by Louisa Young
Nadine and Kitty came wandering back. They had seen a massive tree stump, semi-submerged, which looked like a horse’s head. You could see the castle of Bracciano from just round there, and there was a rock you could sit on, out in the water. Kitty and Nenna had swum out to it; they looked such mermaids with their hair.
And now they could hear Susanna calling them to lunch; her voice faint down two fields and across the little road. Tom’s greed woke his hunger, and he rolled over. He could see Nenna, out in the water. She had made a coronet out of the emerald weeds and was putting it on her father’s head: he emerged from the water like a Triton, hairy chested and dripping, Nenna a naiad beside him, laughing. They shook themselves, water flying off their thick curly hair, and pulled on their sandals to set off up the field. Tom dragged himself off the towel and followed them, muttering under his breath the names of all the delicious pastas which Susanna might have made: in bianco, con ragù, carbonara, all’amatriciana, all’arrabbiata, l’aglio e olio, alla puttanesca …
They walked on up.
‘Come on, perfidious Albion!’ Aldo called back to him. Tom took off at a run, and overtook them at the gate, vaulting it: hands to rung two on the near side and rung one on the far, body horizontal, fly over – yes! He landed skidding on chamomile. The dusty scent of it erupted at his feet, and Nenna smiled. He walked up the hot white-dust road to the shade under the umbrella pines and the pale gigantic eucalyptus.
*
Nadine wrote to Riley.
Bracciano
August 1929
Dearest,
The children are just in heaven, I think. This is an entirely new heaven. Nenna told us that Romans don’t like lakes, traditionally – because the Etruscans live there, so it’s all left over from Lars Porsena of Clusium swearing by the nine gods and so forth … but Aldo finds the seaside too busy, and has enough of it trying to drain it at work. This place is a kind of agricultural ruin, part of a farm belonging to some Roman princes who never come here. One of them, Don Alessio (?) is a bigwig on the Board of Drainage, and an admirer of Aldo’s work at the Agro Pontino, so when Aldo wanted to rent it Don Alessio said yes. It used to be a stable, and still has great stone troughs and iron mangers inside, but from outside it looks more like a tiny castle, with a tower full of pigeons, floors more or less of brick, and the roofs held up with wooden beams. The walls are speckled with lichen, greens and gold, and somewhere on top of the tower, rooks and bright blue sky. It’s a bit of a camp – water from the well, milk from the cows. Farther up the path live a bunch of lovely men in vests – Renzo, Roberto, Armando, Angelo – and their families, in small farmhouses. The men look after the cows and the women make vast vats of tomato sauce in a tiny stone house specially for the purpose. Barns and fields and vineyards recline in the golden sun on all sides; there’s a stream down the side where a Frog Orchestra quack and trill all night long.
High up in the vaulted kitchen (so-called, there’s no stove and no sink; just a stone basin and a big fireplace) ceiling there’s an iron bar for hanging hams off so the rats can’t get them. The very first night, there was a bat hanging from it! Like a trapeze artist, or an acrobatic mouse. Tom made Nenna really laugh when he tried to explain to her why acrobat was funny, in this context. She got the joke and he was so proud and happy.
Sorry! Forgot to finish. It’s two days later. The lake itself is round in its volcanic crater like an egg in a mountain of flour (this is how you make pasta – I’ll explain when we try it at home) surrounded by boggy emerald meadows and Etruscan legends. A soldier made of solid gold lies asleep on the lake’s bed, silent in the deep water with nothing but eels for company. Last night little bats were flying in and out of the children’s bedroom window; livid green crickets cackle all night. I don’t know if it’s the same grasshoppers with scarlet underwings that fly across the meadows all day. Tom is looking it up. Kitty sits for hours damming the stream by moving stones and rocks, daydreaming and talking to herself, tying her wrists with strands of tiny pink and white striped bindweed, and not noticing when dragonflies land on her … Aldo loves this of course, and told her he does exactly the same at work. Sometimes he sits and joins in with her, pointing out the pitch of the land, and how water always takes the shortest course downhill. She got awfully bitten by mosquitoes, and one of the women here said ‘Sei tutta rovinata!’ – ‘You’re all ruined!’ She does look rather dreadful but they all say these aren’t the malaria kind and it’s the wrong time of year – So—
‘The dragonfly hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky’ – What song is that from? That lovely one – Vaughan Williams? Tom swims, all day if you let him. The rubber mask and snorkel for staring at fish is very popular. I think he might be beginning to entertain ideas of being a naturalist. There’s a little wooden dinghy; Aldo is teaching them to sail. Tom and Nenna are old enough to go out alone together; Kitty, much to her sorrow, just can’t swim well enough yet. Yes we’re taking our quinine!
I will post this – I haven’t been to town yet so I haven’t had the chance. Day five or six now.
Angelo and Renzo have taught them how to milk a cow! On a three-legged stool, with their cheeks resting against the great beast’s smelly side. The milk comes out warm and scary, and it tastes quite different to English milk. The rough-tongued calves with little nubs of horns on their curled brows come up and lick our hands; they sucked appallingly on Kitty’s fingers as if they were udders, and she thought they were going to pull them off. Even so she wants to be a dairymaid, or a cowgirl. There’s a gang of ugly lumpy-faced ducks who line up on a stone water trough by the cowshed which I’m certain must be an Etruscan sarcophagus (Kitty then decided perhaps an archaeologist would be more interesting). They do their homework, play cowboys in the barn, pick peaches as if they were apples, and take jugs up the dusty lane to where huge wooden doors open into the hillside, and Angelo’s wife fills the jugs with wine from a tap on a barrel twice as tall as a cow.
All my love to you my dearest—
Nadine
*
And so Italy became regular. 1928, 1929, and then the 1930s, so modern and new. Each summer’s visit became a part of a whole, studding the overall experience with its individual jewels. The year Kitty could swim. The year Tom fell out of the tree. Memories grew on memories. And it was all lovely. And each passing year the children were different in themselves as they grew.
Kitty progressed from cute-like-a-doll to rather stout and serious and, in her eyes, unwanted – unlike Nenna, who, in Kitty’s eyes, was wanted by everybody, especially by Kitty herself. This led to an uneven combination of envy and desire, a watchful attitude, and a sense of dumpy plainness which was not entirely justified, and – had Kitty only known it – more the result of the stultifying school she attended in London, with its obsession with sport and manners over intellect or joy, than of any actual plainness in herself.
Nenna became aware that she didn’t entirely want to be a girl. Not that she wanted to be a boy, but she wanted to stay free, an unregulated sort of companion-at-arms to boys, one who could take them or leave them. She was not amused by the responsibilities of girlhood: cleanliness, white socks, helping in the house, being told when to be back. Being worried about. There was a march where the boys of the Balilla swung by with novantuno rifles, and the girls with baby dolls. She didn’t mind real babies, and God knows there were enough of them about, but why would one want a toy one? And also she felt rather put on the spot. Understanding instinctively that nobody would want to hear about this, she said nothing. In fact she developed something of a habit of silence, and grew charismatic, attracting attention by not wanting it.
And Tom? He wanted everything. To swim, to fly, to run away from school, to fight, to swear eternal loyalty, to mind. He wanted to be older. He wanted to get into trouble.
*
It was in the summer of 1932 that Nadine found herself confused by something which should have been very simple – writing a letter to Riley
. They were staying a little longer than usual that year and perhaps that extra exposure made it all that bit stronger.
Darling,
It is lovely to be here again. The beauty! I know it’s so dull to go on about it and I promised myself not to be one of those English people who wafts about Italy saying ‘Isn’t it lovely isn’t it beautiful’ all the time, as if nobody else had ever noticed, and it was in any way an interesting thing to say – but it’s awfully hard. Because it is so beautiful! I allow myself to do it only on the first day, and after that I just say it to myself. Aldo has been teaching us to fish, off the little boat. The lake fish are called coregoni – they don’t even have a name in English. Did I tell you about Ferragosto? The night of celebration of the Virgin Mary’s ascension into heaven? We all walked round the lake in the evening to Trevignano, a loopy road, and when we got near (Aldo had to drag Kitty some of the way I’m afraid) we could see the little fishing boats all lit up with coloured torches, and fireworks were launched from the decks of Il Batello, the lake’s ferryboat: they reflected off the dark water and it made the strangest effect, as if all barriers collapsed between two sides of anything – between water and sky, above and below, then and now … life and death, hope and fear … I wanted so much to have you there to lean back on and share the beauty with. It was almost spiritual for a moment – even though all to the sound of fairground music and the taste of warm nut brittle. Usually, apparently, the ruined castle up the hill behind the town catches fire from the flares marking the path up through the dry dry grass. One year, Aldo was telling us, it didn’t, and everyone was disappointed, so the young men grabbed up the flares and ran about setting the fire on purpose. Then all the older men had to set up a run of buckets to the lake to put it out.
Where was I? Sorry, Susanna called us for dinner and I have been quite bad about helping out – well, we’re swimming every day, obviously; eating far too much and getting as fat as little olives. The bats are driving Kitty quite bonkers. She read somewhere that they get tangled up in your hair … also she’s reading The Castle of Otranto which would keep anyone awake at night. She said yesterday that she’s writing a story about bats, so I hope that will get it out of her system. Tom is quite superb, diving and sailing and swimming, drawing a lot – not in his mask and snorkel obviously. I love to see them all together – each year I am worried that age and distance might mean they don’t get on so well together, but they do, every time.
all my love,
Yours not in flames,
Nadine
Oh dear I didn’t post this and now it’s two days later! Who would have thought being so lazy would take up so much time? I am drawing a lot though – close-ups of leaves and any little creature I can get to stay still long enough. Beautiful scorpions and spiders with sections, if you see what I mean. I am terribly lazy about going in to town – No desire whatsoever! Even though I could stroll about in the market looking for fresh burrata and ice cream to bribe the children with. I am sorry. How’s Papa? How are you darling? But don’t write back, the post is awful – I don’t even know if you have written, we haven’t received anything. But now we’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow so we’ll be home before you get this. I am beginning to miss you rather a lot now. I’m trying to soften Aldo up to bring them all to London next year, but I don’t know if it’s going to work. He seems to think there’s too many of them, but I shall hold out. —He has decided that Shakespeare was Italian! – or at least stole all his best stories from Italians: Romeo and Giulietta, from Verona, Two Gentlemen, also from Verona, Giulio Cesare, from Rome, also Antonio (from Rome) and Cleopatra, Tito Andronico—! They’ve been translating that bit of Antony and Cleopatra for him, because Nenna has decided that Cleopatra’s barge, as Enobarbus described it, sounded like their island:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
I’m writing it out for you in full because it does sound beautiful in Italian. Not sure of its grammatical accuracy but here it is:
La galea dove sedeva lei, come trono brunito
splendeva sulle acque. La poppa d’oro;
Viola le vele e profumate tanto che
i venti vi languivano d’amore. D’argento i remi,
in cadenza al tono dei flauti, e l’acqua
battuta di loro li seguiva rapida,
quasi amorosi di quei loro colpi.
And Aldo’s response? ‘Shakespeare stole the story from Plutarch, and he was a Roman …’ To which Nenna says, surely he was Greek, and Aldo says ‘Roman citizen’ – you’d think every halfway talented person in the world was Roman to listen to him. So Nenna says, all innocent, ‘And Shakespeare, was he Roman?’ ‘Crollalanza,’ says Aldo, with his devilish little smile. ‘Sicilian name.’
Anyway my love we’ll see you soonest soonest. I will have to post this now, or be utterly embarrassed by having brought it back to London in my suitcase.
Your Nadine
She looked at the letter as she folded it. It really was quite long – five sides! Full and chatty, lots of news, how he liked it. A good letter.
And yet. And yet.
It was not entire chance that she hadn’t got round to posting it. It was so easy out here to neglect things. So relaxing. But that wasn’t it.
Something in me didn’t want to post it. She could acknowledge that. Because it was not an entirely honest letter. There were several things she hadn’t mentioned.
On Saturdays, when the other Jewish children were at synagogue, Nenna and the boys, in smart little uniforms and clean white socks, went off to Little Italians and Children of the Wolf.
There was a song, ‘Giovinezza’, that she really didn’t like. It was too military, and the children would march around to it, and sing, and once or twice she had snapped at them to stop.
Earlier that week, at Trevignano, a bunch of young men in black shirts had walked into the main café in the piazza as if they owned it. They laughed too loud, and ordered beer, and they didn’t seem to pay for it. They were braggadocio in action and she found herself moving the children outside sooner than she would have.
And there was the Day Camp to which Nenna and the little boys had gone, to which she had not wanted Tom and Kitty to go – not that they could have, as they weren’t members of the club that organised it. Aldo had said he was sure they could go as guests, and she had said no, they had some reading to do for school, which wasn’t really true. The excuse was the worst thing. If either of the children mention it to Riley, I will have to explain …
And before they came up to the lake this summer, she had visited Aldo in his office. He laid out drawings before her, in the tall cool room, large and precise. He showed designs for the giant pumps whereby salt water was being sucked out of marshes and beautiful farmland was being revealed. ‘Julius Caesar planned to do this,’ he said. ‘He wanted to bring the Tiber down through the marshes all the way to Terracina, and drain off the water all the way. Leonardo da Vinci too – but it was not done. But we are succeeding.’
She looked at them politely: they were beautiful, vast and powerful. But she was distracted: a photograph of the Duce, framed, perched on the wall right above Aldo’s broad and tidy drawing desk.
‘Would you like to come down there?’ Aldo said, beaming and keen, like a small boy offering a turn on his best toy. ‘I could show you,’ he said. ‘I’d like to so much.’
‘Next time, perhaps,’ she said, but she looked at him and smiled, so it wasn’t rude.
‘We are digging more than fifteen thousand kilometres of canals and trenches,’ he said, and she kept the smile. Fifteen thousand kilometres!
‘Quite something!’
she said. But Riley despises Mussolini. He’s publishing a pamphlet about him this autumn and it is not a fan letter.
‘It’s such an important job,’ Aldo said. ‘For the people. There’s so many men down from the north already, rebuilding their lives. We see the results of our work, every time we raise our eyes. Nadina, it’s such a joy!’
He looked so happy. Dear Aldo!
But but but.
The photograph bothered her. Up there in his hat and his Sam Browne, looking like he thought he knew everything. Odd how people think he’s handsome. He looks like a lump. And there’s too many pictures of him everywhere.
She hated leaving things unsaid. It held a horrid cargo of potential upset.