But in a way it was the chickens, she thinks. The chickens showed her that it was here in Rome that she could keep the boy safer. That here among the ruins was their best chance.
She had gone to see Gennaro for advice on procuring false identity documents. Not at the bar, which was all closed up in the ghost town of the ghetto, but at his house off the Janiculum where he grew vegetables and kept poultry. People had chickens on roofs and in their backyards. They grew vegetables on tiny plots of terrace and on the verges.
Gennaro told her about the nuns at Santi Quattro Coronati who provided fake documents. As she was leaving, he also told her that he had joined a different resistance group now, one that was planning an attack on an SS regiment.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not any more. I have to put the child first.’
She thought he might reproach her. Other people with children still took such risks, but instead he nodded and said, ‘Do you want a hen? Then you will have eggs for the boy.’
‘But where would I put a hen?’ she asked. ‘And how would I feed it?’
‘They eat anything,’ he said. ‘Scraps. Give it scraps.’
‘That’s what we eat,’ she said.
‘You’ll think of a way,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t, you can kill it and eat the meat. You know how to kill a chicken, don’t you?’ He tied its legs together and packed it in her basket. ‘Take another one,’ he said, putting a second in beside it, ‘to keep the brown one company. For the boy,’ he added.
So she cycled home, hurtling at high speed down the Janiculum hill, with the two hens tied up in her basket, so quiet and still she thought they had died of shock and she mightn’t even have to bother wringing their necks. She unloaded them onto the kitchen floor and, after a trance-like second or two, they started rocketing round the room, in and out of the table legs.
‘Look what I’ve brought,’ she said when Daniele came into the room.
At the sight of the squawking birds he clapped his hands together. It seemed to be a gesture of delight. She thought he might be afraid of the flapping, but he wasn’t at all, and she remembered how he had been with the donkey up on the farm, an easiness in his relationship with animals. He looked up at her, and she nodded, although she was not sure what the unspoken question was. He pointed to the smaller one, with creamy tail feathers and a speckled back.
‘You like that one, do you?’ she said.
He nodded again. She bent and caught it, pinned its wings to its sides to stop the flapping, held it to show him how and then decanted it into his out-held arms. Hugging it to him, nestled under one arm, he stroked its downy back with his other hand.
They were rapt. Boy and chicken.
‘We need to give them names,’ she said, scooping up the brown one. ‘I am going to call mine Winston. What about you?’
Daniele tipped his head to one side.
‘Cluck,’ he said.
He spoke as if speaking were quite normal. As if he had not been utterly silent for three months. He rested his cheek on the chicken’s back.
‘You’re called Cluck, aren’t you?’ he said.
She thought of it as the miracle of the chickens. In the midst of their makeshift, hand-to-mouth existence, a miracle.
‘Pleased to meet you, Cluck,’ she said and pretended to shake its claw.
‘Pleased to meet you, Daniele,’ Simone says.
‘She’s not my mummy,’ Daniele whispers.
Chiara shoots him a warning look. Inside she cringes. He speaks only rarely, even now, but this is his refrain: You’re not my mummy.
Simone has crouched down in front of Daniele and envelops the boy in her arms. ‘Little darling,’ she says.
Chiara watches the other woman bypass all the taboos, squeezing the child against her body, the foxtail around her neck swinging down and dipping into the sawdust on the floor, Daniele’s feet in the ruined, misshapen shoes lifting momentarily off the ground.
‘Signora?’ the butcher says.
Chiara swivels towards him, shutting her mouth. It is her turn. There is one piece of meat remaining. The butcher wraps it for her.
‘Finished,’ he calls out, clanging his cleaver onto the block, and the message goes down the line, which quickly disperses. There is a rumour of tripe in Testaccio.
‘Sorry,’ Chiara says to Simone as they cross the road.
‘Don’t be,’ Simone says. ‘I don’t have a child to feed.’
The cobbler’s is shut. Closed for holidays a sign on the doorway reads. Perhaps the owner has fled. Or been taken. Perhaps he was a Jew and is in hiding.
The occupied city, she has discovered, hosts a network of convents, churches and safe houses that conceal Jews who escaped the round-up on 16 October and the subsequent sweeps. And not just Jews. Resistance fighters too. The news now, though, is that some of them got too bold after the Allied landing at Anzio a few days ago; they thought that the liberation of Rome was imminent, and many of the leaders have been arrested. Not Gennaro, though. His group is still in operation.
Chiara turns her back to the shop and gazes down the street at a bare wintry tree and the eruption of cobbles at its base. The only thing to do is to say goodbye to Simone and go their separate ways, and she can’t think why they’re standing here, pointlessly postponing that moment, as if they have anything more to say to each other.
Simone nudges her. She has her shopping bag open and is displaying its contents.
‘I have rice and two tins of tomatoes,’ she says. Her hair, streaked with grey at the front, shines like honey where the sun hits it.
This is the woman, Chiara thinks, who stole away my father from the family home with her honeyed ways, her mellifluous voice, her charming French lilt. The shameless hussy, trollop, husband-snatcher. The Algerian whore.
Chiara remembers her mother screaming at her father, ‘Go to her then, your Algerian whore.’ Chiara knew Simone by repute long before they came face to face.
She shakes her head.
‘And a small sack of charcoal,’ Simone says. ‘I’ve got charcoal.’
Daniele has drifted over to stand next to Simone, where he is fluffing the fox fur. He might think that it’s a toy.
The first time she saw Simone, at her father’s funeral, she was wearing fur. A different sort. Swathed in it, muffled by it. Something dark. Mink, perhaps. Simone was on the outer edge of the mourners, a black veil over her face. She had not been invited, of course, even though Chiara’s father had died of a heart attack in her arms. Still, she had come to the church and stood at the back and then gone on to the cemetery. As they were leaving the graveyard, she had stepped out from under the trees and called out Chiara’s name. Under the veil, Chiara had caught a glimpse of heavy swollen eyes, the face of someone who has cried non-stop for days. She asked Chiara whether she would like to come and pick something of her father’s to have as a keepsake, and some days later Chiara had gone.
Simone’s eyes are puffy now too. She has disguised it with make-up, but the skin beneath them is purplish and bruised-looking.
‘I’m glad you still wear Alfonso’s beautiful ring,’ she says. ‘I think of him every day. I miss him every night. He was my beloved.’
Chiara takes a step back. She does not want this woman appropriating the memory of her father. ‘Come on, Daniele,’ she says.
‘I know that it’s dreadful. I am ashamed of myself. I am.’ Simone starts speaking fast in her low, accented voice. ‘But I just can’t be bothered. I think, what’s the point? And it is very cold in my apartment. The wind seems to rattle through it. It is like being up the mast of a ship. I think the building is swaying in the wind. It never used to sway, but now it does.
‘And downstairs has been taken over by the SS. The second floor. And bad things, unspeakable things are happening there. I know they are. And so every day, every night, I imagine breaking in and rescuing whoever is there. But I can’t and I don’t, and every day that I allow it, pass that door, lie in the same
building with whatever it is going on, I think what’s the point of me, then?’
This is the woman who loved her father unstintingly for more than twenty years.
‘Take the charcoal anyway,’ Simone says, thrusting the bag at Chiara. She has a weary, desperate air as if, once relieved of the burden of charcoal and the necessity it implies of keeping herself warm, she might go and throw herself in the river.
This is the woman whom her father loved.
Chiara sighs. ‘You’d better come to our house,’ she says. ‘It’s not far.’
‘Divine,’ Simone comments, as she lifts another forkful of stew to her lips. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ She shakes her head in wonder across the table at Chiara. ‘To the cook,’ she says, raising her glass.
And Chiara, raising her own glass in response and unable to help smiling back, asks herself, How did this happen? That her dead father’s mistress is not just sharing a meal, but is staying the night with them. And that she is glad.
She wonders whether it is to do with the way Simone exclaims in amazement and delight at everything. How she adores the great echoey apartment with its old-fashioned furnishings and is so pleased finally to see the place where her beloved grew up. How when they stood in the hen-pecked wasteland that used to be the dining room, in among the pushed-back furniture, with the netting over the balcony rail to stop the chickens escaping, Simone actually laughed out loud at the arrangement, pronouncing it ‘genius’. Or how Chiara’s grandfather’s depleted wine store is ‘an absolute marvel’, but the use Chiara has made of it as a trading commodity, exchanging the odd bottle with the sommelier at a restaurant off Piazza Navona for Parmesan, pasta and leftovers (scraps for the chickens), is ‘so resourceful’. Even the makeshift bedroom is ‘extremely sensible.’ It is, Simone pronounces, ‘very practical to heat only one room’, and they can ‘expand outwards again when better times come’. It is as if Simone has flicked open the book that is Chiara, and it has fallen open to some brightly illustrated pages in the middle that Chiara herself didn’t know were there.
Or perhaps it is something to do with the assumption of being utterly welcome that seems to govern Simone’s behaviour, a kind of ease and confidence that calls up a corresponding feeling of generosity in Chiara’s suspicious heart.
Or perhaps it is the way Simone lifts Daniele onto her knee to read a story and nestles her head into his neck, then picks him up and puts him down again, sending him off to play with the chickens as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and then says, ‘What a sad little boy. Where did you get him from?’ and how, when Chiara tells her, she weeps.
Spezzatino di cavallo is not a dish that can be rushed, and the meal has been a long time coming with an extended gap between the first course–a simple risotto bianco knocked up within fifteen minutes of their arrival–and this one. Over the course of the afternoon, while the spezzatino has been slow-cooking and the apartment filling with its nourishing aroma, the two women have discussed the state of Italy, the climate of suspicion in Rome, and the best place to get stockings on the black market. They have listened to the news and heard that an ‘unbreakable German line’ is preventing the Allied forces from progressing and is even pushing them back, agreed that this is Nazi propaganda and that the Allies will arrive before the end of February and, to celebrate, have drunk most of a bottle of Frascati from the precious wine store.
While Chiara has been busy in the kitchen, Simone and Daniele have spent time in the chicken run where they have witnessed the laying of Cluck’s first ever real and proper egg (the previous one came out without a shell), which Simone has beaten into a sort of zabaglione for Daniele, who has eaten it with the smallest spoon that could be found.
Daniele has done a whole page of drawings of Cluck. Chiara has told the tale of Cluck’s first attempt at an egg, imitated the strange constipated noises and movements the hen made while she was attempting to get it out, clucked around the kitchen table and made herself laugh out loud, actually snort with laughter. Daniele has looked at her aghast, and she wonders whether he has ever heard her laugh before.
‘It was funny, wasn’t it, Daniele?’ she says, but he shakes his solemn head.
She has been amazed to discover that she is enjoying herself. Not in an edge-of-the-abyss-tomorrow-we-die sort of way, but genuinely. So that when Simone all of a sudden looked up at the clock and announced that she would have to leave to get home before the curfew, Chiara rushed to put some of the stew in a bowl and cover it with a cloth for Simone to take home, explaining how long it would need to cook, with Simone smiling and nodding and pulling on her gloves. And only when she was at the door did Chiara suddenly remember that Simone had no fuel.
‘Come back in,’ she said, almost tugging her. ‘You can’t cook it, can you? Stay the night.’
The meal has taken so long that Daniele has fallen asleep with his head on the table.
‘And to the cook’s father,’ Simone adds, ‘Alfonso Ferdinando Ravello. The love of my life.’
She looks steadily at Chiara as if daring her to contradict, but then she smiles. The wine and food have revived her. The colour has returned to her cheeks, and her hair is honey-hued. The grey streaks don’t show in the dim kitchen light.
‘Babbo,’ Chiara says, raising her glass.
And then they both speak at once.
‘Excuse me?’ Chiara says.
‘I am so glad to be here,’ Simone says, ‘that’s all. I can honestly say that you have brought me back to life.’
She looks around the kitchen, at the leftover stew in its dish (Enough for tomorrow, Chiara thinks), at Daniele’s hand lying on the table with the horseshoe birthmark, his grubby fingernails, his hair flopping forward, and then back at Chiara.
‘You have saved my life,’ she says, ‘and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Chiara feels herself blush under the other’s ardent gaze.
‘I’d better put the little man to bed,’ she says. She shakes Daniele sufficiently awake to stand and bustles him, eyes half closed, out of the room.
Simone sleeps in Cecilia’s room. She says she doesn’t mind the cold because she is hot-blooded and produces a lot of excess heat.
‘Your father used to say he didn’t need a hot-water bottle when he was sharing a bed with me,’ she says when Chiara leaves. ‘Sorry,’ she says when she sees Chiara’s face. ‘I overstep the line sometimes, I know.’
‘I don’t really mind,’ Chiara says, surprised to discover that this is true. ‘It’s nice to hear his name, you know.’
‘He was more of my life than I was of his,’ Simone says. ‘He had you and Cecilia and your mother. He even had his own mother and father still. I just had him.’
Chiara steps back into the room, tugging at the ring on her finger. ‘I’m sorry I made you give me his ring,’ she says. ‘It should be yours, really.’ She slides it off and holds it out.
‘You didn’t make me. You asked me for it, and I gave it to you.’ Simone closes her own, much bigger hand around Chiara’s. ‘Willingly,’ she says.
In the morning, with hardly any discussion, Simone goes across Rome to her own apartment, gathers a few belongings, comes back and moves in. Until the situation improves, they agree.
Simone has a gift for scrounging and wheedling, and Chiara for making something out of almost nothing. Life with Simone moves up a notch from mere survival.
‘We are more than the sum of our parts,’ she likes to comment when yet another ingenious meal is put on the table, or another bag of charcoal somehow procured.
Sometimes they laugh, and it’s as if Daniele is the adult, an old man bowed by the cares of the world, and they the children. He looks at them reprovingly, as if they are being disrespectful of the solemnity of the times. Our little memento mori, Simone calls him.
‘I do admire you,’ she says to Chiara one day.
Chiara eyes her warily. Admiration is not how she would describe the look on Simone’s face.
‘It must be difficult to live your life with Daniele, knowing that it could end at any moment.’
‘It’s the same for everybody,’ Chiara says. She wants to say ‘for every mother’, but she stops herself.
‘I didn’t mean bombing and raids and all the… ’ Simone waves her arm towards the horizon.
‘Rubble,’ Chiara suggests.
‘Yes. You have to be careful with him, but also with yourself. You have to live with him as if you will have to give him back.’
‘What do you mean?’
Chiara hears a dangerous rise in her own voice. She feels something slide within her.
‘Just a minute,’ she says.
She gets quickly up and goes out of the room, stands just the other side of the door and takes a breath. Not now. She will think about this later. When she is alone, she will ponder when it was that she started to love him more than anything else in the world. Not now.
She returns to the room but she doesn’t sit down again.
‘I can’t talk about this,’ she says. ‘You mean well, I’m sure, but I do not want to discuss this. I cannot see what good it would do.’
Simone ignores her. She lowers her head and holds her hand up, palm towards Chiara, like a traffic policeman holding back a lorry at a busy crossroad. She speaks fast and low. She brooks no interruption.
She says that she understands that Chiara has made it her life’s work to keep this child safe, that she has risen to this task that was thrust upon her. That it is admirable, noble even. That she can see it is Chiara’s contribution to the better world they hope will come afterwards. And that she knows it is difficult to live beyond the day, in these hard times, but that is exactly what needs to be done. When this war is over, they will come for him, not his family perhaps, but his community, when whatever is left of it returns and there is some kind of judgment, some elders perhaps, gentlemen with beards and little hats on the backs of their heads, women wearing scarves, they will come and they will claim him and they will thank her for keeping him safe, but they will take him back. And unless Chiara prepares herself, it will rip the heart out of her.
Early One Morning Page 27
