The Story of Anna P, As Told by Herself
The Story of Anna P, As Told by Herself
by
Penny Busetto
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2014
10 Orange Street
Sunnyside
Auckland Park 2092
South Africa
+2711 628 3200
www.jacana.co.za
© Penny Busetto, 2014
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-4314-1016-3
Also available as an e-book:
978-1-4314-1017-0 d-PDF
978-1-4314-1018-7 ePUB
978-1-4314-1019-4 mobi file
Cover design by publicide
Job no. 002183
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’
Contents
Preface
1: Book of the Present
2: Book of Memory
3: Book of the Future
Acknowledgements
Preface
I AM NOT SURE ANY MORE HOW I ended up here on the island. I think I came to see the ruins and forgot to go back. The local school needed an English teacher and I was asked to stand in until the Ministry in Rome appointed someone.
But that was twenty years ago.
I have lived all these years in uncertainty, knowing only that any day the real teacher may arrive. In the meantime a cheque has been deposited into my account each month. It is not much, but then I haven’t had many needs except for paper and ink to carry on this endless dialogue with myself.
The islanders call me l’Inglese, the Englishwoman, although I have not spent more than a few months in England in my whole life. They are kind enough to me, but I am aware that they speak more slowly to me than they do amongst themselves, as if I were a slightly retarded child. I know it is out of kindness that they do it, yet I have wished at times that they wouldn’t and that I could just be one of them.
I suspect that they are puzzled by me, that implicit in the name l’Inglese is a sense also of la Pazza, the mad woman, although they would never call me that to my face. I think I do not make much sense to them, simple as they are, but then perhaps I do not make much sense to myself either. I am always here, like them; I get up every day at the same time, breathe the same air, eat the same food, yet I have no common purpose with them. I have not tried to explain where I come from, and I think they would not understand if I did. To them Africa is what you can see across the straits on a clear day. It doesn’t connect with an eccentric Englishwoman in any way. To their knowledge I have no past – or family either. I have sometimes wondered what the islanders would do if I died, as at some point I suppose I must.
I am always filled with a yearning for something I can’t put my finger on or understand. At times the pain is so great that I wish I were a man and could pay a woman to hold me for a few hours, to make it pass. My body longs to be held and comforted, to know the warmth and softness of touch. And after a while I began to realise that it doesn’t make much difference whether one is a man or a woman.
I have on occasion, after payday at the end of the month, left the island and, in the anonymous back streets of a big city by night, found the courage to approach a woman and offer her money to spend the night with me. It is not about sex, you understand, although of course there is that too. But it is when the pain of being alone grows so great that it threatens to overwhelm me. We rent for the night, for the space of a few hours, a small room in a nearby pensione under the cynical scrutiny of the concierge and climb the dusty stairs to the small room. A high bed that must have belonged to someone’s grandmother, a washbasin and bidet, a crucifix on the wall – the bare essentials for living and dying. From the walls come the groans and sighs of others like me who find the indifference of the universe too much to bear, who are trying to find temporary respite. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is just about the bodily itch?
I have found a woman who suits my needs well enough. Sabrina she calls herself, although I am sure that is not her real name. The transaction is quick and shameful, and money changes hands – the price includes the room. She shows no interest in me, asks no questions. We slip naked between the sheets in the light that filters through the shutters from the street lamps. The understanding is clear. She is willing to share her body with me for a few hours, that is all. At first she felt she must perform, give me my money’s worth. Now she just holds me close. Sometimes there is release. Sometimes just the holding is enough.
Sometimes when it is over I feel her eyes on me in the mirror as she tidies her hair and prepares to leave, but she never tries to breach the distance now that our bodies have separated. She works well on the level of bodies.
I catch the first ferry back to the island in the early light of morning, bundled up against the cold and damp. I watch the gulls swoop and dive in our wake, the first rays of sunlight reflecting off their wings as they rise, while we below are still caught in darkness and the mainland slips slowly off the horizon. I go straight from the harbour to school.
The island, you ask? Well, it’s not much more than an extinct volcanic outcrop of rocks, with a tiny circular harbour nestled into its water-filled crater. The little village springs up around its sides. The roads are too narrow for even a Cinquecento to pass so you have to walk or take a Vespa to travel around. There is never enough water here. We collect and store rainwater in winter, but the summers are long and hot and there is never enough. Supplies have to be brought over by ferry in huge containers from the mainland.
There are two or three peaks that are not very high, but beneath the cliffs are deep half-submerged caves that have been hollowed out and shaped over thousands of years by the succeeding inhabitants of the island. The Romans bred moray eels in them. Sometimes they would throw a slave into the water for the entertainment of their guests, watch his flesh being torn from his limbs, the white bones exposed by the sharp teeth.
Pontius Pilate was born here, they say, the Roman governor who washed his hands of the whole affair with the troublesome Jew. He drowned himself in a river afterwards. And Giulia Livilla, sister of the emperor Caligula, died here in exile, alone, of hunger. I wonder about her sometimes, what she thought as she sat here at her window looking out across the waves towards Rome, when she realised that there was no longer any hope of return. Or did she keep on hoping until the very end?
Even Mussolini was exiled here in 1943 until Hitler’s troops rescued him and set him up as a puppet dictator in Salò. I have seen a copy of his ration card. So much bread, so much sugar, so much butter each day, the little things of our lives. Did he have forebodings of his end a short time later? They hanged his body by the feet in Piazzale Loreto, you know, like Judas, upside down. And the people of Milan spat on his body and howled out their rage. One of the shadier incidents of the war. The heavy body hung there in the spring breeze. I have seen the documentary, the flickering images on the screen, the people of Milan with fierce faces, hollow cheeks and sunken eyes etched with hunger, pain and fear from years of war.
1
Book of the Present
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light.
TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’
Friday 19 October
As I hurry from the harbour to my classroom, the school secretary, Signor Cappi, stops me and h
ands me a letter. Without looking at it I push it into my briefcase. By eight am I am in front of the class of children, trying to explain the difference between the present perfect tense in English and the passato prossimo in Italian. Each of us isolated, encapsulated in his own world of meaning. Outside the classroom windows the island beckons to them.
The morning trundles on as usual and I try to put the letter from my mind, but I am aware of its presence pulling at me each time I get up and distance myself from it to write on the blackboard. The children are quiet, as if they, like the branches on the vines on this autumn morning, feel the sap ebbing in their limbs. They sit at their desks, separate, each absorbed in the slow inner functions of their organs, the secretions, the seepages, the rhythmic contractions and releases, the passage of sludge through the system. I see that it will not be much use to try to do any work with them unless their life forces can be quickened in some way so I devise a game, noticing as I do that Ugo is on the edge as usual. He stands holding his desk with two fingers, half turned from the others with his large frightened eyes, longing for inclusion yet fearing it at the same time.
At the end of the lesson I hold him back, a shy awkward boy who is struggling with the abstractions of schoolwork. He waits by the blackboard, a hint of panic in his eyes as he moves his weight heavily from foot to foot. I invite him to sit down, and sit near him. I can sense his fear, smell the nervous perspiration as it breaks out on his body.
– How are things going, Ugo?
He shrugs.
– How’s everything at home? Your mother? Father?
His eyes move nervously across the desk and with his thick fingers he plays with a scrap of rubber from an eraser.
– Your marks in English are not very good. I suppose you know. How are you doing in your other subjects?
I wonder why I am subjecting him to this. It doesn’t feel necessary and I am beginning to wish I could get out of it.
– Are there any problems?
I see his shoulders begin to shake. He pushes the chair back with his knees and stands up.
– Debbo andare, he says.
He stumbles out of the room.
I sit down at my desk, open my bag and pull out the letter. I examine the envelope carefully, official manila brown with Polizia di Stato printed in black across the top, and my name in sloping letters below. There is a red stamp, Urgente, across the side. I replace it in my bag and gaze out of the classroom window. From where I sit I can see out over the fallow fields behind the village where dry husks of corn lie untidy on the hard ground. A few vineyards straggle along the edges of the fields. The small sour grapes they yielded now lie fermenting in barrels beneath the houses. There is a sense of sadness in the island at this time of the year. The sea changes colour, becomes dark and opaque, and the first wild storms of winter keep the ferries from entering the harbour. The tables in the piazza where people sat eating and laughing until late are stored, piled up neatly in a back room for next summer. An unshaven man gazes out of a steamed-up bar window at the waves that crash against the harbour wall, then focuses again on the soccer results in the Gazzetta dello Sport.
I see Ugo again in the afternoon as I am walking home after school. He is helping at the vegetable stall in the marketplace, counting and weighing vegetables in a rusty old-fashioned hand scale. He sees me coming and withdraws to the far side of the square. I go up to the stall-keeper, a large muscular man with a shaven head in torn blue overalls and heavy boots.
– Mi dica?
I give him my order and, as he is putting it together, I comment that he is lucky to have his son working with him today.
– Macchè! Non è figlio nostro – his wife breaks in, a battered-looking woman with peroxided hair – è figlio di mio fratello. Our nephew. Capisce? Suo papà lavora a Milano.
I thank them and pay.
I return to the tiny apartment I rent from Signora Bruna, a gaunt woman of indefinable age who runs her establishment near the harbour in the old part of town and lives next door. The entrance leads off an alley and up a steep flight of steps to my door. A large room with a kitchen table and two chairs in the middle and a bed against one wall. Uneven red flagged floor. A worn armchair before the deep shuttered window that looks out on to the rooftops and the sea beyond. A two-plate gas cooker. A sink. A fridge. A tiny bathroom. There is a sign on the back of the bathroom door that reads:
Rules of the house:
No television or radio.
No noise after 8 pm and before 7 am.
One hot bath a week. One cold shower a day
Rent to be paid strictly one month in advance on the first day of the month.
Thirty days’ notice required.
My window overlooks the harbour sideways on. I have placed my armchair beside it so that I can note the time of arrival and departure of the ferries, the changes in shift of the Carabinieri and the Guardie di Finanza, the return of the fishing vessels, each year with less and less fish.
I climb the steep narrow staircase to my apartment and close the door behind me. I throw my bag on to the kitchen table, and as I do I remember the letter. I pull it out and examine it again. It is addressed to me.
Gentilissima Signorina
Anna P.
c/o Scuola Elementare Giosuè Carducci
Via Vincenzo de Luca
0427 Ponza
I turn it over. The address on the back is: Polizia di Stato, Questura di Roma, Via San V. I drop it on to the table and make myself a cup of tea, but while the kettle is boiling I pull the letter back towards me and tear it open with the end of my teaspoon. I draw out the single sheet of paper. I’m not sure why but I feel my heart beating.
It’s just a few lines, from a certain Ispettore Lupo, at the police headquarters in Rome, informing me that I need to come to the Questura urgently and bring all my documents with me. He does not explain why. I neatly fold the page and return it to its envelope and put it on top of the fridge making sure to align it with the edge.
I take some birdseed off the shelf and feed my little songbird, my cardellino, in its cage, trying to put the letter from my mind. I bought it at a Saturday morning market in the capital a few weeks ago where it was on sale as a decoy for hunters. The bird is a fearful little thing, and I am not sure yet whether it can sing or not. It hasn’t made a sound so far. Some do, some don’t. I have hung the cage by the window in my room, from where it can see the hills and the sea.
I carry my tea over to the window and sit down in my armchair with my notebook and pen and my school bag. I have started writing to try to fill these interminable evenings that are now drawing in, growing darker and darker and colder. But first I correct the small pile of homework the children have left me and prepare my lessons for the morning. Tomorrow, with the fifth grade, we will look at the definite article, the. I think this must be the twentieth time I have repeated the same lesson. A whole generation of children has passed through my hands in the meantime. In a year or so their children will be old enough to come to my class. The parents have grown up, married, often left the island to find work elsewhere. Their children have been left behind with their grandparents to repeat the cycle.
I sip my tea and gaze out of the window over the rooftops at the island below.
I wonder what Ispettore Lupo wants.
The swallows are flying low, zigzagging, crisscrossing the sky in search of the millions of invisible insects that must also be flying low as the barometer drops. I know this means they will soon be leaving on their long migration south. Perhaps some will go all the way to the Cape of Good Hope. I straighten up in my seat to watch them, half in love with their speed, their concise precise movement, the way they twist their bodies at the last moment to avoid colliding with branches, masts, roofs, chimneys, and soar up and up into the sky.
Saturday 20 October
It is a cold rainy day, the first real autumn day of the season. After school I come home and read. Eggs and salad for supper.
Su
nday 21 October
It is still raining.
Monday 22 October
School. Risotto with mushrooms.
Tuesday 23 October
This morning I am on playground duty at break. I pull a chair outside into the open air and sit in the shade against the classroom wall, steeling my eyes against the sharp sunlight, watching the children, ready to intervene if a fight breaks out, if someone grazes a knee.
They stamp and run and shout. The girls are playing in groups of twos or threes on the soft grass near the school building, imagining families and relationships, skipping and chasing each other. The boys, nearly all of them, are engaged as usual in a game of soccer on the sandy stretch of open ground behind the school building – they play football every break, usually with a ball made of a bundle of pages torn from the middle of an exercise book bound round and around with sticky tape.
My eye is caught by a movement on the ground at my feet. I bend down and see a wasp moving over an insect, a large moth. I can see the wasp holding it, see its abdomen connect and sting. The moth struggles then is still. I look up again. A few loners, or poorly coordinated boys, hang unhappily on the fringes of the game, unwilling to lose face by joining the girls’ games but uncomfortable in the rough and tumble of the soccer match. I see Simone, small for his age, pale-faced with thick glasses held on with elastic around his head, pushing a toy car around on the dusty ground, making vrooming noises in his throat. I see Ugo standing nearby watching him, his back to the fence, with his arms outstretched and his hands gripping the diamond wire mesh as if he had been crucified. I wonder what it would take to make him breach the distance, what would persuade him to risk rejection and join Simone in his play. He doesn’t often join in with soccer, and I am used to seeing him separate, but this time it is different. He looks afraid. I am uncertain whether to approach him or not, not wanting to worsen his fear or discomfort but reluctant to leave him there alone. I don’t want to move out of my own solitude, but I find it almost impossible to just sit and watch. I wait a few minutes but, when nothing changes, I get up and slowly, as if taking a stroll, begin to walk around the edge of the improvised soccer field.
The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself Page 1