A shocked silence made the room suddenly grow smaller but Rosa dug her fingers in tighter.
‘Let go, you undeserving child.’
‘No.’
Crumbs spilled from her lips. She was suffocating in sugar. Air wouldn’t go in and out of her lungs.
‘Do as I say, girl!’
‘They’re mine.’
‘Release it at once.’
‘No.’
The crucifix that hung around the nun’s neck rattled on its chain as the other veinless hand started to swing forward. Rosa was so fixated on the biscuit package that she didn’t see it coming. It hit her full across the face, sending slugs of half-chewed biscuit sailing out of her mouth over the table and into the milk jug. For no more than a second a numb silence ricocheted through Rosa’s head but then came the bolt of pain and a roaring in her ears. For a moment her mind couldn’t recall where she was, but then the architect’s hands were lifting her to her feet, softly touching her hair, and it was the architect’s voice that hissed, ‘How dare you hit her?’ at the figure in black.
‘Apologise!’
The nun spat the word into the room. She moved stiffly out of her chair, raising herself to her full height, stretching her skinny white-bound neck to its full extent until she looked to Rosa like a crane on a riverbank preparing to strike a frog in the mud.
‘Rosa, apologise to Signora Berotti and to myself. May God forgive you in His mercy. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are no better than your mother.’
That was when the shame came, thick and foul-tasting. It seeped under the door, dripped down the chimney and squeezed under the window frames. Shame that was white-hot when it touched Rosa’s skin. It crawled up her legs, beat its way across her chest, drumming on her heart, and burned a path across her cheeks. She was consumed by shame.
She detached herself from the architect’s touch and backed away with eyes lowered.
‘It’s all right, Rosa, there’s no need to apologise or —’
‘I am sorry, Signora Berotti.’ Rosa dragged air into her lungs. ‘I am sorry, Reverend Mother.’
‘God in Heaven is the One who sees a truly repentant heart,’ the nun said in a brittle voice.
‘The girl has done nothing to repent. Let me speak with her alone, Reverend Mother. Allow me to take her into the courtyard to —’
‘You have done enough, grazie, Signora Berotti,’ the nun said coldly. ‘Please leave now.’
There was a long hard silence in the room. Behind it Rosa’s ears could pick up faint whispers, as though the Devil were laughing behind the paintings of the old men. The only movement came from the architect’s hands as they clenched and unclenched at her sides, long-fingered and restless, a tangle of fine bones that she was holding in check.
‘Do you want me to leave, Rosa?’ the architect asked quietly.
Rosa nodded. Shame scorched her throat.
‘Very well. I’m sorry, Rosa. The biscuits were meant to bring you pleasure, not anguish.’ She picked up her canvas bag. ‘Good afternoon to you both.’
‘Goodbye, signora,’ Mother Domenica said. ‘There’s no need to come again.’
Still Rosa could not bring herself to look at the architect’s face and after a pause Signora Berotti swung away and limped across the Persian rug to the door. There she turned.
‘Take care, Rosa. I am sorry about your mother. You know where I live if you need me.’
The door opened, then closed. She was gone. Rosa tried to call her back but there were no words in her throat and no breath in her lungs. The Reverend Mother did not speak but she seized Rosa’s wrist with her sinless fingers and hauled her across the room under the accusing eyes of the men in red and purple. She swept her down the corridor until she stopped in front of a door and Rosa stood there, mute and obedient. The nun yanked open the door. It was a cupboard full of mops and buckets.
‘Repent!’ she commanded.
She thrust the sinner into the cupboard, slammed the door shut and turned the key. Rosa uttered no sound but stood in total silence, shaking in the darkness.
The darkness kept moving. Shifting around her. It was never still. It brushed itself against Rosa’s skin, cold and clammy, making her turn her head blindly again and again. It twisted through her hair and whispered in her ear sounds that sent her heart fleeing up into her throat. It crept deep into her lungs, squeezing out the air, while her small fingers clawed at the door. She dropped to her knees on the stone floor and begged. She hammered on the door with her clenched fists. With her head. With her feet. With a bucket.
No one came. Not even God.
The hours ticked past. She made herself lie quietly on the hard floor, curling her body into a tight ball, knees up under her nose, but the blackness grew too heavy. It was bruising her ribs, crushing them, so she groped for one of the buckets, turned it upside down and sat on it instead. She paraded through her head those moments that she’d spent walking through Bellina’s streets with the architect, opening her eyes to the buildings, but they were forced out by other images that stalked the darkness. Taking up space. Cracking open her skull. Gnawing at her feet. She cried out once to her mother, but only once.
Don’t let me die. Please, don’t let me die.
The door was thrown open and light streaked inside, making Rosa screw up her eyes. She was startled to see it was morning. She had been in the cupboard fourteen hours and had peed in one of the buckets with no shame.
But she was not the same Rosa when she emerged from the cupboard. She knew that. She could feel it. A part of her was missing – she’d lost the part that wanted to be with people. It had spilled on to the floor in the cupboard, alongside the stinking mops and the rat poison, and made her feel lonelier than ever before.
Sister Agatha was the one who opened the door and stood there with a black Bible in her hand. She made Rosa kneel in the soulless corridor right outside the cupboard and she prayed over the small sinner’s bent head for thirty long minutes. At the end, Rosa asked for forgiveness. But as she trailed behind the shapeless black figure on her way back to her classroom, Rosa knew she had gained something too. She hugged it to herself, as warm and comforting as a kiss.
Rosa knew now that whatever they did to her, these devils in black robes, she would come out of it alive.
Not like her mother.
Rosa had refused to let herself die in the cupboard because she had promised her father that she would keep going. Until he came for her.
‘Where did you live in Rome?’
It was Colonnello Sepe asking the questions this time. He didn’t frighten Rosa, not any more. She knew now what it meant to be frightened and Colonnello Sepe didn’t come close. She was in the Reverend Mother’s high-ceilinged room once more, watched by the secretive eyes on the wall, and the police colonel was trying but failing to make his thin face appear kindly. He was seated behind Mother Domenica’s sturdy oak desk and Rosa was perched in front of it on the edge of a hard chair. The room was too warm. The nun was pretending to read the Bible in her carved chair over by the fire but couldn’t resist glancing across at Rosa each time she spoke.
‘I don’t know the addresses where we stayed,’ Rosa insisted, fighting to keep herself from snatching the heavy brass inkwell from the leather desktop and hurling it at the Reverend Mother. She had even picked out the spot on her white left temple where she wanted it to land. ‘We moved around so often,’ she explained. ‘Rome, Milan, Padua, Naples.’ She shrugged the bony tip of one shoulder. ‘We stayed in a shepherd’s hut in the mountains one year. I liked it up there.’
Rosa made herself meet his eyes and blink in a childish stupid way. He had to believe her and leave her alone.
‘Were you not educated? Didn’t you go to school?’
‘My mother taught me to read and write.’
‘What did she live on?’
Rosa lowered her eyes, her lashes fluttered with nerves. ‘She used to go out in the evening. Sometimes.’ Her mouth grew dry.
&nbs
p; ‘To do what?’
‘Whoring.’
She heard his intake of breath. Felt the nun’s disgust slither across the floor. ‘Whoring’ was a dirty word. Rosa was ashamed to say it, even though her mother had made her promise to use it if she was interrogated. She flicked her tongue over her lips to clean them.
‘Some nights,’ she added, staring at the policeman’s long brown shoes under the desk, ‘she came back smelling of beer and cigarettes.’ She felt a flush rise to her cheeks.
‘Why did she keep moving from place to place?’ the policeman demanded.
‘I don’t know. She never explained. I think it was because…’ She paused and recalled the exact words her mother had made her learn. ‘Because she was running away.’
Colonnello Sepe leaned forward, elbows on the desk, eyes sharp with expectation. Rosa could see that he wanted to grab her by the scruff and shake the words out of her, but he was good at control, this man. Almost as good as she was.
‘What was she running away from?’ He squeezed out half a smile.
‘From herself. That’s what she told me.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘Yes.’ Rosa looked at him with wide innocent eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
9
It was dark and Isabella wasn’t good in the dark. At night her thoughts bumped into one another and elbowed each other out of shape and that was why she didn’t see it coming, this soft, quiet realisation: I should have made more fuss.
She lay in bed and stared relentlessly at the black space that was the ceiling, listening to the rain. It drummed on the shutters so hard that she could picture it churning the oily black water in the drainage canals into a hissing frenzy that could threaten the safety of the town.
The water levels were rising. Six days and nights of unrelenting rain, so that the pumping stations were forced to work overtime to prevent flooding. She was acutely aware that the Agro Pontino fields needed no encouragement, none whatsoever, to transform into a quagmire that would seize any chance to reclaim its land from the controlling fist of Fascism. Isabella lay there wide-eyed among her mangled sheets, certain that she could hear the sucking, squelching, indecent sound of the parched earth drawing in the water, and she was convinced that she felt the house lurch. Actually lurch. Its foundations settling deeper into the mud with a sigh of satisfaction.
But not even the rain could drown out the noise of the slap. The sound of the bloodless hand of the nun making contact with young defenceless skin. It did something bad inside her. The girl’s dark eyes reacted with shock, as though the religious hand had reached in and stolen her soul.
Isabella knew she was the one who could have stood her ground in that stiflingly hot room and demanded that the hard-eyed Reverend Mother account for her action. She could have stormed into Chairman Grassi’s office at the base of her tower or shouted in the face of Colonnello Sepe and insisted that the girl be removed from the Suore di Santa Teresa convent. As a last resort she could even have begged for help from Father Benedict and his gilded altar. She could have called down the Wrath of God to smite that woman’s shaven head.
Suffer little children to come unto me.
That’s what the Bible says, isn’t it? Little children. Rosa was a little child. So Isabella lay on her bed listening to the rain and convincing herself that what she did was right. If she had stormed and shouted, Rosa would have suffered. All of them – Mother Domenica, Chairman Grassi, Colonnello Sepe and even the taciturn Father Benedict – would have taken their anger out on the child. Isabella was sure of that. Rosa would be the one who was chastised, punished in some way that Isabella couldn’t imagine, or even removed from the convent completely to somewhere where Isabella couldn’t reach her.
And she couldn’t risk that.
For Rosa’s sake. And if she was honest with herself, for her own sake too. She had to keep Rosa here. Because the child must know things that she wasn’t saying, things that Isabella needed to hear. What was the connection between Luigi and Allegra Bianchi? What made the woman say what she said, as Isabella sat minding her own business in the town square?
Yet the voice in her head just wouldn’t shut up, the thin whispery one that said over and over till she dragged a pillow over her face, You should have made more fuss.
‘Isabella, no one is talking.’
Francesca had drawn Isabella into the back area of the bakery where the big oven was belching out heat. The air smelled of herbs and freshly baked dough.
‘Who isn’t talking exactly?’
‘The nuns.’ Francesca twitched her hairnet with irritation. ‘I took a delivery of bread out to the convent and as usual they were happy to stop and chat. They always love to hear what’s going on in town, but they were saying nothing. And then when I started to tell the gossips in the wine bars about the abandoned child and her mother, they clammed up.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘Very.’
‘So you think they’re uneasy about discussing Allegra Bianchi and Rosa?’
Francesca nodded. Her dark eyes regarded Isabella with concern, but also there was something guarded behind the concern. She looked away and prodded at a tray of warm rolls, breaking one apart and inhaling the scent of rosemary that rose from it.
‘What is it, Francesca? What else?’
Her friend hesitated, sighed and turned back to her. ‘I think you are playing with fire, Bella.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The nuns were nervous. Someone is making them bite their tongues.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you did glean something, didn’t you?’
Reluctantly the baker nodded her head. ‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
‘One young novice nun, Sister Bernadetta, who doesn’t know the meaning of the word discreet, told me something when she helped me carry the trays back to my van.’
‘What was it?’
‘That Allegra Bianchi had been in prison.’ She pulled an uncomfortable face. ‘That she was again on the run from the police when she came to Bellina.’ She frowned at Isabella. ‘It doesn’t sound good, Bella.’
‘No, it doesn’t. But it would explain why she was so nervous and anxious.’
Isabella tried to imagine what it must have been like to be hunted by the police when you have a child at your side.
‘Thank you, Francesca.’ She picked at the broken roll. It tasted wonderful. ‘One more favour. An easier one this time.’
Francesca looked relieved to change the subject. ‘What is it?’
‘There is a professional photographer in town. Chestnut hair and broad shoulders. I am interested to know more.’
Francesca grinned at her. ‘That’s more like it!’
‘Papa?’
Her father was standing in the living room in his second-best suit, and even though it was not yet seven o’clock on a Sunday morning he was dusting his collection of records, sliding them in and out of their tawny paper sleeves. He liked to handle them almost as much as he liked to listen to them.
‘What is it, Isabella?’
His head remained bent over one of the records and he was smiling at it fondly. Probably Beniamino Gigli as Rodolfo in La Bohème. He was humming contentedly to himself.
‘Do you think I will lose my job?’ she asked bluntly.
The humming ceased. He lifted his head and gave an eloquent shrug of his shoulders. ‘We’re all working here under sufferance, you must realise that, my dear Isabella. If what we do doesn’t please the likes of men such as Chairman Grassi in his marble tower at Party headquarters, then he sends in his Blackshirts in Mussolini’s name and…’ He stopped abruptly and raised his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of defeat. ‘And none of us knows quite what happens then, but men vanish and names are not mentioned again. It happened to my colleague, Dr Pavese. To this day I don’t know what he did to enrage them but he walked down the hospital front steps one d
ay and never came back. We were just informed that someone else would be filling his position.’
‘Do you have any reason to think Dottore Martino, as head of architecture here, doesn’t want me working for him?’
‘No.’
Ah, but you betray yourself, Papa.
His eyes sought out the photograph on the heavy oak sideboard as if seeking forgiveness for the lie. They both looked at it and smiled. She was so beautiful, the woman in the photograph – Isabella’s mother. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head in a double knot and her bright eyes lit up the room in a way that still had the power to make her daughter sit down in front of her to ask her advice. Isabella had inherited her mother’s strong straight nose and high cheekbones, and sometimes when the light was dim she would look in the mirror and see her mamma there. But Isabella had acquired her blue eyes from her father. For the last twenty-one years since her mother’s death, he had not even looked at another woman and every week he lovingly polished the heavy oak furniture that his wife had picked out with such care when they were first married. They rarely talked about her but for both of them she remained forever young and fragrant.
The Italian Wife Page 9