by Jo Riccioni
The soldier’s head nudged back on his neck with a compliance that shocked Lucio as he grabbed it, as if he was handling a child. He pulled him against his chest, heard the surprise lodge in the man’s stretched throat. He felt him stiffen for the fight, but it never came: there was a soft rending hiss, like the piercing of overblown fruit, and then the slap of liquid on rock. And for the first time Lucio felt Urso’s skinning knife become an extension of his hand, the contours of its handle in harmony with the muscles of his fingers and palm. He realised that it wasn’t just his father’s skill that had sliced the jugular of the boar so cleanly: the knife had become a part of him. He felt it now.
The soldier fell backwards, pinning him to the rocks. For a moment the body jerked against him in a strange syncopated rhythm of its own, until Lucio wrapped his arms about the man’s chest and held him there, breathing in his ear until he quivered no more. And they were both as dead weights against the cold stone, the only sound the cuckoo, painfully alive in the new morning.
Leyton
1950
Connie’s night was troubled and full of dreams half begun. She woke feeling confused and regretful, but not about what she’d done with Uncle Jack’s ashes. Her conviction on that count felt so complete in the light of morning that it threw into relief all her other uncertainties, all the other doubts that loomed before her at every turn. She dressed while it was still dark, thinking she could cycle away her mood before the shop threatened to cement it into place, but her bike led her instinctively to St Margaret’s, as it so often did.
The paintings were complete, the bulk of the scaffoldings removed now, so she knew there was little hope of finding Lucio there, losing sleep over them. But still she did, especially when, propping her bike against the lychgate, she saw that the oak door was unlocked and off its latch. She hesitated, not wanting to run into Mr Swann or, worse, Reverend Stanton, and have to explain herself. But it was too early for either of them. The grey clouds were still gilded by the first light, and she couldn’t help going inside to see if Lucio might be asleep on a pew, as if nothing had changed.
She slipped in the door and crept into the nave, but her breath seemed the only life in the stony lung of the church. She stood for a while before the crossing: she had never seen the paintings in natural light, away from the stage spots, and they seemed to have matured now, the colours ripening with the cast of shadows, enhancing the mystery of the scenes to her, the secrets they held. The figures surprised her all over again as she scanned them: Joanna and Salome outside the tomb; John and Peter in Gethsemane; Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary; Saul; Moses. She watched how their expressions changed with the growing light that shafted down the chancel and crept into the nave. And she stopped her breath, feeling like even that tiny sound might disturb the perfect transfiguration of the moment. That was when she sensed it — another presence in the church.
She turned to see a head bowed low in a pew of the north transept, before the mural of St Margaret. ‘Lucio?’ she called. The figure spun around, standing up as he did so, and she saw the angular features, the drawn cheeks of Aldo Onorati. Her first instinct was to leave, to run out of the church, but she held her ground, breathing through her mouth and not daring to move, as if she had just woken something dangerous, an old dog that might bite. She saw him clutch at the back of the pew but realised his grip was more for support, to steady himself on his feet. When she risked a look at his face, she saw his eyes were red and wet, his open lips setting tight, his initial surprise knotting once again into something closed and private.
He sat down heavily and bent his head, considering his hands spread across his knees. He seemed weary to her, as if he had been there all night.
‘I’m sorry,’ she offered at last, feeling she should say something, anything. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘You didn’t,’ he said. His voice was surprisingly soft.
‘I was looking for —’
‘He’s gone.’ He didn’t glance around, and she thought she might back off then, take the chance to slip away, but she stayed — out of ingrained politeness, perhaps, but also curiosity. He wasn’t what she’d expected at all: there was something a little broken that was at odds with what she knew of him, something that reminded her too much of Lucio.
‘Your son is very talented, isn’t he?’ she heard herself say. Her tone was pointed, a challenge in it. It sounded like the voice of someone older, a more collected, assured version of herself.
Aldo Onorati raised his head and considered the mural before him. She thought he was about to contradict her, but he began to nod. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, he is.’
Connie was thrown off-kilter. She realised she’d been expecting an argument, had been preparing herself for one — even wanted it, perhaps. She tried to think of a response that might cover her surprise, but all she saw was St Margaret surveying them knowingly. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ she said. She came closer to the edge of his row, closer to the portrait. At his silence, she cleared her throat, the sound ringing awkwardly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, too loudly. ‘I should have introduced myself. I’m —’
‘I know who you are.’ His weight shifted in the pew with a crack of wood. ‘He told me.’
She nodded. ‘Vittorio.’ His name always seemed a statement, never a question. But Aldo Onorati shook his head and stood up to leave the pew by the opposite end, where he indicated to her the niche within the north transept. He waited while she approached the mural, set in the alcove where she used to play as a child.
The painting of St Dorothea was the only one she hadn’t seen finished. She remembered the night after her trip to the seaside, the maythorn Lucio had been troubling over. As she drew closer, she could see that the bush filled the entire foreground of the view, as if it was the subject. Its flowers weighted the branches, thick and luminous as newly settled snow. And just at eye level, through the thicket, Connie made out a nest, the eggs inside green as olives, the wide beak of the nightingale hen on her stump nearby. She could almost hear again its creaking alarm as Lucio pinned back the branches for her to see.
By the time she looked up to Dorothea’s face, she already knew who she would find there. She didn’t need to trace her thin calves, nearly hidden behind the foliage, the copper curls that twisted about each other down her back, their stark counterpoint against all that white. Heat rushed to her face, doused by an icy flash as she thought of the eyes of the village on her, upon the very feature that singled her out, announcing her like a beacon right there to the side of the pulpit where Reverend Stanton preached. But as she stared at herself captured there on the wall, she found she was most bothered not by what the village would think, but by the way he had conceived her: her hair so prominent because she was walking away, leaving, glancing back over her shoulder, as though at someone who had just called her name.
She heard Aldo Onorati stirring behind her, the scuff of his boots on the flagstones. He came and stood next to her in the recess, and she wiped her cheeks quickly with the heel of her hand.
‘He’s talented, yes … but he’s a fool,’ he said.
She frowned, bracing herself for the argument that might yet come. She wanted to contradict him, to ask why he would say such a thing, how he could bother to understand his son so little. But all she managed was a feeble ‘Why?’
The reflected brilliance of the maythorn seemed to brighten his sallow skin, giving it an odd intensity. ‘He watches,’ Aldo Onorati muttered, as if to himself, ‘but he doesn’t act. He won’t fight. He never has.’
‘Fight?’ she asked. ‘Fight for what?’
‘For what he wants.’
She turned to him, but he was already backing away down the aisle, one hand clutched about his cap, the other deep inside his pocket. He stopped at the door and she caught him glance once more at the painting of St Margaret.
/> She listened to his footsteps on the gravel outside, each one driving something home to her. He was wrong. Aldo Onorati was wrong. She examined the study of St Dorothea again. Lucio had fought. He fought in the way he knew how, the way that was truest to himself: the painting showed her that. It was she who was the coward. She had never fought for what she’d wanted. She looked at her figure among the maythorn blossoms as Lucio saw her, the departing version of herself, so full of promise. And her heart felt as raw as the morning call of the crows among the gravestones — as raw, but as bold and as certain.
Montelupini
1946
The world had been at peace for more than ten months when his father walked back into the village. They had started to believe he wasn’t coming home at all. Lucio spotted him making his way along Via del Soccorso with measured steps, past the missing shutters and falling plaster, the gaping roofs, the charred shell of the town hall. He crossed the piazzetta at the end of the day, as if he’d just returned from a trading trip to Cori. Fagiolo greeted him on the steps of the osteria, and they clasped hands and embraced.
‘Still here, Fagio?’ his father said.
‘Still here, Capo. Still here.’ But Lucio heard the innkeeper’s voice crack and shift registers like a boy’s. Fagiolo cleared his throat. ‘You’re fatter!’ he declared.
His father breathed an uncertain laugh and seemed to grip Fagiolo’s arms a little harder, shaking him affectionately. But he didn’t answer. He didn’t speak of what Lucio knew he saw and felt — the innkeeper’s gaunt frame, the hollow facades and buildings, the lessening of everything he had left behind. His boots shifted on the cobbles as he looked over his shoulder. His eyes traversed the piazzetta, the dark entrance to Vicolo Giotto and back up over the battlement walls, where Lucio sat.
‘Some things are still the same, though,’ his father said. ‘Some things never change,’ he lied.
And it was Fagiolo’s turn not to answer.
Vittorio had written to tell their father of their mother’s death. Once the war was over and the Cori gruppo disbanded, he had come back to live in the village. Lucio didn’t need to read the letter: he knew it wasn’t the truth. Only he and Fabrizia knew what that was, and he hadn’t spoken since the day he’d found his mother by the lake — not a single word, not even to his brother. The version of their mother’s death that Vittorio knew was of Fabrizia’s making. When they came down the mountain with the body, Lucio let her do the talking for both of them: Letia Onorati had had a seizure and fallen down an escarpment, she told the village. She’d scrambled down the scree to reach her, she said, touching her own cuts and bruises. But Letia had never woken up.
It was almost too plain an ending, too uneventful a punishment for the thief of Santa Lucia’s crown, the Nazi whore, the partisan spy. The women crossed themselves and muttered their prayers, but they could not hide their hard mouths, their secret disappointment that Letia Onorati should have come to such an end, after all the turmoil she had caused them. And he watched the men’s expressions soften and glaze still as they remembered her swaying skirts, her graceful neck as she carried her baskets. ‘What a waste,’ was all they said, as if this had not been true of the entire war. ‘What a terrible waste.’
If there were rumours about a baby, Lucio didn’t hear them. Fabrizia had wrapped his sister tightly and hidden her inside his mother’s funeral clothes, only letting her tears fall when the coffin was finally sealed on them both. Perhaps Padre Ruggiero suspected his mother’s infidelity, but if he did, he gave no sign of it.
‘Better such an accident than what might have been,’ he said to Fabrizia, on the steps of San Pietro’s after the funeral service. She glanced at Lucio nervously. ‘I mean the reprisals of the Allies, of course. Against Nazi collaborators.’ His last words were an ominous whisper and he made the sign of the cross, as if he had named Lucifer himself. ‘There were such reports of the forces who came up from the Aurunci — French colonials from Morocco and Africa — black faces and even blacker deeds, all manner of iniquities. Padre Tommaso tells me three women in Frosinone took their own lives rather than live with the shame of it.’ The priest shook his head sadly, but his eye was hard upon them.
Lucio took Fabrizia’s elbow in his hand, felt her weight shift.
‘Evidence again, is it not, of Montelupini’s singular blessings?’ Padre Ruggiero held two fingers up towards Montemezzo and Santa Lucia’s grotto, running his other hand over the crucifix on his chest. ‘Not one of our women touched, thanks to the saint.’
‘Not one, Padre,’ Fabrizia repeated. But when Lucio led her away, he saw her eyes were opaque and flat, unblinking, as he had seen sometimes in animals resigned to the snare, the life in them all but extinguished.
Fagiolo was right. His father was stockier, stronger, like some of the men Lucio had seen return from working factories in the north before the war. At the osteria, they joked that being a prisoner suited him, but not everyone laughed. His father remained quiet. Lucio understood why when he saw what else he had brought home.
In their kitchen the next morning, his father reached into the pockets of his jacket and brought out a gold watch and a gold chain. He laid them on the kitchen table.
‘How did you get them?’ Vittorio asked, picking up the watch and examining it.
‘Farm wages … cutting hedges, weaving bulrushes,’ their father muttered.
Vittorio whistled. ‘Ma-donna.’ He weighed the chain and crucifix in his hand. ‘So you’re saying the English are smart enough to invent machines for the harvest, for drilling seed and threshing, but they’ll pay good money for someone to weave them a basket?’ He pulled in his chin sceptically, but Lucio could see he was hanging on every meagre word their father dropped about life in England.
When the Cori gruppo had disbanded, Vittorio, like so many of his comrades who had had their fingers in the flow of supplies and requisitions, took to profiting from the burgeoning black market. His brother was a natural, always scouting for the next deal, for anything American or English, making connections as far afield as Montemezzo, Valmontone, even Rome. Lucio continued to work their land without complaint, knowing his brother could put more food on the table with one carton of Chesterfields, one shabby and oversized Montgomery, than he was able to after months of labour in the fields. For Vittorio, everything about the war’s victors was superior: their cigarettes, their alcohol, their food, their clothes. He could tell now how desperately Vittorio wanted to hear more of that land of industrialisation, of opportunity, the place where he believed the future lay. Lucio wanted to hear it himself, to believe it too, but if it was so, then why had their father come back? Why hadn’t he simply sent for them?
Vittorio let the chain fall to the table, and it rattled like rain on the corrugated roof of the stable. ‘Gold is good. It will hold its value,’ he said. ‘You might as well light a fire with the lira, but we can do a lot with this.’
‘Can we?’ their father said. His voice was a monotone, but his eyes were restless as spring flies. ‘But what I’m going to do is go to Monteferro.’
‘What for?’ Vittorio asked.
‘I want to trade them.’
‘Already? What do you need?’ His brother was clearly disappointed that this first taste of finery was to disappear as quickly as it arrived. But Lucio also saw Vittorio’s eagerness to show their father what he had become. ‘I can get things for you, you know. I’ve got connections now, Papa. I know a lot of people.’
‘Really? You can get things?’ Lucio remembered the way his father had of making people question themselves. The war hadn’t changed him that much. Lucio’s disappointment felt suddenly heavy in his stomach.
‘Well … I can get cigarettes, some liquor, coffee,’ Vittorio persisted. ‘Tell me what you need.’
‘What I need? What I need is a headstone. You think they sell those on the black market?’
/> They were silent. Their father looked up, but it wasn’t Vittorio he had in his sights. Lucio felt the weight of his gaze fall upon him now, perhaps for the first time since he’d returned.
Through the window above the sink, where his mother had liked to stand, he could see the old spinster, Ardemira, beating a threadbare rug over her balcony. Her hands were almost blue about the broom handle, and as the dust rose up the alley, he felt each blow in his bones like a release. When she stopped beating, the absence of it was like a great void growing in his chest.
He pictured the polished squares of marble in the cemetery, the sepia photographs of the dead strangely alike, rows and rows of them under the cypresses, and the seal of raw cement behind which his mother lay. After the funeral, he had seen the attendant scratching her name in slow, laborious cursive with a stub of chalk: Onorati, L. Rain had started to fall. Nothing more than a brief summer cloudburst that unsettled the dust and made a smell like iron filings. Onorati, L, the attendant wrote again, so there were two strokes over some of the letters, like the memory of another name. Letia Raimondi, Letia Onorati, Rondinella, Leti. So many names after all, he thought, but did anyone really know her? He thought of the baby, the sister he had held in the morning light outside the cave, her milky stare. Nameless and unknown. Did it make any difference?
‘I won’t have the family name chalked on the cement like some pauper’s,’ his father said, his lips barely moving as if his mouth was seized with disgust. ‘We’ll do that for her, at least.’ He fought to keep the accusation from his voice, but Lucio saw it in his face every time his father looked at him. He watched him run the chain into his cupped palm and close his fist over it. ‘Whatever’s left, we’ll use towards replacing the saint’s crown.’
Lucio knew then that he had heard the rumours. But how many of them his father believed, he could only guess.