by Louisa Young
He does not see his entire family cowed before him. He doesn’t know that his sons mock him behind his back. That Marinella flinches when he raises his voice. We who love him hate him. Papà.
‘No,’ he was saying, ‘Benito Mussolini is our man, our leader. He loves us, he will protect us. Look around! He has done us no harm! Has he? Look, there are our plates, here is our roof, here is our food on our table.’
Aldo spread his arm wide. None of them looked up. Marinella seemed absorbed in her piece of bread, murmuring to it, a little song of her own.
‘If we reject him,’ he said, more gently, ‘will we not anger him? Then, will he not punish us, show us his fury, throw us out, as any father would whose children turn against him?’
A big heat expanded inside Nenna’s head.
‘Is that what a father does?’ she asked.
Susanna closed her eyes. The brothers, eyes wary, chins pointed, glanced to and fro between father and sister.
‘When a child insults, a father punishes,’ Aldo said, grandly.
‘What if a father misunderstands?’ Nenna replied, and looked up at him, straight.
‘Oh, Nenna,’ he said, with his beautiful smile. ‘A father knows best.’
‘What if a father is wrong?’ she persisted.
‘What father is wrong?’ he said, disbelieving, indulging, fond of his clever daughter – and she almost smiled, because his wilful blindness was so adaptable that she could almost believe he didn’t know what they were talking about. ‘The Duce is not wrong!’ he said. ‘What father—?’
‘You will not see it,’ she said, ‘because you fear to—’
Beside her, Susanna sighed deeply, deeply, as Aldo rose and expanded into his glory.
‘Fear!’ he cried. ‘To a hero of Caporetto, you say fear?’
‘We lost, at Caporetto,’ Nenna said. ‘Humiliatingly, because of bad leadership and misplaced loyalty. I say this to a Jew who will not see his enemy for what he is.’ And then, dropping it into the silence of his shock, she said, scarcely believing she was doing it: ‘And to a father who will not see that his daughter is right.’
Silence. Then:
‘What is this?’ he said.
‘It is a loving daughter telling the truth,’ she said.
‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,’ he said, ‘to have a thankless child. It is not truth. It is disrespect.’
‘It’s truth as I see it, as it has been demonstrated to me. And Papà, have you not noticed that everybody else agrees with me?’
‘You think I’m frightened, and wrong.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You don’t respect me,’ he said. ‘So go. Go on! Go!’
‘But you are right to be frightened,’ she was continuing. ‘Only a fool would not be frightened. I just wish you would act on it.’
They were talking over each other; neither quite hearing what the other said. How wide and deep can a chasm suddenly be …
‘Go!’ he cried.
Susanna stifled a gulp. ‘Papà,’ Vittorio said. Susanna nudged him, glanced – leave the table.
‘No,’ said Aldo. ‘This is their sister. Let them stay.’
‘You don’t want me to go,’ Nenna said, raising her head, looking him in the eye, big beautiful brown eyes of my father. That was true, she knew it. Her voice was shaking; throat very small for it to fight through. But you have to say it.
‘Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,’ he mused. His face was closed.
‘And Stefano?’ she said. ‘Vittorio? Mother? Marinella? Are they to go too?’ They all looked up.
Perhaps I will vomit.
NO.
Vomit up words. Go on – let it go. All of it.
‘Or are they all to stay here, terrified of your blindness, “protected” by the man who forbids them to own a radio, forbids them work, education – who loves Hitler who murders Jews, throws them – us! – out of his country with nowhere to go, keeps their property, robs them and humiliates them. What have those Jews done wrong, even in the eyes of Hitler, other than be Jewish? Does Hitler know or care where a Jew’s grandparents lived? This bossy new friend of Mussolini, does he know or care that Jews have been in Rome since before Jesus Christ? Are those children he throws out an international communist conspiracy? Or are they children with nowhere to lay their heads, now? That will be us, Papà. That will be Marinella and Mama. Papà, I don’t care. I can go. I am strong, full-grown but young – I can go. The boys are boys, they’re growing up – they can go. We can sleep in barns and lie and steal food. But Mama. And Marinella. Marinella, Papà. How can they steal food and sleep in the street?’
He was trying to talk over her, to talk her down, and in the end she stopped. The boys were staring unnerved.
‘And you!’ she cried. ‘You’ll be old! You!’
‘Child,’ he said. ‘Be calm. Be calm. Listen. Do you recall the life of Edgardo Mortara? No, listen. A Jewish boy of Bologna was illegally baptised—’
‘What are you talking about! There will be war, Papà! Italy will be on the side of the Jew-killer, because of your Mussolini!’
‘Shut up. I am telling you something of great importance – illegally baptised by a Christian maidservant, a thief, who claimed he was mortally ill – and he was taken from his loving parents, adopted by the very Pope, because a Catholic cannot be brought up by Jews, and he was now, by that act done on him without his or anybody’s consent, by an illiterate girl, a Catholic … this was not even seventy years ago—’
The family fell silent before the barrage, fell into the torpor of those accustomed to a parent who goes on and on and on …
‘Papà—’ she murmured.
‘—that boy is still alive – a Catholic priest in an abbey in Belgium, despised universally and internationally for his constant efforts to convert Jews to Catholicism. But listen: the Pope – Pio IX – offered the boy back to his parents, if they would only convert – they would not. They would not. Stupidity! Listen, my stubborn child. The only way to deal with this world is to reject all religion, all superstition, and to put one’s faith in strength and clear modern principle. Which is what I do. Do not fall victim to the webs of religion, my dear girl. Modern principle – such as Fascism offers. This is the way. Il Duce himself said that priests were black spots on humanity, he himself said that they were at fault in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus, he himself said the sacrifice of blood of Italian Jews in the last war was vast and great and generous – I have it here—’
‘It was the Romans who required Jesus to die,’ Nenna said. ‘He suffered under Pontius Pilate. Pilate was a Roman.’
‘Do not involve yourself with any machinations based on religion. Do not concern yourself!’
And what do I say to that? We, so proud of our Jewishness, despite our scorn for religion, are now to declare ourselves nothing to do with Jewishness? Again, as if those who hate us would care!
She said: ‘Only a crank, Papà, deals with the world as if the world is as he wishes it to be. I do not believe in water, therefore I am not drowning. I do not believe in your right to behead me, therefore I ignore your guillotine. I swore loyalty to you twenty years ago, therefore I do not see that you are betraying me now.’
He sat stony.
‘Papà, please! No decent human soul, Jew or otherwise, could look at the acts of Nazism and think them right. Gentiles across the world denounce it – but we are Jews! We are not only witnesses, we are victims! There is not doubt. Papà, you love your Mussolini as if he were a god. You gaze blindly when you gaze on him.’
‘Blindly?’
‘Blindly.’
‘Blindly’ he said.
‘It is reality, Papà. We can leave, if you will come. Or do you want us to curl up, loyal and loving by your side like a spaniel in a folk story, and suffer the fate your folly brings down, because we love you?’
He heaved, and he subsided, and he heaved again.
He’s a volcano. Is he abou
t to erupt? Or is he spent?
‘Because we love you,’ he said, finally, and with some difficulty, ‘we will not throw you out of the house, so long as you shut up,’ he barked, ‘with your disrespectful “truth”. We are a loyal Fascist household. Your chatter is not to bring danger to us. If you wish to leave, to break your mother’s heart, and mine, to destroy your future and to submit to who knows what danger, and bring it also on to your family, well, you are nineteen years old and you know everything, so I am sure you will be safe and happy. Go on! If that is what you want.’
Nenna glanced round the table. The boys, agog. Susanna, holding her hands together and looking, if one had not known that this was a secular household, as if she were praying. And at the end, in her little chair, clutching her damp bread, Marinella. Three years old, fat cheeks, big eyes staring at Nenna. I am old enough to be her mother, Nenna thought. Marinella Marinella Marinella.
‘So you admit there is danger?’ she said, raising her head high this time, staring him out. ‘In a safe and civilised place, you know, people can say what they think. There is no reason for people to live in this arbitrary fear.’
‘Arbitrary!’ he said. ‘Listen to the words she uses … You sound like your English Tommaso …’
‘You educated me,’ she said. ‘So that I could bring glory to Italy. So I will. So I will.’
Susanna was shaking her head.
‘Such trust and love I had for those people,’ Aldo was saying. ‘For that boy. He educated you.’
‘It doesn’t take any education at all to see what is happening, Papà. It just takes opening your eyes.’
‘Listen to her!’ Aldo said. Bemused, almost. ‘He put this into your head. That English boy.’ He stared at her for a moment then said, ‘And what else did he put into you? What else did he open, eh?’
His meaning was perfectly clear.
Nenna turned her face away. And then swung back at him and hissed: ‘I did not hear that filth from your mouth, Father. I did not hear it.’
Her father was leaning back a little, glaring at her, red-faced, a little sneer on his mouth, a little ‘huh’ escaping his lips. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Look at her. Now we know.’
Susanna was crying. Stefano was crying. Vittorio was biting his lip. Marinella gave a low soft wail.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Aldo said.
*
She didn’t leave. More and more families did, anyone with money, or a cousin in London, or a son in America. We have cousins in London. We have a little bit of money. We can sell things. We can still go …
The people who stayed carried on: selling their vegetables, sewing their clothing, going to the synagogue, sitting on their doorsteps. Would they leave if they could? Were things quieter? Or was that her imagination? The neighbourhood was covered by a light, immoveable, indomitable veil: Attesismo. Waiting.
Or was it quiet because nobody was talking to her? Because I am the Fascist girl?
It was as if she had never felt shame before.
But I am loved. Tomaso wants me, in London.
But my mother! My little darling, Marinella – my stupid brothers who I love so much.
*
After the fight with Aldo, Nenna had no more letters from Tom. She accused her father of withholding them, in a mighty rumpus, tempers matching, Marinella cowering, and a slap to her face. She accused her mother, whose quiet denials she had to believe. She lost many nights’ sleep at the thought that they might have been intercepted by OVRA, the Duce’s secret police, so mysterious that nobody knew what their acronym meant. She thought OVRA would now come in the night and take away the whole family. She tried to remember what she had written. Her stupid attempt at code would be transparent to half of Rome – anyone who could read, knew any Romanaccio, knew any English. She expected, nightly, the crack of squadristi at the door. But then no, surely. OVRA had better things to do. But then they had picked up that guy who had wondered – wondered! – why the pischello’s son-in-law Ciano had so much time to play golf.
‘Tom doesn’t care about you,’ said Aldo. ‘Sweetheart, men can be like that. Forget about him. You’re young. You’ve got your daddy!’ And he held his arms out to her, and she went into them, her head on his chest, and she said, ‘I’m sorry, Papà, I’m so sorry,’ and he stroked her head.
As the Duce kept saying, this was no time for sentiment. It was time to toughen up.
*
Stefano, fifteen years old, would glue himself to his seat during the fights. A man does not run. A man stands his ground. A man is not scared of women. A man respects his father. He seethed with incomprehension, but one thing he knew. Tom was the root of the unhappiness and fear in the house. The letters with the English stamps were the poison. A man must take responsibility and protect his family. So Stefano stole the letters.
Then, fearing his own foolhardiness, he didn’t know what to do with them. For a while he kept them in his schoolbooks, but Susanna was teaching the boys herself now and it wasn’t safe. As Nenna became sad, looking for the post each day with an ever-shrinking spark of hopefulness, misery grew in him, and haunted him. He wished he had never started it, he wished he could put them back, he thought about throwing them into the river; about posting them again. They sat there like a snake in a box. But even he knew that the English were weak, dissolute people who scorned Italy. He had to protect his sister, whether she wanted him to or not.
He didn’t talk to Vittorio about it. Vittorio had grown silent at home, and was out much of the time. Stefano didn’t like out. The squadristi, marching about with their passo romano, made him nervous. Vittorio chatted to them! Such confidence – anyway, Vittorio was away. He had talked their parents into letting him go fishing in Catania. So much for school at home!
Inspiration struck Stefano: a way out of his impasse that seemed both honourable and convenient. He posted the backlog of the letters, and each new one that came, through the Bocca della Verità. Let the great round cheese-faced moon-faced stone mouth of truth eat them.
*
Receiving no letters, it became impossible for Nenna to write. The words of Tom’s last letter burned in her mind: 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.
She did not know what to do. She went back to the Embassy, but Johnny Carmichael was not there any more and what could she say to anyone else? My English boyfriend has stopped writing to me, you must tell the King of England and make him sort it out—? She came away thinking that had Johnny been there she might have begged him on her knees.
Sometimes it was just about safety. And then it was about the kissing: desire stuck her through, and she was a speared animal, immobile, open-mouthed, desperate. He has left me. He has met someone else. He has given up on me because I resisted him at every point. He didn’t mean it; he only said it because he is fond of me and thought it would make me go to England … He doesn’t love me.
He has been found and hurt by Fascists in England – they have killed people in France before, why not in England?
He is sick.
He has had an accident.
And: Who would love me anyway, a stupid Fascist Jewish girl? Everybody will hate me. The Jews, because I was Fascist. The Fascists, because I am a Jew. Tom because I am stupid and I have let him down. I have made myself nothing. A nothing.
Was. Past tense. A shift I would have done well to make earlier. I have only myself to blame.
*
Each day was hot and difficult, more difficult each day. Less money, fewer ways to make a little, less to eat. Susanna getting thinner visibly, as she gave every possible bit of food to the boys and Marinella. Nenna was wise to that; she refused the larger piece of bread, the slightly fuller bowl of soup.
Papà – oh, he said nothing. His shirt collars grew shiny, he called her stubborn, he changed not a whit of what he believed. Clinging, she thought
. He’s clinging to a sinking branch. And I’m just as bad, clinging to him. Night after night he sat with the windows open, going over the plans for Pomezia. Night after night, she sat on the other side of the house, thinking about Tom. She hated him. But whenever a man looked at her in the street or at someone’s house, blue eyes appeared before her, blue eyes and white roses and his voice in her ear. Are you my girl, Nenna?
I was always your girl.
And then the brutal suddenness with which he had been whisked away just as—
Just as—
Just as—
—and then she would cry, and cry, because she could feel the touch of his mouth, his hard slender chest against her breasts, that moment when they were both so surprised that this – this instantaneous heat and hunger – was something – that their years of mocking affection could be set on fire just like that – that she wanted him to come back and finish it – or start it – to do what a man does to a woman …
Ever since her father had mentioned it—
She hated her father more than she hated Tom.
She adored him, she was crazy for him, she would do anything for him.
—and then his letters, promising that the help would come, could still come, the talk of visas, of employment for Aldo, of it being possible, of love
even then
and then the letters stopping, and the nothing.
It’s up to me then, she thought. I must start to make up for this.
She went round to Tullio’s, and waited with his mother until he came. They walked together. ‘I’m at your service,’ she said. ‘If my handwriting or my innocent looks or anything else are of use, you and your friends can make use of them.’
Tullio looked at her with some sadness. ‘The daughter of Aldo Fiore?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. The boys weren’t even happy about my doing the certificates for you.’
