Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  ‘He wasn’t going to come. He preferred to stay cosy by the fire with Nonna and let me go out on my own,’ she says, loud enough for the camouflaged boy, still swinging in the tree, to hear.

  Halfway to the vegetable patch, he had caught up with her. Sure-footed in the dark. He followed her along the rows of cabbages, broccoli, late salad leaves, chicory, spinach, and past the white domes of the fennel poking out of the ground. The fronds, dark green and feathery in the light of the torch. She shone it on the small, mud-coloured slugs, showing him what to look out for, the ragged holes in the leaves where they had been having a feast.

  ‘It’s us or them,’ she told him.

  Each slug she found, she squeezed between thumb and forefinger and dropped into a jar of vinegar she carried. She pointed the torch down into the jar so he could examine the noxious, lumpy, slug liquid. On the second row, he tugged at her sleeve and pointed back to a slug she’d missed.

  ‘You spot them, I’ll catch them,’ she said.

  They moved slowly together along the rows of torch-lit vegetables.

  ‘We’re going to make slug pickle, aren’t we?’ she calls as she and Gabriele heave another sack onto the two-wheeled cart.

  Daniele drops down from the branches. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees his head jerk as he lands, as it would if he had cracked his chin against his knees. She remembers doing the same thing more than once as a child, recalling the judder as the impact reverberated up through her skull, the blood filling her mouth the time she had bitten her tongue, the rust taste of it. Daniele makes no sound. He has twigs in his hair and a sprinkling of greenish powder, lichen dust perhaps, over the skin of his forearms and on his nose. He remains in a crouch, his head hanging down. He seems to be examining something on the ground.

  She sees that his brief interlude is over and he is plunged back into the full weight of his situation. She looks away. She has enough to contend with. The farm is a mess, the chickens have been requisitioned by the military, half the sheep have vanished, strangers occupy the barns and outhouses; Nonna, a depleted shell of her former self, has let it all go. Cecilia is fey as the wind.

  With Gabriele she lifts the final sack onto the back of the cart.

  ‘You coming?’ Gabriele says with a nod in the boy’s direction.

  Daniele is still in the crouch. For an instant, she sees him like a diminutive boxer, stunned in the ring. He stands up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. On it there is a smear of blood. Bloody child, she thinks, locked in the remote tower of his silence. Shutting them all out. Shutting her out. There is a new rip in his trousers. He has been wearing the same clothes, day in, day out, for a month now.

  ‘He can’t go,’ she says quietly to Gabriele, ‘he has no papers.’

  ‘I’ll look after him, signorina,’ Gabriele says. ‘Not on the cart. It’ll topple,’ he says to the child as he makes to clamber aboard. ‘Come here at the front, the other side from me. Keep her steady.’

  The boy takes up his position as directed. The donkey lifts her head and pricks up her ears. Chiara runs her hand along the animal’s flank and holds it there, feeling her warm-blooded, solid presence, the life running through her. She rubs her thumb in a circle in the soft place behind the donkey’s ear while Gabriele tightens the halter. She wants to say something. She doesn’t know what it is. To tell them to take care. To come back safely. To hurry home before it is dark. To leave the olives there at the press to be collected another day if there’s a queue. When she lifts her hand from the donkey, it brushes against the dry, hard skin of the old man’s elbow and it feels like bark. Safe as a tree, Gabriele is. No need to say a word.

  She likes the way Gabriele is with Daniele. Not offhand exactly, certainly not unkind, but with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that allows the child to join in and feel useful without pressure or forced jollity.

  Nonna too, when she is sufficiently alert to pay the boy attention, has an easy way with him. Little man, she calls him.

  ‘Go to sleep, little man,’ she said, the first night they were there, after Cecilia had been tucked away upstairs, and they had made a bed for him beside the hearth and put in a hot brick to warm his feet, ‘nothing will hurt you here.’

  And then she had gone back to sitting in her faded floral chair with her crochet in her lap, just as she had when they had first come tottering in, all bedraggled and wispy-wet, like soggy leaves blown in by a harsh wind, and she had said, ‘You’re late,’ as if she had been expecting them.

  Every time the boy looked up, he saw Nonna still there with her crochet hook going in and out of the wool, in and out, and it allowed him finally to let go of his tight and terrified hold on wakefulness.

  Chiara would like to be more like Gabriele or Nonna, calming and steady and measured in her speech, but ever since the night on the train she can’t seem to let up when she is in Daniele’s presence. She is a babbling brook, a stream of words, pouring over and around him, as if his silence is an umbrella he holds up and she the rain pitter-pattering against it, dripping off its rim. Telling him stories, drenching him in them, calling him back into this world, the one they are in.

  ‘Bring us some beautiful oil,’ she calls out now as they set off up the track. ‘I’ll bake bread and we’ll eat it as soon as you’re home.’

  The cart trundles along behind them, and the donkey’s hooves send loose stones clattering. Daniele has slipped his hand under the halter and into the fur of the creature’s neck. She is glad for him of the animal’s warmth. She watches them as far as the crest of the first mound. They are outlined there, etched against the sky, the old man, the boy and the donkey. Then they drop out of sight.

  In the yard, a young man dressed in army trousers and boots but with only a vest covering his upper body, his bare arms gleaming pale and streaked with mud, is sweeping up fallen leaves. At the sound of the latch on the gate lifting, he brushes with extra vigour, beating a last recalcitrant leaf out from under the stone doorstep and brushing it towards the pile in the centre of the yard. Among the motley community that has taken refuge in and around Nonna’s house, there is a permanent element and a transient one, of runaways, like this man. They sleep in the barn, stay a few days to get fed, rested, have their uniforms made to look more like civilian clothes and then, like it or not, they move on.

  ‘Any other jobs for me, signora?’ the man calls out.

  He pitched up two days before and has been making himself useful about the place. Sometimes they come alone, more often in pairs. A few of them are possessed with a fervour and a clear goal; they’re going to join the partisans or the co-belligerent army. Many of them, especially the ones from the South, are aiming to skirt the enemy lines and find their way home. Those ones reckon their war is over. All of them are keen to avoid being press-ganged by one of the fascist militia or captured and interned by the German forces.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘But you can come and wait inside if you are cold.’

  ‘I prefer to keep busy,’ he says. ‘I’m good at… ’

  He casts about, looking round the yard at the leaves piled for mulch, the basket of chestnuts by the door, the logs stacked under a tarpaulin, the wheelbarrow leaning up against the wall, the terracotta tiles on the outhouse roof, the gate to the kitchen garden hanging from one hinge.

  ‘At fixing gates,’ he says. ‘Where do you keep the tools? I can do that.’

  She can’t afford to become beholden to him. There isn’t enough food to keep them all.

  ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘all the jobs, we’ve pretty much got them covered.’

  He looks her up and down. His gaze is lascivious, and she feels something stir within her in response. She thinks he’s going to make a suggestive remark and braces herself.

  ‘It must be lonely here without your husband,’ is one of the favourite approaches.

  ‘My regiment,’ he says, taking an unexpected tack. ‘We were stationed near Venice. A few of us were
out on patrol on the morning of 8 September.’

  He’s talking about what happened after the government signed the surrender in Cassibile; 8 September was the day it was made public. She knows what he’s going to say because she’s heard these stories from others but she has to let him say it. It is his story. Not all of them want to tell their tales. They are still in the middle of them, and it isn’t yet time for the telling. It’s the ones who think that time may never come who tell them anyway.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘When we got back our base was surrounded by Wehrmacht. We didn’t know what was going on. No one had told us. We had no orders. We were on the same side, but they were killing us.’

  Whatever the goal that has spurred him on and kept him running, it is failing him now. He is thinking he might have arrived. Some of them, they are not running to anything, they are only running from. They offer her money sometimes, but there is nothing to buy up here in the hills. Probably not down in the towns either. Food is the currency now.

  ‘We might all be dead tomorrow,’ he says. He takes a step towards her, pulling the broom over the paving stones.

  She licks her dry lips, holds her ground. She remembers his name and summons up her landlady tone.

  ‘But Goffredo,’ she says, ‘you managed to get away. You’re a survivor. That’s what matters.’

  He doesn’t respond. He leans on the broom, biting his lip. At the doorway, she turns to say something else. He has propped the broom against the wall and stands there, facing the stones, in his vest and trousers, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides. She is going to tell him she is sorry but she thinks better of it. What use is her sorrow?

  The air inside the long, low-ceilinged downstairs room of the farmhouse seems colder than it is outside. Cecilia is sewing at a small table set under the side window at the far end. Opposite, on the other side of the heavy, old-fashioned bed that has usurped the kitchen table, Nonna is sitting beside the cold grate. Wrapped in shawls, her crochet hook and ball of wool on her lap, she is in conversation with the empty armchair on the other side of the hearth.

  ‘Not so much as a bleat,’ she says, in the high, soft voice she uses nowadays. She is recounting for the umpteenth time the story of the night when half the flock went missing.

  The room has the disconsolate smell of yesterday’s ashes. The stove at the kitchen end is kept burning, but the main fire is lit only in the evening.

  ‘Not even Gabriele knows,’ Nonna says, shaking her head, because her greatest source of wonderment is that Gabriele, the fount of all rural lore and knowledge, is as mystified as she by the sheep’s disappearance.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll come back, Nonna,’ Chiara says, making her way around the great, cumbersome bed and plumping down momentarily on the edge of its mattress, which lets out a horsey whiff. ‘Like the one lost lamb.’

  ‘The good shepherd went and looked for that one,’ Nonna says, ‘he didn’t just wait for it to reappear.’

  ‘Gabriele’s got a lot to cope with,’ Chiara says.

  ‘I know,’ Nonna says. ‘I’m not gaga. I know there’s a war on. I was just telling your nonno,’ she says, waving her hand at the empty chair, ‘about the sheep.’

  Chiara gets up again and goes over to her sister’s corner. Bending to kiss the top of Cecilia’s head, she notices that her sister’s hair is not just unbrushed, but matted at the back. Everyone is a bit grubby, bundled in together as they are and with inadequate and overstretched washing facilities, but in Cecilia, normally so groomed and fragrant, it is more noticeable. After that first mammoth seizure in the railway waiting room, she has had a series of minor attacks, small spasms that might almost pass unnoticed. Sometimes they are no more than an extended shudder as if a spider has scuttled across the back of her neck.

  ‘Shall I wash your hair for you before dinner?’ Chiara asks.

  Cecilia’s eyes flick up and then back down to her work. She shakes her head, not so much in refusal as a shaking-off of the suggestion, as if it is rather foolish. Her glasses are smeary.

  ‘Let me clean those,’ Chiara says, lifting the spectacles from her sister’s nose.

  She wipes them on her pinny, one lens at a time, and Cecilia gazes at her blearily as if her vision has blurred, even though the glasses are only for close work, and she can see perfectly well without them.

  ‘I can ask that man in the yard to draw some water.’ She places the glasses back on Cecilia’s nose. ‘That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it, Nonna?’ she says, wanting an ally, but Nonna has dropped off.

  ‘What are you sewing?’ Chiara says, although she can see quite plainly that it is Goffredo’s jacket and that Cecilia has clipped off the insignia of the Royal Italian Army and has been pulling out the loose threads. She wants to get Cecilia to talk, to coax words out, because Cecilia seems to be giving up on speech, or it is giving up on her. It is as if she is following Daniele’s lead, although where his descent into silence was sudden and total, Cecilia’s is a more meandering decline. Now, rather than answer, she holds up the jacket she is working on for Chiara to examine.

  Cecilia has become adept at transforming uniforms into new, civilian-style outfits, removing the insignia and exchanging the military buttons, unstitching the side seams and cutting away an arc of cloth from each side to reshape them, then employing the surplus strips to make lapels. The resulting garments would not bear close examination. It would be better if they could dye them too. Nonno’s plundered wardrobe has provided some of the raw material. The work is not dissimilar to what Cecilia had been doing before, in Rome. She was known for it there. Women brought their old-fashioned dresses and suits, their mothers’ or their grandmothers’ gowns, and Cecilia refashioned them into something more modern. It is just that she is working with coarser material now, and her clients are men.

  Chiara sits down opposite and watches as Cecilia feeds the fabric into Nonna’s old sewing machine. Cecilia’s foot starts to work the treadle, and she begins to hum. It isn’t a recognisable tune so much as an echo of the treadle’s sound.

  ‘How are you getting on with the outfit for the little boy?’

  Cecilia has reached the end of the seam. She clips the thread, ties a neat knot, turns the jacket over and smoothes out the other side.

  ‘The little boy I told you about who has no clothes.’

  Cecilia pauses, glances up. ‘Where’s the dirty boy?’ she says. She has a greedy look on her face.

  ‘He doesn’t stink like you do,’ Chiara says in English. ‘I’m going to make the bread,’ she says, getting up.

  At the kitchen end of the room, she ties the apron around her waist, takes the dough from where it has been left to rise above the stove and slaps it onto the wooden counter. She presses it down with the fingertips of one hand, pushes the heel of the other into its centre and stretches it away from her. She scoops it back on itself and repeats the process. She picks up the dough, slaps it down, stretches it out, over and over again.

  She lifts a thin membrane of dough between her hands to check its consistency. It is wrinkly and semi-transparent like the skin on Nonna’s cheeks. She bundles it into a ball and sets it to prove again.

  Mario and Furio, two brothers from Lombardy who are lodged in the lean-to shed with the donkey, are the household’s hunters. By day they melt away into the woods with their slingshots and their traps, and at night they reappear to share the hearth. They bring rabbits mostly, once a hare, wood pigeons or small, scanty-fleshed birds that in fatter times would hardly be worth plucking.

  ‘Here we are, signora,’ Mario will say with a facial contortion that might be a wink or a tic or, as she fears, some kind of comment on the fact that she has everyone call her signora, when she is not a signora at all, and that he knows this. She has taken to wearing her father’s gold signet ring with the face turned in towards her palm as if it were a wedding band. If people assume Daniele is her son, she does not have to explain him. But Mario and Furio were here before sh
e put the ring on.

  The latest haul is a brace of rabbits, which Chiara paunched, skinned and boned straightaway. Now she dices the meat into smaller pieces, calculating how many it will have to feed, what she will add to give it bulk. Potatoes would be good, but they don’t have any. She surveys her collection of condiments. Rosemary and garlic, salt, bay leaves and juniper berries. She crushes some juniper and instantly the forest scent perfumes and freshens the air. She takes a deep breath of it and is suddenly aware of her own relative youth and strength.

  The Allies are coming, the war will end, prisoners will be freed and there will be dancing. She turns to smile the length of the room at Cecilia.

  The completed jacket lies on the table next to the sewing machine. Cecilia has removed her glasses. One elbow is on the table and her chin is resting in her hand, fingers over her mouth. She might be looking out of the window. She is facing in that direction. She might be lost in thought. She might just be lost.

  We might all be dead tomorrow.

  The words reverberate in her head like an invitation. She sets the pot on the stove and then lights the lamps around the room. She scoops up Nonna’s ball of wool from where it has fallen and drops it into her lap. Nonna awakens and unhurriedly resumes crocheting as if she doesn’t know she’s been asleep.

  ‘Do you want to come with me to get some vegetables?’ Chiara asks Cecilia. She brushes her floury hands on her apron and rests them lightly on Cecilia’s shoulders. She bends forward to press her cheek to her sister’s.

  ‘Mm,’ Cecilia says.

  ‘Come on then. Quick, before it’s too dark to see them.’

  But Cecilia doesn’t stir. It wasn’t assent. It is just the noise Cecilia makes that signals a slight awareness of another person’s presence and no more.

  Chiara goes quickly and alone to the kitchen garden. Goffredo is gone from the yard. She picks two big cabbages and stares up the hill. The sun is setting. She feels a stab of alarm in her breastbone, a cold piercing. Gabriele and the boy should be back. She wishes she had not let him go.