The Italian Romance, page 21
‘You wouldn’t want to miss the train.’ There is clearly something of immense interest in that cupboard. She is still in it.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
I have just been dismissed. Well, well.
New South Wales, 1944
‘Are you all right, love?’ Arthur said. He was a man who rarely struck a minor chord, even more rarely asked a serious question. Lilian didn’t know why that was so, although she was clearly and foolishly aware that Mr Scanlan did know why. The hidden life of men.
And so she furrowed her brow, and her eye muscles worried like a scolded dog’s, and poor Arthur, upon whose countenance this painfully questioning gaze fell, was inclined to stick his hat on his head and attend immediately to his duties in the bar across the road. Lilian saw his panic, and read it as genuine concern. She looked down at her notebook, which lay open on a busy, scribbled page and said, ‘Yeah.’
Arthur had been unbuttoning his ink-stained overall. His finger nagged at the third button. He was unsure of the etiquette in such a scene. Was he to throw his overall at the hat stand and say, ‘That’s good, love’, and leave her to it? In his moment of hesitation, the girl spoke some more.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. She rubbed her fingers across the page as if she were trying to erase something. He watched it slide back and forwards. And he had absolutely no idea if her problem was in the notebook or had a more universal character.
His unoccupied hand scratched at his scalp. There were only a few remaining strands of hair hovering over the dome of his head, though he had the grey outline of a monk’s tonsure at the back. He said the only thing he could say. ‘Why don’t we go across the road?’
She gazed at him. He thought she looked about seven years old. ‘I’ll take you into the ladies’ lounge,’ he said. ‘Buy you a shandy.’
‘I don’t like it,’ she said.
‘Well, a lemonade then.’
And she nodded like a child who was overtired from a storm of tears. He nearly put his arm around her.
Arthur sat in the leather booth with his hands on his knees, his back straight. Lilian, on the adjoining bench, kept her handbag on her lap. They were silenced with mutual embarrassment. When Gracie Moran lifted the counter flap and walked into the tiny, otherwise empty lounge, Arthur was visibly grateful. ‘Oh, Gracie,’ he said as he leaned against the padded backrest. ‘Here you are.’
‘What are you doin’ out here, Art?’ Gracie said. She looked at the girl but not with surprise, for surprise wasn’t part of the job. ‘Mrs Malone,’ she said.
Lilian smiled and murmured a few words which were meant to be, ‘How do you do, Mrs Moran?’
‘Oh, well, we had a hard day today, didn’t we, Lil?’ he said. ‘Give us a schooner will you, love, and a glass of shandy for Lil here.’
‘Rightio,’ Gracie said and she was gone, the counter bounced down, before Art could stand and shout into the deserted passage to the bar, ‘No shandy, love. Gracie?’ He limped back to the booth and sat down. ‘Sorry, love. Went right out of my mind.’
‘Don’t worry, Arthur. I’ll try it. I only had it once. Maybe I’ll like it this time.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t drink it if you don’t like the taste of it.’
She watched the counter. He flexed his fingers on his knees. Gracie appeared, a tin tray balanced on her taut hand as she lifted the flap. ‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘Get this into you.’ She smiled at Arthur as she put his cold beer down on the table. The glass was sweating. Lilian stared at the woman’s hair, very blonde, smooth, rolled into a sausage curl above her forehead. She seemed old to the girl. Lilian thought Gracie Moran was brave. She didn’t know why she thought that, exactly. She liked Gracie. She often wanted to speak to her on the street or in a shop, but she could never think of very much to say. Grace, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have much time for her. She didn’t understand that, either, exactly.
Grace handed her the glass of beer and lemonade and Lilian smiled and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Moran.’
Grace gripped the tray tight between her fingers and put her fist on her hips. ‘Any word of your husband, Mrs Malone?’ she said.
‘Not for a few weeks, but he was all right before.’ Lilian put the glass down in front of her. She looked at Arthur, who was looking at her. She tried to think of something she could say.
Grace spoke instead. ‘Oh, well, no news is good news.’
‘Yes, I suppose,’ Lilian said.
Grace looked at the floor, and then, as the conversation appeared to have run out of steam, she said, ‘Give me a shout,’ and disappeared again.
Lilian covered her face with her hands. She said, as quietly as she could, ‘I keep almost asking her how Peter is. I always do that.’
‘Never mind, love.’
‘Oh, poor Mrs Moran.’
Arthur picked up his beer and took the first slurp. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Mum says it was very hard on her, losing her only child.’ Lilian drew her finger down the glass, a trail through the mist of condensation. ‘It’s funny, because I’ve seen her talking to lots of the Italian prisoners. I mean, they’re not really prisoners any more.’
‘She’s been through the crucible, Grace has.’
Lilian worried her brow again. ‘Has she?’
‘Even before Pete was killed. She doesn’t hold it against those blokes.’
‘She hasn’t got a husband, has she.’ Lilian said, more a statement than a question.
Arthur’s eyes were on her as he held the glass almost horizontal. His Adam’s apple gurgled up and down. ‘No,’ he said when he’d finished. He put the glass on the table and wiped his mouth. ‘It’s bloody life that’s been crook to Gracie Moran, not the Italians.’
‘She always looks happy, though,’ Lilian said. ‘I mean, kind of happy, you know.’
‘Yeah, I know. Well,’ Arthur sighed. ‘She gets through day by day, love. That’s how she does it.’
‘I like her,’ Lilian said.
‘Do you?’ Arthur seemed just a little surprised.
‘Yeah! I always liked her. I think she’s interesting.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and he nodded to himself. He folded his arms, stretched out his legs under the table. ‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘See how you like it.’
‘Do you think you can love two people?’ Lilian said. The swill of her third shandy rocked in the bottom of the glass.
Arthur was holding his lighter up to a cigarette. Both hands were involved in the activity, and his eyes crossed as the flame ignited. He drew in. He snapped the lighter shut, withdrew the rolled cigarette, put back his head and exhaled a long stream of smoke. His eyes regained their focus as the stream drifted away from him. He said, ‘I don’t know, love.’
‘I don’t think you can,’ she said.
He leaned over and pulled the tin ashtray, which Gracie had only a minute before emptied into a bucket, towards him. ‘Well, you got that sorted out, anyway,’ he said.
‘Nobody knows what Bernie means to me,’ she said.
Art felt the deep pleasure of another draw.
‘I’d go up and get myself shot instead of him, only they won’t let girls be soldiers.’
‘Well, you could be a nurse,’ he said.
‘Yeah. I could. My friend Bunny is training as a nurse, so she can go. After Bill the Coot was killed. She wants to meet an American.’ She looked into her glass. ‘I really wanted to be a war correspondent. I had a lot to learn first, but Mr Scanlan said he’d teach me everything he knows. He says I’m not quite ready yet.’
‘Yeah, well you should listen to him. He’s trained up a lot of good reporters.’
‘I know, but I’ll just get ready and the war will be over.’
‘That’d be a shame,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I mean no.’ She laughed. ‘Sorry, I mean no it wouldn’t be a same. A shame I mean, sorry. Then Bernie would come home, and everyone else.’
‘Mmm,’ he said.
‘And then the Italians would go home to Italy.’
Arthur tapped his cigarette against the side of the ashtray. The glowing red worm of ash faded to grey almost immediately.
‘Do you think they will?’ she said.
‘The Italians? Why? Do you think they might stay?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mmm,’ he said.
He watched the girl drain her glass.
She said, when she’d finished it, ‘You know when you’ve got a big house, and all the foundations are under it, and if someone puts their hand in,’ and she reached her fingers out, ‘like this and took the most important brick out, everything would just fall down. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Sure.’
She pushed her glass away and played with the ring of moisture left behind. ‘Something’s eating me,’ she said.
‘I can see that.’
‘What do you think I should do? I know what my mother’d say. And Bunny, prob’ly, too.’
‘Well,’ he said. He leaned his head back so that he could examine the smoke-dark ceiling. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with women? They’ve got an answer for you; for every damn thing, they know the answer. Sometimes a person has just got to stumble along.’
‘And will that make you happy?’ she said.
‘Happy? You didn’t mention that. I don’t know what makes you happy, Lil.’
‘Me either.’
He turned towards her, his crown resting against the wall. ‘I tell you what, Lil.’ He reached out for his drink. ‘Let’s drink to your happiness. Whatever that is, and wherever it may be.’ He leaned towards her and held out his glass.
She picked up her empty glass, and clinked it too hard against Art’s. ‘Thanks very much,’ she said as a tear slid slowly as a snail down beside her nose.
Romanzo
Sonia heard the approaching thunder, and knew what it meant. Fear made her throat sore. Gianni walked in front of her. She had been watching him, noticing that his trousers skimmed the top of his ungartered socks. The socks slunk around his ankles. As he stepped forward, even the skin of his bony leg showed itself. She thought three things: that he was growing away from his boy-childhood, striding with quicker and quicker steps into the future she had dreamed for him for thirteen years, and secondly that he was not a boy protected by plenty these days, that he was a boy with darned socks, pants too short, hair gone wild without a barber’s shears. And lastly she thought with how much passion she loved him. She could kiss the bony boy-ankle, the gorgeous ring of bare skin which showed under the frayed hem of those pants.
In the moment before the thunder, she knew that everything about him, the downy moustache above his lip, the new swell of his back and shoulders, the round, moon-like grin his mouth had delighted her with from the first day she had ever held him, were a cause of her heart’s own beating. In a lightning moment such as this she felt these things as a cause of her heart’s implosion and, in the seconds after, its pulsing outwards again with such force and such a physical feat that the world lost its confining power over her. And joy in him, overwhelming desire to hold him safe, was huger than the sky.
The thunder shook the street. She froze. She looked towards the bend of the road, and she said, her voice low and full of sharp authority, ‘Gianni.’ He turned, the intense and absent entrancement dropped bit by bit from his face, and came slowly to her. ‘In here,’ she said. He realised, then, and looked over his shoulder. ‘Now,’ she said.
She stared through the glass pane of the shop’s door. Signore Mazzoni, who had ventured to his customers’ side of the counter, stared back at her. Her hand was on the doorknob. He was about to mouth something to her, was that it?
‘Mama,’ Gianni cried.
She turned the handle as the outriders swerved around the bend. She took his shoulder and pushed him inside. Her breath was short.
There were five people in there, the Mazzonis, three customers. They were silent. Their eyes, dark, watched the woman and the boy as they hurtled through the doorway. Signore Mazzoni, the only man among them, the strings of his white apron wound around and around his waist, walked up to them. Sonia’s neck was stiff; her head leaned back as he came slowly upon her. He put his hand on her arm. She was cold, waiting.
And he said, ‘Quick, Signora. Go to the back of the shop,’ and he stepped right past her, past her son, and yanked down on the dark roller blind, lowered it and, as it kicked against him and threatened to rush headlong back to its safer enwrapment, he tugged, cursed at it, wouldn’t let it go till it behaved and lay still against the nakedness of the glass.
Sonia walked very slowly, drained of all momentum. She took hold of the boy’s cardigan and pulled him along. Her face was white, her eyebrows too dark in the pallor. The four women, together near the back doorway, were in a tight semicircle, elbow on elbow. She looked at them as if they were one, one pair of eyes, shrewd, narrowed, one audible breath, one stout, intransigent body. The mouth seemed to say, ‘Ebraica’. Jew.
‘There are hundreds of them,’ the boy had said.
‘Ebbene,’ Signora Mazzoni had said, ‘well then.’ She looked down the aisle, past Sonia’s head. She said, ‘We should go out to the kitchen, if there are hundreds of them. It will take a long time.’
Sonia’s heart began to pump again. A sweat broke through the fine skin of her forehead. ‘Are they going to stop?’ she said. She spoke to the Signora, whose eyes immediately went to her husband.
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘Wait.’
Sonia put her hands up to her ears. The street shook. For the first time in her conscious life, Sonia felt that her bladder might break open. Like an animal. She leant in to the Signora and murmured a shamed request. The woman whispered, ‘Through the door, out there’, and pushed at the younger woman’s arm. Gianni followed her. The Signora was about to hold him back, but thought better of it.
Sonia was aware of Gianni tumbling through the kitchen behind her, and she was glad. She said over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be a minute,’ and opened the back door on to a stone-floored courtyard, where crates were stacked with surprising neatness and order against a high wall. She pushed open the half-door.
The smell of her own urine rose up, a cloud of sourness, as her bladder gushed its fear.
Gianni heard his mother’s stream. He saw her feet and her ankles and the calves of her legs, and he saw the edges of her pink
knickers down below her knees. He turned to face the other way.
When she came out, and walked with a measured, almost sure pace across the stone, her high heels strutting, he turned again. She pulled her handkerchief from the sleeve of her black cardigan and used it to wipe at her forehead.
‘Are you all right, Mama?’ he said. His voice sounded strange in that enclosed place, where they were alone.
She nodded. She could not speak. She gestured him to go in.
The kitchen, too, was neat. A pot gurgled on the stove, a stained wooden spoon rested on a small plate beside it. The white tiles on the walls gleamed like glass. She twisted the brass handle of the tap, to trickle cold water over her hands. She turned them over. The water was too cold, stung her skin. She wanted to put her face into it. Her hands began to redden.
‘Signora?’ she heard. She looked towards the shop doorway. Signora Mazzoni was there.
She turned the handle quickly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Gianni had been standing by the table, staring at his mother’s bent back. ‘Let’s see what they’re doing, Mama,’ he said.
‘Don’t go out!’ she said, too loud.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t.’
She wiped her hands at her skirt, ineffectively. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘My husband says he doesn’t think they are stopping. They have gone through the square.’ The young da Fogliano woman’s eyes were staring at her, wide as a cow’s. Signora Mazzoni had never had much time for the Jewish Signora, as she was known in the village and thereabouts. She was an aloof young woman. Men said she had ice in her veins. Elsa Mazzoni knew what that meant, knew what lusts men hinted at to each other, what foolish conceits swam around in their heads. And yet she herself felt that that good-looking husband of hers, a man of noble Italian blood, had not been rewarded by this strange fish, had not had his fill from her. And though the Mazzonis were no great match, either, it was different for the young Signore. His vitality deserved more than this one could give him.
And here was the Jewish Madonna peeing outside her kitchen door. Well, we all learn a thing or two in our lives, and this one was no exception. As la Signora stood with her back to the sink, she could barely meet Elsa’s eyes, and this gave a certain satisfaction.
The boy was like his father. He’d been a pretty child, and now he promised a fine manhood. Elsa Mazzoni had noticed the shoulders sprouting on him, and when he’d pushed past her to follow the mother out the back, she’d reckoned he was already a good two inches taller than her.
The Jewish woman was gazing over Elsa’s shoulder. Elsa turned quickly. Her husband was behind her. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said.
‘Can I see?’ Gianni said and he narrowed himself sideways and slipped past the shopkeeper. Sonia shouted, ‘No, Gianni. Don’t open the door!’
‘I won’t,’ he shouted back.
Sonia smiled apologetically at the couple.
Signore Mazzoni said, ‘They have no interest in any of us, Signora.’
She closed her eyes. She heard the man say, ‘Elsa, a little grappa.’
‘What?’ the woman said. ‘For goodness sake, Paolo.’
‘A tiny glass, please Elsa. For the Signora.’
Sonia forced her eyelids open. ‘No, thank you, Signore. There’s no need. But thank you. You’re so kind.’
And she meant it. His kindness almost made her cry.
The young woman seemed to stumble. She raised a handkerchief to her eye. The man looked at Elsa. You see! He jerked his head, urging her to go to the distraught thing. Elsa was caught out, a little ashamed of herself, even a little sorry for the woman. Somehow her husband’s approbation had made her remember: news was spreading of Jews being taken by the Germans. Nobody knew why. Elsa suddenly realised why the woman had been scared enough to empty her bladder. It hadn’t crossed her mind.
