The Museum of Things Left Behind

by Seni Glaister

  ‘Say?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t Sergio mention it? We thought it might be appropriate for you to make a speech at the midsummer festa.’ The laboured innocence in Angelo’s voice hinted that he knew very well this would be news to Lizzie.

  ‘No, he didn’t mention it.’ Lizzie pouted, and leaned forward to whisper, ‘In fact, he promised that the very most I would have to do to reinforce my so-called royal status was parade in front of his people at state occasions. I don’t equate parading with speaking.’

  ‘But you might consider it?’ questioned Angelo, with a teasing smile, and speaking at a normal volume to entice Lizzie to do the same.

  But, still whispering, Lizzie was resolute. ‘Absolutely not. As long as I’m here, just visiting, then if people want to mistake me for somebody they think they would like me to be, that’s their problem. If your president chooses to mislead them deliberately, that’s his prerogative. But as soon as I actively engage in the deceit, don’t you see I’d be lying to them? Impersonating a member of the royal family – there are laws against that in my country. It’s probably treasonous. I could be beheaded for it!’

  ‘My dear, I had no idea.’ Angelo put a comforting hand on her arm. ‘Your country still practises the death penalty? That is indeed a terrible and barbaric thing.’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I’m not sure that the beheading thing is accurate. But I wasn’t joking about the treason. I can’t do that. And even without the law prohibiting it, well, I’d feel guilty. Embarrassed. Disloyal. The people I’ve met so far are taking me into their confidence and I’d feel like I was betraying them.’ Lizzie glanced at the room around her, aware that other conversations had dropped to a whisper or dissolved altogether.

  Now Angelo leaned in and spoke quietly into her ear. ‘Don’t you think that the betrayal might be greater the other way around? They are taking you into their confidence because of who they think you are. If you were then to reveal yourself to be somebody quite different, they might feel much more cheated. Hierarchy in this country is incredibly important. The different strata are not enforced but naturally sustain themselves, and we have learned through many centuries of peaceful existence that to remain among your own is a way of perpetuating that peace. Envy is a very destructive force. If you can learn to live without resenting the lifestyle that others lead, you will be much happier. As such, those from the higher-ranking echelons are naturally respected as people of power. If people are befriending you, it is because it is the respectful thing to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the tablecloths have come out for your benefit. You are an important visitor to them. Don’t deny them that little pleasure.’

  ‘I don’t intend to – and I’m certainly not going to break the promise I made to you. But to ask me to promote the lie, that’s going a step too far, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Imagine that the power you have, the real power, is to give pleasure to the people of this country. If you are blessed with this gift, don’t you have a duty to exercise it as completely as possible? If you have it within you to make a few more people even happier by your words, I think that would be a very noble thing to do. Not at all deceitful.’

  ‘But I’m not a speechwriter. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  ‘Come for supper tomorrow, meet my mother. She’ll inspire you. Then we’ll sit down somewhere quietly and prepare something that you’ll feel proud to say and the people here will feel happy to hear.’

  ‘You’ll help me?’

  ‘Absolutely. It would be my pleasure.’ Angelo raised his glass in Lizzie’s direction and took a long, cooling slug of his beer.

  CHAPTER 30

  In Which the Troubles Escalate

  Sergio awoke an hour before his alarm was due to ring after a restless night’s sleep full of disturbing dreams packed with ominous symbols and portentous imagery. There wasn’t a broken ladder or a flooding river into which he couldn’t read the impending uprising of his people and subsequent collapse of his government. As if his troubled thoughts weren’t painful enough, he had also to contend with the relentless scolding and the wagging finger of his father. That crooked digit, stained nicotine yellow, persisted in its disapproval throughout his sleeping and waking hours. He groaned and stumbled, bleary-eyed, out of bed in search of tea, limping into the gloom of his study and rubbing his eyes as he tried to dispel his nightmares. Shying away from the unwelcome glare that the electric lighting would undoubtedly bring, he instead drew his curtains to allow the first glimpses of dawn to herald his day. He froze. Before he had even examined the piazza properly, the silhouette jumped out at him. Still with one hand gripping a fistful of curtain, the other raised in some unfinished task, he stood and stared.

  From the gloom beneath him, the silhouettes quickly took form as his eyes got used to the dull morning light. Not one but two protesters, each armed with a placard. As yet, they did not appear to be fully committed to action because they were chatting quietly to each other. Aware that any further movement might rouse them, Sergio lowered his left hand and gradually helped the curtain fall back into place. He took a step back and swung around, his back to the window. He exhaled slowly, then counted his breaths to restore calm. Then he peeped nervously around the edge of the curtain again but it was still too dark and the placards were not quite at the right angle for him to read the words that inevitably accused him of some heinous shortcoming. He looked at his watch. Not yet six o’clock. If one idle protester during the hallucinogenic heat of the siesta sun had not spelled disaster, then two before dawn certainly did. And what if it wasn’t just two? What if these men were the early risers, the advance guard, and were planning to assemble a whole piazza full of angry young men, all baying for their president’s blood?

  His chest hurt. He put a hand to his heart and wondered if it might oblige him by stopping altogether. That would certainly allow him to avoid the humiliation he was about to face. He waited for a few moments, to be sure that death wasn’t about to come to his rescue, then shed his pyjamas and deftly slipped into yesterday’s trousers, shirt and braces. On the way to the door, he remembered socks and shoes. ‘Must retain some sort of dignity,’ he muttered to himself, feeling far from dignified.

  The two men in the piazza, arguing softly over the time that their protest should begin in order to attract the appropriate attention, were not aware of the downstairs door opening or of their leader tiptoeing gingerly down the path to open the gate. It was only when they heard, ‘You two, here now,’ hissed from the shadows that they simultaneously dropped their placards with a clatter.

  The president slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand to indicate their complete stupidity and signalled that they should follow him. ‘Quietly, please, and bring your things with you,’ he commanded, aware that, if he continued with such superb efficiency, he’d have them out of harm’s way in no time at all.

  The two men followed him on the same journey that Woolf had recently made and the passage was exactly as he had described it. Up the stairs, down the corridor, and then they were being ushered into the president’s expansive private chambers.

  Pointing them each to a chair, Sergio set about boiling the kettle and making himself a cup of tea. He had the beginnings of a crushing headache and he needed to be able to think clearly. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Yes, we’re here about the tea.’

  ‘You’re here about the … No, no, I mean would you like a cup of tea with me?’

  The men eyed each other, unsure of the protocol. They settled on a mumbled ‘No, thank you,’ and sat up straight in their chairs, mustering a confrontational pose, made fractionally harder by the hospitality they were now being offered.

  ‘Jobs, I suppose. You’re concerned about your prospects, are you?’

  One of the men picked his placard from the floor, raising it just high enough to be read. The president picked out the carefully painted words. ‘Servate theam nostram!’ said one.

  The other raised his. ‘Reddite
nobis nostros hortos!’ said the other.

  Sergio rubbed his eyes tiredly. ‘Students?’

  ‘No, farmers,’ muttered one protester, a note of indignation betraying the insult he felt at the error.

  ‘But your sign is written in Latin. Latin tends to be the domain of the educated.’

  ‘We had help.’

  ‘Woolf, I presume.’ Sergio rolled his eyes to indicate his disdain for his adversary.

  The man on the right, the owner of the ‘Save our tea’ placard, nodded, just as the second shook his head. They looked sharply at each other, glaring.

  Sergio tutted. ‘Oh, don’t worry about protecting him. I wasn’t born yesterday. Woolf got his way by protesting and put you up to this. What’s he trying to do? Right the world’s wrongs through bill boards?’

  Both protesters stared sullenly at their dirty fingernails.

  ‘Well, who are you?’ the president said and, in a weary repetition of the routine he’d adopted with Woolf, he reached for his pen.

  ‘Stefano,’ mumbled one.

  ‘Salvatore,’ mumbled the second.

  Sergio eyed them carefully, taking in their utilitarian work clothes, their workers’ hands and strong frames, rendered weak and unassuming by the splendid surroundings they now found themselves in. ‘Come on, then. Out with it. What exactly are you after?’

  Stefano muttered, ‘We want to save our tea, sir,’ unable to meet his president’s eye.

  ‘And what makes you think your tea needs saving? It’s never been better. In fact,’ the president said, dropping his voice to a loud whisper and leaning in to share a secret, ‘I can tell you in complete confidence, and well ahead of the official announcement next week, that our tea quota has been met and that our tea industry is burgeoning.’ He relaxed in his chair, triumphantly.

  Now Stefano looked his president in the eye. ‘We want you to save our tea. We’ve heard rumours, terrible rumours, that the tea is all to be sold. Without tea we have nothing.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re being a little dramatic. Without tea you have less tea. What you have in its place is an income and you can buy anything you want.’

  The men were clearly confused.

  Sergio smiled patiently. ‘I must say, it’s a little early in the morning for a lesson in economics but I can see I’m going to have to deliver one. The requisitioning of the tea is for your own good. We are entering a global market and, as a responsible government, we are ensuring that we are positioned as a country with something to offer. You want prospects, don’t you?’

  The men nodded.

  ‘And opportunities?’

  They nodded again.

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m giving you. A better future! We’re entering a supply chain and, as with any supply chain, the person with the goods to offer is in a very strong negotiating position. We sell our tea and with that we can buy anything we want. I can understand that you might have become sentimentally attached to the crops you grow, but you must trust your government and understand that cash is, arguably, the best crop of all.’

  ‘Will we still have tea to drink?’

  Sergio chuckled. ‘Of course you’ll have tea to drink. We will only sell what is surplus to our requirements. And you will have enough money to buy all the tea you could dream of! Of that you have my word. Does that make you feel better?’

  Stefano frowned but nodded, and continued the examination of his fingernails.

  ‘And you? What’s your concern?’ asked Sergio of Salvatore, more gently now he knew he had the upper hand.

  Salvatore raised his eyes shyly upwards to meet the good-natured enquiry of his president. ‘We want to save our gardens. They’re being taken from us. We no longer have our own land.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course you still have your gardens. We simply issued an instruction to plant them with tea to ensure we meet our collective targets. The gardens are still yours. They belong to your families. Nobody is going to take them away from you.’

  Salvatore looked at Sergio more combatively now, wriggling his bulky body into a more commanding stance in his chair. ‘They are no longer our gardens if we are not free to choose what we plant. They become the government’s gardens then.’

  Sergio weighed this up in his mind, giving it proper consideration. ‘You were not coerced into tea growing, we merely asked for a pulling together of the nation’s efforts and were glad and heartened by the enthusiastic response. If you feel we were being heavy-handed, then forgive me. That was not my intention. Where do you live?’

  ‘Upper north-west. Eleven hundred metres.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the start of the prime tea-growing land. Well, young man, if you’re lucky enough to be blessed with a garden big enough to grow tea you are fortunate indeed. And if I had been born with such luck I would feel very guilty if I complained about it, particularly if I did so in public. How do you think that will make those at the lower levels feel, those who can’t grow tea at all or who haven’t even got a garden? They would think you were a very selfish creature.’

  Salvatore bit his lip, knowing full well that the circumstances of his birth were, indeed, all that separated him from his less fortunate peers.

  ‘And if they got wind of the idea that you were dissatisfied with your beautiful big garden, do you not think they might ask to swap with you? What would you feel then, if you sat in, say, the lower south-west with no garden at all, just a window box full of tomatoes? Would you feel better then?’

  A frown played across Salvatore’s forehead, but he’d lost his argument before he’d ever started. And suddenly, amid the splendour of his president’s furniture, he couldn’t quite remember what his argument was. There would be tea to drink, his president said. There would be money, too. He could grow whatever he wanted, provided they met their quota. And he was a lucky man to have a garden. He felt light-headed.

  Sergio, whose spirits were rising in direct proportion to the sinking of his opponents’, felt cheery enough to try to perk his visitors up a little. ‘Now, gentlemen, what you probably require is a cup of tea yourselves. Am I right?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Imagine,’ said the president, with a benevolent smile, as he poured the brew, ‘this tea we are drinking might well be the very tea you grew. That should make you very, very proud!’

  The men beamed, and with the lip-smacking, grimacing, puckering that always accompanied the first swig of the day the three sat and slurped the reviving liquid from the president’s dainty china cups.

  After they had left, without their placards, the president locked the door. Leaning against it, he breathed deeply. That had been incredibly close. He had pacified them, he felt sure, but somewhere out there somebody was stirring them to revolt. Not Woolf: Woolf was a pawn. And certainly not those two – they had barely put up a fight. But his feelings of impending disaster were now beginning to ring true. He crossed the room and opened the cupboard where he had put the first placard. Now he stacked the two new ones with it. He had to address the root cause of these grievances before they escalated out of control. He would have liked to speak to his ministers about it but they might sense weakness in him. And who knew? It was not out of the question that one was involved in the plot. Cellini had been uncharacteristically anxious. Yes, a plot to overthrow him! One of them was taking confidential information, state secrets, deliberately misleading the people, and now they were being stirred to revolt.

  Angelo. He could talk it through with Angelo, perhaps. But, no, he should trust nobody at the moment. If there was indeed a widespread conspiracy to overthrow him he mustn’t take any chances. It could be one man, it could be two. It could be all twelve under the guidance of Angelo himself. No, if he was going to defeat this evil, he had to act alone until he was very sure of himself.

  CHAPTER 31

  In Which Lizzie Shares a Secret

  To enter Angelo’s house, Lizzie had to bend almost double to fit through the small door. If she had felt tall next to
the men she had so far befriended, then beside Angelo’s mother she felt like a behemoth.

  Nonna Ada was naturally diminutive but had also lost a good few inches through the rounding of her upper back. She was perfectly proportioned within her home, which, two or three streets above the Piazza Rosa, was still central enough to be considered a good address while perhaps lacking the grandeur of the lower levels. It appeared to have been built around her, with her stature in mind, and as such Lizzie felt uncomfortably tall and clumsy – even the teacup she was handed upon arrival struck her as smaller and daintier than necessary. She felt as if she had stumbled into the home of the Seven Dwarfs and might, at any moment, be chased out by an apple-bearing witch.

  Angelo, by contrast, seemed to benefit from the change of scale. His low voice reverberated fetchingly and his frame, as he hugged his mother, seemed manlier than Lizzie had previously appreciated. She now sat perched on the front of her chair, trying to redirect some weight to her feet and away from the seat’s wooden frame for fear of entering the realm of another fairy-tale and having to flee, leaving a broken chair and a bowl of uneaten porridge.

  Upon arrival, Nonna Ada had spoken in faltering English as she had fussed around preparing tea and making her guest comfortable. But as soon as Angelo had removed himself from earshot, perhaps from the house altogether in response to some barked command from his mother, she fell into the much more accomplished form of the language, adopting the structured grammar used so widely among the Vallerosans.

  ‘So. What have you learned about my country?’

  Lizzie blushed a little, wrong-footed by her physical size. ‘I like it very much. It’s absolutely beautiful—’

  Ada interrupted with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘Yes, yes, of course. But what have you learned?’ She leaned forward in her chair expectantly.

  Lizzie pondered the question. She’d thought she had learned quite a lot, but now, put on the spot, she wasn’t sure that she had. She knew that there was a complex political system that involved an unelected dictator, the sort she had been taught to fear, but since her whispered conversation with him in his bathroom and the many cups of tea they had shared, she wasn’t sure he was that sort of dictator after all.