He had the beginning of his book—and the title of chapter one.
CHAPTER
8
He went up to the red room. This time, he did not meet the puppeteer, who must have found a refuge somewhere in the dark.
He lit more candles and then pulled the ‘ghost’ inside and draped her over the massive chest. In the light, it was clearer that most of the illusion was in the dress and a dead-white mask. A wood frame supported the dress; the arms were jointed constructions like the accordion racks that could be expanded or contracted to fit a space. The whole thing was ingenious and surprisingly well made. Denton thought of DiNapoli’s tale of the fake Fra Geraldo figures, the level of craftsmanship that the city harboured. Naples was a city of artisans, even when their art was dedicated to sham.
He slept for two hours and woke when first light made the room’s tall windows visible. The room, so striking in its red shabbiness by candlelight, now seemed merely dull, light was without colour. Empty plates and bottles stood everywhere. He wondered why he had woken, looked around him: the old woman stood in the doorway, her single candle a pale halo in the morning gloom.
‘Buon’ matino,’ Denton said. He stood, grinning. He pointed at the windows. ‘E matino.’
She stared at him. If she hated him, she had the expression for it. She hissed something. Denton picked the ghost up from the chest where he had laid her and held her up. ‘La mal’ombra.’ He shook the puppet and the head lolled forward. ‘La mal’ombra e finita.’ He knew finita. Always a useful word. He said it again. ‘Finita.’ He draped the puppet over the huge chest again. ‘E matino. Sono—’ He searched for the word for ‘here’. What was it? ‘Qui. Sono qui.’ He wanted to say ‘I’m still here’ but didn’t know the word for ‘still’. Nonetheless, she got the message. She sniffed, looked more full of hate than ever, and turned away. Denton shouted after her, ‘La porta! La porta, signora!’ The door, so the puppeteer could get out.
He found some bread among the wreck of the night, wanted coffee, found that the tall windows opened like doors and stepped gingerly to the shallow balcony outside.
The rain had stopped. The smell of air freshly washed struck him. He shivered because it was cold now, too; he pulled his jacket collar up. A bird was calling softly from above him somewhere; turning, he looked up and saw a ragged line of sticks and grass along the eaves of the house. A nest up there. He thought of a city of rooftops, whole lives lived up there. As if to confirm this idea, the first of the morning sun touched the roof of the tallest of the houses opposite, gilding it.
Turning again, he looked down. The balcony looked into a vast open space; directly below was a shallow garden the width of the house, now weeds ending in a stone wall. Beyond that were other gardens, several with arbours on which vines—grapes?—hung. Colours were indistinct, but he thought that the gardens here were given to vegetables and fruits, not flowers—a few trees, even, perhaps lemons but with no fruit this time of year. The open space was enclosed by buildings, the oldest ones once rather grand: pediments over windows, balconies of wrought iron or even stone, one doorway flanked by caryatids. The newer buildings were lighter coloured, rather pedestrian.
The old walls showed cracks and fallen-away stucco, the effect that of age and decay but not ruin; with the gardens, this was a living place. Rugs and clothing hung on balcony railings; lines had been strung between windows, even across the corners between buildings, to support laundry, most of them empty now because of the rain. A brown cat minced across the top of the garden wall, stopping to stare at him with yellow eyes and then sit and, after licking a paw once, begin to examine its anus.
He went back inside and found the card that the frog-like police inspector, Dottor Gianaculo, had given him. On a page torn from his notebook, he wrote, ‘Dottore, I have found in the cellar of a house twenty-two cases of whisky without customs stamps. Perhaps the police would like to seize it.’ He drew a crude map of the cellar and the hidden wine vault. He signed his name and folded the paper, wondering how best to get it to the questura: this time, he thought, he wanted the police on his side. If Gianaculo could find somebody to translate, of course. And if they could figure out his sketch. And if they’d bother.
He went out again and leaned on the balcony railing. The light was brighter now, more of the housetops turned golden by the sun, the brown cat now a blazing orange. Birds were chirping, some of them flying between the houses. A woman carrying a bucket came out of a house across the way and, seeing him, put a hand over her eyes and stared at him.
Life, he thought. Hundreds live here. All this life. Could he use this? Could he somehow pose the darkness, the deadness of this house, against all this life? Or was the story really one of visible life and hidden life, gardens and families and trees above, tunnels and hidden doors and garrotted men below? Or was it a story about a rapturous embrace of life that also included, even caused, a dark love of death?
He heard the familiar sound of a horse’s hooves and turned his head to the left, his forearms on the stone railing. He looked between two houses, one next to his own, one across a narrow cul-de-sac and at right angles to his own; he felt a start of recognition as he saw that the cul-de-sac had to be the one to which DiNapoli had brought the carriage before. As he watched, a carriage stopped across the little alley’s mouth and DiNapoli, after being woken by the driver, oozed out. Denton called to him, then ran down to the front door. It was unlocked, as he had demanded. The puppeteer had, he supposed, slipped away.
‘Where’s Mrs Striker?’
‘She’s there with the compare. She’s all right, no problem, they love her. I tell you, she made some swell impression. Like some queen, which she is, but I t’ought they was gonna kiss her feet.’
‘She’s safe? Really?’
‘O bufalo, he took a shine to her. She stands there like a queen, she says—I was translating—she says, “Honoured signore, I bring you your beloved grandson, who has been saved from vile assassins by the famous American, Signore Denton! He is pleased and honoured to return to you this offspring of your great family.” No kidding, she talks like that, I don’t have to fix it up or not’ing. What a lady!’
‘She’s been ill.’ Denton sounded to himself disapproving.
‘They take care of her. They love her, I’m telling you. We gotta go. Scuttini wants you should come out there. The sooner we go, the sooner she comes back.’
‘He threatened her?’
‘No, no, it’s just the way he is. You gotta be a little nice, listen to him make a speech, say t’ank you.’
Denton was feeling his lack of sleep and the blows he had taken. He had thought she would come back with DiNapoli, they would return to the pensione and sleep. ‘How far?’
‘Out beyond Porta Capuana. The capo’s farm. A couple miles.’
They set off, the driver grumbling but mollified by the money that Denton passed to him. They clopped through almost silent streets, the city barely waking. Denton made him go by the questura, where he sent DiNapoli in, despite his unwillingness, to leave the note for Gianaculo. At Porta Capuana, DiNapoli pointed ahead at the arch that had been the city gate in the medieval wall. ‘That’s the porta. When I was kid, you looked through it, you saw green. Every’t’ing green. Out there was all gardens, little farms, they grew everyt’ing green that peoples ate in Naples. Now, they build a new town out there.’ They passed through the gateway, the hoofbeats and the grinding of the wheels echoing from the stone walls. On the other side were industrial buildings and smokestacks.
‘Vasto,’ DiNapoli said. ‘They call it Vasto. Real ugly.’
‘How much farther?’
‘Little bit. The compare got a farm, it was like a big estate, one of the old families. They go broke, he buys it. Now he’s the patrone, it’s like he owns the peoples there. They come wit’ the land. He bought them like the cows.’
This sounded like some crazy bit of Italian history to Denton, something medieval or worse. He had seen slave
ry in America; he had fought in a war that had been supposed to end it. This was the twentieth century, after all—how could people be bought and sold in the land that Garibaldi and Mazzini had made free?
Men and women were already on the road beyond Vasto. They must have got up in the dark. The traffic was going into Naples—donkey carts loaded with vegetables; women with bundles or big baskets on their heads, green leaves poking out the ends; a few men wheeling barrows. Denton said, ‘What’s that stink?’
‘They put stuff from the sewers on the fields. It makes the vegetables grow.’ DiNapoli waved an arm at the people coming towards them. ‘They go to the Central Market to sell. Lot of them from Scuttini’s farm.’
They turned off the road between tall stone gateposts, connecting the posts a wrought-iron arch with a place for a central medallion that had been removed. DiNapoli smiled at it. ‘Coat of arms of the Milliciani. ‘They still got the title, Scuttini got the farm.’
The ‘farm’ was a vast landscape of small fields as far as Denton could see on three sides. It included a small village that had its own church and its own shop—owned, DiNapoli said, by the patrone. ‘No school?’ Denton said. DiNapoli laughed.
Tiny houses surrounded the single street. Other houses, no bigger, were dotted among the fields. Denton saw men working behind donkeys, women and children working with their hands to glean some root crop that had already been harvested. He thought he knew what he was looking at: tenant farming, the system that had replaced slavery in the American South. Perpetual indebtedness to the patrone, perpetual ignorance, perpetual bondage to a piece of land whose products belonged half to the master.
DiNapoli pointed ahead. ‘Palazzo Scuttini.’ He chuckled, then ducked his head as if Doro o bufalo had ears everywhere.
It looked like a cluster of institutional buildings, perhaps a hospital or a college. None was more than three storeys, but the principal one had an austere grandeur about it, less a palace than a fortress, with narrow windows and a look of turning inward. Behind it, other buildings—stone barns, granaries, dairies, stables—formed two large squares; above one, a bell tower stood like an overseer. Donkey carts were going through an arched entrance into one square; the other, towards which the carriage was headed, lay behind one of the fortress-like buildings and was partly filled with long tables where women were putting out food and big pitchers.
‘Breakfast,’ DiNapoli said. ‘First they work two hours, then they eat. Then really they go to work.’
As the carriage pulled into the open square, the women stopped to watch it. Some signal was given, and men came running from the other buildings and put themselves into ragged lines. Denton realised that he was looking at fifty or more people. The carriage stopped at a place the driver seemed to have had selected for him. Two of the men, dressed like the others in white collarless shirts, trousers with suspenders and soft caps, came to help Denton down. Shrugging them off, Denton stood in the carriage and looked around the square. All the men had their caps in their hands now. A door opened in the big building and two women came out, curtsying, and then came Janet, and then one of the largest men Denton had ever seen.
O bufalo. Doro Scuttini, the compare.
Denton thought that he should have been standing on the ground when the Camorra bigwig appeared, as a sign of respect—that was the plan, at any rate, as the two now anguished men standing by the carriage indicated. Denton jumped down and thanked them with a smile; they looked at the compare. DiNapoli scuttled behind. Scuttini waited at the edge of a low terrace that ran the length of the house, Janet a few feet from him. Denton allowed himself a long, frowning look at her: Was she all right? Was she a guest or a hostage? He went forward and stood below the man. Not removing his hat, he said, ‘I am Denton.’ Over Scuttini’s shoulder, Janet winked at him.
Scuttini was at least sixty and had an enormous belly, but he was one of those fat men who look as if they could pick up a horse or knock it down with a blow. To Denton’s surprise, he was dressed like his men—collarless shirt, trousers, a hat—and the size of his arms swelled the fabric of his sleeves. His face was severe, his eyes like stones, the face of a hundred Renaissance paintings of greedy, vulpine men, once the face of aristocrats that had now jumped to this boss from the bottom—or perhaps the face had come with the farm.
He came down the single step from the terrace to Denton and stood in front of him. He was inches shorter than Denton but probably weighed half again as much. His look was so severe that Denton wondered if he was going to lash out at him for beating up his grandson on the Via Toledo. They looked at each other, both men’s look appraising, sceptical, giving nothing. Then Scuttini moved close and grabbed both of Denton’s arms just above the elbow, his belly pressed against Denton’s flat gut; the embrace was almost overtly sexual, male organ to organ. Scuttini squeezed Denton’s upper arms and pushed his head forward on Denton’s right shoulder, then on the left. When his head went back again, actual tears shone in his eyes. ‘Grazie.’ His voice was husky. ‘Mille grazie.’ Without taking his eyes from Denton’s, he shouted, ‘DiNapoli!’
DiNapoli trotted forward and put himself next to the two men, his face turned up to the compare. Denton was impressed both by DiNapoli’s obedience and by Scuttini’s command of his name.
‘Signore Scuttini says you have saved the honour of his family,’ DiNapoli translated. ‘He says you have saved him grief and saved his daughter grief over her son. He says he owes you a life.’ DiNapoli looked pained, as if he feared getting a word wrong.
‘Tell Signor Scuttini that I’m happy to have been of service to him and to his family, and I am grateful for the hospitality he has shown to the lady who brought the boy here.’ He looked at Janet and she smiled.
Scuttini continued to hold on to Denton while he listened to the translation. Then he smiled, put his cheek against Denton’s again on each side, and then, still holding one of Denton’s arms, stepped back up on the terrace and led him to Janet. ‘Una donna dei mille! Dei millione!’ Scuttini took Janet’s arm with his free hand and, now between them, led them along the terrace to a table that had been set up overlooking the square below. Seating them one on each side of him, he began to explain what they were seeing—his vassals coming in to be fed—and what they would be eating themselves—the same food. He seemed proud of this. He was a man of the people, he said. It wasn’t like the old days.
There was no coffee. Denton had hoped for coffee.
Janet was the only woman sitting down. The rest, in long skirts and dark blouses, many bare headed but some in scarves and a few in broad straw hats, served the long tables. They came and went like ants from a kitchen somewhere at the far end of the house. The workmen were small and dark, many of them looking old. They wore their hats to eat.
Even at the compare’s table on the terrace, the men kept their hats on. Besides Denton and Scuttini, there were a dozen others, two of them introduced as Scuttini sons-in-law, the others perhaps cousins or allies. DiNapoli stood behind Scuttini’s chair at the compare’s command to translate for him. Mostly, it was not conversation but monosyllabic monologue.
The food was abundant, simple, strange: a kind of corn mush with a tomato sauce over it; a pie of a sort, of which a dozen appeared on the tables below them, bitter greens baked into layers of bread dough; baked root vegetables; abundant fresh bread; cheeses like millwheels, from which one of the women cut slices as thick as books; apples, now a little wrinkled because their season was past. It was all from the estate, they were told; the harsh red wine was their own, the previous year’s; they didn’t play around with vintages or fancy grapes.
The Scuttinis, Denton saw, had taken over the aristocracy’s lands without taking over its manners: the men around him, including the compare, ate as if an enemy threatened to take the food away—an arm hooked around the plate, the head low so that the trip from plate to mouth would be as short as possible. Little was said: eating was serious business. Denton picked at the food, trying a bi
t of everything put before him. Bending his head, he looked past Scuttini at Janet, who raised her eyebrows at him. She looked exhausted but radiant, as if she had triumphed over herself to be there. He winked at her.
A bell rang, sonorous and carrying. The compare pushed his chair back and stood, his great belly pressed against the table edge. Below them, there was a surge as if the earth had erupted, pushing the little men ahead of it. Some were still chewing, some cramming food into their mouths, many grabbing bread and cheese and putting it in their trouser pockets. They converged in a line from the tables and hurried past the Scuttinis, each removing his hat as he passed and keeping it in his hand until he had turned down past the tables and headed across the square to a carriage-wide archway at the back. The fields lay beyond.
The women removed the last dishes from the tables, then dismantled the tables themselves and carried them away. Some of the women were very handsome, but only a few looked really young. The old ones, Denton guessed, were not in fact very old.
When their own table had been cleared, coffee at last appeared. The other men bolted theirs and then, in another version of the parade past the compare, walked behind them, hat against heart, each bowing awkwardly to Janet, murmuring a word (what word?) to Scuttini, and muttering some form of thanks to Denton before hurrying away.
‘Is it like this every morning?’ Denton said.
Scuttini stared at him while DiNapoli translated.
‘No. This was for you and the great lady.’
‘I was born on a farm. It was like this only at harvest time, when we helped each other and everybody ate together.’
‘At harvest, we do this, too. This was the harvest of my grandson’s life.’
Scuttini pushed his chair back so he could talk to both of them. He looked at Janet; the scarred left side of her face was towards him. Scuttini drew his forefinger down the side of his own face and looked at her. She said, ‘Coltello.’ Knife. She pointed at Denton and made a gun of her fingers. ‘Lui—’ She jerked her hand and made sound like a gunshot.
The Haunted Martyr Page 12