The room fell silent again all at once. ‘A sign that an angel is passing overhead,’ said Alfredo. ‘You see, Fergal, even the angels have come to hear who was making such a sound.’ Fergal loved the notion, even though he was mortified by the compliment.
It had been a very long day for him. When the clock struck ten he suddenly felt exhausted, and Alfredo suggested he go home to Moretti’s. Giovanni and Luigi insisted on giving him a lift back to the restaurant, since they passed it on their way home, and Alfredo was glad of an excuse for an early night. Fergal felt nervous about travelling with them. He’d never met anyone like them before - they were so, well, so girly. All his life he’d been punished for being a bit girly himself, so Luigi and Giovanni made him uncomfortable and curious, all at once. But Alfredo obviously loved them. Fergal suddenly wondered if Giovanni and Luigi were gay, and then whether Alfredo might be, too, and whether he had some kind of quiet history - like Fergal’s own history with Father Mac - with either of the two men.
Giovanni talked non-stop the whole way back to the restaurant, and although Fergal had enjoyed their company, he couldn’t wait to get to the silence of his little room. They kissed his tired face and waited until he was safely inside before screeching off down the cobbled road, playing Madonna at full volume.
Arianna was still in the back of the restaurant, with her glasses propped on the tip of her nose, sipping a glass of wine and starting to go over the final receipts of the day. She asked Fergal how his night had been - she knew only too well what an incredible host her brother could be - and whether he wanted some wine, but he asked for a glass of water to take to bed. As he left, she asked if he still wanted to get up and work in the kitchen in the morning - the breakfast shift started at 8.30 am - and when he said he did, she promised to wake him.
Fergal wearily closed the door of his room behind him and looked at his neat bed. His thoughts turned naturally to Father Mac - Dermot, as he called him in private. If he hadn’t been called out to give someone the last rites, he would be about to go to bed in Belfast now.
He took off his clothes and folded them as neatly as he could on the chair by the window. The light had mostly left the Roman skyline, but the dying rays were still enough to cloak some of the buildings in orange and pink, and the whole town seemed to collect shadows. Fergal stood for a moment to study the view. He wondered whether his mother was looking out a window too, far away, whether she was safe, whether she was unhappy. Though she had hurt him so much over the years, he was surprised to realise that he worried about her still. He thought of his brothers and of his distant father, who he hadn’t seen for a very long time. Fergal had been lying in St Bridget’s House, battered and bruised from the beating John had given him, when his father had visited without warning, only to tell him never to darken his door again.
He turned from the window and opened the wardrobe door. There hung Father Mac’s old, lonely coat, long and black and heavy. Fergal took it off its hanger and smelled the collar. He was convinced he could still detect the faintest hint of Father Mac. More than ever, Fergal could have done with his strong arms to hold him, his gentle voice to say that everything would work out all right in the end. Without thinking, he moved over to the bed and lay down, with the coat covering his whole body. He imagined it was Dermot himself on top of him, and he slipped into a deep memory of their last night together on the crisp, careful sheets of his new beginning.
The pillows crackled strangely as his head sank into them, and when Fergal closed his eyes he realised they must be filled with real feathers. He felt his chest tighten and he began to wheeze badly. He switched on the lamp, groped for the stash of inhalers that Father Mac had organised for him and sucked the trusted remedy deep into his struggling lungs.
He removed the pillows from the bed and got under the covers, using the coat as a pillow. At last he drifted into a well-earned, fragrant sleep, clutching the little volume of poems.
4
The next morning, when Arianna kept her word and tapped lightly on Fergal’s door, it took a while for him to remember where he was. ‘I’m awake!’ he said at last.
‘The coffee is nearly ready,’ Arianna called. ‘The other workers will arrive soon.’
Fergal slid out from under the warm sheets and hung up Father Mac’s coat, then he shook himself, wobbled down the hallway for a shower and washed himself fully awake.
The kitchen had already swung into action, the staff’s conversations clattering around the room while the air was filled with fresh bread baking - this was to become Fergal’s favourite smell of all. Even at that time of the morning, the restaurant was popular enough that Fergal was needed. The staff were mostly friendly towards Fergal, although a few of the older waiters resented him slightly. Singers were very highly regarded. As far as Arianna was concerned they were gifts from God, especially those under the watchful gaze of her brother.
Gradually, as days turned into weeks, Fergal began to slip into a routine. After a month had passed, he stopped thinking about time altogether and often had to ask someone what day it was. Between voice training, the kitchen job and his Italian lessons, there was time for little else. Arianna soon treated him like one of her relatives. She helped him as much as she could with the language, but Fergal was amazed by the fact that everyone he met spoke English. It made him think how lazy Irish people were, in some ways. He had loved learning Irish at school, but it would have been good to be able to choose another language too, Spanish or Italian, maybe.
Like the food, the Italian language felt odd in Fergal’s mouth at first when he tried to use it outside of his lessons. But after a while he found he had no choice - the rest of the staff spoke more and more Italian to him and waited for him to find the right words without prompting him too much. He loved the way Arianna answered the phone: ‘Pronto?’ He also thought that the songs Alfredo was teaching him didn’t sound nearly as good when they were translated into English so he would know what he was singing. As weeks turned into months, he eventually began to understand good chunks of the lightning chatter that flashed around the restaurant.
There was something about Maria Truvello, his language teacher, that reminded him of his own mother, Angela. Maria was short, like her, and sarcastic in her own way. She had never been married, though. She had worked as a local schoolteacher all her life until she was forced to retire at sixty, and then she had continued tutoring foreign students. Luckily she only lived up the road from Moretti’s, so Fergal could walk there after the lunchtime rush had ended.
He loved window shopping as he made his way there in the sunshine. Everyone seemed to dress in their best, no matter where they were going. One day he watched in amazement as the local dry cleaner brought out a roll of the smoothest blank paper, wrapped a customer’s clothes and stapled the parcel shut like a gift. As he neared Signora Truvello’s house he saw a woman and her son having coffee in a tiny café and laughing at something in a magazine. It made him remember the day, just before he left Belfast, when he had said goodbye to his mother in a little café in the city centre. Her own mother, his dear Granny Noreen, had only just died. Even after all the bad, mad things that had happened, Fergal had just ended up feeling sorry for this little woman who had attached her heart and her life to the wheelless wagon of his whiskey-breathed father. She’d given birth to four boys in as many years, and Fergal knew he probably hadn’t been the easiest of children himself - he was too different from the rest of them. Now, in those vulnerable late-night moments before he surrendered to sleep, he could allow himself to see more clearly how hard it must have been for his mother. Violently desperate, funny, clumsy and angry as all hell - and that was on a good day - she’d had to fight so many battles on her own, in her own way. Fergal was beginning to see how powerful a bit of distance could be.
And here he was, in front of another little woman, listening and learning. One day, when Signora Truvello reached over to pinch his lips, attempting to help him make the right shape for a word,
Fergal recoiled as if she were about to slap him. When he was a little boy, his mother had hit him repeatedly on the mouth with the back of her hand for saying ‘girly things’. Signora Truvello was a little taken aback, but she managed to brush it off and explain, stroking his head carefully to placate him. Over the next few months she put strange, beautiful new words into his mouth and into his heart, but she never hit him.
As time moved invisibly onwards, Fergal tried to write regularly to Father Mac, attempting to describe everything in minute detail. He wanted him to be able to picture exactly where he was, what his room looked like in the morning, what the kitchens were like. Most of all, he wrote about Alfredo’s house, the challenge of the vocal lessons, Giovanni and Luigi and Signora Truvello. He used a bit of Italian at the end of each letter to show-off a little and to prove he was paying attention in his lessons. He even included a few petals from the lime tree in the garden that had found their way onto his window ledge and filled his room with their subtle perfume.
Father Mac replied carefully and with inevitable formality, saying that he and Mrs Mooney missed Fergal more than they could say and that the parishioners were like little flocks of hungry sparrows after the Sunday service, desperate for titbits of news from Fergal in Italy.
The letters were frequent enough, but sometimes Fergal felt that he didn’t really have enough to say that he could say in safety. He knew he had to be careful about what he wrote. Belfast mail vans were sometimes robbed for possible cheques or cash, and the rest of the letters were left strewn around the road and trapped on car windscreens for the whole world to read. So he waited longer and longer each time before replying.
Moretti’s restaurant had its own postcards, and one night after work Fergal set about writing a note to his mother on the back of one of them. He knew he couldn’t mention how grateful he still was to her for signing his passport form - the postcard would be read by half the street before it even reached her home, and he could easily imagine the trouble that would get her into - so he simply told her how beautiful Rome was and how well everyone was treating him.
He didn’t post it for another two weeks.
Everyone was expected to attend mass on Sundays, before the family lunch was prepared. Fergal would help to set up a few tables in the garden if the weather was kind enough, which it mostly was. It was at these gatherings that Fergal missed Father Mac the most. Everyone was either married or engaged, and he wondered whether there was anybody like him. It wasn’t lost on Fergal that Italian men were much more demonstrative and affectionate with one another. He loved seeing the kitchen staff with their arms draped around one another during their breaks. Even the oldest, crankiest-looking men who played dominos or chess at the restaurant in the late afternoon always greeted one another with kisses. He couldn’t help marvelling, too, at how cherished every single one of the children was. After much pleading, the various parents always relented and allowed the older ones to have little glasses of watered-down wine with the meal.
Alfredo seemed to sense Fergal’s unease at these gatherings and paid special attention to him. Sometimes they would give a recital on the upright piano from the bistro, with the back doors wide open to the garden. Again, Fergal thought of the times he and Father Mac had spent in the chapel or in the front room of St Bridget’s House, going through new music. The incense that had periodically clouded that faraway altar was like a heavily scented memory, floating towards him across the countless miles.
Arianna had noticed that any time she asked Fergal about his family, the very temperature seemed to drop. All the same, one day she asked him, ‘Would you like to give your parents the telephone number of the restaurant?’
Fergal looked flustered and more vulnerable than ever. ‘Thanks, Arianna. I’ll write it down.’ He hated the fact that the simplest enquiry about his family almost brought him out in a rash. It was his weak spot and made him lose all sense of his otherwise growing confidence. He knew he was learning fast, but in his heart of hearts he knew that the past was holding him back and that he would have to let it go completely in order to be truly free. But he just didn’t know how.
Arianna could hold back no longer. ‘Fergal, is something wrong?’ Fergal shook his head. ‘We’re just.. .we’re not a very close family. They won’t be ringing me.’
Arianna tried not to look as shocked as she felt. Alfredo had touched on the subject with her, although he and Fergal had yet to discuss it. She was devoted to Alfredo and had been equally devoted to their departed parents, and it was impossible for her to imagine what Fergal’s family might be like. Privately, she realised that this certainly went some of the way towards explaining the melancholy in his voice, a melancholy that had made her eyes well-up the first time she had heard him sing.
Fergal’s voice lessons inevitably got more and more difficult with each passing week. Alfredo Moretti was a demanding teacher. He knew from experience that if he dug deep enough, he would unearth the whole voice that was mostly buried under Fergal’s inexperience and youth. At least Fergal didn’t have many bad habits to unlearn, although there was the delicate issue of eroding the jagged edge of his Northern Irish accent.
Alfredo knew instinctively that all this would come, but he worried about how controlled Fergal was, how afraid of his own emotions. One day, when Fergal was unable to grasp a particular piece as well or as quickly as he wanted to, Alfredo lost his temper for a moment. ‘You must try harder!’ he shouted. ‘Otherwise you should pack your things and go back home!’
He immediately saw from the look on Fergal’s face that he’d gone too far. ‘Fergal, it’s all right. Surely you know I don’t mean that? I believe in you! I was only being dramatic and trying to get some reaction from you. It’s all right for you to get angry back at me! A bit of honest passion - negative or positive - is better for you, in the long run. You must not be so...controlled all the time.’
Fergal had never really thought of himself as controlled, and he felt very downhearted as he left the lesson. He went back to his room with the manuscript and almost drove himself mad going over and over the complicated melody in his head. Anything was preferable to facing the fact that he was holding so much in.
That night, Fergal dreamed that he was back at his lesson with Alfredo, except they weren’t in his house, they were standing up to their waists in the fountain in the square, grand piano and all, with a crowd of people watching. He was supposed to be singing the Irish national anthem, but try as he might, he couldn’t remember it. Suddenly, huge musical notes dropped out of the darkening sky with rifles, shooting for all they were worth, and the marble horses and riders came to life and chased him down the street like some nightmare cartoon.
He woke up with a dry mouth and went to the kitchen to get some water. As he stood at the sink, he saw the wrinkled calendar hanging beside it and was astounded to realise that he had been in Rome for just over six months.
5
For Father Dermot MacManus back in Belfast, those six months hadn’t passed quite as quickly. He had taken on a lot of extra work to occupy himself, but even though he knew that Rome was the best place for Fergal, he couldn’t shake the loss of him. Sometimes during Communion, if someone was playing the organ, he would picture him on the balcony singing for all he was worth and it made him smile, for a while. He had written to Fergal a few times in a row without expecting a reply, so any time he saw the Rome postmark on the breakfast table it cheered him. Mrs Mooney would hum away to herself - the letter was the next best thing to having Fergal back with them. Father Mac left the letter unopened, savouring the anticipation, until after the first mass. Then he would take his time over it, with a cup of Italian coffee in Fergal’s honour. He would read the letter at least twice, in case he had missed a detail. If he had a free afternoon, he’d take a trip to the graveyard and read Fergal’s words aloud to Granny Noreen’s grave. Sometimes the rain came as he spoke to the soil, but he would always finish the letter before returning to the warmth of the hear
th at St Bridget’s House.
Night-times were often the hardest. When the front door was finally shut and no one rang or called him out for an emergency, Father Mac couldn’t help remembering how he and Fergal used to attempt to put the world to rights while drinking tea and listening to music in front of the fire. When the colder weather came, his bed never seemed warm enough, and he had to admit to Airs Mooney that he could do with an electric blanket. Often, too, if he’d had a few glasses of wine, he would put on the recording from Sligo Abbey and take some small comfort from the sound of his missing lover’s voice floating from the speakers towards him. Then and only then could he face getting under the covers upstairs, knowing that he’d done the right thing in helping Fergal get to Italy. Fergal belonged to the world outside his parish now, and Father Mac’s faith was strong enough to reassure him that it was all in God’s plan.
Though he tried not to, he occasionally masturbated, revisiting the contours of Fergal’s face and lips, but regret always followed close behind, so if he still couldn’t sleep he would read and reread Fergal’s letters. When he put them together he wondered if it was his imagination or if they seemed to be growing more hurried, less regular, more distant in their tone. He couldn’t bear that thought for very long, so he managed to convince himself that he was a fool, that he was overreacting and reading too much into them. Fergal had to change sometime, he told himself, otherwise he wouldn’t have learned anything.
Roman Song Page 3