Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  She put a cigarette tentatively between her lips and hesitated. Was she allowed to take one? But then, she reasoned, these must be to offer to guests, and she was a guest. Wasn’t she? Should she ask? The matches were so short that she burnt her fingers. The cigarette had a perfumy taste. She sat down on the sofa, tapping her ash into the green ashtray.

  The signora rapped with her cane on the door and then burst in. ‘No smoking,’ she cried. ‘No, no, please. Extinguish it immediately.’

  Maria dumbly did as she was told.

  The signora picked up the cigarette box. ‘Come and have tea,’ she said.

  Maria lingered a moment before following.

  I can’t bear it, she thought, and then she went along to the kitchen where a large pan of water was boiling on the hob.

  The signora tipped some into a small cup, set on the saucer a tea bag with a piece of trailing string attached, and placed cup and saucer in front of Maria. ‘Tea, English style,’ she said. ‘I know you like it boiling,’ she added.

  How did she know this, Maria wondered.

  She watched in horror as the signora opened the cigarette box and tipped the contents into a bag of rubbish, which she sealed with a tight knot. ‘There,’ she said and gave Maria a triumphant smile. ‘You,’ she pointed her finger at Maria, ‘are too young to smoke. And I,’ she pointed the finger at her own nose, ‘have stopped.’

  She looked intently at Maria as if expecting congratulations. Maria managed not to say, ‘Bully for you.’

  ‘Does your mother know you smoke?’ the signora said.

  Maria didn’t answer. Mind your own business, she thought. She should ask whether it would be all right to phone her mother from the signora’s telephone. She didn’t want to phone her mother.

  ‘You are thinking, why does she not mind her own affairs. You are right.’ The signora held her hands up, palms outwards, in a gesture of surrender. ‘And I am sorry. I know I am–how do we say it?’ She lifted her hand into a sort of salute. ‘Autocratic. It’s true. But Maria,’ she said and paused.

  ‘Yes?’ Maria said.

  ‘No smoking in the apartment, eh?’ She leant her chin in her hand and smiled.

  ‘All right,’ Maria said with relief.

  That was manageable. She smiled back.

  ‘Of course not. Did Daniele Levi smoke?’ she asked, dunking her tea bag in the hot water and swirling it about.

  The signora let out a little sigh. She pushed her hand up over her face, pressing her fingertips into her cheekbones to form a sort of muzzle over her mouth as if this might be something she was not allowed to divulge. Then, reconsidering, she slid her fingers down again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He used to smoke.’

  ‘Which brand?’

  Maria thought she would buy the same brand when she bought herself an Italian packet of cigarettes, when she had changed some money.

  ‘I need to explain to you about Asmaro,’ the signora said.

  Asmaro, it seemed, had many places within the apartment where he might lay his head, but behind the sofa in the salon was one of his favourites. And so Maria understood that not only did she not have her own separate room but that she was, in effect, sleeping in the cat’s bedroom, and the cat took precedence. She tried to look nonchalant. The signora handed over a set of keys and explained about the lock and how the street door needed the key pushing in and then pulling out a fraction for it to work.

  ‘I will go and lie down for half an hour while you unpack,’ the signora said, ‘and then we will go for an aperitif, isn’t it?’

  As soon as she had gone, Maria unpicked the knot in the top of the rubbish bag and rescued the cigarettes.

  She went out as she was. She didn’t even look for her jacket. It was still boiling hot anyway. She lit the first cigarette on the landing, then ran straight down the stairs and out onto the narrow, ancient street, walking quickly along it. At home the shops would be closing now, but here they were all open. She walked up and then back down the little street, her heart beating wildly. She didn’t want to go too far in case she got lost. Someone shouted down to her from an open window in the bridged section but she didn’t dare look up.

  She went along to the far end where the delicious smell of baking was strong and the street opened onto a wider space. She veered back, passing the entrance to a bar. She came across a dark arched opening, a tunnel-like, in-between place that connected her street with another similar one. Electric cables and exposed junction boxes hung like decorations on the walls. A handcart was parked in a murky recess.

  She loitered on the edge of this shadowed space, smoking another of the signora’s squashed cigarettes.

  The tree-lined avenue where Maria lived with her family in the suburbs of Cardiff was very quiet at night. Nothing disturbed it. No one walked by. If she pushed up her bedroom window in the early hours as sometimes, restlessly, she did, a car might very occasionally be heard passing along the main road down the hill, but otherwise, nothing.

  In the dark winter mornings, the first sound to break the silence would be the rattle of the milkman’s van on his rounds, and the plink plink as he placed the glass bottles on the doorstep. In the spring and summer, when the sun would sometimes rise before the milkman arrived, he would be preceded by the chatter and chirrup of birds, fluttering between the branches of trees, alighting and taking off again.

  If she stuck her head out of her window, she would be looking down onto the tiled front path, the bush in the middle of the small front lawn, the brick wall that edged their garden and those of the houses either side, and, if she craned her head, she would be able to catch a glimmer of the lake on the other side of the main road. Whether she saw the lake or not, her view was coloured by a sensation of its presence, its watery expanse.

  But here in Via dei Cappellari, some form of activity seemed to go on all night long. First of all, human sounds, people calling and shouting in the lane below, and then later a hissing and a rumbling of wheels over stone. And later still, when she could see from a slit along the bottom of the shutters that night was giving way to dawn, came a watery whooshing, endlessly repeated, accompanied by scraping. Unfathomable and insistent noises that put her in mind of dwarf-like creatures rolling wine-filled barrels along the cobbles.

  She lay on the provisional bed like a stunned starfish, her limbs flung out in all directions, a salty film of sweat covering her skin, awash with new experience. The unbelievably delicious and exotic flavours of the meal she had eaten with the signora the previous evening; the method for dry-curing Parma ham that the signora had painstakingly explained; the gurgle of the pale wine as it was poured into blue glass flutes; the faint throb now behind her eyeballs as a result.

  ‘Do you drink wine?’ the signora had said, standing framed in the yellow oblong of light from the open door of the fridge, holding a green bottle.

  And Maria–who had only really drunk bitter in the one pub where she and her friends could get served, or cider sometimes for a special occasion with Sunday roast at home, and whose sole experience of wine was the stolen dregs in the bottom of glasses left after one of her parents’ parties–nodded. Of course she drank wine. She glugged it down, rather too fast, it seemed.

  Then the signora relenting on the cigarette-in-the-house ban because, she claimed, nothing would ever tempt her to smoke again. How the signora was curious about Maria’s mum–who had phoned and been reassured while Maria was down in the street–but Maria didn’t want to talk about her. Their great, wide-ranging, digressive conversation where she seemed to remember telling the signora her life history as the signora washed the dishes and Maria leant out of the window into a mysterious dark shaft, puffing away. And before all that, the bar where they had gone for an aperitif, her first-ever olives and her determination to like them, and a boy who worked there, just a kid really, who greeted her as if she were famous.

  The signora’s speedy movements like a darting bird; her explanations of the strange malady that
had befallen her; the way she would occasionally clasp her hands to her head and hold it as if it were about to fall off, claiming she could feel the imminence of the spinning sensation; her bewildering explanation of Maria’s ‘programme’ for the next two weeks. And how occasionally she would pause in whatever she was doing to exclaim, ‘Maria,’ and twice she had flown across the room to bestow a kiss on Maria’s forehead, and the way, stranger than strange, that Maria really hadn’t minded.

  She lay on her rickety bed, too hot even to pull a sheet over herself, and floated in and out of consciousness, in and out of dreams. It was as if she were on a raft, floating over the deep, dark waters of a different sort of lake from the one at home, where sinuous shapes swam beneath, entwined in weed. Every time she awoke, it was to the hubbub outside.

  She woke once and for all to the cat breathing purrily in her ear and the signora tapping at the door.

  ‘Maria. I go out one minute. I buy cornetti for breakfast,’ the signora called.

  ‘OK,’ Maria said.

  Cornetti. A sort of cake.

  She thought of Tommaso, the boy on the train. She listened to the click of the signora’s heels on the tiles, the thud of the door. She fished out his note from the side pocket of her bag. He had not written her the soppy love letter she had imagined. Instead he had drawn a comic strip, featuring scenes of Milan: a many-spired cathedral, a theatre, a park with a sort of castle, a pathway beside a canal. In each of them a boy with a striped face was waving.

  ‘Give me a ring sometime,’ the boy said in a speech bubble. His address and telephone number were written below.

  She walked over to the window. The very action of flinging shutters open onto the day instead of drawing curtains subtly altered her so that, as she stood there in her nightie, she was different, rounder, sexier, on the verge somehow of being, for the first time in two months, more rather than less.

  The little shops were already open for business, the picture framer smoking his pipe, stroking his moustache and admiring his display; the round metal tables and spindly chairs set outside the bar; two impossibly good-looking boys in tight jeans and open-necked shirts slouching under the archway; the whiff of pipe tobacco mingling with fresh baking. Even an underlying waft of drains seemed exotic. Different drains, foreign drains, her drains. She looked up to see the sky already blue and welcoming above the roofs, its warmth already playing around her. She closed her eyes an instant and was giddy with it. She opened them and it was all still there. There was a window directly opposite hers, as close as the other side of the room, where ivory-coloured lace curtains hung.

  When she fastened back the shutter on the right-hand side, she saw a diminutive painted Madonna in an alcove, gathering grime and pigeon droppings, plastic flowers strewn around her feet. Snatches of language floated up to her, indecipherable and alluring. Someone walked past, singing in an operatic way, unapologetically noisy. Maria dismissed the lake back home and its quiet with a wave of her hand.

  ‘Let me in,’ she whispered to the street.

  She rifled through the clothes she had brought–ragged-bottomed flared jeans, blouses with leg-of-mutton sleeves and long buttoned cuffs, a terylene midiskirt her mother had bought in the sales, a flowery maxiskirt she’d made for herself, her dungarees. Everything looked too hot and too British. None of it expressed how she was now, her burgeoning Italianness. She chose the pink hot pants and her white smock top.

  ‘No,’ the signora said with a shake of her head that made her earrings swing when she saw Maria’s attire. ‘Come with me.’

  And Maria dumbly followed down the hallway, through the signora’s own bedroom, into another tiny room that opened off it (she had two rooms, and Maria was stuffed into a corner of the living room!), which was filled with rails of clothes, shelves stacked with shoes and hatboxes, scarves trailing from hangers.

  ‘Wow,’ Maria said, ‘what a lot of stuff.’

  ‘Borrow what you like,’ the signora said. ‘They are old things, second-hand for the major part, but good quality and well laundered.’

  ‘But they won’t fit me,’ Maria said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the signora said, ‘the dresses here.’ She swept her hand along a row of frocks. ‘They will fit you in a different way. I leave you, Maria. I make coffee. This one, Maria. Hurry, eh?’

  It was a dress from the olden days. Cornflower blue with a black-and-white pattern of lines and swirls, fitted at the bust and waist, with a full skirt, short sleeves and a pointed collar. It fastened at the front with five black buttons, and at the side with poppers.

  ‘Bella, bellissima,’ the signora exclaimed when Maria made her entrance into the kitchen. She clapped her hands. ‘Take what you want from my dressing room,’ she said. ‘I never put those things. I always wear like this.’

  She gestured with both hands, outlining herself, her pencil skirt and silk shirt, her boxy jacket.

  ‘It is my commody style,’ she said.

  ‘Comedy style?’ Maria said.

  ‘No. I want to say commodious style,’ the signora said and, seeing Maria’s face, she leant towards her and patted her arm, laughing in a husky way. ‘I want to say comfortable. There we are. A comfortable style for me.’

  And Maria, one minute outraged and dumbfounded by the little lady and the next enchanted, laughed uncertainly too. She sipped her delicious coffee.

  ‘You said on the phone that Daniele Levi left some stuff here when he went and that you couldn’t keep all of it, but I was wondering if you’d found anything since.’

  She looked across the room at the signora’s austere little face.

  The signora was standing with her back to the cooker, holding a cup of milky coffee. She raised it to her lips and drank, then turned and placed the cup next to the sink.

  ‘We have to hurry now or you will be late. Later we will discuss.’

  And she made a strange gesture with both hands, holding them up near her forehead and fluttering her fingers around like a storm of startled birds.

  They walked quickly, the signora tapping with her cane and Maria rustling along at her side in the voluminous and un­familiar dress, conscious of having an effect, if the fake swoon of the old man in the shop opposite was anything to go by, but unsure whether it was an effect she wanted.

  The signora paused on the corner of the piazza and peered down a side street. ‘Shall we pop to Gianni’s to salute him?’ she said. ‘Do we have time?’

  She looked at Maria questioningly, as if she might have an opinion on the matter. The smell of savoury baking was strongest at that spot. Maria took a step forward into the square where crowds of people thronged the vegetable market. Customers were coming out of the baker’s, clutching pieces of something hot wrapped in waxed paper, biting into it before they even got out of the door, so irresistibly delicious was it.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘Red pizza and white pizza. Let’s go and see him but only for a little moment. You agree?’ the signora said. ‘You must be punctual on your first day.

  ‘This bar is one of the oldest in the quarter,’ the signora told her as they pushed their way into a smoke-filled room. ‘Gianni, Gianni,’ she shouted.

  Out from behind a crowd of people standing at the counter appeared an oldish man wearing a white overall. He had a thatch of grey hair that resembled a Russian hat, and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

  The signora had moved to one side, creating a space as if to spotlight Maria. At the sight of her, the man said something Maria didn’t catch. He shook her hand vigorously.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, signorina.’

  She told him that she was very pleased to meet him too.

  ‘She speaks Italian!’ he exclaimed to the signora who had a rapt look on her face that prompted Maria to try to say something else.

  ‘I don’t speak well but I intend to learn while I am here,’ she said. It was her longest sentence yet.

  ‘Not only beautiful but cleve
r too,’ he said, addressing both her and the signora but speaking slowly for her benefit.

  Maria felt a blush coming on. She looked down at her toes and her Ocean Pearl toenails poking out the ends of her espadrilles. When the moment had passed, the focus had shifted, and Gianni and the signora were talking to each other. Maria raised her gaze, gazing vaguely across at the row of people standing at the bar.

  A man with hair tied back in a ponytail was watching her. He looked her up and down as if she were an item in an auction and he was considering putting in a bid. She raised one eyebrow at him in her most supercilious way, but he wasn’t at that moment looking at her face. She felt her body growing hot, the blush spreading down to her neck and chest and then lower, until at last he raised his eyes, looked at her full on.

  ‘Come, Maria,’ the signora said. ‘We will be late.’

  And they were off again, charging across the top of the market square, dashing over a main road before the lights changed, plunging down a narrow, shaded street and then out again into the vast open space of a huge piazza. As they sped past fountains and high façades and monumental white statuary, the signora flicked her walking stick about to point out sights of interest, while Maria swished along next to her in a hot vacancy. She could stop and look or she could listen to the signora or she could pay attention to her own thoughts, but she couldn’t manage it all, so she did nothing other than keep up.

  They went down more little streets between tall old buildings and across another square where a great domed building squatted, ending up, finally, in the reception area of the language school, where the signora kissed her quickly on both cheeks and handed her over to a surly receptionist.

  Maria, it seemed, was late. Morning class had already begun.

  The receptionist took her to an airless room the size of a broom cupboard and smelling of disinfectant, gave her a written test to do, instructed her that she had half an hour to complete it and then shut her in.

  And Maria–despite not having truly grasped until that moment that this was where they had been heading, that her mornings were going to be spent in this establishment, and not out and about, wandering the streets of Rome at will; despite too the backlog of confused impressions jamming her brain, the sensation of being able to use only quite a small part of it, the discomfort of the tight dress and the poppers digging into her side–mustered what intellectual forces she could and applied herself to the test paper. If she had to do this, she absolutely and categorically did not want to be put in the bottom class.