by JH Fletcher
Her father shook his head. ‘No, I don’t. But you must stay with your mother. A girl needs her mother. It wouldn’t be right for you to stay here with me.’
Lucy understood that her mother had made up her mind to go and that she would have to go with her. Like it or not.
‘To Italy? Never! I’ll run away!’
But where would she go? Hot tears scalded her eyes as she realised it had all been settled, that all her protests were wasted, that she had never had any choice.
Disbelief and denial were followed by anger. She did not want to go to this foreign place across the sea or say goodbye to her friends. She wanted to stay in what was her home, with the familiar sights and smells and sounds about her. Above all, she did not want her parents to break up.
Helena tried to reassure her. ‘You will write to him. And he will write back.’
‘It’s so far away. No-one will know me or understand me. No-one will like me.’
‘You already speak the language. I made sure of that. As for people not liking you … Of course they will. Why should they not?’
Lucy was not consoled; she shut her ears to her mother’s words. The prospect of living in another country, surrounded by strangers, made her feel lonelier than she ever had in the bush, where the air and emptiness talked to her comfortably, like friends. She went for a walk, by herself.
She spoke to the trees, the birds and air, the bright sky.
‘I shall not forget.’ She could not say it to her father, whom she knew she would miss most of all. He did not speak, either. He never did but she understood his silence, which was part of him. Words were unimportant because each of them understood the other. She knew whose fault it was, this situation that neither she nor her father wanted. But he, it seemed, would not fight and she was too young to defy her mother. The day would come when she could. Then I shall come back, she told herself.
They went to Melbourne and boarded the ship that was to take them to Italy. After they had put to sea she did not speak to her mother for four days.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
On the Italian liner, Trieste-bound via Aden and Suez, Lucy breathed the night air, fresh after the tourist-class cabin shared with her mother and two others, a man and woman who snored all night in time with the metallic creaking of the hull. She rested her hands on the rail, feeling her hair lift in the breeze, and watched the steady unwinding of the wake behind the vessel.
Memory, not grief, filled her as she stood there, joined with thoughts of an unimaginable future. All her feelings came together beneath garlands of stars that filled the sky, hanging low towards an ocean brilliant with phosphorescence.
As she stared at the wake it seemed to point not only to what she had left but what was to come. In particular, to her feelings for the mother who had always been the centre of her life, who had forced her out of the only environment she had known and was now dragging her halfway around the world. Ahead of her was a country and life about which she knew nothing. The prospect scared her. Already she felt lonely, thinking about the years of isolation that she feared lay ahead.
All this, because her mother had decided it must be so. She had taken the first thirteen years of Lucy’s life and cut them away as though they were no longer important. Her life gone, she had to face the future unarmed, as helpless as a baby before the new life she did not want.
Even her name had been changed. Everyone else had called her Lucy but to her mother she had always been Lucia. It had not mattered before; it had been one of the many oddities of having a mother who was not like other mothers, who spoke with a strange accent, who came not from Adelaide or Mildura or even Melbourne but a country far away and unknowable, whose existence she had been able to comprehend only in the stories that her mother had told her, the memories that had come and gone like shadows across her mother’s face.
One particular image remained: of herself in bed, the lamplight yellow about the room, her mother’s face staring down at her as she sang softly the song that in time would become familiar to her, in the language that her mother had taught her from childhood but that she resolved now would never be her own.
A Roma c’è una strada;
in questa strada c’è una casa;
in questa casa c’è una stanza …
In Rome there is a street;
in the street there is a house;
in the house there is a room …
Now, standing on deck in the starlit night, she remembered how it had always made her feel unhappy. She had asked her mother about it once.
‘That’s a sad song.’
‘Of course it’s not! It’s a happy song. About Italy and a wonderful story …’
‘It makes me feel sad, anyway. You sound sad when you sing it. Are you sad?’
‘Of course not.’
But she was. Lucy knew it.
Lucy … Lucia … Perhaps it hadn’t mattered before but it did now. Because she knew, without anyone having to tell her, that she was Lucy. And Lucy was dead.
Her mother had dragged her away from everything she knew, the home and friends that she swore now, watching the silver churning of the wake, would for ever be her own. Why had it happened? Because her mother had been unhappy with her own life. It wasn’t fair; her mother’s unhappiness wasn’t her fault. But it was the reason; she had known it for a long time. Lots of her friends’ parents had fights, it seemed it was something grown-ups did, but recently her own mother’s fights had never been like others.
She would be silent for days, the silence bitter, razor sharp. She would flounce angrily with much muttering and heaving of shoulders, while Lucy watched in apprehension. Finally, one day, there would be screams, tears, the smashing of plates. Lucy had felt she was being smashed, too. Afterwards all would be calm again. Her mother would dry her tears, shrug, even laugh, and all would be well. Until the next time.
The first time it happened, Lucy had told her very special friends about it, as a secret. They had stared round-eyed, admiring her for having a mother so like the volcanoes they had read about at school, whose fires burned everything about them.
‘Maybe she’s a dragon in disguise?’
Lucy had not been sure about dragons. But different … Oh yes.
Now she was going to the strange country of which her mother had talked so often, where presumably everyone would be as different as her mother was. How was she going to survive? Where would she find a friend?
2
All the way across the ocean her mother, speaking Italian with each word articulated as though in a school lesson, told her of this new country. Lucy tried to make sense of what she was hearing but the images remained strange. The thought of the new country frightened her but she took care to keep the fear locked up inside herself. Only once had she let it out. It had been the first thing she had said after leaving Australia, and her mother had screamed at her for hours.
‘How can you say you’ll be frightened? I shall be there to look after you! Italy is going to be your home!’ Much better to keep her terrors covered up, if she could.
Something else she could not forget, words that her mother had repeated to her, again and again, during the voyage.
‘You are going to be a great singer. An opera singer, you understand? Not only great: the greatest opera singer the world has ever known.’
The idea had seemed very strange to her, even crazy. A singer, yes. She would always carry with her the memory of herself singing amid the trees of home. But an opera singer? It was unbelievable, an alien notion in an alien world. Her first response was that she would have nothing to do with it. An opera singer? She had thought once she would like to be a dentist. She could relate to that. It seemed possible. But a singer … Yet it was true she had a good voice. It must be; everyone was always telling her so. Even the captain of the ship had said so the previous day, when he had paid a visit to the tourist class and heard her singing.
‘You must sing a solo in the church
service.’
She had not wanted to do it and said so.
‘Then you must come and sing for our guests in first class. Come tonight. They will love it. All those rich people … Who knows what may come of it for you?’
She hadn’t fancied that, either, but the captain had spoken to her mother, who had insisted.
She had sung and the rich passengers had indeed loved it. A contessa had kissed her and the captain, bowing, had handed her a rose.
Afterwards her mother had hugged her, weeping.
It was hard to decide what frightened her most: her mother’s rages or the thought of being compelled to become the great singer that her mother was determined she should be.
Her mother’s eyes shone, as bright and hard as diamonds.
‘You see? They loved you. You and I together … We shall have the life that I always wanted for us both but could never have in that place. The mallee! Never mind. All that is behind us now. We shall be famous, you and I. Rich and famous! As soon as we get to Italy I shall find you a teacher, Italy is the home of opera. You will have to start working. It will be hard for you, dearest, very hard, but I shall help you. It will be worth it, you will see. Worth it for both of us.’
One thing she knew: her mother was the only person she had in the world, now. If she wanted her mother to love her, she would have to obey. She remembered the applause of the previous night, the contessa’s kiss, the captain’s gift of the flower. It might not be too bad, she thought, but bad or not she would have to do it. Her mother’s love depended on it. We shall be famous, you and I. Rich and famous.
The echoes of her mother’s words, demanding and obsessive, filled her dreams.
3
Helena’s cousin met them off the boat in Trieste. During the long years of separation Guido had buried his mother and made a new life for himself as a schoolteacher in Monfalcone. He seemed to have aged very little. Still unmarried, he was very gallant with both of them, bowing and kissing their hands, and Helena knew from his smile, the fleeting graze of his lips on her skin, that there was or could with some encouragement be more to his greeting than the elaborate courtesy that, after Australia, she found so strange. She enjoyed the feeling of being admired; she had forgotten how flattering, even exciting, it could be.
Guido snapped his fingers, found a dock labourer who was willing for a few lire to carry their bags from the boat to the railway station, half a kilometre away. The streets were crowded with jostling people. Lucia clung while Helena came close to swooning with the voluptuous pleasure of hearing once again the accents of the Triestino dialect.
They boarded the train and watched from the window as it followed the track around the edge of the Carso, stark and brooding to the north, while through the other window they could see at intervals the shining waters of the Adriatic. They passed hamlets spiked with poplars, their crumbling, honey-coloured feet in the sea. At length the train turned north past the western end of the Carso and the sea was behind them.
‘I have a small house in the country, just outside town,’ Guido said as they left the train at Monfalcone. Helena nodded, understanding that to a country boy wheatfields and sky would always be preferable to a city of bells and people and streets.
Guido had left his horse-drawn wagon with a friend. They climbed aboard, he clicked his tongue at the mare and they set out. Beyond the town the slight wind of their motion brought to them the mingled odours of horseflesh and the dust of the hedgerow-lined lane. Like the meadows beyond them, the hedgerows were white with dust and Guido told them there had been no rain for months. It was September, still too early for the rains, and hot. They crossed a succession of riverbeds almost empty of water, the iron-shod wheels rumbling across the wooden planks of the bridges while Helena, with Lucia wide-eyed beside her, stared down at courses choked with boulders, massive and marble-white, with pools of emerald-coloured water standing between them.
‘Once the rains start you’ll see a difference.’
Perhaps Guido was afraid their silence indicated disappointment at the parched landscape. If so, he was wrong. Helena sat with parted lips as she drank like water the brilliance of the light, the slowly unfolding landscape of the country that, so peacefully, had taken her to its generous heart once more.
Only now did she discover how much, during the long years of exile, she had missed this land.
Lucia was tugging at her arm. ‘I thought we would see more mountains.’
The child was right. They had passed close by the southern flank of Mount Hermada on the train journey from Trieste, its pine-clad slopes looming high over their heads, but now the air was hazed with heat and dust and they could see nothing of the mountains to the north.
Helena took her daughter’s hand, smiling reassuringly at her. ‘They are there, all the same.’
Being able to see them did not matter. Knowing they were there was what counted.
They arrived finally at the house standing by itself at the end of a narrow track between wheatfields. There were poplars around the house, a stone-walled yard and a well with a bucket hanging on its rope from a pulley. The house was thatched and small, as Guido had said. There were bright rugs on the flagged floor and the air smelt of books and the polish that, he told them laughingly, he had slapped all over the furniture in anticipation of their arrival.
There was an attic room that they reached from the yard by means of a ladder. It was just large enough to take two narrow beds, with a chest of drawers between them. There was a tiny, north-facing window.
Helena stood in the room and sensed how lonely Lucia must be feeling in this strange place made even stranger by her mother’s familiarity with it. She pointed through the window and spoke to her daughter in English for the first time since leaving Australia. ‘The mountains are over there. Perhaps you’ll be able to see them in the morning, before it gets too hot.’
And there, in the morning, they were. Excited, Lucia woke her very early, shaking her shoulder.
‘I can see the mountains!’
‘Italian! Speak Italian!’
They stood side by side and looked through the window at the plain, patterned with the lines of hedges, the fawn-coloured fields harvested of crops, with beyond them the ramparts of the distant range.
Helena looked at her daughter.
‘Do you like it?’
‘The mountains are very beautiful.’ An answer that was no answer. Lucia was like her mother, not a person to give herself too readily. She would wait, judge and form her own opinions about this place as, in time, she would do about everything in her life.
With that, Helena knew, she would have to be content.
4
Helena walked around the town, familiarising herself with the atmosphere of the land to which she had returned.
In many ways things were very different from her expectations. Despite her cousin’s warnings, she had not anticipated the brittle smartness of fascist Italy, the black uniforms she saw everywhere, the banners and vainglorious speeches, the boots of marching men clashing rhythmically on cobblestones. She refused to let them trouble her. She would soon condition herself to ignore them. With her Italian sense of history she thought how, even here in the north, the cobblestones had witnessed both Caesars and barbarians, purple-clad clerics with the characteristics of both, emperors and armies, victims, conquerors, and men and women flung into arenas of blood-lusting crowds and wild beasts. The stones had outlasted them all, as they would outlast the bombastic futility of this latest generation of strutting men. Helena was determined that she and Lucia would survive as well.
Three days after their arrival she found Guido sitting in the shade outside the back door with his nose in a book.
‘Singing lessons for Lucia. How do I go about arranging them?’
5
Seta Cehovin was a little old lady much folded by the years, like the lemon-scented handkerchiefs she always used. She came from Slovenia and was a childless widow who, after her husba
nd’s early death, had made her living singing in the chorus at the Udine Opera House. She had been retired many years now but still gave lessons to those who could afford them. A week after their arrival, Helena and Lucia went to see her in her small house on the outskirts of the town. Helena spoke to the old lady first in Slovenska Spracha, the Slovene dialect that in the past had been widely spoken in the district, but Signora Cehovin put her in her place very quickly, and in pure Italian, at that.
‘We are Italians here, Signora Fisher. I would be grateful if you would speak to me in the language.’
For Lucia’s sake Helena buttoned her lip. ‘Of course.’
‘And the child? Does she speak Italian, too?
‘Yes.’
‘Good. These are troubled times, Signora. The authorities suspect Slovene-speakers of anti-Italian sentiments. It is as well to remember that.’
She turned to Lucia.
‘And your mother believes you can sing. Well, perhaps. I have found that mothers tend to believe many things about their children. They are not always right. Two questions before we start. First, how old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’
Such a sour mouth.
‘Far too young. Second question: you play the piano, of course?’
Lucia looked at her mother for help.
‘No,’ Helena replied.
‘Not at all?’
‘She has lived all her life far from the town —’
Signora Cehovin showed displeasure. ‘We are not interested in excuses. How can you expect me to take seriously anyone who does not play the piano?’
So far Helena had been meek. Now she set her mouth. ‘She has a fine voice.’
‘So you say.’
‘Yes. And if you take the trouble to listen, you will say so, too.’
The two women clashed eyes. After several seconds’ taut silence, Signora Cehovin returned her attention to Lucia. ‘You want to sing?’