Power to Burn

by Fienberg, Anna

‘Signore, Signore, where were you? It’s closing time! Don’t you know we close for lunch?’

  I walked out into the daylight and my knees were shaking. I held on to the iron grille of the church and looked at my hands. Faint trails of smoke slid out from under my nails. The tips of my fingers were smudged slightly with black.

  A bell chimed somewhere in the distance and I gazed out across the cobblestones. A tramp with an old felt hat and shoes tied with string shuffled toward me. I saw with a shock that she was a woman and for a moment I looked into her eyes. The stab of fear returned. Those eyes, so dark and so horribly familiar. The last few lashes along her left eye were white.

  I wanted to push her away, but I ran down the street, toward noise and people and shop windows.

  I found a cafe and ordered a cappuccino. But I didn’t feel elegant and leisurely sitting there. I didn’t feel like celebrating, as I did the first time the flames came. I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

  I remembered the thoughts I’d had in that stone room, before I’d got lost. How my mind was so clear, and full of purpose. Now I was just tired and I wished I could lie down on the polished marble floor, like someone’s old dog.

  I looked across the street and saw the facade of the Colosseum. A girl in red tights whipped in and out of the traffic as she ran to meet someone under the massive arches. Standing there, her jazzy red legs and high-heeled shoes were framed against the ancient stone.

  For a moment, as I looked at the girl and the stone, I held the past and present together, and then I wandered slowly back to the hotel.

  Two days later we caught the train to Firenze. We entered the city at dusk and as we clambered out of the train the cold stung our faces.

  We walked along the Ponte Vecchio, past the medieval shop fronts and along Via Santa Maria Soprarno, toward Nonna’s apartment. The streets were strung with lights overhead, so that the evening was special, draped in pearls. Snow fell softly onto shoulders and hats. This was the hour of the passeggiata and despite the cold, the little bridge was crowded. Below us the River Arno was ice, as still and sharp as glass.

  I followed Nonna up the marble stairs, my bag scraping at my knees. I couldn’t wait to see inside – the place where my mother grew up. Plus I just wanted to get warm!

  Nonna showed me into a small room with tall narrow windows. She opened the shutters and the night shimmered outside.

  ‘This was Cornelia’s room,’ she said, smiling at me.

  I laid my suitcase carefully on a small wooden desk against the wall, and sat down on the bed. One of the pillows had a small blue ‘C’ embroidered in the corner.

  I went over to the other bed next to it and picked up a pillow. ‘L’ was sewn in pink, framed in rosebuds.

  I looked up at Nonna questioningly. Somehow I didn’t like to say this name out loud.

  ‘And that was her sister Lucrezia’s bed.’ Nonna’s face was expressionless.

  ‘Where is she now?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Far away,’ Nonna said, and walked out of the room. ‘I’m just going to put our dinner on. You must be starving,’ she called as her heels tapped down the hallway.

  I opened my suitcase and began hanging up my clothes in the wardrobe. It was made from beautiful old polished wood and inside it smelled faintly of mothballs. That made me smile.

  On the shelf there was a tiny bottle of perfume and an ivory comb. I fingered the things and took the stopper out of the bottle. Holding the perfume to my nose I tried to picture my mother dabbing it onto her neck when she was young. But all I could see in my mind were the dull, family photos we had in the album at home.

  When I’d finished unpacking I took the suitcase down and saw a scribble carved deeply into the top of the desk.

  ‘L loves F,’ it said. The letters were deeply etched, and the wood was splintered all around it. The words looked angry, as if scratched in with a fist bearing down heavily on a sharp knife.

  I opened the drawers of the desk and in the bottom one, right at the back, there was a black-and-white photograph in a silver frame.

  It showed a striking young girl, her face caught at an angle as if she were just about to look away. Her long black hair swirled around her neck, and her hand was reaching up to hold it. She wore a thin gold band on her fourth finger.

  I looked from the ring to her dark eyes and the uneasy feeling that had been growing in me suddenly billowed into fear. Fine white lashes curved down at the corner of her left eye.

  The old chestnut lady. The tramp.

  I took the photo out to the kitchen where Nonna was dicing onions. ‘Who is this?’ I asked, although I already knew what she was going to say.

  Nonna looked at me and sighed. ‘That is your Aunt Lucrezia,’ she replied, ‘and you’d better put her back where you found her.’

  There was an awkward silence and then I did as I was told, tiptoeing back to my bedroom and shutting Lucrezia up again in the bottom drawer.

  chapter 4

  LUCREZIA 1964, Summer in Florence

  Why? Why? It’ll only be for a month! I’ll do the extra cooking, and Fabio can iron his own shirts, for heaven’s sake. This is his future we’re talking about, Mamma. My future!’

  ‘No, Lucrezia, I said no.’

  I grabbed Mamma’s hands and made her look at me. ‘What is it? You’ve always said you liked him.’

  Mamma’s face was pale. She snatched her hands away and ran them through her hair.

  ‘Listen, Lucrezia,’ she said quietly. ‘I do like Fabio, and I’m not worried about the domestic arrangements. Oh, you must try to understand. Fabio’s father is in deep trouble. He is a criminal, he’s brought shame upon his family. We can’t be seen to condone his crime. And anyway, it’s not possible to interfere now, it’s in the hands of the police.’

  I stared at her. At the almond-shaped eyes that had always seemed to understand, and the full mouth that I’d thought so generous. Now her mouth was a thin grim line and the little mole beneath her nose looked ugly, like a smudge of dirt. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time. And I hated her.

  ‘You’re just worried about what people will think!’ I sneered. ‘Ooh, fancy the son of a criminal eating off our plates, sleeping in our beds! We’d never be able to wash away the dirt, would we?’

  ‘Lucrezia! I’m just trying to protect our family. And it does matter what people think. Do you want poor little Cornelia to go to school and be called names? This is a small town, remember!’

  ‘Yes, and your mind is even smaller! You think more about your bourgeois friends than your own daughter. Where are all your values now, your great beliefs in loyalty and truth and being kind to people? You make me sick! It only matters what stuck-up snobs like la professoressa Bongiorno will say!’

  I turned away but I heard Mamma’s hand slam down on the table.

  ‘Don’t you talk like that to me, Lucrezia. Basta! I’ve had enough. If you aren’t mature enough to understand the ways of the world yet, then you’ll just have to stay in your room until you do. Go there now, and you’re not leaving this house until I say so!’

  ‘You can’t make me, I’m almost eighteen. I suppose Papà is behind this. Is this his decision?’

  ‘Yes, it is, and you can hear it from him, he’ll be home soon. Now get to your room, I’m tired of looking at you!’

  I ran from the room and crashed into Cornelia’s bike in the hallway. Tears were gushing down my face, I could hardly see.

  I flung myself on my bed and let the sobs come. I saw Fabio lost, far away in some other city, swallowed up in a new life. I hung on to the pillow and squeezed my eyes shut so tightly that there was just blackness, like at the bottom of a well. But down there, at the bottom, anger was burning, like petrol flames on dark water, and I wanted to smash and tear and bite. I could feel my teeth bared, my face was hardening, the muscles tightening into steel.

  I burned with anger and I used my rage to weave a spell. The words came from an unknown place, like a f
orgotten dream, and I listened only to the fierce animal urging inside me.

  I imagined the shape of a wolf and the wolf’s hunger and rage filled my heart. I opened my jaws and the wolf’s wild song poured out. I knew only thirst and hunger and darkness, as the wolf did.

  I ran out of the room and saw my father in the doorway. He called out to me, some garbled human words, small and puny. The sound of hunted prey.

  I sprang at him and we wrestled, and my teeth closed on his arm. But as he screamed another voice rang out and I looked up to see my mother standing over us.

  ‘Lucrezia, Lucrezia,’ she was chanting my name, but it wasn’t my name now, it wasn’t! Couldn’t she see the wolf?

  I growled, trying to lift my wolf’s voice above his, trying to drown her out. But my teeth loosened on the arm and I saw her make the shape of the circle, the symbol for life. Her hands flew like birds’ wings as she wrote the symbols of magic in the air and slowly I felt the anger dull and the wolf’s wildness wither.

  My face relaxed, the muscles loosened and I dropped on to the floor.

  ‘Lucrezia, Dio, have you gone mad?’ my father shouted.

  I felt a hand on my head and my mother murmured into my ear.

  ‘Oh, Lucrezia, you see, you see the darkness in your heart? Leave it alone, ti prego, and he will forgive you.’

  I looked up and saw her eyes blurred with tears. And then I looked across to my father. A fine pinprick of blood like a single red bead spotted his arm. This time, for just a moment, my wolf was more than illusion.

  It’s strange how anger can make you numb, how burning rage can become frozen. I don’t know how long I sat there in my bedroom, just blank, thinking of nothing. I looked at the polished rosewood of my wardrobe and followed the curling path of the grain with my eye. Back and forth, back and forth, the path leading nowhere.

  Then I sat at my desk for a while and stared at that. With the stub of a pencil I scratched into the desk, L loves F. I went over it and over it working a groove into the surface. Every time I worked over the F, Fabio’s face came into my mind. ‘Love me always,’ he’d said. And now he doesn’t know that I still do. That I’m always thinking of him. And that I’m shut up in this room like some madwoman. Prisoner in my own family.

  I can hear voices coming from the kitchen. Mamma is pleading, I know that whine, like a loyal dog trying to please. She’s finding excuses for me. Showing my better, loving-daughter side. Papà is shouting, hammering her with his voice. I don’t care about either of them.

  I can’t imagine facing Papà again. My rage is small and cold now, like a raked-out grate.

  The room grew dark and I sat there for a long time, staring at the desk. I saw the lights coming on, shining through my window from the apartment opposite.

  And then there was a knock on the door, and my father walked in. His face was grey and two furrows worked between his eyes. I looked away from him, back to the lights.

  ‘Lucrezia, listen to me now,’ he said. ‘Do you realise what happened to you out there?’

  I didn’t answer. Why bother? He already thinks he knows everything. But he knows nothing, nothing about the real me, his daughter. He never has. I could feel the embers of anger stirring.

  ‘You were like a wild animal,’ he went on. ‘You used the power, didn’t you? How long has this been going on?’

  ‘What is this, the Inquisition?’ I said. ‘Yes, Papà, I did use my power. Just like I use my eyes and my hands and my mind. The power is mine, and I can do what I like with it. This is my life, Papà, not yours!’

  ‘But you are my daughter, and you’ll do as I say. Your mother tells me this isn’t the first time. Little magic tricks, little games, harmless things, she says. But look what happened tonight! Would you call that harmless? What would have happened if your mother hadn’t stopped you?’

  ‘I’d be out of this house, and with someone who loves me, me, not just some pretty idea of a daughter!’

  ‘You weren’t pretty tonight, Lucrezia. You behaved like a savage beast. And if you’d gone with the power, you might have become one. Then there’s no turning back.’

  Dio, how I hated him sitting there, his face so earnest, so pompous, as if he knew everything there was to know about the world. I fixed my eyes on his fat black moustache so neatly trimmed and thick, it looked like a shiny slug on his lip.

  ‘How would you know?’ I jeered. ‘You’ve never trusted me. Never trusted me to do what I want with my life. You stamp on me and suffocate me before I even know what I think. But you won’t crush me like you did Mamma. Where is Mamma’s power? What has she done with her life? She’s just cooked your dinners and washed your clothes and run your errands. You think she’s ever done what she wanted?’

  A red blush of rage crept over Papà’s face and he strode toward the bed. He clenched his fists but then he shoved them down deep in his pockets. His voice was as hard and dead as stone.

  ‘Your mother chose to live like a decent woman, with her husband and her family. That is what a woman wants most.’

  ‘And in exchange for that she crushes the magic inside her. Because you say so. Because she’s too tired and defeated to know anymore what she wants. Sounds like a great bargain to me!’

  Papà leaned over and grabbed my hands. His teeth were gritted behind his lips as if he were swallowing something bitter. He looked at me for a long time and then released my hands. When he spoke his voice was quiet, but it was a controlled kind of quiet.

  ‘I’m going to tell you a little story, Lucrezia. A true story. You haven’t lived long enough in the world to know it yet. But your mother does, and she heeds it well.’

  Papà took a deep breath and I felt that old depression sink over me.

  Papà is always telling ‘little stories’ that go on until you want to scream. And they always end with a moral, like a full-stop.

  ‘Centuries ago,’ he began, ‘women with the power were hunted. They were called witches and they were hated and feared as agents of the devil. It is said that when a witch was caught, she was tortured until she was so thin, the sun shone through her. She was chained like a dog and hung up in a tower to suffer cold and starvation. When she was almost dead, but not quite, she was roasted over a slow fire.’ Papà paused, and I waited for the moral. As if I didn’t know.

  ‘That, Lucrezia, is how much people hate la magia. These are the terrible consequences of the power.’

  I stared at him, and suddenly I laughed, flinging my loud brash laugh like a coloured scarf right into his face. Look at that mouth of his, ringed by the moustache, twisting into that righteous grimace of disgust. I’d like to rub and rub and rub at it until it disappeared.

  ‘Let me tell you a little story, Papà.’ I made my voice low and even. ‘And this is how the true story goes. Yes, those women were burnt all over Europe, thousands and thousands of them. I have been around long enough to read a few history books. And the books will tell you that those women were innocent. They were executed just because they were a little bit different – maybe they were too smart or too beautiful, they had red hair, a long nose, a humped back. They became scapegoats for anything that went wrong. But they were no more witches than you! No, real witches would have escaped, and hurray for them! Then they wouldn’t have had to live with frightened little men of no power, like you!’

  Even before I saw his hand move I felt the ringing slap on my cheek. But what he said next was worse than the slap or any of his nasty stories.

  ‘How could you ever expect to catch a husband?’ His voice was a sneer. ‘Do you think even Fabio, the son of a thief, would love you if he really knew you? Knew what an animal you could become?’

  He walked out the door and slammed it behind him. I didn’t turn around. I would never forgive him. Never.

  During that week Cornelia brought me my dinner, and my homework. She talked to me, telling me little jokes and things that happened at school. But she never mentioned Fabio. And neither did I. A gulf of silence w
as growing between me and my family.

  It was like being on a boat, drawing away from a headland. The stretch of water grew larger with every day. The land, a small pinprick of light, was shrinking until it was almost invisible.

  Finally, they decided to let me out. I know it was Mamma who forced the decision. Cornelia said she even threatened to leave Papà if he didn’t relent. But I couldn’t feel grateful to her. Too much had happened. The gulf was too deep.

  But when I walked down the steps and into the morning light, it was like walking into another life. There was hope in the buttery sunshine and cooing pigeons, and the people bustling to work. I started to feel strong again, and myself, as if someone had drawn a bright orange circle around me and inside, there, nothing could touch me. I felt free and as light as the wind.

  I hopped on my bike and flew down the street towards Fabio’s house. He wouldn’t have left yet, I was sure of it. The breeze rushed at my face, lifting the hair off my neck.

  I was growing hot in my cotton blouse and I was glad because my cheeks would be red and shiny, and Fabio always pretended to bite them when they were like that, as if I were a round delicious apple. Oh I couldn’t wait to feel his arms tight around my waist, I would tell him everything.

  As I turned the corner into Fabio’s street I saw a crowd gathering near his house. Men and women were hurrying along, dragging children, calling to each other. I pedalled faster and a heavy feeling of dread began to sink and spread inside me.

  There was an acrid smell in the air. I came up to the crowd and dropped my bike in the road. The smell of smoke was strong now and ashes were floating in the air.

  I pushed past people, knocking into shoulders and backs. A man shouted at me. And then I was in the front line and it was like stepping into a war.

  Fabio’s house was gone. Smoke rose from the jagged rafters of the roof, standing like a skeleton in the haze. Just the row of stone steps led crazily up to the empty sky.

  A carabiniere pushed past me and I grabbed on to his sleeve.

  ‘What happened? Where is Fabio?’ I cried.