Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Perhaps it is the movement itself, something in physical exertion that activates him and overrides his stuck rootedness, because they are running along together once more and although she is half pulling him, his legs are going helter-skelter to keep up. Perhaps, like a puppy, he needs to be exercised daily. Both of them, she knows, would like to accelerate and hurtle away. They catch up with Cecilia and her companions just inside the door of the station entrance hall where the ticket office is.

  ‘Here I am,’ Chiara says, tapping the man on the shoulder.

  He turns slowly and presents her with his long lugubrious face. His son, she thinks, suddenly grasping what he was wanting to tell her earlier. His son was an epileptic and he died.

  Cecilia lets out a cry at the sight of Chiara, the lady starts making shushing ‘There, there, dear’ noises, and Chiara, without looking at the boy, tugs on the scarf and bundles him behind her.

  ‘We were going to get them to make an announcement over the loudspeaker,’ the man says. ‘We didn’t know where you’d got to.’

  ‘I’m here now,’ Chiara says. She can think of nothing to add. She has the child clutched behind her, and her mind is taut but empty.

  ‘We’ve left your bags with a nice boy in the waiting room. We gave him a tip.’

  ‘We couldn’t leave her,’ his wife says and she pats Cecilia’s arm, still looped through hers. The high colour from earlier has drained from Cecilia’s face.

  Chiara knows she should apologise for causing the couple to miss their train, thank them for their kindness, but the man is now staring curiously at the child who, despite her one-armed effort to keep him tucked out of sight, is bobbing out from behind her. They seem to her more like busybodies than do-gooders. To be polite would invite further questions and intimacies. She doesn’t know them. She can’t trust them.

  ‘You could have left her actually,’ she says.

  She is aware of talking over the top of the man. That he has asked, in a kindly manner, who this little chap might be. She summons a peremptory, dismissive tone.

  ‘She would have been fine, just for a minute. She’s not a child. She would have known I was coming back,’ she says. ‘Anyway, thank you. I’ll take over now.’

  ‘But she didn’t know,’ says the woman. ‘She was crying for you.’

  ‘You knew I was coming back, didn’t you, darling?’ Chiara says to her sister.

  Cecilia blinks at her. She takes a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ she says at last, ‘always and for ever,’ quoting Chiara’s own words, her eternal promise. She peels away from the woman and hooks her arm through Chiara’s.

  ‘Oh,’ says the woman, suddenly bereft.

  Her husband mutters something about checking the times of the next train. His wife seems to sag at his side. He clutches at her elbow and propels her towards the ticket office.

  ‘Bye, then,’ Chiara says.

  They were just trying to be nice. They’re not fascist spies. Just ordinary, beleaguered people, offering kindness and expecting a little in return.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she calls after them, but it’s too late.

  ‘That horrible boy is following us,’ Cecilia says as they collect their bags.

  He is trailing behind them, holding the end of the scarf.

  ‘He’s not horrible. Why do you say that?’

  ‘Tell him to go away.’

  ‘No, dear. I will not.’

  Cecilia turns to him. She flicks her hands at him as if he were a pigeon. ‘Shoo,’ she says. ‘Go away. We don’t want you.’

  ‘We do!’ Chiara says, looking around to see if anyone else has heard. ‘Get it into your head, Cecilia. He’s coming with us.’

  ‘Dirty boy,’ Cecilia says. ‘Smelly.’

  EIGHT

  A double bass twanged a deep and reverberating note. The heroine’s voice could be heard in the semi-darkness while the spotlight tried to locate her. It illuminated a pile of stones, a signpost warning of excavation work, a clump of pink-flowered weeds, their leaves laden with brick dust, before finding Clytemnestra, bare-armed, clad in purple. She finished her speech, gathered up her robes and scuttled behind a pillar.

  Simone and Chiara were attending a spectacle among the ruins of the Theatre of Marcellus. The play was ostensibly an updating of the myth that, according to the leaflet, ‘provided a provocative commentary on contemporary power games’.

  Simone’s enthusiasm for avant-garde happenings was boundless. Recently it had taken the two of them to Villa Celimontana on the night of a full moon for a masked ball, to Cinecittà to audition for parts in an epic about the twentieth century (Simone regularly worked as an extra in films and had had bigger roles in low-budget art-house pictures), and to a sit-in in Piazza Cavour to protest moves to change the labour laws. Their presence there had raised the average age considerably.

  ‘Age doesn’t matter,’ Simone had proclaimed.

  However, Chiara took the view that when you were obliged to sit on a camping stool in the gloaming on a coolish spring evening for nearly two hours, while urgent young people appeared from behind pillars or stumps of pillars to harangue you, it did.

  Chiara thought they might slip away during the interval but before she could make the suggestion, Simone said, ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ and then, ‘Will you go and fetch our complimentary cups of wine? With your young legs?’

  On the way to the wine table Chiara had to stop, put her hand to a pillar to feel its solidity, and take a moment. She was light-headed. The ground seemed to be sliding sideways as if presaging an earthquake, but no one else seemed to notice. She took a few deep breaths and carried on. When she returned, Simone was holding forth to the people next to her about the power of myth and declaring that the play offered a redefinition of democracy in the post-Vietnam era. Chiara pretended to read the programme.

  She wanted to talk to Simone. To claim Simone’s attention so that she could tell her about the girl coming. She didn’t understand how she had let nearly three weeks go by without mentioning it.

  A letter had arrived that morning. It was in her handbag. It confirmed the day and time of the girl’s arrival and contained a photograph so that Chiara would recognise her. They had given her a shock: both the image–a blonde girl laughing in a garden, noticeably like him but much fairer and with blue eyes–and the imminence of her incursion into Chiara’s life. She was coming in five days’ time. It was too late to write, telling her not to come, that some urgent business was calling Chiara away from Rome. She would have to telephone instead to make an excuse. But she hadn’t.

  She got to her feet, casting about for something to distract her. Down that unlit path, strewn with tumbled sections of ancient Rome, lay the ghetto. Out of sight, around the corner but within a hundred metres of where they were gathered, was the very place where the Jews had been rounded up thirty years before. Daniele Levi, she thought.

  Her head was a jangle. She made herself sit down again and sipped her vinegary wine.

  The arches of the Theatre of Marcellus were softly lit from beneath, giving them the appearance of hollow eye sockets.

  She pushed her mind backwards in time to before the war, before the massive excavation work that began in 1926 (to reunite fascist Rome with its imperial past in a direct glorious line; she could remember the martial music they played on the radio to accompany the announcement of a new piece of Rome being liberated). Back then she had been a child. The ground used to be much higher–the area where the performance took place would have been underground–and there were little shops and businesses in those arches. Behind the place where they were sitting, where the road now was, there used to be cramped tenements and narrow alleys, with a square that opened out in the middle. Piazza Montanara, it was called. That was where the peasants and small farmers brought their produce to sell from the back of carts.

  She used to come with her nonna, who brought her own empty tubs and jars in her green cloth bag, getting them filled at a stall that
sold walnut sauce and pickled walnuts, as well as a creamy, oozing cheese that smelt of wet grass. She might try making that walnut sauce. And then, as if it had been nestling inside, there came another memory: her father lifting her onto his shoulders and the feel of his dark coat that she held bunched in her fists like rudimentary reins, and he her high horse.

  The second half of the performance was even worse than the first. Chiara kept trying not to listen, to hang on to the remembered sensation of her chin resting in the felt crown of her father’s hat. There was a nihilism at the core of the play that frightened her, as if these young people–who didn’t remember the war, who weren’t even born then, but who were fired up with the idea of overturning everything–might take them all back to that terrible time.

  Afterwards they repaired to a trattoria up the road for a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. Their audience neighbours, a bunch of loud young people, came too, and there was no opportunity for a private word. Chiara sat miserably, not joining in with the conversation that got more lively and political the more red wine they imbibed. Her head ached. She hadn’t slept properly for an age. Sleep occupied a room to which she was denied full access. All she could do was curl up in its antechamber like an old dog or a dutiful retainer, half in and half out. She had given up on the sleeping pills, blaming them for the sick, dizzy feeling that kept accosting her at unpredictable moments.

  ‘Oh no,’ Simone said, when Chiara whispered that she had a headache and was leaving. ‘Don’t go, my dear. We haven’t had a chance to properly chat.’

  Simone’s eyelids were pink. She was quite tipsy. The wine had arrived a long time before the pasta.

  ‘Sit back down, have a coffee–that’s good for headaches. Let’s order you one,’ she said, waving her hand in the direction of the strings of multi-coloured chilli peppers dangling above the aperture to the kitchen.

  The young man beside her was holding forth about the post-war betrayal of the people’s aspirations. ‘The Red Brigade is a direct descendant of the partisan resistance,’ he announced.

  ‘Order a coffee, go on,’ Simone said, followed by, ‘No,’ directed to the table at large. She couldn’t resist rejoining the fray. ‘It’s completely different because the circumstances are not the same. The one cannot be used to justify the other. Of course I understand the pernicious role of the Catholic Church,’ she was saying as Chiara slipped out of the door.

  She was already in bed when the telephone rang. She swung her legs to the mat, felt with her toes under the bed for her slippers, shuffled her feet into them, padded down the hall to the phone.

  ‘You left!’ Simone said.

  Chiara wearily agreed that she had.

  ‘What a shame. I won’t see you now for ages because I’m off to France to see my cousins.’

  Chiara was silent, taking this in. Simone was going to be away.

  ‘The Algerian clan are coming over, and the grande dame sans merci is hosting a gathering. I have been summoned,’ Simone said. She was referring to her ancient, imperious and wealthy godmother.

  ‘Oh,’ was all Chiara managed. And then, ‘How long for?’

  ‘A week or so.’

  ‘Oh,’ Chiara said again.

  There was a pause. ‘Very interesting play, wasn’t it? And what fascinating young people they were. So engagés.’

  ‘Mmh,’ Chiara said.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

  ‘Just very tired.’

  ‘You’re not cross with me, are you?’ Simone said.

  And Chiara, who realised that she was, but unjustifiably so, said, ‘No, I’m cross with myself.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Chiara sighed. ‘In a rash moment I agreed to put up this British girl for the summer.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘She’s someone’s daughter.’

  ‘Well, we all are,’ Simone pointed out.

  ‘Someone I used to know.’

  ‘At the institute?’ Simone said.

  Chiara made an assenting noise. It wasn’t a downright lie, because Daniele did occasionally come into the institute. She remembered that, once, when he was sick and couldn’t go to school, she had taken him into work with her, and he had lain under her desk on a cushion, sleeping. He was quite a big boy then. Eleven perhaps, but no one had even known he was there. His hot-looking face as he slept. The way his eyes were always open a slit, as if he could never completely relax.

  ‘Yes, it was a chap at the institute. He wasn’t there long. His daughter is in the UK now and wants to learn Italian, so they asked me whether I’d put her up.’

  ‘But you don’t want her to come.’

  She could say it now. This girl is Daniele’s daughter, she could say, and Simone would understand. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘That’s the thing.’

  ‘Why did you say yes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. But, suddenly, she did.

  ‘You’re too accommodating. That’s your problem,’ Simone said. ‘It’s also what makes you so wonderful of course. Telephone these people and say you made a mistake and you don’t have room. Which is pretty much true. You do live in a one-bedroom flat, although I suppose you could use the salon, but you don’t want her. And that’s that. Just tell them. You don’t owe them anything.’

  She did owe them, Edna and Maria Kelly, she thought as she replaced the receiver. She remembered now exactly when it was that someone referred to him as Daniele Levi: 1960, the middle of Italy’s economic miracle. March 1960, to be precise.

  She is sitting in the salon, smoking, pretending to read the paper. The Christian Democrats have done a deal with the right wing. That is the front-page news. She reads the headline repeatedly, but she doesn’t care about the outside world. It can go hang, the outside world. Because in her own little world, she has struck a different deal and she is bereft. She has sent her boy away to a clinic. And he was incapable of understanding that she did it for his own good and that he was going to die if he didn’t stop and that it broke her heart. But he was right, she was a liar, and so, for perhaps the first time in their shared life, she had said nothing. Explained nothing.

  ‘Don’t come back until you are clean,’ she told him, and he gave her such a look.

  Oh, how will she ever recover from that look? As if he hated her. Simone says she has done the right thing. A brave and wonderful thing. That he will come back freed of his addiction and he will thank her.

  But in this moment, sitting alone in her vast, empty apartment, she thinks she knows better. That he doesn’t want to be saved. He never really did.

  He has gone and he hates her.

  The doorbell rings. She doesn’t answer it. She cannot bear to speak to anyone.

  It rings again and again. And in between the rings, she can hear, more faintly, the buzz and ping and bleep of other doorbells, like an echo. Someone is pressing the bell buttons of all the flats in the building.

  She goes to the intercom. She needs to make this person go away.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Is Daniele Levi there?’ a woman’s voice says.

  Nobody calls him Levi.

  She answers without thinking. ‘No,’ she says, ‘no one of that name here.’ And she sits down again, sinking into her torpor once more.

  Days later, when she bumps into the upstairs neighbour, Signora Persighetti, on the stairs, she hears that she went down to talk to the distraught young woman at the door. There was a child with her, a small girl with blonde curly hair. Signora Persighetti said she looked like a little angel.

  She was up ridiculously early. She would go to Gianni’s for breakfast and then for a walk to clear her head. And then she would telephone the girl to explain that it would be better if she did not come. She would say she was sick. Again, it was not a downright lie. These dizzy incidents were increasing. Something was awry. She was at odds with herself.

  In the square they were still setting up the market. Stalls were being erected, frames slotted and snapp
ed into place. Vanloads of produce were being unloaded and people were shouting at and to each other. The flower seller that she always frequented, who had only a trestle table and not a complicated structure to assemble, was arranging her blooms. She had bucketloads of sweet peas, and to Chiara, who hadn’t even had a coffee, their scent was sickly sweet.

  She turned down Vicolo del Gallo and went into Gianni’s bar. It was more than an hour before her usual time, and the clientele was different. Her table at the window was occupied. The only space to sit was in the internal room, where market traders were smoking and chatting. An open packet of Marlboro lay on the nearest table, a cigarette smouldering in the glass ashtray. The desire to snatch it up and suck the smoke into her lungs was strong. She spun on her heel and pushed her way back through the bustle of people. Gianni was caught up with the cluster around the bar, people drinking their coffees, calling for water, a biscuit, a cornetto, and did not notice her. Two old men drooping over the central table had grappa chasers. Chiara stepped out onto the street again with the sensation of not having left a trace.

  Invisibility creeps up on you. It is impossible to pinpoint the moment of its onset. Older than you might imagine when you’re young. A forty-year-old woman, for example, has a pull. Perhaps around the age of fifty, it begins. Chiara had thought herself immune. But recently there had been a fading. A feeling of being used up, a sort of creeping pointlessness indefinably entwined with giving up smoking and with the dilemma of the girl. There was a time when she had practised passing unnoticed. Now she didn’t even have to try.

  She crossed Piazza Farnese, where the street cleaners had just finished, and the cobbles gleamed silver grey. A few young and not-so-young people leant or sat around the fountain. She scanned their faces, as she always did, even now, but she didn’t recognise any of them.

  She wandered down Via dei Giubbonari where the shops weren’t yet open. She bought a newspaper from the kiosk at the corner of the main road and walked in the direction of the river. The bar near the Gramsci Institute was just opening. A young man had unfastened the metal shutters and was ratcheting them up with a sort of bent pole that he twisted and turned. It seemed a complicated and challenging task.