by Louisa Young
He gestured, and she clicked down the road, then stopped and turned back to him, and rested her forehead for a moment on the front of his coat, leaning in at an angle like an exhausted person. It smelt of cold wool and another life.
‘She is right,’ she said, and her face wrinkled up again, invisible.
‘How very annoying of her,’ he said. ‘But well recognised. Come on. You can tell me all about it over something strengthening. Soup and chocolate, or strong liquor?’
She looked at him. If I think, nice eyes, does that mean I don’t think he’s attractive?
‘Strong liquor!’ she said, ruefully. ‘But just the one. What time is it? Is it awfully late? Because I think I’d better go and see my father. I mean, probably not now. But first thing tomorrow.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she thought for a moment that she couldn’t look pretty at all, but it didn’t matter because she was being true and honest with someone, with a man, an attractive man, and that was rather wonderful. And she was going to forgive Peter. And, perhaps Iris. Whose fault it wasn’t. And that was rather wonderful.
‘Good girl!’ Johnny said. ‘Oh! Sorry – is that patronising?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and she smiled.
Chapter Nineteen
Rome and London, January–September 1939
Jan 1939, Rome
My Dear Masino,
I only need to change two letters to make that my dear marito, Masino mio marito … I am still laughing, Tom my Husband.
But I am not laughing, because I have received your letters. How can I tell you the strength your words give me? Your words, your admiration, your encouragement, your faith, your love – you love me! – each inspires more of the same in me. I wish to know everything but fear to ask. So is it permanent, this departure? I will go to the embassy to see JC, if he is still there; I am talking – trying to talk – to Papà, to wear him down. I am drips of water against a stone, and it will take a thousand years. He is the Fontana di Papà, I am the Acqua Figlia, tourists will come to see us in years to come. Masino, I recall the poison garden, I understand your machete, but but but. It is my own heart wrapped round with tendrils, my own blood in those tangles. I am not laughing. I remember you standing in a field and shouting your views to the sky. Now I am not sure anything can be written on paper. Will there be war? You make it sound inevitable. Nobody here wants it – well only the stupid young men who think it’s glorious. I see little Stellina out with them, hanging on their arms like a pretty handbag, making eyes … my first kiss, my second and my third. You know what I am talking about. Masino mio, anything that you know, that I do not know, please write and tell me. I feel only knowledge is real, I can only hold on to truth. And it is hard to find, specially since I realised I am no judge of it and never have been. Yes I have been wrong, my entire life. Yes! Tom – you think I am strong but there is a weakness inside me as a result. I stop in the street, or before I speak, and I think ‘Are you sure?’ I am not used to this. I don’t know how to estimate things now. And now is a terrible time to start – here where everything is either confused or wrong or lying. You will be my Bocca della Verità – I will put my hand in your mouth, and you will bite my follies and my errors.
I still cannot say that I will do it – you know what IT I mean – alone. I am the only one earning now; what would they eat?’
She could not tell him the details of this. Who knew who read what letters? She had got false papers from Tullio in non-Jewish name, and she walked an hour each day to work to clean a palazzo on the far side of the city, polishing marble floors in tall dim rooms, the mop swabbing to and fro, dustmotes in shafts of sunlight through the shutters, stone steps and dark oil paintings, where nobody knew her. She gave the money to her mother. She kept her real papers in her other pocket, for when she came back to her neighbourhood, in case she was stopped, and she was convinced that something as stupid as taking the wrong papers out would be how she would ultimately release herself from this intolerable situation. She had her story prepared: Oh, yes, I just found these in the street. I’m taking them to the police station. She mapped routes, and thought about which police station was where, so that she could be pretending to be on her way to a particular one if challenged. But why aren’t you going to the one just behind you, signorina? Oh, I didn’t know there was one down there – thank you! – I’ll go there instead. The ‘thank you’ was a good touch. After all, I am a Fascist too. Grateful to these blackshirted boys who look after me so well. She wore her party badge at all times. Someone had said all Jews were no longer allowed to be party members. She didn’t even know. And how long before I have to wear a yellow badge alongside it? Now she had opened her eyes, she was learning fast.
Some of her friends had left. Some were carrying on as usual. The better off were for once worse off – their fathers’ jobs were more official and therefore more officially ended. The poorer people in Piazza just carried on making the best of things, as they always had.
These were not things to write down. Her letters to Tom developed a curious language of their own, a mélange of English, French, Romanaccio, Italian, code from their childhood. No names; il pischello (a Roman word for boy) for the Duce; and she signed herself, from your little sister.
She continued:
Mama has sold the good sheets. I wish, in a way, I were a proper Jew; I would look to God for relief. I swear when I see our friends and neighbours coming out of synagogue they look lighter than when they went in – but alas no one is coming from the mountains for us. Or if they are, they are not people we wish to see.
Anything that you can do for all of us, tell me, and I will obey.
Dalla tua Sorellina
*
Tom read this in the office, back in his original role. The paper hadn’t been that impressed by his Italian adventures. You had to have a certain status, it seemed, before getting into trouble would be admired. Even Vaughan had smirked a little when Tom was put back in his box – hanging round the magistrate’s court, cracking his knuckles and listening out to hear who on the foreign desk was retiring/moving on/about to be sacked. Out of hours, he started an advanced French course held in a primary school; he sat on a ridiculously low stool at a tiny school desk, his bony knees sticking up, one of them constantly jiggling with the nervous energy which was becoming his constant companion.
Being back in London made not being in Italy feel utterly impossible. From the safety of here, the urge to be there, to fight back against what was going on there, grew stronger day by day. The anger grew stronger. The fear grew stronger. He could smell the badness coming. He was beginning to feel … up for it.
*
February 1939
Carissima,
I like that you might be laughing – a splendid response to all this. But I have only one thing to say: COME. COME. COME. You see I say it three times. I will say it as many times as it takes. COME. At the very least, say you will come. I am putting things in place. Please send me IMMEDIATELY two little portrait photographs, signed on the back by a lawyer as your true likeness, and a copy of your birth certificate. When I have you in place HERE I can start to work for the others. Everybody might be able to come. I enclose letters from Riley’s company offering employment. Aldo will be a translator and Susanna I’m afraid must be our cook. So that, and the marriage, may make it all right re the visas. I have to say ‘may’ because so many people have come already, and it’s all a bit of a bunfight. But I am doing my best.
Yes, the paper has decided not to send me back to Rome, what with my expulsion, my lack of experience of the political side, my youth, etc. But that is not so bad, as it is by concentrating here on the paperwork that I am most likely to be able to bring things to a happy close. It takes time. Time! I am not sleeping particularly well. Forza, sorella mia, forza e pazienza.
Darling. Come. Now that everything is polarising. You have to be here, under the same light source with me. COME COME COME SAY YOU WILL COME.
February �
�39
Masino mio,
If by repeating that word you could remove the fact of my family, then by all means repeat, there would be a point to it. (Though it wouldn’t be necessary – I would already be there.) But can repetition change facts? No. So. How about this? If I can ever come, I will come. About the photos. The Jewish lawyers have already left, and the rest like everybody else are dancing on their toes on a hot roof where we are concerned. I am sure I will find some old drunk though who will do it. Or some other way out. Will you not need photographs of the others? I can make the boys and Marinella do it, but I don’t know about Mama and Papà … or perhaps you are still hoping I will forget about them.
There is not much to say. I am tired. Yesterday I sang with our friend from Piazza for the first time in a long time. My voice creaked like an old door. I must sing as I do my work, like a Rossini housemaid.
I should have so much more to say to you. This is hardly worth the cost of a stamp. I am so full, Masino, of so many things, and yet I am already exhausted – but you don’t need to hear about that. I have given up reading. There are now so many reasons, spiritual, biological, political, all contradictory, as to why I am a lesser being that I cannot make sense of it. I see my old schoolfriends joining in; people we have known all our lives. There is a theory of envy – it is all because we are more intelligent than others. But I am not intelligent enough to understand. Or it is because we are rich, an international web of bankers taking over the world – yet I don’t have money to sweeten a lawyer to sign a photograph. Or because we are a communist plot, an international web of socialists taking over the world. Don’t you see how I have taken over the world? I was reading a student journal: it listed all the places from which we are to be chased (cafés, schools, gardens, swimming pools, streets, hills) and it used the term ‘civil death’, for us. Civil death?
Papà sees it all now as a test of his Fascist faith. As God tried Job, so il pischello is trying my papà. The backbone of Fascism is obedience to authority: so Papà continues to obey. He keenly and devotedly excludes himself, according to il pischello’s laws. He agrees he must no longer use the library, if that is what il pischello wants. He no longer works, because il pischello does not want him to work. He will stride nobly into his own civil death, for his beloved pischello. His pride is magnificent. He will never change his mind. He may as well kill himself. It is after all what il pischello wants. He said to me – you can imagine how he spoke. He said, how do you define faith? Faith is what rises above the challenge of rational doubt. He rises so far above rational doubt that he flies. He is the Icarus of rational doubt. So he is irrational to the point that he will sacrifice us all. He might as well spank his own bottom. He will thank the hangman, offer him help to tie the noose around his own neck, congratulate him on ridding the world of one more horrible Jew. My papà.
I am so sorry. You know what about. And so angry.
We get no sympathy. Sympathy is unItalian. It is weak, old-fashioned, unpatriotic and punishable by law. And still on occasion Papà produces the old cliché: if the pischello knew about this he would of course do something … our pischello is a kind pischello, he is only tough for our own good, his minions betray him, it is they who are corrupt/violent/incompetent, not him – if he had the means, the information, the whatever, he would be the first to rectify the situation, to solve all our problems, to answer every petition … There were old contadini women kneeling as he passed, in Torino. Even if I were not banned now from the cinema, and even if I could afford to go, I would not. The newsreels make me sick.
Your pischello Inglese was here. You probably know. He brought an umbrella; il pischello Italiano thinks umbrellas unmanly, and believes therefore that the English will never enter a war. He has forgotten that they were in the last war, and didn’t do so badly.
Blessings to you
Tua sorella.
*
Nenna wrote this letter at the kitchen table. She could hear her father next door, talking quietly to himself, rustling papers. Before she went upstairs, she looked in on him. As she thought: he was standing, leaning over the desk, absorbed in the smooth white field of a set of plans. His sleeves were rolled up and his forearms were strong in the low lamplight, fists resting on the leather desktop. Every now and again he issued a low admiring chuckle, or leant in to smile at a detail.
He looked up, his smile creasing as he called to her, ‘Buona notte, amore!’
‘Buona notte, Papà,’ she murmured.
*
Tom and Kitty were back in the American Bar at the Savoy. She wouldn’t meet anywhere else now.
‘How can you afford it?’ Tom said. ‘On your typist’s pay.’
‘It’s an investment,’ she said. ‘I need to meet a nice class of chap, and move in interesting circles. Anyway, what’s going on? You look positively green.’
‘What, Carmichael not nice or classy enough for you?’ he said.
‘Johnny’s perfectly charming,’ she said, ‘as you well know. Don’t change the subject.’
Tom grinned. Kitty made an amusing Woman of Mystery – she almost had it right, but there was something innocent about her which shone through the cigarettes and the flippant comments.
‘Perfectly charming!’ he said. ‘That’s good, I suppose. I’ll tell him you said so.’
‘You will not. Now why are you green? And could you please stop twitching your leg, it’s a horrid habit.’
‘Am I green?’ he said – and she gave him a very straight and familiar look, the one she used to give him when he was being that bit too naughty, too likely to land them in trouble; a look containing both pride and a touch of please, Tom – the look of a girl who knows him very well and is concerned for him.
He smiled.
‘I’m in love,’ he said. ‘I actually am.’
She squeaked and jumped and waved her arm to order champagne. ‘Who with? Do I know her? Tom, that’s marvellous.’
‘It’s Nenna,’ he said. ‘I’m properly in love with Nenna.’
Kitty sat down.
‘But—’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ said Tom.
*
For three hours Tom and Kitty sat and drank and talked, and when he got home Tom wrote this:
Nenna,
There’s something I need to say, and in all the talk of bureaucracy and papers and family I’m not sure that I have made it perfectly clear. Something has happened to me and I don’t think it will ever unhappen, whatever the future brings. I have fallen in love with you. I am in love with you. I am in love with everything about you, with your heart and soul. Take this fact and keep it close and do with it what you will. I am yours. I always will be.
Tom
*
Nenna wept when she read it.
Here he is – here he is.
That night in her boat-like bed she wrote his name, Masino, on the soft skin inside her forearm, with the point of her compass. The scratches were delicate and white like the frond of a feather. She pushed a little harder: beads of ruby blood along the pearly scratch. It all looked so clean and beautiful. It hurt. She pushed a little harder, and smiled.
That night she dreamed for the first time in years of the island pulling itself free and sailing away.
*
She read his letter again the next morning, and at every possible opportunity. The glory with which it inundated her made her suddenly bold to her father at table.
‘I saw Gelsomina today,’ she said. ‘They’re leaving too, did you hear? To America. New York!’
His reaction was immediate, pre-sprung.
‘When you speak to me like this,’ Aldo cried, flinging his fist to the table and his eyes to heaven, ‘you are like the proselytising Christians, trying to force me into a conversion I don’t want. I will not convert! Do you understand, my love, how offensive you are in asking me to? The Duce is my leader, torment me as you will.’
All around the table the members of the family curled u
p beneath it, silent, dark heads tucked down, snails hiding from salt. But I have a shell, Nenna thought, and this can’t go on. She didn’t particularly want to challenge him in front of his sons, his wife, but round the table was the only time she could say anything to him. He was out of the house, all the time, as if he were going to work – but what work? Has he, miraculously, of all the Jewish professionals in Italy, not lost his job? They did not know. He did not say. Susanna would not ask. But the law, now, forbids him to work.
‘Do you think I don’t know history?’ he was saying, pumping himself up, the familiar rhythmic inflation of his self-assurance, his conviction of his superior knowledge, his justified resentments. ‘You talk to me of liberty,’ he said, ‘and imprisonment – were you born with the filth of the ghetto under your fingernails? What do you know of Venice and Trieste, of Napoleon? What do you know of Pius the Seventh, of the Inquisition? Does the terror of the generations flow more strongly in your blood than in mine?’
No. But I see that you are terrified, that you have inherited that terror and can’t admit it.
‘Do I know nothing of the gratitude due to the princes of the House of Este? Of the duplicity of the Spanish who expelled us from Spain but allowed us at Milan, under Spanish rule – until they expelled us again—’
It was the kind of blind proclamatory shouting to which it’s both pointless and impossible to respond out loud.
Yes, you know so much, Papà – so why can’t you know this too? This one thing which it is necessary to know?
‘Ask your mother about the Jews of Mantua!’
Now – see – he slaps his napkin – faded and shiny from long use and too much washing – out in the air, snapping like laundry in the wind, and settles it down on his chest, tucked in at the collar. As he always does. Now – hands down on the table.
‘Yes, I am all for Rome,’ he said, elbows out, face stern. ‘But I know what has happened elsewhere too. And above all I know that Rome has produced our saviour, yes, a saviour who through no fault of his own, through practicality, has had to take issue with those foreign Jews, with no national loyalty to Italy – he understands that our land cannot afford them though with the generosity of his generous heart he would, he would, if he could – but a land is only so big, it would be foolish, immoral even, to let everyone who wants our beautiful land to come here—’
