The Italian Romance, page 23
‘Jack! How can you say you don’t matter?’
‘Because I don’t.’ He smiled at her and shrugged. ‘If I ever did, it was a long time ago.’
‘You’re younger than me.’
‘My age isn’t the point. I want one thing now – for you to be safe. I’ll do anything for that, you know.’
She eased her hand away. ‘You don’t know me at all, Jack. You know nothing about me. I’m not what you think.’
‘I want to know you, Sonia.’
‘Ssh,’ she said. She looked up the staircase. ‘I’ll go and dry myself.’
‘Come down quickly,’ he said. ‘I think ... I think something has happened.’
She froze. ‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘I may have gotten it wrong. Alphonso will tell you.’
She moved as if to walk past him. He said, ‘No, go up and change. There’s time enough.’ He touched the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘You’re wringing wet.’
‘I won’t be a minute.’ She pulled free of him and ran up the stairs.
He looked away from her, towards the front door. The brief respite was over.
When she came into the kitchen, Gianni and Berta were gone. She could hear their voices in the cellar. Alphonso closed the cellar door. ‘A telephone call came while you were out.’
‘Who?’ Her heart beat quicker.
‘It was Maria, the little ragazza at your parents’ house.’ Alphonso limped to the table. He sat down hard. ‘I said, calm down, child, calm down. What has happened? Why are you ringing?’
Jack leaned against the back door. He crossed his arms. He could understand only a few words. But he knew.
Sonia said quietly, ‘What is it? Father?’
Alphonso opened his large hand and looked into it. ‘No. Not that.’ He spoke in a low voice. ‘The Germans came. They took away your mother. And Jacob’s wife and children.’
Sonia’s head drained of blood. She got to the table and Jack sat her down on a chair, held his hand wide against her back.
‘Where?’ she said. She could barely speak.
‘Maria didn’t know. They weren’t the only ones. There were three trucks outside, she said.’
‘Jews, you mean,’ she said.
He looked into her eyes. And after a moment, he nodded.
She said, ‘Why are they doing this?’
He made a fist of his hand and beat it three times against his chest. ‘Hate,’ he said.
I’ve lost the damn kid. Nine-thirty at night, and where the hell is she? I could wring that bloody Jim’s neck. Why doesn’t he look after his own daughter; expecting me to do it. Probably been dodging his responsibilities all his life. No wonder Francesca doesn’t see a future for them. Got more sense than her mother has. I didn’t spot that in him. Bloody well spot it now.
I’ll have to go out after her. That’s all I can do. Guido can let her in if she turns up. Little rat.
She slept for twelve hours when she arrived. Parked herself in my spare room, zipped open her bag, tossed the lot out over the floor, and crawled into bed. She ought to have her adenoids out. I’ll say that to Jim. Snored like an elephant all bloody day, while I was trying to write. I had to sit outside on the roof terrace. The damn breeze changed the page every time I leaned back to think or got up to have a glass of water.
And then she’s up all night, curled in an armchair watching satellite TV and that rotten music thing they have. The bloody Barnardis rushed up, of course, banging on the door to complain. Or he did, emissary of la Signora. I had to get out of bed – no wonder I’m so bloody tired. He peered over my shoulder and saw her. The girl was too wrapped in the video clip to pay the slightest attention. And I just knew from him that I’d made his day, or month. They’ll be like gadflies, loud doorknocking, discussions with the other neighbours, downstairs with Guido haemorrhaging his ulcer for him.
I’d better put the mobile phone in my shoulder bag, though who I’m going to ring I don’t know. Why on earth did I let her go out on her own in the first place?
Guido is now standing sentry outside the apartment building, while I am on the island waiting for the tram. He volunteered his cousin, the vice-squad lieutenant. I told him we’d just wait and see before we disturbed him. And I’m almost a hundred per cent certain that I’ve left the terrace doors open. The invisible man can make himself at home, I couldn’t care less, as long as he leaves before I put the key in the lock.
Here is the tram, turning the corner down at the railway station. I’ve got a booklet of biglietti in my bag here somewhere. In the zipper compartment, maybe.
I nod to the woman driver, who stares at me. I’d nearly forgotten about the bruises. There are only a handful of people on board. I sit near the front, my hand a shield up on the glass so I can see out. Pointless, really.
The little minx asked me where the shops were. I told her she was to stay this side of the river, and she promised she would. And she did call me from a public booth at about five. She’s not a bad kid. I asked her to describe where she was, and I recognised it. She said she’d met a couple of other kids and they were going to have coffee, was that all right and did Dad call?
If she’s not in the square, I really don’t know what I’ll do. I suppose I’ll have to go to the police. The driver brakes at the stop near the supermarket. She’s watching me in the mirror above her head.
I’m always a little wary at this time of night. Well, Sunday afternoons, too. It’s not wariness, really. There’s an air of desertion about. Sometimes I feel that I’m the only living soul knocking around here; the footpaths on either side of the Viale are almost abandoned. I feel like a rubber ball in a squash court, and whoever it was that started the ball bouncing promptly forgot about it, turned off the lights, locked the doors and went home.
Nio said to me once, you turn a corner in Rome and your breath is taken away; an ivy-covered wall, perhaps, a small fountain hidden behind a tree.
I turn here. How many, many times we walked this way, arm in arm. Where medieval saints walked in sandaled feet. He said Francis of Assisi coaxed a lamb, rope around his woolly neck, up along this stretch, knocked on his lady friend’s door and said, ‘Look what I brought you!’ Maybe she loved him enough to love the lamb, too, as it trotted past her, down her marble hallway, dropping a trail of hard, black, sugar-stenched pellets.
The people are here. I never feel as lonely in this rabbit warren, all roadlets leading to the square. There’s the yellow phone she rang me from. I can hear Lorenzo’s voice, up the side road, singing to the tourists eating out. I hope he gets a few bob tonight. He’s the tiniest bit off-key; must have been on a bender for a few days. The tourists probably don’t notice.
Oh, no, not Lorenzo. Alfredo. Alfredo Cabrini. That’s a dose of senility for you. Lorenzo was never off-key. He was not always at his best, and that was because of the benders he’d go on. He’d disappear for a few days, then come back ashamed; you could hear it. His tourists probably didn’t notice, either, too entranced by the moon above their table, the warmth of the evening air, the candlelight; they’d live their lives recounting the night they were serenaded in Rome. Nio said to me once that Lorenzo was an angel, only he didn’t know it. He told me the story that night, how Lorenzo had dreamed dreams, tried for the big opera houses. Didn’t make it. So he gave it all to the streets. I cried. We were walking along just here, twenty-five, thirty years ago. I was embarrassed by myself, and I turned my face away from him. He couldn’t believe it. What’s happened, love, he asked me? I didn’t know how to say what it was, the poor desperation of it, the transfiguration of it. Or was it Nio himself, his eye, his soul? It was one of those nights, I suppose, when I was raw, skin peeled back. Or maybe I was menopausal, I can’t remember.
I’d pictured her slinking around the fountain, but she ain’t here. A pack of Germans, all right, taking photos of one another looking laidback and devil-may-care.
A Filipino woman, or is she Vietnamese, makes a beeline for me. Her tray of goods is attached to her by a leather strap roped around her neck. She thinks I’m a tourist. ‘Lady,’ she says, ‘please buy.’ She has the oddest assortment of things. Plastic brushes, battery-run drum-beating monkeys, packs of cigarettes, oriental fans. What is she doing here? She’s no more than twenty-five. Very pretty little thing, embarrassed as hell. If the embarrassment is a ploy, it’s one that works. I’ve got a five-thousand-lire note in my pocket – the brush is four thousand nine hundred. If I’d had to open my bag, I wouldn’t have bothered. ‘I’ll take the brush,’ I say. And, damn me, she’s pulling a hundred-lire note out of her money box. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say and I walk off, putting the useless-looking brush in its plastic bag in my pocket. But she won’t have it. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Please take. Change.’ She’s at my elbow. She has a tiny silver cross at her throat. The note is in her hand, held out to me.
I put my finger and thumb on each side of it. My God, her eyes are sad. ‘Thanks,’ I say. That has satisfied her. And like a little black rabbit she scurries away, her tray bouncing, leaving me with the note hanging from my fingers. I wonder if she has any children waiting for her at home. Now, that’s enough of that. Can’t bear her burdens.
The outdoor restaurants in the square are packed. I’ll have to give her time to spot me, too. I saunter past. They never seem to change, these people. Behind their barricades, their stripy plastic frontiers, the same luminous conceit of particular young males, the certainty of their present and future conquest of the world and their voluble persuasion towards this certainty of the others at their table, the girls fresh enough to be convinced, less extraordinary fellows trying desperately to bask in the radiance. Near them, isolated couples casting themselves in roles of humiliation, glumly silenced because they can’t attain the same exuberance and, I fear, giving birth between them to the worm of their own, quite possibly avoidable, decay. And then, too, the lovers, who don’t know there’s much going on at all apart from their own heartbeats. Year after year, decades.
If she’s up one of the roads off here, I’m sunk. I’ll just circle, and then decide what to do. The church side of the square is in relative darkness, high-walled. There are figures over there. I suppose I might as well see.
I think that might be her. Hard to tell. They’re sitting on the ground as far away from light as you can get in this electric place. Two of them. The girl’s chattering away, waving her hands. Oh, yes. That’s our Jane.
She is open-mouthed. She tries to get to her feet, scrambling against the stone wall at her back. ‘Am I late?’ she says.
‘Yes. Very,’ I say.
I am overcome, suddenly. This little thing, full of her own drama, is nothing but a pale shadow to me. The softest corn-silk hair, the body so terribly slim, and the waist – naked to the world, jeans down around her hips – is so small I can’t imagine how everything fits inside her. But she could be a reflection of the fountain’s water, glistening and forever disappearing across the ochre wall behind her. I don’t think I can do this. My heart is broken. How did that happen?
New South Wales, 1944
Lilian unwrapped the brown-paper parcel. She had pulled at the string’s bow and, unusual for her, it fell cleanly apart. The paper was folded into triangles at each side. She was excited.
The parcel had been on her desk when she came in, her name written in pencil on the front, as if it were an envelope. The linotype machine was chattering in the room behind; Arthur was sitting at it, reading off copy paper as his fingers flew.
Her fingers delicately lifted the two folds apart. An exercise book. He had written his name on the cover. Her fingers drifted to it, tracing the roundness of the vowels, the depth of the consonants. She already loved the sound of it, how her mouth moved around with it; she longed to say his name out loud to someone, to him best of all, to hear his reality issue from her own self.
She took hold of the cardboard cover and with utmost tenderness opened it up. What struck her first was the handwriting itself, so different from her own. Perfect, almost. Slanted to the right. It was so measured that she didn’t immediately notice he’d written in both languages. He’d begun in Italian. The second paragraph, half a page, was in English. She held up the leaf between her palms and looked over to the next page, ran her eye down it, and the one facing. Why had he done that?
She got up quietly and looked in at Arthur. His back was to her as he sat typing. She closed the door, carefully. She returned to her desk and pulled at the brown paper, folded the sheet over, folded it again, opened her drawer and tucked it inside. She stood staring down at the clear flow of the handwriting as she wound the string around her webbed fingers. She dropped that in to the drawer, too, and closed it.
Lilian put one knee on her chair, and sat herself down on it.
The dead lived in that desert. And heaven was so near, for once in our lives so close we could almost touch it. The ache of it, to see heaven through the infinite mist of dust, a few feet above our heads. Our eyes wept. We picked grains of sand from our lashes. If tears ran the eye clean, one would look straight ahead, praying the dead gone this time. But they moved, slow as shadows.
Herr Hitler tells us that the dead live as fruits of his philosophy. Beautiful myth that can carry such a weight of bones. All the poppies of Flanders unfurl once more. Such a red resurrection.
Here they are, Herr Hitler. Flailing in this desert storm, pulling their limbs from the earth. Words are snatched with the wind. We hear only the rush at our ears.
I am to hold my rifle at my shoulder, to aim a bullet at a standing corpse I see in the distance, add in the veer to the right, the wind factor. Because if I do not perform this act of will, I might fail to see all this beauty which exists for me only in struggle. I might reduce to such cowardice that my dynamism leaks from me. Signore Mussolini, this individual might then climb the one tree skeleton which passes for life in this place, might climb above the dust storm into its bony arms, and might see that there is sunlight, see peaks of ridges, and know beyond any fable of yours that there is water, too, vast, limitless stretches, that it laps against the edges of this continent, laps the edges of my own Italy, too. This individual might not care for heroism any longer.
Yet this man pulls his finger against the trigger, fires, and another man falls. The other did not hear the sing of the bullet as it arrowed destiny to him. Like me, he heard nothing but the chaos of the wind. And that is it, for him. Gone now.
‘He dropped it in just after I got here. I saw him sitting in Malone’s truck earlier, waiting.’
Lilian put her arms over the open book, hiding it. Arthur had given her a shock. She’d jumped. She turned her head to where he was standing in the doorway.
‘Want a cup of tea?’ he said, limping across the room to the press. He bent down and opened the cupboard door.
‘Please,’ she replied.
‘What, did he send you a story or something?’ He reached in to the shelf for the cups, the precious sugar.
‘His time in the desert,’ she said.
‘That’ll be interesting. From the other side. Don’t know if it’s a good time for it, that’s the only thing.’
‘No, it’s not for the paper. He’s a writer in Italy. A kind of journalist, I think.’
‘I see.’ Arthur slammed the cupboard door. ‘You’ve got a lot in common.’
‘Well, except for continents and things like that.’
‘Minor point,’ Arthur said. He caught her eye, and she looked down. ‘Is he married, Lil?’
‘Yes. Unhappily.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He shook the kettle. Water rattled around in it.
‘It might be true,’ she said.
‘Often is.’ He struck a match, lit up the gas on the ring.
‘But it’s irrelevant to me,’ she said. ‘Because I’m not.’
‘Ah.’ He leaned at his waist to view the flame. He blew and the licks jumped from jet to jet, till the circle was alive with it. ‘Is it any good?’
‘Yeah. Sad.’ She uncovered the pages, sat back in her chair. ‘It’s different from how we write, you know.’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Well, there’s more words or something. I don’t know, it’s just different. Like we say, here’s a table.’ She knocked her knuckles against the wood. ‘And they might say how the table reminds them of something else. You know, like that.’
‘Uh-huh. Will I just give you one sugar? We’re running low.’
‘Yeah, I’m getting used to it now.’
‘You get used to everything,’ Arthur said.
She closed the cover of the book. ‘Arthur?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Do you think the war is changing everything?’
‘I suppose it is. It’s a funny old world.’
‘That’s what Dad says. It’s a funny old world.’
‘Hard to know what else to say.’ He folded his arms, leaned against the cupboard. They listened to the faint whisper from the water as it began to heat.
‘It must be terrible if you’ve done something really bad,’ Lilian said.
After a long while, Arthur said, ‘Oh, he said he’d be in tomorrow. Probably wants to pick up his book.’
She knew that her lips were smiling, though she was trying to appear indifferent. She rasped her nails back and forwards on the cardboard cover, and they listened to that for a while, too.
Romanzo
‘That’s too much,’ Jack said. ‘Believe me, you won’t be able to carry it all.’
Sonia felt foolish. He looked at her face, so like a scolded child’s. He touched her dark hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Of course you’re right. We are not going on a holiday.’ She shook her head as she gazed down at the luggage. ‘No. Just the small bag. And a few things must come out of Gianni’s.’
They were alone in the front hallway. Her son’s laughter drifted up to them from the kitchen. ‘He doesn’t understand,’ she said.
