The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  She stopped for a moment, as if the basket were overburdening her, and put it down. Sabina turned. ‘A stitch? You should walk regularly, swinging from side to side, not scurrying, with little steps.’

  Rosa said, ‘It’s nothing,’ and picked up the laundry and set off again. Her legs moved, her feet went forward one behind the other, but she felt winter come down on her and numb her to the bone.

  A man had once weighed his daughter in the huge scales used in the port for the cargoes coining off the ships from the East; he had promised that the suitor his daughter chose would take her weight in gold for a dowry, she was so virtuous. And probably beautiful too, thought Rosa. But without her virtue, even if she had been beautiful, she wouldn’t have been worth the weight of her little toe in dross. Rosa thought of the Madonna, and thanked her, thanked her with a welling passion of gratitude such as even she had never felt towards her before that Tommaso had not taken advantage of her total willingness and that she was still intact – no one would be able to say anything against her. They could examine her if they wanted, those witches could paddle inside her to make sure.

  And another wave of chill wrapped her; yes, she had been left untouched, though she had cleaved to his seal like hot wax and his pigment had painted her stomach the colour of the moon. Suddenly the cold around her began to burn, as an unknown and unsuspected rage lapped its edges and she felt for Tommaso sudden furious rancour. Contempt joined that rage too in turn, as she thought of his condition, the future of a conscript, the birth of a Post Office clerk’s son, who was in any case a stranger in the south, with God knows what dangerous notions in his head. He should value her, a woman of substance: she had, if not a sack of gold weighing sixty kilos, at least one of the most handsome trunkfuls of linen, drawn-thread-work and crochet table-mats in Ninfania. And a loathing for him seized her. He should have wooed her, he should have talked to her, made love to her with sweet-talk. Then, remembering, she almost gagged at the feel of his slimed cock under her hand, and the raw acid smell of his seed. Nothing but a beast, dumb and rude and mute and savage, she called him under her breath; a man who could only talk men’s talk, who had none of the graces a nobleman would have, but of course Tommaso Talvi would never make a nobleman. However could she have imagined it?

  She shook out the clothes over the scrub with more alacrity than she had shown at the washing; she was released from her error, she had escaped, just. She declared to herself firmly that the incident was a little misadventure, with no consequences. No matter that it had been a failure.

  Her mood of derision held that afternoon and evening, when Tommaso came by and stood in the shadow under the balcony of the house opposite, watching the house.

  The night before, Cati had fallen asleep sitting with her mother and Rosa on the balcony in the cool of the evening; when her mother had given her a gentle push to rouse her, she found her slightly feverish and put her to bed. So, just as Caterina had wanted, she remained dead to the world through the night. Her sister’s escapades were none of her business, she told herself.

  She was better the following day, however, entirely recovered, it seemed, and when, from the balcony, she caught sight of him skulking, she quickly volunteered to fetch the dish Sabina had prepared from the oven in the piazza. He stopped in front of her, and nodded, in salute. Then, addressing her formally as if she were a grown woman, he asked to accompany her. In silence they walked to the communal oven, and back, and she almost ran with the tray steaming with fragrant tomato and garlic to try to alert Rosa so she could prepare herself for his appearance. But he followed closely behind her and presented himself to her mother with another of the staccato nods he had learned on the parade ground. Nunzia was flustered.

  ‘Have you got your papers yet?’ she asked. His long hands hung clumsily from the short sleeves of his jacket, like a scarecrow’s stuffed gloves from its straw body. He seemed to gulp the air before speaking, like the fish his complexion called to her mind. She noticed her own brusqueness, but could not help herself; she was looking forward to the army clearing him out of Rupe. He was an anarchist, she could tell, even though her son shielded him by denying it. His kind of wildness understood nothing of the law, nothing of the limits obscure people like themselves had to submit to, he would lead her family and others into a similar misapprehension of the way things are and always have been: they wouldn’t grasp the impossibility of change, the need to keep still like an animal avoiding a hunter on its tracks. But Tommaso Talvi was the type to jaw about whatever new scheme had taken his fancy and then jeopardise everybody around with his big boasting empty talk. Her husband might want justice, but he wanted it through the proper channels. Her elder daughter came in with roses in her cheeks where she had pinched herself, in order to give her swarthy complexion colour, as her mother had once shown her. Nunzia noticed a look pass between them. She saw that Talvi’s frizzled up as it met Rosa’s, like a brand which is doused, and she also saw that Rosa did not notice, but went on as if a bubbling sulphurous spring rose inside her.

  In the bedroom, Cati hugged herself and preened, ‘Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, she’s got him where she wants him.’ Everyone would know he’d become Rosa’s suitor, now that he’d been to the house and paid a call after meeting her secretly at night. Caterina knew this was the way things were done; she glowed at her own craftiness at bringing it about.

  Tommaso began saying, ‘I expect to hear any day now…’ Rosa’s insides turned over, all her carefully fostered haughtiness resolved itself into a small sweat on her upper lip and a moistness in her palms. She thought, Now he’ll say what he was going to say last night, except that I made it hard for him, I was so unloving, so unresponsive.

  He greeted her, his eyes falling on her again for an instant and then skittering away. It flashed through her, He’s asking himself, Was it really me, last night in the dark? And before she set the thought aside, she too responded in kind, and wondered, Was it him? Had the encounter taken place at all? Perhaps she had been sleep-walking, and had not been responsible. Perhaps she had not been there at all, in the street, but a phantom instead had taken her place, looking like her, feeling like her inside too, but not her, for she, Rosa, had been in her bed, dreaming. Perhaps she had made it up altogether, and there had been nobody, no phantom, no sleep-walker, nothing.

  He was no longer scanning her, after his ordinary greeting, and she plumbed his manner for significance, without success. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘offer our guest something fresh!’ She was behaving with unaccustomed grandeur, slipping on a manner of authority and calm that would have made her mother laugh, if she had not wanted to cry.

  The heat of summer was beginning to gather its strength, and the day outside hummed with the gorged drowsiness of the flies. Tommaso said, quickly, that he could not stay, that he had just had something to drink, anyway, in town. Reproachfully, Rosa dipped into the deep pot of olives and served a scoop of the waxy jade pebbles on to a dish and set it near Tommaso. A vinegary smell pricked the still air for a moment, then faded.

  He remained standing, ill-at-ease, as if he had been called somewhere and was awaiting release. But Rosa motioned to him to sit, and sat herself down, opposite him at the table, expectant. The silence continued. Only the beads in the doorway rustled, as Nunzia’s disapproval distempered the air. Rosa ignored her, she wanted to speak so much she felt the words swelling her up inside like leaven in dough, pushing it up out of the mould until it has doubled and redoubled in size. She could make all the speeches she would like Tommaso to make, a hundred times over, and yet his awkwardness under her mother’s severity filled her full of pity too, and her chivalrous love returned to warm her and fortify her, suturing the cut that had opened in her earlier at his muteness the night before. But custom, who holds all things in her grip, especially the train of courtship in the Noonday of Italy, demanded that he take the initiative in wooing and she remain wordless, especially in company.

  Rosa cast an eye at her mother’s frowning back, w
here she attended to some task, and tried to exchange a glance of impatience with Tommaso. But he only looked at her blankly, and gave no rueful half-smile in collusion. He was tugging anxiously at one earlobe, and the silence continued to hang between them, though Nunzia slapped and stirred at the range. He stayed on, though it seemed he was on the point of departure, for moments together, stuck to his own indecisiveness like an insect on the tacky strips of paper designed to catch them. She could sense his muddle, and it touched her. She recognised that he wanted her to forget what had happened, but that it also leapt vividly before his eyes and had a hold on him too. He was already in so far he could not find his depth, and he wanted to turn and strike back for the shore, but, like an unpractised swimmer, found that the distance he had come was too great for him to return.

  At last, he spoke, and asked when Davide was expected, for he was about to receive his marching orders, and he was hoping that her brother would be back, as expected, for the summer holidays from the university, so that they could meet before he left.

  Rosa made a little game out of answering, so pleased was she to be entertaining him with her talk. She could have said, Any day now, and left it at that. Instead she chattered about the law and the law exams and found Davide’s last letter from Riba, and showed Tommaso the flourishing strokes of her brother’s handwriting, and asked him if he too wrote with such tails on his p’s and g’s and such loops on his l’s and d’s? She went to find him a pen and paper to write something for her so she could see, she could even be able to tell his character from his writing. (Would he seize the chance to give her a message, without her mother seeing through her ruse? Would she be able to read it? They usually had to wait for their father to come home to decipher Davide’s news aloud to them.) He took the sheet and wrote, in a smaller and slower hand than Davide’s, his name and the single word, ‘Avanti!, ‘Forward!’, and gave it back to her, with a serious air. She folded it, and kept it. When he saw her smiling so happily at this offering, he scowled. She had become so attuned to the seisms of his feelings she could see that he wanted to hit her. But he had repented of his impulse as swiftly, she knew, aghast at himself that he could consider treating her so roughly, a young woman from the family who were his friends, almost his own kin, his people. The queasiness which had first compelled him to come back to the house that evening clawed him again, and kept him in the chair under her fond glances and bids to intimacy. He did not know what had possessed him the night before, yet, gradually, the sweetness she gave him began to dissolve his confusion; his vivid spurt of pleasure returned to him and he looked across at her and asked, ‘Will you be coming to the passeggiata next Saturday?’ Her heart tumbled inside her then, like a bird shot out of the sky.

  In the bedroom, Cati hugged herself again with delight as with pent breath she waited out the meeting. ‘Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, now you have someone to love you, yes you do.’

  12

  The Snail Hunt 3

  DOLMETTA, MAY 1931

  THE NOONDAY GAZETTE had arrived with the water cart that morning; children were still working the spigot to fill the tall earthenware jars from the big barrel mounted in the muletrap, while the carter stood by to keep count of the charge. Their mothers, lifting the heavy vessels onto their heads to carry them home, clicked at the young ones’ improvidence, as they splashed and squirted spray at one another by thumbing the tap’s mouth – mistakenly, or so they cried out when scolded. Davide took his usual place in the shade of the circolo’s front room, on the cathedral piazza abutting the wharf, overlooking the scene outside through the coarse cotton lace jalousy. The chimney stack of a small steamer, the slanted gaffs of fishing boats returned from the morning catch, the furled booms of others, moored and idle, bisected his segment of sky; framed by the blind like a holy picture fringed with handmade paper lace, it could have been the setting for a miraculous landfall of a saint’s body. He knocked on the wall for the boy from the café next door to come in, and indicated his usual order with a nod; to the other company, he raised a slow hand, palm over his breast but not touching it, and bent his head over the paper.

  The front page was taken up with the Leader’s activities: a photograph showed him pumping along a line of soldiers, his elbows thrust back, his chest puffed out, its outline blurred by hoary growth; Doric-square, his famous chin jutted up and outwards, as he took a salute of volunteers for Africa at a little trot. He had been long absent from the public balcony of the Roman palace which he had made his stage, and he was now proving that he wasn’t in chronic decline, as rumour held, with a pox contracted years ago, but had merely suffered a passing dose of’ flu. Davide turned the page, passed over columns of marriages and deaths, noted the substance of wills wonderingry, and came across a report that caught his attention. ‘The grieving relatives of the late Don Antonio Beatillo, who died on February 20 last year, Year IX of the glorious Fasces, RIP, gathered together yesterday in the noble family’s residence at Italico and amid scenes of bitter sorrow issued a statement, jointly signed by all the agnatic relatives of the late illustrious savant. After much deliberation and in great sorrow, the family of Don Antonio Beatillo, learned laureate and doctor, glory of the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Naples, have resolved themselves to appeal against the last will and testament of their beloved and revered father, made in January last year, as being composed by the deceased when not in his right mind.’

  Davide skipped the list of signatories and went on: ‘The late Don Antonio’s interest in the thought and teachings of Pythagoras led him, the family allege, into heresy, and ultimately in his last days, into dementia praecox, aggravated by the debilitating epilepsy from which he had suffered since his middle years.

  ‘In his last will and testament, the celebrated philosopher, author of Pythagorean Mysticism and the Ninfanian School, left his entire estate, the noble house at Punta del Giorno, the farms and their sheep folds in the hills at Crotone, Metaponto and Matera, the vineyards that fringe the banks of the Sauro gorge, to none other than himself, when he should return in his next incarnation to take up residence on his territories again.

  ‘In the meantime, Don Antonio instructed his bankers to maintain the houses in readiness for his return. In accord with the seasonal moves established during his present lifetime, his households and their servants should travel and provide for his needs. His considerable fortune should meet this expense, he declared. (Over 20 million lire, it is believed.) He expected a celebratory meal on re-entry into this life, and a litre of his own wine from the most recent good vintage. If he had not returned in twenty years his son, Don Benedetto, should inherit his lands and administer his fortune in the normal way. This most unusual of last wills and testaments concluded, “Till we meet again”, giving the usual words of farewell a renewed vigour of meaning,’ noted the reporter in the Noonday Gazette.

  The family had not paid much attention to the terms of the eccentric patriarch’s last wishes, as the stipulation that all his possessions should be held in readiness for his return merely put the houses and their produce at the usual disposal of his family, while removing the problem of his personal presence and authority. The wives of his sons, under their black lace mantillas, smiled with relief that they could now administer the populous households without attending to their princely father-in-law’s caprices. But in the isolation that their riches had brought about, and in their serene acceptance that privilege was their due, they did not anticipate for a moment the press of people Don Antonio Beatillo’s idiosyncratic will would bring to their door.

  They hardly imagined that there were so many indigent, yearning, crooked, canny inheritors on the earth. The reincarnations of Don Antonio Beatillo pursued his family like horseflies at a carthorse’s eyes, and they were hard put to flick them away.

  Davide had been asked to act as legal counsel for three candidates from Rupe, four from Corrado, and for some five others who appeared but wisely did not divulge their place of origin. Some claimed to be Don
Antonio Beatillo himself, reincarnate; others, more crafty, urged the claims of babies discovered, they said, in the local limestone caves, foundlings dropped from the sky, with tokens proving their selfsame identity with the magnate, recently deceased, much lamented (RIP) who owned all that land down in the valley of the Dragon Torrent. In all cases, they had purchased an ill-afforded shoeshine for the occasion and begged someone – the mothers of the infants, Davide supposed – to spruce up a suit of clothes, by dangling a magnificent future before them, and then wrapped their proof in a newly-washed blanket. Hunger looked out of both pairs of eyes.

  Davide saw how they fastened their hopes on his powers of persuasion in the courts where identity and responsibility are conferred. He had not taken the cases: he read now in the paper that a bigger fish from Rome was representing the family’s appeal against the terms. So he was glad he had refused; he had never shown much aptitude for the law anyway, for its necessary feints and tricks. He had never really shown an appetite for work in any form. When it came to make-believe, he preferred opera, for in opera a knave in disguise is quickly discovered, and is unambiguously a knave, nor is the matter of a song a lie from start to finish. Even the villains speak truly of their villainy, like Iago in Otello, but he, Davide, would have had to make false speeches to client and judge, had he taken the fees for claiming some rickety starveling was the landowner scholar come back to earth.