‘Goodness me.’
‘Hadn’t you thought of that?’
‘I’m a nonna!’
She phoned Beppe back. ‘Tell Maria that I will be making a special lunch tomorrow and to come straight home after school.’
‘I thought I’d had a stroke,’ she said the next morning.
She and Simone were in Babington’s at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. Chiara had been reluctant, but Simone had insisted on her coming out, said she would only fret if she stayed in. It was Simone’s treat.
Simone was wearing a floor-length caftan with broad gold and purple stripes, a present from Algeria. She wore a purple clasp in her hair and orange beads around her neck. She reached across to wipe a stray crumb from the corner of Chiara’s mouth and chucked her cheek with the backs of her fingers.
‘You’re far too young for a stroke. And you’re not the type. You’re thin. Thin and young,’ she pronounced.
She took her hand away, flapped it dismissively in Chiara’s direction and picked up another cake, looking out of the window as she consumed it in such speedy little bites that it was hard to imagine afterwards that the cake had ever been there.
‘Look at that,’ she said, indicating with a nod a man on a bicycle pulling an empty rickshaw on wheels. ‘Is that for tourists? It won’t catch on.’
‘I’m not too young. There was a man in the papers this week who was only thirty-eight. He had a massive stroke. He can move only his left eyelid,’ Chiara said.
‘What man?’ Simone said.
‘A man here in Rome,’ Chiara said. ‘I don’t know. Haven’t you read any newspapers recently?’
‘He was thirty-eight?’ Simone said, bringing her full attention to bear.
‘Yes,’ Chiara agreed. ‘Thirty-eight.’ Daniele’s age.
‘I don’t think you’ve had a stroke,’ Simone said. ‘There are no indications. Your speech is normal. There is no drooping.’
‘I know I didn’t have a stroke. I said I thought I’d had one, that’s all.’
‘What were your symptoms?’
‘A sudden, dreadful dizziness. Something fizzled in my head, and I couldn’t speak for a while. It kept happening. I had to be very, very careful not to make quick movements because, if I did, if I swung my head to the right, then everything would spin. It felt as though the world had become unsafe. Uncertain.’
‘Have you only just discovered that?’ Simone said.
There was one cake left on the plate.
‘I could eat that but I won’t,’ Simone said, virtuously. ‘But then it’s a shame to waste it,’ she added. ‘And it is my day off.’
She meant from her diet, which involved taking some potion that stimulated the production of amino acids, which in turn speeded up digestion or metabolic rate or something.
‘You don’t want it, do you?’ she said, eyeing the cake, and then looked up. ‘Oh, Chiara. It’s serious, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tell me last night? Oh, you were so caught up in worrying about the girl you forgot to mention that you were ill.’
Her face sagged, and her great age, normally disguised by the bonhomie that pulled up the skin and flesh, the splendid bone structure, the languid bounce, was revealed, undeniable.
‘I knew there was something dreadfully wrong,’ she said in doomed, bereft tones.
‘No, no, no,’ Chiara protested. ‘Not at all. I’m better. Look, I’m cured.’
She turned her head to the right. Outside, a portly middle-aged couple were negotiating with the rickshaw rider.
Simone seemed unconvinced. She picked up the last cake and dejectedly munched it.
Chiara set about a lavish description of the treatment, making it into an old-fashioned laying-on of hands, a calling-up of ancient wisdoms to banish the rogue, chalky substance from the canals of her inner ear.
‘At one point,’ she said, ‘I was thinking about that marble floor and hoping they wouldn’t drop me.’
‘They were hardly likely to drop you. A child could lift you,’ Simone said. ‘So you’re cured, are you?’
‘Until the next time,’ Chiara said. ‘It was as if I were inside a tornado. Isn’t it amazing, that a microscopic fragment out of place can so distort one’s notion of reality?’
‘What’s more amazing is that hanging you upside down can rectify it,’ Simone said. ‘Do you think if the members of the government were all hung upside down, it would correct their interpretation of the world?’
‘Well, it worked with Mussolini,’ Chiara said.
And they both sniggered, like schoolgirls at a dirty joke.
Simone wanted to go for a ride in the bicycle rickshaw, but Chiara demurred at such a pointless extravagance. As soon as Simone had two pennies to rub together she liked to spend them.
‘It’s because you weren’t brought up in penury,’ she told Chiara. ‘That’s why frugality has an appeal to you.’
‘It’s not that,’ Chiara said. ‘I just want to get back. In case.’
‘It’s only ten o’clock,’ Simone said. ‘Let’s at least have a little walk first.’
They climbed the Spanish Steps, weaving their way in between the tourists and hippie types, the vendors selling beads and painted plates, the artists who would execute your portrait or do your caricature for two thousand lira.
As they set off along the road at the top, Chiara told her about the outing with Dario Fulminante. It seemed to her almost like a dream, that afternoon. The bubbling waters of the river, the apparition of the peasant man among the bulrushes, the film-maker who had been her companion in that brief moment out of time.
‘Dario Fulminante,’ Simone said. ‘That sounds like a stage name. Does he make porno films?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Chiara had a sudden vision of the creepy financiers in their suits and sunglasses. ‘Documentaries, he said.’
‘Perhaps there’ll be a role for me. You must keep in touch with him.’
‘You wouldn’t take part in a pornographic film,’ said Chiara.
‘Well, I don’t mind taking my clothes off for a good cause,’ said Simone. ‘And I had years of practice as an artist’s model. I can hold a pose.’
She paused, propped herself against the parapet, flung an arm on high and leant backwards an inch for Chiara to admire her upturned head in profile. Beyond the low wall that edged the pavement, Rome spread off into the hazy middle distance, with its trees and greenery, its roofs and roof gardens, its domes.
‘Ha ha,’ Simone laughed at herself as they resumed their stroll. ‘It would depend. If it were an arty film or not. If it had a political message.’
They turned into the park and plumped down on the first unoccupied bench, sitting in silence in the general shade of the high umbrella pines and the more particular shade of an overhanging myrtle shrub. An incongruous and stumpy olive tree grew out of the gravel. Opposite was a children’s play area. A donkey pulled a cart containing small children. Bigger kids shot past on roller skates.
Chiara looked at the little olive tree. It was not a good place to grow, in the shade of the pines. It would never get enough light. But it had to make the best of it, send down its own gnarly roots through the gravel and stone, in between the roots of bigger trees to find some sustenance, and at the same time it had to stretch itself upwards and aspire to bearing fruit. She thought about the olive grove above Nonna’s farm and the ancient tree, the Mago, where Daniele one moonlit night, as he had later told her, had wished that he would go to sleep and never wake up. Then her thoughts leapt to the oak tree that he used to climb near the Anita Garibaldi monument and she remembered she had left a note for him there, not that long ago. How foolish she was.
‘Would you like a caramel?’ Simone said, shifting next to her on the bench and proffering a tube of boiled sweets. ‘The lemon ones are the nicest.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘What’s the matter? You’re sighing.’
‘Simone, do you think he might be alive? That he’s out
there somewhere?’
Simone looked at Chiara and opened her mouth as if about to speak. Then she closed it again and gazed straight ahead. She might have been watching a tottering infant who was chasing the pigeons, arms held wide, hands cupped. She put her arm over Chiara’s shoulder and squeezed her upper arm as she spoke.
‘I think if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found. He is capable of disappearing and melting away. Of hiding right under your nose. We know that. He could be anywhere. He could be down the road. Or he could be in America. But, in all honesty, I think he would have been in touch.’
Chiara got to her feet. ‘Shall we go?’ she said.
Simone stood up too and gathered Chiara into her arms. ‘I’m sorry, Chiara,’ she said. ‘Can you bear it?’
Chiara allowed herself to be held.
‘What are you going to make us for lunch then?’ Simone said in the cab.
‘I’m going to do pasta with walnut sauce. With mascarpone. I’ve got all the ingredients already because it’s what I was going to make for dinner last night but didn’t. It’s quite rich and creamy but then we’ll have a very light main course. Just a green salad and some fish. Do you know that method where you fry the fish quickly in oil first and then marinade it?’
‘No,’ Simone said, a fond smile on her face. ‘Tell me.’
‘Well, that’s what you do. So I fried it all up last night and put it in a marinade. Oil, white wine, garlic, parsley and mint.’
They had reached the house.
‘Why don’t I go and get some ice cream for dessert? We’ll put it in the top of your fridge. What flavour does she like?’
‘Get strawberry,’ Chiara said. Then, ‘Is it going to be all right?’
‘It’s going to be more than all right. It’s going to be fantastic,’ Simone said.
‘You don’t know,’ Chiara said and she clutched at her friend’s arm. ‘I did such a terrible thing.’
And she tried to tell Simone, there on the doorstep, the thing she had never told anyone, that only she and Daniele knew, because suddenly the idea that her dear friend didn’t know was unbearable, but Simone kept interrupting.
‘Oh, I remember when you got that document,’ Simone said. ‘I said what does this mean, and you said something like, it means he’s mine. But of course it also meant that all his family had been wiped off the face of the earth, and so that had to be dealt with too.’
‘Will you let me get my words out?’ Chiara said. ‘I have to confess the terrible thing I did. The unforgivable thing. You might not want to be my friend when you know.’
‘I already know,’ Simone said.
‘You don’t know what I’m going to say.’
‘I do. I half guessed it at the time. One minute you were going every week to the Israelite Community Office, standing in those interminable queues, and the next, hey presto, you’re allowed to be his legal guardian and all obstacles have been removed. It all happened too fast. So you don’t really need to tell me, except for the purposes of self-flagellation, of course. I know that does always have a pull for you.’
Chiara stared at her friend, who looked steadily back at her. ‘I cut him off. I severed his only possible connection.’
‘You saved him from more upheaval. No one could have loved him more than you did or cared for him better,’ Simone said. ‘There comes a point in a person’s life, when whatever has happened, whatever suffering he or she has had to bear, she has to shove it all into her backpack, pick it up and carry it, walking her own path.’
‘Simone,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me it’s time I grew up?’
‘Impudent lady, aren’t I?’ she said. Then she kissed Chiara on both cheeks. ‘I know I’ve told you this a thousand times, but I do adore you, Chiara Ravello.’
TWENTY-TWO
‘Let me see,’ the man behind the desk says, as he always does. ‘Levi, Levi,’ he mumbles and he starts shuffling through a pile of files and folders on the desk beside him. A foul-smelling cigar hangs from his mouth, and his eyes are half shut against the smoke.
It is the same rigmarole every time. Nothing ever changes except that the mountain of papers and folders and box files, stacked haphazardly here and there on the floor, on the shelves and covering a long table at the back of the office, grow higher. But Chiara is hopeful, more than hopeful, in a state of excitement and anticipation, because this time they are going to stamp her docket. On her previous visit, after an episode she cringingly thinks of as ‘bribing the rabbi’, although he wasn’t a rabbi and it wasn’t a bribe but a donation for which she received a receipt, she was given to understand as much. It is quite unrelated to the money that changed hands. It is above board and entirely to do with the fact that there is hard evidence that all Daniele’s family perished at Auschwitz, as well as the amount of time that has passed, nearly four years.
Since the war ended, people have started to return: imprisoned soldiers from Russia, partisans from up in the mountains, prisoners of war from their camps in North Africa or Britain or wherever they were, Jews who had been in hiding. But nobody from Daniele’s family.
There had been news of an old lady who might have been his paternal grandmother, but it transpired that it was some other family named Levi. His father had had a sister, but of her there was no trace. But still information keeps coming in and has to be collated, checked, cross-referenced and added to the piles.
‘Good news,’ the man says. ‘Something came in. There’s a file marked with a note telling the clerk to contact you.’
‘Me?’ she says.
‘Did they contact you?’
‘No,’ she says. She shakes her head for emphasis. ‘No one has contacted me,’ as if by tripling her denials she can eliminate the fact of there being something worthy of notification.
‘We don’t get through it all,’ he says, puffing on his cigar and looking round at the stacks of files. ‘It piles up. But it is so important, this work.’
‘What was it?’ she says. ‘What is it?’
There are loose folds of skin around his jowls as if he had been a very fat man who had suddenly became radically thin, and the skin, in a state of shock, has remained where it was, empty, waiting for the flesh to return.
‘Perhaps I’ve got this wrong,’ he says. ‘Levi was the name, wasn’t it? So many Levis. I thought it had been put out here with the green files for action.’ He lifts the top file and riffles through the ones underneath. ‘We had a letter from a lady in Genoa who might be the boy’s aunt. She is married now and about to emigrate and she wanted to make sure before she went… ’
And he is telling her now about how they had heard from this woman before but they hadn’t connected it with this particular case. Chiara can see that in fact he has two files in his hand, that the second has attached itself–via the clip holding the note in place–to the top one.
She puts down on her side of the desk her neatly typed document, which she needs to have stamped and signed, and she smooths her hands over it. Bile rises in her throat, and she wonders whether she might be sick.
It is over. He is going to be taken away. Not across Rome to a nonna’s house where she might visit, but to an aunt who is going to remove him from the country. She will never see him again.
‘Dorotea,’ the man calls out, replacing the files on the counter, and a woman with hair so black it is almost blue appears from a back room and stands in the doorway. ‘Do you know where the Levi file has been put?’ he says, twisting around. ‘The one with the note on it.’
Chiara looks expectantly across at the woman too. At the same time she slides her hand forward, plucks the note from the file and puts it in her coat pocket, all in a single movement.
‘Was it Levi or Levante?’ the woman at the door says.
‘Oh,’ the man says, turning back to Chiara, ‘perhaps I made a mistake.’ He shuffles quickly through the files in front of him again.
‘Can you stamp my document then?’ Chiara says.
‘Do you know?’ he says congenially. ‘I’m not at all sure I can. Let me check.’ He gets up and goes into the back room.
Chiara reaches across for the stamp. She moves only her arm, keeping her body very still so that the person behind her in the queue will suspect nothing. She rolls the stamp in the inkpad and presses it onto her document. There are voices coming from the back room. Chiara rolls the document, slides it up her sleeve and grips her cuff. She sneezes. She lifts her shopping bag up onto the desk and opens it wide to fish out her handkerchief. The man reappears at the door but then turns to answer a question. She picks up the Levi file, drops it into the bag and blows her nose.
‘Husband’s name Durante, that’s right,’ the man says as he walks back in. ‘It appears my colleague remembers the letter too. The file has temporarily been mislaid. It might be that my superior has taken it up himself. We will write to you as soon as we have located it. We will make this a priority because the person in question is intending to leave the country soon.’
‘You have my address, don’t you?’
‘Well, it’s in the file, so when we find that, yes, we will have. But it was Via dei Cappellari, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘that’s not right. Please erase that one from your records.’ She gives him a different address.
On the first Friday of every month, whatever the weather, Chiara and Daniele walk up the Janiculum hill to the Anita Garibaldi monument. Each time Daniele brings a new note and sticks it in the same spot, on the bas-relief at the back, in the crook of Anita Garibaldi’s elbow. He doesn’t ask where the previous note might have gone, nor does he give any indication that he expects a reply. They always sit for a while on one of the patches of grass around the statue or on the plinth steps.
Today, no sooner has he put the note in place than the heavens open. They sit on the steps huddled under an umbrella with the rain sheeting down at their feet.
‘I don’t look like my mamma, do I?’ he says.
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