Devotion

by Louisa Young

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, surprised by her sudden warmth. ‘What is it, bambina?’ Her face flooded with the fresh pinkness of relief.

  ‘I saw the newspaper, Papà,’ she cried.

  ‘Were you worried?’ Aldo said. ‘There’s no need! Oh, come here.’ He put the bag down on the table, and wrapped his arms around her, all love, all fatherness, glad to have the opportunity with this big girl who so seldom now came to him blinking for comfort. ‘Some fools are saying it came from Minculpop, that the Duce approved it. Well that can’t be true, can it? I have written to him, and his reply will explain everything. He’ll write back soon. I’ve been telephoning too. Everyone knows it’s a nonsense, some little stupidity. Fascism is unity, tesoro, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Collective and equal? For the Slovenian and the Arab, the Jew and the Libyan, the Sicilian and the Venetian – all of us equal in the Empire?’

  He was crooning to her now, and looking over her head to Susanna, sharing his reassurance.

  ‘The Duce has always said so,’ he murmured. ‘He will knock this on the head. It’s just a stupid insult, a mistake. It means nothing.’ He smelt her clean hair, and his heart was full of her, his first-born lovely girl. For what had he suffered, if not to keep this girl safe?

  ‘I said to him – do you want to know what I wrote?’ She nodded. ‘I wrote that of course I do not doubt him in any way, indeed that it’s my very faith in him that causes me to believe that he himself would want to calm your foolish fears! Because the Duce is as another father to you – all wise, all loving. Like me! So, we know he will write back! But we know too that he is a very busy man.’

  Susanna was clattering, cutting onions, casting them into the warm oil, their fragrance rising. The boys were arguing about who would lay the table; Tom was collecting the plates, the bread, the salt. On the wireless, Louis Armstrong finished singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. ‘And that was the ever-popular Italian musician Luigi Fortebraccia,’ said the announcer, blandly.

  ‘What?’ said Tom, in sudden, harsh disbelief.

  ‘What?’ said Susanna, to Tom.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Tom said. ‘“Luigi Fortebraccia”? He’s certainly not Italian. He’s an American negro. It’s Louis Armstrong. A black American negro.’

  Nenna looked up from her father’s shoulder and stared at Tom.

  ‘It’s a mistake, Masino,’ Aldo said kindly. ‘It’s all just a mistake.’

  For a moment Tom looked as if he was going to throw the pile of plates, or swear, or—

  ‘Isn’t it just,’ Tom said, and walked out to the terrace, his back rod-straight.

  Aldo looked from his wife to his daughter and shrugged and made a face: crazy boy!

  *

  It was Susanna who decided that the English had longer to stay at Bracciano. ‘Please don’t go,’ she said to Nadine. ‘I am happy to see you again.’ There was something in her voice – what, a strain? The very slightest echo of strain? – that made Nadine stop for a moment.

  ‘What is it, Susanna?’ she said – but neither her minimal Italian nor Susanna’s few words of English was enough. The very spareness of Susanna’s communication though gave it a force. Please don’t go. It could be courtesy; it could be desperation. Nadine smiled and said, ‘Shall I get Nenna to translate?’ with a gesture towards outside, but Susanna shook her head. ‘Non è niente,’ she said, which Nadine knew to mean ‘It’s nothing.’ Though, literally, she thought, it translates as ‘It’s not nothing.’ Hm.

  She spoke to Riley about it later.

  ‘Well, they’re all over the place, the lot of them,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she sees things her blinkered husband doesn’t.’

  ‘Might you talk to her?’ Nadine suggested, knowing as she did that—

  Riley looked at her. Really?

  She didn’t know. Perhaps it was niente.

  When Aldo saw them he started bellowing: ‘So glad you are staying long; stay a long time! Whenever you like!’

  ‘He’s some kind of monster, isn’t he?’ Riley whispered to Nadine.

  She gave him a look.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  *

  The announcement a few days later, that Mussolini was absolutely behind the new racial manifesto made Tom’s heart leap. Now, he thought. This is the moment.

  But it had no effect whatsoever on Aldo’s thoughts. He continued seamlessly: ‘Well, he doesn’t mean us, the Italian Jews. He means the foreign Jews. Certainly he doesn’t mean those of us who were Fascists from the beginning, from the March on Rome. These journalists!’ he cried, cheerfully. ‘No sense of detail, no knowledge of history … And you seem to think,’ he told Riley, ‘that because something is said, something will happen! Ah, such touching faith. So literal, the English. Nothing is happening! This isn’t Germany – all right, we can get the railways into shape but that doesn’t mean people will follow rules. Let me tell you about the viper invasion. Years ago – you remember, Susanna? Nenna? – there were suddenly vipers everywhere, a plague, so the mayor promised five lire for every dead viper that was brought in – and half the neighbourhood set up viper farms overnight. Fellow at Trevignano built a new bar out of vipers. The contadino is furbo and so is everybody else. Why would they waste their time with this? The Italian Fascist has better things to do than start to hate his neighbour … He has too much pride. Tomaso, do you see anybody doing anything about any of these declarations? No. So please,’ and he dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘will you stop scaring Nenna? I need to go to work and not come back to scenes of hysteria. This Jew has an appointment with the government to finish off another city.’

  Aldo didn’t know what they did all day while he was working. Ate lots of food that he paid for, he hoped. In the evenings they all drank wine and played scopa, and at Ferragosto they all went to the festa. The fireworks were superb that year; Aldo bought nut brittle, sharp and sweet in the mouth, for everyone.

  ‘This is a Christian celebration, isn’t it?’ Tom said, as the Holy Mother of God lurched through the streets on her gold platform, on the shoulders of her agricultural devotees.

  ‘The assumption of the Virgin Mary to heaven,’ Aldo said, and wondered why Tom seemed amused.

  *

  After Ferragosto, after the shooting stars of San Lorenzo started filling the night sky, they all returned to Rome, and it was time for the English to go back to London. Most of the farewells were fond, no declarations were made, and there had been no actual fights in the past week, so Aldo was happy. Only one thing was said which annoyed him.

  The English were in their car, ready to leave, and Nadine leaned forward out of the window like a queen on a balcony, and said, with gentle formality, to Aldo and to Susanna: ‘We wanted to say – all of us – that if you find you would like to come to London at all, for whatever reason, please come. Se vuoi venite a Londra.’ She wanted Susanna to understand. ‘We would love to be your hosts and help you.’

  Well that’s sweet of her, Aldo thought, and he said, cheerfully, ‘Ah, but with this war everyone’s so sure of, how will that ever be?’

  ‘I mean,’ Nadine said, ‘If, because of the war … As Jews.’

  ‘AAOOW!’ he cried, a great big mock-furious noise. ‘Not you too! I thought you were the sensible one, my sister! Of course we will visit you one day soon, and we will go to Brighton and complain about your horrible English sea and bad food. Now go on – time to leave before I cry. Tomaso, get in, vai!’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going,’ Tom said. ‘I’m staying here for a while. Unfinished business.’

  They all stared at him.

  ‘You are so jammy,’ said Kitty, peering out of the window behind Nadine. ‘Bye!’

  Aldo made a special sympathetic face for her, clicked his heels and gave her a Roman salute – at which a complete chill fell over the group hanging out of the windows. Kitty’s hand twitched – but she did not make the salute back. Nadine gave a rather ghastly smile. Riley in the driver’s seat barked a bit
ter laugh, and looked at Aldo, a true look, eye to eye, and pulled out.

  ‘My friends,’ Aldo said, smiling.

  ‘Arrivederci!’ called Nadine, her hand out of the window, waving, and he saw that her face was white as bone, suddenly.

  ‘Aldo!’ she yelled, leaning out, her hat in peril – ‘Aldo! Arrivederci! I mean it!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rome, September–November 1938

  The city feeling of Rome enveloped Tom quickly: fractious, noisy, exciting. It was still terribly hot. Laundry hung limp from the balconies and across the roads; even the fleshiest geranium leaves were going a little brown and brittle at the edges; donkeys leaned into slivers of shade at midday, pining for autumn. The women were unbearably beautiful, and the house too small for the grown children and the unspoken conflict inside it. It all made him nervous. The former ghetto was quieter, cautious. Dark-eyed girls smirked up at the young toughs on whose arm they hung; shopkeepers kept more indoors than he remembered. There did seem to be fewer people around.

  The day before the family had gone back to London, sitting out on the low wall by the river, Tom had had a conversation with Riley. He said, ‘The paper says they can use me here. I’m going to get my Italian really up to scratch before I go down to Palermo. It’s ridiculous, really, that my tenses are so limited. I practically only operate in the present, like a Buddhist …’

  Riley had said: ‘Are you sure?’ to which Tom could only say, ‘Yes.’ Riley did not like the plan, Tom was sure of that.

  ‘It makes sense,’ Tom said. ‘The paper’s really happy about it – their correspondent here is very political, so they want a bit of more social reporting. I’ll do some vignettes of everyday life, that sort of thing. What the man in the street thinks. They say I can use a nom de plume.’ (This was not the complete truth. The foreign desk had already liked, and printed, his piece on the dilemma of ‘Armando, the Fascist Jew of Rome’.) ‘They won’t pay much and there’s no guarantee about the job when I go home after Palermo,’ he said. But this way, he felt, he could achieve … something.

  ‘And your real reason for staying?’

  ‘That,’ Tom said. ‘Plus I’m going to make them to come to London.’

  Riley looked across to the low glow of Trastevere.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ he said.

  ‘Good Lord, Riley!’ said Tom. ‘Course not. We hardly talk.’

  ‘That’s why I ask,’ Riley said, drily.

  ‘How could I be in love with a girl who’s besotted with Mussolini?’ Tom said, and tried to laugh.

  Riley looked at him.

  ‘You don’t have to stay in love with the same girl all your life,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not in love with her!’ Tom’s face now was scarlet, he could feel it, and there was nothing he could say which wasn’t protesting too much. ‘She’s my sister. And I’m responsible for her.’

  ‘But she doesn’t seem to be taking it in.’

  ‘Well perhaps we’re wrong!’ Tom said. ‘Perhaps this isn’t leading anywhere. I have to try though. Don’t I?’

  Riley smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you do. And if it doesn’t work, this is what you do: you give up, and come home. Set a time limit on it.’

  *

  So, he had to try. He registered with the Prefettura, found a tutor with a thorough knowledge of irregular subjunctives and the future perfect. He studied, he wrote, he made friends with some chaps at Reuters, he filed stories. He was staying at Johnny’s again but he visited the cousins regularly; chummed up a bit with Stefano and Vittorio. Summer burnt out into autumn: something Tom had never seen in Italy. There was something real about being there out of holiday season. He tried to hold on to that, because almost everything else felt frail and artificial. Autumn, yes, felt more genuine: working, buying socks and a jacket like an actual man. He had not realised that he did not feel like an actual man. He lifted cigarettes to and from his mouth; felt the solidity of the china of his coffee cups. Inhaled, exhaled. He let Nenna ignore him, and he waited.

  Late in September he was surprised when Susanna made him dip apples in honey before dinner.

  ‘It’s Rosh Hashanah,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you heard the shofar today? Or see the people emptying their pockets into the river? Apples and honey, chicken polpettine with celery. Happy New Year! And I’ve ordered a mullet for Yom Kippur.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t Jewish like that,’ he said.

  ‘Some things you needn’t change,’ she said. ‘Everybody likes chicken polpettine. And cakes. I’ve made sfratti.’

  ‘They’re shaped like sticks,’ said Nenna, coldly. ‘For bashing Jews with. It’s traditional.’ She had herself been to the cemetery with Susanna, and placed stones on Aldo’s ancestors.

  Several times he was overtaken by a profound inability to do anything at all. It was following one of these that he bought the jacket. Tweed was not available, so he got something in a curious substitute from Corsica. Rome’s September had been as far as could be from the aching chill of his recent autumns in Cambridge, the east wind over the flat lands, but by October the evenings were offering the damp that settles into your bones, and the darkness creeping in earlier and earlier.

  *

  A few days after Rosh Hashanah, Nenna came over to Johnny’s to wave a newspaper at Tom.

  ‘So what about this?’ she cried out. ‘No war! Look! It says so right here. The Duce has negotiated a peace – just in time for Yom Kippur. You see? Peace with honour, your Chamberlain says.’

  ‘Let’s go out and celebrate,’ Tom said, but she refused. She had only come to make her point.

  *

  Johnny, when he came back that evening, said to Tom, with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, ‘You can’t really stay here, old boy, if you’re going to be visiting them all the time and having them visit you. It’s not entirely safe.’

  ‘How do you even know she was here?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Carmichael.

  ‘So are you asking me to move out?’

  ‘I’m asking you, again, to make up your mind.’

  ‘You know what side I’m on, Johnny.’

  ‘Act like it, then.’

  *

  Peace with honour. The sigh of relief across Europe moved like the wind, and for a moment Tom too let himself breathe out. But then, in its wake, the follow-up presaged by the Racist Scientists’ Manifesto began to make itself known. As if the peace agreement had given it permission, he thought. The Duce growing bold on this diet of approval. Tom did not believe in this peace. In its existence. There is no peace. There is stalemate.

  He went to the island the day the next announcement was made, ready to catch her if she gave him a chance. She came home in tears, bewildered, suspended: new laws said Jews could no longer go to school. Nor could they be employed in any capacity in any Italian school, from nursery to university. ‘Papà!’ she cried again, and again Aldo went into the recital, the words stale by now, but as comforting as a nursery rhyme for her. This time there was a new verse: ‘We are Discriminati! The Duce has said so, you see, I was right! As I was wounded in the war, and as a founding Fascist, of course this does not apply to us! And anyway, the women are setting up a Jewish school. You can teach there. Everything is all right my darling. Have faith.’

  ‘But where am I to study?’ she asked, and Aldo told her to be patient, he would sort it out, there was some paperwork, of course she would be going back – and so she was patient. Some of her friends – Jewish friends – who had matriculated already were told they could stay on. Those who had not were not admitted. She waited. Not for long. In October came the government’s Declaration on Race, which the entire family ignored. It didn’t have anything to do with them. They were after all discriminati.

  Tom stood alongside, and stared in disbelief as yet again she closed her eyes and let her father hug her.

  Then she looked at him, and said, ‘What? Your know-all
eyes are full again – what is it now?’

  ‘So it’s all right to throw other Jewish children out of school?’ he said. ‘If their father wasn’t wounded, or if they’ve only been here three hundred years, not two thousand? As long as it’s all right for you?’

  She went very pale. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But this is the world. This is the real world.’

  ‘Your head has been poisoned,’ he said, and she started to shake.

  ‘I didn’t make any of this,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  *

  He found himself staring at adults, proper adults, men and women in their forties and older. All these people have known war, and they’re just carrying on about their business. And at young people too: all these people, their parents were in it, one way or another – do they talk about it? What have they been told? In the English bookshop he found copies of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Goodbye to All That, read them all. Oh, Dad, he thought, over and over, just that phrase. Oh, Dad. You were younger than me now. He realised he meant both Peter and Riley, and that he somehow meant Aldo as well.

  He had developed the habit of reading the foreign papers at the agency: you couldn’t get them anywhere else, and the local press was uniform in its Fascism and its bellicosity. Nothing looked good. Nothing.

  On 11 November – Armistice Day! – Tom picked up the Washington Post, and read, ‘The greatest wave of anti-Jewish violence since Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 swept Nazi Germany today.’ The diplomat who had been shot in Paris a few days before had died. Tom read of the riots across Germany and Austria which had followed – ‘as a result’. The Hitler Youth, the Gestapo and the SS had been out smashing up synagogues, robbing and burning and destroying Jewish shops and factories and businesses, and murdering Jewish people, and taking them away. Thousands of them.

  He picked up another paper: ‘Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the “fun”.’