Rosa too woke up the next day unsure whether she had walked in the street below in a dream, but the mud between her toes showed her that she had indeed left the house. She stele into the kitchen to find Sabina and beg some hot water in secret, before the others found her out; Sabina giggled and her eyes flicked from side to side as Rosa described how she must have sleep-walked, how dangerous it was, how someone could have accidentally woken her and she might have fallen down, without being able to put out a hand to stop her fall, and died.
Sabina nodded energetically. ‘What a fall that would have been! I know the falls that can happen to young girls; it’s an amazing thing, when you think how supple their bodies are, how round and well-padded – yes, my little signorina Rosalba, what terrible falls can happen!’ She tested the water with her elbow, pushing the sleeve up, as she had done when the girl she was teasing was a baby, and then dipped the scoop into the cauldron and ladled it into a bowl for Rosa to wash the dirt of the road off her toes.
But as she bent to give her the bowl, she lowered her voice, and whispered in Rosa’s ear, ‘Be careful, you’re not a child any more, you mustn’t forget that. Gallivanting at night – really. I trust you, you’re not a fool, you know what could happen if you got up to some mischief out there,’ and her fingers described general obloquy with a sweeping gesture of abolition, ‘and then you’ll never get a husband either. Unless …’ her voice dropped lower, ‘you get me to take you to La Lavandaia to be made good as new, but you wouldn’t like that, my little lady, the cutting and the sewing hurts like the devil …’
Rosa took Sabina’s arm and pinched her, hard, her teeth set in fury. ‘Be quiet, you horrible witch, just stop your filthy talk, what are you saying? I was walking in my sleep, I told you, I’m not responsible for what happens in the night …’ And tears rolled down her flushed face as Sabina helped her wash between her toes, hastily, so that the evidence should be put away before the others joined them for a piece of bread and a glass of hot milk. And when Rosa heard Caterina getting up next door, and coming towards the kitchen, she gave Sabina another hard pinch on the thin part of her arm, just to make sure she knew there wasn’t to be another word.
That was understood, and Sabina rubbed her arm to ease the bruising, then began to attend to Cati, puffy from sleep, like a bird with its feathers fluffed up to keep warm; and then, with a sidelong look at Rosa, began humming,
‘I’ve got a wonderful little girl
She knows how to cut and sew –
One blouse every fifteen days –
My little girl don’t eat very much –
Just a mountain of bread a week!’
Cati, her mouth full, repeated, ‘Just a mountain of bread a week!’ and giggled.
‘My little girl don’t drink very much –’
Together they sang,
‘Just twenty bottles for lunch –
She’s got such a tremendous nose
You could stuff a loaf of bread in it –
She’d got such beautiful bazooms,
You could fill …’
Cati fell silent, and watched Rosa, who didn’t wait to hear Sabina’s voice rise to end the verse, but, shaking with sobs, fled to her room, and there hurled herself face down on the bed. Unconcerned, Sabina went on, as she worked at the stove,
‘You could fill a two litre jug –
Oh! what a daughter, Oh what a daughter!
A pain in the neck for the man who takes her –
Oh my daughter! Oh my daughter!’
‘Really! This isn’t the street, Sabina,’ said Nunzia, coming in and kissing Caterina on the top of her head. She looked around for Rosa; and sighed when Sabina indicated, with a jerk of her head, that she was in her room, and fuming. ‘Let her be,’ said her mother. ‘It will cure itself, let’s hope.’ But Cati took in their neglect of her sister, and she put down her piece of bread steadily and stood to leave.
‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘Ask her to come back; there’s no use crying.’ As Cati left, she continued, to Sabina, who was sprinkling flour into a basin and whirling it into a dough with her fist, ‘But you can only wait for the storming to pass …’ She sighed. ‘I cried too, when I was her age. Though I can hardly remember why, now.’
Cati went in to Rosa, who lay, gripping the down coverlet, to cram it into her face and muffle her sobs; she climbed up next to her, and stroked her head, and tried to cradle her with a thin arm across her shaking shoulders and felt herself going dry in her throat and choked up too; Rosa twisted, her red face glowered up at Cati. She hissed, ‘Go away, you don’t understand anything.’
‘Oh Rosa,’ Cati began,’ ‘I do. I do.’
‘No you don’t, you can’t. Everybody loves you, and no one loves me. They just tease me, because I’m …’ And all of a sudden, she wasn’t crying any more, she was angry, and she took hold of Cati’s hair and pulled. Cati accepted the pain without squealing; and Rosa subsided.
When her sister became quieter, Cati began again, ‘There’s no one like you, Rosa, please don’t go away and leave me. I can’t understand anything – not without your telling me. I’d die without you.’
‘Huh,’ said Rosa, straightening, and pulling herself up. ‘Well, you’re no good to me, you just get in my way.’
Cati’s heart twisted, then withered inside her, like a paper taper set to the fire.
If the child in the cradle on whom Carabosse lays her curse after the other fairy godmothers have given her everything that makes a girl lovable could have understood the ordinary life she was forfeiting, she would have renounced their fairy boons; given the choice, Caterina would have rejected her charms too, in order to be closer to her sister, to be more like Rosa. But she faced the impending loss of Rosa’s love, it seemed to her then, without the benefit of such a choice. In her insouciant assumption of the pleasure she gave others, Caterina was trapped: she expected that overflowing fountain of love, and when it was staunched, the guilt took her in its fist and squeezed. She had failed to spread light and warmth, to do what her sister needed, and she must put aside her own terrors, and her own interest, and help her sister towards her heart’s desires. It was unfair that Rosa appeared to others to stumble through the day with her heavy clumsiness when Cati knew the brilliant forkings of her sister’s spirit in intimacy, the bright patterns she could weave out of the darkness, that made her something rare and starry. Caterina judged then, as she watched Rosa pin her hair, that the ease with which she, Caterina, won applause – when she danced and sang the cherry song, or strewed flowers before the host in the procession, making a little reverence to the monstrance on every third step backwards – was undeserved, the effect of some trick she did not want to perform but that came to her naturally from some evil in her, the same evil that had inspired her bad thoughts of Tommaso and prevented her doing as her sister, her beloved sister, wanted.
She would go that afternoon to fetch water from the fountain, she liked doing that anyway, and nothing-could come of it to hurt her, there were always plenty of others there, and she’d give Tommaso a sign, so that he’d come, come at night to find her, that was the way it was done, she’d seen it, becks and smiles under half-closed eyes as the water brimmed in the young women’s jars. She knew snatches of song that Sabina sang about girls caught outside after hours.
It worked out as she hoped; Tommaso was hanging about outside in the square with a group of other young men, smoking and strolling around to join the girls drawing the evening water at the fountain; he came near her; to her surprise, she saw he wasn’t smiling, not like the others, who were laughing and exchanging remarks, between themselves, grinning strenuously as they play-acted contempt for the young women they wooed.
Tommaso bent close to her, and said, ‘You didn’t come.’
And she took a breath sharply at his directness, and shook her head in fright ‘I couldn’t,’ she said.
‘Aaah,’ said Tommaso, ‘I see.’ He straightened, and she heaved one jar out of the basin,
but he took it from her and she felt his strength give the heavy vessel sudden lift; she put it down and thanked him. He nodded, with a half-bow.
‘Always at your service, beauty.’
Rosalba would have twitched at such words, but Cati was so used to them, she only wavered because she was wondering how to give him her message, and she thought he was going to turn. So her eyes fell on the water jar. He understood, and helped her lift it onto her hip. No man, however enslaved to beauty, would ever carry it for a woman. There was a riffle of suppressed laughter at this permitted intimacy, but Caterina pressed on, for Rosa must not cry any more, not like that, must not cast her off, not like that.
And she gave Tommaso Rosa’s message, ‘Come. Come tonight.’
11
From The Duel
RUPE, 1912
WHEN HE DID not speak, but just jerked his head as if a fly had buzzed near his ear and irritated him, when he did not greet her, not even by name, let alone with the caressing words she had so often uttered in her games of make-believe, Rosa began, murmuringry, ‘I didn’t know when to come down, I wanted to be sure no one was awake …’
He nodded, and his grey-green eyes seemed to grow darker as he scanned her, below him, looking up at him, his gaze travelling quickly over her face to her breasts; she brought an arm up involuntarily, to shield herself from his look.
‘Is it all right? I …’ She wanted to ask him, Do I please you? And her suppliant’s face, round and even in this twilight, thickly flushed in the hectic way that he had seen before, repulsed him and made him take her by the arm she had raised and move it like a detached limb back to her side. He held it there, and with the other hand cradled one of the globes of her breasts and jounced it, like a buyer testing a melon’s weight in the market.
‘Yes, it’s all right, it’s tremendous,’ he said. She moved her free arm to stop him inspecting but he put his head on one side. ‘Now, now,’ he said, ‘Let’s be a kind, dear girl, your lover wants to get the feel of you, let him, if you’re as sweet as you seem to me to be.’ Sharp whey-like sweat came off him as she smelt his closeness; he was walking her backwards into the recess of the arched double doors of a neighbour’s carriage entrance, sticking to her awkwardly, like children playing at dancing, standing on each other’s feet, and when he had her against the door, he took his hand from the underside of her breast, and fingering her nipple, made it rise, then tweaked it till it stood up higher; twinges darted from her breast to her groin, and Rosa closed her eyes with a little gasp.
‘You like that?’ Tommaso released her other hand, and took her other nipple between finger and thumb. It too rose, and pinching hard until she gave a moan, he kissed her, until she opened her lips to his, when he snapped shut and bit her lip; her eyes flew open, he looked at her and smiled, raising his eyebrows. ‘You like that too?’
‘I …’ she began, bewildered, the pain in her lip did not send the same honeyed message to her body, ‘I don’t know …’ She wanted to say, Please say something to me, please talk, but he had her still by her nipples and was pulling her towards him, then pushing her back. She tried to take his hands away, and he raised them both, and patted the air, as if to say, ‘All right, all right, I was only doing what you wanted.’ She stepped sideways, she didn’t want to pull away from him but all the same this time she would have liked to wake up from her somnambulism to find herself back in bed with Cati, dreaming of sweetness and lovers’ words, but he pressed close to her, and said, ‘You can’t go yet, not yet. We haven’t done anything, together, yet.’ It was the first time she heard him use ‘We’ and ‘together’; the words entered her consciousness like comets, blazing. He picked up her hand and put it on his cock; then placed his own hand over hers and made her squeeze; it was hot, even under the rough material of his trousers, and rolled about clumsily over the squidgier sack of his balls; but he was panting, making stirring motions with his knees against her legs, working with his free hand at his waistband, until he freed himself from his flies and had wrapped her hand around his naked cock; he spat on his hand and worked the spittle onto the skin, and when he made her hold him again, she felt the wetness on her fingers, and drying fast as he pumped himself up and down over her hand, pinning her hand under his. He shuddered, and groaned aloud, and the sperm hit her dress, on her stomach near her navel; it soaked through the cotton like me spreading warmth of pee, reminding her of when she wet herself as a child, and gave off a quick raw smell. She looked at him, for a moment all sarcasm wiped from his features, the eyelids calm as a corpse, arranged for a laying out, the unusual pallor of his skin like mica in the dark, but the seraphic vision lasted only a fraction of a moment, and the glint came back into his eyes and the twist to his mouth, and he said, slapping her on the side of her breast with a playful cut, ‘Fantastic. We’re two of a kind, my girl; you like it almost as much as I do – and no damage done, either.’
Rosa often went to the washplace with Sabina to help her and she was glad that she could pull her blue cotton dress out of the basket and slosh it into the water before anyone else could examine it for stains; not that the stain spoke openly of its origins; it could easily have been milk, thought Rosa.
Her secret was kept, her secret, which made her feel aglow inside. As she laid the wet dress on the stone coping of the basin and rubbed soap into the fabric at the waist, she unfolded every motion of the tryst Tommaso had kept, and exultation filled her so she felt it might fly out of her mouth in a huge whoop. She rebuked herself for her timidity, for her first dismay that he had not shown more of the lover’s courtesies she had imagined from the fairy tales she told herself; he had been too eager, obviously. She tutted aloud as she remembered she had nearly quailed altogether and quit him when he caressed her so directly and bit her; but he was masterful, and had knowledge, and her love burst into ever greater intensity at the thought of that expertise. She wondered, laughing as Sabina jogged her, for she had halted in a daydream, what it would be like to encourage him, to overcome the scruples he so kindly showed by not exploring her body. She determined she would show him how generous she could be, next time, how to her the priests’ talk was cant, and she’d defy all for love of him. She pushed the dress back into the running water of the stream above the basin, where the soap did not film the water, and mourned the disappearance of his sweet milk; his pleasure had frightened her, it was true, at first when he did not speak and did not ask or explain. But she was glad of that too, for she might have felt she was honour bound to refuse – she could hardly have consented without shame – but this way, he had given her the most intense pleasure, which crossed her back and forth in waves of shock and fear, redoubling upon themselves and increasing in strength. Heroism presented itself to her still as sacrifice; but she turned her mind in pity to the heroines who had suffered atrocious torments to keep their bud for the eternal bridegroom; surely, and the paradox hit her humour with satisfying logic, the most excellent act of selflessness for a virgin was to surrender up her state? The grail itself was sin, none other than sin itself; what greater obeisance to Love itself than to part with all? And with that thought, she wrung out her dress, and flopped it into the basket that Sabina had already filled with a heap of the family’s washing.
She heard nothing of the gossip exchanged at the laundry that morning, and answered only absently to pieces of news she was given. When Sabina heaved the basket of wet washing onto her head, Rosa took up a smaller one, which the older woman indicated, and obediently wedged it onto her hip – daughters of good family should not carry burdens on their heads, like maidservants. Together they made their way to the patch of thorn bushes which was Sabina’s preferred place for drying.
Suddenly, she found herself shivering. She struggled with the cold fear that had laid its hand on her: she had gone with a man, without protesting, without a single pledge from him, and not a word of kindness, not a promise for tomorrow; she looked at Sabina’s back in front of her, the pinafore tied behind over her gathered s
kirt, and imagined her husband’s hands around that still sturdy small of her back, and wondered had she let him do that, do what Tommaso had done, before they were married? Of course she had, everyone did, that was how it happened; but then, yes, it was also how Serafina …
There entered her mind a memory of the feast day of the Madonna della Bruna; it fell in July in the time of the fierce lion sun, as they called it in the hills, and yet the shrine attracted crowds from all Ninfania and all around. They had been once, all together: the procession had suddenly swirled past them, the men shouting and sobbing around the towering carnival float with the Madonna swaying at its apex in a white satin gown embroidered with gold. She was in all her bridal finery, although her son was already born, poised stiff on her arm in a dress of the same stuff, and both of them were wearing starburst crowns on their heads. Mary tottered up on her perch from side to side but nothing wiped the mild, sweet benignity from her doll’s face as she dropped the dew of her mercy down from heaven on the mortal exiles below wailing and weeping in the vale of tears. Inert, mute, untouchable, she seemed uncanny and prodigious to Rosa, who wanted her to protest the hectic fury all around her, to come alive and give a sign, as, below her, the volunteers hauling the lumbering shrine on their backs on poles criss-crossed and tethered grew more obstreperous and howled and the crowd pressed up and obstructed their laborious way ahead; after three turns around the piazza they at last reached the platform in the middle, only a little distance from the Duomo they had left, and the sweat-streaked bearers put down the skewed tower on which the Madonna stood, and tumbled to their knees. The priest blessed them, then gave the word, and with a roar, knives unsheathed, the front ranks of the crowd rushed the dais and slashed at the wood of the Virgin’s triumphal car and, shouting aloud, carried it off in fragments; she continued to look upon it all unmoved from her ne perch, and someone came back glorying in his spoils – was it her uncle, or her mother’s father? – with splinters for each of the family and a chunk the size of a brick for himself. Caterina refused hers, Rosa remembered, she had turned her face in dismay into her mother’s waist under the crook of her arm. Franco put his in his mouth and chewed it up, he was teething at the time. But Rosa had accepted hers, as an amulet it was as well not to neglect.
The Lost Father Page 13
