The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Then, conscious of her daughter’s struggle, for even though Rosalba had her commotion battened down, something was still leaking out, her mother would change stratagem, and admonish instead, ‘You could have been born crooked, or wall-eyed, with ears like carnations, red and all twisted into knots, you could have one leg shorter man the other, and have to wear a brace and a big boot with a metal clamp that made you go de-dong, de-dong so that everybody would hear you coming, you could be soft in the head – though of course, they are the happiest of all – what bliss not to know. Not to understand, to see the world in a haze! You could be hairy all over (there are bearded ladies, you know), you could have webbed toes and six fingers or a birthmark on your face, like mulberries when they fall to the ground and stain it, like that poor kid of Straparolas, and instead you’ll be a big beautiful woman. All woman. Some men love big breasts, you’ll see, we’ll find you a good man who won’t be able to believe his luck that Fortune’s wheel turned and dropped this wonder into his life, this Rosalba – this dawn rose – the Lord Saviour inspired us when we named you – who is so good and built like a real woman.’

  But Rosalba hugged herself at night, trying to flatten the globes swelling out of her sturdy, small limbs, that overburdened her as if they were actually eating her for their own purposes, like the spherical clumps of dark green waxy mistletoe, which will eventually hollow out and kill the tree that is their host. And her mother pursued, again improvising another set of consolations, to find the draught that would give her daughter happiness and hope, saying, in a whisper, so that the others in the house would not hear, ‘You know too, my darling, my perfectly named Rosalba, that what men do with women isn’t worth much, not to women like you and me. It’s another kind of woman, poor things, who are born with cravings, because their mothers were too much exposed to the hot wind from the south when they were carrying them, and it frothed up the liquid in their womb, and brought the baby almost to boiling just at the time when the passions are forming, in the third or fourth month.’ She dropped her voice even lower, ‘And these women’s babies, if they are girls, they develop a thing, like a man’s but smaller, invisible, a little sticky-up mushroom-like thing, that makes them want men all the time, it’s like a mosquito bite, it makes you want to scratch there to make it go, but if you scratch it it only gets worse, and can even turn bad and fester and ooze with yellowish liquid. That’s why you have to be so careful to keep out of the south wind. But some women are fools, they swing the pendulum across their stomachs, and if it swings left to right they think, “It’s a boy,” and stay in the wind at all opportunities because they want their sons to be strong, and big and irresistible to women, they want them to crack women’s hearts right open and sail through their lives on the brimming lake of tears, shed by abandoned fidanzate. Bah! Such fools, if they swung the pendulum another day, they’d soon find that it goes round and round some days, and back and forth others, and that you can’t trust tricks from the devil like that to tell the truth. And so the babies who are girls and should be protected from the wind are heated up in the womb. What can you do? That’s how it is. With them. But not with me. Not with you. You’re lucky.’ She extracted her hand from her daughter’s and, folding her own in an attitude of prayer began to singsong Hail Marys. Rosalba, this time damming up another kind of convulsion, joined her. She wanted to tell her, Please, I have one of those sticky-up mushroom things, Mamma, I have that mosquito bite and that juice. It feels like persimmons in there, when they are perfect to eat, and so you are lying to me about keeping out of the wind. But I’m glad you didn’t, because sometimes it comforts me for being so ugly, so squat, for knowing that no one ever ever will find me pretty.

  They found the place. Tommaso lit a lantern and jumped down into the ditch around the walls, and into the house. Davide followed the light; they passed through several rooms, their shadows spanning gigantically the porphyry-stained walls, then contracting all of a sudden to a human size that made Davide’s stomach clamp tight. The night was cold. A mushroom scent wrapped them; Davide felt he was bedding down in compost.

  ‘This is women’s business,’ whispered Tommaso, as the lantern picked out a pipe here, a tambourine there, the bare bottom of a nymph, a burning sacrifice on a small altar, smoking reds and a girl spinning on tiptoe, her dress out to either side like the stripes on a top. Another had an animal in her lap, its head was turned to suckle at her breast. ‘This is what happens when women are left to their own devices,’ Tommaso was saying under his breath. ‘Holy Mother of God!’

  It was thousands of years ago, Davide told himself. He was clammy with fright as he followed Tommaso, and his breath steamed in front of him like a burdened animal’s. People were doing these things here all those thousands of years ago, when the Romans lived in big farms in the hills. ‘Before malaria finished them off,’ he said, aloud.

  ‘It’s the women who did for them, stupid. They did for the Roman Empire,’ Tommaso put to him, with a laugh, enjoying himself. ‘Because they were always carrying on – just like here – rather than getting down to business and the work they ought to have been doing.’

  He walked on, Davide keeping close behind him in the dark and the damp. ‘And, look, not a single man around!’ Tommaso paused, his eyes shining in the blue-edged flame of his lamp, as he stood in the centre of the chamber and scanned the painted walls slowly, as if censing the pictures in a saint’s day procession. Davide shivered, and jumped at the sound of crackling outside. Tommaso’s eyes did not blink. ‘Nobody’s there. It’s just the noise of the night.’ But he sheltered the flame with his hand, to conceal its glow, then said, after silence enclosed them again, ‘I want to find the best bit.’ He gave a kind of snort, and moved closer to the wall, his shadow shrinking till he matched the painted people on the walls, it’s an orgy, can’t you see? Ahah! One girl’s beating another – Holy Mother, blessed dirty and filthy Mother, you know, they like this, sometimes, they really do. You’d think they’d get enough of it without doing it to each other. Ha, look, she’s wearing nothing. But the point of it all…’ and he paused, passed his cocked thumb up and down through the ring of finger and thumb of his other hand, and rolled his eyes, ‘the thing, the thing they’re worshipping!’

  ‘A…’ said Davide, trying to keep his teeth from clicking audibly and provoking Tommaso’s derision. He followed Tommaso’s looming hands, a kind of scarlet against the light catching the dominant pigment in the pictures, as he sketched in the air a cock so high and so heavy it made him stagger like an athlete tossing the caber in the Olympic Games.

  “Whose is it?’ asked Davide. He was stuck with his friend in a room with nowhere else to go but into the dark.

  ‘It must be here somewhere. The men were all laughing about it.’ He swung the lamp, and the floor of the room seemed to swing with it. ‘It’s not anyone’s,’ he went on. ‘It’s itself. It’s on its own. Come on, look!’

  Davide took this in, then asked, ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘I don’t know, how should I know? I haven’t seen it, you know. I’m just telling you what I’ve been told.’ He paused, and the light travelled close to the wall, pointing up its roughness in a landscape of shadows.

  Davide said, before he could stop himself, ‘I want to go.’ The silence outside was strangling him, and inside the chamber, the air was full of hands, reaching for him, humming with frenzy as they approached to touch his hidden parts. He could not help himself, and he said, aloud, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to piss.’

  ‘Go ahead, then, piss.’ There was a sound of fizzing as Tommaso did as he instructed Davide.

  ‘I can’t, I’m hard. Not in here, anyway.’

  Tommaso gave a laugh, smothered in a kind of whistle, and then, with a show of reluctance, lit the door to the passage down which they had come.

  Later, he asked him, ‘What are they doing to the thing – the women?’

  ‘Having fun, stupid.’

  ‘What, exactly?’


  ‘How should I know? I wasn’t there, was I? Mother of God, you’re a real friend in need, aren’t you?’

  Davide continued, ‘How do you know that it’s there? That that’s what it is, then? We never found it, did we?’

  Tommaso shrugged. ‘It just is, everyone says so. We can go back, in daytime. Why don’t you believe me? Everybody just knows, idiot. You know when you see it. It’s that shape. What else could it be?’

  Did his mother have these women’s hands? His sisters their mouths? And Caterina, with her turned limbs and her vase painter’s perfect shape, was she like them? He made the effort, moved Mamma near Papà’s body in his mind’s eye, disrobed the familiar carboy contours of his father’s tummy, placed his upright cock in position below, veiled it, made Mamma approach – no, she wasn’t correctly dressed (undressed) – he removed her sprigged pinafore, faded from many a drubbing on the washing stone, kept her in her best dress underneath, the blue linen with the white belt she wore at Easter, bent her forward to worship, and could not. He could not go on with this dumb-show in his fantasy, could not even imagine what she might do then, or found the imagining intolerable, and flung it from him in horror, then in howling mirth. At home, his sisters and his mother served and glided, bent and fetched indoors, they collected water in the cistern and filled the jugs and set them to cool in the depths of the pantry under cloths to keep flies and mosquitoes away; through their ministry of water they quenched the thirst of their menfolk, or laundered the linens they had brought with them as their dowries to the marriage, and folded and unfolded on the matrimonial bed; his women belonged to the shadowy depths of the shuttered rooms of a tamed interior, a chest of seasoned and polished wood for goods to lie in, not in a smoking scarlet-painted chamber, spilling liquid, whirling in a tarantella ecstasy, letting animals suck at them. They cared for animals, yes, they handled them, they milked the sheep that had been grazing on the plains to flavour the cheeses. But a wild beast’s jaws with all those teeth and hot saliva – putting it there! He shivered, and there shot through him the arousal he had felt during his dream, when the wall of his belly came away, and his innards were exposed to the dream woman and her touch. But it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t possibly be true. Women would never do such things. Even then. He hated Tommaso for scoffing.

  Yet Tommaso’s superior knowledge, his higher resistance to experiences stuck Davide by his side more closely than ever, a bolt of fear mixed with pleasure ran through him at the memory of Tommaso’s blasphemies alone, and he wanted to rub himself in his daring, as if it were an oil that a wrestler might use before a fight.

  In the cafés and the circolos of Ninfania’s small towns, after the find on the Marchese’s lands, the old men corroborated with much head-wagging and some smirking – and Davide was all ears, though less shameless about showing it than his friend – that the Villa of the Rituals showed the witchcraft women contrived the minute they were ever given a millimetre – or, rather, as the saying went, give them a little finger and they’ll take your whole arm. Never leave a woman on her own. Above all, never leave two women alone together! Three was worse, four, a curse, five, a calamity, six… It was the devil’s work, such a catastrophe could not be dreamed of in this world.

  The old men never remarked on the satisfaction they felt at the sacred mysteries painted on the villa’s walls. They couldn’t admit to it, but Davide noticed all the same how much they loved and revered the Lady of the Villa, their imagined mistress of ceremonies, for showing such taste in the object of her worship.

  ‘I recommend you, Your Excellency, to remember that in their independence from male supervision she and her followers are at fault…’

  ‘True, indeed, honoured Professor, but I also recommend you to observe that their instincts directed them admirably…’ And his audience would tap amiably with the ferrules of their canes on the stone floor, smiling silently. It was agreed, a woman with a healthy appetite was a treat from heaven. As long as she was under control.

  Davide took in their relish, and their unanimity, and struggled to hold on to his differences with them, to keep doubting their words and their experience. In his mind’s eye, he gave his mother’s and his sisters’ features to the women he told himself he must prefer, the tender and enraptured virgins of the holy images the priest sometimes handed out on feast days. In his mother busying about the kitchen, he recognised St Praxedes mopping up the blood springing from the martyred Romans’ wounds; in St Lucy, who offers between finger and thumb a stalk flowering with her own eyes, he discovered the comforting figure of his sister Cati with a sprig of rosemary to lay down among the freshly-ironed laundry.

  Davide no longer wanted Tommaso to come home with him as often as his friend would have liked. And yet, the more he felt estrangement growing between them, the more he clung to his attachment to Tommaso’s robustness. Also, the summer was drawing near when his classmate would be leaving school to go into the army, and he was getting touchy about Davide’s exemption from military service. Davide himself felt correspondingly guilty. His own father complained every summer of the loss of children to the landlords and their bailiffs. Of gifted children. Children he sometimes felt might go to the Conservatory in Naples if only they could continue learning music. But that wasn’t Tommaso’s predicament: his father could have paid to release him. He had a state salary, paid regularly, and a pension from the Post Office promised. But he chose not to, he considered the army what Tommaso needed.

  To change allegiances now could cut across Davide’s voiceless but ingrained idea of manhood; to turn and turn again was a woman’s way, fickleness was her charm, part of that vacancy in need of filling, that vacillation in need of support which the male provided. Besides, Tommaso had done nothing to give him reason to end their friendship, and Davide’s sense of justice was too sharp to avoid him for no reason except that the knowledge he had passed on to him had got under his guard and into his secret places.

  He began to dream things he could not tell him.

  Once Tommaso was coming towards him, railing, his pale face red and bloated with weeping, his hair matted and wet with sweat and ragged with tearing at it and he begged Davide to help him; he had, growing out of his forehead, lumps like a kid’s at birth, tenderly swelling horns. It would have been funny, Davide thought afterwards, if the dream had not felt like a huge underground cavern, blue-black and ice-cold and stoppered up. Talvi, a sixteen-year-old Talvi, who was going to have as many girls as he wanted because women liked, no, loved a man like that, who knew their secrets too, how could such a man, so careless and bold, sprout horns? Faces lowered around him in the dream, fingers waggling at either side of their temples to mock his affliction, laughter echoing. Turning to Davide, the devastated boy begged his friend to help him rid himself of them. They had not yet grown, they were just hard protuberances under the thin sore fleshy scalp above the hairline. Talvi took up a club and began battering his head, demonstrating to Davide what he must do. He, Talvi, could not do it hard enough, he wept, without passing out and as a friend, would he, please, he begged him, would he? And Davide took up the club Talvi handed him – it was already streaked with blood and hair – and laid about his friend’s head until the bumps that were bursting through the hair were flattened in a mess of whitish lymph and damp hair and blood, and his friend’s head emerged looking like a newborn baby’s when it is first shown to the waiting relatives at the mother’s door, and they cluck at the hairy, wet crown above the crumpled face. Tommaso opened his eyes, and smiled, a huge grin from ear to ear, and said, ‘That’s it. We got there!’ He was alive, he was hornless, he was himself again.

  Davide, when the memory of this dream returned, still gagged on the memory of his assault; in the dream he had not questioned for a moment that he should beat about his friend’s skull, but rather, the task had given him satisfaction. It tied him to his friend, scarring him with remorse and a mining need to make amends.

  3

  From The Duel
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br />   RUPE, 1910

  CATERINA TOOK THE lamp and held it under her chin.

  ‘Careful! Don’t burn yourself,’ hissed her sister beside her in the bed they shared.

  ‘Aieee! Rosalba,’ whispered Caterina under her breath, ‘I’m a devil escaped from hell for a single night, and I’ve come here specially to find you, Rosalba, and steal away your soul.’ She snapped her teeth together over the orange glow of the lamp and opened her eyes wide.

  ‘Don’t,’ shrieked Rosalba, butting her head into the bed in a delicious fright, and covering her head with the sheet. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, I swear. And besides, I promise to be good and never do anything wrong again.’

  ‘Too late,’ growled Cati, raising a hand spread claw-like and bringing it near the lamp so that it too took on the dark skeletal hollows and scarlet-rimmed glow of her spectral face. ‘Too late, you are my cho-sen oonee …’ And she let her voice hang thrillingly in the shadows.

  ‘It’s so scary,’ purred Rosalba, uncovering her eyes to look the better at her sister’s devil face. She held her position for a moment, as if spellbound by the vision of torment, then, unclenching her body, said, ‘It’s my turn now.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Cati. ‘Don’t overdo it, or else we’ll have to stop. You know how you shriek.’ She liked playing her mother, firm and knowing. She handed her the glass globe over the round wax apple with its molten navel. ‘All right, your turn.’