Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  Facts: I want to tell you the facts. In sequence. I despair of explaining why I did what I did – though, oddly, I feel you may understand. Power-games are well known to you, Signora Crispi. How I did it will be more easily narrated.

  First: my need for equipment, i.e. weapons. Carlo, as you know, is a big man for an Italian and in good shape. When we fight, he wins: history of the sex-war. I wonder did you ever fight his father? Physically, I mean? Macchè! I see you sniff, purse your lips, half shrug, turn away. Tsts! A woman has her own weapons. A true woman uses tact, charm, humour, patience. Translate: guile, pussy and a readiness to let herself be humiliated. Right? Right. I’ve used them all. I’ve enjoyed them. Some sick pleasures can be touched off by nausea. In Carlo too. Your son, Signora, is not quite the clean-cut Mamma’s boy you sometimes like to think.

  The last few sentences may not mean much to you. That’s just too bad. I have no time to bridge the culture divide and the generation gap. It would take more than Caesar and his minions to build a bridge like that. I was coming to the question of equipment, tools, weapons in the most simple sense – metaphor will get us nowhere. To spell it out: Carlo used to knock me about.

  Try to understand this: I had never known people hit each other until Carlo did it to me. My parents never hit me, much less each other. It would not have occurred to them to do so. It was not part of my experience. It was something one saw happen in films or read about. It happened, one knew, in the more old-fashioned boys’ schools: a purely masculine, father retrograde practice which should, and soon would, be abolished like hanging and the birch. If Carlo had threatened me with a chastity belt or infibulation, I could have hardly been more outraged and determined to resist, whatever the risks – and there were risks.

  You’ve seen me with a black eye. It wasn’t the only one I got. I had to go to a doctor with a dislocated neck, and again with my nose. The inside is all twisted up even though the line of my profile is unchanged – which is lucky since I intend to peddle my wares on new markets. (Am I annoying you?) Anyway, these rows didn’t always end in bed. Sometimes, as the front door banged, I was left alone and seething with the bitterness of the impotent. Oh yes, I have hated Carlo. Remember we had practically no money. That miserable job your cousin got him with the safe pension at the end was – but I must keep to the point. We were going through a bad time, fighting maybe once a day and although I was terrified of being disfigured, I put my pride in never backing down. Verbally, I am a champion. I can humiliate, ridicule, provoke, dose my effects, deviate things towards a little sado/masochistic romp or escalate to what sounds like a final rupture – would be a final rupture if we weren’t living in Volterra and, as often as not, without the fare to Florence in our communal kitty. I suppose I half enjoyed those rows. I had nothing else to do. Volterra is not a jumping place. The cinemas seemed to show a sequence of slapstick films by Ciccio and Ingrassia – a purely Italian taste, may I say – or else those panoramic wet-dreamers’ fantasies designed for Near-Eastern markets. They bored me. I was bored. I had intended doing some designs for shirt fabrics and sending them back to London where an old art-school mate was to try and flog them for me, but somehow I did very few during our year in Volterra and what I did didn’t get sold.

  I blamed Carlo. The letters from London were kind but I could tell my old friend thought my stuff lousy and that it was living in Italy and being spoilt and lazy that was the trouble. This bothered me. You see I had been good. I had been one of the few people who actually got work while still at art school. Nobody doubted but that I would make out. The scholarship to Rome – won in the teeth of several talented men – was supposed to have set me on the high road to success. It turned out to be a high road to Carlo and an existence just a shade more stimulating than a battery hen’s.

  Oh, you tried to help! You used to invite me to Florence and ‘occupy’ me with visits to dressmakers and hen parties. God, the grotesquerie of those! The quintessential vacancy of the talk! Its sediment is stuck in my brain: kernels of dehydrated, interchangeable chat. Just mix and stir: ‘Darling/super/oh/ genuine/real/pure Austrian loden/English tweed/morals/mohair /porn…. My little-woman-who-knits…. My little antique dealer….’ (You had nothing but dwarves at your service!) ‘Have another cup of…. What a lovely cup…. Yes, from Capodimonte. My aunt left me a set of cups, but when the charwoman broke a cup and I tried to replace it, they said, “Signora, that cup.” …’ Uuugh! Eeeegh!

  I used to imagine someone had done a lobotomy on me. It was a nightmare I kept getting: my brain had been furtively removed. When I woke up I was never really reassured. I’d hear myself sounding like you. When I was still trying to perfect my Italian I used to copy your intonations and later began to feel I’d sucked in your mental patterns as well. ‘Si, diamine,’ I’d hear me say, ‘I always wear pure silk next to my skin: so much cooler and a natural fabric….’ Actually, when you got intellectual, you were worse. It could be so embarrassing when you sounded off on ecology that sometimes I’d interrupt to ask how to make a ‘true’ lentil purée and get you back to what you understood. You never minded. Lentil purée was closer to your real interests. ‘Pian, pianino,’ you’d recommend, ‘that’s the whole of it. Never let them boil up. Pian, pianino. Slow but sure! Chi va piano va sano e va lontano! Remember that, Una!’ Once I dreamed I was making lentil purée. All night, endlessly, repetitively, I kept stirring the brown, manure-like slop, the smooth, cosy caca. Pian, pianino! Stir, stir. When I woke up I had a crying fit.

  ‘I’ve lost my mind,’ I told Carlo. ‘I’m turning into a cow like your mother!’

  ‘Must you be rude about my mother?’

  ‘I’m not rude. She thinks women are cows. She’s quite happy to be a cow!’ I said. ‘She’s always saying it. “Pick women and oxen from your native district,” is her number one favourite saw. Donne e buoi dai paesi tuoi. Do you think’, I screamed, ‘that that’s polite to me?’

  ‘She’s very patient,’ said Carlo. ‘She’s a saint. You do everything you can to embarrass her with her friends. What would it cost you to conform a bit?’

  ‘A saint? Shit!’

  ‘Words like that …’

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ I roared so the neighbours would hear.

  Carlo went to have his breakfast alone in a café.

  That was the day I bought the shackles from the old-iron man, the ferraiuolo who used to pass by once a month with an old cart drawn by a mule.

  I wonder can I make you understand? Am I mad to try? How could you see my reality with my eyes? But I want you to. I want to make you. Once. Even if only while you read this. Then you will reject it, feel contaminated and try desperately to wash off the memory and flush it out with talk, exclaiming and wringing your hands.

  The ferraiuolo is a dry old man whom I like. He goes down our street at regular intervals, shouting his cry, buying and selling old iron – buying mostly or even cadging. He scarcely expects to sell any in our middle-class district. Sometimes, though, he has a few hooks for hanging flowerpots from balconies or some other appurtenance of bourgeois living: an old lantern, some piece of wrought iron he hopes might please our knowing eye. I often give him coffee. This is not the done thing. You disapprove. You’ve told me so. The neighbours find it odd. Oh all your forebodings are being confirmed! I can see your smug, martyred look as you read this.

  I had been fantasizing a lot over the previous months: day-dreaming. My scenarios were banal. In one, a design of mine won a prize and led to my getting a job in London which was so well paid that Carlo threw his up and followed me. This made me the breadwinner and very soon he began to feel diminished. This was the climax of the dream which would then taper off in a largo maestoso with me comforting him. A more satisfying scenario dealt with our fights but reversed their pattern. In the dream I won. Usually, I turned out to have been taking secret karate lessons and one day when he was being especially odious I would suddenly throw him over my shoulder. It was an orgasmic dream and had to be
used sparingly. I only indulged in it when I was feeling particularly humiliated. It was a great pick-me-up. After a few good dream kicks or karate throws, I felt sorry for Carlo and rather tender towards him. When the real Carlo came home, he was astonished to find me changed from a resentful termagant into quite and amiable wife. I think he concluded that I was responding to firm treatment. He was wrong. What was happening was that I was beginning to believe in my dream.

  It was one of those slapstick Ciccio and Ingrassia films which gave me my next idea, which was this: I would creep up behind Carlo and hit him judiciously on the head. The blow must not be fatal but must be hard enough to knock him out cold. While he was out cold I would tie him up. Next I would drag him down to the cellar where I would keep him a prisoner on bread and water making him do my will.

  Puerile, Signora? But remember where Carlo is now.

  I didn’t for a moment think I would do it. My fantasies were – I thought – purely therapeutic. They kept me from breaking up a marriage which I wanted to keep going. They helped me through what I thought of as a bad patch. Because something was sure to turn up soon. Carlo would get a transfer to some proper city where I would find work and where we would have friends and more money. It was just a matter of hanging on.

  As the dream grew too familiar, I had to keep escalating it. Like a drug, I had to up the dose, and like ink in water it began slowly to spread until it was thinly colouring my waking life. The first actual move I made was to buy some pieces of old lead piping from the ferraiuolo. They were quite short, about a foot long. I told him I was going to do an assembly of metal scraps as a sort of garden sculpture. That sort of thing was popular enough and he was not surprised. Instead, I wrapped each separate piece of piping in a number of old socks and hid it. Piece number one was in our bedroom below my underwear. Piece two was in the kitchen behind the pressure-cooker. A third was in a drawing-room vase. And so on. The idea was that next time Carlo and I began to fight I would put my cellar plan into effect.

  It must start with a row. I must have provocation. This was riskier than just creeping up on Carlo when he was reading the paper or eating breakfast, but the game, I felt, had rules. He must hit me first.

  Oddly – or perhaps understandably? – our rows slackened off after I bought the lead piping. When we were sitting in, say, the dining-room a tiff would begin to simmer and danger, unknown to Carlo, would loom. There was, for instance, the time he complained about the pasta and asked how long did it take an intelligent woman to learn to time it? His sister had known how to cook pasta since she was eight and he had no doubt I thought myself cleverer than she. Behind his back, in the cutlery drawer of the walnut sideboard, wrapped innocuously in a damask napkin, lay piece of lead piping number four. All I had to do – but I don’t have to tell you. I gloated – and conciliated.

  ‘Well,’ he heckled, ‘deny it. Deny that you think Giovanna is a dumb little thing.’

  ‘I do deny it.’

  ‘Can’t you sound more convincing?’ His fork was embedded in glutinous spaghetti. He tried to extricate and wind a few tubes. They broke. ‘Glue!’ he spat. ‘Giovanna …’

  ‘I like Giovanna.’

  ‘You’d like to influence her. I must say I admire your gall. You’re only two years older than she. You don’t understand this country.’ (Another poke at the congealing mess.) ‘Yet you take it upon yourself to lecture her.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to be listening.’

  ‘Well I was.’

  ‘Anyway she was lecturing me.’

  Giovanna of course is your spy, Signora! Your victim, doll, mouthpiece and punching-ball. Poor Giovanna. She’s waiting to be married before settling down to being one person. Meanwhile there’s no trusting her. She and I – though she may deny that now – got on quite well. Alone together, we both let ourselves say a little too much. I liked drawing her. She has that frail blonde Florentine beauty and it bothered me to think how some sexy brute like Carlo will one day squash her flat. I enjoyed Carlo’s juicy gaminess, but I’m tough, whereas you brought poor Giovanna up to be subservient. Oh yes, you did. Can you deny that when we stayed with you, you always got her to iron Carlo’s shirts? Over my protests, of course.

  ‘Oh,’ you said, laughing, ‘it’s good practice for when she’ll be married.’

  Putting me in my place.

  ‘Una’, you said, ‘is an artist. She designs shirts. We can’t expect her to iron them.’

  The galled jade winced.

  ‘You’re an artist,’ said Giovanna the day Carlo – as it turned out – was eavesdropping. ‘So it’s different for you. Besides, you’re not a Catholic. Nobody has to be a Catholic. It’s a free choice. If you make it, you live by it.’

  We were talking about birth-control.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘when were you offered a choice? To be a Catholic or, for that matter, a woman?’

  ‘Or’, threw back Giovanna, ‘to be alive at all. But I am alive and if I live I ought to do it coherently. If I try to change the rules, I’ll make a fool of myself. I have no power. The best I can do is conform elegantly. That’s the civilized way.’

  ‘You have power over your own body.’

  ‘Uncontrolled appetites’, Giovanna stated, ‘are obscene. One must practise restraint. What would you think of a glutton who pierced a hole in his belly, evacuating the masticated food through a pipe – let me finish! Through a pipe into, say, a disposable plastic bag so that he could go on ingurgitating more unnecessary edibles? The idea disgusts you, doesn’t it? Well I feel the same disgust at the idea of a man evacuating all that risk-free sperm into a disposable plastic container!’ (Had she got the hideous image, do you suppose, Signora, from some preacher at that convent school you sent her to? Or was it some lewd local confessor who fanned her scruples with his prurient, garlicky breath?)

  ‘But, Giovanna,’ I answered, ‘if your husband doesn’t do it with you he’ll do it elsewhere. You’ve been brought up to control yourself but the male half of the population has not. Assuming that you can control yourself once you get married – which is highly questionable – no Italian male is going to accept the same restraints for himself.’

  We argued it back and forth and it ended up with Giovanna having a crying fit.

  ‘I’m asking you’, said Carlo next day, ‘to leave Giovanna alone. She must wonder about me after the way you talked. She must think I’m a sex maniac.’

  ‘Come off it, Carlo, the only thing wrong with Giovanna is that she’s a virgin, twenty-two years old, idle and living with her mother. She’s bursting with repressed sex. Put a match to her and she’d explode. All she needs is a few months on her own in Paris or London.’

  ‘If ever I leave you’, said Carlo, ‘you should try your hand as a pimp. It’s a good refuge for sex-obsessed women in their decline.’

  When he is as nasty as that I know I have him. He has lost his cool and I can toast him on the spit of his contradictions. For Carlo – did you know? – is an uncomfortable hybrid. He’s two-thirds cool cat, a third residual Latin. The cool cat carries the Latin like a caudal growth: something disagreeable and reversionary whose removal would require painful surgery. It makes him easy to torment. But I forbore. Piece of piping number four restrained me. I savoured the responsibilities of power.

  I was going to tell you about the shackles.

  That purchase was a consequence of my earlier one. The ferraiuolo decided I was obviously a good market and took to showing me his most unpromising junk. I suspect he sold my name – there is a trade in such tips – to other pedlars as a likely gull, for all sorts of beggars, tripe-vendors, rag-and-bone men, gipsies and tramps began to call. None of them had anything I wanted until one day, about three months after I bought the lead piping, the ferraiuolo himself turned up with an object which he assured me would figure marvellously in an artistic assemblage. It was a set of fetters. Or perhaps two sets. I’m not sure, since I could never decide whether they were intended for shackling
one four-footed or two two-footed animals or perhaps merely the rear hooves of two four-footed ones. Anyway there were two separate units involved. Each consisted of a pair of U-shaped pieces of iron with holes through which an iron bar was threaded. The iron bar itself was about five feet long and pierced at its extremities with holes through which stout chains were passed. These chains could be fastened by a padlock. Since each U-shaped fetter contained six holes in all, the bar could be threaded through at varying levels so as to diminish or enlarge its size. At their largest, the fetters would fit a man’s ankles, at their smallest, a child’s wrists.

  ‘What were they for?’ I asked the ferraiuolo.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe they were used in a slaughter-house? Or a stud? Maybe they were an instrument of torture? They’re very well made anyway. Lovely handiwork! You won’t get a finish like that nowadays. An odd object anyway. It’ll intrigue people. Nobody will have seen another. They could even be part of some old historical object.’ The ferraiuolo waved his hand imaginatively. ‘Like, ah, I don’t know, maybe a set of stocks, why not? Un ceppo, si. Maybe I should try and sell them to an antique dealer, if you don’t want them. I’m giving you first refusal because you’re a customer, that’s fair, isn’t it? A night club might use them. They’re suggestive.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Listen,’ the ferraiuolo tried humour. ‘If your husband has an eye for the women, you could use it to tie him by the leg, haha! I’m only joking; you understand, Signora. It’s just my way. No offence meant.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll take them.’

  *

  In fairness to myself, I think I should describe one of our rows – started, as it happens, by you. It was last December and you had driven over with your guilty Christmas gifts and gossip. An American friend of mine, you reported, had walked out on her Sicilian husband. He had retaliated by kidnapping their six-month baby and fleeing to Messina. An English girl who works at the British Institute had taken her in and, together with some left-wing lawyer friends, they were about to take legal action to recover the baby.