Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  On her return, Cecilia is gone and Gabriele has dozed off. She shakes him awake.

  ‘I’ll be round in the morning for you, little man,’ he says and leaves.

  ‘Take everything off,’ she orders Daniele. ‘Hop into the tub. I need to wash your clothes and you need to scrub yourself and then I have to do your hair. You were starting to smell like an old sheep’s cheese even before you coated yourself in mud. Pecorino, I’m going to call you.’

  She puts the stool he used for climbing out of the window next to the tub.

  ‘Use that as a step,’ she says. ‘I will look the other way and I will count to twenty. When I turn round you’d better be in the water.’

  She turns away and starts counting.

  There is a strange smell in the room. She thought earlier that it was some odd ingredient Beatrice had added to the soup. Now it is stronger, and smoke from the fire is backing up, acrid fumes. She suddenly remembers Daniele’s shoes in the chimney. She fetches the tongs, hooks them out, charred, crisped and smoking but not yet actually on fire. He has nothing else to put on his feet, but for some reason it seems hilariously funny to her. She puts the shoes outside the door to cool down and, wheezing with suppressed laughter, beholds them smouldering on the doorstep, burnt offerings.

  Back inside, she hears him climb in with a kind of sharp inhalation through the mouth, as if of pain, followed by a long sigh that denotes, she can tell, a sort of relief.

  The water comes up above his shoulders. He is still at that age where his head looks too big for his body. His little neck poking up out of the water is like a twig, snappable. She dips in a jug for hair rinsing.

  ‘Do you want to duck under and get your hair wet?’ she says.

  He slides beneath. He’s gone longer than she thinks he should be. She counts to twenty again and resists the desire to hook him out. Then he bobs back, his face as blank as usual.

  ‘Been for a swim, have you?’ she says, rubbing the soap into his thick hair. ‘Catch any fish down there? You could have brought us up a nice little fishy for our tea,’ prattling nonsense, thinking sound and chat and normality might soothe. His hair is a golden-brown colour, much lighter than her family’s.

  He is hunched in the water, his shoulders lifting to his ears. She would kiss his bony shoulder if only they were on those terms.

  ‘Don’t worry, I can’t see it, the water’s so dirty now from your ragamuffin body, my Pecorino, that you don’t need to hide anything,’ she says.

  She has the sense, ridiculous though it is, that he has exercised a choice in coming back. She imagines him burrowing into whatever muddy hole he had squeezed himself, down into the soil like a worm, and staying there, tight-packed in the earth. Or coming out, in his new brown guise, his apparel of mud that makes him invisible to the ordinary human world, and roaming the hills bare and light-footed like a little wolf.

  Thank you for coming back, she thinks, but says, ‘Help me rub the soap in.’

  He lifts his arms and she gasps. She catches at one of his hands. He squirms away. She catches it again and holds his arm aloft.

  ‘What’s this?’ she says.

  Like buttons on the inside of his upper arm, half-moon-shaped indentations, some already with scabs, others pink and raw, purple bruises beneath. With her other hand she picks up the lamp and holds it to cast a better light.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ she says, although she already knows.

  She sets down the lamp, lets go of his arm, rinses his hair, reaches around his slippery wet body and lifts him out into a towel. She stands him on the stool and pats him dry. He lets her. The scars and wounds cover all the parts of his body that would normally be concealed by his clothes. On his buttocks there are longer cuts, slash wounds, as if made with a knife. Or scissors.

  Cecilia would have used the nail on the forefinger of her right hand to make the crescent-shaped incisions–the fingernail on her left was trimmed short because it was her thimble finger. She must have dug in until she had pierced the tender skin and then squeezed and twisted a pinch of flesh beneath.

  Chiara binds him tight in the towel and sits with him on her lap, holding his tense body in her arms and rocking him. He smells clean and sweet, the scent of childhood.

  ‘When your mother gave you to me,’ she says, ‘I promised I would look after you. And I will.’

  She slips the nightgown over his head and tucks him into bed next to Nonna.

  ‘Sleep,’ she says. ‘Safe and sound next to Nonna. Tomorrow is a new day.’

  She holds the lamp over the two of them, Nonna and Daniele. She will talk to Nonna in the morning, first thing, over their early coffee, when Nonna is at her most lucid. She will ask, What does that mean, now, in these circumstances, what does it mean to look after this child? Because she can’t see a way clear.

  The boy is staring up at her. He won’t close his eyes while she is watching him.

  ‘Sleep now,’ she says and moves away.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the lamplight catches the mess of cloth on Cecilia’s sewing table. Cecilia is usually so neat.

  Chiara pauses, puts the lamp down on the side, picks up the first piece of cloth and then the second. The outfits Cecilia had made for the child, cut to ribbons. Chiara lets them run through her fingers and fall back to the table.

  A great hammering at the front door intrudes on her sleep and she leaps up before she is even properly awake, thinking they are back, they have come back already, she thought there would be more of a breather, how will she hide him, where will he go? I should have left, she thinks. Last night, I should have dressed him in his old clothes and burnt shoes and fled. I’ve left it too late.

  She pulls on her cardigan over her nightdress as she flies down the stairs. It is almost light outside. The boy lies next to the still, small lump that is Nonna, awake but unmoving. His dark eyes follow Chiara as she crosses the room. Someone shouts from outside. She recognises Gabriele’s voice and starts breathing again.

  ‘I was wanting the boy to come and collect chestnuts,’ Gabriele says when she opens the door. ‘I thought I’d keep him close today.’

  ‘What time is it?’ she says. ‘Come in. We’re late. We all slept in.’

  Nonna never sleeps in.

  ‘Daniele,’ she calls, ‘jump up. Here’s Gabriele for you.’

  They are going to look for chestnuts, she remembers, so she can make chestnut flour and turn it into bread and pasta. The wheat flour is almost finished.

  ‘You’ll have coffee, will you?’ she says.

  The stove is nearly out, and the room has a bitter chill.

  ‘Oh,’ she hears Gabriele say behind her. ‘Oh, it’s like that is it? Up you come, little man.’

  She turns to face them, looks along the length of the room as if it is a theatre and she the audience. She raises her hand to her throat and feels the tears start to well, her stomach start to cramp, her body grasping that Nonna has gone before her mind has processed the scene.

  Gabriele stoops and gathers the boy out of the bed. The boy twists in Gabriele’s hold and they both look down at Nonna, still there, curled on her side, like a dead leaf.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Welcome,’ the little lady said. Then she offered her face. Maria understood that she was expected to kiss the proffered cheek and be kissed in return and then, unexpectedly, do the same on the other side.

  ‘Come, Maria, come,’ the signora said. It sounded like ‘comma’, as if she were pointing out the need for Maria to punctuate her sentences.

  On their way out of the station, the signora kept one hand on Maria’s forearm to steady herself, and they moved forward slowly, Maria dragging her case, the signora’s ornate cane hooked over her wrist, dangling between them, knocking occasionally against Maria’s shins and threatening to trip her up. Maria had known it was the signora as soon as she’d seen her, even though she wasn’t wearing a mushroom hat.

  Outside in the dazzle, a yellow taxi was being kept wait
ing. The cab was there and didn’t need hailing, but the signora stepped forward and waved her stick at it in a commanding way. The driver got out and handed Maria’s case into the boot. She was dimly aware of hundreds of yellow buses and a mass of people, but she kept her eyes down, letting it all remain an undigested blur on the edge of her vision.

  The car set off into the hooting golden haze.

  ‘I ask your pardon,’ the signora said. ‘I have a–how do you say it’–she made a whirling gesture with her finger–‘in my head and I have experienced an incident.’ She twisted her mouth to one side and looked at Maria hopefully.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Maria said.

  ‘Not a grave incident,’ the signora said. ‘Accident,’ she corrected herself. ‘I want to say accident.’ She gestured towards her bandaged ankle.

  They both looked at it. ‘Oh dear,’ Maria said again.

  ‘Maria,’ the signora said, starting over.

  ‘Yes,’ Maria said. She was glad to own up to that trilling Italian rendition of her name.

  ‘I am not myself today. Because of the incident. My English on this day is’–the signora paused, searching for the word. She scrunched her face up, puffed out her cheeks. She made a flapping gesture with one hand and drummed on the taxi window with a manicured fingernail–‘is very little,’ she said, eventually. She held her finger and thumb close together to indicate how reduced it was. ‘Talk to me. Tell me about your journey,’ she said.

  Maria shuffled through the journey in her mind. She settled on Tommaso.

  ‘There was a boy who got off in Milan,’ she said.

  ‘Be careful of these Italian boys,’ the signora said. She had sunk back into the upholstery but she wagged a warning finger. ‘They will want to eat you.’

  ‘He was only half Italian,’ Maria said.

  ‘But which half?’ the signora said and laughed a surprisingly dirty laugh.

  Maria, remembering Tommaso squashed against her in the night, found herself joining in. She told the signora about the raw meat.

  ‘Raw meat?’ the signora said. ‘Prosciutto crudo?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ Maria said.

  ‘It is a delicacy,’ the signora said. ‘It’s a–how do you say?’ She held out her hands as if waiting for the answer to be dropped into them from above. ‘An acquired taste,’ she said.

  Maria wrinkled her nose.

  ‘I tell you another thing,’ the signora said and started to laugh again. ‘It’s what we got for dinner.’ She clasped her hand to her head and sank back. ‘Look out the window,’ she commanded.

  The hot afternoon sun was beating on the side of Maria’s face. She turned to look out just as the taxi emerged from an enclosed shopping street into a large open space. It was a place of such startling golden-and-white, shining magnificence and grandeur that Maria forgot everything else. She pressed her hands flat together as if in prayer and made a little whimpering noise. They were only in the place for a fraction. A great expanse full of cars and coaches, traffic police, buses and darting people, and beyond them a huge white staircase leading up to a palace set on high, the ruins of more ancient buildings off to the side, other splendid domed buildings dotted about, an impossible-to-absorb extravagance of the ancient and the beautiful and the stuff of now, all thrown in together.

  ‘Wow,’ she said and in her mind’s eye she was doing a gallop. ‘Where was that?’ she said.

  ‘I take you tomorrow,’ the signora said. ‘After school.’

  School. Had the signora said school?

  The cab plunged back into a darker street where the buildings loomed tall on either side and then emerged into a lighter space. Great pillars and trees sprang up from a hollow in the middle of the square.

  They drove down cobbled streets that were hardly wide enough for a car to pass through and pulled up in one of these, underneath an archway.

  The street at ground level was in shadow but higher up, nearer the roofs, the amber buildings were still bathed in sunshine. A delicious aroma of hot dough floated in the air.

  Are we really going in here? Is this ancient doorway the front door? Maria thought, standing behind the signora who was fiddling in her bag for her keys.

  The baking aroma was making her mouth water. She took in a deep breath and detected another smell that made her heart miss a beat. She sniffed again. Something dank, cool, faintly salty.

  ‘What is that smell?’ she said. ‘It reminds me of something.’

  Just then the signora said, ‘Here we are,’ and the door swung open.

  Maria stared past the signora into the dark vestibule of the building. In her mind’s eye she saw a rectangular shape, a wavering oblong like a window onto nothing. She sniffed again, but she could no longer detect the strangely familiar scent. Instead, an odour of vegetable peelings and soup drifted down from above.

  She stepped inside, and the door closed behind them. She blinked. Stone stairs rose up straight ahead of them. The steps dipped in the middle, worn down by the tread of countless feet over the centuries. They were ancient. They were venerable. If she hadn’t had a bag to drag, and the signora in front, Maria would have bounded up them.

  The signora was telling Maria things, but her words were trailing off into the stairwell, and Maria was deaf to them, bursting with the newness and the strangeness of it all. Buoyed by a breathless excitement, she imagined she could have flown up if she’d put her mind to it.

  Then she was following the signora into the apartment, the entrance lobby all stained glass and flashes of colour, a coat-stand laden with more coats than one little woman could ever possibly wear, cool tiled floors, old-fashioned, dark wood furniture, musty and overcrowded, but clean and smelling of beeswax and lemons. The kitchen rather bare in cream and chrome, like something out of an antiquated advertisement, the big refrigerator with a curved front. A square table with a yellow cloth over it and three wooden chairs set around.

  She was given a guided tour of the whole flat: a bathroom jammed with the equipment you would expect to find in a kitchen: washing machine, ironing board but also–how delighted her little brother Pat would be if he could see it–a real-life bum-washer; the signora’s bedroom, which she had only a glimpse of but enough to get an impression of draperies and hangings; a dead-end hallway stuffed with furniture; and, at the other end, round a corner, a huge living room, which Signora Ravello called the salon. Maria didn’t like to ask where her room was. She thought she must have misunderstood or missed something. That there must be another door.

  ‘Where did Daniele Levi use to sleep?’ she said.

  The signora, who was standing in the middle of the salon, adjusting a painted screen and explaining how it unfolded, stopped what she was doing and stood very still. She straightened up and looked at Maria as if she had said something extraordinary.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said.

  ‘Daniele Levi,’ Maria said. ‘Your former lodger, you know.’

  The signora blinked at her as if she could not imagine how to respond. ‘Oh,’ she said at last, ‘the apartment was bigger in those days.’

  She gave a tight little smile and folded back the screen to reveal a strange piece of furniture that included within it a sort of bed.

  ‘And here is Asmaro to greet you,’ she said as a lean black cat emerged from behind it. ‘He is a prince among cats.’

  She crouched to stroke the animal, still holding her cane but out at an angle as if she were about to use it as a prop in a dance routine. She spoke in Italian to the cat. ‘Amore,’ she said, ‘Amore,’ burying her face in its fur. She lingered over the word amore in a way that made Maria rather embarrassed for them all.

  ‘I will leave you to unpack while I make you a cup of tea,’ the signora said. ‘Do you like tea?’

  Maria nodded.

  The signora tappety-tapped with her cane out of the room. The cat lingered a moment longer, examining Maria, and then followed.

  Maria pushed the door closed after them. A
tower of different-shaped boxes and crates behind the door wobbled.

  In all her imaginings of being in Rome–which were sparse because it had been easier to launch herself without forethought–Maria had never, in a million years, thought that she wouldn’t have her own room. But not only was she to sleep, it seemed, in a corner of the communal living space, but on a bed contraption that protruded from the jaw of a heavy dark piece of furniture that might snap shut at any time. And how was it possible for an apartment to have shrunk?

  Maria’s bedroom back home was a small and contained place at the front of the house where even her own brother and sister would know that if the door was shut they would need to knock. The only person who ever transgressed was her erstwhile father, Barry, who, in his cups of an evening, would open the door a slit, slip his hand in and turn off the light.

  ‘Lights out, Maria,’ he’d sometimes say but as often as not he’d say nothing and just stumble along the landing to the bathroom or wherever he was going.

  Her own mother, at the height of all the turmoil, had only slapped at the door with the flat of her palms and pleaded, and when Maria hadn’t answered she had gone away.

  Her gaze darted round the room, bouncing off the ornate gilt-framed mirror, to the leopard-skin armchair, the baggy green sofa, the velvet footstool, the thick, greenish-gold rug, the dark-wood bookcase crammed with paperbacks, the painted tallboy in which she was to stow her clothes. It was like being in a museum. Nothing matched anything else, but there was an overall loveliness. There were ashtrays on the various little rickety tables set here and there, of coloured glass, various shades of green, one with tiny bubbles within the glass. There was more of this bubbly coloured glass on a shelf below the mirror. Bowls of varying sizes and extravagant, lipped shapes.

  On a small round table inlaid with embossed leather stood a hinged box made of pale wood. Maria flipped it open. It was packed with cigarettes; long, slender ones. They looked posh. There was even a pack with a picture of the Colosseum on the front, containing tiny wax-coated matches.