by Louisa Young
‘She is going to get into trouble, though,’ he said.
‘She’d always do anything for a bun,’ Nenna said. ‘It didn’t really matter when she was a little kid.’
‘She is a little kid,’ said Tom.
‘She’s about fourteen.’
‘A child,’ said Tom.
Nenna rubbed her mouth again. It felt as though she was rubbing the kiss in, not off.
Tom thought: I could kiss her now.
It might help.
God no of course I couldn’t.
But he looked at her and thought: there will be a first kiss for us though. It will happen. I will do it.
*
Aldo took Tom with him to see the new towns. They stopped outside Cisterna, at the edge of the hills, and looked down over the plain, wide and smooth, divided in quadrants by roads and canals, flat as a tablecloth carefully laid. Graceful eucalyptus trees, small and floaty in the distance, lined the banks and ditches. Beyond lay the blue sea, no flatter than the land. Tom smiled.
‘Before we made our bonifica, our reclamation work, it was dinosaur country,’ Aldo said. ‘Weeds and reeds and pools and swamps to the end of the eye. You imagine diplodocus and brontosaurus walking about. We found a mammoth skeleton … But now it is just frogs – do you eat frog?’
‘No,’ Tom said.
‘You should try it. It’s delicious. We’ll go and see Olivieri, and buy a few. He’s been trapping them here for years. Eels too …’
Aldo pointed out the towns. From this height they were star-shapes and circles, geometrical urban paradises set in the chequerboard of green fields and brown. Littoria, opened in 1932; Sabaudia, 1934, and Pontinia, which was still in progress. ‘It won’t take long,’ Aldo said. ‘We built Sabaudia in two hundred and fifty-three days. Littoria – look at it now, how beautiful it is – was a mess hours before the opening. There was a terrible storm, mud and flooding everywhere.’
‘I thought the bonifica had stopped all the flooding,’ Tom said.
‘Mostly. That night, not. The men worked all night, and they have a tale that the ground underneath the piazza opened up and swallowed a tractor whole. Every man working on the town,’ he said, making the expression that means indulgent disbelief in the face of peasant cunning, ‘was holding on to the rope, and saw it fall. They tried to save it but it was too heavy, and they had to let go.’
‘Is that true?’
Aldo shrugged, made a moue with his mouth. ‘Beh,’ he said. ‘Everything was nice by morning when the Duce came to make his speech and plant some trees. They do say the driver had a kitten, and it couldn’t be saved, and you hear it mewing on stormy nights …’
‘So is the tractor still under there?’
‘So they say. Or maybe someone sold it. It was just a tractor – not one of the huge Tosis with all the buckets – oh, you haven’t see the Tosis – come, let’s go and find one.’
Aldo grinned and gleamed as he drove Tom down on to the great tablecloth, taking him on a brand new road along a brand new built-up bank to where a great dinosaur of steel and electricity leant its long neck over into a wide vale of water and mud. It was festooned with a row of vast buckets, which constantly moved along like beads on a gigantic necklace, shunting each other into the mud and water below, and in turn scooping, scooping, scooping, and then dumping, dumping, dumping. Farther away, in a canal bed of thicker mud, sinewy brown-faced men in shirtsleeves and caps dug, and dumped, and dug, and dumped, and dug, and dumped. In the distance, hovering almost above the plain, Tom saw three more diplodoci, leaning their long necks, buckets scooping, dumping, scooping, dumping, and crowds more men, digging, and dumping, and digging, and dumping. The smell was revolting and the noise tremendous. The dance lurched on, both primeval and industrial. Tom was entranced.
Aldo was saying something about explosions, having to blow up rocky outcrops. Tom pictured volcanos of mud bursting into the sky.
‘The workmen are from the north,’ Aldo was saying, his face misty with pleasure at the rightness of it all. ‘Ex-soldiers. They will have a house and land of their own; quinine every day against the malaria. They are building Italy, and Italy is building them.’
Turning back, leaving the raw landscape where the men and machines were still slogging to win land from water, they came to the salvaged land, flat and perfect with tiny fruit trees, fields that had yet to see their first harvest, new houses, blue with red tiles, pretty and neat, dotted about regularly on the empty land. Aldo waved at people as they passed: women working in the fields, children. They waved back. ‘Every house has mosquito nets built in,’ Aldo said, and for a moment he looked as if he was going to cry.
‘Come,’ Aldo said. ‘I’ll show you the pumps. They’re down at Mazzocchio; six of them as big as aeroplanes, and as noisy. They pull nine and a half thousand gallons of water a second, and send it through the canals down to the sea.’
‘What would happen if they broke down?’ Tom asked.
Aldo gazed about. ‘All under water again,’ he said. ‘One week maybe.’
‘It all looks so perfect,’ Tom said. ‘Like a toytown.’
Aldo smiled.
‘Did anybody live here before?’
‘Not really,’ Aldo said. ‘Maybe a few.’
‘What happened to them?’
Aldo didn’t know.
Heading back up the via Appia to Rome, Tom asked, ‘Have you met the Duce?’
Aldo glanced at him in surprise. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘All the time! He comes down to admire the works – and to help. Shirt off, digging, helping get the harvest in. Also’ – and he gave Tom a look – ‘he has a girlfriend down this way. He comes on his Moto Guzzi to visit. Then we pretend not to know it’s him.’
‘Have you talked to him?’
‘Of course!’ Aldo said. ‘Everybody talks to him. He listens to everybody. And what’s more he gives you a straight answer, and he keeps his word.’
*
When boys yelled at foreign girls in the street, ‘Eh, bionda!’ and so forth, in not at all the same way that their grandmothers used to coo the same words to Kitty, Nenna yelled back with a mouthful as dry and salty as anchovies. They did not yell at her twice. Word got round.
It’s a great big hokey cokey, Tom thought. Yes and no, to and fro.
‘It’s because they get a cheque for seven hundred lire when they get married,’ he teased. ‘They want you for the money.’
Tom did not shout at girls in the street. He was, like it or not, an English gentleman. He wasn’t sure, now, that he did like it. He could tease her, and make her make that face, the one she was doing now, narrowed eyes, pouty mouth, the ‘Yes, yes, I know what you’re up to’ look, but he could not – cannot what? he thought. If I were not an English gentleman, he thought – but the thought stopped there. He was an English gentleman, and there was nothing he could do about it.
But English gentlemen touch women. They father children. They hold girls too close at dances. They go out on to the verandah with them, they kiss them in cars, and stay for hours in the carpark outside the tennis club. They cuddle up with barmaids and town girls and – he’d heard about this – they give money to girls they meet in stations and pubs, to do the kind of thing some of the chaps at school did for each other …
None of this was anything to do with Nenna. Nenna was – well, she was nothing to do with any of that.
‘They want those blondies for their lovely Aryan genes,’ Nenna said. ‘And men with plenty of children get better jobs, so they have to start young. I suppose I’d better marry one now, and get a good start.’
‘You’re far too young,’ Tom said, bringing out his mocking tone, which would make all his dirty thoughts go away. ‘A mere child.’
‘Younger than I are happy mothers made,’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘But don’t worry Tomaso, I’ll wait for you. We can marry when we’re old enough to know no one else will have us. When we’re twenty-five.’
‘But if w
e leave it so late how will we fit in our seven sons?’ Tom asked, grinning gaily as his mind filled up suddenly with fantastic images, shocking images, of him and Nenna creating sons, images of golden thighs and coiling hair and breasts and mouths … ‘Five thousand lire apiece, don’t forget!’ he cried. Dear God, I am becoming a lunatic. ‘But what if we have seven daughters too?’
‘Life insurance!’ said Nenna. This was another kindness from the Duce to his people: if anything happened to the patriotic mother there would be an insurance payment for the upkeep of her seven fine Italians sons. ‘You know the signora with twenty-four children? She’s pregnant!’
‘Imagine!’ cried Tom. ‘Twenty-five children dressed like Vittorio and Stefano in their little shorts and their hats like acorns, marching across a desert to invade Abyssinia, singing’ – and he sang – ‘“Ti saluto, vado in Abissinia, cara Virginia, ma tornerò.” If they’d invaded somewhere else, of course, they’d have put in some other girl’s name … I’m going to America, dear Angelica; to Albania, dear Grainne – it’s an Irish name, Nenna.’
This is better. Sort of. At least it’s changing the subject.
‘Bulgaria, Maria,’ Nenna said.
‘Haiti, Katie,’ said Tom. ‘Uganda Amanda.’
‘Bolivia Olivia,’ said Nenna.
‘Tanganyika Veronica!’ cried Tom.
‘Nigeria Valeria!’ from Nenna.
‘To Guinea, dear Minnie,’ said Tom, ‘and Chile, dear Millie’ – at which they fell about laughing.
By the end Tom was physically sitting on his hands, red-faced, and Marinella was watching them with huge eyes and an expression of vast wisdom.
*
Was it because I was so engrossed in her? Was I just blinded?
*
Tom wrote to Nadine and Riley.
Dear Old Folks. Everyone’s well. The baby is very sweet, though everywhere is festooned in urinous cloths as a result, which is not really my cup of tea, talking of which I’m longing for one. The autarchia thing is getting really quite extreme. Nenna has a particularly nasty coat which is apparently made of milk. It’s called Lanital. Sounds like a medicine or something to clean the bathroom with. Aldo is very keen on it all and quite believes that coffee is not good for us and chicory is not revolting – also leather shoes are not necessary, we must wear cork or rubber. I feel quite privileged to be allowed my English brogues which are of course not unpatriotic because they are English and so am I. I managed an entire week at the lake before term began and have elongated my capacity for staying underwater, unfortunately as I have not invented a way of reading a stopwatch underwater or of persuading Nenna that timing me is an interesting project I still don’t know how long exactly I can stay there. I was about to start training up Stefano as my assistant in this experiment but alas he had homework and now everyone has to go back to school, so my ignorance remains intact. Having had a look at Tiber water under a microscope last summer – positively oodling with life forms hitherto unknown to man, or at least to me – I don’t think I’ll be continuing my research when we get back to the island. Been to a couple of rallies and so forth, all jolly stirring but somebody said the tanks were made of wood, so—
Anyway, Aldo etc send their regards – it is now dinner time, so accubituri te salutant – those who are about to lie down and scoff salute you. I won’t say I’ll write again because I probably won’t— Yr lvg Tom
A conductor had left the country because he wouldn’t play Giovinezza before his concerts.
‘Idiotic,’ said Nenna. ‘Why not play it? It’s his job and it’s a lovely song.’
Tom said he had read in the paper that a senator had slapped the conductor’s face once for not playing it.
‘Well, he felt strongly about it,’ said Nenna. ‘Songs can be very strong. You remember how we used to march up and down …’ They remembered: Nenna and Kitty singing Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza … Youth, youth, springtime of beauty … You couldn’t sing it without marching up and down.
Nenna was back at school. One weekend her gymnastics troupe took part in a display: Tom went along with Susanna and Aldo and the boys, to watch. Johnny Carmichael, also on the new course, came along.
The Duce was up there somewhere, thumbs tucked into his belt no doubt, swaying his stout chest around, being adored. They peered and craned but they didn’t get a glimpse. So many ranks of people passed by! Young men with charms dangling from their hats; boys from the Balilla walking with their bent arms swinging alternately right across their bodies so their elbows pointed at their shoes. Everyone so very much in time. So much saluting. Aldo and the boys cheered and stamped their feet, and as Nenna’s troupe came cartwheeling by, bouncing and spinning along like great white flowers, Tom’s spirits rose – with the general enthusiasm, of course. And, yes, with the sight of her legs flying, long and strong. Her hair was tied up tight around her head. He realised, seeing it tied so tight, how glad he was that she didn’t cut it short and hold it in place with clips, like the other girls – and her face was bright with exertion and pride as it flashed by, upside down, spinning. Her arms, flexible and brown, were curved with muscle, her belly stretched and smooth under the white shirt.
‘There she is! There she is!’ shouted Stefano and Vittorio, and Susanna, beside Tom, put her hand on his arm and turned to smile at him with a maternal pride which made him flush with shame. On his other side, Carmichael whispered, ‘What do you think of all this? Rather ridiculous, don’t you think? But impressive.’
‘Mussolini is a great statesman for Italy!’ Tom said. ‘Every Italian knows they need discipline and a strong leader. They’re not like us English, naturally hardworking, and reasonable.’
‘Stop that,’ said Carmichael, giggling.
‘Stop what?’ Tom said.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘You sound like Papà,’ said Stefano.
Carmichael fell silent.
*
Tom was bemused about what was going on in Abyssinia. There was some disagreement, and Mussolini had sent soldiers, and the League of Nations had got involved. Tom wasn’t convinced about invading other countries. How was it fair?
Aldo, just back from another rally, bluff and cheerful, laughed and laughed at that. ‘From a son of perfidious Albion!’ he said. ‘The country which – have you heard of the British Empire? Dear boy, allow me to quote.’ He turned to the bookshelf, and took a paper from the pile. It took him a moment to find the right thing.
‘Here,’ he said, and read: ‘“As soon as the British have sated themselves with colonial conquests, they impudently draw a line across the middle of the page in the Recording Angel’s book, and then proclaim: ‘What was right for us up till yesterday is wrong for you today.’”’
Tom thought for a second, and supposed he had a point.
‘But Anthony Eden is brokering for peace,’ Tom said. ‘Peace is better, surely?’
‘Arms embargo!’ said Aldo, and snorted. ‘You lot are trying to tell us what to do. Listen. The Duce wants to take back what is naturally ours, that you lot – Albion! – messed about with at Versailles. And it is the duty of a powerful country to spread civilisation. Don’t we all have empires? France? Russia? Germany? And if we invade, the darkies will benefit from Roman standards! They will be delighted.’
Tom thought for another moment, and supposed that he was proud of the Empire, and supposed, in a way, that of course Italy would want one.
‘There is slavery in Abyssinia!’ Nenna said. ‘It’s terrible! These things have to be challenged.’ Her eyes were wide and shocked. ‘Don’t the English newspapers tell you these things?’
He hardly heard the words, her eyes were so beautiful.
‘You lot watch out,’ Aldo said. ‘Inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato.’ The Englishman Italianate is the devil incarnate.
*
Tom really tried to settle to work. For several weeks he persuaded himself that he was revelling in the deepe
r involvement: working hard, seeing more of the chaps from the college. He’d be back in England for university early in October, but wanted to stay as long here as he could. He read the papers – English or American ones if he could get hold of them: Joe Louis the Brown Bomber beat Max Baer, the former champion (Aldo wouldn’t like that: in June Joe Louis had beaten Mussolini’s boy, Primo Carnera the Ambling Alp, despite being 9 inches shorter and 65 pounds lighter). Howard Hughes had flown the plane he himself designed, at 352.46 mph. Hitler has put through the Nuremberg Laws depriving German Jews of citizenship; aviator Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the Black Eagle of Harlem, had volunteered for the Ethiopian air force, and was on his way to meet Haile Selassie – that gave Tom a pang. He had loved Hubert Fauntleroy Julian ever since reading about his flights and parachute jumps in New York, years ago, where he wore a red suit and played the saxophone as he descended, crowds rushing up and down the streets of New York as the wind blew him this way and that. One time he had landed on the police station in Harlem. Or something.
Aldo was a little moody. The latest phase of the bonifica at the Agro Pontino was finished, and everybody had been laid off – thousands of men. ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘They were getting restless with the sacrifices that have to be made. As if you can achieve anything without suffering.’
Tom asked, ‘What have the men been suffering?’
‘Oh, the usual complaints. The camps are too crowded, the wages are too low, the food is bad, things are dirty, there’s not enough doctors—’
‘And is it true?’
‘Of course it’s true! It’s not the Dopolavoro! They can’t expect to sit about playing briscola all day! But anyway, now they’re all sacked, so they’ve nothing more to complain about. For the next phase, they’ll employ men with more enthusiasm. Me for example!’
*
