Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  ‘Go on in, signora,’ he panted, ‘I will be with you shortly.’

  Chiara ducked under the half-open shutter into the semi-darkness. She didn’t usually frequent this bar but it had a quiet feel, and a kind of pleasant stuffiness, a closed-in, coffee-scented warmth that took in the tables and chairs, the glass-topped bar, the glasses hanging from racks above it, the bottles behind it, the curved till at its own wooden counter at the far end, and the shelves of cigarettes. Not the sharp, wake-up smell of fresh coffee but something more comfortable and homely. For the briefest of moments she was back in the downstairs room of the house in the mountains, Nonna laying out the cups on the table.

  The boy outside, still wrestling with the shutters, made a sound. It was only a little grunt, but Chiara detected a different note. She hurried outside. He was leaning back at a difficult angle and seemed to be holding the whole weight of the shutter with the bent pole as if it were a fishing rod and his catch an impossibly heavy, giant fish.

  ‘I’ve done it wrong,’ he said.

  She saw he really was only a boy. A plume of black hair, crisp white shirt with an apron over, dark fluff on his upper lip. He looked at her in desperation. He seemed too young to be working.

  ‘What happens if you release it?’ she said.

  ‘It will smash,’ he said in a strained voice, his eyes rolling at her in desperation.

  She was examining the workings, something she’d never done before.

  ‘It will crash and break and Signor Bellucci… ’ His voice rose to a squeak. ‘Bellucci will sack me,’ he said. He made the sound again.

  ‘Let it go,’ Chiara said authoritatively.

  He did so, leaping backwards out of harm’s way for the catastrophe that would ensue, but the shutter rolled back on its runnels fairly quietly to the correct place and stopped.

  ‘I think you have done it,’ she said.

  They went inside, and the boy took up position behind the bar.

  ‘What can I get you, signora?’ he asked.

  As he switched on the espresso machine, wiped down the steam wands, slid the steel portafilter baskets out to check and then slotted them back in, he settled into himself, taking on a more confident air.

  He was called Luca and he was fourteen years old. He was training to be a barman and he had worked there for two weeks. It was an exceptional thing to open up by himself–the boss had telephoned him at home very late the night before to say it was an emergency. Everyone was sick. They were depending on Luca. He had been early that morning to the boss’s house where he had collected the key and been instructed in how to do the shutter, but he hadn’t really understood. He couldn’t connect what the boss had told him with the mechanics of the thing.

  ‘You needed to be shown how to do it properly,’ Chiara said. ‘I think you’ve done very well.’ She had the sudden sensation of being rather good at talking to young people.

  ‘If signora would like to sit at a table.’ He indicated the tables. ‘At no extra charge.’

  ‘I should think not,’ she said, smiling to soften it.

  She scanned the headlines. In America the committee investigating the Watergate scandal was continuing with its hearings, and they were being shown on television. Andreotti had been there, having dinner at the White House with Nixon and Frank Sinatra, a couple of months before. She had seen the photograph on the front page.

  ‘Crooks and villains,’ she said, as the boy placed a steaming cup on the table.

  ‘Excuse me, signora?’ he said.

  ‘Politicians,’ she said, ‘and mafiosi.’

  So much that was hidden. So many broken promises. The government had resigned now, and the Christian Democrats were trying to form a new coalition. Always cobbling deals together, they were. No one seemed to have a vision.

  The cake delivery was at the door. ‘Excuse me, signora,’ the boy said again.

  He and the delivery man unloaded trays of brioches, bread rolls, medaglioni and the thin sliced bread for making sandwiches. She thought about the strange unfathomable winds that blow people one way rather than the other and wondered whether or not it was a good thing for Luca to be training as a barman and what future there was in it.

  ‘Would you like to have your own bar one day?’ she asked after the cake man had left, as Luca was arranging the confectionery behind the glass counter.

  He shook his head wonderingly. She saw that his imagination had not reached that far, and she had disconcerted him.

  He got on with preparing the sandwiches. He said that soon there would be an influx of people on the way to work, and he needed to get them ready now because after that he would be too busy.

  ‘There used to be a bar over there, on the other side of the road and down the street,’ she said.

  ‘In the ghetto,’ the boy said without looking up from his work.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and lapsed into silence.

  The face of a man came into her mind. In fact there were two men, but she only remembered one of them clearly. They had been leaning against the wall. Rather than seeming poised to spring, they looked more ready to saunter away or perhaps casually light a cigarette and smoke it languidly. The one she remembered had dark hair, was close shaven. Nowadays they depicted all German soldiers as blond and Aryan, but it wasn’t so. He was lean and dark with an aquiline nose. It was true that they were mostly meatier than the Italians, but this one, you could have swapped him for one of the people being rounded up, and no one would have questioned it.

  For a moment she allowed herself to imagine it. The tables turned. The persecutors stripped of their uniforms and weapons, and clothed instead in the patched-together outfits of the ghetto inhabitants. The rabbi nudging them forward with the tip of his machine-gun onto the trucks. She had watched a woman with a bundle being stopped. They had bayoneted the bundle and its pathetic contents had spilt out onto the cobbles: her clothes, a Torah wrapped in a pinny.

  ‘Was it that little one with the postbox outside?’ He was mashing tuna with the back of a fork in a glass bowl.

  ‘No. I’m talking about thirty years ago,’ she said.

  ‘But the bar with the postbox is very old,’ Luca said. ‘It must have been there for centuries. On one side it has a real postbox and on the other there is a slot in the wall where you can put money for the orphans.’

  ‘Yes, Bar Toto.’

  Daniele flashed into her mind. She saw his look of ­concentration as he folded the note he had written to his mother into a tiny square and forced it through that slot.

  ‘The one I’m talking about, it’s not a bar any more,’ she said. ‘It’s a sort of shop. A wholesaler selling electrical goods or something like that.’

  She didn’t know why she had mentioned Gennaro’s bar. Poor, brave Gennaro. One bullet to the back of the head in March 1944.

  Luca was waiting for her to say more. She made a show of looking at her watch. ‘I must be off,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you for your help, signora,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

  She paused at the threshold and turned to look back at Luca. A faint undercurrent of the dizziness stirred in her head, and she kept one hand on the door handle. Luca was rinsing glasses now and setting them out upside down to drain on a white cloth he had draped over the counter. She was thinking again about how they used to post those notes to Daniele’s mother, and at the same time about the letter she had sent to Maria’s mother. She seemed to be waiting for a link between the two, a sort of bridge, to manifest itself.

  Luca, aware that she hadn’t quite left, looked up. ‘Make sure you come back another time, signora,’ he said.

  ‘I have a girl from Wales coming to stay with me,’ she announced.

  ‘Wales?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it’s in Great Britain, next to England and Scotland and Ireland. And she’s coming here to learn Italian. She’s not much older than you.’

  ‘You should bring her here,’ he said. ‘If you
come between six and seven in the evening, we do snacks with the aperitifs. We have soft drinks too.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised. ‘I’ll bring her on Tuesday evening if she’s not too tired.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’ He grinned.

  ‘It’s a date,’ she said.

  The street was busy with traffic as commuters, buses and cars rumbled past. In between them she could see the entrance that led to Via del Portico d’Ottavia and the ghetto, but she turned her steps towards the river instead.

  First, she would go to the Basilica of St Cecilia in Trastevere. On a clear-skied day like this one, the light flowing down through the high arched windows made the painted ceiling glow. The effect was uplifting. However, she didn’t go only for that. Under the altar, there was a marble sculpture of the saint, said to be a true likeness done when the tomb was opened a thousand years after her martyrdom and she was found to be intact, the wounds on her neck still fresh. This statue of St Cecilia lying on her side–face turned down towards the earth, her feet bare, her arms in front, her dimpled hands with their ringless fingers softly curled–never failed to touch Chiara. She would go there and light a candle for her sister, and she would make make her peace with the decision to let Daniele’s daughter come. Let it settle within her so there would be no more prevarications.

  Then she would climb up the Janiculum hill, past the botanical gardens, all the way up to the top, to the monument to Anita Garibaldi. Of all the places that Daniele chose to leave notes for his mother, this was the one that they fixed on. Long ago and for many years, she and Daniele used to visit it religiously mid-afternoon on the first Friday of each month. Now, Chiara was going to go there and she was going to leave her lost boy a note. She would tell him that he had a daughter. It was a ridiculous, pointless thing to do, but she didn’t care. She was going to do it anyway. She checked in her handbag that she had a pen and her notepad.

  Afterwards, after she had folded up her note and inserted it, the way they used to, in the hollow on the frieze at the back of the monument, she would catch a bus back home and prepare the apartment for the girl’s arrival.

  She quickened her pace. There was a lot to do.

  NINE

  Assunta laid her basket on the floor at the top of the stairs, put one hand out flat on the wall and the other on the small of her back. She paused long enough to catch her breath, examining the middle door of the three on the landing as if she hadn’t seen it many times before.

  The stone stairs always shocked her with their steepness. The smell of cooking wafted up the stairwell, a slowly simmering meat sauce. It was early in the day to be cooking meat sauce. The two doors to either side were identical, fine-grained, ancient wood panels with brass knobs and ornate lock fittings, while the one in the middle, although it filled the same-sized aperture and had a similar sort of handle, was made of a different wood. The patterns in the grain went in swirls, and in their contours, as Assunta had discovered on a previous occasion, it was possible to discern the backside of an elephant.

  At some point in its history, Assunta was vague as to when–anyway, after the war, for sure, but before Assunta had begun working here seven years ago–Signora Ravello’s apartment, the one Assunta was about to enter, had been divided in two, and the other part sold off. The elephant door was the entrance to the apartment made from the hived-off section and was of a more modern construction. Assunta liked to imagine, although she knew it was fanciful, that the wood came from Africa and that was why an elephant had left its imprint in the grain.

  Abyssinia, perhaps, in that brief time when Italy had its empire. She almost seemed to recall an image of natives, tall and impossibly thin, armed with spears, guarding their forests against the Italian invaders. She might have seen it on a newsreel at the picture house. Maybe even Libya, because Signora Ravello’s father had done business there and might possibly have imported timber. Or was Libya a desert?

  Assunta’s secret elephant reminded her every time she came to this stairwell that we are all God’s creatures, and the world is a weird and wonderful creation of His devising. So she would take a moment here as she caught her breath to reflect on this truth.

  Assunta’s duties were normally confined to ironing blouses and bedlinen, sweeping and washing the tiled floors, and cleaning the bathroom (Tuesdays) and the kitchen (Thursdays). She had come in today on a Saturday, at Signora Ravello’s special and urgent request, to make the apartment ready for the arrival of the foreign girl who was coming to stay.

  She imagined Signora Ravello would have left a note for her as to what she wanted doing. If not, she intended to wipe down all the skirting boards; brush the cat hairs off the upholstery; pull out the lighter pieces of furniture in the living room, or the salon as the signora liked to call it, and sweep behind; polish all of the furniture; and hang the rugs over the line and give them a good beating. There wasn’t much more that could be done, given that the apartment contained twice the amount of furniture that it could comfortably fit, crammed to the rafters with all the old pieces inherited from its former, grander self.

  At the end of the hallway that led nowhere there was even one piece of furniture piled on top of another, a foolishness that meant both items were effectively useless. The cabinet pinned the chest shut and the chest elevated the cabinet out of reach. Assunta shuddered to think what might be concealed therein. But it was no use pointing these things out to the signora. She would talk about heirlooms, and usefulness not being the only measure, whatever that meant. No, the only cleaning to be done in this apartment was very superficial. The mere idea of a spring-clean was preposterous.

  She put her key in the lock but before she could turn it, the door was flung open and there was Signora Ravello, wearing old paint-spattered clothes and a plastic rain-hood. The moulting cat slid between her legs and out onto the landing where it hissed at Assunta’s back.

  ‘I thought we’d get more done if I pitched in,’ she said in a bright, forceful way.

  Assunta was of a mind to turn right round and go home. All of her other clients either kept out of her way or, at the very least, ignored her when she was working, treating her as if she were invisible. That was as it should be. Them getting on with their business, she getting on with hers. She had no idea why Signora Ravello thought herself the exception to this unspoken rule. She suspected that the signora’s propensity to follow her round the apartment, giving advice or getting in the way, was something to do with her being a leftie, possibly even a communist. Certainly she left copies of the Manifesto newspaper lying around the house for Assunta to tidy away.

  She wasn’t having it. People trying to tell her how to do her job. It was probably her own fault for letting the signora get too familiar. She had even stayed for lunch with the signora on more than one occasion, but not any more. They weren’t her sort, the signora and her funny old friend Madame Simone, who had introduced them in the first place. They were a couple of old biddies and it was about time they admitted it instead of racketing around the town at all hours.

  Assunta remembered the words the signora had said as if they’d been branded with the hot iron on her own forehead.

  ‘You have to dampen linen like that to get the creases out.’

  That was it. Assunta had laundered and was ironing a mass of stiff cloth that the signora had found in the junk room. The signora had the notion that she was clearing things out and was going to sell them at the flea market. But, often enough, when Assunta came in on a Tuesday, another ‘objet’–an ornate vase, a little painted cabinet, a glass paperweight–would have appeared, and Assunta would know that the signora had indeed been to the market at Porta Portese on Sunday but had bought rather than sold.

  The cloth in question wasn’t linen at all but ordinary calico cotton, which Signora Ravello’s sister, who had been a dressmaker back in the day, probably intended to use for cutting out patterns or for children’s school aprons, but which was not worth anyone’s time or money to wash, peg out
, bring in, press. The cloth, though, still smelt of naphthalene, which gave Assunta a sense of comfort and hope, as if her own old mother were somewhere near by, packing away the winter blankets in the box that went under the bed. The stains were ingrained, and the creases more so; it was all a waste of time, but hers was not to reason why.

  She hadn’t minded the signora’s presence at all, because she was telling a tale about dresses her sister had made for the fat twin daughters of someone important, and Assunta had been thinking what an entertaining little personage the signora was, despite her heathen, socialist and bossy ways, and what a lively manner she had when telling a story, and how that was a sort of gift, a talent not to be buried.

  She had been thinking too that there were women who did, and there were women who had things done, and that the signora, in some ways and in common with Assunta, fitted better into the former category–when, all of a sudden, the signora had come out with the comment about dampening the linen.

  And then, before either of them had perhaps noticed this might be dangerous ground, the signora had tripped across to the sink, fetched some water in a tumbler and, dipping in her fingertips, started flicking it over the cloth on the board. And Assunta had felt her face redden and not, as the signora seemed at first to think (but was quickly put right), out of shame at not having adopted this method without prompting. There had been sharp words and harsh looks, and since then the signora had made herself scarce when Assunta came. She wouldn’t call it a rift between them exactly, but it was a cold feeling that hadn’t been there before. She didn’t like it, but there it was.

  Now here was the signora, in her bewildering headgear, twittering around Assunta as she hung up her coat, telling her how she’d been trying to clear some space for the girl, but that she seemed to have made more mess. Assunta didn’t need telling; she could see piles of rubbish outside the doorways the length of the wide hallway. The cabinet on top of the trunk at the far end listed as if the signora had tried and failed to heave it from its perch.