The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  He had been born on the saint’s name day. His father often reminded him of it, as if that was at least one thing in his favour. No one in Montelupini doubted the special protection that Santa Lucia dei Boschi granted the village. On Sundays, the nuns taught every child how the Duke of Alba, at war with Pope Paul IV, sacked each town in the Lepini mountains, but could not conquer Montelupini’s citadel, thanks to the Lady of Light. And during the great drought, when wells and washhouses throughout Lazio dried up, the spring below Lucia’s grotto continued its determined drip, snaking through the mountain to feed the Fontana Nuova far below. Every family in Montelupini had a personal story of her intercession: children saved from malaria, marriages saved from infidelities, wine saved from souring.

  But Lucio’s love of the saint had always been material, not religious. He loved her because she was unlike all the other statues of sallow saints in the neighbouring churches, the pained Madonnas in their blue-and-white robes, languidly proffering the Christ Child. There was something human to their Santa Lucia: he felt it in the auburn curl of hair at her throat; the flesh tones of her cheeks and lips; even in her shawls, which fell in folds of burned orange, like real silk, about her feet. She was subtle and complex, and he saw in her the hand of an artist who loved man more than he feared God. To Lucio, that made her special enough.

  They said every village had its sceptic, and his grandfather was more than happy to fill that role for Montelupini. ‘Up your arse with Lucia,’ Nonno Raimondi would slur whenever the saint’s protection was invoked. ‘This village is the shithole of Lazio, the thunderbox of Italy. That’s why nothing comes here. That’s what protects us,’ he would call, raising his glass to the women gathered on the steps of San Pietro’s with their candles and rosaries. ‘Porca troia, Montelupini’s so dull even the Spanish flu gave it a miss!’

  Rumour had it that Lucia’s grotto had been the undoing of Nonno Raimondi. The mural behind the effigy remained his last, unfinished work, tormenting him even now. Lucio studied the sketched-in lines of the temple at Syracuse, the partially painted tomb of Sant’Agata, the host of incomplete cherubs. The villagers claimed it was the saint’s doing: Barilotto could never get the mural right because Lucia didn’t want a drunk blasphemer working on her chapel. But whenever Lucio came close to the statue he could understand his grandfather’s impotence. How could Nonno Raimondi’s work live up to the mastery of it, drunk or sober?

  His father muttered and sighed in the pew before him. Dead leaves had scuttled through the grille to rest in the aisle. Outside, Lucio could hear Urso and Valeriana, whose whines were growing with impatience. He felt he should pray: he needed the saint’s help now more than ever, but he was not good at asking in the clenched, fraught way of his father, whose fervid mouthings seemed more like he was locked in mortal combat with God than asking for a blessing. Urso had simply touched the foot of the effigy, crossed himself and gone back to his dog. ‘Yes, my beauty. I know. Yes, yes,’ he could hear the butcher reassuring her in his throaty way. ‘I’m going to miss you too.’

  His words seemed to hover at the door of the grotto, like wasps circling before diving in for their attack, driving home to Lucio the real purpose of this detour to the mountain chapel, to the saint of his birth. His father wasn’t asking a blessing for the hunt. He was praying for the coming war and for his son, for Lucio, to fill his boots and to step up to the mark while he was away. He wanted to tell his father he could do it, take care of the family, take care of everything, when he was gone. But the air in the chapel felt suddenly thin and insufficient, and he had to step away and find the warmth of the sun.

  The light that bounced from the rocks outside made him squint. Urso had laid out the contents of his pockets and the canvas bag. There were two heavy knives with grooved bone handles, not unlike the ones on the butcher’s worn chopping block. There were several coils of dirty rope, and two thicker blades each affixed to lengths of pole, making a kind of pike. Urso reached for one of these and went down on his knee before Lucio. ‘Now, Gufo, courage! Your weapon, sir.’ He shoved the spear into Lucio’s hand, searched his face, and then laughed heartily. ‘Don’t look so worried, boy,’ he whispered. ‘Valeriana does most of the work. She’ll sniff out a dozy spinosa or badger for us, and you can finish it off with your pike. Alright? Forza!’

  Urso reached for the other spear and handed it to Lucio’s father as he emerged from the chapel. ‘Set?’

  He nodded. ‘In the mouth of the wolf!’

  Urso grinned and finished off the saying for good luck: ‘And may the wolf drop dead!’ The starlings in the trees screeched at his growl. He clicked to his dog and set off at a pace Lucio hadn’t thought him capable of.

  They worked their way deeper into the wood with its rises and dells, its briars and fallen trees to be negotiated. Even his father seemed to struggle to keep up with the butcher’s large and practised strides, as good as noiseless as he tracked Valeriana’s tail forging ahead of them through the undergrowth. Her whining had stopped: an expectant silence had descended on both the dog and her master. Lucio listened to the faint workings of the forest.

  Without warning, Valeriana sprang into the ferns and vanished. For several minutes none of them moved. The only sound was the groaning of the trees, the distant chime of birdsong. Uncertain, Lucio kept Urso in his sights. With a jut of his chin, the butcher signalled the dog’s whereabouts and cocked his head. As if at some secret signal, he started to run, coming to an abrupt stop at a tangled thicket of holly and young hornbeams. Valeriana had begun a fierce baying, and alongside it they could pick out the angry grunts and squeals of some cornered beast. Urso lifted his stick to thrash through the scrub, but the two animals burst forth, a young boar bolting towards them with Valeriana clamped to its ear. Lucio caught the flash of her bared teeth and the newly ruptured tusks of the boar. Within seconds she had it down, her massive hind legs firing the barrel of her body, so that he understood for the first time what she had been bred for.

  ‘Get here!’ his father shouted from Urso’s side.

  The butcher was bent over Valeriana, her tail in his fist, struggling to hold her back. ‘Now or never, Gufo. I can’t keep her from its throat for long,’ Urso called. ‘Forza! Su!’

  It was the dream of running with legs of lead. Or the slowing of time so that all the details of a second pass as minutes. He was no more able to move than one of the giant chestnuts rooted all around him. He could hear the blood coursing in his ears, felt the pulse of it in his tongue. The faces of Urso and his father, flushed with adrenalin, glanced up at him and back at the boar, and he saw the disappointment gathering at their mouths.

  When he finally reached them, the animal was panting and pumping blood from its belly where his father had driven his pike, pinning it to the ground. He circled Lucio now with slow, deliberate steps and raised his hand. Lucio flinched, but the blow didn’t come. Instead his father reached for the spear and tugged it from the boar. Its scream caught Lucio like a fist to the stomach. He saw his father’s clamped teeth, heard his animal grunt as, in one fluid stroke, he pulled the head of the beast against his thigh and drew a deep slit across its throat with Urso’s skinning knife. The boar’s blood let over the leaf litter of the forest floor and slapped across Lucio’s boots.

  Valeriana’s whines were all that was left of the confusion. Urso kneeled over her where she had fallen, trying to stem a gash in her side. He kept up a constant murmur as his hands worked over the dog. ‘Come on, my beauty. Up, up … you’ve had worse than this. It’s only a scratch from some angry little squire … Up, now, up!’ He pressed at the dog’s torn belly with the canvas bag as if the wound was no more than a graze.

  ‘Urso.’ His father’s voice was low. ‘Move away.’

  ‘No. It’s not like that,’ the butcher said. ‘It’s not like that, Capo.’

  ‘Paolo, come away.’

  It was the first time L
ucio had heard the butcher’s real name. And he knew then what his father was going to do.

  ‘Go with the boy. Go tie the boar to the spears.’

  Lucio looked at Urso. His cheeks seemed redder, the veins about his nose more broken when wet. His father told him to lead the butcher away from the dog, but instead he stood next to him and waited while he stared down at Valeriana. Eventually he pressed his fingers inside the great hook of the butcher’s hand, hanging limp at his side.

  ‘Gufo?’ Urso said, as if he had forgotten all about him.

  They turned away to the dead boar and Urso set upon it with a vengeance, binding its legs around the pikes with ropes so tight they broke the animal’s skin. He knotted and yanked and knotted until they heard the short, high whine of Valeriana. The butcher fell still. A crow’s caw ripped through the silence.

  His father called and Lucio went to the tree where he stood, the dog’s collar dangling from his hand. ‘You and I will carry the boar down the mountain. You can manage that at least, can’t you, boy?’ He nodded, but his father had already stepped away, towards Urso and the boar.

  Lucio forced himself to look down at Valeriana. The innards that peeped from the gash in her belly were glossy, seething like they were still alive. He thought of her head on Urso’s lap in the osteria and considered it now, its jaw askew. He took off his jacket, laid it on the ground and pulled the dog onto it, tying the sleeves about her until her torn and bloody teats were hidden.

  The trek home was laborious, with the boar hanging between them on the spears. On the flat he took most of its weight, being shorter than his father, but the struggle gave him some distraction from his thoughts. Urso trailed behind them, Valeriana laid across his shoulders, like quarry. They didn’t speak until they reached the Viale Roma. There they parted ways, Urso going down to his allotment on the road to Monteferro, where Lucio imagined he would bury the dog. Lucio wanted to go with him, but his father and the butcher had already clasped fingers in a wordless farewell.

  As they were climbing Via del Soccorso his father said to him, ‘You think it covered your shame, giving your jacket to a dead dog?’

  Lucio didn’t answer.

  ‘Perhaps when you have it back you can tell me whether the dog’s blood is easier to wear than the boar’s?’ His father spat into the chalk of the road.

  The beast swung between them. Lucio thought of Valeriana on Urso’s shoulders, her glassy eye and greying tongue. And he thought of his bloody jacket holding together her swollen dugs, full of milk for her puppies. It wasn’t his shame he had most wanted to spare. It was Urso’s.

  Leyton

  1949

  Halfway through summer, Mrs Cleat had begun to leave Connie to tend the shop alone on Tuesday afternoons. The Leyton and Parishes Christian Ladies’ League had been fundraising since VE Day and were now in heated discussion with the Parochial Church Council over the status of what some considered a rather avant-garde mural scheme for St Margaret’s Village Church. The idea of not having a say in such a controversial legacy to posterity, such decisions of high art and donor signage, terrified Mrs Cleat considerably more than leaving Connie in sole charge of her livelihood. Standing on the customer side of the counter in her hat and gloves, Mrs Cleat talked Connie through every emergency that might befall a Tuesday afternoon’s trading. ‘Now remember that catch on the meat slicer, Connie. I don’t want blood all over my new Formica … and keep a lookout for them didicoy … Mrs Watt says she seen caravans up at Buckworth Wold and they’re on the march with forged coupons, no less. Mind what I told you now. If in doubt —’

  ‘— throw them out. Yes, Mrs Cleat, I remember,’ Connie said in a grave voice. She had never once seen a gypsy shopping for groceries in the high street, or a forged coupon for that matter, and it amused her that the coupling of both rarities was the height of criminal masterminding in Mrs Cleat’s head. The shopkeeper appraised her for a moment, her nose cocked upwards as if irony was something that could be smelled, like milk on the turn. Finally her attention flicked to the clock, and with a start she gathered herself together and hurried off to meet Aunty Bea in the memorial hall.

  Connie let out a deep breath. These afternoons of independence had become like oases in the desert of her days. She could silence the bell and have the door wide open to the insects and the pollen-filled afternoon; she could hang up her white coat and serve at the counter with a tea towel tied about her waist and her hair free of its net; she could chat to the old Misses Penny, secretly slipping in whole biscuits and newly opened leaf tea among the barrel remnants and sack dust that Mrs Cleat offloaded to them on special. These short hours she felt as though she was breathing air into the corners of herself, that her existence might not be as paper thin as she had grown to believe. Inevitably there were consequences to pay on Mrs Cleat’s return, but even they were worth the brief time she spent alone, exerting the addictive pleasure of her own will.

  She was not the only person to enjoy the Christian Ladies’ mural meetings. Mr Gilbert now collected his groceries in the hour between the school bell and Mrs Cleat’s return. Connie dealt with the after-school flurry of children with hot pennies and coupons from their mothers, and in the lull that followed began to pre-empt Mr Gilbert’s needs, navigating her way around his tastes and his ration book.

  ‘New Government Cheddar in today. I’ve kept you the first cut. You might have it for your tea,’ she called to him from her ladder behind the counter, having heard his greeting at the door. ‘I’ve got your Branston, too, and some flour and tea.’ She had her back to him and an arm reaching into the dim recesses of an upper shelf. ‘And shoe polish … there, light brown.’ With some effort she freed the tin from above the cartons and packets, and waved it triumphantly over her shoulder. ‘Should match your Logues. I knew we had that colour somewhere.’

  ‘Do you see,’ she heard Mr Gilbert say, ‘how she looks after me? And what attention to detail! Had you even noticed my shoes were tan … and rather worse for wear?’

  He laughed and she turned her head, aware that they were not alone. One of the Italians was with him: the shorter, leaner of the two brothers. He stood behind the counter, his hands in his trouser pockets — almost brazenly, she thought, like he had been coming into Cleat’s all his life. She saw his gaze travelling up her legs on the ladder, resting on the run in her stocking that she had stopped with nail varnish and tried to position under the hem of her skirt. She hurried down and felt the need to put on her white coat. When she had finished busying herself with its buttons, the Italian was still scrutinising her, without apology. He seemed mildly amused. She noticed his skin was golden and glossy as a nut.

  Mr Gilbert waved a hand between them. ‘Vittorio, this is —’

  ‘The girl with the bicicletta … on the hill.’ He brought a hand from his pocket and clenched it around an imaginary handlebar, whistling through his teeth.

  ‘And you’re the whistler,’ Connie said. She started to dust off the scale, before feeling like Mrs Cleat and stopping herself.

  ‘Oh good, you’ve met already,’ Mr Gilbert said matter-of-factly, and he clapped the boy on the back, grinning. ‘Splendid.’

  The Italian tilted his head to the side. ‘Victor Onorati,’ he said. ‘My name is Vic.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. No Italian. He wants no Italian. Everyting Inglish, Inglish,’ Mr Gilbert mimicked. His hand lingered on the boy’s shoulder as they laughed, and their complicity caused a pang in Connie’s stomach, like hunger, but for what she did not know.

  ‘Vittorio here has come bearing gifts. We thought you might like to share them with us. Come for tea at the schoolhouse?’

  ‘Me?’ she said, and felt immediately stupid for it.

  ‘Why not you? Vittorio keeps saying he deserves someone prettier than me to practise his English on, isn’t that right, Vic?’ The boy seemed unashamed at the comment, whether it w
as true or not. ‘Come on, Connie. It will do you good,’ Mr Gilbert said.

  She sensed her neck and cheeks becoming hot. It wasn’t just the compliment or the unexpected invitation. It was the Italian’s composure, as if he already knew the outcome of this meeting and was interested simply in the manner in which it would unfold. She thought of the few village boys his age who came into the shop, often in pairs, their chummy bravado as they made a show of ignoring her while browsing the shelves, before buying what they always bought: five Woodbines or a tube of shaving soap. It felt seductive to be looked at so directly, to be examined quite patently as something desirable and worthy of attention. Before she had even thought through what would happen if she got home late without telling Aunty Bea, she found herself nodding.

  ‘Excellent, then,’ Mr Gilbert said, and began to collect the bags from the counter, thrusting them one after the other into his student’s chest. ‘Come along, Vittorio. If you seriously intend to become a Vic you’re going to have to stop all that staring. It won’t do around here, old boy — making the girls blush to their bobby pins.’ He squeezed Vittorio behind the neck and she watched them leaving, waiting for Mr Gilbert to lift his hat at her through the bay window. But he passed distractedly, steering the boy by his shoulder, and Connie noticed an ease, a physical affability that she had never seen between two men walking on the streets of Leyton until then. A liveliness had settled in Mr Gilbert’s manner, a brightness in his face that had not been there before, and for the first time she could see the man he might have been fifteen or twenty years ago, the man he might have been at her own age. She found herself curious about this change the Italian boy had effected in him, but she now understood the rankling in her stomach was not jealousy. It was apprehension. Staring through the bull’s-eye pane in the shop window, she sensed something shift, some tiny fracture — as if she was at the centre of a kaleidoscope, and everything about her was on the cusp of something new.