The Italian Romance, page 26
Lil said, ‘I’ll just ... uh...’ and he nodded and returned to his scone. Her mother looked quickly around at her, and away again to the men.
She walked down the hall to her own room. It was a morning room; there was no flood of light falling through the window. She closed the door. She heard Vince laugh, and her father talk in a kind of roar over him.
She sat heavily on the mattress and felt the springs bounce. They squeaked. She picked up her white pillow and held it on her lap.
Lilian didn’t know how long she sat in there. She knew it was too long. The knock at the door was so tentative, she wasn’t sure if she’d heard it. She said, ‘Yes?’ The knock came again, one knuckle perhaps. She tried to raise her voice, though it seemed too curled within her. She said, ‘Yes, come in.’ He stood in the doorway, unsure of himself, or of her. ‘Are you coming?’ he said. He was angry, she was sure of that, but quietly.
She put the pillow on the bed. ‘Well, I ... I thought you’d want to see your mother alone. You know. Frankie and everything.’
‘Does that mean no?’ he said.
She stood up. The backs of her knees felt the cool metal of the bed. ‘Don’t you think it would be better?’ she said.
He stared at the white frame of the door. She waited. He nodded but as if to some conversation that did not include her. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Are you ever coming home?’
She took two steps towards him. ‘Oh, yes, I mean of course. I just decided to ... just wait till you’d seen your family, you know.’
‘And who are you, exactly?’ He stared at her now.
She was frightened of his eyes. Or not that. She was frightened that she couldn’t see his eyes. They had disappeared into a cave, his brow bone, the eye socket, the sharp jut of his cheekbone. She opened her mouth to speak, but as she looked at him, her throat hurt and would not allow it. She pulled her gaze from him to the floor.
‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘See you whenever.’
She said, ‘Bernie?’
He had been holding himself straight, his hand up against the edge of the door. He’d turned, about to walk away from her, then he stopped. His shoulder hid him.
She said, ‘Have you been sick?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, I’ve been sick,’ he said. ‘Sick of the whole damn thing.’
‘No, I mean your skin. You look sick.’
He relented, just a little. ‘It’s the tablets we had to take so we didn’t get malaria. Makes you yellow.’
He examined his boots for a moment. ‘Is that all?’ he said.
He heard her take a little, shuddering breath. He looked over at her. She rubbed her arm and she was watching her hand as it moved against her skin. She was trying to swallow.
He was so tired. ‘God,’ he whispered.
When finally she raised her eyes, he was gone.
Romanzo
Sonia walked behind the others. Her legs were wet. Ankle-high grass, a slap of a low-lying branch, damp leaves, and in the end it was will that hardened up inside her and made her put one foot in front of the other. And this was something new. Sonia was a woman who, till recently, had looked down at the floor, up at the ceiling, folded her arms over her chest, swallowed her pain in small doses. That was how it was in a world where, really, what had there been to complain about? Except a husband whose eyes glazed over when they fell on her? She surprised herself. She had been surprising herself quite a lot lately. This will had been there all the time, asleep, coiled.
Rain had been falling all morning. They’d been late setting out because of it. The old man wanted to give them his black umbrella and Jack had almost taken it for her, but she’d stopped him, politely refused it. The old man, who’d stood in his kitchen with it held out to her, lowered his arm. The wooden handle was as polished as a river stone, and the furls were overlapped in large, hypnotic generosity. He brought it up close to his heart. His hurt at the rebuttal struggled on his face with relief. Sonia had guessed that the umbrella was his wife’s pride. He’d probably never used it, never moved it from its peg on their bedroom door since the day she’d died.
But the rain had stopped. It was a fairytale wood. Light fell now. A sheer sheet of it spilled through a dripping treetop, widening behind the trunk till it covered the ground. Jack and Gianni had stepped through it. They’d brought the light to life; bright dust motes swirled in their wake, circled and floated. The two she loved the most.
She stopped her plodding, unsteady steps. The leaves all around her rained water, beat, beat, beat. A drip iced down her forehead. She stared at the two as they disappeared up the track and rounded the bend. The subtlest shift had happened, the crucial shift. This Englishman was sure in the way that only lost and found again sureness can be, the hurt passions of a passionate boy, the slow and bitter discarding of young men’s dreams, everything made new again in her. He overwhelmed her. And he, in an instant almost, though in truth the weeks had been whispering it to her, had become her heart. It was all gone now, the old world she’d once inhabited. Francesco, writing from his cold northern prison to someone else perhaps but not to her, the years of her useless need for him, gone, slipped off. Even her home, the yellow stone catching light, the quiet garden she’d looked over from her window day in, day out, all gone. And perhaps everyone she’d ever known spirited away. She also had been spirited, to some other universe, she and Jack and Gianni.
She moved again. Her socks were sopping, her leather shoes slipping under her. But she herself was shifting like light, everything in her on the move, alive and gossamer-like, and nothing solid to hold, to pull her known self back. What had happened, had happened. And Sonia sloughed off herself.
The slush of the soles of her shoes on the muddy path walked with her. She was almost alone in that patch of wood. She wasn’t afraid. As she came up to the bend, she listened for their low voices. There was a silence.
She turned, the hugeness of an oak blocking her view along the pathway. She looked down to step carefully over a swollen snake of root.
Her eyes looked up. Something had beaten in her heart. She was already on top of them, so close, so sudden she could not quite understand. How many? Five, seven, Schmeissers, handguns, and her two beloveds, Jack with his arm on Gianni’s shoulder, waiting for her. The boots of the Germans were caked with mud. They smelled of sweat and leather.
I’m not letting her out tonight. She can sulk and lie on her bed all she likes. If her punk friend wants to come up here and see her, he’s welcome. Welcome might not be quite the word. He’ll be tolerated, anyway. They can sit out on the terrace with the bats and I’ll relegate myself to the living room and stick my walkman’s into my ears. That’s enough romance for them.
I’m getting tetchy waiting for Francesca to ring. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe she said Monday. She’d hardly scoot back up the country without even a phone call. On the other hand, she might. Oh, well, I’ve been waiting fifty years. I suppose I can wait another day or two.
And now that bloody Irishman throwing a spanner in the works. It simply wouldn’t be possible. The invisible man, ten feet away all these years. No, I don’t believe in a coincidence that big. No. I’ve got enough people popping up miraculously in my life.
When the punk shows up, I’ll have a quiet word, as the Irishman suggested. Someone in that world will know who he was and where he came from. Anyway, whoever you were, Rodolfo, rest in peace. So near and yet so far, hey?
Speak of the devil. There’s the intercom. I’ll just put down the newspaper and check. It might be Francesca.
Needn’t bother. There’s the whirlwind I seem to have reaped, thundering through the lobby.
‘Hello, hello,’ she’s yelling. She can barely get her breath. ‘Cool! Yeah, come in.’
I see. It’s the devil. Ah, well.
The best thing to do is to barely notice. I open the newspaper and sink back into the cushions. She is hovering outside by the stairwell. There he is, crashing the concertina’d grill closed. Sounds like he’s running up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Ciao,’ he calls.
She says, ‘Ciao,’ her only word of Italian but perfectly at ease with what she has and what she hasn’t.
I detect a little moment of silence. How old did the Irishman say this guy is? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend at college or somewhere? I suppose it’s Jane’s foreignness, the blonde hair, the pale fragility and all that. Now they’re having a whispered conversation. She’s probably relating my witchery to him, my old dodderiness that seems to think she’s only a child or something.
They’re staggering inside. I glance to my side, casually, over the glasses perched on my nose. They are joined at the hip; all the better to devour me with, I suppose.
He’s not that tall. Pleasant enough, from the looks of him. He’s a bit sheepish in front of me. I think I terrified him the other night when I found them together in the square. He combs his fingers up through his hair. He looks about ten years old with his forehead bare to the world like that. The brown curls spring back, knowing their place. He says, ‘Buona sera, Signora.’
‘Hello there. You’ve come to visit Jane,’ I say. If that’s a command, let’s hope he hears it.
He clutches tighter at her waist. ‘Signora, tonight I am free from the work with homeless.’
He’s about to present his argument. So I, being too old and doddery to understand what’s going on, interrupt him with, ‘That’s lovely, Jane, isn’t it? So you can have a night in. Jane can show you the terrace. Make yourself at home.’
‘Thank you,’ he says. He looks at her. Her forehead wrinkles. She stares at him, a signal to try again.
I say, ‘Actually, Jane won’t be going out tonight, so it’s nice of you to come around. You could probably do with a quiet night yourself.’
‘Yes, Signora,’ he says. He’s defeated. He looks at her; she looks at him. She doesn’t look at me, I note. Finally she jerks her head towards the terrace door and they stagger off, arms diagonal across each other’s backs.
I want to laugh. I make do with a cough.
As they open the glass door, the noise of the traffic pours in. They close it behind them and it’s quiet again. I shake the folded newspaper to straighten up the corner which keeps nodding back, as if it’s too tired to be read. I peer at the article. The latest move in the Middle Eastern dance. I’ve read the first line six or seven times. The hieroglyphics still don’t form into any recognisable phrase for me. And I wait. I wait for the phone to ring. What is she doing now? Sitting on her bed in the hotel, staring at her telephone?
New South Wales, 1946
‘What must I do?’ Antonio’s eyes filmed and brimmed. He was not like a child, overwhelmed, out of control. He was like himself in this new world where no one’s will had consequence, where we all lifted and fell on a wave that may have been swelled at some specific time, or that perhaps had always been waiting for us.
She couldn’t bear to look at his eyes. He leaned on her desk as if he no longer had strength. She sat, facing him, and lowered her head. Nothing in her seemed to be working, her legs, her mouth. She was too young to recognise her fear, that she would be smashed against the rocks no matter what she did, what she did not do. It was she who was overwhelmed. She put her hand over his. It was clenched on the desk. She could clearly see the lines ringing the join between his thumb and finger. He was a tree, sun-beaten. Her fingers settled lightly on him. How she loved his hands.
‘Lilian, please,’ he said.
She did not look up. She said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Her lips were dry.
‘Lilian.’ Antonio withdrew his hand. Her own closed in on itself. ‘If you stay with him, you will never be alive. You will never write. It is not possible for you.’
She covered her face with her hands, and in there, privately, tears slid down her cheeks.
He said, ‘You want things to stay as they are. What, forever? I’m being transferred. I can’t stop that. And soon I’ll be on a ship, goodbye to Lilian, goodbye to our little romance. Is that what it was for you? Something to do while he was away?’
‘Oh, God, no. No.’ She dropped her hands. Her nose was running. ‘Of course it wasn’t, Nio, you know that. But look at him. How can I? How could I possibly...’
He stepped close to her. Her reddened, wet, distraught face had surprised him. He put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her in to his waist. ‘Ssh,’ he said.
She wrapped her arms around him. Her body began to shake as the weeping spasmed up from the pit of her stomach. He gripped her tighter.
And then he knelt down in front of her. He eased damp strands of hair from her cheeks, tucked them behind her ears. She wiped the back of her hand under her nose.
He said to her, ‘You’re everything I want. Everything. Every fantasy I’ve ever had, that’s you.’ He watched her face. Her eyes narrowed into almonds and crinkled at their ends. He loved her eyes, he loved them particularly when they did that. He smiled at her.
The backs of her fingers brushed his hard cheek and jaw. ‘You must have terrible fantasies,’ she said. She was laughing.
‘No! They’re wonderful. Truly.’ He leaned to her, and with the tenderness that he had never known before, he kissed the tip of her nose.
She put her hands on either side of his face. A deep quiet, only recently born, came up from her and out to him. She said, ‘I love you so much.’
He brought his forehead to hers. They rested into each other. She could feel his breath. She could feel the damp of his skin. She had been so tired, and now she felt at peace.
They pulled apart. He put his hand on the edge of the desk and eased himself to his feet. She looked across to the window onto the street.
He brushed at the knees of his trousers. ‘So,’ he said. ‘In one month. Vince should be able to get some men by then. And we’ll be sent to the coast.’
‘You don’t know where?’
He shook his head. ‘North, that’s all. And after that, who knows? We wait.’
‘And then Italy,’ she said.
‘Then Italia.’ He looked her straight in the eye.
She nodded.
He blew out a breath. ‘Till then, we pass by each other, good morning, Signora, good morning, sir, how are you? Good, good, oh that’s good.’
She snorted.
‘Very eloquent race,’ he said.
‘Oh, don’t start that,’ she said.
He raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘The eloquence of silence. Speaks louder than words.’
‘Sometimes it does.’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. And as we speak of words...’ He walked to the chair where he’d thrown his dark grey jacket. He pulled some lined paper from the inside pocket. ‘Here’s your story. I like it, very much. No plot.’
‘I know. I can never think of one.’ She reached out her hand. The sheets of paper assumed significance. Antonio saw it in her face. He tapped her on the head with them.
‘Your life blood,’ he said, and gave them to her.
She looked down at the opening paragraph, absorbed.
‘I received a letter,’ he said.
She looked up, her eyes wide. ‘From home?’
‘Si. Paulo, my friend from the university. He heard from someone that I’d been captured, from another that I was in Australia, and so on.’
‘Does he know anything?’
He looked away. A car glided by on the dusty road. ‘No. Nothing I didn’t know. He said he’d heard about my father dying, but ... someone else had written to me about it four years ago. I wrote to Paolo this morning. I’ve just posted it. He will make enquiries for me.’ He nodded to himself.
‘That’s good.’
‘Yes.’ He looked down at her. ‘So, my darling girl. I go. Rewrite the middle section. I marked it. It falls flat.’ He quickly glanced at the window, and then leaned over her. She raised her face. He kissed her lips.
He threw the jacket over his forearm as he walked to the door. She said, ‘Antonio.’
He turned his head.
‘I love you with all my heart.’
He smiled. His eyes filled again. He looked down at the door handle, turned it. He blew her a kiss on his fingers as he went out.
Romanzo
Sonia tried to calm her breathing. It washed in waves up through her chest, her throat. A soldier held the barrel of his rifle across her stomach.
Gianni turned his head to her. They were walked away, he and Jack, further up the dirt track. He was a hundred yards from her now. His huge, dark eyes seemed to glisten. They were so clear, his eyes. Jack gripped the boy’s shoulder; in his other hand, he still held Sonia’s small bag. Gianni was as high as Jack’s ear. Sonia saw Jack lean, whisper something. Gianni looked up at him.
She called, ‘Gianni.’ One of the Germans poked the butt of his submachine gun at the boy’s ribs. Sonia breathed in and stared at the guard beside her, as if to ask him to do something. He was not interested in her. He watched an officer who was speaking loudly into his wireless. Another soldier held the box up for him. The officer gripped the phone tight against his head, squinted, trying to hear. Sonia could hear the static, incomprehensible rumble of a voice from where she stood.
Another woman stood beside her. She was older, her whole thin body shaking. She was a Jew; Sonia knew it as soon as she saw her, and the woman in her turn had whitened when she recognised Sonia for what she was. Their eyes, huge and terrified, acknowledged the very unsubtle truth. The Germans knew what they were, too.
The woman’s husband, who swung a brown cardboard suitcase from his left hand, almost trotted up the path with a German soldier, the last of a string of men, young, Italian, partisans. The Jewish couple must have been with them.
Sonia fell against the woman’s shoulder when their guard turned his face to her and shouted, ‘Beeilung!’
