‘Roberto, I want to explain something to you.’
He waited. An owl drifted through his headlights on silent ghostly wings.
‘I want to explain,’ she continued, ‘that when I meet someone new, I have to try hard not to hate them.’
Roberto was stunned into silence, but when she didn’t speak again for another half-kilometre he asked, ‘Why is that, Isabella?’
‘The first reason’ – she was staring straight ahead, though he sensed she was seeing nothing – ‘is that I have to try not to hate people for being alive. When my Luigi is dead.’
A dull ache set up behind his eyes. As he changed gear in the car he let the back of his hand brush against her skirt where it hung over the seat, aware that her words sounded like a form of goodbye. He didn’t wish to say goodbye.
‘And the second reason?’
She took a long breath. ‘I was crippled once, Roberto. When my husband was shot. I don’t want to be crippled again. So I stop people coming too close.’
Roberto applied the brake and halted the car, its headlights pooling on a rat that scuttled across the road.
‘Oh, Isabella, I won’t cripple you. I promise you that.’
She lifted a hand and lowered her face into it. But made no sound. It took him a full minute to realise she was crying and that she was embarrassed to be doing so in front of him. The wind stirred the dust in the world outside and here in the car Isabella felt more fragile to him as the light seeped away. Her hair hung in a veil between them but he rested his fingers lightly on her shoulder and left them there, wanting the promise he’d made to flow through the cotton of her jacket and into her skin.
‘I am afraid, Roberto. Afraid of getting scarred again. The way Gabriele is scarred by the loss of his Caterina. What will happen to him now?’
‘He’ll be all right. I’ll make sure of that.’
She nodded, trusting him. ‘You are a generous man, Roberto.’ But her face was still hidden. ‘It’s taken me ten years, but I have made another life. I have my architecture and I am building a new town. I walk and I talk and I eat and drink like any other normal human being. No one can see the scars. Just my limp is a reminder.’
Her voice dropped as she removed her hand from her face and placed it in her lap. ‘No one knows, Roberto. I have said these things to no one before. Not even to my father.’
Roberto curled his hand tightly around hers and could feel the tension strung out in its delicate bones. He leaned back in his seat, giving her room to breathe, space to recover some of the certainty of who she was and what kind of place it was that she lived in. The truncheons had robbed her of that today. He had brushed shoulders with the Blackshirts before and knew how effectively they could destroy a person. He’d seen them tear a man’s belief in himself right out of his heart with a few viciously aimed blows and he couldn’t bear it to happen to her, but he made himself crush the anger that was growling in his gut.
‘I will keep your secret safe, Isabella.’
For the first time she turned her head and looked at him directly, a trace of a smile lifting the shadows from her face. ‘Grazie, Roberto.’
‘Now, will you come and eat my fish with me?’
She looked down at his large knuckles wrapped around her hand and he felt a pulse of heat under his palm.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
She picked at her food as daintily as a cat. He had grilled the red snappers and dished them up with beefy sliced tomatoes drenched in olive oil and with chunks of rough bread to mop it up. He liked looking at her. She had small hands that moved with unconscious grace and she licked the oil that glistened on her full lips with quick flashes of her tongue. Roberto wanted her to sit there and let him take her picture, but he didn’t ask. He wanted to capture the thoughtful way she studied his photographs that were pinned to the walls, but she was still too tense, so he was happy to sit and talk with her and watch the colour return to her cheeks as she sipped her wine.
He was asking her about the design of the new fountain being constructed in the Piazza della Libertà when Isabella said abruptly, ‘Why do you help them?’
‘The Fascists?’
‘No, the Caldarone family.’
He couldn’t tell her the truth. But he could tell her part of the truth.
‘Because, as you saw today, the Caldarones are in a bad state right now and need help.’ He smiled. ‘And to annoy Chairman Grassi, of course.’
Isabella tilted her head back and laughed, setting her hair into a dance as she swung it off her face. Roberto caught a trace of its fragrance, the warm scent of jasmine, and wondered what one of its rich dark curls would feel like between his fingers. He liked the way she laughed. As if she meant it. Really meant it. Too many women laughed politely.
‘So, tell me, Isabella.’ He leaned forward, elbows on the table, closer to her. ‘Why are you hell-bent on helping Rosa?’
The pupils of her dark eyes grew huge for a heartbeat and then she matched him elbow for elbow on the table and leaned forward till her face was only a hand’s breadth from his and he could see the creamy perfection of her skin.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘Rosa is in a bad state right now and needs help.’ Her eyes were solemn but her mouth took on a quick teasing curve. ‘And to annoy Chairman Grassi, of course.’
‘Why take such a risk?’
She looked away. ‘I am already involved with the girl, Roberto, whether I want to be or not. I saw her mother jump to her death from a tower that I created.’ Her gaze settled on one of his photographs, the one of a boy about ten years old with bony elbows and spiky hair carrying a hod piled with bricks up a scaffolding ladder. Five storeys off the ground. A cigarette in his mouth. ‘Allegra Bianchi gave her daughter into my care. I don’t know why, but I intend to find out. For Rosa’s sake… and for mine.’
‘Take care, Isabella. Don’t underestimate the danger of breaking the rules here. You saw what happened today.’
She seemed in no hurry to abandon the black and white image with its world of construction and hard labour, but he saw a frown tighten the corners of her eyes.
‘I’m not the one taking risks with Gabriele,’ she pointed out. ‘Roberto, you can’t fool the ONC agents.’
‘I know.’
Abruptly she jumped to her feet and limped over to the photograph. She inspected it closely. She pushed her nose so tight to it that it struck him she was trying to climb inside the picture. He liked that about her.
‘How do you do it?’ she asked.
‘Do what?’
‘Make it so real.’
‘I went up there. Climbed the scaffolding.’
‘What? With that great big heavy camera?’
He laughed. ‘No, the Graflex is for high quality pictures that are more posed. A cumbersome but superb beast. This one I took with my small Leica using a fifty millimetre lens. It makes me anonymous. People don’t notice it. And I’ve painted its shiny parts black to make it even less noticeable.’
She nodded and glanced around the walls at the other photographs. ‘They’re beautiful. So natural. So intimate.’
‘That’s because I prowl the streets all day, ready to pounce. Stick a big camera in front of people and they freeze, but the Leica lets me sneak up on them.’ He shrugged and waved a hand at one of a man trying to pull a folded newspaper from his dog’s mouth outside the library. ‘I like to trap a moment of life.’
She turned her head, her eyes suddenly darker as if she’d seen or heard something that alarmed her. ‘Is that what you’re doing now?’ she asked. ‘With me? Trapping a moment that you will add to a fine collection? To show someone else later, perhaps.’
He had no idea where it came from, this sudden ferocity, as unexpected as summer lightning, but he could feel the heat of it. He pushed back his chair and moved over to the door that led to the stairs down to the street. He opened it and stood back from it, uncertain whether she would stay or run.
‘See, Isabella, you are not trapped.’
He could hear her breathing.
The electric lamp on the bookshelf cast shadows in the room but not enough to hide the flush of colour that swept up Isabella’s neck and on to the fine bones of her cheeks. She shook her head.
‘I’d better leave,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Coffee first?’
She found something that resembled a smile. It hung crookedly on her face. ‘Another time, thank you.’
‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘There’s no need. I can walk.’
‘Yes, there is. It’s dark out there.’
She shook her head again but suddenly seemed too fatigued to argue. He helped her into the jacket she had abandoned on a chair but he was careful not to touch her, aware of the nervous energy coming off her skin and of her acute desire to be away from him. Once outside, a car swept past, throwing its headlights in her face, and he found himself alert to every flicker of her eyelids and every plume of breath from her lips. Though it was only October there was a touch of winter in the air this evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly.
‘No need to apologise.’ He turned up his collar against the wind and against his cold dismay at losing her so soon. ‘Today was hard, Isabella. I’m not surprised you feel that the sooner you’re out of the hair of this crazy photographer the better. I feel the same myself sometimes.’ He added an easy chuckle to convince her that there was no harm done.
‘It’s not that.’
‘What then?’
She lifted a hand, a faint shift of pale skin in the darkness of the street, and she touched his cheek with her fingertips. That was all.
The night sky was clear and thick with stars, but the mist still slunk along the ground. Roberto drove Isabella home through the quiet streets. He parked his car on the roadside and walked her into the elegant courtyard of her apartment block, conscious that her limp was noticeably worse. He could see she had no strength left to fight against the pain and he didn’t like to imagine what kind of effort that must take each day.
‘Buonanotte, signora,’ he said to her. ‘Sleep well.’
But again her pale hand crept out of the darkness of the doorway and reached for him. This time it attached itself to the lapel of his jacket and didn’t let go.
‘Roberto, forget about the convent. I’ve changed my mind. Don’t go there. Stay away from it completely. No photographs.’
‘But how else will you know whether Rosa is still there?’
‘That’s my problem. Forget I ever asked you. Please, just don’t go near Mother Domenica and her prison-school.’
‘Why?’
‘I should never have got you involved.’
‘Ah, Isabella, don’t you realise it’s too late for that? I am already involved. We are already involved.’
He heard her breath catch in her throat and felt her fingers tighten on his lapel. ‘No photographs,’ she repeated, scrutinising his face fiercely. ‘It might be dangerous.’
‘Don’t imagine,’ he told her, rubbing the bruise on his neck, ‘that all Blackshirts are like those brutal men today. To be a Blackshirt doesn’t mean you have to have a black heart.’
She made an odd sound under her breath and stiffly unlaced her fingers from his lapel. The mist in the courtyard seemed to possess form and weight, like a person standing between them, and Roberto didn’t care to put a name to whom that person might be. Instead he stepped back and headed for the car.
‘Grazie for the fish,’ he called out, and raised a hand in farewell.
Only when he was out of sight did he check the weight of the gun in his pocket.
‘Are you ready?’
‘We’re ready,’ Gabriele answered, propped against the doorpost for support.
‘Take only what you can carry,’ Roberto told him.
The moon had risen, turning the road across the flat plain into a river of polished steel that flowed through the darkness, but still the mist stalked the fields and ditches like smoke in great white drifts that came and went at will, obscuring stretches of the road. It was the mist that would be their friend tonight.
Four old cardboard suitcases tied up with string stood outside the house and beside them lay four bundles wrapped up in tablecloths, looped in a knot to fasten on someone’s back. One for each of the younger children to carry. The baby was wrapped up warm in Alessandro’s arms and he was pacing back and forth across the yard.
‘The animals are in the barn, all fed and watered for the night,’ the boy said as soon as Roberto stepped out of the car.
‘You’ve done well,’ Roberto told him. ‘We’ll get you all up into the mountains before the rain comes. It will wash away any tracks.’
‘I don’t want to leave here.’ The boy looked lost in his cap and threadbare coat, both too big for him. He gazed out across the black expanse of fields that seemed to exhale their night-breath into the mist. ‘I liked working with the cattle and the land. It was a fine new life for us.’
‘No good looking back, Alessandro.’ Roberto placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He could hear the fear smothered in his young voice. ‘You have to look to the future now.’
‘Roberto is right, son.’ Gabriele limped over to them. ‘This bloody town is no good to us. It’s a place where you can find yourself behind bars or with a cracked skull just for looking at the Fascist flag the wrong way.’ He spat viciously on the ground. ‘That’s what I think of Il Duce.’ He clapped a hand hard on his son’s back. ‘We’ll do better down south, won’t we?’
‘No,’ the boy said stubbornly.
A thin wail rose from near the house. Roberto glanced over to where the sisters were lined up against the wall, thin shadows that scarcely registered in the darkness except that one of the twins was crying. He walked over and crouched down. She was shivering.
‘No need to cry, little one. You’ll soon be warm and safe again.’ He pulled the blanket that was draped over her small shoulders more firmly around her. ‘Make no sound now.’
‘Why can’t we take Columbine with us?’
Her twin patted her sister’s cheek for comfort. ‘Columbine is our pig,’ she whispered to Roberto.
‘No animals, I’m afraid,’ he explained gently. ‘They all belong to the ONC, so they have to remain here.’ He scooped up both children, one on each arm, and carried them to the car. ‘In you get. The sooner we leave the better.’
It was a crush, cramming everyone in, small bodies piled on larger ones and cases strapped to the roof, but Roberto worked fast. He had to get the Caldarones out of here quickly. He kept a sharp watch on the veiled landscape, alert for the slightest movement or the flicker of a torch, but all the time there was a harsh pulse of anger at his throat. Finally he checked the sacking covers taped over the headlights to keep them to no more than a dim glow, but before he slid into the driver’s seat of the overloaded Fiat, Gabriele hobbled up to him and clasped him to his chest. Tears were streaming down the man’s gaunt face and his lips were quivering behind his whiskers.
‘Grazie, my good friend, mille grazie. I was a fool to come to this hell-hole.’ He kissed Roberto ferociously on both cheeks. ‘You were sent from God to save me and my family. You will always be in my prayers.’
‘Thank you, Gabriele.’
Roberto took one final look at the farmstead. A hell-hole? The pulse quickened in his throat. Right now the whole of Italy was one damned hell-hole.
‘Andiamo!’ he said, and started the car.
13
Rosa did not believe that God was in the convent chapel. It was much too plain for Him. It had no marble statues of the saints with sad faces, no gilded crosses. And it smelled of empty stomachs.
Why would He bother to come here?
All it could offer Him was one measly Madonna of painted plaster. The whitewashed walls were as bare as a shroud and the heavy wooden altar looked no better than someone’s dining table. God wouldn’t like it here any
more than she did. He would be in Rome, only an hour away by train. Right now, if Rosa had to guess, he was probably in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Matiri in Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica listening to the huge pipe organ. That’s where Rosa would be. If she had any choice.
So that’s why she didn’t think it was a sin to release the mouse in the chapel. God wouldn’t even notice. She slid the lid off the small bonbon tin she had stolen from behind the refectory curtain where Sister Agatha kept her secret stash of peppermints. Rosa had hidden it under the bib of her grey pinafore dress, aware all through Father Benedict’s sermon of the scratching of tiny claws against the metal. She felt sorry for the poor mouse, imprisoned in a dark place. But it wouldn’t be for long. She’d caught it yesterday in the outside lavatory with the help of her friend Carmela who, Rosa discovered with surprise, was immensely brave when it came to mice.
The Italian Wife Page 13