Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Afterwards, when she was sitting in a classroom full of Swedish au pair girls conjugating verbs out loud in unison, the notion came to her that to acquire the language required a combination of external and internal forces: an alertness to the actualities of vocabulary, grammar and idiom, and then, through study and practice and repetition, an allowing of these to percolate through and awaken an inner core of knowledge that she was sure she must possess. Just as she had always been half Italian, whether she had been aware of it or not, so the language might also be inside as well as out, secreted in nerve clusters, in her cells, or in some previously unaccessed part of her brain. Now that she was here, there was a familiarity about it, something that couldn’t be explained just by her study of the record from the library.

  School finished at noon. The Swedish girls immediately filed across the road, under a stripy awning and into the ice-cream parlour opposite.

  Maria lit a cigarette, the last of the signora’s. She was on another narrow cobbled street, this one curved. She wandered round the bend. A man in uniform with a gun stood on guard outside a bank. She loitered in a doorway opposite, waiting for someone to go in so she could learn the protocol. Bank of the Holy Spirit was its unlikely name. No one went in or came out. She wondered whether perhaps it was not a real bank but something religious, to do with storing up virtue.

  She put out her cigarette and boldly approached, pushing through the street side of the complicated door arrangement. She found herself in an in-between place that resembled an airlock. The door behind slid shut and clicked into place of its own accord. There followed a bleep. She took shallow breaths to preserve the oxygen, waiting for something to happen.

  Nothing did.

  She reached forward to the inner door, ready to throw her weight against it if need be. It swung open and she shot through, performing a little gallop to stay upright. She recovered, handed over her two ten-pound notes, was given quite a large stack of lire in return and emerged ready for the next mission.

  She spotted a sign hanging above a shop farther up the street, a white T on a black background. She rehearsed her words before entering.

  ‘I would like typical Italian cigarettes,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ the tiny old man behind the counter replied.

  She repeated herself.

  The old man, surely too ancient to be working still, said something she couldn’t catch.

  ‘Can you repeat?’ she said.

  He spoke again.

  He seemed to be saying they didn’t sell that brand. She pointed at a pack at random. ‘That one,’ she said.

  She wanted change for the telephone.

  ‘Telephone,’ she said helplessly, showing him the grubby notes he had given her as change. He exchanged them for some unlikely looking coins with a groove in the middle.

  ‘What are these?’ she asked, but he ignored her as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

  She went to a telephone booth and dialled her mum’s friend, Helen. There was no answer.

  She wandered back past the school entrance, trying to remember which way she had come that morning. The road curved round and there in front of her, on the other side of an open urban space, was the domed building again. Now she recognised it. The Pantheon. She looked at it in wonder and then at the people milling about in the square.

  She walked back to the telephone box and dialled Tommaso’s number. ‘It’s me,’ she said, ‘the girl from the train.’

  ‘Maria,’ he sang.

  It sounded as though he was planning to go for a full-blown rendition of the song from West Side Story but then thought better of it.

  ‘My language school is right next to the Pantheon,’ she said.

  ‘How chic,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she said.

  She didn’t want him to get the wrong impression so she told him about the ponytail man. ‘Have you actually spoken to this dude?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, I’m not going to worry about him. He’ll open his mouth and he’ll be a dickhead. He’ll say something stupid and chauvinistic.’

  ‘Unlike you.’

  ‘Unlike me. Exactly.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be a feminist, like you.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I’m half Italian too,’ she said and found herself telling him about Daniele Levi.

  ‘Welcome to the identity-crisis club,’ he said.

  He said he would telephone her one evening at the signora’s flat if she didn’t mind.

  Snippets of the signora’s earlier commentary flipped to the surface of her mind as she retraced their steps and came across the street full of basketwork shops and workshops.

  ‘In case you should ever need anything made of raffia,’ the signora had said, in a way that indicated she herself never would.

  There was the church containing a famous painting, not to be missed. And here was the elongated square, Piazza Navona, with the three fountains, the water bouncing off the great white statues now and sparkling in the bright midday sunshine. It was a pedestrian zone, but this was the place, according to the signora, that the Rolling Stones had driven slowly around in a white Rolls-Royce. Back in 1967.

  She wondered whether Daniele Levi had liked the Rolling Stones. Or whether he had been more of a Beatles man. Barry, who was a Beatles man, said you couldn’t be both. You had to choose. Or perhaps jazz was always Daniele Levi’s thing.

  She passed the museum all about Rome and its history, which the signora, who had never been, had recommended. Here was the shop that sold good-quality umbrellas, and the artisan bread shop, and here she was back in Campo dei Fiori where the market was still going on.

  There was the stall where they short-changed you, and here the signora’s favourite flower stand, and beyond was the statue of Giordano Bruno who had done something heroic and been burnt at the stake hundreds of years before, and here was the delicious bakers–FORNO, it said in big brown letters above the door–and here round the corner was their own darling street where she and the signora lived and there, at the bottom of the stairs, was that smell.

  It stopped her in her tracks. She hovered there, breathed it in, as the door closed behind her. She shut her eyes. What was it? It conjured something inexpressible.

  She opened her eyes. There on the wall, where it twisted around the stairwell, was a slanted rectangle of light. She looked behind her to see the source. Sunshine streamed in through a small barred and glassless window above the door. She stared. She had the strange sensation of standing beside herself, as if she might be able to hold her own hand. She saw the window in real life and at the same time she saw it as a picture in her head. As if she had already known it was there.

  SIXTEEN

  A squat big-bellied man, with mottled red cheeks that puff out and fold over the ends of his moustache, squeezes past the queue and out of the doorway, clutching his precious bloodied package to his chest. There is some muttering as the queue shuffles forward. Did he get more than his fair share?

  Chiara, queuing outside in the street on a cold, bright January morning, watches him waddle away at high speed. She would like to ask him a question. Every whisper on the street of food supplies–beans, dried vegetables, twists of salt, sardines in oil at Piazza Vittorio, sometimes coffee in an underpass near there, flour and sugar at Tor di Nona, canned goods and rice laid out on provisional stalls, no more than bits of cloth on the pavement, in the streets behind Termini–sends her hurtling from one part of Rome to another. She spends half her life queuing. She joins queues even if she doesn’t know what the goods on offer might be. Often there is nothing at all, or it is gone.

  She would like to say to this scurrying man, ‘How come you are so fat? What’s the secret?’

  She glances down at Daniele–he is wearing an old pair of Nonna’s chamois leather gloves, several sizes too big, giving his hands a crinkly, ancient-looking appearance. He resembles a ragamuffin but so many people do that it doesn’t matter. Hardl
y anyone lives in their own homes here in Rome any more. He is holding onto the edge of her coat pocket, clutching the cloth. Not flesh on flesh, never that.

  She follows his gaze across the road to a poster pasted on the window of the cobbler’s opposite. It depicts a red-lipped black man, head thrown back and mouth open, laughing maniacally as he crushes a captive maiden in his massive, muscular arms. The maiden is draped in classical robes, with a smooth, alabaster breast, chaste thighs pressed together, an image of pale purity.

  ‘The liberties … of the liberator!’ reads the caption. A Stars-and-Stripes banner protrudes from the man’s rifle. Rome is full of this lurid propaganda.

  The queue moves forward. They are under the crimson oval sign with the protruding horse’s head now. She can see through the window. Nothing hangs from the hooks above the butcher’s head, and the metal trays she can glimpse between the waiting people are empty, scrubbed clean, but there is definitely meat left on the block, and perhaps the butcher has something else hidden down behind the counter. Afterwards, if they get some meat, she will call in at the cobbler’s and see whether anything can be done about Daniele’s burnt shoes. The toes curl up at the end, like a clown’s. If she gets meat, if she cooks something tasty and nutritious for them today, other things can perhaps be mended too.

  She thinks of the chickens she has acquired from Gennaro, flapping and scratching around the dining room, shitting on Nonna’s oak sideboard. She thinks of how she has plundered Nonno’s wine store, trading his Treviso and his precious Barolo for pasta, Parmesan, scraps. She thinks of the salon, where bolts of Cecilia’s cloth are strewn just as she left them, when she heaved them up and spilt them out on that last day; where she and Daniele sleep in among them, as if there were no bedrooms and they had nowhere else to go. They are like refugees inhabiting the apartment in a temporary kind of way, as if always on the verge of leaving. It is all a muddle.

  The apartment misses Cecilia, tidying, keeping it in order, being there as a living presence to come home to, sewing things together so they seem to make sense. Making it into a home.

  Chiara presses her fingers against her eyelids. Let her not start weeping in the street, in front of the child.

  The word ‘unremarkable’ surfaces in her mind. The nun who handed her the fake identity documents said it.

  ‘If you are out alone, you take your proper documents. But when the boy is with you, take these other ones that make you into a family, and that way you arouse less suspicion. You are unremarkable.’

  Those words have stayed with her. There is a truth in them and a bleak kind of comfort. Because these times are so extraordinary that their story is just that. They are bereaved, orphaned, hungry, haunted, fearful. They are unremarkable.

  Another customer leaves. The line moves forward. She and Daniele are through the door, past the threshold, properly inside. She gives her pocket a tug to catch his attention.

  ‘I think we might be lucky today,’ she says.

  The cold blood smell is in their nostrils. There seems to be just one piece of meat on the slab, but it’s a good size. Chiara prays it won’t run out before they get to the counter, that none of the customers in front has any kind of special deal. The cleaver falls through the air, slicing through the slab of dark-red flesh. She watches the arc of its movement to see where it falls. They all do. They are worshippers at the altar of the chopping block, the butcher their high priest.

  She feels a hand on her shoulder and a surge of adrenalin shoots up her spine. She makes a shrugging movement as if to slide the hand off.

  ‘Chiara?’ a woman’s voice says.

  She half turns to look up into the face of a tired-looking, middle-aged woman.

  ‘Chiara Ravello?’

  The woman grasps both of Chiara’s shoulders, swivelling her so that they face each other square on, and Chiara, instinctively, unthinkingly, without even glancing at him, ushers Daniele behind her back and out of sight. She cannot yet place this tall person, who is gazing at her in disbelief and wonder and something else, some other emotion. She finds herself being drawn into the other’s arms. She breathes in the other’s scent, that unmistakable blend of roses and vanilla, together with something else she could never name when she was a child or an adolescent–something that she used to smell in her father’s hair and in the crease of his pocket-handkerchief–but that now she recognises. Musk.

  She tries to pull away, but her knees are trembling, and the other woman is holding her firmly. Simone Gauchet, her father’s mistress.

  ‘Call me Simone,’ she remembers her saying the last time they met. ‘Come and see me whenever you want.’

  But Chiara hadn’t ever wanted.

  Any port in a storm, she thinks now, and allows herself to be held a bit longer. It is so long since she has been embraced by someone bigger and sturdier than herself. She has been the hugger, not the hugged, the comforter and not the comforted. She struggles not to weep. She can feel the other’s bosom heaving.

  The woman lets her go and as she takes a step back, tucking Daniele more tightly behind her, Chiara notices that the years since she last saw Simone Gauchet soon after her father’s funeral in 1938 have not been kind. She has lines around her mouth, her skin is pale and blotchy. She looks haggard. She is a big-framed woman, built to carry some flesh.

  ‘I am so glad to see you,’ Simone says. ‘I feared for you in the San Lorenzo bombing.’

  Her voice, unlike her face, seems immune to the ravages of time, husky, musical and low. A man might call it seductive.

  It would be rude beyond measure to turn away. Chiara has to say something. ‘We weren’t living there. Cecilia and I moved out of the San Lorenzo apartment a few years ago,’ she says. ‘After my father died.’

  ‘I was worried,’ Simone says. ‘When I saw those pictures on the newsreel with the pope there praying in the rubble, I thought, Oh no. Not Alfonso’s girls. My darling Alfonso. His lovely girls.’

  With the tip of her middle finger she smoothes tears away from her powdered cheeks.

  ‘But you are fine. You are here. Oh,’ she sighs a great sigh. ‘You cannot imagine the relief.’

  Chiara stares at Simone Gauchet saying his name, her father’s name, out loud in the middle of the butcher’s shop, as if he were hers, as if the wound of his loss were hers. Claiming some kinship with Cecilia and Chiara when she didn’t even know them. Smiling at her now as if all is right with the world.

  ‘You’ll be sorry then to hear that my mother was there,’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ Simone says, as if winded. Her smile disappears and her tired face sags again. She looks sadly at Chiara. ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ she says.

  Chiara can detect no evidence of sarcasm in the other woman’s tone, no sign of ill-will or latent satisfaction that her rival is dead.

  She hates me, Chiara’s mother used to say, that trollop, she can’t bear the fact that I’m prettier than she is.

  ‘Your poor mother,’ Simone says. ‘Poor you.’

  Chiara, abashed, stares down at the floor.

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Chiara says quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent an image of Cecilia, her pale sleeping face, like a child’s in its unknowingness, from surging up in her mind. She does not want to be reminded of her sister. ‘She’s in the countryside, at our grandparents’ farm,’ she says firmly.

  She is not going to tell this woman that Nonna is dead, that she has left Cecilia in the care of virtual strangers. That she said she would return within two weeks and circled the day on the calendar with a red pen. That the circled day is long past.

  ‘It’s safer for her there,’ Simone remarks.

  ‘Oh, much,’ Chiara agrees.

  And the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this is actually true, enters her mind for the first time. Perhaps her guilt at leaving Cecilia is a self-indulgence, and her sister is thriving in her absence. Beatrice and Ettore, who were to move into the farmhouse
for the duration, had promised to care for her as if she were their own. Perhaps she, Chiara, held Cecilia back.

  Another customer leaves. Chiara moves a step closer to the butcher’s counter and, in the movement, Daniele is revealed.

  ‘You have a child,’ Simone exclaims in a loud, astonished voice.

  Daniele has the hat with earmuffs pulled down so far that it covers his forehead entirely. His dark eyes peer out and up at Simone as if from the shadowy space under a low bridge.

  Chiara resists shushing her. She reminds herself that the false identity documents are in Daniele’s inside jacket pocket. She is Signora Chiara Ravello Gaspari, as if she were Carlo’s widow, and he is Daniele Gaspari.

  Family, she thinks, clutching at the nun’s words. Unremarkable. Even so, an urge to fill a silence, to pre-empt comments and questions, sets her talking.

  ‘It’s the chickens,’ she hears herself saying. ‘We were going to go back to the countryside but we were given these chickens and so, we, um… ’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Simone says, but she is not really paying attention. She is smiling down at Daniele. ‘I knew you were engaged. Carlo, wasn’t it?’ she says. ‘But I didn’t know you had got married!’

  The realisation that Simone does not even know that Carlo is dead, that he died a month after her father, helps her control the urge to babble.

  ‘This is Daniele,’ she says.

  She does not have to explain herself to this woman. It is no business of Simone Gauchet’s that she has broken the eternal promise she made her sister that she would return. Always and forever. Neither does she have to tell Simone Gauchet why she might be exposing a child to the dangers and privations of the occupied city when she had a choice.