Suze and I agreed, via a silent exchanged glance, that the subject was closed. Another word, and our darling child would disgrace us by saying something incredibly rude when we next met the beautiful sisters and their mama.
We decided not to risk the ‘couscous’. We ate pasta under the cork oaks in the shimmering light of evening; with a sauce of stewed red pepper strips and tomatoes, and a wine of the region which I’d bought from the campsite bureau. It was delicious, that wine: straw-yellow, dry but not too dry; and so delicately, subtly scented! The tepid air was tinged with indigo, the drowsy scent of the scorched maquis grew stronger as the sun descended. We seemed poised on a pinnacle of exquisite calm: like a foretaste of Paradise.
Suze touched my hand. ‘Here?’ she murmured.
But my peace was not complete. I was thinking of Laura Brown and her twins, and the sad fate of that dirty little girl, trailing along behind such beautiful older sisters. I didn’t answer at once. Suze reached over traced with her finger a little knot of tension, that had formed without my realising it at the corner of my jaw.
‘Not here.’
She stood up, and stretched. ‘Why do I get the feeling that we’ve been invited to this festa by royal command? Well, let’s go, anyway. At least we’ll have something great to look at.’
In spite of Suze’s cynicism and my vague misgivings, we had a terrific time that night, at the little bar called L’Ecureuil. The local population was out in force, far outnumbering us tourists; which always makes for a better atmosphere. The sangria flowed and the guitarists were superb. Perhaps nothing less would have made the evening so memorable. But from the first, fierce, poignant attack of that music, that stiffened all our spines and opened our eyes wide, the festa was alight. Soon as the first set was over people were talking, laughing, speaking in tongues. Barriers of language, nationality and income vanished. People started dancing on the tiny patio, that looked down on Van Gogh terraces of olive trees in red earth. The stars came out, Suze and I danced together. The mayor of the village, a plump little woman in a purple kaftan and tiny black slippers, danced alone: the genuine flamenco, wherever she’d learned it, with haughty eyes and a fiery precision that brought wild applause. Celine and Carmen, indistinguishable in pretty full-skirted sundresses, one red, one blue, danced with anyone who asked them (I hadn’t the courage). Suze said ‘all we need now is the handsome prince’.
‘But how’s he going to choose between them?’
‘He’s a fool if he tries. He should take them both!’
I looked for the third daughter, and spotted her sitting in a corner beside a glum, fat woman in a print overall. She was wearing a different tee-shirt but the same grubby shorts, and brooding over a half-empty glass of cola. The two of them seemed the only people in the world who weren’t enjoying themselves. I know how moody little girls can be. Maybe it was her own idea not to dress up, and her own plan not to have fun. But I felt sorry for the child.
I was eating the couscous after all—having a good time always makes me hungry—when Mrs Brown came to join me. Suze was with Bobbi, indoors, with the crowd of local kids around the table football machine.
This Englishwoman had a very direct way of asking questions and handing over information. As Suze had remarked, there was something autocratic about her friendliness. She had soon told me that the twins were what we had guessed. They were clones: genetic replicants of their mother, with a few enhancements. It was a simple story. She’d been married to a man who was unfortunately infertile, but luckily extremely rich. It had suited his fancy to have his beautiful young wife copied: and then, two of the implanted embryos had ‘come through’ as she put it. ‘I carried them myself,’ she said. ‘though my husband didn’t like it. He thought pregnancy would spoil my figure. But I couldn’t bring myself to use a surrogate. It wouldn’t be the same, would it? They wouldn’t have been completely mine.’
Later, the marriage having ended, her third daughter had been the result of a natural conception with a different father…
A mistake, in other words, I thought. Or an experiment that went wrong. Poor kid!
‘What about you? Did you carry Bobbi, or did Suze?’
‘It was me.’
Thea drew the short straw, we used to joke. We both knew I’d been the lucky one. One parent of a fused-egg embryo is always more compatible with the fetus than the other, and that’s how the choice of birth-mother is made.
‘And, excuse me for asking, did Bobbi have a father?’
I explained, with modest pride, that she was all our own work. The fused-egg embryo treatment, imprinting decided by synthetic methylation, a true recombination of the genetic traits from each female partner…
So we confided, quickly becoming intimate; like people who first suspect and then confirm that they are both members of the same secret society. As indeed we were, though there’s nothing really secret about modern reproduction technology. Bobbi has never met any prejudice. It helps, no doubt, that you have to be relatively rich, and therefore de facto respectable, before you can afford these techniques. I noticed that Mrs Brown’s furtive interest in my daughter (which had struck me when we met on the campsite) diminished when she knew Bobbi’s provenance. The regal Mrs Brown, I decided, had been afraid we Americans had a better, more advanced model of child than her twins. Now she’d assured herself that this was not the case—that Bobbi was a mere copy of her two mothers, with no improvements—her curiosity vanished. We passed on to other topics.
I wondered if I dared to mention the youngest girl, maybe suggest that she and Bobbi could get together. But when I looked around I couldn’t see her. The corner where she’d been lurking was empty.
‘What is it?’ asked Mrs Brown. ‘Is something the matter?’
Celine and Carmen were still happily dancing. ‘I was looking for Marianina.’
‘Oh, she went back to the villa,’ she explained casually. ‘With Germaine, my nanny.’ She laughed. ‘Marianina hates parties. She’s too young, she gets so bored.’ But her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I knew she was hiding something. Marianina, I guessed, had been sent home in some kind of disgrace. Poor little Cinderella!
Bobbi stayed with us at the bar until three am, along with probably every child of her age for miles around except Marianina. We stayed long after Mrs Brown and the beautiful twins had departed, until the very end of the party: when the flamenco guitarists joyously played and everybody sang, at the tops of our voices, the simplest of drinking songs: the songs that everybody in Europe knows; or sings along anyway.
-ce soir je buvais!
ce soir je buvais heureux!
A few hours later I woke up in the trailer, with a terrible hangover and the dim memory of Suze trying in vain to get me to take an Alco-soothe. Since even miraculous modern medicine can do little about the morning after once you’ve let things get that far, I got up. I took a tepid shower in our tiny closet bathroom and went for a walk to clear my head.
That covetable pitch on the topmost terrace, which we had admired when we first arrived, had fallen vacant. The red car that had been parked there had disappeared; so had the little climbing tent. I went up there and sat on a rock, in blissful solitude, gazing southward towards the twinkling three cornered smile of the sea. I was thinking of a paper I had to write, for a conference in the fall; and of finding a house in Provence or the Alps Maritime, with vines around the door and a roof of roman tiles. It was so difficult to choose a resting place, in this summer world where neither Suze nor I had any roots. Too much freedom can be as frustrating as too little.
I wondered if I could see the villa where Mrs Brown was staying.
I didn’t notice the little girl who came scrambling up the hill until she burst out of the bushes right in front of me—and stood there, glowering, holding what looked like a bottle of shampoo. It was Marianina. She had been expecting someone, but not me. This was my first impression as the child stood, stared, and then came slowly towards me.
�
��You left this behind in the showers,’ she said, in French.
‘No, it’s not mine.’
It was very odd. I couldn’t think what she was doing on the campsite, or why she was pretending that she’d come from the sanitaires, when those modest toilet facilities were in completely the opposite direction from her approach. She was dressed as she had been at L’Ecureuil, the same shorts and the same tee-shirt. The contrast between this girl and the rest of her family was more startling in their absence: to think of all that golden perfection and see Marianina’s rough brown head, her scratched, dust-smeared arms and legs as thin as knotted wire. She went on staring at me unpleasantly: a child already embodying the threat of adolescence, a neglected child who would throw stones, let down tyres, perhaps steal. Perhaps she had stolen the bottle of shampoo.
‘Were you looking for someone?’ I tried not to sound aggressive.
‘So, they’ve gone,’ said the little girl.
‘Who?’
‘My friends.’ She came closer: closer than was comfortable. Still sitting on my rock, I was trapped by her scrawny, demanding presence. I could feel her breath.
‘What is it?’
‘We were going to make a rocket.’ She still spoke in French. ‘But they’ve gone.’
‘I don’t understand you. What do you want?’
With an indescribably sly and ugly smile, she thrust a finger into the open mouth of her plastic bottle, and then pulled it out covered in pale slime.
I jumped up. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I did not like the situation. I didn’t want any part of a little girl—perhaps ten, twelve years old- who behaved like this. I did not want to be alone with her. As I sprang to my feet the child darted away. I went to the edge of the terrace and saw her, half way down the hill already, slithering on her bony little rump. As I watched she reached the level ground, turned and stood malignly repeating that sexual-seeming play with the bottle and her grubby finger.
Back at our trailer Suze was making breakfast, breaking fresh eggs into fragrant melted butter. The bread van had arrived at the campsite gates, tooting like a steam-train. Bobbi came running back from there with an armful of warm baguettes. I made coffee. I didn’t mention my encounter. We ate our petit-dejeuner sur l’herbe, and I talked about the paper I was writing.
‘How do you copy a chair?’ I asked Bobbi.
‘You could draw a picture.’
‘That would be a picture of a chair. Another chair is another sum of things taken out of the world. A certain quantity of wood, metal or plastics: varnish, maybe nails, wear on the machinery or tools; a measurable expense of food, or energy from whatever source. Something for something. It’s like double-entry book-keeping. A thousand chairs means a thousand objects at a certain cost per unit. One can bring that cost down, but it is always, allowing for all your expenses, a substantial fraction of the first amount. But if you copy a piece of software a thousand times, what is the cost?’
I was getting my own back for the times when Suze, the scientist, would hold our baby entranced explaining the table of the elements; the anatomy of a star.
‘Eerm, wear and tear on the keyboard? Wear and tear on the storage disc!’
‘Infinitesimal,’ I said. ‘And not equivalent in the same way. This is the problem, Bobbi, and it isn’t just a problem of economics. We have a system of values, of morality, based on people competing with each other to copy things, at the lowest possible cost per unit. That’s capitalism. But when the cost, the object of all this competition, effectively disappears, what happens to our system? Life gets very puzzling. Do you remember the Mickey Mouse episode in Fantasia? When Mickey uses the magician’s spell, and the magic broomsticks just keep on coming, appearing out of nothing, more and more of them, and they won’t stop?’
I’d decided to call my paper ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.
‘Leave the kid alone, Thea,’ said my wife, passing me plate of eggs and dropping a kiss on the tip of Bobbi’s freckled nose. ‘She has no idea what you’re talking about, poor baby.’
‘No, I like it!’ cried our daughter, bouncing up and down. ‘I like it! Let her tell me!’
Our miracle of the modern world: made possible by prosaic laboratory science, but to us completely magical. I thought of that other little girl and her starved, all-too-knowing eyes.
I went to the bureau to buy more of that wine. The manageress, an Italian woman with bushy black hair and a beak of a nose, was in a talkative mood. I had the impression that she approved of Suze and Bobbi and myself. She liked our American passports. She liked the fact that Suze and I were married, a pleasant example of the new world (a newer world than the USA!) showing affection and respect for the old ways. I mentioned the English family, and learned that Mrs Brown was not a regular visitor. She had arrived in St Mauro for the first time a week before: but she had created a good impression by spending money locally. We agreed that the twins were phenomenally pretty.
‘And the youngest girl. I suppose she’s made friends with some other children on the campsite? I saw her here this morning.’ I was uneasy about that child. Her malevolence, or her unhappiness, had cast a shadow on me.
‘Ah. La Cenerentola!’ The woman grimaced and shook her head.
It was the name I’d used myself. ‘Why do you call her Cinderella? Because of her sisters? The Brown sisters certainly aren’t ugly!’
‘I call her that because she’s a sad case. Something went wrong, eh? One only has to look at the older girls to see what they are to the mother.’ She shrugged. ‘Vanity parenting! I’ve heard of it. But it looks as if, the third time, Madame wasted her money.’
I suppose one has to meet prejudice sometime. I muttered, (embarrassed, but feeling it was my duty to defend Mrs Brown), that Bobbi was also the result of an artificial technique.
‘Listen. I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s the fruit of it. Why bear a child, no matter how the baby was conceived, just to do her harm?’ The Italian woman drew herself up, looked from right to left, and leaned darkly forward over her desk, with its innocent sheaves of bright-coloured tourist leaflets. ‘You saw her here, eh?’ she hissed. ‘Do you know why she here on my camping, la cenerentola? She was looking for the couple who have left, those climbers. And do you know what she wanted with them?’
‘Err, no.’
‘Well, I know. That is why they left, obviously, so suddenly: because she’d been with them, and they were ashamed. It was the woman, I expect. She did it too but she was ashamed, and she wanted to get her man away from the nastiness. Believe me, I tell you what I think. I don’t say the couple weren’t to blame. But it surely was not the first time for la cenerentola. A child doesn’t go around asking for that. Not unless she is getting it already, eh? Eh?’
I escaped, feeling terrible. If there wasn’t a word of truth in the manageress’s vicious gossip, it was still extremely distasteful. The next thing I knew, I’d be under suspicion myself. When I got the chance (while Bobbi spent the afternoon sleeping off her late night) I told Suze everything. We agreed that the child did look neglected, and there really might be something wrong, something ugly going on. What could we do? Nothing.
But Mauro had turned sour on us. It was time to move on.
Act II: Cinderella And Her Sisters
Two weeks later we were in a seaside town called Santa Margarita, south of Livorno. We’d decided to give up camping for a while, and reserved rooms through the international clearing-house site on the internet, that boon to impulse-travelers—our booking whirled in digital fragments by the wild logic of the global network, from Siena to Livorno via Hawaii, and Tokyo, and Helsinki. The hotel overlooked a quiet, bright piazza: a renaissance chapel with twisted-candy marble pillars, a pizzeria and a cafe.
‘It’s quiet now,’ said Suze. ‘But at three in the afternoon, anywhere is quiet. Think of the noise at night.’
‘Oh please, oh please,’ begged Bobbi, who only wanted to get to the beach.
The padrone ex
plained that the window shutters were completely soundproof.
‘My wife suffers from asthma, and cannot bear a stuffy atmosphere.’
Ah, but when the shutters were closed tight these rooms—two pretty rooms, and a bathroom between them- would still be airy, beautifully airy, the way you Americans like, because of the inner courtyard-
I stepped out with him onto the open gallery. We looked down, we looked up. He explained the ingenious and environmentally sound air-conditioning system. It was a very nice courtyard, with a fountain pool in the centre and big planters full of greenery. I was delighted with our choice. I suspected Suze was delighted as well, but she was angling for a discount. My Suze always likes to squeeze the envelope: she’s always trying to get the work done with one instruction the less.
‘Suze, this place is lovely-‘ I began, perfidiously. I looked up, once more. La cenerentola was leaning over the gallery rail on the floor above, staring at me. I stepped backwards, really shaken. That sour little face, peering down at me: so vivid, it was like an hallucination.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s go away. Let’s think about it.’
‘Madame, is something wrong?’
‘Thea! You look as if you’re going to faint!’
And alas for me, I almost did faint. I was dizzy, it was the heat, maybe my period was coming on. I couldn’t explain myself, I couldn’t possibly tell the truth. Naturally, by the time the padrone had fussed over me, and his wife had administered delicious lemonade (for the sugar, the best thing for faintness), all discussion was over. We were installed.
But in any case I wasn’t frightened any more. What was there to be frightened about?
I was left at the hotel, lying down, because of my faintness, while Suze took Bobbi for her first swim (the padrone having given careful directions to a very nice, really clean beach). I felt fine. After an hour or so I got up, and went out. There in the piazza, sitting alone at a table outside the cafe, I saw Laura Brown.
Grazing The Long Acre Page 17