‘Nice coffee, Dolores. And I love the cups and saucers.’
‘Isn’t it? I can’t stand that oul instant muck. Since Italy, all those years ago, I’ll only drink the good stuff. I bought the cups in Brown Thomas. In the sale. Cost an arm and a leg even so.’
‘Oh. You were in Italy?’
‘Only for six months but it doesn’t take long to get to you. It spoils some people for life, you know - in a good way, I mean. So, Anna, what have you got to say to me?’
I told her all about the box; the papers, the harmonica, the comic. Then I threw out my Jewish theory, and on a lighter note the suggestion that Nonna had been a spy. Finally I showed her the papers, which I had brought along, as well as the letter addressed to Bella. When she’d finished reading it, I asked if she knew or had heard of anyone by that name.
‘Mmm,’ Dolores said, shaking her head, ‘but now that could be just a term of endearment. Bella meaning beautiful in Italian, and they use it sort of affectionately you know. You don’t even have to be beautiful, just beloved. Or at least? Do you know what you do now, before we go any further - go up to my old room at the top of the stairs, a door straight in front of you, and in the end of the wardrobe you’ll see this big square handbag, a tan-coloured, old-fashioned yoke. Bring it down to me.’
‘You don’t recognize the writing - no?’ I asked her.
‘No. I mean it’s hard to say, it’s print isn’t it? Could be anyone.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t think it was Nonna’s but as you say. Anyway I’ll get the bag.’
When I got back Dolores was smoking. ‘Show,’ she said and I gave her the bag. ‘Anna, I should tell you first off, I didn’t know your granny all that well. Certainly not in Italy, just in case you’re expecting anything. I met her on the train going out of Italy, her and the baby - that’d be your mammy. She was in trouble. That’s all I knew, and so me and this other couple, well, we wanted to help her, without being too involved, you know. We all thought war was a matter of days away, nobody doubted it really. And you have to help your own in time of war. But now, Anna, I’d have to say, I’m not sure I believed everything your granny said, even then, to be honest. But I pitied her, you know. I pitied her.’
‘So you didn’t know her in Italy at all?’ I try not to show my disappointment.’
‘No. But there could well be something in your Jewish theory though, because that Mussolini was only after bringing out the anti-Jew laws and Jews were making a run for it from all over Italy. As for your spy theory? Don’t make me laugh. She wasn’t cool enough to be a spy. If you’d seen her the first time I did, you’d know what I mean.’
‘What about here, when you used to meet her here, did she ever say anything, you know?’
‘No. It was missus this, missus that. Neither of us got too personal. But now I do remember this one time - and if she was Jewish, this might make sense - I met her in Wynne’s Hotel for tea, and while we were waiting on the girl to bring the tray I happened to mention something about a programme I’d seen on the telly a few nights previous regarding the Italian Jews and how so many thousands of them had been rounded up and sent to the German camps after the occupation - you know?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about Italy and the Second World War.’
‘Well, the way it was, the Italians were in with the Jerries for a couple of years, then they changed over to the Allies. That made them enemies. So Germany occupied Italy, and first thing went after the Jews - are you with me now?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Anyway, I happened to mention this to your granny and how a few thousand of the Italian Jews had been rounded up and sent off to these camps where they died. Well, you want to have seen her. One minute she was grand, and the next minute she’s this pain in her stomach and has to go home. Not a biscuit, not even a sup of tea had passed her lips. So. There you are. Just thought I’d mention it. Do you know whose bag this is? ‘
‘Hers, I suppose?’
‘That’s right. She gave it to me to mind for her, a good few year ago now.’
‘Do you know what’s in it?’ I asked.
‘Ah yes, I do know. Even though I said I wouldn’t look - not that she asked me to promise - but, well, to be honest, the older you get the nosier you become, and the less point there seems to be in keeping secrets. It was so long since I’d seen her, I thought she was dead. Anyway, it’s yours now. Here, take a look at this.’
The first thing she pulled out was a bank book in the name of Anabelle Stuart. The opening balance was in the amount of five hundred sterling, the date the account had been opened was 1936. The bank was in London.
‘Who’s Anabelle Stuart?’
Dolores shoved her cigarette into the corner of her mouth and closed one eye. She poked her finger at the name on the bank book, and then back at the letter. ‘Bella - Anabelle? Short for? Ah, who knows? I’d never have even thought of it but you showed me the letter. Tell you what but, five hundred quid - now that was worth a right few bob then. And here - this mean anything?’
Dolores handed me a silver sea horse. ‘What is it - an earring?’ I asked.
‘No. A cufflink. Only the one, mind.’
The last thing in the bag was an envelope. She put out her cigarette, opened it and emptied it onto the table. A group of small passport-size photographs slipped out. The missing photographs from the identity papers.
‘Well, there you are now,’ Dolores said as we pieced them together and studied the official stamps on each one. ‘Same faces, different names and nationalities. One set obviously has to be false. What do you make of that now?’
‘The woman is her. I’m sure of it.’
‘It certainly is.’
‘The man - I don’t know.’
‘Me neither. Would it be your grandfather?’
‘I don’t know. I never saw a picture of him.’
‘Go away?’
‘No. And there’s no picture of the boy.’
‘No,’ Dolores echoed. ‘No picture of the boy.’
*
Dolores phoned me about a week later. ‘Do you know what I’m only after remembering?’ she said, as I picked up the phone.
‘What?’
‘The harmonica. There was a harmonica in the compartment on the train. She said it belonged to the boy. But later when she’d calmed down a bit and I questioned her further about it, she didn’t answer me.’
‘Right. But there was only her and the baby on the train?’
‘She insisted the husband had been arrested at the border. I don’t know, I only ever saw your granny and your baby mother. And the only time she mentioned the boy was with the harmonica. Here - did you ever find out about your man?’
‘What man?’
‘Him in the letter. Did you go to the library, find out what he did?’
‘No. I might wait for a while before I do. But listen, I’m thinking of going over there, to Italy.’
‘Good for you, Anna! Where will you go?’
‘To Bordighera, you know, the town that’s in the address on the letter? Because I was thinking, as you said, it’s obvious that one set of those papers has to be false. But the letter seems real, doesn’t it? I mean, why forge a letter like that and why say those things in it? Anyway, I was going to give you a call to say goodbye.’
‘Well, good luck to you.’
‘I don’t really know why I’m going or what I’ll find there, but.’
‘Ah, you’ll always find something.’
‘You take care, Dolores. Will I write, let you know how I get on?’
‘If you feel like it.’
‘Well, I’ll see you when I get back anyway, tell you all about it.’
‘When you get back? Sure I’ll be well dead by then,’ she said and cackled like a witch down the phone.
*
I may have a fever; my head is banging and my throat sand-dry. The nightdress is stuck to me and there’s a sweat-moist patch on the
bed where I lie. I don’t know this room; high, narrow, shaft-like. Except for a diagonal ladder of light leaning against one wall and falling across the bottom corner of the bed, the room is in darkness. Overhead a ceiling fan huffs.
From the street, a chaos of sounds. Car doors, beeping horns, the on-and-off rev of motorbike engines. Music. I hear muffled car stereos and the raw insistence of a ghetto blaster. Further away, a broader more cohesive sound - a disco or maybe a live band playing. There is something belligerent about all these different factions of sound; beating, thumping, punching out at each other. I feel like an innocent bystander caught up in a mob fight.
After a moment I begin to hear laughter. The laughter is young, but not childish. And voices. The voices: foreign. I sit up, suddenly wide awake, and hear myself say, ‘That’s right. Jesus, that’s right - I’m here.’
The shutters creak back. Stepping out onto a balcony hardly big enough to hold one pair of feet, I remember that I’m on the fifth and topmost floor of a hotel called Centrale. Across the way, the train station where I arrived a few hours ago, worn out after my misguided plan to arrive in Bordighera as Nonna might have arrived, more than sixty years ago, down through France on a train. Too excited to sleep for the first part of the journey, too exhausted to stay awake for the latter. The train sucking me into its rhythm and knocking me out. It was only chance that made me open my eyes, as the wheels squawked up alongside a sign that said ‘Bordighera’.
I test the balcony railing - sturdier than it looks - then, leaning on it, look down. The middle of the square is pooled with light beamed out from the headlamps of parked cars and scooters. People everywhere, mostly young or at least energetic enough to deserve to be young; bare limbs and light, well-cut clothes. A scooter slips in and out of the crowd and a head of thick black hair on the pillion sways into a spray of silver light. Another scooter arrives, then another. Brown arms wave goodbye or hello. Kisses are exchanged, first in greeting then farewell, often a matter of seconds between the coming and going. The air is convulsed with music that seems much less offensive now. It’s like a makeshift, open-air, drive-in nightclub. Couples smooch close together, others bob in a circle. Over to the side two boys show off their break-dancing skills. On the outer edge of the square tall palm trees in the shadows look down like dowagers; like me.
I hold my wrist out to the light and look at my watch - past one o’clock in the morning and I wonder if the whole town is like this, and if it’s always like this. I hear a wolf whistle and my eye automatically follows it down to a young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, sitting sideways on the back of a parked scooter, his fingers stuck in his mouth. He whistles again then waves up at me.
’Ciao, Bella,’ he calls. I look down at my bit of a nightie and what amounts to most of my legs. Then jumping back into the room I shove over the shutters, mortified, but far from displeased.
A few minutes later I come downstairs in search of something to eat and there’s nobody in the small foyer. A voice rattles out of a radio somewhere and a television flickers through the crack of a half-opened door marked ‘Privato‘. There’s a handbag sitting on a chair and a large ring of keys lies just an arm-stretch over the reception desk, including a key with my own room number on it. The entire front of the hotel is opened out onto a terrace - white plastic furniture under a green striped canopy, which in turn opens out onto the square. Most of my money is upstairs, my passport, the brown envelope of Nonna clues. But I’m too hungry and excited to worry about any of that now.
Turning away from the bright-light action of the hotel square, I take a short street that leads to a crossroads where a bar on one corner shows light.
It’s an ordinary little bar; a few tables out on the narrow pavement of a busy main street, a few tables inside, only one of which is occupied by a middle-aged couple sitting over two small glasses of wine and a plate of thick pizza cut into squares. The couple stare intently into one another’s eyes and hold hands as if they’re about to start arm-wrestling. Outside an old man sits, nothing on his table at all but pipe, pouch, matches and ashtray. He holds a newspaper up to his face, over which he sends an occasional wandering eye.
I know how to say panini. This is how I put in the time on the journey over, learning scenes from a phrase book. Although the only scene I recall now is the bar scene, and out of that, only the words panini and prego.
An elderly lady with a squashed brown face stares out over the cash register. Another one in her late fifties sweeps cigarette butts across a floor that appears to be used as one huge open-plan ashtray. A man comes out to serve me, wearing a grey silk suit and a sleek silver-tipped moustache.
There is one panino in the glass case on the counter. A puny thing with what looks like a squeeze of white wax peeping out of the slit. I point to it and say, ‘Panini.’ The old lady looks up from the cash register. I add, ‘Prego.’ Then point to a bottle of beer.
The man in the grey suit starts talking to me and I go into a mild panic, shaking my head to let him know I’ve exhausted my vocabulary.
He says, ‘Inglese?‘ Then tries, ‘Americana?‘ And I shake my head again before remembering how to say Irlandese.
’Ah Olandese. Hamsterdam?‘ he suggests.
‘No. Ireland. Irlanda? Dublin? Dublino?’
The woman with the sweeping brush says, ‘Irlanda. Irlanda, vicino a Inghilterra,’ and for some reason the way she says it makes me understand that she’s his wife.
’Ah Irlandese!Che bella!Mamma,’ the man says to the old lady, who has left the cash register and come down the counter to serve me. ‘La signora e Irlandese.’
’Bellissima!‘ Mamma declares and I notice her hand veer away from the glass case where the lone panino cowers like the last brown mouse in the cage. She digs under the counter and begins to pull things from a press: bread, a brick of cheese, an arm of salami.
’Bella Irlanda per una bella signora,’ the man says, practically swooning, his hands lifted out towards me in abject admiration. His wife at the sweeping brush catches my eye, and gently rolls hers to heaven.
The man guides me out to the pavement and, with a maitre d’s flourish, serves me my beer. His mother comes out with a fresh panino, a plate of pizza squares, rolls of salami, a bowl of olives, a bowl of crisps. She begins yapping away about Ireland. I smile a bit, frown a bit. Then she stops, pats my arm as if to say, It’s all right, I know you don’t understand a word I say, but I wanted to say it anyhow. Then she goes inside and resettles her squashy face back over the cash register.
By now, I realize the clue that relies on the name Bella is not going to get me too far. I eat my sandwich and watch the late night traffic of flash cars skim past my nose.
Later I find my way to the promenade and twice walk the length of it. It’s past two in the morning - not that you’d notice. There’s a fifties-style bar with a curved outdoor counter, another bar further along; neat rows of tables and chairs and a man with a microphone in hand, crooning through and around them. I come to a playground; children still playing. A jaded granny on a bench tries not to nod off while her hyperactive grandchild mills up and down a slide. I pass grass verges, flowerbeds, benches, palm trees, a pavilion. Stalls selling jewellery and knick-knacks, and a black man, the tallest man I’ve ever seen, in full yellow robes selling handbags spread out at his feet.
I notice odd things as I walk along, like the amount of adults eating ice cream, and the amount of children who are still up and about, although a few casualties are beginning to show: a toddler flaked out over a father’s shoulder, another child over the side of the buggy as if rigor mortis has just set in. And how everyone seems to stare at each other, old people on benches, younger ones perched on the railings by the sea, those in the centre walking along; everyone openly gawking at everyone else. And how nobody’s drunk. I notice that too.
I step to the right to avoid two roller bladers winging their way towards me. Then I stay with the sea. Looking down the beach back towards
France; umbrellas, furled for the night, stand in troops behind their individual beach clubs. Pubs and restaurants extend into the water on stilts. A queue of people at a nightclub down the way disappear under a canopy beaded with Hollywood lights.
I come to the end of the promenade and a few small hotels. I stop at one called Parigi. A ball has rolled from a pile of plastic toys at the top of the steps. I bring it back up and replace it. The hotel is closed for the night. Through the glass door I can see the foyer: dark wood and marble glazed with dimmed light. It’s quiet down here at this end of the promenade, so quiet I can hear the sea. I study the tariff list pinned to the door but can’t make sense out of the sums of lire. So I write it down to work out later, along with the hotel’s name and telephone number.
The road slants up, the beach goes down. I continue on towards a small church that has a tower like a chimney pot jutting over the sea wall. I light a cigarette, sit on the wall, look out for a while at a black luscious sea. To the east a port of boats and small yachts fidget and jiggle, beyond that a headland stuffed with the lights of another town. Across the way, solid and square, is a statue of a queen that I take to be Victoria.
Next morning sound gets me again. Sweeter, softer, but no less intrusive than the racket from the night before. Every fifteen minutes it wakes me up, this recurrent conversation of bells. In the hour between dawn light and daylight, I lie, until my ear finally stops expecting, and allows me to go back to sleep.
*
It’s only since I’ve arrived here that I realize how little I know about Nonna, how seldom I’ve actually considered her life. Now everywhere I go I think of her. I imagine her sitting on this bench; queuing in that shop; walking along this street in the shade of these trees. I wonder what she’d think of the constant slog of traffic moving down the main street, or the outrageously expensive boutiques and fabric shops it passes on the way. Was every second shop in town a hairdresser’s or beautician’s then, as it is now - the way in an Irish town every second shop is a pub? And did women go out to breakfast dolled up to the nines, as if they’ve already been up for hours at the mirror? And was the shop that sells nothing but seashells here in her time? Or the holy shop, staffed by pretty nuns in cream habits, which appears to sell only statues of angels?
Last Train from Liguria (2010) Page 37