by Jo Riccioni
Lucio gazed at a remnant haze of summer heat pooling in the valley. ‘We wouldn’t be us, though, would we?’ he answered, but his voice had no substance and felt like nothing more than the itch of cicada song in his throat.
‘Come on,’ his brother said. ‘Let’s get the Don over with.’
Padre Ruggiero was asleep in a chair on his verandah. Through the kitchen window Signora Mazzocchi, his housekeeper, called for them to take the baskets down to the cellar and not to wake him. The screech of her voice alone, however, was enough to rouse the priest.
‘Ah, boys,’ he called to them, folding back his rug. They approached him and ducked their heads.
Vittorio drew a shy smile from his repertoire. ‘Sorry, Padre. We didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘Never mind,’ the priest said, but as he replaced his biretta, its red tassel wagged at them like a reprimand.
‘Papa sent us with the last of the grapes.’
He took the basket and felt carefully between the fruit. ‘Yes. Good. Did they have a safe start this morning?’
Lucio knew very well that Padre Ruggiero had already been told every detail of the soldiers’ departure before they’d even disappeared around the bend to Montemezzo. Signora Mazzocchi, who reported to the priest on every prayer and peccadillo of the Montelupinese, was not known as La Mula for nothing. She could make the steep track between the village and the priest’s house faster than anything on four legs, including Padre Ruggiero’s Esperian mare.
Vittorio lowered his eyes at the priest’s question and didn’t answer. Lucio heard him conjure a faint sigh.
‘Well, Primo. Good boy, good boy,’ the priest murmured, reaching for their shoulders and prompting them into a kneeling position. He placed a hand on each of their heads, saying a short prayer for the speedy return of their father. Vittorio whispered a fervent amen.
‘He’ll be back before you know it,’ Father Ruggiero said, pushing their heads away as permission to rise. He reached down and pulled out a large bunch of grapes from one of the baskets. From it he pruned two stems of bruised fruit that had been crushed against the bottle. Lucio expected him to toss these to the ground and scold them, as he often did, for their careless packing. But instead he opened Vittorio’s fingers and placed the weeping clusters in his palm.
‘There. Now off you go, boys. Off with you! And make sure you help your mother. Signora Mazzocchi tells me there are still some late figs rotting on the tree in the Vigna Alba. But I’m sure Letia will manage the land very well without your father. She has you two to help her, after all. So I won’t need to ask another family to take over, will I?’ His smile was rigid and he did not blink.
They left him swatting at a fly, and passed under the trees of his orchards, taking the shortcut home. When they reached the chalk track, Vittorio broke into a run and Lucio struggled to keep up. On the stone platform of Rocca Re, his brother stopped and bent over, breathless. ‘Prick … arsehole,’ he yelled, his neck bulging with the effort of it, ‘fuckwit!’ A trickle of grape juice dribbled through his fingers onto his dusty boots. He jerked his fist up, knifelike and obscene, hurling the mashed grapes into the air. They stood for a while, and Lucio could almost feel his brother’s anger crackling like static about them.
‘Come on,’ Vittorio said at last, gazing at the drop in front of them. ‘Come on. Fuck it all. Let’s do it … Do it. Jump!’ The words became a chant in his mouth, something tribal, to satisfy the raging in his blood. ‘Jump! Jump!’ It had always been his dare, ever since they had first climbed there alone — to leap from Rocca Re into the scree twelve or fourteen feet below. There the mule track snaked back on itself, continuing down to the village. Jumping Rocca Re would have saved them walking time, but that was never his brother’s motivation. ‘Just to jump,’ Vittorio would explain. ‘Just to do it, that’s why. To be the king of the mountain.’ But he had never actually taken the leap. Not until then.
Before Lucio could put out a hand to stop him, Vittorio had flung himself over the ledge, his wild shriek the only thing left behind. Lucio teetered on the rock’s lip, craning to see: his brother was lying on his back in the loose shingle, a rip in the arm of his shirt blossoming red, his eyes open but vacant.
‘Primo!’ Lucio cried. ‘Pri?’ A chill surged up his neck and through his hair. He heard a soft groan from below, and another that became a shuddering cough. Finally Vittorio surrendered to a belly laugh, writhing with it as he drew up his cut knees. ‘Your face,’ he wheezed between convulsions. ‘Your face, Guf … peeping over the edge … like I was dead!’
Lucio sat down, his legs dangling over the drop, listening to the thrum of his heart through his whole body.
Vittorio brushed himself off, fingering the cut in his elbow. ‘Come on then, Guf. Jump,’ he called up. ‘Do it. Do it! Challenge the king of the mountain!’
Lucio peered down at his brother’s face — that grin like a spell, the creases at the corners of his eyes half-encouraging, half-critical. He got up and balanced on the edge of the precipice, feeling his fear in the grip of his toes, the weakness of his knees and stomach, the adrenalin that threw every detail into relief and made him weightless with anticipation. His love for Vittorio was exactly that contradiction: the soaring thrill of possibility and the crushing need to protect himself, to protect them both.
He pushed back his hair with his wrist and made his way slowly down the slope of the mule track.
That night Fabrizia, Urso’s wife, was waiting for him under the battlement wall. Her legs were planted wide, her arms crossed over her brawny breasts. ‘Come down,’ she called into the night. ‘Yes, you, Gufo. I know you’re up there.’ He considered the line of her broad jaw, the angry quiver of her shawl in the moonlight. The butcher’s wife was not a woman to refuse. She grunted at him as he dropped down from the shadows into the piazzetta, but once he was in front of her, she hurried away towards her house in Via Allori, her shoes darting like fish under the oceanic sway of her backside.
At the door to her house she paused and sniffed, checking him over. He began to regret following her. Perhaps she was brewing one of her famous scoldings, like the time she stormed into the osteria and dished Urso their anniversary dinner straight onto the briscola cards. The other men had spluttered and sniggered, but when she was gone, the quiet left behind was the worst kind of reprimand, like the hot, grubby calm that follows a sirocco wind, and Urso had squirmed in his seat until enough time had passed for him to slink home.
‘Well, come in, then,’ Fabrizia complained, as if he had asked to follow her. ‘I haven’t got all night.’ He had no idea what he was doing there. Inside the kitchen, she lit the oil lamp and motioned to the scrubbed table. On it was a basket with his jacket folded inside, washed clean of Valeriana’s blood. ‘Take it. There’s a pork knuckle in there, too — for your mamma to make stock.’
He felt the urge to reply, but she waved her hand before her like she was shooing a mosquito. He picked up the basket and stepped back towards the door. As he passed her, she took hold of his arm. ‘Urso —’ She stopped and bit her lip. In the lamplight her skin was downy, pinkly veined about the nose and cheeks. ‘He was quite specific about it,’ she said. ‘Told me it was you and only you who should have it, being the special one, the one to make it.’
He didn’t understand. He wanted to ask her about Urso, to have her ease his mind, but she sucked in her breath and pushed him over the threshold.
‘And make sure you bring that basket back,’ she said. He turned to nod, but she had already shut the door in his face.
In the piazzetta of the old village he squatted under the streetlamp. The cat with the broken tail picked its way over the battlement walls. Draughts funnelling along the alleyways carried the chill of winter that night, and the men at the osteria had gone inside. He heard a cry of ‘Scopone!’ from within, followed by murderous yells and groans. The baske
t at his feet creaked. At first he thought it was the draught that made his jacket stir, but when he put his hand upon it he could feel warmth, a wriggling underneath. A paw jutted out from under the collar. He pulled back the fabric to find a puppy, stretching from sleep. It was tan all over, its ears too big for its body, its belly swollen with worms. Next to it was a bottle of milk and a glass medicine dropper, like the ones his mother used to measure out herbal tinctures to add to the grappa. Urso must have gone to her to borrow it, for no one else in Montelupini used such an instrument. He began to understand why he had never seen the butcher in the days after the hunt. He had been nursing Valeriana’s puppies, keeping them alive with goat’s milk, drop by drop, or trying to, at least. That was an indulgence the men at the osteria would never let him live down. So this shivering runt was all that was left of the seven, the lone survivor of the great cane corso’s litter? It was so small that its entire body was curled within the circle of Valeriana’s spiked collar. He fingered the rusted nails driven through the leather. Beside the collar lay the hard bone handle of Urso’s skinning knife. He drew the blade out of its sheaf and weighed it in his hand. The puppy squirmed again. They had big shoes to fill. Both of them.
The donkey was discovered missing long before Nonno Raimondi. Lucio had thought he was at the osteria all night, but when he checked, Fagiolo shook his head.
‘Barilotto’s not been in all day.’ The innkeeper rubbed at his chin, looking at the end of the bar, where Nonno Raimondi’s stool was vacant. ‘Has your mother checked up at Prugni?’
‘There was a little widow in Gavignano he used to visit in the autumn,’ Polvere called from his spot at the bar. ‘He used to talk about her truffle pig, you know. And her big …’ The baker cupped his hands before his chest.
‘Santa Lucia, Polve, I think those days are past for the old boy,’ Fagiolo said. ‘He could hardly get his leg over a donkey, let alone …’
‘Wouldn’t stop him trying.’ Polvere shrugged. ‘I know Barilo.’
Lucio left them still debating and went home. His mother was on the floor, beside the crate where they had made a bed for the puppy, running its ear between her fingers and thumb. She glanced up. He hated to see the disappointment on her face as he entered alone.
‘It’s typical of him to do this to me.’ She got to her feet and paced the kitchen. ‘He’s only got the one bottle of Gold in his pocket. I checked the cellar. He can’t last a day on that. He should have been home by now.’ She snatched her shawl from the back of the door. The lines of her face had settled from anger into worry.
Lucio picked up the lantern and followed her as she started along Vicolo Giotto, going down towards the vineyards, in the direction of Prugni. A young moon hung over them, weak and nearly transparent. His mother headed beyond the last plot and through a shortcut of waist-high grasses before joining the thin track where the rugged rise of the mountains began again. When she turned to him, her face was pale in the glow of his lamp, her hair loose down her back. She might have just risen from sleep. Or from death, he thought. He knew where she was heading: the single hoary chestnut tree that whistled its lament between the ruins of the old settlement. There, the eerie quiet of the ancient foundation stones made the villagers tell ghost stories of massacred Volsci, the mists clinging to the mountain, scented with the smoke of funeral pyres.
‘He used to go to the ruins to drink himself to oblivion,’ his mother said. ‘He’s crafty. He knows no one ever dares go up there, so he won’t get disturbed or brought home.’ Lucio looked at her. She dared though, didn’t she? She had always been fearless like that. He sometimes believed it was her seizures that made her so. Walking constantly along an abyss would make any other track seem easy.
But the further they climbed, the more he realised they wouldn’t find his grandfather there. At the top of the hill, they sat among the ruins to rest. The chestnut tree creaked and whispered to itself, and the lights of the village broke the night like shards of glass.
A scrabbling sound on the mule track below became footsteps. They saw the swing of a lantern rising over the ridge: Vittorio stood before them, his breath blowing thick and white.
‘I’ve asked all over. Umberto Udine hasn’t seen Nonno or the donkey and he’s grazed his goats halfway to Carpeto today. Fabrizia was in the shop all day and didn’t see him cross the piazza either.’ He sat down beside them to catch his breath. Lucio saw the expectation in his brother’s eyes.
‘So?’ Vittorio asked. He nodded encouragingly, as if the force of his own will might put the words he wanted to hear in his brother’s mouth.
Lucio rubbed his arms. The sweat from the climb was chilling on his skin.
‘Tell me that he’s taken you to the grappa still? Tell me you’ve asked … that he’s showed you.’
‘Vittor,’ his mother warned, but Lucio could see that even she entertained some fleeting hope.
‘Tell me, Gufo,’ Vittorio continued. ‘Tell me you got it out of the old man.’
Lucio nudged his toe at the cracked casings of fallen chestnuts. Somewhere in the scree below, he could hear a gravelly cough, the disgruntled hock of a badger.
‘Porca Giuda!’ Vittorio cried. ‘You didn’t do it, did you? The one thing coming to you, the only thing you had to do and you fuck it up!’
‘Vittorio, don’t,’ his mother said, and his brother growled with frustration. He snatched up his lantern and headed back to the mule path. ‘Where are you going?’ she called after him.
‘To see if I can’t find him before the frost does. I’ll make the old bastard tell me if it’s the last words he gasps.’
His brother’s lantern disappeared into the darkness. He felt his mother close beside him as the temperature dropped even further, and the crust of moon froze in the vast lake of night.
‘He was never going to teach you, you know,’ she said. She crossed her arms about her and ran her hands along her shoulders. ‘He’s jealous of it. Jealous as a lover. He’ll take it to the crypt. But that’s his gift to you.’
He let the words sink in, checked the truth of it in her black eyes, and he felt guilty at his relief — the release from the burden of attention, of expectation, that the grappa would have forced on him. Could Nonno Raimondi really have understood that?
The badger coughed again. They heard its feral spit. He gazed out across the valley and knew where he would find his grandfather.
He reached the plateau of Montemezzo just before dawn broke. Vittorio was right: a frost had settled in the night. The undergrowth was encrusted with it, and for a few minutes, before the first stirring of the birds, he stood listening to his own pulse, and imagined that he was the only living thing in the stiff blue silence. Leaves stirred above him. There was the slow beat of wings among the branches, a night bird retiring. He came to the outcrop and the chapel of Santa Lucia as the first orange rays began to tilt between the trees. The donkey was tied up outside, her ears twitching. He put his hand on her, and she snickered and blew at him as if in reproach that he had taken so long. The grille door was ajar, the key still in the lock. He took it out and held it in his fist: Nonno Raimondi had kept a copy after all these years. The gate keened as he pulled it open. For a second, hope flickered inside him, like the candle burning at Lucia’s feet.
Nonno Raimondi was sitting on the floor to the side of the altar, propped against the unfinished mural. His back was to the grille. Around him were his rags and palette, the unwound roll of his brushes.
‘Nonno,’ he called, but when he touched his grandfather’s shoulder it was leaden, his skin washed in the stony grey that had been creeping from within him for months. Lucio prised the bottle from his hand, but it was not Raimondi Gold. He smelled the turpentine and oil mixture, already separated into its constituent parts. In his grandfather’s other hand was a rag, and before him, on the altar wall, he had begun to scrub away at a segment of the mu
ral. Lucio held his lantern up close to the spot. A section of column at the temple of Syracuse had been reduced to a muddy smear, the paint partially dissolved. He peered at it, squinting in the low light. Underneath it, he thought he could make out the ghost of another image: a faintly mottled variegation, as of feathers, and a round yellow eye that fixed him in its sights.
Leyton
1949
On the green, Uncle Jack was oiling the grass roller for its winter hibernation. Connie leaned against the wooden hut the Leyton cricketers optimistically called the clubhouse, and savoured the smells of summer: chalk and linseed oil, the old wood of a graveyard of stumps, the musty wadding of leg guards. It was also the smell of Uncle Jack, in her mind. Every Saturday as far back as she could remember, he had mowed and manicured the pitch for the Sunday game, even when there was none to be had. During the war, when the Parishes League was suspended and the Leyton Green was lucky to see a match a month — a motley affair made up of Home Guards, servicemen on leave and too-eager boys — he became even more obsessive in this ritual. He seemed to treat it as his personal war effort, as if national morale was reflected in the glossy nap of his flawless green, the pristine white of his bowling crease.
Connie came to help him on Saturday afternoons after work. As a child she had learned to hide in the clubhouse, knowing the alternative was Aunty Bea and the Christian Ladies in the memorial hall, lecturing on how to knit socks or bottle jam for endless bring-and-buys: Warships Week, Fire Watchers, the Red Cross. Compared with the complex world of female alliances formed over ration-book recipes, amateur operatic programs and, now, church-mural commissions, there was something simple, something restful, about Uncle Jack behind his roller. His patient, measured walk, the neat lift of his sprigged brogues, his self-contained purpose calmed her at times when it felt like Leyton was suffocating her every breath. Pacing silently beside him, trying to match his enormous stride on the flattened grass, was one of the most comforting memories of her childhood, one of the few that anchored her. She still liked to slip off her shoes and place her hand beside his on the rusty handle that stained their palms brown, listening to his soft wheeze as he worked, the legacy of the TB that had kept him at home during the war.