It was the effort of forcing herself to give him a rational reply that made her so nervous. Or, if it was a game he was playing, the effort to go along with it, and not lose her temper and shout ‘Stop it! That’s enough! Fifteen years it’s been going on and it isn’t funny any more!’
What would he do if she did tell him the truth? she wondered, as she tried to calm herself by lighting the gas in the oven, giving her mixture a final stir, and considering whom she would meet in town this morning, what the weather would be like over the holiday weekend and whether, since Easter was so early this year, there’d be as many tourists as there were normally. Would he give her one of his blank stares, as if he hadn’t heard her, and turn back to his magazine, or the television? Would he simply shrug, as if to say, ‘We all keep our balance in our own way and if that’s your way, so be it’? Or would he nod his head a few times, look at her accusingly and then tell her very quietly that it wasn’t his fault he had to stay in all day, and couldn’t work and didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for anything? He hadn’t chosen to get sick, you know, to be in considerable pain most of the time and to have nothing to look forward to except further years of inactivity, sickness and pain. And frankly, he found what she said unfair, unkind and uncalled-for. She didn’t know; and she would never find out because she knew that whatever happened, however nervous she became or strongly tempted she might be, she never would follow him and tell him the truth. Just because it would be unfair, unkind and uncalled-for. Oh, she thought, but how she’d love to! And what wouldn’t she have given to have been able to! To stand over him as he sat there neat, disfigured and slowly, slowly, more slowly perhaps than even she, dying, and say to him ‘Shall I tell you why I bake those cakes every Friday? Because ridiculous though it may sound, I feel they’re my only link with the outside world. With reality, sanity, health, happiness, with light, and youth, and hope. Of course I know we’re never going to have visitors. Who wants to come here, with the shutters always closed, with the place perpetually dark, with this air of … of death? I mean, if anyone has anything to say to me they say it in town when I’m shopping, or they telephone. And when Elisabetta and the children come to stay it could hardly be said that they drop in because we know weeks in advance when they’re coming. Nevertheless, I have to feel that someone might, that someone could, and if that if they did I’d be ready to welcome them. Those cakes are my hands stretched out towards life, if you like. They’re my only possibility of contact with life, except when I see Elisabetta and the boys. What do you want me to do? Not stretch out my hands? Not be ready to welcome life should it, by any miracle, suddenly decide to stop by? I’d be mad if I did that. I’d go mad if I did that, and anyway, what would happen to us if we both just hung around here all day, if we both just … sat on our hands? How long do you think we’d last? How long could we stand it? We’d go crazy, we’d fall to pieces, we’d—oh, I’m sorry Giuseppe, I’m sorry. Really, though, it’s not very extravagant, when you think of it. I mean, I know it’s a waste to bake cakes week after week, month after month, year after year, that never get eaten. But under the circumstances, I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay, is it? For, as I say, sanity, hope, life. What’s more, you must admit, apart from that one extravagance, or eccentricity, if you like, I’ve always been very careful, haven’t I? I’ve never wanted lots of clothes, or anything. I’ve never asked for new furniture. It wasn’t me who wanted a colour television set. That was you, wasn’t it? You said you didn’t like the black and white. So please, please, don’t begrudge me my cakes. Because without them, I don’t think I could go on.
‘I mean, I know these last fifteen years, haven’t been easy for you. But they haven’t been easy for me, either.’
Sickness, silence and darkness. Sickness, silence and darkness …
No, of course she’d never tell him any of this, she thought as she began to scoop out handfuls of her cake mixture and pat them into shape. Not only would it have been unfair and unkind, but also, though the truth, it wasn’t perhaps the whole truth. Nevertheless, she was glad to have made her speech, if only in her head. For now, having unburdened herself, she felt not just calm again, but her normal, quietly cheerful self again. A self who would probably be able to get through the week ahead without a single recurrence of her bad temper. And a self who might even be able to get through more than that, as long as nothing untoward happened. Or as long as Giuseppe didn’t come into the kitchen next Friday morning, gaze at her, and say, with a puzzled air, ‘I don’t understand.’
*
Maria baked her cakes to keep a hold on life and sanity and reality, or at least to stretch out a hand towards them. The reason why, however, had she told Giuseppe this, it would not have been the whole truth, concerned the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind; and the precise nature of the visitors (or, to be absolutely honest, the visitor) whom she knew wouldn’t, but hoped might, drop in one day. For it wasn’t just any old passer-by she maintained her perpetual welcome for, though had by chance someone unexpected rung the doorbell, she would have been only too glad to offer the fruits of her Friday morning labour to him or her, and to have crowed to Giuseppe afterwards, ‘You see.’
And the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind, and the precise nature of the person she was, in the final analysis, baking her cakes for, concerned, as most things in her life seemed to, the events of that summer fifteen years ago, when Elisabetta had married. When Elisabetta had left them; when Giuseppe’s sickness had first manifested itself; and when, without wishing to be too dramatic, her world had started to fall apart.
Oh, that summer, Maria would tell herself every day, carrying the subject round with her like a child who never changed, but who remained a constant source of interest and provided her with all the company she needed, wanted, or was ever likely to need or want. Oh, that summer, that summer, that summer.
She had been working with her aunt at the time, in her uncle’s tobacconist and newsagent’s; supplementing her income by taking cleaning jobs in the houses and apartments that had been let for the season to tourists. Meanwhile Giuseppe, who didn’t approve of this second job—he said she wasn’t strong enough and anyway didn’t like the idea of her being a cleaning woman—was employed by the local water authority, supplementing his income by working as an odd-job man and freelance plumber.
In which capacity he was called one Sunday morning towards the end of April to ‘The Villa’, as it was known locally. One of the few houses that hadn’t been built in the last thirty years. It was a large, not particularly attractive turn-of-the-century building that belonged to some industrialist or businessman who lived most of the year in Milan and spent only the occasional weekend in Sardinia. A tube had become blocked and someone had mentioned Guiseppe’s name as a person who could be called upon in an emergency …
It was not a particularly remarkable occurrence, as local people were always mentioning Giuseppe’s name as someone who could be called upon, at any time of day or night, in an emergency. He never complained; he never made a fuss; he just turned up, did what had to be done, charged a reasonable amount for his work and disappeared. And that was how it went today. He got the phone call at nine-fifteen; by ten-thirty he was home again. What was remarkable—or anyway curious, or amusing, or a coincidence—was that in the hour and a quarter he had been absent, Maria, who didn’t do either of her jobs on a Sunday, had stopped by the tobacconist’s on her way to Mass, just to say hello, and while there had overheard a thin, drawn, but apparently pleasant woman asking her aunt if by any chance she knew someone who would be prepared to come and do some cleaning for an hour or two a day. ‘We have that old villa up behind the Hotel Roma,’ the woman said. ‘And we’re going to be here all summer this year. So I wondered—do forgive me for asking you, signora, but I thought maybe … You being here in the centre of town, you probably know everything that’s going on, and …’
‘Well,’ zia Clara said with a lau
gh, waving her hand across the shop, ‘you could ask my niece Maria. Sometimes she—Maria, do you want a job?’
‘The poor woman,’ Maria told Giuseppe when she got home, smiling at this coincidence of both of them being approached by members of the same family at more or less the same time. ‘She looked so embarrassed. She started wringing her hands and apologising, and saying how sorry she was … I’m not sure why. There was no need to be embarrassed. I mean she only asked …’
‘What did you say?’ interrupted Giuseppe, who seemed to find nothing amusing about this story.
‘I told her, yes, of course. I’m going to do two hours a day, three days a week for a start, and maybe later, if they have a lot of guests, I’ll go in every day. But she’s offering almost twice what I get at the Franceschini’s, she said it won’t be hard, and—she thought it was funny too, when I told her my husband had just gone off to mend one of her pipes. Or fairly funny. She seemed embarrassed about that as well. She said “Oh, we’ll soon be employing your whole family,” and laughed, and then seemed ashamed of laughing and really, I thought she was very nice. Unhappy, perhaps. But nice.’
As she continued to find Amelia Cavalieri when she started working for her, and found her still more so when she started not only going in every day, but when the tormented industrialists’s wife really did end up employing the whole of the Bellettini family. That is, she asked Giuseppe if he could come in a few evenings a week to try to do something about the ‘garden’ surrounding The Villa; a stretch of land that had hardly been touched in years, and was overgrown and dismal. Then, after she had discovered that Elisabetta, who was getting married in mid-September, was a maths and physics teacher in the local school, she had asked her if she could come in for five or six hours a week and give some lessons to her thirteen-year-old son, whose maths exam had gone badly at school; he was going to have to repeat it in October.
Indeed, she became so fond of her, and so sorry for her, that by the middle of July she felt she had known her for years. She didn’t even mind too much, couldn’t, for all that she thought she should, mind too much, when she realised that Giuseppe, in his quiet, undemonstrative way, was, well, ‘falling in love’ with her, absurd though it sounded when she said it to herself. She didn’t and couldn’t mind because Amelia did absolutely nothing to encourage Giuseppe, and was almost certainly unaware of his feelings. Moreover, Amelia was so nice and so unhappy she deserved to be loved by someone; she clearly wasn’t by her husband, who only rarely made an appearance at the villa. Indeed, Maria couldn’t help feeling that temperamentally Amelia was rather like Giuseppe or Giuseppe rather like Amelia. Both were withdrawn and tended to see the serious side of things. Both were, or appeared, troubled, though for no discernible reason. And both bore whatever troubled them with a reserved, slightly formal grace, never waved their problems in other people’s faces, and went through life made gentler and kinder by the doubts that assailed them, rather than harsher and more aggressive. Naturally, there were differences: Amelia did have a certain sense of humour and sometimes seemed about to confess what it was that disturbed her; whereas Giuseppe’s tendency to look on the dark side almost never left him, and he was so stoical that one knew he would never break down. Also Amelia, for all her air of fragility, had that underlying assurance and sense of power that an upbringing based on solid economic foundations generally confers; whereas Giuseppe, for all the apparent firmness of his stance, had that underlying lack of assurance and sense of helplessness that an upbringing based on the most precarious of economic foundations generally confers. Still, they were alike enough for Maria to think, when she saw them together, that they were two offshoots of the same plant; and to feel confident that even if Amelia were to become aware of what Giuseppe felt for her and even if, extraordinarily, she reciprocated his feelings, neither would do anything about it. Amelia because she wouldn’t want to hurt her children and possibly her new-found friend Maria, and would know that however passionately she loved Giueseppe, those differences between them would be sufficient to keep them apart. And Giuseppe because he too wouldn’t want to hurt his Maria, and he too would realise that ridiculous and sinful though it might be to allow oneself to be constrained by the past, neither he nor Amelia would ever have the strength not to be. His sense that ultimately his place was with the dispossessed and disinherited of this earth was too strongly and intricately bound around him ever to be uprooted, or disentangled. And her sense of belonging, however much she blushed for it, in the officers’ quarters on the ship of life was as deeply etched into her as her feeling that, for all their sins, officers were necessary if that ship was to keep moving forward, be there ever so many casualties below decks, be there ever so many people lost overboard and drowned in the process.
Paradoxically, though, and not surprisingly, it was this one great difference between them that could have caused some sort of passion to grow up between them, and was the cause of Giuseppe’s feelings for Amelia developing into that grave and silent love that only he, and his wife, were aware of.
Was it this love, however, that if she wasn’t aware of it consciously, she might in the back of her mind have realised existed, that caused Amelia to make the offer she made at the beginning of that August? Or was it rather her affection for her admirer’s wife, allied to her ingrained sense of guilt, and her still more ingrained sense of what was economically desirable, and who was not merely exploitable, but was actually willing, and eager, to be exploited? Maria didn’t know; and it was something about which she preferred not to think, neither when the offer was made, nor for some time after. As she preferred not to think about Giuseppe and her own motives for accepting that offer. Amelia had made it; they, after a minimum of discussion, had said yes, if with a mutual, faint and inexplicable sense of shame, and foreboding. That was all there was to it; and whatever the motives of the parties concerned, it hardly affected the result.
The nature of Amelia’s offer was the following. As Giuseppe and Maria were well aware, The Villa was too big and grossly underused. ‘I mean I know we’ve spent all this summer here, but’, (this with a look of terrible appeal, as if everything depended on the two people to whom she was so anxiously talking) ‘there’s no way of knowing whether we’ll come again next year.’ Moreover, the surrounding garden was huge, unmanageable, and even with constant and expert care was never likely to amount to much, ‘not with this wind blowing all the time,’ the pale, thin woman said, waving a hand towards the sea, but in a tone that suggested she was talking about some affliction of the soul. ‘Not here, on the hill, and being so exposed. I mean the best we could hope for would be a few woody shrubs and that sort of thing. When what I’d really like’—and now, surely, she was talking of some interior landscape—‘would be a sort of English garden. You know, all lawns, and big shady trees, and great banks of flowers that look wild but aren’t, and roses, and honeysuckle, and everything scented, and sweet.’ A pause. ‘That’s my dream. However, since that’s not possible here and since Santa Teresa is growing by the minute, and apart from the wind and the position, it makes no sense to have a garden this size in what will be almost the centre of town in a few years time, my husband thought that the best thing to do would be make a low wall across the garden there’—she indicated a point about four metres from the back of The Villa—‘and put up some holiday apartments. He suggested a building of four or five floors, with, say, four apartments on every floor. That way, we’d solve the garden problem, we wouldn’t be wasting all this ground, we wouldn’t be interrupting our own view of the sea and, if the apartments were built carefully, most of them could have terraces that would also have sea views. Those that didn’t would be cheaper of course, but the thing is, and this is why I wanted to talk to you …’ She looked from one to the other now and seemed to be imploring them to say ‘no’, in advance, to whatever it was she was going to propose. ‘My husband said that if we did do that—and as long as we get permission I think it could be done fairly quickly—we�
��d have to have someone permanently on the spot to take care of the place. A …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, a porter, in a sense, I suppose. But,’ she rushed on, to cover her confusion, ‘more than that really. A caretaker, a … I mean not only in the summer, when there’d obviously be things to do, but all year round. You know, someone who can paint the apartments in the winter, go and make sure the wind hasn’t blown the shutters off, make sure … Oh, you know,’ she repeated, ‘everything. And naturally, I mean, I hope you don’t mind, I thought of you two. You see, we do want people we can trust. The work wouldn’t be hard. I mean, in the winter, Giuseppe, when you come home from work, maybe just half an hour a day. And Maria, instead of going from place to place, and doing an hour here and an hour there … And the thing is, over the road there …’ She pointed now across the dusty track that ran by the side of the villa and petered out on the crest of the hill in what was at present an unofficial car park, to which the young people of the town came at night. ‘Where those garages are, and that storeroom, my husband thought he’d build four little houses. Three of them we’d let too, as holiday homes, but one—the one at the end, I thought, so it’d have views as well—would be for you. And I mean, we could design it together, so it’d be exactly as you wanted it. That would be the first thing to be done, so you could move in immediately and keep an eye on the work while they were doing the building behind here, and … and that’s it, really. I’m sorry to spring this on you and I know you’ll want to think about it, but’—and now, in her eyes at least, she practically went down on her knees and took their hands in hers, though at this point apparently urging them to say yes, rather than no—‘I would love it if you did accept. I mean, it’d be so wonderful having you so close and if you did accept, well, probably it’d make us that much more eager to come again next year, and the year after, and the year after that. We’d be … it’d be as if we were all part of the family. And I know Dario would like it and the girls, and—as I say, I’d love it. Truly. So do, please, think about it, and let me know what your decision is. And then maybe tomorrow, or the day after …’
The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Page 7