The Italian Wife

by Kate Furnivall

  Her thigh pressed along the length of his where they sat side by side in the smoky carriage. Her body needing him, needing the comfort that her mind refused to ask for. During the hour of the journey she stared with unfocused eyes at the beauty of Italy’s green fields and shimmering poplars speeding past and yet for Roberto it was impossible not to imagine Luigi Berotti’s hands claiming ownership of her slender body, his lips leaving the imprint of his kisses on every part of her creamy skin.

  Ten years ago. He reminded himself with a rough shake that it was ten years ago and she had been only seventeen when she married him.

  Don’t judge her, Roberto. Don’t judge her. Any harsher than you judge yourself.

  He turned to her and kissed her hair. He breathed her deep inside him as if by doing so he could inhale the pain, removing all trace of it from her, and in its place leave the solidity, the certainty, the calmness she craved.

  Her hand sought his, sliding her fingers between his, and together they waited for Bellina to come closer.

  Dark blue uniforms. A red stripe down the side of the trousers. A white bandolier across the chest. The carabinieri were out in force. The sight of the dark wall of them standing to attention on the Bellina railway station platform alarmed Roberto, but he turned his back on them, helped Isabella off the train and set off towards the exit gate with no sign of agitation. His aim was to get her out of here as fast as possible.

  ‘Signor Roberto Falco?’

  Colonnello Sepe stood before him. The thin face and brilliantined hair looked deceptively ordinary and innocent in the warm autumn sunshine. Except for the gun on his hip. That didn’t look innocent.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are under arrest, Signor Falco.’

  Beside him Isabella uttered a cry.

  ‘On what charge?’ Roberto demanded.

  ‘On the charge of sexually maltreating a child.’

  ‘What! Don’t be absurd.’

  Isabella stepped in front of him, placing herself between him and Sepe. ‘There’s been a mistake,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Roberto Falco,’ Sepe continued, ‘do you deny that you kissed one of the girls at the convent? Gisella Sevona, to be exact.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ Isabella responded. ‘This is a lie that someone is —’ But she glanced over her shoulder at Roberto’s face and the words died on her lips. ‘Roberto,’ she whispered. ‘No.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Roberto said stiffly. ‘It was nothing more than —’

  ‘You did kiss this Gisella?’

  ‘Yes. But it was as a friend, nothing more. I kissed her forehead.’

  Colonnello Sepe gave a signal to the wall of uniforms which immediately surrounded them. ‘You had only just met the child,’ he pointed out with disgust. ‘So don’t call her your friend, Falco.’

  The handcuffs closed over his wrists. Isabella was wrenched away from him. The black doors of the arrest vehicle slammed shut.

  The girl stood immobile. Trembling.

  Her cheeks were flaming. Her eyes clung to the floor of terracotta tiles in one of the interrogation rooms at the police station. On each side she was flanked by Mother Domenica and Sister Agatha, but her head seemed too heavy for her because it hung down low.

  ‘Gisella, repeat what you told me,’ Mother Domenica commanded, her white neck stretched taut as a swan.

  ‘He kissed me,’ the girl muttered to her feet.

  ‘Say it again.’

  ‘Signor Falco kissed me.’

  ‘By force?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gisella,’ Roberto stated flatly, ‘that’s not true.’

  ‘Silence, photographer,’ Mother Superior hissed. ‘Silence. What you did was an abomination.’ Her colourless eyes flared with righteousness. ‘Our Lord Jesus tells us, “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” You hear those words, photographer? Drowned in the sea. Even that is too good for your damned soul.’

  The woman was a distraction. She wasn’t the one with the key to the handcuffs or with the prison cell waiting to slam shut on him. He switched his attention to Colonnello Sepe and felt his heart clench tight. The policeman had him condemned and convicted already. The dark eyes were bored. They wanted the girl to fall into hysterics, to crumple to the floor, to sob out her accusation and demand that her violator be hanged.

  Instead she hunched in silent misery before him.

  ‘Look at me, Gisella,’ Roberto said quietly, and her furtive gaze sneaked up at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Tell the truth to them. You know and I know what really happened. I only kissed your forehead because you begged me.’ His glance flicked around the sterile room and over the uniforms of the policemen and the nuns. ‘But I know you’re frightened. It’s all right, I understand, I’m not angry with you. But please tell them the truth.’

  The girl in grey spoke to her shoes. ‘I did tell the truth.’

  ‘Condemned out of his own mouth,’ Mother Domenica stated with satisfaction. ‘He admits he kissed her.’ She waved an arm at him like a great bat’s wing, and as it whispered through the air he saw a gleam of triumph leap into her eyes. ‘He will pay for his sins.’

  ‘And you will pay for yours, Mother Domenica,’ Roberto said angrily. ‘You are the one who has forced that child into this situation, but who is forcing you? Who is behind your venom?’

  ‘I am appointed by God to protect these innocent children.’ She raised the metal crucifix that hung on a chain around her neck and thrust it towards him in a dramatic gesture. ‘Be gone, the devil is within you.’

  ‘We are each our own devil and make this world our hell,’ Roberto said harshly. ‘Even you.’

  ‘Enough! Colonnello Sepe, remove this man. You’ve heard enough from his own lips.’

  The policeman regarded her with dislike. ‘I do not require you to tell me my job, Mother Domenica.’ He nodded at the two carabinieri standing to attention by the door and they stepped forward to seize Roberto’s elbow. He turned on Sepe.

  ‘Tell Grassi this will not work. He may have something on that nun over there, but he has nothing on me. This is dangerous. Dangerous to him.’ His words filled the small silent room, banging on the walls. ‘Tell him that from me.’

  ‘Take the prisoner to the cells.’

  37

  Isabella ran into the street with the green door, her lopsided gait jarring at this speed but her mind was oblivious to all else.

  You are under arrest, Signor Falco.

  Colonnello Sepe’s voice. His words. The sour tone of voice. The pleasure he took in his work. They all reverberated through her mind. And Roberto’s It wasn’t like that. Of course it wasn’t like that. Whatever reason he had for kissing the convent girl’s forehead, it was an innocent one, Isabella had no doubt. It was being twisted into something abominable, but by whom?

  That’s what she was here to find out. She raced towards the small huddle of women gathered on the pavement across the road from the house where Roberto lived. The woman in the red dress was there, though not in red today, and her dark eyes were bright and excited. She watched Isabella approach and without a word she extended her arm and pointed a long painted finger at the green door opposite. It was hanging off its hinges.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They came.’ The woman shrugged.

  ‘The Blackshirts?’

  ‘Yes. They didn’t even wait for old Signora Russomanno, who lives downstairs, to open the door. They just knocked it down and barged straight in.’ She cocked her head on one side and gave Isabella a speculative stare. ‘What has he done?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a mistake.’

  A harsh laugh broke from the woman, revealing a chipped front tooth. ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘In this case it’s true.’

  The woman smiled thinly. ‘You want a glass of wine?�
� She shrugged again. ‘You don’t look good.’

  ‘Grazie. But no. I have to find something.’

  ‘In there?’ She nodded up at Roberto’s rooms.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pah! You’re too late.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Go take a look.’

  It would be here. Something would be here.

  Isabella stood in the middle of Roberto’s room. It had been torn apart. They had relished their work, those Blackshirts, and done it thoroughly. The photographs were stripped from the walls and shredded like grey confetti on the floor, catching the sunlight and throwing dancing patterns of it on the ceiling. Every cupboard and every drawer had been ransacked and emptied, their contents tossed in a pile and hammered to pieces by their truncheons. Even the furniture. Broken wooden legs and splintered side panels jabbed up in the air at odd angles.

  But the darkroom was the worst. The filing cabinets of thousands and thousands of photographs had been spilled out all over the floor and his developing chemicals had been poured over them. Images had blackened, faces had melted. The stink was as rotten as the men who did the deed. The Graflex camera was smashed and it broke something inside Isabella. She couldn’t bear to see all Roberto’s work destroyed. Such brutal devastation, it hurt to look at it.

  Her anger threatened to choke her as she crouched, frozen with rage, surrounded by the wreckage. She stirred the sodden heap, searching for anything, any clue, any sign, any glimmer of hope in the blackened mass that would tell her she was right. She had to be right, there had to be something here.

  Where is it, Roberto? Your safety net. Your fallback. For when times get tough. Your insurance against Grassi.

  Because she was certain he had one. Why Grassi would suddenly turn on Roberto like this when he had previously left him free to seek out information and feed it to him, she didn’t know, but Roberto would be prepared. He would have known this day would come.

  Where?

  She picked her way around the apartment, hearing his laughter, seeing his hands holding up the camera to show her, its knobs and levers like extensions of his fingers, his handsome face lit up with a kind of deep commitment. Like a man showing off his lover.

  Where, Roberto, where?

  She stood immobile in the room for five full minutes, her eyes searching. Her mind fighting its way through the chaos. Only then did she fling open the door and charge down the stairs with hair flying behind her.

  How could she have been so stupid?

  His car, his little black Fiat Balilla. It sat patiently under a tarpaulin in the blacksmith’s yard. Roberto had told her that he’d tucked it away there yesterday before travelling to Rome because he didn’t trust Grassi not to have him followed if the car was at the station. Roberto had once helped the blacksmith’s brother when he fell foul of the law against foreign contraband – bringing foreign wine into the country instead of using Italian ones. So the blacksmith was happy to oblige with a corner of his yard occasionally.

  Isabella pulled the tarpaulin off the car, seized the chrome handle and swung open the driver’s door. No one in Bellina locked their cars, it was considered antisocial. She breathed in deeply, seeking his scent, but what greeted her was a faint ripple of the smell of his photographic chemicals – what was it he’d told her? Sodium thiosulfate, that was it. He must have carried it inside the car.

  It made her smile. When she thought her mouth had forgotten how to do such a thing, it curved into the beginnings of a smile and she could feel Roberto watching her. The sensation was so strong that she turned and studied the yard around her with its iron tongs and chisels hung on hooks on the wall and the roar of the forge where the blacksmith was hammering inside his stone shed. Roberto wasn’t here. Of course he wasn’t. Her mind was jittery.

  She began her search. Quick. Thorough. Unobtrusive. No sign of panic to anyone who glanced her way. Under the seat frames, in the pockets, behind the rug folded on the back shelf. She rummaged through everything and peered under the curve of the broad wheel arches.

  Nothing.

  Just a petrol can, a toolkit, a tyre lever and a tripod on the back seat. She moved faster, going through every part of the car. Her hands even explored the engine compartment, searching its oily corners and crannies.

  Nothing.

  Where, Roberto? Where? I know you. You won’t leave your back uncovered.

  She sat herself in the driving seat and sank her forehead on the steering wheel with a moan. What was she missing? What else was there to search?

  With a sudden thought she sat up and looked above at the headlining, a beige cloth that was stretched taunt. She clambered on to her knees and her fingers skimmed it as attentively as she’d seen her father’s fingers explore a patient’s abdomen. But it was smooth and unruffled, nothing hiding behind it. Nevertheless, in desperation she removed a screwdriver from the toolkit and tore it open.

  Only then did it occur to her to look under her feet. The floor was covered with a thick rubberised black matting that was firmly stuck down, but using the screwdriver she prised up the edges and ripped it back in the driver’s footwell and then in the passenger’s.

  Again, nothing.

  She climbed into the rear, sank the tip of the tool under the matting once more and wrenched it free. And there it was. Gazing up at her as if to say ‘What took you so long?’ It was a brown envelope. She snatched it up, tore open the sealed flap and slid out exactly what she expected: a photograph.

  She flipped it over to take a look at the front of the picture and her eyes widened with surprise. She felt a buzzing on her tongue as if she had bitten a live wire and it snapped something into life in her head that had been frozen since the moment she’d heard the words You are under arrest, Signor Falco.

  She clutched the photograph to her chest, as though someone might snatch it away, and covered it possessively with her hands. Abruptly she started to laugh. A strange whooping sound that was wrenched up from deep inside her and set her limbs shaking. She sat in the back of Roberto’s car and laughed till tears came rolling down her cheeks. Only when they finally ceased did she dare look at the photograph again.

  It was a shot of Benito Mussolini himself. In all his finery. A pristine white uniform with a blaze of medals across his chest and his knee-high black boots gleaming like glass. He was in a large courtyard that Isabella didn’t recognise, but the building behind was without question the Party headquarters in Bellina and the Fascist flag fluttered boastfully from above a doorway from which Mussolini had just emerged.

  But Il Duce had missed his footing. Whether through drink or lack of attention, he had skidded off the step into the courtyard and the photograph showed him in mid-air, halfway to the cobbles. His hands were outstretched to break his fall and he looked like a fat white rabbit leaping through the air. Italy’s leader looked absurd. His face was distorted with alarm, his mouth open wide in a shout.

  But the clever part. The wondrous part. The miraculous part of this photograph lay somewhere else, because behind him, still in the shadow of the doorway, stood Chairman Grassi, clearly taken by surprise by his leader’s stumble.

  He was laughing.

  The Blackshirts again. They blocked Isabella’s path across the high-ceilinged marble reception hall of the Party headquarters, but this time she brandished her envelope under their noses.

  ‘Chairman Grassi needs to see this,’ she told them firmly. ‘I promise you he will have you shot if you don’t let me through to show him what’s in here.’

  They hesitated. One held out a hand. ‘Let me have it. I will make sure he sees it.’

  ‘No. The chairman will want to speak to me.’

  ‘That is not possible. You have no appointment.’

  ‘That’s true, but I have an important message for him. It is from Mussolini himself and Il Duce will not be pleased if you get in his way.’

  The Blackshirt laughed. He was young and handsome and did not take kindly to being th
reatened by a woman. He sneered at Isabella openly. ‘Why would Mussolini bother with a cripple like you?’ He started to walk away.

  ‘Because I am Signora Berotti, an important architect in this town.’

  He turned and looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘I dined with Il Duce,’ she informed him. ‘I sat at his table and I have his private ear. That is why. You would be wise to listen to me. You will suffer, I promise you, if you do not take me to see Chairman Grassi immediately.’