by Francis King
The Rocchigianis had let out two rooms near the top of their house to a German woman, one of the many destitutes of that nation, who attempt to scrabble an existence in a city where they are now no longer wanted. Fräulein Kohler, who had been manageress of the defunct Pensione Germania, took in needlework, gave occasional lessons in German, and offered herself as a guide to bewildered Swiss tourists. With her was a girl, of obvious Italian features, whom she always called her ‘‘niece’’. The niece was nineteen, but being both epileptic and slightly simple, did no work except sewing, and never left the house except in her ‘‘aunt’s’’ company. She could have been a beautiful girl, with her large, vaguely melancholy eyes, her soft hair and skin, and her clear features, but for the fit which as a child had caused her to fall on to a stove and shrivel one half of her face. She had always frightened Enzo, particularly when in the darkness of night he would be woken, on a sudden, by her shrill, unearthly screams; so that meeting her on the stairs, he would always hurry past with no more than a glance and a quick ‘‘Buon giorno’’. But Giorgio had long since decided that she was, in his own crude phrase, ‘‘ a lovely bitch’’.
Fräulein Kohler, whether through an intense possessiveness, or through fear of what other accidents might befall, always locked the door on her niece when she went out; and the niece herself, Bella she was called, never seemed to rebel or even fret against this strictness, appearing content to sit for hour after hour at an open window, sometimes sewing but more often merely gazing out into the Borgo. If Giorgio or some other of the local boys whistled up to her, she would look down but make no other response. When her ‘‘aunt’’, a big, red-haired woman about whom everything seemed aggressively competent except a pair of small, strangely frightened green eyes, talked to Bella, the girl would answer her in a soft voice without any trace of German accent, usually in monosyllables; she would rarely talk to anyone else. But sometimes, when the two women sat out together with the Rocchigianis on a hot evening, Bella, who appeared to be paying no attention to the conversation, would all at once let out a strange, high-pitched, whinnying laugh at a remark which no one else had thought funny. Only on such occasions, and during her fits, would there be a stir in the dreamy immobility in which her whole life was passed.
Giorgio was explaining how he had found a key that would open the door of the bedroom in which the two women slept, sharing a double-bed, which was covered after the German fashion in a balloon-top scarlet eiderdown. That evening, he continued, Bella had told him that her mother would be acting as cloakroom attendant at a dance at Fiesole and it was unlikely that she would return until the early hours of the morning. ‘‘ So it’s money for jam,’’ he said. ‘‘As soon as Mum and Dad have turned in, I can open the cage.’’ He chuckled, and then noticed that Enzo was staring at him, his face dripping with water and a rag-like towel in his hands. ‘‘What’s the matter?’’
‘‘Nothing.’’
‘‘You prig!’’
Enzo shrugged his shoulders.
‘‘You don’t think I should do it?’’
‘‘I didn’t say that.’’
‘‘But you think it. You do, don’t you?’’
‘‘Well—yes.’’
‘‘My God!’’ Enzo admired his brother for many things which he assumed that he himself did not do because he lacked the courage, and this contemptuous exclamation at once made him wince. Like most younger brothers, he very much wanted Giorgio’s good opinion.
‘‘If it were an ordinary girl,’’ he tried to explain, ‘‘it would be different. But you know she isn’t all there. Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s doing.’’
Twisting the tongs in the flame of the stove, Giorgio laughed: ‘‘She knows what she’s doing all right. You can take that from me. And she likes it!’’
‘‘Then perhaps that makes it worse. Perhaps she loves you.’’
‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’’ said Giorgio coolly. He looked round for a piece of paper on which to test the tongs and stooped to the floor. He whistled. ‘‘What’s this?’’ The wad he had picked up was Enzo’s three thousand lire.
‘‘They’re mine. They must have fallen out of my shirt when I was undressing.’’
‘‘Where did you get them?’’
‘‘I was given them.’’
‘‘Oh, yes?’’ Giorgio still held the three notes in one hand, while with the other he grasped the curling-tongs. ‘‘ You were given them,’’ he mocked. ‘‘And by whom?’’
The inquisition continued, as the older boy avenged himself on the younger for the disapproval which had somehow blunted the edge of his night’s adventure. When he had learnt all the facts, he looked out of the window and, seeing his father, slouched in a chair with his pipe, while his mother still sewed, called down: ‘‘Hi, there! Enzo’s come home with three thousand lire. He was trying to keep it dark, the little miser.’’
‘‘What! Where’d he get it?’’ came back the thick, slurred voice of their father. ‘‘What? … That’s all very fine, but he lives here for nothing, does no work, hasn’t done any for two years. The rent’s overdue, he knows that.’’
Enzo had all along guessed this would happen if he showed them the money and now, cursing himself for his carelessness, he determined not to give in. His father shouted up, he shouted down; Giorgio intruded his cool, sharp comments. His mother pleaded—the money was Enzo’s, had been given him for the doctor, and should be used for that purpose. Rubbish, exclaimed Signor Rocchigiani. There was nothing wrong with the boy—except idleness. He could play football, couldn’t he? Well, couldn’t he? The once quiet Borgo echoed with their recriminations, heads appeared at windows, a woman’s voice shouted to them to shut up and Signor Rocchigiani shouted to her to do something obscene in return; until, after many minutes, Enzo saw the three notes fluttering slowly down from his brother’s smooth, beautifully manicured fingers into his father’s grasp. ‘‘ No, Luigi,’’ his mother once again protested: but the notes were thrust into the purse sewn inside Signor Rocchigiani’s greasy belt.
‘‘Thank you,’’ Enzo said bitterly to his brother.
‘‘It wasn’t my fault. He told me to chuck the money to him.’’
‘‘You didn’t have to do what he told you.’’
‘‘That’s fine, coming from you. You’re always telling me I should have more respect for Mum and Dad.’’ But being naturally good-hearted, in so far as selfishness, vanity and weakness allowed him to be, Giorgio now felt guilty. ‘‘ I’m sorry, Enzo,’’ he said. His brother had stretched himself out on the bed where they both slept together, and Giorgio went and sat beside him, putting out a hand to ruffle the younger boy’s hair.
‘‘Oh, have it your own way, then,’’ Giorgio said. He picked up the tongs which had cooled during the argument and once again twisted them in the flame.
A girl’s voice was fluting plaintively: ‘‘Mummy! Mummy! What was all the noise about? We can’t sleep’’; and their mother could be heard answering: ‘‘It’s nothing, dear. Go back to bed. Back to bed.’’ Giorgio was singing to himself as, standing astride before a blotched mahogany-framed mirror, he crisped his hair; but from time to time his whole body was shaken with a cough and he would yet again lean out and spit into the darkness.
When, an hour later, the house was still and Giorgio had slipped out on his outrageous errand, Enzo still lay naked on the crumpled coverlet, his arms crossed behind his head and his eyes staring at the ceiling. He hated them, he hated them all. The money was his, Giorgio and his father had stolen it from him. They didn’t care if his back got worse and worse until he became a cripple. He couldn’t help it if he couldn’t get work. There were thirty-eight thousand unemployed in Florence alone, it was so unjust. So unjust, unjust. And his father had never done a stroke of work for as long as he could remember. Selling guidebooks in the Signoria, that wasn’t work, and he didn’t even do that now. Drinking and smoking and playing cards, and talking politics, politics, pol
itics, while his mother worked herself to the bone. Oh, but she was so weak with him, always had been, had only herself to blame. If only he could get away! Why not to England, or to America? There a chap had a chance. That’s all he wanted, just a chance. Or Tunis. Rodolfo had spoken to him so often about Tunis. One walked through the orange groves and picked oranges, just put up one’s hand.… But the French had turned them all out, they weren’t wanted there, they were wanted nowhere. He was wanted nowhere. Nowhere. Wanted nowhere.… He turned over and lay with his hot cheek against the cold pillow; sweat trickled down between his shoulder-blades while, one hand, hanging over the edge of the bed, rapped on the floorboards. At this moment Giorgio was lying in her arms, here, just here, beneath his fingers. Again he rapped. Oh, it was horrible. He thought back to his first and only visit to the ‘‘casino”, and how afterwards he had pretended to Rodolfo that he had enjoyed it. But of course Giorgio was right. Bella was beautiful. Sitting at the open window, her sewing in her lap, while she gazed down. Such fine wrists and the soft shadows under her cheek-bones, soft shadows between her breasts when she wore that silk dress and leant forward to pick up a reel of cotton.… Feeling an increasing pressure in his loins, he turned over once more on to his back, and stared at the ceiling.…
‘‘Mother! What are you doing?’’
‘‘Sh!’’
Her hair now in pig-tails, she slipped through the door, a small saucepan clutched in one hand; she did not turn on the light.
‘‘Is the back bad? I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. Dad should have let you have the money. But you do understand, don’t you? He’s so terribly worried just at present. And it came so conveniently—the rent being due and all,’’ she explained.
‘‘Oh, I’d forgotten about it,’’ he lied. ‘‘But it’s hot. I can’t sleep.’’
‘‘Where’s Giorgio?’’ she asked, suddenly realizing that what she had taken to be the shadow of his sleeping form was only the bolster which Enzo had pushed from beneath his head.
‘‘He couldn’t sleep either, so he went out for a stroll.’’
‘‘I warmed this oil to rub your back. Turn over.’’
‘‘Oh, there’s really no need. It’s not hurting. You’re tired, Mummy. Go back to bed.’’ Enzo could remember how ten, even five years ago, his mother had still been beautiful; but the worries and privations of the war, combined with child-birth and long hours spent underground in the steam and darkness of the laundry, had already spoiled her. At thirty-six, her hair was turning grey; her skin was blotched and sallow, the pores distended; round her neck there were four or five deep wrinkles as if a length of twine had been tightly twisted about it.
‘‘I’m not tired. Turn over, dear.’’ Coming from Siena, she spoke without any of the disagreeably hard and guttural ch’s of her husband and her children.
Enzo at last turned over, and she sat down beside him. Dipping her hands into the saucepan of warm oil, she began to work at the boy’s glistening body with a persistent rhythm that made him think of lying out on the beach at Viareggio, while the waves broke and receded over him, one after another, causing him to glow and tingle from his head to his feet.… Now, glancing at her as he lay with his head turned sideways, he saw that she was working with her eyes closed, as if in sleep, and that her arms, so strangely white against his brown body, were much thinner and frailer than he had ever imagined them to be. And yet she was so strong. As she bent close above him the crucifix which she wore slipped out of her nightdress and rested for a moment icily against his spine. Now her fingers seemed to be gently erasing his anger and bitterness as if they were things written in pencil, there, on his back; and it was her own spirit, not oil, that she seemed to be rubbing into him, rubbing with a rhythmic, unwearying persistence as her love persisted unwearingly, in spite of the disappointments and fatigues of the day. Enzo was at last utterly relaxed.
‘‘I wonder when Giorgio will return,’’ she murmured.
As she said the words an epileptic scream flashed like a dividing sword through the night’s reposing darkness.
Doors opened, feet thudded down stairs; voices were raised, one of the girls began crying, ‘‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’’ over and over again, and then Giorgio could be heard explaining coolly: ‘‘ I heard the sound just as I was passing the door on my way in. I tried all my keys and this one fitted.… A bit of luck, a real bit of luck.’’
Chapter Four
‘‘YOU’RE later than usual,’’ Karen said to her mother who had only just arrived at the breakfast-table.
‘‘No, not later. Earlier. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up at half-past six and went for a walk. Now I’m hungry.’’ She turned round to click her fingers for the waiter. ‘‘ He’s half asleep—always is in the morning.’’
‘‘What was it like out?’’ Max asked, without any interest, since the mail had brought him a heap of business letters to keep him absorbed.
‘‘Oh, cool.’’
‘‘He’s not really listening,’’ Karen put in.
‘‘I know. That’s why I answered in only two syllables.’’
Beside the Arno Mrs. Bennett had found the once-dusty vegetation glistening with a heavy dew that wet her bare ankles and made her plimsolls squelch. She had walked into the sun which had at first appeared as no more than the tip of an opaque pink finger-nail through the mist on the hills; but as it rose higher and drank up the mist, her eyes began to ache from having to look at it and her skin to prick and itch with its slowly increasing warmth. All at once she felt tired and decided to sit down. The ground was still damp, but recently she had ceased to worry about such things, and finding a small, humped mound, she lowered herself on to it and stared at the water. How dirty it was, she thought: where it slapped the wrinkled mud there was a fringe of scum in which bobbed cigarette-ends, paper, and the other human filth of the city. Yet those two boys who had helped to make this filth—who daily bathed in it and sunbathed beside it—had been clean, so miraculously clean. And at the thought, she once more gave herself up—as she was always now giving herself up—to the recollection of their sleeping beauty on the dim, high bed.
She stirred from this reverie to notice some sunflowers growing behind her; and since they were larger than any she had seen in England, the vast orange petals curling outward to the warmth of the morning, she tottered up to pick one, not realizing, because there was no fence, that they were grown there for their seed. While her hand struggled with the stiff, prickly stem, twisting it from side to side without its once yielding, someone sneezed from the undergrowth at her feet and, to her astonishment, a voice asked: ‘‘Che fa?’’
‘‘Am I not supposed to pick it?’’ she answered in English.
Like some aged Caliban a man lumbered up out of the grasses and approached her, dragging a tattered army blanket in his left hand and carrying some boots in his right. His clothes, with their innumerable joins and patches, had the appearance of having once been sewn on to him and then never removed, in spite of an increase in his girth which threatened to explode them as the swelling seed explodes its pod. A grey lather of hair frothed from his head over his chin, the nape of his neck and the space where his shirt lay open. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, mended at one side with a piece of rag and cracked horizontally across both lenses. His mouth had fallen in about two long, decaying eye-teeth, the bridge of his nose had collapsed. Again he sneezed, and a thin thread of spittle glittered in the sunlight on his beard. ‘‘Ing-leesh,’’ he suddenly said, in a voice which wheezed and scraped as if some old engine had been started up after many years of idleness.
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘You-want-the-flower?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Un momentino. A moment, please.’’ He sat down on the mound where she herself had been seated and began to tug his boots (they made her think of the early Charlie Chaplin) on to his blackened, sore-covered feet. Then, without doing up the laces, he went over to the sunflower and be
gan to wrestle with it, his breath coming painfully in long, shuddering sobs, as if it were some creature he were trying to behead. ‘‘ Difficile, difficile,’’ he muttered.
‘‘Oh, don’t bother, please don’t bother.’’
‘‘No, no.…’’ He swayed grotesquely from side to side, and the whole plant now swayed with him; then he tugged, tugged, tugged. ‘‘Ecco! … Please, lady.’’ With a strange little bow, almost as if he were parodying the manners of a dead generation, he held the bruised, battered head out towards her, the nails on his upturned hand curling round over each finger as if they were claws. Now a strong smell of turpentine from the bruised petals was mingling with the sweet-sour, almost intolerable odour from his mouldering body.
‘‘Thank you.’’
Suddenly, looking into his face and finding nothing uncovered by hair except the collapsed nose and mouth and a pair of blue, blood-shot eyes, whose red, sagging rims were smeared with what looked like golden eye-ointment, she felt an overmastering horror. ‘‘Thank you,’’ she repeated. She twisted the stem of the flower into the belt of her dress, and turned to hurry away.
But he was hobbling after her, gesticulating, talking Italian, tripping from time to time over the laces he had never done up, then all at once shouting, running as she ran, clawing at her arm.… She knew that at any moment she would fall, collapse, be left wholly to his mercy, and wondered whether to shout for help; until through the stream of Italian she heard, as if she were at last striking some solid object through water, the words ‘‘Tip … tip … tip’’; and then, in an enraged, tearful reiteration, ‘‘Hungry … hungry … hungry.’’ Turning her back to him in case he should try to snatch her bag, she pulled out the first note that came to her hand, unfortunately a thousand lire, and threw it to the morning breeze so that he had to grovel after it as it fluttered over the mud.… She did not wait to hear his thanks.