Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Cheered beyond measure by the porter’s assumption, Chiara took a moment to go to the ladies’, put on some lipstick and comb her hair. In the mirror she had a ravaged but jaunty look. The stick had a lovely carved handle that fitted snugly into the palm of her hand. If she had to make her way about in this tilting world, then a stick like this was just the ticket. She was in a state of buzzing excitement. Jittery.

  ‘All OK?’ the man said when he returned. ‘No plaster, no crutches?’

  She waved her stick.

  ‘The meeting’s rearranged. We’re doing lunch, which is better. Would you join me?’

  She couldn’t see why not. Everything was ready back at the apartment for the girl’s arrival, the bed made up, the kitchen cupboards packed with special provisions.

  ‘Go on, you’ll be doing me a favour. And you have to eat. I’ll drop you off afterwards,’ the man said.

  And there she was again, rumbling through the streets of Rome in this stranger’s car. She directed him now to Via Ostiense and to a restaurant there that she had never been to but whose address he read out. Al Biondo Tevere, it was called. The physical whirling had abated, but she felt she had entered another sort of whirl altogether.

  His name was Dario Fulminante and he was a documentary film-maker, but hoping now to break into fiction.

  ‘Do you know that other Dario?’ she asked. ‘The one who makes horror films?’

  But he didn’t.

  ‘I think he’s very well regarded here in Rome,’ Chiara said. ‘Innovative montage techniques. Use of music.’ She waved her hand airily.

  It was Simone who had told her these things.

  Dario Fulminante said Italian cinema was going in a different direction now, a post-Fellini direction.

  ‘But Fellini is still going strong, isn’t he?’ Chiara said.

  Dario wagged his head from side to side as if to say, depends what you mean by strong. Chiara felt vaguely offended on Fellini’s behalf.

  He found a place beyond the restaurant to park his big car, and they walked back along Via Ostiense, buses and cars and great lorries hooting by in the other direction, a torrent of traffic heading out of town. He took her arm and led her through black iron gates into a quarry-tiled courtyard where large succulent plants in red pots were set between round tables covered with red-and-white checked gingham cloths.

  It seemed clear to her now that in this hiatus before the arrival of Daniele’s daughter, she had been given an opportunity to celebrate, to find whatever peace and joy and acceptance she could, to raise a glass to her departed loved ones, as well as to prepare herself mentally for the arrival of Maria and whatever that might entail.

  The tree that pushed its way out of a hole in the red tiles and grew all the way up and through the trellis that formed the roof was set there for her delight, and she bestowed a quiet smile upon it. The vine leaves that canopied the trellis, their fresh, dark, early-summer green, and the sun that shot down in between them like so many little spotlights, singling out the odd pink flower or shiny leaf, were an invitation. There was a grapey wine smell and the aroma of cooking.

  Delicious, she thought. It was like when you’re ill, definitely unwell but not life-threateningly so, and you let all your worries and duties slide away from you and allow yourself just to be. That was what she was doing. Just being. Thoroughly occupying this limbo place, this in-between moment, and this man, Dario–with his wet brown eyes, like the dog she had loved but had never been allowed to own–had turned up right on time to be her companion.

  The men he was meeting wore suits and sunglasses. Not at all the bohemian types she had imagined. Financiers, she thought. He introduced her as his new, but dear, friend. A glass of straw-coloured wine was put in her hands, and the party made their way up a short flight of steps that led to the terrace overlooking the river.

  They stood in a sort of huddle while the waiter prepared their table; the men exchanging hearty pleasantries before they got down to business, Chiara among them but hardly listening. She was leaning on her lovely stick, dreamily drinking the yellow wine, watching the waiter. He shook out the white linen cloth so that it caught the light and was momentarily transformed into an icebound tundra with bluish slopes and dark shadows before it cascaded like snow over the table.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Dario said to her in a low voice, meaning, she supposed, if they talked shop.

  She said, no, not at all, and the huddle tightened with Chiara on the periphery. She looked out at the river, leaning on her stick, a delightful affectation.

  It wasn’t like the rivers flowing through other capital cities–such as the Seine, the Danube or the Thames. It was like a country river. As she watched, a family of ducks floated past. It flowed faster here than downtown, the waters funnelling along a narrower channel. The banks were a confusion of bushes, bulrushes, trails of convolvulus, clumps of bracken and ferns, the odd fig tree. It was a slender stretch of bucolic wilderness within the confines of the city.

  A barefoot man wearing earth-brown clothes came running through the long grass. She reflected that until two days earlier, Friday, when she had left the note for Daniele, the sight of this man would have set up an internal commotion, a raggedy choking pain, and she would have scrutinised him with a kind of dread, tormenting herself with the idea that he belonged to some rag-tag community that knew, or knew of, Daniele, that she must learn where he had gone, investigate. That it might even be Daniele himself, because he was good at hiding right under your nose, at camouflage. She would have made enquiries. She would have tramped pointlessly through the undergrowth.

  But no longer. She had let all that wash away. She was emptied out. She was like a transparent vessel, a glass jar snagged momentarily in the river’s stream, the sparkling waters swirling past and through it.

  Over to the right, towards the city centre, etched against an azure sky, was the black, cylindrical outline of the gasometer. She put her wineglass on the table and picked up the water instead, aware both of a deep thirst and a desire for sobriety. To imprint on her consciousness this rich, layered now; this new newness in which, by way of golden light and emptied-out emotion, Daniele’s absence and Daniele’s daughter’s imminent presence flowed.

  In the morning, on the day of the girl’s arrival, she went to Gianni’s for her cappuccino and cornetto.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said when he enquired about her bandaged ankle. ‘A foolish accident but not serious.’

  That wasn’t why she was there.

  ‘I have a young British girl coming to stay with me for a week or two,’ she announced. ‘Welsh, actually. The daughter of an old friend.’

  Gianni stroked his moustache and eyed her. ‘Welsh?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. You know, from Wales, next to England.’

  ‘Ah. England,’ he said. ‘You’ll be making her a pot of tea.’

  ‘Oh, good idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy some tea.’ Chiara herself didn’t drink tea, a tisane now and then, but not tea as such. ‘They take it with milk, don’t they?’

  ‘In the North of England they do, but not in Wales. They take it with lemon in Wales and they like to have a saucer,’ Gianni said with authority. ‘Bring her in for an aperitif,’ he said.

  Chiara remembered the appointment with Luca in the bar near the Gramsci Institute.

  ‘I will,’ she promised, ‘but not this evening, because she will probably be tired after the journey.’

  She went to Ruggeri’s and bought a small yellow packet of Lipton’s tea.

  ‘I have a young girl from the UK coming to stay with me,’ she confided to the shop assistant. ‘They drink a lot of tea over there.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the assistant said. ‘My brother works in London in a restaurant. You have to make sure you boil it for a long time.’

  ‘I will,’ Chiara said, storing the information.

  She stuck her head into the foyer of the Farnese cinema. ‘Do you ever show foreign films in the original lan
guage?’ she asked the receptionist, who was painting her nails a luscious red. ‘Or are they always dubbed?’

  The receptionist frowned and blew on her fingernails.

  ‘Only I have a young Welsh girl coming to stay with me, and her Italian’s not very good and I wondered… ’

  The receptionist shook her head. ‘We never have films in Welsh,’ she said. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Ha ha, no. I was thinking English. Films in English. They might be American or British or even Australian films, I suppose.’

  ‘Your best bet is the Pasquino in Trastevere,’ the woman said.

  ‘You’re right,’ Chiara said. She knew this already. She was a regular at the Pasquino. ‘I’ll get a newspaper and find out what they’re showing.’

  She meandered back across the middle of Campo dei Fiori market. She bought some figs at one stall, some flowers from another and a melon from a third. She made sure they all knew about the girl coming. When she popped into the shop on the corner to buy some bread, she told the chief baker and the lady at the till.

  She took the supplies home. She arranged the flowers in a vase and stood at the window, looking down into the street, at the people milling about and at the way the light glinted off the handlebars of the scooters close-parked against the wall of the building opposite.

  She had made a start. But now she needed to tell someone who really mattered. And in the absence of Simone, that was Antonio.

  All the people wandering about down below, looking in the shop windows, seemed to be smoking. She hadn’t had a cigarette for over a month but suddenly, urgently, she wanted one. It would be just the thing to give her–not courage exactly, because why would she need courage to talk to her dear friend, but it would help her gather herself together, consolidate her sense of this being the right thing to do. And perhaps, yes, a little bit of courage because she was going to have to break through the thick barrier of silence that had built up between her and Antonio on the subject of Daniele.

  She looked up. Across the way, diagonally above her, a man in a vest stood at an open window, smoking and observing the activity in the street below. She didn’t know him but she had seen him sometimes, setting off in the morning, carrying a bag of tools. She had a feeling he was from the South. A labourer. A masonry worker. Something like that. The building he lived in was two storeys higher than her own with an ever-changing itinerant population. There were at least ten names next to the numbers beside the front door.

  She leant against the window rail, observing the smoke plume out from his mouth and then disappear against the blue of the sky. He was fascinated by something going on down in the street, but Chiara realised she couldn’t follow his gaze to find out what it was. The tilt of her head brought her to the borderline of dizziness. She could sense its proximity, like a shadow in her brain, an ink blot. To extricate herself safely, she would need to dip her head leftwards and down. She brought her hand to the side of her face to guide it but, fearful of the spin, not quite ready, she continued to gaze up at the man as if she were utterly captivated, as if she were looking at a painting, taking in all its details.

  The man’s glance fell on Chiara, and he pulled his head back in surprise. Chiara became aware that with her other hand, the one not holding her head in place, she had two fingers raised to her lips and was miming smoking a cigarette. Before she could melt back into the room, he repeated the mime back to her. She gave a tiny nod and wagged the middle finger of her right hand, hoping he would take this for assent. He bent out of sight and reappeared, holding a cigarette, which he hurled with gusto down and across the street towards her. It fell short, tumbling down to the cobbles below to be trampled. He put up a finger to indicate he’d be a minute and disappeared again. He was soon back, making a flicking motion with the back of his hand, banishing her. She stood back, braced herself against the bookcase and took the opportunity to right the angle of her head. Nothing happened. Nothing spun. Things remained in place.

  A projectile came hurtling through the window and landed on the sofa. It was a biro and attached to it with tape was a cigarette. She waved her thanks up at the man and he mimed writing. He wanted the pen back. She made as if to throw it back up but he indicated no. He was right. She would undoubtedly have missed. He spiralled his hand. Another time, he was saying. Then he gave her a wave and went away. What a delightful transaction, Chiara thought. Not a word had been exchanged. Perhaps the man thought she was mute.

  Daniele and his three-month silence came to her mind. Elective muteness, it was called, she had found out later. Brought on by trauma.

  She settled herself in the chair nearest the window and lit the cigarette. This would be her very last cigarette, ever. She meant it.

  How strange it was that Daniele had never enquired about the fate of the letters he left for his mother. It was understandable that he wouldn’t have asked when he was little, when everything was an unexplained mystery. He would post his note in the crook of Anita Garibaldi’s arm on the bas-relief at the back of the monument. When they returned a month later, the note would have gone. She still had them all somewhere, in a box that was probably in the sealed loft above the junk room.

  The cigarette was foul. It wasn’t worth it and there was no comfort to be had there any more. She was finished with cigarettes.

  She found Antonio in church, officiating at mass. It must be a holy day of obligation because the congregation was quite big. Assunta would know. When people started filing out, she went up the side aisle to the altar. He was snuffing out the high candles, and there was a strong scent of burning wax.

  ‘Chiara,’ he said, turning to her with a smile, holding the brass candle-extinguisher aloft, ‘what a nice surprise. Oh, but you’ve been in the wars. Poor thing, what happened?’

  ‘It’s not serious. It’s fine. I need to talk to you,’ she said, ‘about something else.’

  ‘I’m hearing confessions now,’ he said, nodding back down the church to where a few congregants were kneeling in the rows next to the confessional. ‘But I’ll be free in about an hour.’

  ‘I haven’t got an hour,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be at the station at two.’

  ‘Come into the confessional then,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so horrified. I just mean we could have a quiet and private little talk straight away. Walk with me so I can explain to the ladies who are waiting that you have special dispensation to jump the queue.’

  There was someone already ensconced inside the confessional who wouldn’t be budged.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Antonio whispered to Chiara. ‘As soon as this one leaves, just come on in.’

  He still had the candle extinguisher in his hand. Propping it against the church wall, he ducked into his part of the confessional box, leaving Chiara standing in the aisle, staring at the carved door, where cherubs with fat little stomachs blew bugles among oaken leaves. She didn’t want to wait. She wanted to get this conversation over and done with.

  She took a seat and allowed thoughts to come of that last time.

  They had been in the office at the pontifical library. There was a penholder on the desk, a bird made of alabaster with a hole in its back where the pen rested, and one of its fluted wings was broken, snapped clean off. The curtains were drawn, and it was stuffy. She remembered the penholder and the curtains and a desk lamp and a sort of tray-cum-basket containing envelopes and paper and paperclips. Daniele was next to her, both of them facing Antonio. If she had known she would never see Daniele again, then she might have found the strength to turn and behold him, and she would have that picture of him in her head to keep. But she hadn’t.

  In among the stationery in the basket-tray thing was the shorn-off wing, lying there, carefully kept, as if one day someone might glue it back on.

  She did not have a clear memory of that meeting. What was said. How things were decided. At some point Daniele had left with Antonio to go and collect some of his things from the apartment, and then Antonio had returned on
his own and given her back Daniele’s keys. Daniele had gone and wouldn’t be bothering her again, and she wasn’t to worry, she was just to look after herself now and get better.

  She remembered the sensation, as she was walking home, of utter desolation, and then the chaos of the flat awaiting her. By then part of it was being sold off to settle the debts, and everything was just stuffed into her side, piled up. There was no room anywhere, no space, no air, and all the paraphernalia of Daniele’s existence that he hadn’t deemed essential in that twenty minutes he had been given to pack were scattered about. She had lain down in her bed and pulled the covers up over her head.

  And of course Simone had come round. She had tidied the flat, arranged things into some sort of order, engaged a workman to build the loft above the junk room to store Daniele’s things when Chiara wouldn’t let her throw them away.

  Chiara lived among the muddle, muddling along, thinking sooner or later he would be back. Later on, when she realised no one at all, including Antonio, knew where he was, she took to frequenting Porta Portese flea market, ostensibly to get an idea of how much all the antique furniture riddled with woodworm might be worth, but really to look for Daniele; she thought that was the sort of place he might turn up, trading in something.

  She always came home from the market with a treasure, an object that justified her regular trips. Eventually her interest got caught up with the acquisition and search for these little somethings, until it became as if they were really what she was going for, to look out for whatever her current collectible thing was, and the apartment got more and more crammed. Still she added to the hoard of useless, pointless objects. As if an accumulation of things could hide the emptiness.

  There was linen for a while, lovely old linen with embroidery and lace, and she would wash it and starch it or, later on, when she was earning again and had taken on Assunta, she would get Assunta to do it, squeezing it into already-full drawers.