The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Davide came up and said, ‘What did you say?’

  Tommaso stood, and made to take Davide in his arms, to clap him round the shoulders, his friend, to whom he wanted to say goodbye even more than to his own parents, but Davide’s eyes were shot with red and he stepped back from Tommaso, and, following the rules printed on the records of family honour scrolling before his eyes, he told him he lied.

  By the law of the mentita, Tommaso must reply with a challenge; if Davide had dealt him a blow, he would have forfeited the choice of weapon. So they fought with the Pittagora family pistols: Franco was sent to fetch them from the cupboard where they were kept at home. Nunzia screamed when Franco appeared and told her what was happening. But on her own she could not go against the custom.

  From the square, Davide and Tommaso made for the quarry outside the town, where such challenges were answered. The witnesses to the insult in the café followed them up the street, and presented themselves as seconds on both sides. A few children from the dirt alleys in the slum quarter they passed through joined the small crowd behind the adversaries. The spectators pressed together; they were holding their breath with excitement, and had formed a wide circle around the two youths, as bystanders usually do after an accident, not before. Someone ran for the priest. He refused to come. He was afraid to be an accessory, for it was against the law to duel; he promised, through the grille in his front door, that he would pray for them both at home.

  Rosa in the apartment by the curtain at the window willed her eyes to see the scene unfolding. ‘I want to be there,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t bear being kept indoors. Always in the wings, never taking part. I want to go out there.’ Her nails scraped on the glass panes. ‘I must take part.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Cati whispered, frightened. ‘You know you can’t.’

  Rosa did not respond, but stayed at the window, so close it seemed mat she wanted to fall through it. She thought of the prince who appeared by magic in the heroine’s bowl of milk, and of the time when the jealous old witch shattered a glass into the bowl so that when he was summoned again he was running blood from the cuts all over his body. Rosa trembled: she saw Davide, she saw Tommaso rising up red out of the white milk.

  ‘It’s not allowed. Besides, I don’t want to go and see. I couldn’t bear it.’ Caterina moved closer to the table, as if it protected her, scraping in turn with the legs of her tall-backed chair on the tiles. ‘Rosa, do you think anything will happen to them?’

  ‘I want to take part,’ Rosa said. Then she was quiet, she was trying to pick up the noises from outside. ‘I’d like to fight, you know.’ She turned around to her sister. ‘I’d like to face my enemies on my own. I think I could kill, too. I don’t think it would be difficult.’ She brought her hands together with a sharp motion, and squeezed.

  Cati pleaded, ‘Rosa, please don’t talk like that. You’re making everything worse.’

  ‘If they were fighting with swords, there’d be more danger. Because you have to persevere then until one or other draws blood.’

  Cati shuddered; a blade slid through Talvi once again, then ripped her brother too. He was holding his face, and his eyes were wide, and he repeated over and over, I’m losing my m … m … m … m,’ so heavily and stupidly that she knew he was trying to say ‘mind’, but couldn’t get it out because he had already lost it.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll shoot each other, they’re friends,’ Rosa continued, trying reasonableness in order to staunch the fear flowing in the room between them. ‘They’ve practised with those pistols together for years. They don’t have to score a hit for it to be a duel. It’s just a matter of honour, of making a good show, with a proper fight.’

  Keeping her knees together tight, and rocking on her hands under her legs, Cati put in, ‘And all on account of you.’

  Rosa got up and looked down on the street, parting the shutters quietly, not to disturb her mother. ‘Mamma’s praying really hard, for sure.’ She nodded towards the wall of her parents’ bedroom. To her sister, she said, ‘You shouldn’t keep on saying that. You seem to have the idea on your brain.’

  ‘They are fighting for you,’ responded Cati, happily. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Rosa turned back to the window. ‘It doesn’t feel like it though. In stories, something has really happened when there’s a fight. But nothing has happened, you know.’

  ‘Oh but it has, it has. Everything is different now. It’s an adventure, and it’s happened to you.’ Can’ was talking to Rosa’s back, solid and vigilant at the window. ‘And to me. And to Davide. Oh, Davide.’

  Rosa replied slowly, without facing her sister. ‘It’s an idea they have, between themselves. I don’t really come into it’ She turned, at last. ‘You seem to think their fighting’s giving me some kind of pleasure.’

  ‘No, of course not. Rosa? You do come into it, though. When it’s all over and Davide comes back safely and Tommaso isn’t hurt either, people will stop talking about you, but everyone will still know, inside, about Tommaso coming after you like that, won’t they?’

  Rosa was pacing now, with more quickness of motion than she’d possessed for weeks, ‘Do you think so?’

  Cati whispered, still rocking, ‘Aren’t you frightened? I mean, don’t you mind? About Tommaso, I mean? What happens now? You can’t ever see him again. Even if he doesn’t get hurt. Even if he doesn’t get killed.’ Her whisper broke into a squeak.

  Rosa stopped her circling of the table, and said, ‘He might die.’ She tested the thought ‘I don’t mind.’ She tried it again. ‘I don’t care about him.’ As she repeated it, she felt a sudden lightness. Then she began to cry, and set her teeth to fight the tears. ‘What does it matter anyway? Whether he dies or not I’ll never see him again. That’s the whole point of it. Anyway, have you ever heard of anyone getting really hurt in a duel? I haven’t. Even that Socialist who said the Virgin couldn’t have had Jesus without a man – remember that? Even he didn’t get killed.’

  Cati began to pray, under her breath, for her brother and for Tommaso and for her sister Rosa and for herself; she was to blame, she had made herself a snare. She begged Jesus and the Madonna for forgiveness. She had acted to please Rosa, she told them, and yes, it had pleased her, Rosa had stopped suffering from that terrible despair that had made her turn against her sister, before Tommaso.

  Her mother and father’s bedroom door opened, quietly, and Sabina emerged. ‘Your mother, your poor mother!’ She came over to Rosa on silent feet and shook her head at her, raising her hands and waggling them together in grieving exasperation; then she bent to Cati and pinched her cheek, ‘My Lady in heaven, you’re so precious, what are we going to do when you grow up, my God, my God, what are we to do?’

  Cati twisted, remonstrating. ‘Rosa …’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Rosa. And would Rosa like some coffee? Your poor mother, that saint on earth, has asked me to make her a cup.’ Sabina prevented Rosa’s advance towards the door. ‘She doesn’t want to see you. The sight of you now will destroy her last vestige of strength. It’s only by keeping herself to herself–in the company of the angels and saints–that she can bear this at all.’

  Rosa shrugged, flung her hands up, resumed her pacing.

  From the kitchen, they heard the beans rattle into the mill, then the harsh blades of the quern crunching and grinding them released the first plume of the powdery bitter aroma; they heard Sabina tapping the ground coffee out of the wooden drawer, and the wooden spoon made the earthenware jug sound; then the smell of the brew swelled under the rush of boiling water and floated in. Sabina entered with a thimble of glazed white china, and passed through into the bedroom, defying Rosa with her set shoulders to stop her and ask for a cup. Rosa huffed, and went to the kitchen herself.

  ‘I don’t want any,’ Cati called out after her.

  Rosa returned with her cup to her post at the window, as Cati started to pray again, trying to keep her mind on her prayers and their so
lid and dependable formulae, so different from the chancy events outside. But, in the stuffiness of the room, she drifted off into a wretched sleep, and remained stuck there, harrowed by her dreams’ violence, as Rosa continued to keep vigil, so bright and hot that she felt if she put her hand to the curtains or the tablecloth they would spark and leap into flames at her touch.

  The quarry was limestone and crumbly; it had been excavated for the stones of the basilica, eight hundred years ago, and it was still being hewn. Davide stepped in it, as if he were barefoot on burning sand in summer. It was chilly between the smooth white walls with their stitched squares marking the saw’s passage; the air was still and cool in the cold stone’s propinquity. He tried to move his limbs normally, but it was as if he were now paddling in oil, heavy and hampering. He longed to be indoors, to be quiet, alone, in wintertime, by the stove in the kitchen with a book or looking at the flames through the glass. So he turned a fraction later than Tommaso at the sound of the signal and shot wild, at the moment when the lead bullet from the pistol he had lent Tommaso hit the stone floor to his side and ricocheted, flying up at a forty-five degree angle. It penetrated his head near his temple; the lead lodged in him then and began its sluggish discharge of poison into his body.

  This was the family legend, on our side of the Atlantic; my Italian grandfather, amateur singer (baritone), wearer of waxed moustaches and kid gloves in the marriage photograph taken against a backdrop of a playing dolphin, died of a wound he got defending the honour of his sister. (The years between, the lapse of nineteen years contracted into a single instant in the telling.) In my teenage eye, my duelling grandfather levelled his pistol, narrowed his smouldering eyes over the sights and pressed; the hammer fell, the powder sparked and the bullet sped fiery and deadly down the polished bore, smoking out of the end of the gun, but too late, askew, for he was already falling, mortally hit, as the Scarpia of your story, the villain, unloaded his pistol too but with more deadly aim, a hair’s breadth readier in response, cold and prompt as consciencelessness itself. Davide would appear to me dressed in frock coat and high collar, with the nipped waist of the Regency buck, standing sideways, poised, his shooting hand flung outwards like a single arm of the crucified Christ, the other on his hip to steady his stance; or else I saw him in ribbed and finned and damascened armour, like the St Georges of Carpaccio and Uccello, who look as if they’ve flayed a predecessor of the dragon and given its hide to an armourer to tailor into a suit. Oh, the duellist in the chivalrous literature the young are given has become the heir of the scienza cavalleresca, he continues the practice of knight errantry, shielding damsels and offering all varmints – and infernal monsters – just vengeance. To me, the calcareous landscape of the south, gaping with the cave lairs of dragons, was the natural backdrop of the avenger’s exploits. I saw your father against it, tilting with the beast, while the sister he was fighting for stood by, her peaky profile outlined over her hands joined in prayer, surveying unmoved the drama of her vindication. For the princess in the richly diapered full-skirted dress at the side of the duel is far too maidenly to cheer when the lance pierces her defamer and stitches his tongue to the floor of his fiery gullet and thence twists through to his blackguard’s heart.

  The Lombards brought trial by combat to Italy along with the pigeon-breasted sirens and harpies that spout rainwater from the eaves of the basilicas in Riba and Dolmetta and Tirrani, and the straining slaves who bear the episcopal throne of Riba on their shoulders, and the solemn lions couchant at church doorways throughout Ninfania. But somewhere down the years the outcome of the duel no longer proved the innocence of the victor or the wrongdoing of the loser. Duelling became an end in itself, the only way to expiate a wrong in honour, and set aside the consequence. When my grandfather heard that clamouring and understood, sickeningly, what he had to do, he also knew he had only to fight with Tommaso to clear the name of his family. He was swept into the quarry by the code that obtained to undo an injury his friend had done him; it did not matter who the victor was. The duel was the thing. As with a penance, the more serious the hurt the more effectively cauterised the original injury. By duelling à outrance your father wiped the stain clean: today, nobody remembers what the slander was in the first place. You don’t: I’m still trying to piece it together from your scraps of memory. Which is how it should be, which is what Davide wanted when he went to the quarry.

  Though he might have preferred that I should keep quiet about it now.

  As he blacked out he would have smiled if his face had not felt as if it had turned to syrup. It was a rush of triumph he experienced, the ecstasy of the sacrificial, but his features were disobedient and he brought his hand up and touched the warm liquid stuffing coming out of his head. He – Davide Pittagora, tongue-tied, indecisive, and withdrawn – had managed to speak out; he heard singing, and the singing was not only the bloodlet from his skull but a wild chorus, giving voice to his joy.

  He’d declared his sisters his own, now, everyone would know they had to reckon with a champion. For that he’d fall and fall again till his last breath. This was the southern land where a woman was worm a dozen fights, no, more – twenty, fifty, a hundred – where the princess in the picture with her hands joined in prayer over the battle was worm her weight in gold, and where, when an indemnity was paid to the victim’s relations after a trial by combat, the price of a dead man was fixed at ten times less than the price of a dead woman. Rightly, Davide knew, for you can only measure a man’s value by his women, you can only appraise a country through its women. The queasiness in his stomach rose; he was plunged into a blood-pudding world where all was dim. Then there came through the total eclipse splinters of colour, humming as they came. He strained to see them, they were approaching in a heat haze, their shapes resolving themselves, tapering, dividing, until at last he recognised them. Their arms were intertwined as they swung lightly over the earth, and Caterina was dancing along alone beside them; their dresses flared transparent like the petals of sweet peas. Or was it their faces, opening like flowers with honey in their throats? Even the advancing tide of blackness could not blot the sweetness of their chorus, greeting him in full voice as he leant over the balcony, he was singing too, in unison with them, something strong and lyrical, and the doves were fluttering upwards into the dome in the last act – and he was going under, to be admitted to their company in paradise.

  It was only when I was seventeen, and beginning to understand a bit about sex and the madness of it, how it ambushes you and then hungers inside you, springing on you again just when you least want it, that I asked you, ‘Did his sister do anything? I mean, what was he fighting the duel about? Or was it just something people were saying?’

  ‘There’s no smoke without fires, I’m afraid,’ you said.

  I was looking at your family albums, and Caterina, with bubbly white curls, smiled back at me from a bar stool in her son’s home. Behind her there was a set of traffic lights, with the notice, ‘When the barman says Go, go!’ She was wearing a flowery drip-dry trouser suit with a stitched-down vertical crease – it looked like a seam in the snap – and a loose overshirt. Her arms were bare, fat and dimpled with age, as if her skin had been painted on and scumbled. Her smiling teeth weren’t her own, they were too even, and her feet stood swollen in orthopaedic sandals. Rudi had his arms around his mother; it was her seventieth birthday. They’d sent the photo to you as a Christmas card. A furrow between her brows looked inked in, permanently pleated. He was holding up his glass, and the traffic lights were switched on green.

  ‘Caterina was the one they say I take after,’ you said, putting on your reading glasses to examine the photograph. ‘But I don’t know. I don’t see it myself.’

  Caterina’s face in old age was jowlier than yours, and California had sun-dried her; her face was like one of those wedges of dried peach from a health-food shop, the central groove flattened. I repeated my question.

  ‘Probably. She probably had done something. But we n
ever inquired too closely. We never really thought to inquire. It wasn’t the point, what had or had not taken place. What mattered was what people were saying. Fare figura; honore. Reputation, appearances. Your father always used to say, Never wash your dirty linen in public. Well, that was true in Italy, only more so. Honour and reputation depend on what’s being said, spoken aloud; the duel put an end to all that. For heavensake’s, think if it hadn’t achieved at least that!’

  I thought of the Leader, his boasting, his lies; he organised silence and made a good show, too.

  ‘So that was the sister he fought for,’ I said.

  You added, taking off your glasses to look at me, ‘Caterina was the lovely one. So I suppose so.’

  You began turning the pages back. ‘I might be able to find a snapshot of Rosa. I think there is one here, from that trip I made, soon after your father died. She was dead then, but Lucia gave me a photo of them together for old times’ sake.’

  ‘But weren’t you angry with Caterina? Didn’t you reproach her for causing the duel?’ I asked, though I knew that the princess with her joined hands who watches while St George does battle remains blameless. It’s not her fault he wants her for his prey; though people forget that rather easily these days.

  ‘We never mentioned it, as far as I can remember. You see, we took it for granted. It was something that had happened, that had had to happen in that way. Papà couldn’t ignore the insult – and it couldn’t be made not to happen – but there was no point going over it and recriminating. Spilt milk, we have the same expression. Funnily enough, it was never discussed when Cati’s name came up – it wasn’t as if the business was on the tips of our tongues and we were biting the words back all the time, not like when you’re with someone who’s had a terrible drama, and they’re partly to blame, you know, someone whose wife has committed suicide or who killed her in a car crash when he was driving, and when you’re with them you natter about this and that, how dreadful the values of Dynasty are though you’re an addict just the same, and all the time, you’re thinking, “His wife took an overdose and he didn’t realise in time,” “He was driving that car and she was killed.”