by Francis King
‘‘Bella,’’ Fräulein Kohler was saying in the voice used by nannies who have decided to be ‘‘sensible’’ with their charges, ‘‘you don’t want to waste all that good food, do you? You don’t want to be hungry tonight? And think of Giorgio who spent hours shooting the birds for us—and of Signora Rocchigiani who cooked them.… Lebe Gott! What is the matter with the girl?’’
Two tears had welled out of Bella’s fine dark eyes and were followed by others which came more and more rapidly. Her face remained impassive as if this grief, like her epilepsy, were some divine visitation beyond her control. Without shame or attempt at concealment, she accepted these tears; and that very acceptance had the effect of intensifying the mood of nervous dread which Enzo was suffering.
‘‘Bella, do stop snivelling.’’
With a sudden shudder and a grimace, Bella turned her head aside as if purposely to reveal the red, corrugated scar, its texture that of a coarse piece of horse-meat, which disfigured her so terribly. She said something inarticulate (Enzo heard: ‘‘I can’t … let me go … don’t …’’) and then in a noisy paroxysm of tears she rushed from the room.
Fräulein Kohler sighed: ‘‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the girl. These last few days she’s been even worse than ever. It’s so worrying. And tonight I have to go out and leave her alone again. Ah, well, we all have our crosses to bear.’’ Signora Rocchigiani had been waiting to serve Fräulein Kohler with a second helping and as soon as the German woman realized this, she held out her plate: ‘‘Only a few, dear,’’ she said. ‘‘I might as well finish up what that stupid child has left.’’
After dinner Fräulein Kohler locked Bella in their room and set off for Fiesole; and soon after the Rocchigiani family, with the exception of Enzo, went to an open-air cinema.
‘‘Come, Enzo,’’ his mother said to him as they waited for Signor Rocchigiani who had retired to the lavatory after his meal.
‘‘You know I can’t come, Mother. I haven’t any money.’’ She looked in her purse. ‘‘I’ve nothing either.… Giorgio?’’
‘‘No use asking me, Mother. My pension isn’t due until next Friday.’’ Giorgio drew deeply on his stump of cigar and then began coughing.
‘‘Why do you smoke that shit?’’ Signor Rocchigiani demanded, doing up his braces as he appeared. ‘‘No wonder you can’t stop coughing.’’
Giorgio did not answer.
‘‘I wish you could come, Enzo,’’ Signora Rocchigiani said, looking with her painfully protruding eyes in the direction of her husband.
‘‘Oh, I’ve told you, Mother,’’ Enzo began impatiently.
‘‘It would have been so nice, all the family together. We don’t often all go out like this.’’ She looked back at her two sallow, lanky girls who stood silent behind her, and then said mechanically: ‘‘Wipe your mouth, dear.’’ They were children who had, prematurely, something of their mother’s air of suffering, and this set them, as it set her, apart from the menfolk. They spoke little and were always playing quiet, adult games or reading comic papers.
‘‘Let the boy earn some money and then we can think of nice family parties.’’ Signor Rocchigiani raised his hand as if he were going to yawn, but it was a belch he delivered. ‘‘Let’s go,’’ he said thickly.
‘‘Couldn’t we—wouldn’t we perhaps lend—?’’ Signora Rocchigiani began, but she was cowed into silence by a massive:
‘‘No, damn you, no!’’
Giorgio stamped out his cigar under his shoe, and smiled at his brother, while the others went on: ‘‘Tough luck,’’ he said; and he put his hands in his pockets and followed them whistling.
Enzo lay on his bed for a while attempting to read a copy of Picture Post which Colin had given him. He was trying to learn English but, unlike Rodolfo, who picked up phrases with the same facility that he picked up belongings, the Florentine made little progress. He ran a slow finger under a line and then scrabbled the pages of a dictionary, which had also once been Colin’s. Physically, he felt sated after a meal of such unaccustomed grandeur, but spiritually he was experiencing a complete sense of emptiness. When he had worked for Lady Newton, though he had often to do unpleasant and even degrading things, he had felt that he ‘‘ belonged’‘; he had his place in the world and in his own family. Each week he had surrendered the major part of his wages for his father to drink; and though he had resented this, it had bought him his rights. Those rights no longer existed. Once again he was loose, like a vessel so worthless that no one goes out to retrieve it; and until he again bound himself, he knew that he would suffer from this perpetual sense of unreality and waste.
But with Colin he sometimes escaped this feeling and that was odd, for the English boy puzzled the Florentine as much as if he belonged to a totally different species. Enzo did not even know if he liked Colin, and the kindnesses he performed for the English boy seemed sometimes to be performed out of a compulsive sense of duty rather than as acts of friendship. Perhaps, after all, he felt happy when he was with Colin because he guessed that the English boy needed him; though how great was that need Enzo must never have realized. If he had analysed their relationship (which, of course, he never did) Enzo would have discovered that it was at once more, and less, than a mere matter of liking or disliking. They ‘‘belonged”; the English boy needed him, if only to help him to hobble on his crutches, and he, more subtly, needed the English boy to give him the assurance he existed in a world where his apparent uselessness had made him doubt that fact. Colin was the first person to whose happiness he had been a vital necessity; and being that, Enzo had recovered a long-lost belief in his own powers.
Now he decided to go and see his English friends, and having plastered his hair with water, and splashed more water over his face and his arms, he took up the Picture Post and the dictionary and went out to the landing.
From above a voice shouted: ‘‘Chi è? Enzo?’’; and the face of the upstairs tenant, a small, vitally garrulous woman with neat features and grey hair, was looking down at him.
‘‘Yes, it’s me,’’ he said. ‘‘What are you doing?’’ He ran up the stairs two and three at a time, and found that at this already late hour she was scrubbing the encrusted tiles before her front door. Those she had not already washed were grey with dirt, but the others glowed red, as if inflamed into that colour by her ceaseless friction.
‘‘I want it all to look nice for the wedding.’’ The next morning her only daughter was going to be married at Santa Croce church and for weeks past she had been working at her preparations. ‘‘See, I’ve polished the knocker. It looks a treat, as if it were gold. I can’t tell you how long it took me. And inside I’ve got a whole heap of flowers my brother-in-law brought me from Antella.’’
They talked for a few minutes more, though no doubt she would have liked to go on talking for the rest of the evening, and then Enzo left her, once again hearing, as he jumped down the stairs, the hiss and scrape of her brush on the tiles and the ring of her bucket. But when he passed Bella’s door he heard another sound too. The girl was making an inhuman kind of moaning, one low, prolonged cry following rhythmically on another, like the keening of women at a funeral. A chill came over him, as he stood by the door, irresolutely wondering whether he should call out and ask her what was the matter. Probably nothing, he decided, for he had long since decided that there was no logic in anything she did. But it was eerie, and he felt that he wanted to run far, far away. ‘‘Bella!’’ he called. ‘‘I say, Bella!’’ No answer came.
He shrugged his shoulders, turned back once as if to make another attempt, and then ran on.
He picked up Rodolfo by the Uffizi, where he was slouching in the hope of cadging a cigarette or a meal from some foreigner, and together they made their way to the Palazzo d’Oro. They found the children in, playing cards in one of the lounges, while Maisie played patience separately on a small table. She threw each of the Italians a cigarette out of her tortoise-shell case and then,
peeling off a piece of cigarette-paper which had stuck to her lower lip, asked Enzo: ‘‘Any luck with a job?’’
‘‘None.’’
‘‘I wish I could think of something.’’ She rested her spidery, heavily ringed fingers on the edge of the table, the skin round the thumb-nails gnawed and chewed from nervousness, and at last said: ‘‘ Haven’t you any ideas?’’
‘‘Plenty,’’ Rodolfo grinned, with the kind of pertness he knew that she liked.
‘‘Such as?’’
‘‘If we could go to Tunisia,’’ he said, thinking of the idea for the first time. ‘‘We could run away together and begin a new life. But it needs money—plenty of money,’’ and he rubbed the finger and thumb of his right hand together.
‘‘I thought your family was turned out of Tunisia,’’ Pamela interrupted. ‘‘I thought Italians weren’t allowed to work there any more. I thought that was what you said.’’
Rodolfo grinned, making a weaving movement with his left hand: ‘‘Everything is possible,’’ he declared enigmatically.
‘‘You mean you could go back?’’ Colin asked.
‘‘If we had the money.’’ Rodolfo used his little finger to flick the ash off his cigarette into the glass bowl which stood at Maisie’s elbow, and then peering over her shoulder at the patience said: ‘‘Everything can be arranged.’’
‘‘His breath is something terrible,’’ Maisie said in English; but she was enjoying the proximity.
‘‘How much money?’’ Colin pursued.
‘‘A hundred—a hundred and fifty—thousand.’’ Rodolfo was about to pick up one of the cards and place it somewhere else, but was stopped by Maisie who gave his hand a slap as she exclaimed: ‘‘Leave it alone, boy. I want to do it myself.’’
‘‘For the two of you?’’ Colin said, with a tense kind of persistence.
‘‘For the two.’’
Later Mrs. Bennett joined them, leading Nicko by one hand and carrying one of his fairy-stories in the other. ‘‘Read, Granny,’’ he said; but she sighed, ‘‘No, dear, I’m really far too tired,’’ and sinking on to a sofa in the shade of a distant corner, she at once closed her eyes and appeared to fall asleep. But there was no relaxation in either her face or her body. She slept like a soldier waiting for an attack. A nerve throbbed incessantly in one of her eyelids and every line seemed to be drawn taut, almost to breaking-point. Her chin was tilted upwards, her hands were clasped tight; and her whole body, erect on the sofa, gave the impression of a monumental straining forward, as if life were struggling in a vast piece of statuary.
Most of her days had seemed to be passed in this kind of strained sleep; she read little, ate little, and spoke only under a weary compulsion.
Pamela had begun to read to Nicko, and Enzo, like a child, had seated himself by the boy to listen to the story. He must have understood little, but he followed every expression on the face of the English girl, and when Nicko laughed he, too, joined in.
Colin got up and went across to his grandmother. ‘‘Granny!’’ he said. But the only answer was a long, hissing whistle from Mrs. Bennett’s half-open mouth. ‘‘ Granny!’’ he repeated louder.
Without any apparent transition from one state to another, Mrs. Bennett was all at once awake. ‘‘What is it?’’ she asked.
‘‘Granny, you know I have some money on trust?’’ He had heard about this money, though he did not know what ‘‘on trust’’ meant or how much it was. ‘‘You know that, don’t you?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Well—well, would I be allowed to use it?’’
‘‘Use it? What for?’’ she asked without any apparent surprise.
‘‘For something, something private. Something important,’’ he added.
‘‘But if it’s on trust until you’re twenty-one, you’re not allowed to touch it.’’
‘‘Not allowed? But I thought—it is my money, isn’t it?’’
‘‘Yes, it’s your money, but you can’t use it until you’re twenty-one.’’
‘‘Oh.’’
‘‘Not unless your father lets you.’’
‘‘He has to say yes?’’
‘‘I suppose so, as he made over the money. But I don’t really know.’’
‘‘I’d better ask him.’’
‘‘Yes, that would be best.’’
Still without curiosity as to why the boy should want the money, Mrs. Bennett again closed her eyes and slipped back into unconsciousness; and the long, hissing whistle, like a kettle on the boil, started once more.
When Max came into the room many minutes later, he exclaimed, ‘‘Nicko, you should be in bed! What are you doing here? It’s very nearly ten.’’
Nicko did not answer; he tugged at the thick pile of the carpet on which he was seated and kept his eyes still fixed on Pamela’s face.
Mrs. Bennett said in a drowsy voice, without opening her eyes: ‘‘He obviously wasn’t going to sleep, so I thought I’d let him up. After all the Italian children go to bed at all hours, and look none the worse for it.’’
‘‘But he needs sleep,’’ Max said. ‘‘ Otherwise he gets whiney and overtired.’’
Mrs. Bennett rose: ‘‘ Come along, Nicko.’’
Nicko did nothing.
‘‘Nicko!’’
‘‘Did you hear what Granny said, Nicko?’’ Max asked in a slow, loud voice. ‘‘ Nicko!’’
Nicko did not answer, but continued to tug at the carpet.
‘‘Nicko, I don’t want to speak again. Do as Granny says.’’ Max’s face was slowly darkening.
When Nicko still made no response, Max suddenly strode across the room, put his arms round him and dragged him to his feet. ‘‘No, no, no!’’ the child screamed, and Mrs. Bennett said: ‘‘Put him down, Max!’’
‘‘He must learn his lesson.’’
As he was half-carried, half-dragged to the door, the child put out arms and legs to anchor himself to each person or object that they passed. He clutched Maisie, kicked at a table, and at the last, lunging for a vase containing some vast white and red peonies, brought the whole thing in a crash and tinkle to the floor. Water streamed outwards; and half-insane with fear at what had happened, the child gulped, was momentarily silent, and then emitted a long, piercing wail.
‘‘That’s enough,’’ Max said. When roused, his temper was terrible. ‘‘I’ve just about had enough.’’ He threw the child over the arm of the sofa, and holding him down with one hand, began savagely to beat him with the other. Nicko was silent; and it was only this silence that, in the end, made Max stop, fearing he had struck the child senseless. Pamela was pulling at her father: ‘‘No, Daddy! Daddy! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”, the tears streaming down her cheeks. Rodolfo and Maisie both watched from the patience-table with an air of alert interest. Colin was pale.
‘‘Come, Nicko.’’ Mrs. Bennett picked up the child, who began to sob as soon as he felt her, and carried him from the room. Max went across to the french windows, opened them and stood looking out. His loins and back ached, as if in a fever; he was covered in a chill sweat.
‘‘Why did you?’’ Pamela asked, going across to him. ‘‘What was the point? It won’t make him any better. You know that it won’t.’’
‘‘Oh, shut up!’’ Max said thickly; and turning from the window, he strode from the room.
‘‘I wanted to ask him something,’’ Colin said. ‘‘It won’t do now.’’
At the same moment Maisie exclaimed: ‘‘Oh, clever boy!’’ Rodolfo had discovered a way to make the patience come out.
As Enzo walked home after saying goodbye to Rodolfo he began to think of Bella. It was a beautiful night, with a wind that touched and then left the water as if afraid of any long fusion with the element that it wooed. Sauntering, Enzo experienced a vague romantic longing, compounded of desire for the epileptic girl, nostalgia and the determination to escape—to Tunisia, perhaps, as Rodolfo had suggested, or to America; to anywhere where
he would be free, and have work, and be able to live the life of a man. Even the clothes he was wearing, the brief pair of shorts, the open shirt and gym-shoes, suggested the uncomfortable physical state in which he now found himself, neither man nor boy, but something of both; and as his body seemed to be about to burst through the outgrown structure of the shorts and his muscular, hairy legs looked absurd thus revealed, so he felt the closeness and the absurdity of the life he now lived, and longed to put it aside like an outgrown suit of clothes.
It was strange that Bella should be a part of these musings; and yet, often, when he had nothing else to do, he would begin to think about her. She was beautiful; and yet it was a beauty which left him full of dread and hopelessness. For he knew that, in spite of his brother’s momentary possession of her body, she would always be, in her inmost depths unattainable, unpossessed. She was like a cup so cracked that it will not hold water; a ground so barren that no seed will grow there. Nothing human touched her in the inaccessible silences of her being, he was sure of that. Her griefs were not human, any more than her sudden fits of laughter or those more terrible fits when she writhed and frothed before him, filling him with a ghastly physical malaise as if the whole human creation had suddenly been turned into wild beasts. Yet he loved her. He did not know it, but as he walked home, sauntering through the evening, the desire at the heart of all his other desires—to go away, to be rich, to begin a new life—was his desire for her.
He called in at the Bar, kept by the old woman with the eye like a hard-boiled egg, and pleaded with her for credit, remembering how Rodolfo had stolen for him the damp, flaky horns of pastry with their oozing of pus-like custard. The woman said no, but then, as he was about to go out, she summoned him back, and sighing, prepared a cup of coffee. ‘‘I go into hospital to-morrow,’’ she said.
‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘It’s my eye,’’ she said. ‘‘ They say they roll it off as you roll off the top of a sardine-tin. Well, I shan’t be sorry to lose it.’’