She and the woman along the corridor stare at each other, and then both glance away. Chiara bends to talk to Daniele and looks into his stricken eyes. Did he see? She feels as if her own face mirrors the half-glimpsed woman’s, her mouth open, her throat parched. She swallows.
‘At Nonna’s farm where we are going now,’ she says, in a kind of croak. She swallows again. ‘There is an olive grove. Some of the trees are very, very old. So old no one knows how long ago they were planted. Four or five hundred years. Yes,’ she says and taps the top of his head, his hat, for emphasis because although his gaze is in her direction, he appears to be looking through her into a dark place. She drops her voice, dramatically.
‘And in this grove, there is one tree that is magic. We call it the Mago.’
She can’t be sure whether he is listening or not.
‘Shall I tell you why it is called the Mago?’
She doesn’t wait for a reply. She is gabbling.
‘There are three reasons. You know in magic stories, there are always three. One.’
She takes her hand from his head and counts with the fingers of one hand on the other. The boy follows this with his eyes.
‘It is so old you would think it was nearly dead and could no longer bear juicy, fat olives, that it is dried up and finished, and the bark is so flaky and wrinkly you can snap off twigs easily, like that,’ she snaps her fingers and he starts. ‘But still every three years, it produces the most marvellous, abundant crop of olives, and they make them into the most delicious olive oil.
‘Two, inside the trunk there is a hollow, and you can climb all the way inside. Can’t you, Cecilia?’ she says and looks up at her sister for corroboration, only to be confronted instead with a glare of such outrage, as if Chiara is betraying some trust, some confidence, their sisterly bond, that Chiara loses her thread.
‘Three,’ she says. She doesn’t have a number three. She casts about.
‘That boy pinched me,’ Cecilia says in a sudden loud voice. ‘When I was asleep, he pinched me.’
It is the longest sentence she has spoken all day. She proffers her hand with a red mark on the back of it.
‘I don’t think he did, darling. Perhaps you caught it on something,’ Chiara says.
She turns back to the boy. She has lost him. He is staring into the black hole again.
‘Number three,’ she says in a fierce whisper, ‘is that when it is a full moon, when the moon is big and silver, you can climb inside the Mago and you can make a wish. Only one wish,’ she says, holding up her forefinger, ‘not three. So think about what you will wish for.’
She adds a proviso.
‘We don’t know if the wishes come true or not, because no one ever tells what their wish is. Except for Gabriele, who always wishes for olives.’
She imagines smiling reassuringly at the child, but her facial muscles won’t oblige.
Cecilia is twisting her hands together and writhing in her seat.
‘Show me your hand, Cecilia,’ Chiara commands.
She holds her sister’s hand and rests her other hand on the boy’s head once more. She steadies herself between them as the train rattles along the track.
ELEVEN
‘Are you all right, signora?’ a man said.
He was youngish, with dark ringlets trailing down his back, dressed in a navy pinstriped suit. He had been there all the time on the periphery of her vision, checking items off on a clipboard as two other men in overalls carted huge cardboard boxes on trolleys from the back of a lorry parked on the cobbles to one side of Chiara.
Chiara blinked at the man, whose expression indicated irritation rather than concern. She wanted to say she was fine. That was what decorum dictated. To protest that there was nothing the matter, to smile apologetically and move out of his way. Not that she was physically in his way, but her presence, her weeping presence she now realised with horror, was disturbing the flow of his morning transactions. But she found she couldn’t summon the words from anywhere. Even a little white lie to a stranger was beyond her. She felt as if she had been undressed and made to stand there, naked and dumb, in this street in the ghetto, in front of the building where Gennaro’s bar used to be.
She turned away in a sudden sharp shift, and the world spun. A car came trundling over the cobbles, moving quite hesitantly as if the driver might not have intended to drive into this labyrinth of narrow streets at all and was seeking a way out or a place to turn. Chiara saw the car approaching, but something snagged in her processing of the information. She couldn’t configure events into their chronology.
She stepped out. The car caught the edge of her foot, and she abruptly sat down on the roadside, the base of her spine cracking against the kerb-stone as she landed.
A little crowd quickly gathered, and a clamour set up.
Chiara allowed her eyes to close, to contemplate her injuries, such as they were, from the inside, rather than seeing them reflected in the reactions of the audience. A juddering was travelling up her backbone. Her foot throbbed faintly like a weak pulse but hardly hurt, not yet.
She opened her eyes. A woman showed the flat of her palm in a no-nonsense gesture that said ‘Halt’ when she tried to get up.
‘No, no, signora,’ the woman said, ‘don’t even think of it. Call an ambulance,’ she said to someone else. ‘The signora mustn’t be moved.’
A discussion started up about the driver’s responsibility and what should be done if the foot turned out to be broken or if the accident had caused some other loss or damage. A man in dark glasses with onion breath and yellowish skin knelt and tentatively examined her foot.
‘I’ve had training,’ he said to no one in particular.
There was another man, older, standing just behind, as if waiting for an audience with Chiara. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he mouthed.
She gave him a careful nod to indicate that it was fine, he needn’t worry. The fingernails of the fellow poking at her foot were black and bitten.
‘I don’t think it’s broken,’ he mumbled, but no one was listening to him. They were all engaged in the burgeoning row. The man who had apologised was caught in the middle of it. He was the driver.
Bearing witness on the one side were two elderly ladies from the dry cleaner’s. They had been sitting on their bench outside the shop and had seen the whole event, they claimed.
On the other side of the argument was the ringletted man in the pinstripe suit, who had become the driver’s unofficial spokesman. The apportioning of blame teetered first one way, then another. It took in Chiara’s injuries, real or potential. Contusions and swellings were mentioned, fractures and shock. People going about their business when other people didn’t have the wit to look before crossing the road also came into it. There was talk of ambulances and medics, of reckless drivers and dangerous pedestrians.
Chiara was watching a hand like a creeping rat inching towards her handbag, which had fallen open at her side. The hand reached the brim, and exploratory fingers dipped inside. She looked up. The sickly man at her feet appeared to be staring straight at her as if he didn’t know what the little animal on the end of his scarred arm was doing, as if it had its own independent life. There was something she recognised.
‘Do you know Daniele?’ she said in a very low voice. ‘Daniele Levi.’ She couldn’t see his eyes, because of the dark glasses. ‘Or Daniele Ravello?’
She had been mistaken. It wasn’t the man she recognised. It was the gesture.
‘Best just sit there,’ the man said, withdrawing his hand and standing up.
His trousers were candy-striped. She followed his progress as he meandered through the small throng, standing close first to one person and then another, finally sauntering away.
Chiara’s foot started to pulsate in the offbeats of her spine’s throb. She had nothing to do but sit in the road. Boom went her spine, pa-pa-te-pa went her foot, whoosh whoosh went her head, like drums played with brushes rather than sticks. A coffee stiff with
sugar was put in her hands, ‘For the shock, signora,’ and she sipped it pleasantly.
The row was hotting up. It seemed to go beyond the particular case in question and to relate to something farther back, more deeply rooted and visceral, not so much to do with rights and responsibilities, but with blame. For Chiara, still mute, still mainly tuned in to the syncopated rhythms of her body, notions such as that of fates being decided on a whim or a whisper at street corners, the elusive quality of fairness and even the nature of persecution, fluttered past in a loosely connected and abstract way, like paper dancers unfolding in the breeze.
A pen and notepad were brought out so that details could be written down. It made Chiara think of the note she had left up at the Anita Garibaldi monument for Daniele, and an image appeared of him climbing up and retrieving it. She pictured him lean and healthy and with a spring in his movements. She thought of all the times they had visited the monument together and he had posted the notes to his mother, and how, afterwards, she would go back and collect them.
Something had been said, something irrefutable and strong, while Chiara’s attention was wandering. The man in the pinstriped suit had lapsed into silence because now, it seemed, he was on his own in championing the hapless driver, and the dry-cleaning ladies were winning the day. The driver himself was still apologising.
‘Signora,’ one of the dry-cleaning ladies said to Chiara, ‘don’t worry. We will testify when you denounce this man.’
Chiara, with a sudden rush of clarity and responsibility, wondered what she was doing, sitting dreaming in the sunshine, listening to her own internal jazz while entertaining fanciful notions that her letter to Daniele had been received. It was up to her to put an end to this tomfoolery.
She looked at the driver properly for the first time: a man in his middle years, pleasant tanned face, big nose, grey wavy hair pushed back, touching his collar. A blue shirt in soft cotton, gold-rimmed spectacles. He seemed more of an observer than a participant. As if he couldn’t quite take seriously all this baying for his blood and was just waiting for it to run its course.
He was looking at her. ‘So sorry,’ he mouthed again.
She held out her hand to him. He stepped forward and took hold, not of her proffered hand, but of each of her wrists, encircling them with his big hands. She was pulled lightly to her feet, taking most of her weight on the uninjured foot, the driver supporting her the whole time. He muttered something in her ear and Chiara quietly assented. He spoke out for both of them, taking command.
‘I am taking the signora to the hospital,’ he announced in loud, authoritative tones with traces of a Milanese accent.
‘This gentleman is taking me to the hospital,’ Chiara said, feeling called on to demonstrate to the crowd that she wasn’t being kidnapped. She cleared her throat, tried again with more gusto. ‘Please cancel the ambulance if you have called one,’ she said.
Leaning heavily on her rescuer, she allowed herself to be led towards the car, still in the middle of the road, the driver’s door agape where he must have leapt out. He could have just kept driving, she thought. Some people would have done.
A shriek came from one of the dry-cleaning ladies.
Chiara faltered, but the driver propelled her forward. ‘Keep going,’ he said in an undertone. ‘It’s some new drama. Nothing to do with us.’
Us, she thought as he handed her into the comfort of the car and closed the passenger door. A phrase from long ago came into her mind–‘There is no us’–but she didn’t like to recall who had said it and to whom.
The driver was at his side of the car, one foot braced on the running board, leaning on the roof, listening to whatever the new drama entailed. Chiara wasn’t an expert on cars and didn’t herself drive but she paid attention to the smart and extraordinarily long vehicle in which she sat. She had seen an advertisement for it in a magazine with a miniskirted girl lying on the bonnet. The latest Lamborghini. In reality, she noted, there was room for several girls to lie on the extended bonnet if they had a mind. You didn’t get many big cars like this in Rome.
Then the driver swung in, switched on the engine and a disembodied male voice said, ‘Skylab is now in orbit.’
‘Here we are,’ the driver said, as he reached forward and turned the voice off. He drove to the end of the road and said it again, ‘Here we are,’ raising his eyebrows at her in a twinkling way.
It was as if they had pulled off a heist, she and the man, and were now making off in the getaway car. Chiara had never before been in a car with a built-in radio. The seat squeaked with newness as she shifted her weight. There was a smell of caramel.
They turned into the dense traffic heaving along Lungotevere.
‘You will have to direct me,’ the man said. ‘I don’t know my way around. I’m down from Milan, to talk about a film we might make. I was on my way to a meeting and I took a wrong turn.’
‘Just drop me anywhere along here,’ Chiara said.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We need to get you checked out,’ he said, ‘to make sure.’
‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘It hardly even hurt.’
The traffic lights at the crossroads with Via Arenula were red. He looked sideways at her. ‘You must be tougher than you look,’ he said, shaking his head as if in wonder at her prowess.
She resisted the desire to say something self-deprecating about tough old meat.
‘Oh, I am,’ she said. ‘This is a good place to let me out.’
They were coming up to the Mazzini bridge. She could dive off to the right and be home in ten minutes.
‘Here?’ he said.
He was jammed in the middle lane. He braked, wound down his window, stuck out his whole left arm and made circular motions with it. Perhaps it was a gesture that had a different meaning in Milan. Here it set klaxons howling and horns hooting. Someone bellowed at him that he was a parrot.
‘I can’t stop here,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘these bloody Roman drivers won’t let me.’
They drove along in silence for a while. He kept craning round to see if he could shift to the nearside lane as they traversed the whole length of Lungotevere, following all the loops and turns of the river. She would have to get a bus back at this rate. To Chiara it felt as if the city were whizzing past at dizzying speed.
‘I’ll stop when I can,’ he said.
Eventually, he jostled his way into the nearside lane, manoeuvred the big car over to the right and drew up half on the kerb.
He turned to face her. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I can’t in all conscience actually just drive off without knowing that there are no bones broken, no lasting damage.’
The phrase ‘lasting damage’ rang in her head.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Really.’ She opened her door and swung her legs out.
‘Let me see,’ he said. He jumped out, came round to her side and knelt at her feet. ‘Show me,’ he said.
Chiara was wearing what Simone called her ‘nun shoes’, low-heeled lace-ups that were good for marching about and even, she fondly thought, laid claim to a certain downbeat elegance. She saw now the falsity of this notion. But she stuck her legs out, and they both looked at her slender ankles. That would never go out of fashion, she thought, a nicely turned ankle.
‘It doesn’t look swollen,’ he said. ‘Let me see you walk.’
The man stood to one side, with the walls of a building behind him and pedestrians bustling past, squeezing through the gap. To the other side was the kerb, a green iron lamppost, a stone bollard. All this was usual. What was different was her feeling of tentativeness about the enterprise. She wanted handholds.
She took two steps and suddenly lurched sideways. It wasn’t her foot giving way so much as the ground dipping and buckling, the lamppost at the corner of her left-hand vision sliding forwards. It was as if, for an instant, she could feel the earth’s rotation and her stumble, rather than a loss of balance, was her attempt to keep on her feet in an unsteady world.
In the casualty department, a nurse bandaged Chiara’s ankle and gave her a typewritten sheet with some exercises to do.
‘Keep it moving,’ the nurse said.
Chiara found she wanted to go the long way round to get to the consulting room door, her fingers touching the walls at all times. But the nurse was watching her, and so she launched herself out into the space, shuffling rather than stepping so that a greater portion of foot remained in contact with the ground.
‘Don’t limp,’ the nurse said. ‘Put weight on it.’
Chiara concentrated on reaching the door frame. The spin had abated but, nevertheless, she held the door to anchor herself before slowly swivelling around. No sudden movements: that seemed key. She was surprised to find the nurse was right behind her, close enough for Chiara to see that what looked like a growth on the nurse’s nose was actually a blob of terracotta-coloured make-up. She must have dabbed it on but forgotten to rub it in. It occurred to Chiara that perhaps she ought to mention the dizziness. That the foot injury was merely a symptom of the actual problem.
The nurse picked up the watch pinned to her pocket, consulted it and then let it fall back. She was waiting for Chiara to leave so she could follow.
‘Do you think I could have crutches?’ Chiara said.
‘It’s not broken,’ the nurse said.
‘Or a stick? A walking stick?’ Chiara clarified.
Perhaps the nurse was short-sighted. Perhaps she had removed her glasses to apply the make-up and then couldn’t see what she was doing. She was squinting at Chiara now.
‘We don’t do sticks,’ she said and squeezed past Chiara to speed off down the corridor in her soundless shoes.
Chiara continued leaning there for a moment. A silver-haired porter holding an empty wheelchair winked at Chiara. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said mysteriously and propelled the wheelchair through some double doors.
The film-maker from Milan was no longer in the waiting room, but then the porter reappeared. ‘Your husband has gone to make a telephone call. He’ll be back soon,’ he said and then, ‘Have this. It’s been lying in lost property for a year,’ and he gave her a walking stick. It was just the right height for her.
Early One Morning Page 16
