Last Train from Liguria (2010)

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  ’Sta bene, Signora?‘ Pino asks.

  She nods and then he is gone.

  The next time she sees Pino, he is back by the mule station, hand leaning on the little porter’s shoulder, both men smiling, talking, smoking, eating cake while they’re at it, hooked tongues catching cream, hands reaching for tiny coffee cups on a tray held by the woman with the dirty apron. She blinks and they’ve disappeared.

  Bella pulls a cushion into her back and settles into it. She leans her shoulder on the folds of the hood, sucks on the stick of citrus-sharp ice. Behind her she can hear the luggage rack being loaded and strapped, and for a second remembers to fret about her alligator bag, the pouch of money, the bits of jewellery belonging to her mother that she hasn’t yet sold. Then her eyes close down.

  She sees a terrace of blue-eyed mules. A woman in an apron with one mutilated breast. A dog with a scabby back. The dog cocks his leg, splashing yellow piddle all over a hill of ice. The woman walks towards her.

  *

  She misses the sullen shift of the sea, its curious muscularity, pushing everything on, giving the impression of always being in charge. The big black car too, ever decisive, following its own nose from Palermo to here, barking and snorting at anything that had tried to get in its way, asking nothing of her, expecting nothing, only that she continue to drift in and out of sleep.

  Now that she is responsible for her own mobility, Bella finds she’s reluctant to move. Not that there is much to encourage her, here in this vast dim room, scarcely furnished.

  A bed in the distance stands raised like a tomb, wings of muslin and a mattress obese with what would have to be goose feathers - even from here, she can see it won’t offer much in the way of support for her back. Down this end, one dainty chair and a low lacquered table, the seat on the chair like a velvet lozenge which she wouldn’t dare sit on. An enormous mirror on the back wall, her reflection skulking inside like a mentally disturbed neighbour at the window. Then the floor - a marble piazza. One large primrose-coloured rug in the centre. And that’s it, really - no chest of drawers, no dressing table, not so much as a hook for a jacket, nowhere to lay out her personal belongings, nor indeed to hide them away.

  *

  ‘I shouldn’t go unpacking if I was you, not till the Signora’s ‘ad a word,’ the housekeeper had said on the way up the stairs, startling Bella with a shrill London accent that melted to honey the moment she had started to speak Italian, leaning over the banister to do so at a trundle of servants carting the luggage up from the hall. An English housekeeper - Bella had felt less alone then, thinking there would be at least one person to chat to. The housekeeper’s demeanour and evasive eye, however, soon made it clear she was not the type to get chatty.

  ‘Dinner’s at seven. The Signora will see you before’and. Maria will come fetch you. I’ll send the girl up with washing water.’

  Through a pair of tall doors the housekeeper then retracted her string of servants, leaving the last, an elderly man wearing pale pink gloves, to clatter and clang his way out of the room. Bella hadn’t been able to decide if she felt locked into her room, or out of the household.

  *

  Three hours to kill. Bella turns to the shuttered windows. Squirts of light through the slats. A warm cage over her face and hands. An infinite silence outside. She stays for a while listening for something to snag it. In the end she does this herself by dragging the iron rods away from their latches, then pushing at the shutters until the creaking gives way to a luminous rush. She passes through it, eyes blinking against a bouncing mosaic of yellow and gold.

  Now on a terrace. How far she is from anywhere else in the world is impossible to know. Way beyond the perimeter of this villa there is a pock-marked mountain, a russet-coloured town cut like a dried wound into its shoulder. It could be ten miles away, or a hundred. There are other mountains besides, crawling all over the landscape, other villages and towns. Yet despite all that is available to her eye, nothing suggests the recent journey she has made with Pino. She may have been asleep for most of it, but for the last quarter of an hour or so, after waking and sensing they were almost there, she had remained bolt upright and alert.

  Where has it all gone? The last few miles, the high gates they had finally passed through. The dogs that were silenced by a man with a stoop. The lodge where Pino had pulled in for a moment to take an oversized key from a child with an oversized head. The escort of cypress trees along the avenue; flowers that had looked as if they had been painted onto their stems. And Pino, his car. Where is all that? Bella looks down.

  A garden built on descending terraces; balustrades and marble vases. Statues on a low wall in the distance. A fountain with a cherub astride some sort of fish. Closer to the house, a rigid parterre - hedges pruned and bent to someone’s geometrical will. To her left hand a driveway turning into the villa. Surely this could only be the front of the house - it could hardly be meant for tradesmen? And yet. The way she had come in with Pino had also seemed like the entrance. There had been a loggia; wide stone steps to a large entrance hall, dark and mercifully cool. Staircases and servants. The English housekeeper. Chandeliers. But a different driveway. A stand of Lebanon cedar to one side. A pond. The pond hosted by a large cast-iron frog standing on one leg. Another parterre - flowerbeds instead of box hedge, wrought-iron frill around the edges. A lawn with a trio of benches. She had been reminded of an English public park, had half expected to see men reading newspapers, women watching children, kites.

  Bella walks to the end of the terrace, peers over the side of the balustrade; lemon scent and an orchard. She lifts her eyes and again there is nothing familiar in the landscape, not even the outline of a road, where a car might have travelled. Only haphazard fields and the tangle of wild flowers, dry brown mountains and arthritic trees.

  She can remember leaving Palermo now, and how her mind had seemed to be swaying like a storm lantern, in and out of darkness. The skin peeling off the front of houses. Pink domes on the churches. Then nothing until… Scrub and the smell of almonds. A palsy of silvery leaves. Waking to terror on a road so steep she thought she was going to topple out of the car. Then despite the terror, falling back to sleep almost at once. Cobbled rooftops, brittle and cracked by the sun. Had she stretched her hand down over the side of the car she could have touched them; they would have crumbled like desiccated bones in her hand.

  A large grass square. Pino had stopped and brought her a tin cup of cool water. Old brown faces under caps, playing something at wooden tables. A cupola of tree shade holding them in. Lemons falling out of trees. Limes. Waking again to more children again, jumping on the runner of the car. Pino reaching down to his side to pull out a whip which he lashed, or threatened to lash, at the children. She had tried to tell him to stop. The children dropping off one by one, screeching and jeering into the flurry of road dust. Two of them blonde, one ginger - surprising her.

  Darkness again. Swirls of orange. Being thrown down sideways on the seat, now forward, now back. Pino leaning his arm over the seat asking if she’s all right. Moving under an arch, leprous walls closing in on the car, women hanging out of windows overhead, screaming across at each other. The noise deafening, suffocating, until sleep came again like a blessing.

  On and off throughout the car journey, the noise from the dockside had slipped back to her. Coming out of the engine in a sudden yodel, in the scurry of pebbles beneath the wheels, on the nagging voices of goatherds they had passed along the way. Even the church bells that softly burst around her in some silent and airless town were accompanied by the sounds of the dockside. Then just before she had woken for good, the road had loosened and the car, taking a slight swerve, suddenly stopped. The back of Pino’s head had appeared through the veil, a vast skirt of sheep wobbling around the car. Pino, lighting a cigarette, had remained quietly smoking even after the flock had passed into silence and stillness.

  Silence and stillness. No sense of location. No sense of anything at all.


  *

  Bella feels herself jump as her attention is brought back to the terrace. A ratchety grinding in the garden below; mechanical, even a little musical - of course, crickets! Almost at once she sees a diagonal flit up the orchard wall. A lizard! She has never seen one outside of a cage or a picture book, nor heard the sound of so many crickets. It gives her a burst of childish pleasure. Now she realizes the extent of her journey, just how far she has come.

  As the lizard slides into the lemon groves, she catches sight of someone moving through the trees. A slow figure, head covered and bowed, the dress full and black. The figure moves deeper into the orchard; foliage clasping around it masks Bella’s view. Wads of greenery and pinpoints of light. The figure re-emerges just long enough for Bella to see it belongs to a nun.

  She turns back into a room that the sun has filled up and a rug that has turned to gold silk. Nightingales around the edges. A glimmer runs through it. When she moves her head or takes a step to the side, the glimmer moves with her. She stoops and begins to stroke the silk. Warm and soft, it seems to respond to her hand. She takes off her shoes and stockings, pulls the rug directly into the bank of sunlight and, carefully unfolding herself, lies down. Patting the rug with her feet and her palms, stretching her toes, Bella feels her spine settle into the carpet, the spread of the sun on her face.

  High in the corner of the room sits an unlit votive, above it an elaborate cornice. On a faraway ceiling cherubs are dancing.

  *

  Maria has a deformed bottom lip. Sponge-like and purple, it droops towards her chin. Hair cut tight to a large head, face like cedar wood carved to the bone. She has huge hands, tough forearms and a pair of unfortunate legs, bandy as brackets. Were it not for the little rose-dotted dress, Bella would have thought her a man - perhaps a retired jockey. Walking with her now on the way to meet Signora Lami, there couldn’t be a sweeter, more sympathetic guide - almost impossible to equate with the Maria of such a short time ago.

  Bella thinks of the young girl who had arrived earlier with a basin of water, towels and a pot of lemon tea turned cold. The girl had found Bella, just up from her snooze on the rug, still in bare feet. Pretty little thing, hair tied back by a checked scarf, a child really, nine or ten years old. She had been completely taken aback by the sight of Bella’s feet. ‘Like marble!’ she had gasped. ‘Come marmo!’

  While Bella had prepared for her interview with Signora Lami, the child had remained, skipping about the place, devising little tasks that might delay her. She would hold the Signora’s comb for her. She would lay the Signora’s nightdress on the bed for tonight. She would brush the road dust from the Signora’s jacket.

  Lena, she had said her name was, not nine or ten, but thirteen years old. Far too small for her age.

  She had been rubbing a cloth over Bella’s shoes, head cocked, chattering her way through an extravagant story concerning a cousin and her lover which Bella, although she could only understand bits, suspected was full of delightful lies. Then Maria had come storming through the doorway, shouting her head off. Something about Lena still being here instead of down in the kitchen. The further Maria came into the room, the more enraged she had seemed to become. After a few moments Bella began to understand this was because the silk rug had been left in the sunlight. For this the child had borne the brunt and all the blame; such lack of respect, exposing a valuable carpet like that, only fit now for the dogs to lie on. The Signora would be informed. Lena would be thrown out, she could live on the street in Palermo like the puttanella she clearly was. While Maria was dragging the rug out of harm’s way Bella had tried her best for little Lena, explaining that it had been her mistake and not Lena’s. But Maria didn’t seem to hear. It was as if she couldn’t even see Bella was in the room. Her bottom lip bouncing with agitation, Maria had marched over to Lena and, sticking her hand in behind the checked headscarf, taken a tug of hair in her fist. The child’s head flew back, her eyes fattened with tears.

  ‘Oh!’ Bella heard herself say. ‘Oh now. Please!’

  Finally Maria noticed her, throwing her a look that implied if Bella didn’t watch her step, she could very well be next.

  *

  Now walking through the convolutions of the villa, Maria seems to have completely forgotten the incident. Bella has to wonder if she can be quite right in the head.

  She sees the nun again, praying again, as they pause at the open door of what appears to be a chapel. Bella considers asking Maria about the nun, who she is and why she is here. There is no doubt that Maria will be forthcoming. Since leaving the room and the weeping child behind them, her voice has been going in a non-stop canter of gossipy gems. Bella has gleaned this more from the expression in Maria’s eyes, the emphasis of hands, the lowering of tone every time they pass a particular room, or servant, and has, in fact, understood little or nothing of what has actually been said. For all she knows, Maria may have already given her the story of the nun.

  Inside the chapel the nun kneels in the centre of the altar rails. There is a full-sized candelabrum blazing on either side, giving her wings of jittery light. Her back so straight and dark and steady. Bella waits while Maria slaps her large hand into the holy water font outside the chapel door and collapses into a genuflection. Crossing herself and loudly whispering a passionate prayer, she finally staggers back up onto her little legs and starts yapping again, maintaining the tempo until they turn a corner to see, at the end of a corridor, the English housekeeper standing at a staircase. Then Maria, mid-sentence, falls silent.

  The English housekeeper, by contrast, has nothing to say. When Maria hands over custody (or at least that’s what it feels like) the most Bella gets is a nod. A few moments and many stairs later: ‘Wait in ‘ere please, the Signora shan’t be long.’

  Another vast room. Her mother might have described it as ‘handsomely furnished’. For a house on Kensington Square maybe or a feature in Household Miscellany. Here it seems out of place, slight and absurdly lost, surrounded by too much height and space. A stage set in an empty theatre.

  Bella wonders how the Signora should find her - sitting, standing, walking about? Then she notices the photographs arranged in sections along one wall and in little assemblies on occasional tables, sideboards and the top of the grand piano way down at the far end (where a whole regatta of silver frames appear to be crossing a sleek black lake). This might be the best option, to be found at the photographs - after all, why else were they there, if not to be admired?

  After a few moments Bella begins to realize something odd about this little gallery. The photographs, taken in various locations and on dates chronologically arranged over several years, appear to have only one subject - the Lami boy. Here as an infant on a bed of lace; a blanket on the grass; held in the cradle of a woman’s arms. She follows his progress, finding him now as a bigger baby, free of swaddling and filling into his own little shape - sitting in a bath bashing bubbles; trapped like an upturned turtle in a high chair waving a spoon; now lying back on the sofa holding one toe. A pretty baby, smiling and chubby, always obliging to the camera without ever seeming to be aware of it.

  Older now, he stands on fat uncertain legs. Frame by frame the legs straighten and grow sturdy. They begin to change again, lengthening, thin ning a little, while the photographs take on a different mood. Now he is posing, solemn and deliberate. And she thinks of the theatre again; the sort of publicity pictures that are found on the wall in the foyer or going up the Grand Circle stairs. The little archer; junior horseman; apprentice hunter buckling under the weight of a gun. The First Holy Communion boy, hands joined in prayer, rose leaves at his feet. At the piano in bow tie and miniature tails - the boy as musical prodigy. The latest picture shows him in fancy dress; an Indian prince, face gravied-up, moustache and turban included. A picture she finds no less or more contrived than any of the others - as if it were just another role out of many he has learned to play.

  The fancy dress was the last to be taken, dated 1 April 19
32 - pesci d’aprile. More than a year ago now. More than six years since the first picture was taken.

  Apart from a dog here, a pony there, an impressive muster of white peacocks somewhere else, he is always photographed alone. Yet he can’t have always been alone. In the picture at the piano a man’s shadow leans over him and the man’s hand - sea horse cufflink peeping out from under the sleeve of his jacket - is poised to turn the page of the music score. There is also the photograph taken when an infant in a woman’s arms. But the shadow at the piano is incidental, and the woman holding the baby is firmly excluded. It’s as if the camera wanted only the boy.

  It hits her then that she doesn’t actually know his name. How could that possibly be? She scours her memory, but there’s nothing. All she can find is ‘my son’ in Signora Lami’s letter, and ‘your son’ in her own reply. Yet she must have heard it somewhere.

  Bella wanders down to the far end of the room towards the French doors, slightly parted. A narrow view of the terrace outside and a light breeze through the gap. She wonders if the missing garden could be out there, if she were to step out, look down - would she find it? She imagines herself for a moment, darting like a cuckoo through the doors, eyes pecking for glimpses of the cast-iron frog or the trio of park benches. She cranes her neck, straining to see through the side gap of the door. There are tiles on the terrace and a circle shape - a wheel. A sudden breeze causes a curtain gauze to shudder across her view. She waits for the curtain to move again to reveal - the wheel of a child’s tricycle? Perhaps the boy is out there, too, having a shy, sly preview of her. (His name. She has to remember his name.)

  Now a movement - a jolt. And the wheel edges a few inches, then stops. This is followed by another sound, an odd, insubstantial cough - a courtesy cough, as if someone out there wants to establish mutual awareness. Which way to move - if at all? Before she can decide there is more coughing - nothing courteous or insubstantial this time. A man’s cough. Jagged and violent. Like a chain of angry howls.