The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  By the time she had avoided Aunty Bea’s questions in the kitchenette, filled a cup with water and carried it back, Mrs Repton was gone. Connie realised she had expected it, and was even relieved. Still, she paced the spot for a while, as if Mrs Repton might return.

  The moon had risen and the shadows were cooler, damper. A few feet away, she caught the glow of something in the rough before the trees. When she got closer, she remembered Mrs Repton’s discarded shoes. She studied the pointed toes, the delicate heels clumped with turf, the very whiteness of the leather, like she had come across a pair of rare nocturnal creatures foraging in the spinney. She shook off her sandals and nudged her toes gingerly into a shoe. As she wobbled on one leg and reached for the other heel, she heard a voice. She swung around to see someone squatting against an oak trunk.

  ‘God!’ she said. ‘How long have you been there?’

  Vittorio nodded towards the shoes. ‘Be careful. They might bite.’

  She heard the amusement in his voice and flicked off the heels a little too quickly, stepping back into her sandals. ‘They do bite. I don’t know how women can wear them. That’s obviously why they take them off whenever they can.’ She turned away, embarrassed, but had to press back a smile despite herself. He’d come looking for her.

  ‘Didn’t you like the fire?’ she said. He shrugged and smirked at her, as if he knew very well what she was really asking. They heard Bobby starting a new song on his clarinet.

  ‘Far Away Places,’ she said. ‘Do you know it? From the radio?’ He shook his head. ‘Bobby’s in the Benford Marching Band, but he wants to get a jazz group together. He’s good enough to.’

  It was nervous chatter, from being there alone with him in the dark. He must have sensed it, for he got up. ‘We can walk.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere.’ He pointed two fingers along the trees. ‘Just to walk.’

  They strolled to the accompaniment of unseen creatures beyond the oaks, woodpigeons snug in the branches overhead. She became aware of the cold, and the nutty smell of the mellowing hedgerows.

  ‘Will you ever go back, d’you think? To Italy?’

  He dug his hands in his pockets. ‘Not now. Maybe one day. When I’m rich.’ He flicked a coin and caught it with his other hand.

  ‘Planning on making a fortune, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was surprised how serious he was, how certain, like it was already mapped out and would be happening soon. ‘You moving on from hoeing sugar beet, then?’

  He didn’t answer at first, and she regretted her tone: he became restless, irritated. ‘My father says we must wait seven years. Mr Repton can help us apply for English passports after that. Then I get a better job.’

  ‘Seven years! It can’t be that long, surely? Why can’t you get another job now?’

  ‘Mr Repton sponsors us. My father says we can’t change. If we don’t have papers they send us back to Italy. And then —’ He stopped and pushed a foot against a tree trunk. His breath was short and angry. ‘Then Lucio and I will be called by the Italian army — for service. My father doesn’t want it. He wants nothing to do with the army, with Italy now. Not anymore.’ His face in the shadows made his mood all the blacker.

  ‘Don’t you miss home at all?’

  He hesitated before nodding, almost guiltily.

  ‘What? What do you miss?’

  ‘The sun.’

  She laughed. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘The water.’

  ‘The water? What, for swimming?’

  ‘For drinking.’

  ‘How can you miss water? Doesn’t water taste the same wherever you are?’

  He shook his head. ‘In our village, high up, there’s a spring that comes from a split in the mountain. It’s cold in the cave where the water comes, and quiet. Like walking inside the rock. And when you drink, you taste the earth and the stone.’

  She imagined the chill of it, the metallic water on her tongue. ‘So what does our water taste like?’

  ‘Here, it tastes different.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He started to walk again. ‘Here, it tastes like sweat.’

  They had come back to where they began, to where the white shoes lay discarded in the grass. He reached down to pick them up. ‘But here, you can make money from sweat. Here, there are lots of chances for someone like me. Then, when I’m rich, I pay someone else to sweat for me. Same as Mr Repton.’ He grinned and took hold of her hand, hooking the straps of the shoes over her fingers. And as he held her wrist, she had to look away so he didn’t see the pleasure it gave her. Or the fear, like being too close to a flare — bright and dazzling but beyond her control, eventually leaving her with nothing but smoke.

  She backed away from him, towards the spot along the path where she had propped her bike. ‘When can I see you?’ he called.

  ‘You know where I work,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I’m going anywhere either.’

  She followed the track and found her bike. When she switched on the lamp and sat back in the saddle, she thought she saw the flash of a face, one she had caught before in her beam. ‘Lucio?’ But the face disappeared, the undergrowth stirring softly, a bird beating up to its roost, swallowed in the black boughs.

  Montelupini

  1943

  The afternoon was damp and claustrophobic. Lucio felt grubby vapours hanging like phantoms over the hills. A lacing of drizzle had begun to collect on his jacket and on the donkey’s coat, visible as frost, and the trees dripped despondently. Ahead of him, Vittorio was as sullen as the weather. It was the first time their mother had allowed them to make the trading trip to Cori without her. The walk across the mountains took the best part of a day, and they had to stay in the town overnight, at a cousin’s house. After the market, which had begun at dawn, their return journey seemed all the longer, not helped by the fact that their trade had been shamefully poor. Even Viviana hadn’t managed to sniff out something for their supper to redeem them. She disappeared from time to time, only to re-emerge from the undergrowth, uninspired, her coat slick and darkened from the wet.

  The buckle on her nail-studded collar jangled intermittently. It was the same one Valeriana had worn. Lucio had needed to pierce an extra hole in the leather to accommodate her smaller neck. She hadn’t grown as big as her mother, but it still amazed him to see the beast she had become, to watch her keen muscular form as she hunted, a far cry from the runt that had once curled in his palms. She’d clung to life as a puppy, stubbornly, the way those who have death close upon their heels sometimes do, surprising everyone. And for that he had called her Viviana, the force of life. Now the name seemed doubly fitting: their past two harvests had been so blighted, their livestock so depleted, that Viviana did not eat the scraps from their table — they had become the guests at hers.

  A scuffle in the scrub made the dog roll off a growl. She froze, then darted away. Vittorio scanned the wilting meadow, clicking his tongue and calling her name, ‘Ia. Iana!’ Within minutes the dog sprang from the shuddering grasses, throwing a spray of dirt into the air ahead of her. They caught an arc of fur, the flash of a white underside, and then Viviana was on top of her quarry, panting and whining, impatient for her orders. It was a rabbit, small and fat, pregnant perhaps. It seemed almost knowing in its stunned compliance. Vittorio pulled out Urso’s bone-handled knife, and Lucio started to fuss at the straps on the donkey’s load, trying not to hear the tug of the blade, the release of innards across the chalk path, the noise of Viviana as she choked them back.

  ‘Better than nothing, I suppose.’ Vittorio grunted and held up the carcass. From the corner of his eye Lucio saw his brother wiping the knife on the grass. Despite everything, he had still not managed to steel his stomach to hunting. It was not in his nature any more than it was in Vittorio’s to pick u
p a pencil and trace the line of Viviana’s ribcage, or catch the angle of her spine as she leaned into the breeze, her tail as straight as a whip. It was Vittorio who had trained her for the chase, and it was Vittorio who had stolen milk to keep her alive as a puppy. Lucio had stood by while his brother ducked into Berto Udine’s goat pen to draw milk from two or three nannies in quick succession, had followed his leisurely walk down the Viale Roma with the corked bottle warm inside his jacket, and had listened in silence as he called good morning to the women at the washhouse.

  ‘Here, let me help you with that basket,’ Vittorio would say to Signora Udine, Berto’s own mother, lifting the load of washing onto her head and turning his grin on the women at their washboards.

  ‘Get on with you, Primo,’ some of them would say, tittering, while others fixed him in their sights and called to each other, ‘Santa Lucia, what I wouldn’t give to be fifteen years younger …’

  Lucio could hardly believe it was the same boy who set traps in the barn at Collelungo and casually mutilated rats and mice, just enough to slow them so the young Viviana could get a sense of the chase, a taste for blood. Or the same boy who could, without thinking, slit the neck of the dog’s first live quarry — a badger, Lucio remembered. In the light of the lantern, the animal’s blood had sprayed across his brother’s cheek, and he had thought about their own blood, running in their veins: how different it was, how different things might have been had his father chosen Primo for that last hunt.

  As they tacked down to join the path at Collelungo, a light flickered in the meadow by the Fontana Nuova.

  ‘It’ll be Corbellino,’ Vittorio muttered. ‘Coming to check his father’s traps, no doubt.’ The poor harvests and general shortage of meat had made anyone who could fashion a snare into a hunter these days. Corbellino was two years older than Lucio, a handsome, popular boy who had been elected leader of the Avanguardisti, an honour for which Vittorio was unable to forgive him.

  ‘We can save him the climb. His traps are empty. I already checked them,’ his brother said with unveiled satisfaction. He held up the carcass of the cony. ‘He can sniff on this if he likes. It’ll be the closest he’ll get to red meat tonight.’

  Lucio said nothing, but the nearer they came to the yellow light, the more they realised it did not swing to the stride of a walker. It glowed static in the night, and gradually other lights began to appear around it. They smelled a fire and roasting meat, and soon became aware of a camp in the meadow. They could hear the clang of pots and utensils, the odd cadence of foreign voices, and intermittent laughter, boisterous and bold.

  They descended the track from Collelungo, mesmerised by what they saw — uncertain, thrilled and indignant at once, as if they had come across a herd of wild stallions among the campo’s mules. They stood in the shadow of the washhouse, watching the silhouettes of soldiers pass between their tents. Lucio strained to see their faces. Some were ruddy and plump-cheeked, no more manly than his own; others had pale skin and hair the colour of maize in the firelight.

  He thought of his father and Urso smoking or playing scopa about a campfire in some unknown place. In his mind, their faces changed, replaced by those of Vittorio and Corbellino, Bocca and Rampichino, all the wide-eyed, glossy-skinned village boys he’d grown up with, telling jokes and playing morra and laughing in their Fascist Youth uniforms. The one face he could not see among them was his own.

  The donkey snorted and sidestepped, and Viviana, who had been sitting patiently on Lucio’s foot, got up and began to pace, sniffing the air. He pulled on Vittorio’s sleeve and began to lead the donkey away, up Via del Soccorso. But his brother was slow to follow, reluctant to drag his gaze from the camp. When he finally did, he brooded the rest of the way home.

  ‘Fagiolo said the Germans would come,’ Lucio offered, wondering if he should have shared the information sooner. ‘There’s been a troop camped in Monteferro for a fortnight. I heard him telling Professore Centini.’

  ‘So what?’ his brother replied. ‘They’re only passing through. Even the bastard circus doesn’t think Montelupini’s worth the stop.’ It was the sort of thing Nonno Raimondi would have said. But Vittorio’s voice cracked, lacking conviction, and Lucio thought it wasn’t the first time his brother — or his grandfather, for that matter — had sworn something they didn’t believe.

  As he undressed that night, Lucio asked Vittorio a question. ‘What do you think they want here? The Germans?’ But his brother wasn’t listening. He was like this sometimes when he hunted: blinkered, unswerving, almost feverish with it. He wouldn’t settle until he had what he wanted. But this time, Lucio didn’t want to imagine what that might be.

  Signora Mazzocchi steadied herself against the counter of the butcher’s shop. Lucio had come in early to bring Fabrizia the pelt of the cony and some of its meat, and now found himself trapped there, the hatch blocked by Padre Ruggiero’s housekeeper. She was red-faced and breathless, tripping over her words.

  ‘Yes … that’s what I saw, I tell you … right in the meadow by the Fontana Nuova … their intimates strung up like flags for all to see!’

  Fabrizia glanced at Lucio and brought her attention back to cleaving the bones before her. They both knew Signora Mazzocchi must have trotted down from Padre Ruggiero’s villa at the first glimmer of dawn, so she could be in the thick of the news as it spread through the village.

  ‘It’s indecent … improper. They’re supposed to be the German army, not a bunch of gypsies … Is that rabbit there, signora?’ she asked Fabrizia, as if to justify her presence in the shop, even though she clearly had no intention of buying meat that morning. Not that there was much on offer: Fabrizia’s supply these days had been reduced to scrawny poultry, the underfed pigs and goats of villagers desperate for cash to buy basic provisions: oil, salt, more flour or maize to tide them over until the harvest. Spring was always the hungriest month in the mountains. Lucio brought her whatever they could spare from Viviana’s quarry and she sold it in the shop, allowing them all a little cash to keep them in staples.

  ‘I’ve already spoken to Professore Centini about it, of course — great bumbling oaf that he is. He says his hands are tied.’ She exhaled peevishly, puffing out her lips and reminding Lucio even more of a mule. The constant simmer of her opinion seemed to bubble up and overflow with a hiss, like milk boiling on a stove. ‘Let’s hope Aldo Onorati comes home soon,’ Signora Mazzocchi said, glancing pointedly over her shoulder at Lucio’s mother, who had just passed the window and entered the shop. ‘Centini is lost without him. Aldo would never have allowed Germans to camp right where our women wash their clothes. It’s asking for trouble … How fresh is that spinosa at the back?’

  Lucio knew his mother was used to the minor insults of the village women — talking of her business without addressing her, as if her condition made her deaf or mute, or plain stupid. But sometimes he suspected they did this for another reason altogether: they couldn’t bear to look her in the face, to fall under her unflinching gaze, for fear of being exposed to her opinions, which they knew to be dangerous, or, worse still, might reveal the pettiness of their own.

  ‘I hardly think so, Signora Mazzocchi,’ his mother said. But she faced the window to the piazza, impatient to be gone.

  ‘Hardly think what, pardon me?’ the housekeeper replied, feigning surprise at being addressed. ‘Do you mean your husband would not have managed these Germans better?’

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I hardly think it’s improper they should be camped there.’

  ‘Oh?’ Signora Mazzocchi flushed, seeming reluctant to be drawn into an exchange.

  ‘Are we not in bed with the Germans now?’ his mother said. ‘They’re going to be seeing our underwear at some point, don’t you think?’

  Lucio heard snickering from behind the counter. Fabrizia opened her mouth and took a deep breath in a half-hearted attempt to stop herself. ‘Ho
w is your son, Signora Mazzocchi?’ she said, her voice unnaturally smooth, solicitous. ‘Has Angelo received his papers yet?’ She picked up her cleaver, and the muscles in her forearms, round and solid as ham hocks, twitched.

  Signora Mazzocchi stiffened. ‘No. Well, I’ll think about that spinosa. Good morning, signore.’ She hurried out and the beaded curtain at the door clacked in her wake. Fabrizia’s stomach made the butcher’s block shudder as she laughed.

  ‘How is it you know the exact thing to shut La Mula up?’ his mother asked.

  ‘The shop feeds me all the latest ammunition.’ Fabrizia wiped her knife. ‘Ah, she makes me sick with her Il Duce this and our men that, and all the while her son’s dodging the call. He’s been seventeen for the last three years. You know she’s packed him off to family in Siracusa? Underneath it all she’s hedging her bets that Mussolini won’t last the spring. But the cheek of the woman, wishing Aldo home, like he could simply hop on a boat.’

  His mother hummed a vague reply, her washing basket creaking on her hip. Lucio stepped through the hatch to the other side of the counter. Fabrizia stopped what she was doing and looked between him and his mother. ‘So it’s true, then? You have heard something.’ They didn’t answer.

  Every time a letter arrived from his father, Lucio felt guilty for it, for not missing him in the way that Fabrizia missed Urso, and he saw the same guilt mirrored in his mother’s face. The letters had come regularly, at first — from Valmontone, then Naples, and later Tripoli. He noticed the way his mother read the thin pages, the way her eyes jumped over the words, as if searching for something she knew she wouldn’t find there. She would leave the sheets in the middle of the kitchen table, perhaps hoping he and Vittorio might read something in them that she could not. But after a while, even Vittorio stopped talking about their father’s desert postings, the day-to-day lives of the soldiers, the early successes of the conflict. As the campaign in North Africa began to falter — the facts relayed by Fagiolo’s wireless, which picked up Radio Londra — they barely spoke of the letters, of their gradual tapering off and then their complete absence.