‘Stefania was discovered by a farm worker, a man called Passeri, who had been on his way home with his donkey. He stopped when he noticed something bright among the trees. Stefania’s white woollen socks that Aunt Miriam had crocheted for her. She still had them on even though she had lost shoes, skirt and knickers. The socks were as white as the moon if stained on one side with blood. Passeri was a charitable man and he untied her hands and feet and helped her to clean off the blood disfiguring her face and legs. He carried her on his donkey all the way to the hospital. Next day she lodged an accusation.
‘Mario meanwhile had heard about the rape and grabbed his hair in his hands. This was not what he’d wanted. He hurried to the hospital to ask Stefania’s pardon but she spat in his face and told him if he came again she would denounce him as the instigator of the disgusting act. He went away with his tail between his legs. He continued to apologise, sending her flowers picked on the banks of the Terzolle, and love letters which she always tore up unread. After many months of this she sent him a final letter telling him never to write to her or come near her again: to her it was as if he’d never been born and had never even had a name.’
‘Are you crying, Papà?’
‘It was all complicated by politics, my dear. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about the rape of your mother, but I wanted you to know about it. Nanni went on to be a big fish. He’s a Member of Parliament now. It’s right you should know this. It’s the way our country works. Instead of punishing bullies, it celebrates them and pays them a salary. He’s managed to stay afloat. He’s rich now. He never discusses his past. But he has lots of ideas for the future. Haven’t you heard his voice on the radio?’
‘No, Papà.’
‘Your mother, who never had a political idea in her head, became a sworn enemy of the regime. All her previous admirers vanished, whether because of fear or contempt no one knows. A woman carries the violence she suffers on her own shoulders like a sackful of rocks, you know. Even Muzio disappeared, tall, elegant, handsome Muzio. I was the only admirer left. A little later my father died leaving me the shoemaking business so I had to give up the bakery and go back to the profession of my ancestors.’
‘So she chose you because she had no one else?’ Amara liked teasing her father. And she wanted to lighten the atmosphere after the grim story of the rape.
‘I think she began to think better of me when she found I wasn’t a paid-up member of the fascist party, and that I kept away from their rallies and never made the Roman salute or wore the badge or sang anthems in honour of the Duce. One Sunday we made love behind the shop among sacks of flour and bowls of yeast. That’s when you were conceived, Amara, in tenderness and consolation. I don’t think beautiful Stefania ever really loved me. I was too small and dark. She liked tall, lanky, elegant, blond types like Muzio and Mario, with blue eyes and smooth hands, Daddy’s boys complete with car and dégagé air. That was her type. Instead she got me with my wild hair, eyes like a desperate oriental khan and the ridiculous pomaded moustache she teased me about, and with no car, only a bicycle; I was a total disaster. But she was grateful and fond of me.’
‘Did she never take a lover, Papà?’
‘She didn’t have much time to, Amara dear, even if she’d wanted to. As you well know, she was still very young when she fell ill. It seemed just a slight fever, a mere nothing, but it turned out to be typhus, and the idiot of a doctor treated her for flu. By the time they realised it was typhus it was too late. She died beside me, at night, without a sound. And while she was dying you were sleeping the sleep of the blessed and I hadn’t the courage to wake you. She went so quickly, Amara darling.’
‘Was it she who gave me this stupid name, Amara?’
‘She would have preferred Marlene, like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, a film that came out the year you were born. One of the films I saw from the back row in that ramshackle cinema with wooden seats that made such a noise every time you got up or sat down.’
‘Wasn’t I named after a little bear born in a circus near our home? That’s what you once told me.’
‘Yes, maybe. Perhaps. I can’t really remember. But there was a bitter taste in my mouth from what was happening in this country. The increasing arrogance and bullying, the shortage of work, the new laws that made it almost impossible for anyone to breathe. Not surprising we were bitter, don’t you think? Then you arrived bitter, in fact very bitter, considering the times you were born in.’
‘But why did you never marry again, Papà?’
‘I never found anyone as good as your mother Stefania.’
‘But she’s dead now and you’re still alive.’
‘I talk to her. I go to her grave and tell her what I’ve been doing. I talk to her about you and about myself. And in her own way, she answers.’
‘How?’
‘She doesn’t need words. Thoughts travel faster than words. I can see her and hear her. She’s wiser now she’s dead. Not so haughty as she was. But she can still smile.’
24
This morning the hospital is flooded with sunlight. The broken shutters, the flaking walls, the old iron beds, don’t seem so gloomy and decrepit. The polished floor shines beneath the nurses’ coarse shoes. Medicine bottles tinkle as the trolleys go backwards and forwards.
There’s a party atmosphere and a great crowd of relatives in shirtsleeves with shopping bags over their arms on their way to see the patients. Three children are playing with a toy tractor on the floor. There’s even a sad-looking cat with bald patches in his fur, crouched on the sill before an open window.
Luca greets her from a distance. He is walking in the corridor with a pretty young nurse with long blonde hair and a white cap worn sideways. Thank goodness he’s found a distraction, thinks Amara, cheerfully approaching him. She is carrying a paper bag containing doughnuts that are still hot. She bought them in the street from a little boy with a squint who was struggling to keep off the flies with a homemade fan made from chicken feathers.
Luca hurriedly dismisses the young nurse and advances with unsteady steps. Now he seems more like the Luca she used to know: tall, suave, seductive and unpunished.
‘How are you?’ she asks, offering the sugared doughnuts.
‘I can’t eat those, Amara, but thanks all the same. Have you thought about my suggestion?’
‘I have, and my answer is no.’
‘Will you go back to Vienna?’
‘I’m staying here three days; I shall go and see my father, then I’m off.’
‘Three days from today? Let’s say four not counting yesterday. Why attach so much importance to that child who must have been dead for years?’
‘I don’t even know why myself. I like to think he could be still alive.’
‘You’ve always been one to chase after dreams. Here am I with my living body and you go running after someone who’s dead.’
‘I want to know if Emanuele made it.’
‘You’re raving mad.’
‘Tell me about your last flame, as Suzy calls her.’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Was she a blonde or a brunette?’
‘You know I have a weakness for blondes.’
‘How much younger than you?’
‘What does it matter? She treated me as if we were the same age. We did all sorts of things together: journeys, expeditions, planning the future. We’d already paid the deposit on a new home on Viale Michelangelo.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘A tiny flat. Where the gardener of a villa used to live. Falling to bits but just what we needed.’
‘So you’ve lost the deposit, have you?’
‘I’ve lost it, yes.’
‘Why did your blonde leave you?’
‘Who knows? You women are unpredictable and strange. You can never be trusted.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I bet you started fooling around with the maid.
Or something of the sort.’
‘A neighbour. Actually the owner. A very elegant little woman. But I wasn’t short-changing my partner. I was head-over-heels in love.’
‘You were head-over-heels in love with your partner but you were caressing another woman.’
‘Well, you know how it is with me. Faced with a beautiful woman, I can’t resist. But I was doing nothing wrong. Just a little flirtation on the side. Neither of us took it seriously.’
‘But as luck would have it your flame … what’s her name?’
‘Angelica.’
‘As luck would have it, Angelica took it badly and left you.’
‘Too jealous. But I wouldn’t have stood for that in any case.’
‘Has it never occurred to you that exclusiveness might be essential for love?’
‘Seems a vulgar idea to me.’
‘Vulgar it may be, but it must have some foundation in reality since most people think it an absolute necessity.’
‘Exactly, absolute. I’m against everything absolute.’
‘You’d even be capable of flirting with death himself, you would.’
‘And would that make life jealous?’
‘Life would have good reason to be, don’t you think? If you’re really flirting with death, you have to be irrevocably abandoning life. Like with your little heart attack.’
‘Well, the metaphor’s spot on.’ He laughs, becoming once again the Luca of long ago whose smile bewitched so many women.
‘Have you never been jealous yourself?’
‘I don’t want to own anyone, you know that. For me it’s enough to caresss another body and feel it respond to my caresses. What need is there for exclusivity?’
‘If you ever really did fall in love you might even get jealous.’
‘I believe in the peaceful sharing of property. Exclusive property doesn’t tempt me. I’m a real democrat.’
‘But when women fall in love they assume you’ll be faithful to them. At least during the short time when you tell them you love them.’
‘They get that wrong. I make no claims on exclusivity but I don’t guarantee it either. I’m a free man.’
‘A free man, with the freedom of a tree in a desert.’
‘I’m not afraid of being alone.’
‘Liar! When all you do is ask me to keep you company.’
‘The contradictions of a fearless spirit like my own. I’m not afraid of being alone but I enjoy company, especially the company of young women like you.’
‘Goodbye, Luca. I’m off to see my father. We’ll meet again tomorrow.’
25
Amara opens the French window to the little balcony overlooking Via Alderotti.
The roses have withered and their leaves are yellow. Despite the fact that she stuck two full bottles of water upside down in the vase. And covered it with fine river-gravel left to soften in water beforehand for two days. But it has been hot and the plants have dried up. With her fingers she detaches a dead rose, straightens a bent corolla, agitates the parched soil and gives the little plants a lot of water while a gecko shoots between her feet and goes into hiding under the edge of a saucer that holds a vase.
Go back to Luca? Why not? asks an insistent little voice. But it would be like reliving something already known and experienced. Perhaps he is right to call preferring a ghost to a living body perversion. Yet Emanuele’s head continues to present itself persistently to her imagination. God is with us, that’s what the name Immanuel means. But is Immanuel with us?
She must find out whether he is dead or alive before she can decide anything. She wishes she was already back in Vienna. She has sent in four articles from the city of Mozart. And her boss has seemed satisfied. It’s not easy to describe the cold war. Perhaps it’s best to start from particular moments, from insignificant details that reveal a common feeling, a smell or a climate. And to expand from there all the way to reflections on history. But she doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes it feels like trying to grind water in a mortar. She has told her readers about her train journey, about the Pension Blumental, about Frau Morgan. She has described Kraków and Auschwitz. She must do some interviews that lie outside her inquiries about Emanuele. Her longing to return to Vienna gets more intense every day. She hasn’t finished her work as a witness to what has happened in that country numbed and impoverished by Nazism and the war. But at the same time she will resume her search for Emanuele. The man with the gazelles is waiting and there is nothing to keep her here in Florence. Her father? Yes of course, the sick Amintore shut up in the care home run by the Ursuline nuns of Villa Cisterna. I must go and see him, she tells herself, steeping a black teabag in a cup of boiling water.
She eats a biscuit sitting on a rush-seated chair in the small single room into which have been crammed a bed, a cooker fixed to the wall on a bracket, a basin that also serves as a bath and, hidden by a curtain, a toilet. How is it possible to inhabit just ten square metres? By using the kitchen table as a writing desk and adding books to the shelves full of food and pans. The house in Via Alderotti that once belonged to grandfather Sironi and later to her father, and is now divided into four flats for the children of her Aunt Miriam. An extra toilet projects from the outside wall like a fungus. All Italy is poor, even if noisy reconstruction work disturbs the sleep of those who have other things to think about.
At night Amara settles happily into the solitary bed where she has so often let her mind wander. She quickly falls asleep from accumulated exhaustion. No sooner are her eyes closed than she sees Emanuele reaching out a hand to her from the cherry tree. Come up, he says, come up because bombs are on the way. Here we’ll be safe.
Next morning she hurriedly washes and dresses to go to the Ursulines where her father has been living for nearly two years now, victim of a degenerative illness. The streets are empty. A fresh breeze is blowing from the north. Sister Adele greets her with an abrupt nod, considerate but uncommunicative.
‘How is my father?’
The nun doesn’t answer immediately. Perhaps she hasn’t heard; she heads into the damp entrance hall with its smell of soup for the poor.
‘How is my father?’ Amara repeats, struggling to keep up on the steep stone stairs.
‘You’ll find him a good deal changed.’
‘How changed?’
‘Not really with us.’
‘Is he very ill?’
‘No, he’s well enough, but his mind tends to wander. Sometimes I hear him singing to himself. He hammers in imaginary nails and beats time by clicking his tongue. He was a shoemaker, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘He thinks he’s still in his shop.’
Turning a corner, she sees him. Amintore Sironi, in a wheelchair, at the end of the loggia. His illness has bent and stiffened him. He has a rug over his knees, and a yellow and black check beret pulled down on his head. She goes up to him and smiles. But he looks at her as if he does not know who she is. When she bends to kiss him he explodes angrily:
‘So you’ve come at last after all this time!’
‘How are you feeling, Papà?’
‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
Amara takes his hand in both hers and lifts it to her cheek. She is suddenly stricken by guilt; he was waiting for me, she tells herself, and there was I busy far away, wasting time when he needed me.
‘Isn’t my Stefania beautiful?’ he says, turning to the nun who nods compassionately.
So he’s mistaken her for her mother. And now what? Go along with it or correct him? She watches him a moment in bewilderment. She feels her father’s strong fingers squeeze her wrist, then slip into her closed fist with a lascivious gesture. The smiling nun moves away. She has other things to do. She leaves Amara alone with her father who thinks she is his wife.
‘Papà,’ starts Amara timidly, ‘I’ve brought you some fresh doughnuts. Do you like doughnuts?’
But he seems not to hear her, perhaps he isn’t even listening. There�
�s a radiant smile on his pale dry lips. He holds her hand tightly and begins humming.
‘What are you singing, Papà?’ Amara bends over him and tries to catch the notes from the mouth of a sick man who has lost his memory. But perhaps no, perhaps he hasn’t really lost his memory, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his memory has overcome his conscience. A fragile man at the mercy of a powerful memory. Now she thinks she recognises the tune. A song of the Alpine troops, from the time when he was a National Service recruit in the Cadore Mountains: ‘Down in the valley there’s a tavern, And fun and fun, Down in the valley there’s a tavern, Where we Alpine soldiers love to be … And if I’m a girl pale as a rhinestone, A winestone a winestone, and bottles of wine!’ He’s singing a cheerful hit-song about wine, ignoring the war, the wounds and the fear.
‘I’ve been waiting for you, Stefania,’ he says now in a smooth clear voice. Not like his humming a moment ago, when he was muddling the notes. He squeezes her hand so hard it hurts. ‘I’m always alone. Why do you always leave me alone? But I knew you’d come. So I put up with the nuns, and with all these idiots round me. And that nurse Lucia who keeps telling me you’re dead and buried. Dead my foot! I know you’re alive. And here you are at last. Isn’t this a live hand? And a live arm? Do the dead wear clothes? What lovely material you’re wearing! So soft, so soft. Silk is it? Or percale perhaps? I’ve always liked percale, it reminds me of those white flowers, what are they called? You know, the ones that seem to be ceramic, with a single yellow pistil and a strange smell of dry figs and hydrolyte. Do you remember when I used to add hydrolyte to the water and you would say: more, Amintore, more! And I would put in the powder and then the water would sting the tongue like bicarbonate … In my opinion, hydrolyte is just bicarbonate … Do the dead wear shoes? I can see them, you know, the little red shoes you’re wearing, really beautiful, you could even dance in them, couldn’t you? We should go dancing more often. It’s years since we last went dancing, Stefania darling. Now let me take off this cap which stinks of sickness and wash my hands and we’ll go out together. Here they always force me to eat the same stuff: potatoes and cabbage, cabbage and potatoes. They say there’s a war on but that’s just talk. The war ended years ago, I know that. Sometimes they give me a boiled egg, but what can I do with a boiled egg? What I need is a nice chicken. Next time you come will you bring me a nice little chicken? Do the dead wear silk stockings, eh? Do the dead wear knickers? I can feel them, you know, I can even feel them through your skirt, I can feel the elastic on your knickers. Are you wearing the ones I like? Those black ones with a little ruff round your thighs, is that what you’re wearing? Show me, Stefania!’
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