The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Nunzia had her own idea about the genesis of his unusual stature: when she was first carrying him, their cousin Mirella’s husband sent her back a postcard from America. He had arrived, he was looking for work, and he told her that he was fine, that the buildings here were taller than the peak of the Gargano you could see on clear days and that there was a Greek colossus in the sea just outside New York that made the big bronze emperor in Barletta look like a pygmy. ‘The picture showed the skyscrapers, and, Mother in heaven, if looking at those pencils reaching up to write in the clouds didn’t pull out the limbs of my baby boy and make him an American giant!’ But his mother was proud of him: such stature was princely among the dwarfish and swarthy southerners. And so manly. It was well known that even Rodolfo Valentino, the most famous son of the Mezzogiorno, the stunted Noonday of Italy, had to stack his shoes with newspaper to walk tall.

  The razor skimmed off the lather, dirtying its warm whiteness with the pepper of his beard’s growth – he was working from the outside in, from ear to lip, checking at his moustache, and then from neck up to chin. There was a tricky passage, over the cleft in his chin, and he sucked in his mouth to stretch the flesh there as smooth as it would go and stuck his tongue under his bottom lip to fill out that indentation too; the razor’s length made it difficult to enter these dimples and valleys. The barber in town used a smaller blade to smooth these places and sometimes laid two threads in parallel lines, one on each side of the offending remnant of stubble, and then, with the ends firmly caught between his teeth, twiddled until the hair came up by the roots, pinched between the strands. But this was not a finesse that could be performed on oneself, he knew, to his regret, for the father appreciated a close shave, and loved to feel the naked satin of his cheek and jaw after a visit to the chair in town.

  As he relathered his neck, where the stubble grew more thickly and stropped the razor on the belt that hung from the stand by a brass hook, he began to sing. (When you looked back into the sunlight of those days, you would see your father, and he was singing.) He was singing because the day was newly laundered, it promised to be hot, but fresh, the wind was in the west and its fingers would remain soft on the spring growth; there might be a shower or two, bringing more plumpness to the almonds in their shells, and to the hard beads of the olives in tassels on the branches. It was too perfect to introduce even the mildest note of discontent by calling for some more hot water from the kitchen. Still, he would like the women indoors to think of his need, without his having to disturb the immaculate day.

  But they didn’t, and he raised his voice a little louder, not just to remind them that he was there, planing his cheeks to appear in splendour before them, rosy, silken, but to add to their pleasure too in the day. His natural pitch was baritone, but he could scale it up, and most of the arias he liked best were tenor’s laments or paeans or love songs or promises, and he would reach for the high notes with a kind of quiver that lent them an even more vulnerable quality, as if he were himself cracking under the strain. He loved to play up to this, and warble, the note wobbling with vibrato, as a pledge of his utter sincerity and at the same time a parody to add to his fun and to his womenfolk’s sentimental amusement too.

  ‘On-on-on her pe-eace my pe-ee-ee-eace depend-eth,’ he strained, and his clean cheeks flushed with the volume.

  ‘All that ple-eases her, gi-i-i-ves me li-i-ife,

  All that harms her, brings me death.’

  He flourished the razor aloft, and brought it skimmingly down on the strop and swept it up and down to the lilt of Don Ottavio’s love song, as if bowing a fiddle, and then as glanced in the mirror he saw her, his youngest, my mother, in the shadow under the east wall of the courtyard (for it was early, it was eight o’clock). She was following his every movement, looking for all the world like a figure from a Greek vase come to life, with wide-awake almond eyes, as they say in those parts, though they were really shaped more like lime leaves, with a curved tip in the outer corner. Her legs, at eight years old, were rangy enough to leap around the belly of the vase with a maenad’s abandon, and she seemed to fall naturally into attitudes that would proclaim despair or frenzy on a Greek pot, but which in her case betokened only a growing child’s difficulties of co-ordination. She was taking after him, certainly, in her length of limb, her father thought, though she reminded him sharply of Caterina his sister too. Cati, an angel of beauty, and so good with it – still in America.

  He did not acknowledge that he had noticed Fantina in attendance on him. But his voice stretched in response, as he finished his morning shave and, folding the razor shut, laid it aside and patted his face dry, modulating tragically through the cloth,

  ‘All that harms her, brings me death.’

  Aware of his daughter’s silent company, he performed his outward show for her, and stopped to inspect himself, striking his best three-quarters view, with his straight nose pointed slightly down so that his eyes levelled with his reflection, under furrowed brows. He looked keenly at his image, corrected a ragged tip of his moustache with a touch of rosy wax from the tin, and then assuring himself that his toilette was now soigné enough for a visit to the city, he raised his eyes to the sky and for the benefit of Fantina, still watching and listening, he sang out to the stirrings of early summer all around,

  ‘My daughter! I tremble all over at the word!

  As if the heavens suddenly opened to me …

  You’ve shown me a universe of such happiness

  I can’t find words for it –

  Now let your father offer you

  A paradise on earth.

  You are the radiance of my crown,

  The glory of my name …’

  Fantina ran up to him laughing, as he turned to catch her and hug her to him, and the faces of Maria Filippa and his mother and his daughters appeared at the door of the kitchen and looked out at him, indulgent.

  Fantina smelt the soap on her father’s cheek, felt the bulk and warmth of his chest through his shirt and wondered at the curly hairs that grew on his body; she clung to the vibrating currents of his voice as he reprised, more softly now, as she was so near, Boccanegra’s marvelling recognition of the baby girl he had lost in the grown young heiress before him. The role suited Davide’s voice, and holding Fantina’s delighted face with his eyes, he changed key, and, his hand on the towel still tied around his neck, began the poisoned Doge’s farewell to life:

  ‘My temples are burning! I feel a black flame

  Snaking through my veins…’

  From the door, Maria Filippa was crying out, ‘Davide, you’re tempting Fate.’ His mother too was shaking her head, impatient with his presumption, his teasing of their superstitious fearfulness. Davide sang on, smiling under theatrically knitted brows,

  ‘The sea! The sea! I see reflected in it

  My deeds of glory and sublime exploits of war…

  Aah, the memories that stir! The sea! the sea!

  Couldn’t I have found my grave in your embrace?’

  His daughters in the doorway smiled in response, but his mother and Maria Filippa gestured to him to stop such folly. It fell to the women to surround the family with barriers against harm, to keep a thorough observance of the laws of luck: never to talk of death was the cardinal rule, let alone sing about it. There were lesser rules not to be ignored either: never to destroy a spider’s web, or crush its maker (drowning was all right), never to put your hat down on a bed, or death would mistake the next sleeper for his own; never to light a waxen match to an older man’s cigar or pipe, but always a wooden one; always to say three Hail Marys if an owl cried in the day; and so on and so forth through a most intricate catechism. Behind each image of the bearded old god with flowing hoary beard or the soulful young saviour plucking his own scarlet heart crowned in fire from his breast, hulked the malign angel of destiny beating sombre, leathery bat wings and landing on sharp talons. Gestures of propitiation also helped to beguile this Fate from noticing an undeserved excess of happines
s she might want to redress; it was necessary to place offerings at crossroad shrines, to fill the vases before the Madonnas at the corner of streets in town, and not to forget the other saints, with their particular skills and offices, to keep novenas and carry out vows, always with the correct accompanying small sacrifices and penances. Fate, the spiteful despot, had to be distracted; words like death, or happiness, had to be kept from her ears in case she spread her raptor’s wings and decided to seize the speaker and remind him of her power. Maria Filippa performed an assiduous series of gestures to snatch days of tranquillity out of her talons. Inwardly, she thought Fate was like a client at a brothel whose house is broken into while he frolics, but can do nothing later to establish the connection; so Maria Filippa daily flirted and flattered faceless destiny, and while the tyrant seemed successfully distracted, ransacked the store of happiness for her family. And now Davide was laughing at her consternation, ‘Not yet, not yet, I’m not in despair yet, not yet at death’s door.’

  He buttoned up his shirt and patted Fantina on the shoulder as she began to carry the shaving kit back into the house, walking with a controlled tread towards the pots of geranium and basil against the southern wall. There she tipped half the contents of the bowl into the earth, and turning to the red rose growing in an old winecask on the adjacent western wall, near the springing of the arch over the farmhouse’s entrance, poured the rest of the water over it, shaking the basin to use up every drop. She was remembering her mother’s instructions to use the soap to kill aphids on the rose stems and buds, but to avoid touching other leaves for it would stain them and spoil the basil for eating. ‘My clever girl, that’s right,’ said her father, squeezing her shoulders with approval.

  Davide went in to eat his morning bread and drink the coffee which his wife now set before him, and she examined him, not admiring the rival of Valentino, the young Gary Cooper and the smoothest shave in Ninfania, but noticing instead the vein in Davide’s temple pulsing, blue under the web of thread capillaries, and keeping the beat to his heart like bubbles coming to the surface from some gill-less creature who had sounded bottom in Davide’s tall thin frame. She put out her hand to touch his face, and tried not to let tears come to her eyes. Her nervousness annoyed him, and her ritual precautions brought him the nearest he ever came to open scorn. His view of the Christian god was more orthodox than his wife’s; though sceptical, his Jesus was loving, just and conscious, not a wild black thing let loose like a Greek moira in human lives. But at the same time, he was careless in his observance, like most of the men of his province; when he was a boy, talking with his friends, he had decided that priests wore dresses and lace and fancy hats because the lack of women turned them into women. And how could you respect a man who was halfway a woman? You had to have a woman to know what it was to be a man.

  There were bad priests, priests with priests’ housekeepers, he’d learned early, there were corrupt priests, who told the police what they knew from the confessional. A shameful lot, lazy, greedy, treacherous. They forfeited the right to that magic password which gave entry to the men’s sanctuary: they had to keep company with women. Men went to church with their mothers as boys, and with their wives in their prime; only in old age might they go in answer to their own need, and the fear of death permitted to their condition. Real men thought little of priests; though fathers of seminarians pretended to be proud. But Davide knew, in his colleague De Petra’s case, that his son’s vocation only meant that a gifted youth could leave Ninfania and go to Rome to finish his studies, and then, maybe, discover that God had not called, him after all.

  Could he have allowed the same for Pericle? Never. His son – a novice? In a soutane, with a pale and studious complexion? With a little Latin, and maybe even a bit of Greek, in special honour of his forebears? He chuckled, as he breakfasted with his ministering womenfolk around, and remembered his son’s moods, that wrinkled earnestness of babies, the flower-soft mouth, and the outbursts of grief that cleared as suddenly as they had struck, to give way to gentler becks and calls. He thought of the baby’s greedy love: his daughters had not seemed so possessed by need. Could this baby have grown up to be a reverend father? He laughed aloud.

  The memory of Pericle, his first child, had ceased to give him pain; after the birth of his youngest, long-limbed Fantina, his own star, his closest darling, he had felt a terrible anguish that he was not the father of a son again; since then, Maria Filippa had miscarried once, and they had tried to be careful, for he discovered that unlike some of his friends, he needed her strength far more than he desired another male on the family tree. He enjoyed announcing his contempt for other fathers who lamented the births of daughters; in America, he informed them, dowries had been abolished, and it was considered more useful even among some families of the Italian community – as well as cheaper – to bring up girls. Girls were half the trouble boys were, of course.

  Except in one respect, and it was a man’s duty to see to that and protect them until the right husband came along who would replace the father in her life. As he knew, he would remind his listeners, from personal experience. And they acknowledged his authority, for the personal cost of his chivalry was a famous matter in his native Ninfania.

  Now he sprang to his feet and asked for his hat and cane; was handed them by Immacolata, his eldest, to whom he made a small bow in deference to her sixteen years. Fantina asked to come with him. ‘As far as the road,’ he said, ‘But then, my star, you must go back; it will be hot, and your mother and your grandmother will need you, and I will have to walk slowly, much more slowly than I want to, even if you are my little giraffe child with long legs like the spokes on a fan.’ He mimed her legginess with his hands; she made a pretence of sulking, then thought better of it and ran into the sun again ahead of him, towards the road to the town by the sea where her father would buy the paper and sit in the circolo with the other members to read it over a coffee, or discuss the prospects of a sale of a piece of land or a building, for which his legal services might be needed.

  On most days when the family were staying at the farm, he walked to Dolmetta, but sometimes, if it were very hot and dusty the day he was due in the city, a carter sitting on a high bench behind a steaming horse would fetch Davide to drive him to the station. On the tenth of the month the rents fell due at the palazzo on the Via de Giosa, and Davide took the train in to collect them. His cousin Sandro – ‘Papà San’ – had invested in the building when they had all come back from America in 1922, and when he returned to New York he had put Davide in charge of it, and allowed him a small cut of the proceeds in return.

  As he always did on rent day, her father said to the older three sisters, ‘Be good. Help your mother’; he kissed Maria Filippa, then Nunzia his mother, and told her to rest and let the children do whatever was needed; he would be gone all day, returning late, errands fulfilled, with a small gift and news of the city, to which they would all be returning after the short Easter holiday. When he got back that night, he told himself, he would organise the repainting of the wrought iron work over the lower ground floor windows on the outer walls of the farmhouse. Then he caught up with Fantina on the track which linked the road to the farm.

  She was watching a small beetle play dead against the calcified limestone – unsuccessfully, for he was conspicuous in scarlet and black livery, like a flag waver at a festa with his confraternity’s colours flamboyant on his banner.

  ‘Look, look,’ she tugged at her father’s hand. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What do you think it is?’ replied her father. Lucia was joining them, at a slow step. At twelve, Lucia was the last daughter before Fantina, and had already begun to shrink from her father and ally herself with her older sisters. As she hung back, following him and Fantina, Davide sighed. His little women became not so little so quickly. Spontaneous hugs, exchanged thoughts, displays of pleasure in the father’s doings began to disappear. When he kissed Lucia now, she held him away and he complied, readily, since natural
ly he too did not want to brush against those signs of her new condition, the changes of contour and mass in her small frame. Lucia, like her mother and her two elder sisters, was neatly made and short, her flesh compacted on her bones in fine-grained roundness and density, like a turned wood spindle or a clay pot fresh from the mould, so that she looked like a figurine that reproduces adulthood in a smaller scale. Yet Fantina, gawky and deer-like as she was, possessed the more composed features; Lucia’s eyes sat crookedly above lynx-sharp cheekbones and a small mobile mouth which gave the impression even in silence that she was busy chattering. But these days Lucia kept her thoughts and her talk from her father, and when he entered a room in which she might be with one of her sisters, she brought her unruly features to attention, clamped her lips together in as straight a line as she could manage, and smiled demurely in a sudden, vivid, even sophisticated impersonation of a grown woman pretending to be shy in the presence of a man.

  When Lucia joined her sister in surveying the still insect in their path, he said, ‘He’s showing his colours to scare you away, in case you wanted to eat him. He’s not always red, it’s battledress.’

  While Davide had sometimes asked himself if his daughters’ demonstrativeness should be curbed, and then, with the swift growing up of Immacolata and Talia, learned that no intervention from him was necessary to bring their shows of love to an end, he found the performance of Lucia’s bashfulness much more disturbing than anything his other daughters had ever shown. She was quick-witted at school, with an easy grasp of numbers, and a talent for rhetoric: ‘Latest News from Tripoli’, in the early days of the campaign, imitated the radio bulletins to give an account of an engagement in which a company of Italian bersaliers, in their cock feather headgear, had fought valiantly for the glory of the patria and the Leader. Lucia did not invest the words she wrote down with any felt belief; she had overheard and she reproduced. She took on the colours of others readily, like a space on which a brilliant shadow falls from a Venetian glass or the floor barred by the shutters’ slatted darkness.