Last Train from Liguria (2010)

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  ‘It’s very squeezy, Signora,’ Alec said as they came near the church and peered into the pack. He seemed a little shaky and pale.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it, Alec? Would you like to go home? I know I would. Let’s do that - shall we? Let’s just get out of here, go home and annoy Maestro Edward. Maybe we can play cards. Make toast at the fire - would you like that?’

  As they turned to go back they saw Luzzati pushing to get through. On a day that was meant to be only for women, with men as spectators on the side. A day that was only for wedding rings. He couldn’t make himself stay away, even though he had already donated a considerable amount during the previous weeks, as everyone seemed to have done, except for Signora Lami.

  The newspapers published details of all contributions and Luzzati had underlined his name and donations in red, then hung the cuttings on the cafe wall, alongside a framed copy of his letter praising the regime that had been published in the Popolo newspaper.

  Now here he was again, humping a bolster pillowcase on his back, looking like a thief in a child’s book. Bits of candlesticks poking out of the top, bumps of other things showing through the cloth. He was shouting at the women to get out of his way. Demanding the record-keeper write every item down so it could be printed in the newspaper for all to read. People, without looking at him, stepped aside.

  Bella would never forget the face of this usually serene man, emptying the pillowcase out, the sound of the items clanging onto the ground. His wife, coatless and shivering, was standing halfway up the street, twisting this way and that, as if quite literally she didn’t know which way to turn. Bella took her arm and led her back towards their cafe. The poor woman had tears pouring down her face. ‘E impazzito, Signora,’ she said to Bella, ‘a causa di Trieste.’

  Eventually Bella managed to get out of Signora Luzzati why her husband had ‘gone mad’. His brother’s shop in Trieste had been broken into, his nephew beaten up. They were scrawling the synagogue with words the old lady could not bring herself to say.

  Bella knew so much about the Luzzatis - that the Signora had a touch of lumbago, that he had a morbid fear of the sea and couldn’t even walk along the promenade, how they had moved to Bordighera to retire and had ended up buying the cafe. How they had first met years ago in the dentist’s surgery in Trieste where their son and five grandchildren still lived, that he had been engaged to someone else at the time - there had been a scandal and talk of a lawsuit. All that. Yet until the Day of the Faithful she had no idea that the Luzzatis were Jews.

  *

  She wakes with a start, head swaying from her neck, jerks back and takes a soft crack against the bark of a tree. Her neck. Bella curls her hand over it and squeezes the ache. A dream is still whispering in her head - something from the past. ‘What was it about?’ she asks herself out loud, the mild shock of her own voice bringing her fully awake. She is in the pine garden, yes. Where she had stopped for a rest on the way to see Rosa.

  The bells of the midday angelus wander up from the Nervia and Roya valleys. Churches she may have seen on Sunday outings, churches she may never see as long as she lives - she listens to them all now. Down in the centre of Bordighera the peals are more rounded as if they are being weighed on the palm of a hand. Loudest at her back they come from the old town and the church of Maria Maddalena.

  Bella scratches her arm where the mosquitoes have taken advantage of her sleeping absence. She tells herself to get up and go. But she is still a little tired and the noonday heat holds her down. The smell of Sister Assumpta’s orphanage soup rolls on and off the air. Brewed out of local donations: kitchen gardens, restaurants, shops, farms. Bella sniffs a guess at this week’s surplus - cabbage and salumi.

  The last toll of the angelus shivers then dies and she can hear now, through the long pines, a sound of passing voices. Two men, possibly three. Occasional phrases slip out of their deep dull rumble: ‘Difesa della razza.’ ‘La questione ebraica.’ ‘Demografia.’ ‘Manifesto.’ Words she’s been hearing more and more, and is sick of hearing more and more, these past weeks. Defence of the race; the Jewish debate; demography; manifesto.

  They will pass, like so many other notions and fads have passed since she first came here. This is not Germany - this is Italy, she reminds herself, yet again. Bella stands, stretches her arms over her head, pushes them against a non-existent weight, then leaves the garden.

  The old town is full of pre-lunch activity on piazza del Popolo and all the narrow streets leading into it. Women on last-minute errands press past each other in shop doorways. Street pedlars, returned from the parade, congregate around the shade of the clock tower portico and begin removing themselves from their trays like horses coming out of harness. In front of the church, men stand around in tidy groups of two or three. From the widow’s bench, five soft-leathery faces stare out.

  Outside the cafe the three small tables are taken. Two men in a mumble over a jug of wine. At the next table a young priest sips his aperitivo under a wide-brimmed hat and reads the newspaper, pausing sometimes to make notes on the margin or to underline a phrase. At the last table a municipal official smokes a pipe and glares angrily at his plate of bruschetta. A boy in uniform sits on the church step eating a half moon of melon as if he is using it to wash his face.

  She can hear the beads on shop doors rattle and drop like Japanese fans; and the roll and grind of handcart wheels across the cobbles; and the suck of the boy on the melon. She can hear everything except voices - there is a surprising absence of those.

  The sound of a thud. When she lifts her eyes to it Bella finds herself looking straight at the window of Rosa’s long kitchen - the window she knows to overlook the church and this square. It is shut. For a moment it seems the curtain has shifted, and a brief shadow falls over the lace. Bella lifts her hand to wave, but sees after all there is no one.

  A few steps around by the side of the church into piazza Fontana, the smell of the orphanage soup becoming suddenly keen. She can hear the voices of children singing grace before lunch. Bella looks at the fountain and thinks of the milk boy - a milkman now, with full beard and two small children, always careful to ignore her whenever their paths happen to cross.

  A woman leans over the fountain; darts of water dancing into a tin bucket resting on the stoop. The baker, outside his shop, swishes a broom across a small area of ground. Over his door a crick-necked Madonna peeps out of her flour-dusted niche. Bella can see now, the windows on the other side of Rosa’s apartment which run the length of the house are also unpromisingly shut.

  She crosses the piazza, returns the woman’s tired half greeting, thanks the baker for his ‘buona pranzo‘ although she doubts she’ll bother with lunch today.

  Now in the house where Rosa lives. Up dim flights of stairs, past food smells and clattering kitchens. The doors of the apartments on each return are all open, giving a steamy wedge of daylight that helps her to follow the way to the top of the house. But when she gets to Rosa’s the door is shut tight. She decides to knock even so.

  She knocks again. ‘Rosa?’ she says. ‘Sono io - Signora Stuart.’

  On the landing below, a footstep. A voice calls up. Bella looks down and recognizes the bald woman who insulted Rosa’s dying husband five years ago. The woman comes up a few stairs and stops, then asks if she’s looking for Rosa.

  ’Si - cerco Signora Fabbri,’ Bella confirms.

  ’C’e. Di sicuro.’ She is there. Definitely. The bald woman is gleeful, like a spiteful child telling a tale. That door was open not five minutes ago, she declares. Give it a good bang. The woman forms a fist and thumps the air in case Bella has failed to understand her. Then she climbs the last few stairs to stand beside Bella outside Rosa’s door. She begins to jeer through the keyhole. ‘Rosa Fabbri? Ci sei? So che ci sei. Apri la porta.’

  Bella would just as soon go now. Let Rosa pretend not to be at home, if that’s what she wants. But the neighbour will not be satisfied until Rosa is thoroughly mortified. She thumps the d
oor again.

  ’Stia tranquilla. Non importa,’ Bella says and turns to go.

  The woman catches her by the arm, her grip gypsy-firm. Bella watches as she flattens her other hand and bashes it off the door. She sees now the woman also lacks eyebrows and eyelashes. She remembers they call her La Testa Nuda, and wonders how she came to be that way.

  Slowly the door opens a crack, and a red-faced Rosa peeps through. ‘I am sorry, Signora Stuart,’ Rosa begins in her careful English.

  ‘Why should you be sorry?’ Bella asks her.

  Rosa shakes her head but doesn’t reply.

  ‘Are you ill, Rosa?’

  Rosa shakes her head again.

  ‘Is everything all right? Your sons, they are—?’

  Rosa nods, biting her lip.

  Bella stands waiting. Now and then she throws a deliberate glance at the neighbour to let Rosa know they’re not alone.

  ‘Won’t you let me in, Rosa?’ she whispers after a moment. ‘Nothing can be that bad, surely?’

  Rosa opens the door. As soon as Bella is in, she closes it again. The neighbour shouts on the other side, words Bella can’t make out.

  ’Zitta.’ Rosa snarls back through the keyhole. ‘Puttana pelata.’

  ‘Excuse me, Signora,’ Rosa says, angelically, as if she has not just called her neighbour a bald-headed whore.

  The air in the apartment feels tight and hot like a greenhouse. Bella sees this is because Rosa has been ironing and all the windows are closed. There is a pillar of white shirts stacked on the table and in the little room that leads off the kitchen, rows of black uniforms hang from rails. There is a dry musty odour of pressed cloth, and an acrid waft of old sweat on warmed cotton. Bella notes the electric iron she gave to Rosa when Signora Lami brought the latest model from Switzerland and declared this one to be obsolete.

  ‘Rosa - may I ask you for a glass of water? It’s so warm.’

  ‘Oh scusa, Signora. I’m so sorry. Of course, one moment. One moment.’ On the way to the water jug, Rosa goes around and opens all the windows.

  The room where the uniforms hang is small, the size of the pantry in Villa Lami, kept dark to protect cloth from the sun. The rails that cross it from wall to wall are from a time when Rosa’s husband was a travelling salesman of men’s suits. Military uniforms now fidget and sway in the new breeze the opened windows have admitted. She can see the black shapes of shoulders, arms, legs. The glint of a button or epaulette when they give a slight turn like headless soldiers at ease.

  Rosa hands Bella a glass of water then removes a stack of shirts from a chair for Bella to sit down.

  ‘I’ve been worried about you, Rosa,’ she begins.

  ‘Yes.’ ‘I just wanted to see if—’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. They are all in the centre for lunch after the parade so I have nothing but fruit to offer. Please excuse me.’

  ‘Rosa, really, I didn’t expect lunch. To be honest I should have been here an hour ago but I stopped in the pine garden and, well, fell asleep.’

  Rosa gives a small smile, then goes to the sideboard and pulls out a bowl of apricots and grapes. ‘I have some cheese, Signora - if you like?’

  ‘No, I’m fine, the fruit is plenty, it’s too hot to eat, really.’

  Rosa comes back and sits down beside her. ‘I did not know what to do, Signora Stuart. So instead I do nothing. But now you are here.’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘It’s my son, Signora. Alberto - you know, who works for the Ministry of the Interior?’

  ‘Has something happened to Alberto?’

  ‘No. He is well. But he has the new promotion I tell you about? Now he works for Demorazza - I think it’s the name.’

  ‘Demorazza?’

  ‘The new department for the problems of race.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He says no more I cannot work for the Lami house.’

  ‘Why does he say that?’

  ‘Signora, you must know this already.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But it is in all the newspapers, on the radio news too. Please, Signora, don’t make me say it.’

  ‘Edward didn’t get the papers today, they were late. I’m supposed to bring them back. And I haven’t heard the news, I’ve been out.’

  ‘My son, he know this for many weeks. He say first wait, things could change. I try to tell you before.’

  ‘Yes, but you only said there could be problems, nothing definite.’

  ‘Now is definite. So I must not go again to Villa Lami.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  Rosa begins to cry.

  ‘Oh Rosa,’ Bella says. ‘Tell me. We’re friends - are we not friends?’

  Rosa nods. ‘The race laws. They have come true, Signora.’

  ‘The race laws? Oh God. I thought they were just another rumour because of the manifesto.’

  ‘Alberto says the manifesto is the scientific proof these laws are necessary. Now they are here. They are the law.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Alberto says it better to stop working for the Lami family before the law comes to the public. I write a letter to the Signora and tell her already.’

  ‘There will be a way around these silly laws, Rosa, wait and see. They’ll all be forgotten by this time next month.’

  ‘No, Signora.’

  Bella plucks an apricot from its pile and begins to roll it between her palms. She waits for Rosa to explain.

  ‘She is a Jew. I am an Aryan. It is the law, Signora. No Aryan can work as the servant of a Jew. Alberto says. Only the other way around from now on.’

  ‘So is Alberto suggesting that Signora Tassi should come and work for you then?’ Bella snaps.

  Rosa glances at her, then looks away. ‘I don’t want to leave Villa Lami,’ she continues. ‘I need the work. Because Alberto is promoted he goes to Roma, he is the only one who brings real money to the house. And the Signora is always good to me.’

  ‘Yes. I see how it is now. Do you know, Rosa, what the other laws are?’

  ‘You must read for yourself.’

  ‘Do you have the paper?’

  ‘No. My son Dario, he take it.’

  ‘Please tell me. The newspaper kiosks will be closed now.’

  ‘I remember the one for schools because I am thinking of Alessandro. No more Jews teaching in schools and universities. No more Jewish influence over Aryan children.’ Rosa pauses and looks down at her hands. ‘Or no more going to school, Signora. Alessandro will not be allowed in the school.’

  ‘But that’s absurd. Apart from anything else he’s Catholic, like his father.’

  ‘Only bloodlines will be important now, Signora. And the Jew it comes from the side of the mother. Alberto say is called contamination.’

  ‘But to take a child’s education! It’s too much. It can’t be right. You must be mistaken.’ Bella stands up. Rosa pulls at her wrist to make her sit down again.

  ‘There is no mistake. I swear that to you.’

  ‘After all he said about protecting the Jews! He’ll never get away with it, surely not?’

  ‘He is il Duce, Signora.’

  Bella looks down at the apricot in her hand, then replaces it in the punnet. ‘He is a monster, ‘ she says.

  ‘Please don’t speak that way, Signora,’ Rosa quietly says. ‘If anyone hear.’ She waits for a moment. ‘There are other laws also, I don’t remember now. There will be more ones after. They will keep coming. My son is certain.’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s all right. I can’t hear any more now. I can’t. Please. I must go.’

  ‘I try to tell you. You would not listen, Signora, you would not.’

  ‘Even if I had listened, Rosa, what difference would it make now?’ Bella says.

  Rosa comes with her to the door and puts her hand over Bella’s. Her eyes are hazy from crying. ‘We are still friends, Signora?’

  ‘I have to find Alec,’ she says.

  Bella runs, the s
ound of her footsteps over the empty piazza like slow sardonic applause. She tells herself to think only of Alec. Nothing of what Rosa has said, either now or before. Nothing that has been said by anyone, anywhere, over the past months or weeks. Half-heard rumours, or words almost read. Nothing. She cannot allow her mind to go beyond Alec. Not five minutes into the future. Until he is beside her, holding her hand, until the door of the Villa Lami is shut firmly behind them. Alec.

  She turns into the long, vaulted carruggio of via Bastoni. The light of dusk inside. From the eaves the constant smug gurgle of pigeons then a frenzied implosion as Bella rushes inside. Something swoops down through the darkness and skims past her ears. She can feel the agitation of the air on her face as it whips by. Bella screams and folds herself down. Then turning she catches a glimpse of the bird bursting through an arch of sunlight.

  She comes out at the porta Sottana, stands for a moment and looks down all the scales of its steps. Beyond the Roman palms, the cobbled roofscape below, the tower of Santa Teresa, the beneficent sea.

  Behind her, on the far side of the old town wall, she hears the tinkle and bleat of goats browsing. A washing line over her head purrs on the afternoon breeze. There is a tin plate of cat food outside a door, a bluebottle nosing around the rim. A woman’s voice calls out, ‘Mimi! Mi-mi!’ and a young black cat pounces from a ground-floor window.

  ‘It is nothing,’ she says to herself, pressing her hand into her heart to slow down the beats. A lot of hot air. Of course it will pass. What was I thinking of, getting myself all worked up like this? Bella gives a short dismissive laugh, then begins her return down the steps.

  Back on via Pineta she sees Mrs Cardiff rounding the bend, the Australian teacher whose name she can’t recall, waddling by her side. Mrs Cardiff begins speaking to her while still yards away and although Bella can’t yet hear, she can tell by the bluster of movement that all the reassurances she’s been feeding herself on the way down the steps have been in vain. Bella knows her stoic friend is not easily given to the excessive gesture or word.