Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Then there were the clothes. She loved the clothes, and one of the effects of the apartment division had been to create a funny little space, not a room, but a small chamber off her bedroom; this she filled with rails of glorious clothes that didn’t even fit her, and this was also the place where she kept the bolts of cloth that were Cecilia’s legacy.

  For a while she had been keen on little keys. Then things made of blue porcelain. Sewing machines with wrought-iron treadles, even though she didn’t sew. And now Murano glassware.

  For such an age she hadn’t got it. That, in a litany of last times, that one, in the office of the pontifical library, really had been the last one.

  She turned to look at the confessional door, which remained stubbornly shut. Surely this was longer than ten minutes. She transferred her gaze to the candle extinguisher. It was a miniature version of the implement carried by the lamplighter of her childhood to douse the gas lamps when the sun rose. She looked again towards the altar, where a solitary candle that Antonio must have missed still burnt. He hasn’t managed to douse all the lights, she thought, despite his efforts.

  The occupant of the confessional emerged.

  Chiara knelt inside the wooden box, separated from Antonio by a patterned grille. She remembered the lines from long ago–Bless me, Father, for I have sinned–and she felt their pull, the power and the comfort of ritual, of formula, of things laid down before, of rules. She would have to speak over the top of them, but to start at all was hard. A thought had come to her, a horrible equivalence that held her silent. If she opened her mouth, the wrong words were going to come flying out.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Antonio said.

  She was thinking about how when the SS rounded up the Jews in October 1943, they gave them twenty minutes to pack their belongings. There was a list of the things they should take and the things they should leave behind. She knew that many of them had not even had the presence of mind to get dressed. She wanted to ask Antonio whether, when he had given Daniele twenty minutes to gather his possessions, he had supplied him with a list. She wanted to say that if Daniele had been thinking straight, he would not have left his trumpet and his leather jacket.

  On the other side of the grille, Antonio sighed.

  Poor, long-suffering Antonio, she thought. But he wouldn’t thank her if she let these words loose. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Daniele,’ she said now. ‘Daniele has a daughter.’

  She was glad she couldn’t see Antonio’s face. It meant she didn’t have to take his reactions into consideration and, once she got going, the anonymity of the confessional was very liberating. She was off, recounting the story of the letter and the phone calls from Cardiff.

  Suddenly the grille slid open and there was Antonio’s face, looking red and strained, and so disconcertingly close she could smell his peppermint-and-tobacco breath.

  ‘I didn’t know that opened,’ she said, taken aback.

  ‘She’s coming?’ he said. ‘This girl is coming?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m meeting her at two.’

  He pressed the palms of his hands together and touched his fingertips to his mouth, tilting his head back and forth slowly, pulling his lower lip open and closed. She looked at the embroidered sleeve of his cassock, a pattern of white on white, only visible this close up. Cecilia could have sewn that, she thought irrelevantly.

  After a while, Antonio shook his head and lifted his chin to rest it on his hands. ‘What possessed you to say yes, Chiara?’

  ‘She’s Daniele’s daughter,’ she said. ‘My boy. His daughter.’

  And suddenly it did seem quite blindingly obvious.

  ‘Your boy,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  He lifted his hands in front of his mouth again and stared down as if he were looking off the edge of a high building.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘What are you going to tell this girl about your boy?’

  She didn’t like his tone. ‘Maria,’ she said. ‘She’s called Maria. And I’m going to tell her the truth.’

  ‘What truth? That he was a junkie, that he stole from you, bankrupted you, that he was a criminal? Are you going to tell her about the time he and his cronies broke into the pharmacy?’

  She was taken aback. Antonio was always so kind to her. She could not remember him uttering a sharp word to her before.

  ‘Not straight away,’ she said, ‘and not like that.’

  ‘The protection racket? The night he got stabbed? When he stole Gianni’s keys and emptied the safe and tried to make it look like a burglary? The times in hospital? The overdoses?’

  ‘Those won’t be the first things,’ she said.

  Why was he being so cruel? Nothing had prepared her for this cruelty.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell her that you said you wished you hadn’t saved him. That he had ruined your life.’

  She didn’t speak. This was Antonio, her friend.

  ‘Well, that’s the truth,’ he said, pursing his lips.

  ‘Never mind, Antonio,’ she said, standing up rather shakily. ‘I don’t need your approval. I did not come here to ask you for advice about the wisdom of allowing Maria to come. I was merely informing you that she is coming and, really, I can’t see why I bothered.’

  She could say a lot more, but she didn’t feel up to it.

  ‘Wait a minute, Chiara,’ he said. ‘Don’t rush off. Hang on. Pax,’ he said, wafting his hands up and down soothingly. ‘Pax.’

  She waited.

  Antonio didn’t seem to know what to say. ‘The thing is that he was ruining your life. And his own. And what he did, how he treated you, was unforgivable,’ he said eventually. He fluttered his hands again.

  She knew better than to plead mitigating circumstances for Daniele. Antonio was, after all, the man who had taken it upon himself to send him away without establishing a line of communication.

  ‘Nothing’s unforgivable,’ she said. She hoped very much this was true.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he asked.

  For a moment she seemed to catch a desperate look on his usually calm face and she wondered what he could possibly have done that might require such a level of forgiveness.

  ‘Look how well you’ve done without him,’ he said, rallying and pushing his own troubles, whatever they were, to one side. ‘How you’ve rebuilt things. What a rich, full life you have.’

  Dario Fulminante, golden wine by the glittering river, all her friends, Assunta and her holy pictures, her funny nephew Beppe from the South and his queer friend, her beloved work, her lovely cluttered home, the glorious depth of colour in her red glass bowl, a hundred happy occasions with Simone. Asmaro, a prince among cats, came slinking into her mind, bringing up the rear.

  ‘Don’t let this girl spoil that. As soon as you tell her more than she already knows, the floodgates will open. She will start digging things up, asking questions.’

  ‘She will anyway, I should think, whatever I do or don’t tell her. I am not going to be frightened of that. I am sick of lies and half-truths.’

  Antonio didn’t speak. He just stared at her glumly, biting his lower lip.

  She didn’t know why he couldn’t see it.

  ‘Listen. This is a chance for me to move on and make a fresh start. To clear things up. To greet and welcome Daniele’s daughter–who is not Daniele… ’ She waved an admonishing finger at Antonio. ‘Yes, I have constructed a life for myself, it’s true, and I don’t want to jeopardise that, but I want it not to be one where his name is never spoken. I want to enter the next phase, and this girl will be the key. Why would you want to deny me, and her, that?’

  ‘I fear for you,’ he said. ‘That is all. With Daniele, you were too fond.’

  ‘There is no such thing as too fond,’ she said.

  ‘There is, Chiara. There is. And that is why telling this girl everything is a mistake. Stirring up all these old passions.’

  ‘Oh, Anton
io,’ she said, ‘do you really still not understand that those feelings have never gone away?’

  The look on his face seemed more anguished than her statement warranted.

  ‘You never stop loving your child, whatever he has done,’ she said.

  Whatever you have done to him, she added in her head.

  Antonio was looking down now, shaking his head, his hands clasped in front of him.

  ‘I have not heard a single thing from Daniele in a decade,’ she said, ‘and I don’t expect to now.’ A little noise escaped from her mouth. ‘I wish I knew what had happened to him. I pray that he is safe. Sometimes, I imagine him in a sort of isolated community in the mountains somewhere. In clean air. Living close to the earth. I can’t imagine how else he would ever have got off the drugs and stayed off.’

  She paused again and took a deep breath.

  ‘But in my heart I think he must be dead.’

  There. She had never said that out loud before. She wished there was a seat in the confessional and not just a kneeler. She leant heavily on her stick.

  ‘I have been mourning him, grieving for him, for ten years. Now it is time to bury him.’ She felt suddenly very old and frail.

  Antonio raised a hand to his brow and sank his head into it.

  She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  She had a strange sense of role reversal, as if she were the priest and he the sinner, burdened with unspoken transgressions.

  He raised his head, rubbing his hands across his face as if he were wiping away tears. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The girl is coming.’

  She nodded at him.

  ‘So, can I ask you to wait before you tell her? I would like to be there when you do because… ’ His head twitched as if the reason escaped him. ‘Because I had a part in this story too.’ He put his hands together again. ‘But I’m away for a few days now.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. She hadn’t planned on blurting out the story at the train station anyhow. She opened the confessional door and stepped into the aisle.

  ‘I am only thinking of you, Chiara,’ he called after her.

  She was glad of the walking stick as she walked to the main road to get a cab. The encounter with Antonio had left her feeling drained.

  Antonio slid the grille shut.

  ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,’ he muttered and he tapped his breast softly with his closed fist.

  The action shifted some phlegm, and he cleared his throat. He had done it for the best, he reminded himself. Acted in everyone’s higher interests. He had been saving them from themselves. They were on a highway to destruction, the pair of them. Chiara had been too fond. Never drawing a line for the boy, apart from that one disastrous time that she sent him to the clinic and he came back worse; always giving in, indulging him, making excuses, claiming that no one but she knew what he had suffered. Going back for more. Love thy neighbour as thyself, the Lord had said, and where was Chiara’s self-love in that abasement? And the boy, biting the hand that fed him? Someone had to do it.

  ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘help me.’

  He stepped out into the aisle. ‘I’ve been called away,’ he announced to the waiting parishioners. ‘An emergency. Confessions are cancelled. Say an Act of Contrition and five Hail Marys each.’

  He made the sign of the cross and intoned a general blessing, then hurried out of the church.

  Antonio had not been pleased when Daniele had got in touch after four years’ absence. Chiara was doing well. She seemed happy. She didn’t talk about Daniele any more. He had gone to meet Daniele, who claimed to have been in Israel, working on a kibbutz for some of the time, but from the look of him he had definitely been living rough. He was in a bad way. Antonio had seen straightaway that the man was still an addict, not that he denied it, to give him his due. He wanted to get off the drugs and come home, he said.

  Antonio did a deal. He would help Daniele get back on his feet but he must stay out of Chiara’s life. If and when Daniele had managed to stay clean for a whole year, he, Antonio, would broker a meeting.

  ‘If she needed me, I would come running. She knows that, doesn’t she?’ Daniele had said one time.

  They had been standing on the beach in Ostia, on the edge of the anarchic shanty village where Daniele was living. Why would she ever need a junkie Jew boy? Antonio had thought at the time, but had confined his response to a nod.

  Back at the rectory he had to hunt for the number of the boarding house where he used to leave messages for Daniele and where they had their final meeting three years ago. He knew it was on the inside cover of his address book, identified only with a D. But he had a new address book now. Chiara had given it him for Christmas.

  He knelt beside his bed and pulled out the suitcase that he used as an extra drawer.

  As he was on his knees anyway he offered up a little prayer for Daniele as he did periodically.

  ‘Lord, let him not have fallen back into bad ways,’ he said.

  Then, as if in a vision, he saw Daniele as he had been when they had their last conversation, and he sat back on his heels, feeling himself go hot.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ Daniele had said. ‘A whole year.’

  He was standing in the middle of the front room at the boarding house, his sleeves rolled up, holding out his sinewy arms, his palms turned up, as if offering himself for inspection.

  Antonio saw that it was true. Daniele was like a man who had climbed a mountain with no equipment and was clinging to the rocky pinnacle. He could see how close to the precipice Daniele was, that dangerous black glow he had, that notion that if he had managed a year, perhaps he should celebrate by shooting up or whatever they called it. But also: that he would not.

  Antonio observed Daniele in his bizarrely biblical pose, and a voice in his head, which he did not recognise as his own, said, ‘No.’

  Daniele took two paces backwards. His arms fell to his sides, and his fists bunched. He stood with his back to the window, the sea framing him in blue, and stared across the room at Antonio. The light was behind him, and Antonio couldn’t see his face, but he could feel the piercing gaze.

  In Antonio’s memory, there followed a long, uncomfortable silence in which he felt the other man’s eyes boring into him, while he looked beyond to the glitter of the ocean. A man on a fishing boat cast his line, and the black swoop of it sliced momentarily across the skyline.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to see me again either,’ Daniele said eventually.

  Antonio became aware that he had been shaking his head. He stopped. He made his voice gentle. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Daniele had thanked him for all that he had done but told him there was no need for him to come again.

  Antonio had the sensation of something slipping from his grasp, as if he were trying, with clammy hands, to keep hold of a delicate crystal glass. ‘Lord help me,’ he said, rocking on his heels.

  Here was the book, and here was the number.

  He had to hold on to the bedside cabinet as pins and needles shot up his legs. He had been sitting on his feet too long. When he had recovered, he hurried downstairs on trembly legs to the telephone in the hall.

  Let him be there. Let Daniele Levi still be somewhere in that squalid quarter of Ostia, and he, Antonio, would eat humble pie.

  The landlady of the boarding house answered. Daniele hadn’t been seen for three years. She didn’t know what had happened to him. Gone, vanished. Antonio swallowed. Something hard and prickly was stuck in the back of his throat.

  ‘Was he using again?’ he made himself ask.

  She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. Probably. ‘They all do,’ she said. ‘They climb out of their hole, but something always pulls them back in.’

  Daniele hadn’t been pulled. He had been pushed.

  As Antonio replaced the receiver, an image came to him of Daniele toppling backwards into the abyss from the mountain top, in his own guilty hand the bl
ade that had cut the lifeline. He stood in the rectory hallway, staring at the pattern in the floor tiles as if it might be a code that he could decipher and that would tell him what to do.

  ‘Mea culpa,’ he mumbled under his breath.

  He left messages for his fellow priests, telling them that he had been called away, that there was a person in great need, and could they cover his duties for the next few days. He would go to Ostia and he would search for Daniele or news of him, in among the flotsam and jetsam, the human detritus that littered the shoreline there. He would go to the village built on the old seaplane base at the mouth of the Tiber. He would wander among those precarious dwellings that were always at risk of flooding and collapse, should a storm cause the river to surge.

  He would ask questions. If Daniele were anywhere to be found, he would find him, or discover his fate.

  TWELVE

  Squinting against the light of the low November sun, Chiara tries to make out the figure of Daniele moving in the boughs. He is helping old Gabriele by shaking the ripe fruit down. A shower of purple, green and yellow olives plop onto a blanket spread out beneath the tree. The boy and the tree are the same colours, shades of greenish-brown, brownish-green, muted greys. He is standing on a thick branch, his arms above his head to hold a higher one, using his whole body to make the tree rock and sway. She sees that his absorption is so total that he has forgotten all the rest. He is pure physical self. She would not call it happiness, no, but still, he is just a little boy, bouncing in a tree. Being bounced.

  She is on the alert for these moments. She notices them. She stores them, and when she can she stokes their faint flames.

  ‘We went on a slug hunt last night,’ she says to Gabriele as she helps him lift the blanket by its corners and funnel the fruit into the last sack. ‘Didn’t we, Daniele?’ she calls up into the branches. She doesn’t expect an answer. He has not uttered a word since he fell silent on the first day.

  ‘Bad this year, the slugs,’ Gabriele says. ‘They like the wet.’

  The different-sized olives tumble over each other into the sack. She savours the intense quality of green that the green ones hold. She can detect their faint scent.