woman of the people. But because sometimes Chiara thought that Assunta might indeed really be Morante on an undercover assignment, researching her new book, or on her uppers and without other more marketable skills, she was particularly careful not to treat her with undue deference.

  ‘I do sometimes,’ she said. ‘If I feel like it.’

  She busied herself at the stove and started to cough. The raucous, phlegmy seizure took her by surprise. This time she couldn’t stop. She stood hawking and croaking, grasping at the work surface for support. Tears streamed down her face as she retched and choked. Assunta started whacking her on the back, but it wasn’t an obstruction that could be easily cleared. Then Assunta pushed a chair into the back of Chiara’s knees and she flopped down onto it, bent double, made a last gravelly scraping noise and sat back up, tentatively.

  ‘Signora Ravello,’ Assunta said. ‘This won’t do.’

  ‘I know,’ Chiara said.

  She took herself off to the doctor, leaving Assunta with a phonetic transcription of a message to enunciate if a non-Italian speaker should phone. ‘Signora is out. Call after midday.’

  Doctor Bruni had retired. His replacement was new, young and enthusiastic. He asked her about diet and sleeping patterns. He gave her some pills to help her relax but warned her they didn’t mix with alcohol. He tapped her chest and lifted her shirt to thump her on the back and listen to her lungs. Then he said, with utter compelling gravity and in words she didn’t like to contemplate fully, that she really must stop smoking, that the other things would pass, and that there was nothing else wrong with her. That it sounded as though the damage to her lungs was not irremediable. He could detect no signs of emphysema. She was a bit underweight, but that was prob­ably to do with her metabolism and not a cause for worry.

  No more half-measures, she decided on the way home. She would quit immediately. It would give her something to think about, other than the girl. She smoked her very last cigarette with her cappuccino at Gianni’s bar, sitting outside in the sunshine. The chef from the restaurant on the corner was standing in the alley diagonally opposite her, smoking. He nodded across before grinding out the cigarette end beneath his heel and disappearing back inside. She was going to have to forgo more than the actual cigarettes, she saw. It was the whole community of smokers. Those companiable pauses between tasks.

  Oh Antonio, she thought with a pang. Their mid-morning outings to the café near Ponte Sisto. How could those continue without the cigarettes? For a moment, the sensation of loss she felt was as intense as if giving up smoking meant giving up all savour and delight and friendship.

  She hadn’t smoked that cigarette with sufficient ceremony, she realised. She ordered an espresso and a vin santo, waiting until Gianni brought them out before lighting up once more.

  ‘This is my last cigarette ever,’ she told him.

  ‘Then I will join you if I may,’
he said.

  He snapped his fingers, told the boy to bring him a coffee and settled into the chair beside Chiara. The waiter from the restaurant on the corner appeared with a watering can and doused the little bay trees that were lined up outside in pots. Their dark green leaves shone as if they had been polished.

  Chiara was trying to endow the cigarette with significance, to smoke it in a weighty and contemplative way.

  ‘Do you know what the doctor said to me?’ she said.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Smoke or live, your choice.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Gianni said. ‘That is hard. They do say it’s very bad for you, this smoking business.’ He blew smoke out in rings that curled up between them. ‘But I’ve always found it a great comfort.’

  ‘Me too,’ Chiara said.

  Across the way, a tabby cat emerged from the alley and lapped at the pools of spilt water around the plant pots.

  When Gianni’s had reopened after the war, she used to bring Daniele for a frullata here. She recalled his legs dangling when he sat on the stool at the bar.

  ‘Do you remember Daniele?’ she said and turned to see Gianni’s face change, his jaw set.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ he said.

  What had she been thinking?

  For your sake, signora, I won’t prosecute, Gianni had said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  She handed Gianni the half-full packet of cigarettes to distribute as he saw fit. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  On the way home Chiara made a deal. If I keep off the fags, then, on the third day from now, the girl will ring again. If she doesn’t, then it wasn’t meant to be, and I will resume my life.

  If the girl rang, she would allow herself one conversation with Daniele’s daughter. Just one.

  Assunta had all the windows and doors propped open and was scrubbing the kitchen floor with some lemony-scented product. She had stripped and changed the bed. The washing machine was juddering away in the bathroom, and there was a soapy, sudsy smell. No one had rung.

  Chiara told Simone she was sick, needed solitude and would telephone her when she was recovered. For the next three days, she wandered around her home as if she were a ghost haunting its corners. She worried and fretted over where Daniele’s belongings might be, but this led to no useful or constructive form of action. The lack of cigarettes was a hole into which her life was falling. Everything was loss. There was a denuded feeling to the apartment, she noticed as she paced its confines, pushing her way to its very boundaries, plunging into her dressing room and parting the clothes hanging there to stare at the blankness of the white wall beyond. She tunnelled right to the back of the junk room, clambering under and through the legs of a folded-down, gate-leg table and then scrambling back out, fearful that the phone would ring and she wouldn’t get to it in time.

  She had the sensation that the empty space where Daniele’s possessions should have been was spreading outwards. It was a sort of existential emptiness and therefore unchecked by the abundance of solid things in the flat–the mass of both inherited and acquired furniture, the objets d’art, the glass collection, the paintings and the books, the draperies, wall hangings, shelves, mirrors, clothes and cloth, the knick-knacks. Concentrating on her work was unthinkable. She couldn’t even read a book.

  She patrolled the apartment or lay listlessly on the sofa, ­listening to the radio turned low. There had been an attack on the Rome office of the Italian Social Movement, the new ­fascist party. In Milan a grenade thrown at the police ­headquarters had killed four people and injured forty.

  There were suggestions of secret service involvement and complicated double bluffs.

  She was lying there one time, staring vacantly at the piece of green chenille that covered the side-table the radio stood on, when she noticed, as if for the first time, that the little low table was in fact a box. The sight of it shook her. She didn’t need to lift off the heavy radio and remove the chenille to know that this was her old strongbox, where she used to keep the jewellery she had inherited from Nonna. She didn’t need to, but she did it anyway, whipping the cloth away as if to catch the box unawares the way it had caught her, squatting there for who knows how long, posing as something it wasn’t.

  ‘I’m in trouble, Ma,’ Daniele had said.

  Ma. He’d picked it up from some American film. He owed money. Such a lot of money. A mountain of promissory notes.

  ‘If I don’t pay today,’ he said, ‘the notes will be sold on and the next debtors won’t be… ’ He looked blankly at her, swallowed. ‘So understanding.’ He was quoting someone.

  ‘I could sell the furniture,’ she said, casting about.

  ‘Nobody wants this kind of thing any more,’ he said. ‘All these knobbly, heavy wooden things. It’s the 1960s. Haven’t you noticed? People are ripping this stuff out and throwing it away. It’s junk.’

  He was right. Formica was all the rage.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I know what to do.’

  She fetched the little key from the kitchen jar and ran to her bedroom where she kept the strongbox under her bed. It contained the string of pearls; the gold and pearl earrings like gold leaves that sat on the lobe with a pearl, like a dewdrop, in the centre; the diamond and sapphire brooch; the amethyst tiepin that must have been her nonno’s and probably wasn’t worth anything much; Nonna’s rings–her wedding ring (she must have donated some other less precious one when Mussolini called for Gold for the Fatherland in 1935); and her eternity ring set with tiny diamonds. The rings were too big for Chiara’s fingers, but she had kept them because one day Daniele might marry, and she would pass these on to his wife, but that didn’t matter now because the present need was greater.

  He called ‘Ma’ after her, ‘Wait, Ma,’ but he didn’t follow her.

  She was thinking, this would have to be it, everyone was always telling her to stop bailing him out, and this would be the very last time, truly the last time, and he would have to mend his ways. She had already given him her father’s precious gold ring, but it had disappeared from his finger.

  She dragged out the strongbox. It was empty except for a scrap of paper, saying, ‘Ma, IOU.’

  He was sitting with his head in his hands when she returned to the salon. For once, she could think of nothing to say. She did not fill the silence.

  ‘Have you got anything else?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve had everything,’ she said.

  He told her he was done for.

  And here was the strongbox under her nose all the time. Still empty.

  At night she took the sleeping pills and dropped into black unconsciousness. It wasn’t sleep as such, but sleep’s deformed sibling.

  By the third day Daniele’s daughter and cigarette abstinence had become inextricably entwined. Chiara was gasping for a phone call.

  ‘Signora Ravello,’ the girl said in her tentative, weepy way. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you again.’

  And Chiara, instead of delight or vindication, felt a sweeping irritation. A little voice like an insect near her ear pointed out that this might be to do with the nicotine craving, but she swatted it away.

  ‘Yes?’ she said as if she were a very busy person who could hardly spare a moment, instead of someone who had been waiting for this call for days and who had put the rest of her life entirely on hold.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ the girl said. ‘I know you were only his landlady, but,’ she dropped her voice, ‘Daniele Levi really was my father.’

  Chiara allowed herself again to be thus relegated. She had no intention of telling the girl the sad history. She wanted only to hear his name and to speak it again herself. To have news of Daniele, even if it was third-hand and superseded. But she needed a cigarette to accompany the conversation. She felt as though she couldn’t do it alone.

  She made an effort to concentrate on this unknown girl in faraway Wales, whispering stories of things that had happened before her own birth but under C
hiara’s nose, that she knew about and Chiara didn’t. The girl was explaining how Daniele had come to meet her mother, and Chiara was thinking, I remember that dreadful winter, Rome covered in snow and ice. And then after the thaw, Daniele was always zooming off on that motorbike he used to borrow. She knew he went too fast on the bends.

  ‘Drive carefully,’ she used to say.

  ‘Super careful,’ he would say.

  Sometimes before he left, he would pick her up and spin her round. Had she glimpsed him with the blonde girl, zooming down Via dei Cappellari on the bike? Oh, that was the summer he had been sweet again. Yes.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said, tuning back in to the girl.

  Although it was daytime and light outside, the girl’s subdued tone gave a nocturnal, furtive feeling to the conversation, so that Chiara pictured her huddled in a darkened room.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Wait a tiny moment.’ Chiara went and fetched herself a stool from the kitchen so that she could sit down to listen. ‘Go ahead, Maria,’ she said, thinking what a most Christian name for Daniele’s child.

  ‘Was he handsome? My mum said he was,’ the girl said.

  He was beautiful. He could be ugly.

  ‘Yes, I suppose he was,’ Chiara said, ‘quite handsome. And fair-haired, which is much admired here.’

  ‘I’m fair,’ the girl said excitedly. ‘What work did he do? How did he earn his living? Do you know?’

  Chiara cast about. Theft. Extortion. Delivery boy for criminals. Dealing. Or worse. But that summer, the summer of 1956, he had acquired a little car and he had done some deliveries for contractors. That’s what he said. She hadn’t enquired too closely. It seemed at the time to be gainful employment and almost honest.

  ‘He had a driving job,’ she said carefully. ‘And he was studying at the university.’ He was enrolled at least. He might have gone to a lecture for all Chiara knew. ‘Philosophy,’ she added.

  ‘Philosophy,’ Maria breathed, as if entranced. ‘Why did you,’ she paused, audibly swallowed, ‘why did you write that it wasn’t known if he was dead or alive?’