There was a silence. The plane had come back down to earth. Then they all started talking at the same time, and the signora burst into tears.
If the priest was the hero of this story all along, she didn’t know why he had been in such a state in the hallway.
‘Father Antonio,’ she said, half standing up, and caught his gaze.
He looked at her, and she thought for a horrible moment that he was going to cry.
‘Yes,’ he said, then raised his hands and lowered them again, almost as if he might be going to bow to her. ‘All right,’ he said.
Madame Simone had drawn up a chair next to the signora and was speaking to her softly. The priest, who had lowered himself to his knees at the signora’s feet, started beating his breast.
‘Mea culpa,’ he was saying. He was making a confession.
‘What’s going on?’ the girl was saying. ‘What’s going on?’
And Assunta, who had a job following it all herself, took the girl’s hand in hers and gripped it tightly.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Help me, Ma,’ he says and then he passes out.
He is lying across the threshold. Half in and half out, his legs protruding onto the communal landing.
She drags him the rest of the way in, her hands in his hot, damp armpits. It takes her a few heaves. She grunts as she does it, and he half wakes.
‘Is that my little ma?’ he says. ‘My little ma,’ and he reaches up to her with fluttering hands, but before they connect, they fall down by his side. She lays him out in the entrance hallway. He is too heavy to take farther. She brings water. She puts a cushion under his head.
She thinks about the first time she saw him like this, so out of it that he could hardly form a sentence. He was only a boy. Fourteen or fifteen. It was after she had shown him the Levi file.
‘I did it for us,’ she said, ‘for you and me, so we could get on with our lives.’
And he said, ‘There is no us.’
There was a kind of sweet smell around him.
She removes and pockets his keys, which were hanging in the lock. There are kick marks in the door, the imprint of his boot, a dent in the wood, a splintering. What a battering he has given it. But better the door, she thinks, than someone’s face.
Why did he try to kick the door in when he had his key?
She lifts his head. ‘Drink,’ she says.
She must keep him hydrated. Watch over him to make sure he doesn’t fit or choke on his own vomit. Wake him hourly.
‘Have you taken something? What have you taken?’ she had said that first time, seeing that his pupils were dilated.
‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ he had said. ‘It’s all under control. It’s good for me.’ He had nodded at her. ‘Good for the thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘You know,’ he had said, ‘the sadness thing.’
She sits next to him, on the floor in the entrance hall, under the coat rack.
Help me, Ma.
She has the alarm clock beside her in case she should fall asleep and she sets it for one hour’s time.
The clock ticks. He has his mouth open, lying on his back, slack-jawed, and he breathes noisily.
She touches the birthmark on his outflung hand. It has grown and stretched over the years, become paler and more amorphous. From this angle, it looks like the faint image of an uncoiling snake; a small patch within it of darker pigmentation could be the snake’s eye. Funny how sometimes she used to think that because he had this horseshoe birthmark, a talisman of good fortune imprinted in his skin, he carried his luck with him. How she persisted in thinking it was luck that had saved him when the rest of his family had perished, and not, as he seems to want to demonstrate to her, its opposite.
‘I don’t blame you, Ma,’ he has told her more than once.
‘So why are you so intent on throwing your life away?’ she has asked him, but he doesn’t seem to have an answer.
‘This is where we are come, my darling boy,’ she says now.
His quiff has fallen forward, and she nudges it back from his forehead. His hair is stiff and slimy with the grease he combs through it. His skin is clammy, like uncooked pizza dough. She has the impression she could push her thumb into it and make a mark. Reshape it. Like putty. She dips a sponge into the bowl of water and gently wipes his face.
He always acts as if he has a hard shell, like a snail or a tortoise. Or an egg. She remembers the first egg Cluck laid, a globule that made no sound as it landed on the floorboards. Something barely contained, the line that divided the world from it and it from the world imperfectly delineated.
He used to love to roam the hills, climb trees, swing and jump, camouflage himself in mud. His eyes sometimes shone when he did those things, but now it is only in that briefest of moments, just after the needle has gone in, that his eyes brighten in the old way. As if it is the wildness calling to him. That’s what they buy him, these drugs, something that is like freedom.
She remembers him, a switch in his hand, or a fallen branch, and he was swishing it through the grass and leaping about, near but not too close to the one sheep with its autumn lamb. She feared that he would lash out at the lamb as he passed, but he didn’t. He never did. He would never hurt an animal. It is himself he hurts. All his rage goes inwards.
She puts her head on his chest and listens to his fast-beating heart.
She says, Help me.
TWENTY-FIVE
The view from the junk-room window was of tubes, vents, overflow pipes, ducts, waste pipes, wires: the hidden outlets and inlets that kept the building functioning, the grubby backside of things. But if Maria put her chair under the window and laid her head on the sill, she could look up at the sky.
In a minute she will go out into the mess of the apartment, where everything now was being shifted and sifted, thrown away or refurbished, and she will sit in the kitchen with the signora, Nonna Chiara, and they will work together on Keats’s letters. After that they will have their conversation session, which has now become a kind of history lesson, both in the smaller, domestic sense–Daniele’s favourite meal, how he played the trumpet at a school concert, his night-time drink–and the wider context of fascism and war and social upheaval. And she will try to grasp a bit more about the place where the two intersected and who he was, her pained and handsome father. Heartbroken and a heartbreaker, one of those boys girls think they can tame.
About all of it Maria was insatiable. However, she was also soon sated and had to retreat for a while to this quiet, whitewashed little place that was her own. The false ceiling had been taken down and all of Daniele’s possessions, stored up there for years, sorted through. She had hung his trumpet on the wall next to the photograph, and placed in her bedside cabinet all the notes he had written to his real mother, which Nonna Chiara had kept in a box. It was nice to have her own room, but it meant she was next door to Nonna Chiara’s and she could hear her crying at night. Sometimes that would set her off too, even though most of the time, caught up in the glory of her new Italian life, she wasn’t really sad.
‘That ring you gave me,’ she told her mum on the phone, ‘used to belong to Nonna Chiara’s father, and the initials stand for Alfonso Ferdinando Ravello.’
She knew now that at his lowest point Daniele had taken all of Nonna Chiara’s jewellery and pawned it to pay for his drugs, but she didn’t feel that was something her mum needed to know. This ring was the one piece that was rightfully his.
Her mum had wept when Maria had said that even if Daniele was alive, no one had any way of tracing him. That the chances were he would never be found, and was probably dead.
‘Nonna Chiara is going to take me to the place where Daniele used to leave letters for his mum,’ she said, ‘and I am going to write him a message and leave it there. I thought perhaps you might like to write one too. To say goodbye,’ she said.
Tommaso was coming to visit in a week or so, when the work on the apartment would be finished. H
e was going to sleep in her old spot in the salon.
‘So it turns out I’m half Jewish as well as half Italian,’ she had told him when he called.
‘Blimey O’Riley,’ he had said, affecting an Irish brogue, ‘and you a Catholic.’
Later still she and Nonna Chiara will prepare their evening meal or they will go out to eat in the trattoria on Campo dei Fiori where Maria had tasted smoked mozzarella, cockles and clams but had turned her nose up at rabbits’ brains. Afterwards the alarming Simone, who frequently gathered Maria in her arms and crushed her against her cushiony, perfumed breasts, might take them to a show or a happening. Or she and Nonna Chiara might go to the cinema in Trastevere where they showed films in English.
Or she might go out promenading with Beppe and Carmelo. Once or twice, when it was really late, she had pretended she was going home but instead she had run, by herself, through the night-time streets to Piazza Costaguti in the heart of the ghetto where Daniele Levi’s family home had been. She had stood alone in the darkness in the empty square and reached for it, the huge, cavernous absence of the family she would never know, the horror of their fates, but she couldn’t somehow seem to feel it properly. It was all very sad, and she sort of missed him. Daniele Levi, her biological father, the person she most closely physically resembled and whom she would never now meet. But she didn’t know him and, anyway, she already had a dad.
She lay with her head on the sill, looking up at the limitless sky.
TWENTY-SIX
It is August, the hottest month. Chiara waits in the relative cool of the entrance hall. The red Murano bowl, one of the objects to survive the cull, the great emptying and winnowing that the apartment has undergone, catches her eye. She takes the bowl from the shelf, balances it in the palm of one hand, feels its weight, the perfection of its dips and contours, the smoothness of the glass. She lifts it with the other hand and uses her fingertip to find and touch the hidden flaw, the tiny fissure in its base. She imagines dashing it to the ground, the shock of its shattering, ruby shards and splinters scattering.
She raises it to her eye instead and peers through at the world stained red. She steps sideways and through the bowl’s lens she looks down the length of her newly spacious hallway to the place at the end where two ancient pieces of furniture used to stand but where now a mirror hangs. She sees herself, a small figure in black, with a Cyclops eye of burning red, like a little devil.
Maria emerges from her room halfway down the hallway, sees Chiara and smiles.
‘Rose-tinted glasses?’ she says.
Maria doesn’t see her as a devil. She doesn’t know the violence inside.
‘You need a blouse with that,’ Chiara says.
Maria is wearing a pleated pale-green crêpe de Chine skirt from Chiara’s collection and one of her own tight black tops that puts Chiara in mind of a man’s vest that has shrunk in the wash. Her arms and shoulders are bare.
‘The skirt is lovely,’ Chiara adds.
‘Nobody wears blouses,’ Maria says, sashaying down the hallway as if it is a catwalk.
‘Nobody,’ Chiara says as she replaces the bowl. The monster in her subsides.
‘I mean nobody my age. You look nice in them. Anyway, you haven’t got the full effect yet. It’s going to look fab.’
Maria, next to her now, reaches down Daniele’s old leather jacket from the coat rack and shrugs it over her shoulders.
‘See?’ she says. ‘Eclectic chic.’
‘You’re going to roast,’ Chiara says. ‘It’s like an oven outside.’
‘I don’t care,’ Maria says. ‘I’m wearing it.’
‘Let’s go then,’ Chiara says.
The carved handle of the walking stick protrudes from the umbrella stand next to the door and on a whim she takes it.
If Maria asks why she is taking a cane when she is supposedly cured of her head-spinning malaise, she will make some joke about how it befits her new grandmother status. She will put on a croaky, old-lady voice. Maria, however, is more interested in telling Chiara a story about a man on the bus who had been staring at her.
As they walk along, Chiara swings the cane and reflects that the comfort of it lies not in the support it offers but in its capacity to transform into a weapon. A cudgel.
Ever since Antonio’s revelation, she has been in turmoil. She wants him defrocked, excommunicated, paraded in shame through the streets, her erstwhile friend. She wants him tarred and feathered, struck down by a thunderbolt. A savage rage burns through her. She is surprised that no one can see it from the outside. That they say, ‘You look tired,’ or ‘Nice haircut,’ when they should be saying, ‘You look dangerous,’ or ‘You look nasty.’
Rage has replaced grief, and it is ugly beyond redemption. When first it came, like a gargoyle within her, it felt bigger than she was, pushing at her seams and bursting through her pores. It spoke through her mouth. When Simone reached out her hand to Antonio as he knelt at their feet, it said, ‘Don’t touch him.’ It is more contained now but still it presses against her forehead from the inside, like a migraine. She has told Antonio by phone that she is not ready to see him yet, but that she understands that he was not motivated by malice.
‘So when stamping on his foot didn’t work, I started shouting,’ Maria says as they wait for the lights to change at the crossing on Lungotevere.
‘You what?’ Chiara says. She has not been paying full attention to this dramatic tale.
‘This gross man, groping me on the bus. How do you say “grope” in Italian?’
‘Oh dear,’ Chiara says, ‘tell me that part again.’
Sometimes it seems to her that it is only the presence of Maria in her life that stops her from running amok with her cudgel, frothing at the mouth, smashing and breaking things, laying waste.
They pause in the middle of Ponte Sisto, facing upriver towards the dome of St Peter on the horizon, and Maria finishes her story.
How she shouted out, Quest’uomo– this man.
And then again louder, ‘This man, this man!’
How no other words came to help, but it was enough, because she was shouting in her new Italian voice, which was richer and stronger than her English one. The cry was taken up by the women of the bus.
‘Driver, stop the bus,’ they shouted.
The man was manhandled off, dumped on the pavement, shouted at and cursed.
‘Shame on you,’ they cried.
She had been going to give him her supercilious look, but the bus had pulled away.
‘You coped with that very well,’ Chiara says. ‘Show me the look.’
Maria turns to face her. She is already flushed in the heat, and they haven’t started to climb the hill yet. She tilts her head so she is looking down her nose, half closes her eyes and raises one eyebrow.
‘Very effective,’ Chiara says, remembering a little boy with no defence other than a hooded gaze. She takes a tighter grip on the handle of her stick as the monstrous fury wells up in her again. It is as if she were pregnant and big with it. It makes her quiver.
‘I love this bridge,’ Maria says. She is looking down at the water swirling past. ‘I think it might be my favourite because of the way, with the reflection, the arches make perfect circles.’
As they continue on their way, she prattles on about the relative merits of bridges, and Chiara finds herself arguing in favour of the splendour of the St Angelo one. They call in at the basilica of St Cecilia’s to light a candle for Cecilia and so that Maria can see the likeness of the saint, her trailing hair, her outflung, dimpled hand. Then they weave through the little streets of Trastevere to Via Garibaldi, from where they climb first one and then another set of stairs that cut off the twists and bends of the road, carrying them steeply up the hill.
They emerge opposite the fountain of Acqua Paola.
‘Wow,’ Maria says, ‘wow,’ exclaiming at the great baroque façade and the water cascading out of the basins set into the pillared walls, the shallow bowl it fal
ls into and the aquamarine colour of it against the white marble.
But Chiara doesn’t speak. She has turned to look at the panorama of Rome laid out at their feet. As she gazes across the expanse of the city to the other side bounded by the mass of the Castelli hills, she experiences again that old sensation of rising above the rubble, the pettiness and the empty noise, to a quieter place.
She understands that at the heart of all her hopes for Daniele–that he might be alive, that he might even be well and alive–when all those layers had been peeled away and discarded, there at the innermost core one minuscule hope had remained: that Daniele, wherever he was, would at least know that he was loved. And now that hope is dead.
She understands that the monstrous rage that fills her hasn’t replaced the grief. It is the grief.
She becomes aware of Maria standing quietly at her side. Maria has taken off the jacket, and the freckled skin on her shoulder glistens.
‘I’m sorry you’re so sad,’ Maria says. ‘What can I do?’
‘You’re already doing it,’ Chiara says.
They continue onwards and upwards, past the Giuseppe Garibaldi monument and along the path lined with white-painted busts of Garibaldi’s followers until there she is, Anita Garibaldi on her rearing horse.
‘Daniele,’ Chiara suddenly says, ‘really liked coming up here. He liked high places. He loved climbing things, scrambling up trees and over walls and out of windows. He was a nimble and agile boy. He had a sort of grace. He was a wonderful dancer.’
She wonders whether this is quite true, whether she is rewriting him. Then she remembers a thing he did, his party piece.
‘He could do this extraordinary thing,’ she says. ‘He called it the flagpole. He would place his hands in a certain way, like this.’
She hangs the walking stick over her forearm to have both hands free to demonstrate, bending her knees and stacking her hands around an imaginary pole.
‘And then he would unfurl his body at right angles to the pole, like a banner. He was so strong.’ She unhooks the cane and looks at Maria. ‘How could he believe that I didn’t want to see him?’ she asks.
Early One Morning Page 33
