by Louisa Young
Tom towelled his head, hair sticking up. ‘I didn’t know if I was meant to strip off or what,’ he said. ‘So I didn’t. I thought that would be best. I’ll take them off now—’
Nadine took him by the ear and said ‘You’re a little monster’, then ‘Get upstairs,’ she said, pushing him, and she gave him a kiss as he passed.
*
Lying that night in bed Nenna listened to the water outside the window, tumbling over the rocks, and felt its familiar chill in the white and patchy plaster on the walls. Kitty, lying beside her, was restless. ‘Nenna,’ she said quietly. She pointed to the high wooden head and tail of the bed, said ‘Barca!’ and smiled. Then she pointed up at the vaulted ceiling of the room, made movements with her hands denoting upside-down, and said ‘Barca!’ again, pleased and wanting to please. Nenna understood, smiled at her, and said ‘Buona notte, carina. Sogni d’oro.’ Aldo stuck his head round the door to kiss them goodnight, and Kitty fell asleep with the look of a child who had just discovered that the world was a very strange and potentially glorious place.
*
Sometimes, at night, Nenna imagined the island shaking itself free of the travertine stonework that moored it in place between Trastevere and Sant’Angelo. It would pull its roots out of Tarquin’s great skeleton, deep in the Tiber mud, its bonds would fall away, and slow and stately it would begin to move back down the river towards the sea, trailing froth behind it … where it was heading she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that Kitty would turn out to be someone with whom she could discuss these things.
She lay and thought about Tom, who had been into the river all alone, before she even had the chance to offer it to him.
*
That first night Nadine wrote to Riley.
Isola Tiberina
Rome
17 July 1928
Riley my darling – it sounds like an Irish song that way round, doesn’t it? I want to tell you absolutely everything about everything – the journey (easy); the house – yes, they live on the actual island, right in the middle of the Tiber! Do you remember? With the hospital and the bridge with the head with four faces, that you said was a good symbol of the fallibility of the human race: all looking in different directions, not realising they were one creature? The back of the house slides right into the rocks and the river as if it were Venice or something. You look out the window and there it is. SO romantic. Rushing river noise all the time. And of course rather damp. And inside the house we have Aldo, who is terribly handsome and charismatic – I think you’d like him but perhaps not as he does take up a lot of room. He talks all the time – in English and Italian mixed so we are all learning and picking the language up (some (the children) faster than others (me)). He’s an engineer of some kind and plays the guitar. The little boys clamber all over him while he’s playing and he doesn’t mind at all. Lots of hair, big wise eyes like brown honey. He said tonight: ‘How do you like me? My enemies say is Aldo more Roman or more Jewish? I look like both, of course’ – and he does! You could just picture him in a toga, or in the robes of one of Bernini’s marble prophets. They don’t seem to be religious at all, thank god – can one thank god for that? It seems rather absurd – anyway, of course he doesn’t wear robes, he wears slightly flashy city garb: black suit, a white shirt, a pale blue waistcoat buttoned high at the neck. His English is eccentric but frankly I have no right to complain with my (lack of) Italian. I am reminded constantly of that line of Milton’s about educating children, about how ‘they may have easily learnt at any odd hour the Italian Tongue’. Susanna, his wife, is quite quiet but smiley. I haven’t got hold of her yet but I will though she has next to no English—
Here Nadine was about to write about the delicious dinner that Susanna and Aldo had produced on their first night. Even now, after all this time – perhaps because she was far from home and its everyday habits – it was easy to forget for a moment, how unkind it would be to mention such things to her husband whose ease with food had been shot away with his jaw at Passchendaele.
The children are Fernanda, known as Nenna, who has lots of hair and a pale wide face like a Piero della Francesca, inscrutable, and the children terribly want her to like them, and two younger boys who I can’t tell apart – black-haired, naughty-eyed, tumbling and playful: Vittorio and Stefano, a pair of wriggly black-haired shrimps, who seem to be about six. Perhaps one of them is bigger than the other. Nenna is perhaps ten – a bit older than Kitty and a bit younger than Tom, so that’s all right, though I’m not sure what Tom is going to do all day as they – the girls – have already sneaked off upstairs and can be heard singing. The marvellous thing is that the piazza is more or less like the park for us, so they can just go out and lark about and be perfectly safe. I dare say they’ll all be bilingual by the end of the week. People pinch Kitty’s cheeks between their knuckles and call her a beautiful blessed blonde angel: ‘Bella bambina biondina, un angelo, bellissima bionda beata.’
She stopped a moment as she wrote this, and then in a rush she wrote—
Darling – I’m sorry but it’s on my mind again, perhaps because of being here, where we were when we were so young & silly, and when we first so truly came together – tell me, again, please, that you don’t hate me for not being able to give you a child of your own? I don’t mean tell me, or hate me, I mean – I suppose, thank you, again, for not adding your disappointment to my own. Perhaps I might go and get myself blessed by some saint of fertility – I’m sure there is one – several probably – or perhaps I will just remain grateful that Tom and Kitty needed us – oh, that’s come out wrong too. That we were there when they needed us.
She stopped again and considered crossing out the whole passage – which would mean starting the letter from scratch.
No. He could know her thought processes, flawed as they were. One day perhaps her cycle would settle into actually being a cycle; and she’d put on some weight, and her ‘system would calm down’, as the last doctor had put it.
She continued:
I’ll send this now and write in more detail tomorrow. If you see Rose – and please do see Rose, make her come to dinner. She works so hard and you can talk politics and social policy without the children pulling your sleeves and complaining – tell her I will write to her. And make sure she doesn’t go to Locke Hill too often. I still fear she’s going to decide Peter needs her again. How is he? Lord, see how the habits stick! I am not worrying about Peter, or about darling Rose, or even about my dear dad or you. How is my dear dad? How is my dear you? I love you I miss you and I will do my very best to get thrown out of the Sistine Chapel in your honour and in memory of 1919—
Nadine
It was family legend how during their honeymoon in Rome, in 1919, Riley had lain on the floor, the better to gaze at the astounding ceiling, and been thrown out, and gone back, and been thrown out, five times. Long ago, he had wanted to be a painter, but the war had swallowed that notion. Nadine, it turned out, was the artist.
She really wished he were with them. But so be it. His inability to be there with them was exactly the kind of thing that they, nine years into their marriage, could smile about and accept. She could accept all kinds of things now. She had accepted Julia’s death – because there’s nothing to be done about it. And Riley’s wounds – because look how he is overcoming them – though she’d hesitate to use the word ‘accept’ to describe how he was about it. But his practicality, his everyday perseverance … yes, there were times when she didn’t think about it, and, she thought, nor did he. And she accepted not being a great artist – because I am an artist, and to be an artist at all, of any kind, and to be paid for it, is a joy and an adventure. And being mother only to other people’s children – ditto.
But all that said, Rome stirred her up.
*
Tom woke early and tried to head off out without being seen, but Susanna spotted him, sat him down and fed him hard cinnamon buns and milky coffee, by which time the girls and Nadine had ap
peared, so after a frustrating delay – Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels the fastest who travels alone, Tom muttered to himself – they were all sent out to acquire onions. Tom and Kitty saw, for the first time, places that would become so familiar later: the butter-coloured synagogue, the small local market and the big astonishing one at Campo dei Fiori, the piazzas and alleys and temples along the way, the giant pines the shape of umbrellas, the scraps of road and ancient wall for larking on. Sheep asleep in the shade of gigantic arches. A cart piled high with baskets of chickens. Nadine walked like a dreamer, smiling and pointing things out. Tom felt her love like a hand on the back of his collar.
They stopped at a café for cool bittersweet spremuta di limone, made from huge lumpy Sicilian lemons with leaves on their woody stalks. Kitty’s feet, swollen in her little brown sandals and speckled with mosquito bites, were hurting, so Tom and Nenna were allowed to go on alone.
He walked beside her, suddenly silent. She wasn’t chatty as he had seen her be with Kitty. He didn’t know much about girls. Some chaps had sisters, some of whom giggled. She didn’t seem to be like that.
‘Vuoi vedere le statue parlanti?’ she said, suddenly.
He looked blankly at her.
‘Sì,’ he said, and thought quickly about it in Latin: – parlanti – from parlare, to talk, sounds like a – not a past participle, what’s it called – anyway, the -ing one. Talking. And did she say vedere? To see?
‘Vedere parlanti?’ he said.
‘Statue parlanti,’ she said. ‘Vuoi vederle?’
Statue. Statu-ay. Statue?
She was leading him; up streets, down alleys, round carts, through crowds, through a great marketplace, where onions were forgotten. They came out into a long piazza like a racetrack, with three fountains down the centre; mighty stone figures and dolphins vivid among the water and green streaks of weed. All around, Latin was written across rearing buildings. Tom recognised it from a print Riley had at home, in which it was flooded and filled with boats: Piazza Navona.
See statues talking?
He smiled and imagined how a statue might lean down to you, stone lips moving like flesh, voice creaky and dry, talking Latin. He spun round, his hands in his pockets, to look at everything.
In a small piazza beyond, Nenna stopped, and said, ‘Ecco. Pasquino.’
It was a statue: battered and ancient, with no arms and not much in the way of legs, twisted on a sort of staircase of a plinth which was pasted all over, like the wall behind him, with printed leaflets and notices. A lot of people were bustling about, with bicycles and shopping baskets, and some men in vests and blue trousers were digging a hole in the road.
‘La statua parlante,’ she said.
Tom thought, It must be an oracle, like Delphi or something. There’s probably a procedure—
‘Do you ask it questions?’ he said.
She raised her eyebrows at him, and looked brave. ‘Va be,’ she said, and straightened her shoulders. Then, with a consciously respectful demeanour and a glance back at Tom, she went up to the statue, pushed herself up on tiptoe and called out, softly, towards Pasquino’s distant and lichened ear.
He did not answer.
‘Is that it?’ Tom said, and Nenna grinned and said ‘Yes!’
‘Statua non parla,’ Tom said, having been working on the Latin phrase since seven streets ago.
‘Può darsi una risposta,’ she said, seemingly perfectly satisfied, and Tom realised that he wasn’t that concerned about the statue, or the tradition, or the superstition, or even the answer. He wanted to know what she had asked.
‘Quale est domandum tuum?’ he asked, and she squinted at him.
‘Domando tuo?’ he said. ‘Domanda tua?’ He knew Italian had vowels where Latin used us or um. Couldn’t remember the gender of the word for question though.
Nenna slid her eyes sideways, and said: ‘Segreto.’ Secret.
He wondered whether to tease her to get it out of her. Teasing, in this Latin/Italian mixture? He didn’t think he was up to it. But he wanted to know. He couldn’t let a girl keep a secret from him. It would be undignified.
They walked in silence for a while, through the hot bright streets, turning into the black shadows beneath high yellow palazzi.
Other than physical force and language, what other tools did he have? He was thinking furiously. Nenna glanced at him.
Perhaps she wants to tell me. Why else would she have taken me there?
So I must just give her another opportunity.
As they rejoined the river, he turned to her and said: ‘Io credo che tuo secretus dire a me volunta. Se non volunta, perche me ad statuam parlante portare?’ Which he hoped meant. ‘I believe you want to tell me your secret. If not, why take me to the talking statue?’
She laughed, of course. And then she stopped laughing, and she stopped and thought for a bit, and then she took him by the hand, which was slightly alarming, and pulled him across the road and into a church: cool, dim, empty. Glancing around, she spotted what she was after, and led him over there.
‘La mia domanda,’ she said, and looked at him fiercely. He nodded.
She pointed at a painting of the Madonna and child, folded her arms in the universal sign of holding a baby, and made the universal rocking-the-baby motion. ‘Bambino Gesù,’ she said.
He got it. ‘Baby Jesus.’
She pointed to herself. ‘Io,’ she said.
‘You,’ he said.
She drew her finger sharply across her throat. The universal sign of murder.
And that puzzled him.
And she made the universal hands-out palms-up shrug gesture of not knowing. And stared, waiting for his answer.
‘La Mia domanda,’ she said very clearly, ‘era se io ho ammazzato il bambino Gesù.’
From a language point of view he understood perfectly. Her question had been, did she kill baby Jesus?
It was from every other point of view that he was confused – so much so that he thought he must have got it wrong. But the only alternative was did Baby Jesus kill her, which seemed even more unlikely. But then many things are unlikely.
They left the church, slipping out into the day which had grown brighter and hotter even during the few minutes they had been inside the church.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Your question. Tua domanda. Why?’
Nenna scuffed her shoes on the road, and did a little dance step. She wasn’t looking at him.
‘L’ha detto un ragazzo a scuola,’ she murmured, and would say no more.
He held on to the phrase.
*
Dear Heart
Oggi ti scrivo in Italiano! I don’t know what the Italian form of Riley would be. Rilino? Reelee? No, not really – today I write to you in English as usual. But I did go shopping with Susanna in what used to be the ghetto, and I said buongiorno a lot, to all kinds of people who mostly seemed to be cousins on Aldo’s father’s side, I think. Susanna introduced me to everybody as cucina which I thought meant kitchen but apparently not. Or perhaps as well. It is all VERY Jewish – you know how in England people are only Christian when they’re in a church, but here it is a part of everything – food, music, traditional lines of work, all kinds of rules and habits, as well as synagogue. Aldo and Susanna seem to have masses of the culture but none of the religion. Interesting – and nobody seems to hold it against them at all. Aldo has a little gang of chaps he plays cards with – Signor Seta next door is his best chum I think – he has quite a saucy wife who wears her floral housecoat very tight – the men all wear hats and have bright eyes and call for each other like small boys wanting each other to come and play—
This is a short and sweet one – like you! I will be home before you know it. Ti adoro! You probably recall what that means.
She had that day taken a long walk with Aldo. Striding beside him she felt like Kitty scurrying after Tom – after all, she’d never had a brother. She smiled. He glanced back, and slowed down for her.
&
nbsp; ‘You know we came here for our honeymoon?’ she said. ‘I keep catching glimpses of my younger self, loitering in that doorway, say’ – she pointed at the vast, shadowy entrance to an invisible courtyard beyond. ‘Or eyeing up a statue, or considering the light on the river.’
‘Perhaps we passed in the street,’ he said.
‘1919!’ she said.
‘Those strange days …’ he murmured.
‘I’d been a nurse,’ she said.
‘I was a soldier,’ he replied, and they looked at each other, and they both knew that they did not want to look back at those times when their countries had just been at war, and at their selves in the shock of survival.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘life is long, if you’re lucky, and who knows – who knows what is coming?’ With which she very much agreed.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘The Arco di Tito. Come. I give you a tiny history lesson. So. First Jewish people came to Rome two thousand years ago to ask protection against King of the Syrians, and they stayed. Then later, after destruction of Jerusalem and burning of the temple, Emperor Tito brought Jews back for slaves. Look—’
They were coming up to the great arch, looming against the blue above them.
‘It looks just like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,’ she said.
‘This is the original,’ he said, with a little swagger. ‘See, look inside.’
The vault of the arch was like a slice through a great church or temple: the ornamental ceiling, squares and flowers looking almost Tudor, and the carved stone panels at the sides.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘You see the menorah? Trumpets?’
She looked. ‘Oh,’ she said.
‘And the prisoners carrying them – those are the Jewish prisoners. Jews paid their ransom, and took them into their community – where we still live. Our great great great great etc., etc., grandparents. Good, yes?’
She didn’t know whether to smile or cry.
‘And Tito had a Jewish fidanzata, Queen Berenice. A long long time we have been here.’ They gazed for a while and Nadine thought how little she had ever thought about being Jewish.