‘What is it?’ Rosa asked.
‘I can’t meet Bruno Pasqua.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘He’ll see through me straight away. All I am is a fixer, the way I’m doing with the next manuscript upstairs . . .’
‘Then don’t meet him,’ Rosa said. ‘Good. Cultivate your air of genius and mystery. I’ll write and say you’re far too occupied with your latest work and may we kindly see the details of what he offers, including his financial proposal?’
I sat back in my chair. Rosa was perfectly determined to take this route. The thing is, everything she told me made sense, as if Domenico himself was whispering instructions into her ear.
We talked some more, then we cleaned the kitchen for the night, finally putting out the lights. At the top of the stairs Rosa took off her small glasses and let them hang from the chain around her neck. She held both my hands and squeezed them, and smiled into my face. Without words she was telling me how happy she was that my life had found something of its road.
Well, maybe it had, and I knew who to thank.
Both my exhilaration and my anxiety had passed. As I closed the door to my bedroom all the warmth and good spirits I’d felt that day and night were no longer with me. Instead I felt curiously empty, and wasn’t sure why. I lay over the bed covers with a book. After thirteen pages I realised I’d absorbed absolutely nothing by a writer named Poe. I felt unutterably lonely. Not because I had no friends, woman or family – Rosa was as close as I came to all these – but because, as far as I knew, I was the only one of my kind.
But I wasn’t quite so different to the rest of the world, I thought. Isn’t that what being with Veronica had revealed to me? I did have needs and I did have longings and I could even satisfy them as normal people did. What if, as Domenico had believed, there were others born like us? Hundreds of others? Couldn’t I make a life with them just as I’d done with my master? If so, where and how would I find them?
I rubbed my face and my temples.
Domenico’s own words: ‘We’re far from alone.’
I’d assumed he’d been seeing his visions in the room, but he might have meant that other individuals like us were wandering in other circles, also looking for their place. I was lucky to have found him; I was lucky to have found Signora Rosa Bortolotti, who was not one of us but was of our world. The alternative would probably have been to go through life with no clue about what I was and why the great world seemed so far removed from me.
And finally a thought struck me. By its very obvious nature it had managed to never strike before. Or perhaps I’d never allowed it to.
Domenico and I had found one another. In fact, he was the very first person I found upon my escape. It was almost miraculous.
No: Domenico had found me.
His story was that Salvatore and Gino had come upon him during their search and asked if he’d seen a running boy. Something about them worried him and so he’d followed, being on hand to save me and not a moment too soon. But hadn’t he also said that he’d only been travelling into Etna to observe the phenomena of the smoke rings? Then why had Domenico, such a man of peace, been carrying his most powerful weapon, the long-barrelled army rifle? It was bulky and awkward, and would only have been an impediment to his sightseeing. On all our journeys into the mountains or across endless plains he’d only ever wanted to bring the .22, and even that was left behind most of the time.
So he’d been prepared. He’d deliberately set out to rescue me.
And now in a way I’d been rescued again. I was safe with the woman who’d not only brought Domenico up as a son, but who glowed for joy at good news coming my way.
Her husband had worked for the project; Rosa had been one of Doctor Vliegan’s nurses; she might even have borne Domenico in her own womb.
I strode from my room and knocked on Rosa’s door. Then I rapped harder just to make sure she heard me.
‘Rosa, come back to the dining room. I have to talk to you.’
I went down and waited for her, bottle of brandy on the table and my first snifter already drained.
‘Am I your son?’
Signora Rosa had let her hair down and she was in her night-gown. In the flickering light she looked older by ten years, as if she’d feared this discussion ever coming. She closed her eyes and spoke with them shut, the lids trembling slightly.
‘No, you’re not. They put you in me and I carried you to term. The term was less than three months. Then they cut you out. I’m no more your mother than the bed you slept in when you were a baby.’ She opened her eyes and they were full of shame. ‘You weren’t the first.’
‘Who were the others?’
‘Domenico, and also the creature you killed. The third and last was you.’
‘They let Domenico live with your family, but not me?’
‘Five years after the delivery they brought Domenico back to see how siblings and a family life would affect one of the special children. He was with us before the sad occurrence of the second. I let myself be talked into a final experimentation and then I was done. I never laid eyes on you, Cesare. Never held you. The understanding was that you’d be for something else not to do with families. I didn’t know what. I only discovered the facts later. Your test was an investigation into what could be brought out of the new children by using brutal circumstances as a tool.’
‘I remember other children. And disappointment.’
‘That’s why they decided to force the worst out of their children. None of the plans had proceeded properly. They put you with Gozzi and they kept watch on you. The surprise was how much you wanted to please your master. They’d expected you to turn into an animal.’
‘Expected or hoped?’
‘Both. Then they decided you were no more use so they let you be. Gozzi divested himself of you immediately.’
‘If you knew all of this why didn’t you come get me?’
‘I kept an eye on you from a distance. I was horrified at what was happening. So was my husband. It was so removed from the original plan. We —’ she took a deep breath. ‘We did try. At first we were warned away, then when my husband kept pressuring the higher echelon for you to be removed from your circumstances and handed over to us they saw him as a major problem. In a meeting he made threatening remarks. Things about the press. The prime commandment of the project was Silence. We’d already joined an international campaign to end child slavery, and with the help of hundreds and thousands of people in Italy it was building momentum. Next came his drowning. No one involved with the program was fooled. It was a warning to me and to everyone else in the project who’d allowed themselves to become attached to the special children. If these men would do away with one of their own scientists then what else were they capable of? I had three sons to think of.’
‘This happened when I went to the sulphur mines?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did Domenico become involved?’
‘He was the only person I could turn to for help. All I could do was keep track of you. I’d already made sure my sons all worked overseas but even I could see that the tentacles of these men extended around the globe. My boys were vulnerable. Any action I might take would affect each of them.’
Signora Rosa’s voice shook. I poured her a little brandy and she took a sip before continuing.
‘I asked Domenico to find out about your life in the sulphur fields, about your new master and how you were treated. The plan was that he would eventually buy your so-called contract out from that man Salvatore. You managed to escape. So Domenico set out to follow Salvatore and his tracker, hoping they’d lead to you. They did.’
‘Then he took me in.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now you’re caring for me and giving me another home.’
She tried to me
et my eyes but couldn’t do it.
‘So I have to thank you, Rosa.’
Signora Rosa finally wept then, quietly and without hope.
‘You have to hate me. You’re right to. I loathe the Amatis and their legacy. The things they’ve done under the guise of good works. Under the guise of helping humanity. The things my husband let himself do. I don’t feel anything but pity for all the other women like me, but most of all I hate myself for what I did and didn’t do . . .’
Her tears came from a sickness that had burrowed deep into the soul.
‘No,’ I said, and I was sure I meant it.
Rosa’s hands trembled so much that when she covered her face it was as if she suffered from a kind of palsy.
‘Listen,’ I told her. ‘You gave me life and then you saved me.’
I made her lower her hands and I held them firm.
‘Then what’s to be angry at, Rosa? What?’
Yellow Book
Rosa solicited an offer from Bruno Pasqua, which she refused in my name, and when he doubled it Rosa visited a lawyer versed in these sorts of affairs. She said I should see him with her so that I could understand my own business. I couldn’t have cared less. The signora had the measure of things and whatever she thought was good was good enough for me.
Bruno Pasqua sent contracts which I signed, scrawls on the official documents to get them out from under my nose. He’d repeated his request to visit, but I hadn’t changed my mind. Instead I was more and more absorbed by the possibilities of this new manuscript. As I wrote about Donato’s sexual encounters I even began to see myself as him, seducing women, using their bodies, making pleasure the centre of my life. The idea of some kind of statement about the coldly opportunistic politics of Italy and Europe now seemed ridiculous and irrelevant; what did I care about governments and society? I cared about Donato and his women, whom I undressed in vivid detail.
If the English woman Veronica had still been in that hotel room I would have visited her and begged to watch her in her nylons again. Her red lips on my mouth would have comforted me. I sublimated the desire by writing ten furious pages about longing and fucking, then tore them to shreds. I wrote it all out again, this time putting Veronica herself into the story. Donato was me, holding her naked body in a hotel bedroom while her impotent husband smoked and drank outside. Donato kissed her pale cheeks and covered her warm mouth with his own as she fingered herself into the climax he hadn’t been able to give her.
Veronica’s hand rested, and Donato kissed her fingers.
Donato kissed her fingers and tasted them in his mouth.
My body trembled and I came into my hands.
Then I heard someone using the brass knocker at the door downstairs, probably one or a few of Rosa’s coterie of friends. I definitely wouldn’t be joining them in the parlour.
When I took a glance down to the street from my window I saw a well-dressed man waiting, looking around, taking everything in as if he was a jungle cat scanning his terrain. I knew immediately and without doubt that this was Bruno Pasqua. I’d made Rosa reply to him three times, always saying I was too busy to meet, yet here he was not taking no for an answer.
I stormed downstairs and Rosa was politely letting him into the inside landing, where he was taking off his hat, scarf and overcoat, saying ‘ . . . of course, unannounced like this . . . the height of rudeness, but —’
‘But nothing,’ I interrupted. ‘But you choose to come here anyway and abuse this good woman’s politesse by putting her in a position where she can’t send you away. Even though we’ve made it absolutely clear how unwelcome any sort of visit is —’
‘But,’ Bruno Pasqua went on smoothly, yet with an edge, like a man revealing the handle of his pistol, which was, so far, still in its holster, ‘I need to ensure that the extraordinary manuscript I’m about to acquire for quite a bit of money on my company’s behalf is indeed written by the personage whose name is on the title page, and that the events depicted, while not at all required to be real and true, are at least real and true to the circumstances they depict, by which I mean, young man, that what’s in those pages is a true reflection of life in our island’s abominable sulphur mines, and not some fancy dreamed up by a child in pyjamas.’
Two in the afternoon and I was wearing pyjamas. Not only that, his words meant the man wasn’t so stupid as to swallow whole whatever was sent to him. And one more thing: even though I’d signed the contract documents, he hadn’t.
Rosa invited Bruno Pasqua into the sitting room and I trudged upstairs to dress. By the time I’d done that and had run a brush through the mop of my hair, Rosa had served our unexpected guest with espresso coffee.
I awkwardly stuck out my hand. ‘Cesare Montenero, and I apologise for my behaviour.’
He stood and his grip was dry and strong. Pasqua was a short man with a powerful build. He didn’t seem in the least bit bookish. His hair was long and thick, falling to his shoulders. His nose had been broken some time in his youth, and though he was middle-aged and handsome, one of his cheeks was slightly indented. There was the look of sunburn to his face. His lips were chapped. I thought he was more of a retired boxer or wrestler than a man of the arts.
‘And I must apologise again at this intrusion,’ he said. ‘My excuse: book contracts are partnerships and I suffer from anxiety when I don’t know my partners. I won’t trouble you very long.’
We sat. He took me in, a fool who’d been in his pyjamas in midafternoon, unwashed and unshaved. Neither Rosa nor I had the slightest clue what to say.
‘I don’t have the chance to come home very much,’ he filled the silence, ‘but whenever I do I like to make a worthwhile trip of it. My brothers and uncles are fishermen in Riposto. I’ve been out with them for days now. The taste of the salty wind,’ he smiled. ‘The next Mattanza being planned. Books are good, but the sea – well. Is your family from the coast?’
I gazed at him. So the inquisition begins.
‘I never knew my parents.’
‘You don’t remember them?’
‘As in the book, I was too young. And they never came to find me.’
‘The boy in the book is in fact you? It’s a true story then? Of your slavery?’
We played like this for an hour. I was a slave and uneducated yet I wrote like an angel. How so? I never knew my family but I’d become this ‘Montenero’ – where did that name come from? I worked in the worst sulphur mines, not those that were open-cut, which were hellish enough, but in vast tunnels underground – yet my health seemed excellent. My lungs weren’t destroyed by sulphur or my back destroyed by labour. Why had I survived so well?
Almost everything he brought up led to a new line of inquiry. We drank two pots of coffee and ate cake. If he stayed much longer Rosa would have to feed him dinner.
How is it so? and Why did it become? and Who was that?
I was surprised I could handle his questions, and he liked my answers. I never strayed too far from the truth. I told him things exactly as they were, except for the fact of who wrote the book’s originating material and the true manner that the late Don Domenico Amati and I had come together.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I believe you’re immersed in a new book. Are there any pages I might peruse?’
I didn’t mind. I thought it would provide proof to the things I’d told him. I went upstairs and gathered up the new manuscript I was making out of what Domenico had left behind. It was three-quarters done. When I returned to the sitting room Pasqua was telling Rosa how much he liked his life in Milan but how greatly he always looked forward to his visits to Sicily – even though it was hellish being away from his wife, and his son and young daughter.
Bruno Pasqua looked up and I placed all two hundred and seventy-six loose-leaf, handwritten pages into his hands. He was delighted.
‘May I?’<
br />
‘May you what?’
‘May I peruse it?’
‘It’s not finished.’
‘To get the flavour.’
Tiresome man – but I could see the benefit. He had a new manuscript written in my own hand, what better verification could there be?
‘When?’
Bruno Pasqua turned the title page over. ‘Now, of course.’
He was perfectly serious. He’d already started.
When Rosa quietly shook me awake I thought it was morning. It wasn’t. I was in my clothes and I’d been asleep over the bed covers. The windows were dark and in the streets below the last people of the night were taking their evening passeggiata.
‘He’s asking for you, Cesare.’
I went downstairs yawning, and in a minute Pasqua was pumping my hand. I could see the last page turned up: Donato kissed her fingers . . .
‘We must redo the contract. I want this, unfinished or not, I want it.’ He couldn’t hide his enthusiasm, then leaned in and whispered, ‘I can taste those fingers myself.’ For Rosa’s benefit he said in a louder voice, ‘And please, let’s meet tomorrow night, after you’ve had a good day’s work. There’s so much to discuss.’
So I met Bruno Pasqua the next night at a place that was supposed to be the finest restaurant this side of the island. I didn’t know if it was true, but the first king of the united Italy, Vittorio Emmanuel II, was said to have dined there in his day. Framed photographs on the wall showed Italian presidents and prime ministers who’d also passed through.
One of the many things I’d liked about living away from society with Domenico was that I’d never had to dress for any particular occasion, or shine my shoes, or attend to such menial tasks as my own grooming. Cold water in the face got me through the mornings and bathing every week or every several weeks had suited me perfectly. Now I was in a much different world, and Rosa had made sure this particular day had been spent not in the gainful writing that Bruno Pasqua had suggested, but in being shepherded around the city like a lamb. She had me fitted out with new trousers, new dress shirts, several pairs of waistcoats, a jacket, silk ties and finally a hat in the new style supposedly all the rage in the best circles of France.
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