Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  The child’s parents approached, pushing a younger sibling. They were having a row. The child stood still as a statue, his sword brandished high above his head, and they walked past, engrossed in each other, not even registering his marvellous pose. He stayed a few moments, unmoving, and then he leapt down and ran after them, thwacking at the sides of the stone tiers, his red face scrunched up. He swiped low, slicing into the wheels of the pushchair. The mighty sword caught and was mangled in the spokes. The mother smacked the boy’s legs, and he started to wail.

  ‘At least you’re not being fed to the lions,’ Barry would probably have told that boy if he were here. Then he’d make him forget the raging injustice of his treatment by telling stories of bloodthirsty crowds, roaring beasts, bold warriors and hapless Christians.

  She leant back and let the sun bathe her face. Barry, her erstwhile father.

  She blinked, stood up, brushed from her exquisite dress some bits of twig and grass that she must have picked up when she caught the signora, and set off in the other direction.

  On the way back home, Chiara had to ask the taxi driver to stop. She clawed at the door, stuck out her head and was sick on the pavement, emptying the carefully prepared lunch into the gutter, with people stepping out of the way and making disgusted noises. Back in her own building, she hauled herself up the stairs, clutching the banister. The nauseating whirl had abated but it hadn’t gone away, and something was dislodged in her head, as if a stone that used to cover the hidden entrance to a cave had been kicked aside.

  This girl. This alien being she’d allowed into her life, this girl with all her questions. When she realised she had actually placed the hidden photograph of Daniele in Maria’s hands, she had nearly passed out.

  She had imagined a child, a wispy sort of a creature. She had been fooled by the quiet little voice on the telephone, the tears and the hesitancy. Someone manageable, biddable, tidy-awayable was what she had had in mind. Not this large-breasted, tousle-haired, almost fully formed, blatant sort of creature–and yet, and yet, alongside the nausea and the dizziness and the what was it, she sought the word. Terror seemed too strong, but it would do, it was close enough. Terror, yes. And alongside that, another feeling, a kind of soaring, a thing she hadn’t felt for such a long time she hardly recognised it. And the name of that thing was elation.

  Daniele’s daughter.

  She needed to contact Antonio and tell him they were doing it now. The big revelation. She could not put off telling the girl any longer.

  Father Pio answered the telephone. Antonio was away. He would be back after the weekend.

  ‘Tell him to telephone me the moment he returns,’ she said.

  She wondered whether she could wait until the following week. Yes, if she planned things carefully, outings and excursions. The language school had a trip to the catacombs at the weekend. She would book the girl on that. And she would enlist the help of her cousin’s son, Beppe.

  She would keep the girl so busy that her feet would not touch the ground.

  EIGHTEEN

  One of Daniele’s hands is hooked into Chiara’s pocket and the other is stuffed into his own pocket, where he clutches the notes he has written to his mother. A surge of pride–that he can write so well and that she was the one to teach him–momentarily overrides her anxiety.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she says.

  He nods.

  ‘You know where we’re going and what we’re doing?’

  They are going first to the ghetto and then to the Janiculum hill above Trastevere, the sites he has chosen.

  ‘You have the documents?’

  Their false identity documents are in his inside pocket in case they should be stopped. He nods again.

  They set off and the anxiety returns. She is a tangle of fears. She is fearful of the effect on him, on them, of returning to the scene of his family’s abduction. She is fearful that some military presence remains in the ghetto. She pictures a lone sniper, biding his time, crouched at the window of a high room, adjusting the angle of his rifle. She is fearful that Daniele might run away when they are on his home ground, might make a dash for it, disappear into one of the ghetto’s narrow alleyways and hide. It is so strong in him, the impulse to run. And how will she ever find him again?

  Chiara wanted to postpone this expedition. Two weeks earlier there was a partisan bomb attack on an SS police regiment and dozens were killed. Tension is high, rumours are rife. Nothing on this scale in the heart of the city has happened before. She had cycled up to Gennaro’s place, but he wasn’t there. She doesn’t know whether he is in hiding, if he has been caught, or even if his group was definitely responsible, but she is full of dread. She has heard stories that the bomber was among the victims and that an SS soldier shot someone dead on the street just because his hands twitched when he had been told to hold still. There is talk of reprisals, of random people being plucked from the streets, children even, and old men who had nothing to do with it taken who knows where. People have disappeared.

  Simone said that the time will never be right and they should go ahead.

  Chiara and Daniele walk quickly and purposefully. Simone follows at a distance. She is their back-up, ready to set up a commotion to divert attention if necessary. The streets and squares of the ghetto are deserted. Even so, with each step, Chiara is conscious of resisting the urge to pick up Daniele and run. Just to be here with him seems a provocation, a wilful tempting of fate.

  They cross Piazza Costaguti and walk through the dark passageway next to the little temple at the far end of the square. Daniele lifts a loose stone next to the doorway in the corner of the yard, the entrance to his family home. He places his first note beneath, where the spare key used to be kept. The thick walls of the buildings around, the eerie silence, the lack of an exit route other than the alleyway through which they entered, make the courtyard oppressive.

  Daniele stands staring at the doorway. She can hardly bear to think how the emptiness and the quiet must strike him, what thoughts might be going through his mind.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’

  The face he turns to her is expressionless. She sees that her fears that he might run away were unfounded. He appears to be in a sort of trance. He is a mystery to her. I will never know, she thinks. They walk on.

  The second note slides easily into place behind the street sign.

  They turn into Via del Portico d’Ottavia. He has chosen an ancient charity box embedded in the street wall for his third note. Chiara has passed it many times without ever noticing it. Beneath the slot there is an inscription, in Hebrew, she imagines, and beneath that its translation into Italian. For the orphans. The slot is for coins and the folded note will not fit through.

  ‘Can I help?’ she says.

  He ignores her, opens the note out and refolds it. His movements are unhurried. He is taking an age. Her heart will burst forth from her chest and her legs collapse beneath her while his stubby child fingers fumble with the piece of paper. She notices a little keyhole in the metal box. She wonders who was the custodian of that key and where it might now be. She has a sudden vision of a great pile of unclaimed keys that would unlock the doors to the ghetto buildings. She looks away. The streets are still empty.

  Finally, he is done and they move on, posting the last of the ghetto notes through the door of Gennaro’s boarded-up bar. They continue along Via del Portico d’Ottavia, past the Theatre of Marcellus and out onto Lungotevere.

  They cross over the little bridge onto the island in the middle of the river to St Bartholomew’s church where they are to meet up with Simone. There is a service in full swing even though it is the middle of the afternoon. They stand at the back, just inside the door.

  The priest is reading the gospel. ‘Jesus went forth with his disciples across the Kidron valley, where there was a garden,’ he says.

  It must be Good Friday, she realises. The vegetable garden above Nonna’s house appears in her mind and the vall
ey on the other side of the hill.

  ‘Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place,’ the priest continues.

  Something long held down erupts and a wail bursts from Chiara’s lips. She claps her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound but, behind her hand, her mouth is open in horror. There is a well of unshed tears in her and it is bottomless.

  Then Simone appears and leads them back out into the porch where she takes Chiara in her arms.

  ‘What is it?’ she is saying. ‘You did so well. You both did so well.’

  Chiara cannot compose herself sufficiently to answer, but clutches at Simone’s sleeve and sobs inconsolably into her bosom. ‘Cecilia,’ she manages at last.

  Simone holds her and pats her and makes soothing noises. She reminds Chiara that she has left Cecilia in the care of the Morelli couple and that Beatrice sounds like a very competent woman. She mentions too the sturdy and loyal Gabriele. Eventually Chiara calms down.

  Simone doesn’t accompany them on the final stage of the expedition. She leaves them there. She is going to see whether she can find anything for them to eat that evening. Bread rations have been cut again. They have already consumed today’s meagre quota and there is nothing in the shops.

  The fifth note is to be left at the Anita Garibaldi monument, which Daniele picked out from a photo in the bookstore. Chiara feels weak and light-headed with tiredness and hunger and emotion. She imagines Daniele too must be weary and so, in the hope that a bus will come along and they will not have to walk the whole way, they follow the bus route.

  Via Garibaldi zigzags up the Janiculum hill. As they climb higher and leave the city behind, Chiara starts to feel less tired. She breathes more easily and strength returns to her legs. It is a beautiful day and the oak trees are in bud. No bus comes by. They pause a moment in the vast square where the monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi stands. From here the privations and damage the city has suffered are not visible. Rome appears undiminished, intact. It shimmers in the soft spring air.

  ‘How lovely,’ Chiara says.

  They walk farther and then there she is, Anita Garibaldi on her stallion. And Daniele, detaching himself from Chiara’s side, gallops ahead to meet her. He gallops up to the monument and then twice around its base, holding imaginary reins. He rears up, whinnies and comes to a halt, pawing the ground.

  He looks just like a child, playing.

  Chiara stares at him, amazed. She feels she could even break into a gallop herself, but refrains.

  ‘This is the right place, isn’t it?’ she says when she catches up. She means this is the place where the hope and possibility of a message getting through does not seem so far-fetched.

  He nods.

  The bronze statue depicting Anita Garibaldi, a gun in one hand and a baby in the other, is mounted on a plinth decorated with dramatic scenes in bas-relief. They climb the plinth steps and walk slowly around, examining the scenes. The parts that most protrude, banners held aloft by riders, flying manes, fetlocks and muzzles, are lighter in colour, with a greenish tinge. The frieze on the back of the plinth shows a scene of devastation, the aftermath of a battle, bodies piled on top of each other. Here that greenish sheen appears on an outflung hand, a sagging shirt-cuff, the heel of a boot pushing into someone else’s face.

  Chiara and Daniele are drawn to the figure of Anita herself, kneeling among the bodies; the curve of her back, the waves of her hair, the folds of her dress, alert and full of life in among the dead. In the crook of her right elbow there is a hollow. Chiara hoists Daniele up and he inserts his note, folded into little squares, into it.

  Then she lifts him down and smiles at him.

  ‘I can climb that tree,’ he says, indicating a nearby oak.

  ‘Show me,’ she says and she sits on the plinth steps to watch him climb.

  When they get home, they find Simone has managed to procure a bag of chestnut flour and Winston has laid two eggs. Chiara makes them a sort of sweet loaf and they eat it hot, straight from the oven.

  NINETEEN

  Maria knelt in front of the Pietà, contemplating its marble folds. Here was a cool and peaceful place to be. Although there was a steady stream of tourists coming and going in the huge church behind, muttering and possibly complaining about the indignity of being made to cover their arms and their heads (if they were female), or remove their hats (if male) before entering, they didn’t impinge on her. Maria herself had a thin cotton scarf, borrowed from the supply at the church doorway, about her shoulders.

  After days of frenetic activity–mornings at school; afternoons hurtling around Rome for sightseeing with the signora’s nephew Beppe and his friend Carmelo, or some other friends of the signora who wanted to show her round the university; the whole of Saturday being taken up by an excursion with the language school, which the signora had booked her on, to Hadrian’s villa–now, finally, before this most famous of statues, she had come, quite simply, to a halt.

  She had seen the Forum, the Palatine hill and the Campidoglio, the nearest of the Catacombs and a bewildering number of churches, including one made of bones. She had worn a variety of exquisite outfits from the signora’s collection and been much admired. Today she was wearing a knee-length, sleeveless tunic dating from the sixties. It was made of shot silk with a blue warp and a pink weft and oversized pink buttons down the back.

  ‘Just begging someone to unbutton them,’ according to Carmelo.

  Not him, though, because he was not that way inclined.

  She had visited Keats’s grave in the Protestant cemetery behind the Pyramid and sat at the desk in the salon, puzzling over Keats’s theories about life and love and consciousness, mansions of many apartments and dwelling in uncertainty. She had drunk chilled white wine, downed an espresso every day after her lunch and hardly missed proper cups of tea at all. She had learnt to twirl her spaghetti around her fork and not to slurp it, how to tell whether a melon was ripe, the names of seven different sorts of pasta and the difference between Parmesan and pecorino. She had eaten artichokes, aubergines, peppers and garlic, and her insides were lubricated with olive oil.

  She knew to buy tickets at the tobacconist before boarding the bus, to ask for the till receipt in a bar in advance of ordering, and not to sit down in a café without checking the prices. But still, however much she learnt, she had the sense that something vital was eluding her.

  She was thinking about something she had read in a novel about Michelangelo. How he would go up to Pietrasanta to choose the marble for his sculptures, and how it seemed more as if the piece of marble was calling out and choosing him. And then, as he chipped and chiselled, he felt that he was uncovering and revealing the figure within. She wondered whether, as a piece of marble was to Michelangelo, so Italian was to her, and whether her British crust was being chipped away and, if so, why it was taking such a long time.

  She had been running to inhabit the Rome version of herself so that she could leave behind the other one, the sad, pale, listless British one. And sometimes the gap between the two closed, becoming infinitesimally small, but at other times the bright, bold, Roman Maria would skip out of her range, pulling away. She was as ignorant about Daniele Levi now as when she had arrived and, she acknowledged now, in this moment of stillness, despite being almost all of the time in company, despite the stream of admirers that Rome provided, the constant offers from men, the pinching and the groping to be fended off, despite or perhaps because of all that, some of the time she was gripped by loneliness.

  She thought of her brother and sister, and of Barry who wasn’t her father, and of her treacherous mother, then pulled the scarf up over her head and, hidden inside its folds, allowed herself a little weep. She wiped her nose with the scarf and rolled it into a bundle to drop in the box by the door.

  There, outside, was Rome laid out for her in all its glory. She could always count on that. An endless, unfolding delight of winding streets and squares, fountains and stairways, hills and parks, statues, pillars and arches
that drew her out of herself from hour to hour. And always on offer when it threatened to overwhelm her was the quiet, cool refuge of churches. The city tugged her from her confusion and sadness and then plunged her back into it, but before she had a chance properly to dwell there, she would be distracted again by this enchanted world. Despite what she sometimes thought about having been damaged and lost beyond remedy, Rome crept in. She inhaled it.

  She stepped down into the huge square, her dress gleaming in the sunshine like a dragonfly’s wings, iridescent. On the other side, she hopped on a bus to the railway station where she caught a metro out to the area of EUR, to the south of the city. Finally she was going to visit her mother’s old friend Helen.

  ‘You never told me, why did you never tell me, that I have been here before?’ Maria’s voice was shrill.

  ‘Pardon?’ Her mum sounded careworn, distracted and then, rallying, ‘Maria, is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me. I’ve been to see Helen.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ There came a deep, tremulous sigh. ‘Wait a minute.’

  There was the clatter of the receiver being put down, background shouts and shushings. You could stretch the phone cord across the hall and into the living room. It only just reached. Then you could have a more private conversation, standing bang up against the closed door on the other side. Perhaps her mum didn’t know this or perhaps she didn’t want Pat or Nel to trip over the taut cord when they ran through the hall.

  ‘Here I am,’ her mum said when she’d done whatever she needed to do not to be disturbed.

  ‘You brought me here when I was little,’ Maria said.

  ‘Helen told you.’

  ‘No, I remembered.’

  ‘You couldn’t have.’

  ‘But I did. We went up onto the roof of her building, where they hang all the washing. She wanted to show me the view. She said you and she used to go up there.’