The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘Look at the candle.’

  ‘I’m not going to blink at all.’

  ‘Keep your eyes wide wide open, like me.’

  ‘The flame’s getting taller.’

  ‘Now close them. Tight. What do you see?’

  ‘I can see a burning halo, a sun inside my head.’

  ‘Mine is scarlet, it’s on fire.’

  ‘Mine’s going green. It’s got blue edges. The core is yellow.’

  ‘It’s moving! It’s whirling!’

  ‘Shush, don’t shriek, Mamma will hear.’

  ‘There are floating bits, out to the sides.’

  ‘They’re shooting stars, like in the sky, in August, raining down from far far away. They take millions of years to come here.’

  ‘Billions of years.’

  ‘Quadrillions of years. Their light has been travelling towards us for eternity! From before the world began! Oooooh, it makes me feel dizzy.’

  ‘I feel dizzy too, I love it, my head full of stars.’

  ‘Here, give me the lamp again, let’s go spinning.’

  The sisters snuggled down the bed, with the lamp on the table beside them. Rosalba shut her eyes, and hummed. Her sister twisted, still lying down, to watch her.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see trees, dark, tall trees, with damp filmy webs in their branches like grey lace, shining in the morning.’

  ‘What kind are they? I can’t see them.’

  ‘They’re strange, they’re not like any trees round here, they have. leaves that hang down, like loose hair.’ She put her head out over the edge of the bed and threw her hair over her head so that it trailed on the floor.

  ‘Are they pines?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t smell them. It hasn’t been raining in this forest, it isn’t hot in there, I can’t quite feel what it is like under them, because they’re rushing past my face, on either side of me.’

  ‘You’re in a carriage?’

  ‘No. I’m still, they’re moving.’

  ‘You’re so lucky, Rosalba, I can’t see them. I can’t feel them.’

  ‘Ooh, I’m giddy, I’m giddy. I’m spinning… Do like me, and you’ll spin too, and you’ll see trees, flowing past dark, tall, with trailing hair.’

  ‘I wish I’d gone to the Gargano with you that day. But I hate seeing the little dead larks the hunters bring back. Now I wish I had gone. Ever since you went there, you’ve seen trees.’

  ‘They were stately,’ said Rosalba, pulling herself up from her upside-down position. ‘They were old, but not wrinkled like olive trees and crooked, but kingly, somehow. And there was music in them, all silvery and rustly and hushed. But I don’t know if they’re the trees I see when I’m spinning, not exactly, but something like them.’

  ‘I think if I’d come with you and Mamma that day I’d be able to see trees now.’

  ‘But when I saw the trees at the Gargano, I felt I’d seen them before. Even though they weren’t like anything I’d ever known, I had a foreknowledge of them, as Mamma says, a premonition. I’d already seen them, when I was spinning.’

  ‘How can you touch yourself there?’ Caterina’s voice quavered.

  ‘Oh, Cati,’ said Rosalba, sleepily, ‘you always ask me that. I wish you’d try. Then you’d stop nagging me about trees and spinning.’

  ‘But it’s dirty down there,’ Cati grimaced. ‘Your pipi comes out there, and it smells bad.’

  ‘Not when you’re spinning. It smells good, like the sea, like the edge of the sea, where it’s warmest.’ Rosalba’s voice was fading, she was adrift with sleep.

  Cati put her hand out and touched her sister’s and held it tight. ‘Oh Rosa,’ she said, it’s a sin.’

  ‘Shush,’ said her sister. ‘Sleep, now.’

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Of course I do, stupid.’

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘Cati!’

  ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Goodnight, darling Rosa.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  4

  From The Duel

  RUPE, 1911

  WHEN TOMMASO TALVI returned at Easter after his first term of service with the infantry in Caserta, Davide, who was in the country at his mother’s family’s farm for the feast days, walked into Rupe to find him. Tommaso’s ranginess now looked lean, the hauling and drilling had put meat on his chest and thighs, pulled his bones together, like a puppet restrung at the toy hospital, and given his limbs a new springiness. Davide felt ungainly beside him; he was shooting up and his trouser bottoms rose up his calves month by month, to his mother’s dismay, for there was no more material in them to turn. Talvi’s uniform was stiff and clumsily made, and the cheap wool smelt of human and other salts dissolved ineradicably into the yarn. But he had two of them, as well as two summer outfits – and they looked new. His voice had developed an adult rasp, and he’d grown a moustache, with trimmed short ends, and when he smoked, he held the cigarette between finger and thumb, and added emphasis to his remarks by pointing the burning end at his interlocutor, as if to brand the truth of what he was saying.

  The youths standing round him under the white oleanders in the square were paying keen attention to Tommaso’s comments on life in the barracks near Naples, and they in turn were filling him in with news: the Work and Freedom gangs – so-called – the landlords’ thugs were growing more brazen, for the authorities weren’t showing the least interest in crushing them. They had badly beaten some fieldworkers when they’d refused to get into the carts to go to work, demanding that the bailiffs fix the rate of pay and guarantee the hours beforehand. ‘They should beat them in return,’ said Tommaso. But the others, while mimicking his show of fist, shook their heads. The gangs were armed, whereas the peasants … ‘You can do a great deal with a blade,’ said Tommaso. They moved on to easier matters, the priest’s change of housekeeper, the new soda pump in the bar across the way, on the other side of the square. But presently, Davide prised him from their admiring company, and as it was midday and the weather steamy (Easter was late that year), he proposed they find some indoor coolness.

  Alone with Tommaso, Davide found him less raucous; he had himself been beaten and disciplined and yelled at and he had learned to hold his tongue. When he did speak, the names of distant towns and countries – Libya, Somalia, Eritrea – formed in his mouth like alien food that he had learned to eat. He expected to be sent abroad, he told Davide, Italy was to have colonies in Africa, like other European powers, like France and Germany and Great Britain, and get rich like them on the proceeds. There would be treasure; perhaps he would be noticed by his namesake, the general, surely a cousin; there would run black gold.

  ‘Black gold!’ Davide echoed.

  ‘For the generals, perhaps,’ said Talvi’s mother, later. ‘Not for you. There will be nothing for you. What dreams these fools dream. Black gold! Red dust rather! Yellow sand rather! A general for a cousin! Beh! Much worse than out there …’ She nodded towards the deep window niche in the wall, beyond which the earth of Rupe’s hard tableland could be seen, dry as chaff on a winnowing floor. ‘We still know how to make things grow in territory that’s shrivelled and shrunken as an old bean. But there, in black Africa… what do they know?’ She blew in derision through her lips, and jabbed at Tommaso. ‘He couldn’t stay at school. On no, by all the dirt and misery in this world, he’s to be a soldier. His father won’t pay up,’ she jerked angrily at the thought, ‘No, he has big ideas about the Future of Italy too. So my son must go. He’ll get killed by one of those wild men, no better than animals!’ She threw her hands in the air and wailed.

  ‘Why won’t you face up to what you’ve got,’ Talvi cried out. ‘A blockhead, no salt in his marrow, a good for nothing but shoving an
d hauling and … fighting. Admit it, Mamma,’ and he took her hands from her face and made her look at him, and she writhed and pulled herself free and howled, ‘You will die, you will die, and your bones will lie there, in the sand, with nothing but wild animals to say a prayer over them, until those savages come and take your head to make a goblet out of it and your finger bones for a fetish.’ She drummed her head on the table until her son went to restrain her, holding her out between his long extended arms like a struggling cat whose claws frightened him.

  ‘Oh, please, please,’ Davide implored her, ‘please stop. He isn’t even going yet, and who knows, if he does go, what will happen? It’s not true, he’s as good at his books as me …’ And he stopped in confusion, any defence of Tommaso showed up the inequality of their position more sharply. She looked up at him, eyes sore with her visions, and muted her outcry as if he had suddenly reordered the world, redisposed the pieces of her son’s fate. ‘You think so? It’s possible he won’t go?’

  ‘It would be a hero’s death, anyhow, too good for the boy,’ said his father, coming in through the door.

  Davide fought with his uneasiness in their company. He tried to brighten the air in the Talvis’ room, to jest them out of their gloom, just as he would for his own children later, adopting a formal manner for entertainment in order to overcome the tongue-tie he sometimes suffered in company. He reddened, and began, ‘Anyway, what if they do use Tommaso’s finger bones for a fetish? We have San Nicola down the road in Riba.’

  Talvi’s mother was listening; she pushed her son from her with a shrug, and palmed her brows, as if to press the pain out of her head. ‘Forty-seven heroic Ninfanian sailors travelled across the sea to find the saint. When they got there,’ Davide went on, rushing his words, ‘to his shrine in Myra, they found a huge, sealed, marble sarcophagus. The bones were inside it, swimming in perfumed oil!’

  Davide was red with the effort of speaking up, and Tommaso’s father was grunting. He looked to him, for reassurance, and with a twitch of his eyebrows the older man gave him permission to indulge his wife with his story.

  ‘They had to get down into the tomb, and fish for them, and then, when they embarked a great storm blew up… You know this bit.’

  ‘Ah, but I love to hear it,’ she said, calmer now. ‘Old stories can’t come back to plague us.’

  ‘So you say,’ said her husband, under his breath. ‘Too many old stories for me. Too much of the same, day in day out.’

  Tommaso was hovering at his mother’s side; his friend could see how even he hated being caught in a fight between his parents. With a brusque nod to Davide to ignore her husband, she scorned him, ‘His ideas! His hopes! What dirt and misery! He won’t accept.’

  Tommaso said, quietly too, ‘Mamma, leave it, deep down you agree, you know you do.’

  ‘What’s the use?’

  Davide aimed to soothe her, above all; her need quivered in her voice. So he went on, and she gave a nod, pleased, ‘I promise you, that if anything happens to Tommaso in Somalia or Libya or wherever, a band of us will get together and sail across the seas to find his body and bring it back and use it to make miracles for us…’ Davide was laughing, easing them, trying to ease them, into tranquillity.

  But Tommaso Talvi’s mother’s lip was trembling again. Davide quickly resumed, determined to prevail against her mood. ‘So, on the way here, there was the storm, and the boat carrying the precious body was tossed and blown off course, this way and that, until the captain despaired of reaching Riba at all. But with tremendous courage and determination in the midst of great difficulties and terrible dangers he steered through the gigantic waves that reared up on either side of the barque, like the curtain walls of fortresses – yes, that big – and managed to put in to harbour on some island, off the coast of Greece. There the ship stayed, for the gale force continued to blow from the north, closing off their way out of the harbour. It went on blowing, right in their faces. They prayed all right; they prayed day and night, gathered together around the relics of the saint in the hold. They entreated him to set them free to return home; they fell to their knees and beseeched him to set a prevailing wind for home.’

  ‘A lawyer, already. What oratory!’ Tommaso’s father said, ‘I expect it’ll get you a long way.’

  ‘Did they have anything to eat? Anything to drink?’ asked Talvi’s mother, sweeping the room as if the forty-seven Ninfanian braves were present. There was plenty of clutter in their quarters; but Davide knew not to expect food.

  ‘No, that’s right, it was a barren island where they had landed, and they were running out of water too when the saint inspired the captain with a vision of the truth: one of the men had been stealing relics, taking parts of the saint’s body for his own purposes, and hiding them away to sell them later for his personal gain! Unless these fragments, a fingertip here, a toe there, a strand of hair, a portion of skin, were reunited with the main trunk, the wind would remain contrary…

  ‘That night, they discovered the culprit. He was putting back the bones he had stolen into the cask in which the saint and his scented oils…’

  ‘He still exudes them to this day, all praise to him,’ Talvi’s mother interjected. ‘I have some.’

  ‘And the wind changed instantly, and they set sail for home.’

  ‘What happened to the thief?’ asked Tommaso.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said Davide, with a laugh.

  ‘He was forgiven,’ said Talvi’s mother, determined, ‘through the special intercession of the saint, who always shows mercy to sinners, especially sinners who do wrong through need. Maybe that sailor knew what it was like to have nothing. Maybe he was frightened of that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Talvi, for once in agreement with his wife.

  ‘I’ll give you the bottle I’ve got of the holy myrrh that oozes from his bones (it’s colourless, and it doesn’t smell at all) when you go off to Africa to die,’ and she was about to begin again, ‘Oooh, my son, my son.’ But now Davide and Tommaso were at the curtain which hung across the open door, and were almost gone, hot as it was outside in the early afternoon, Davide stopping only to interject his thanks.

  They sat under an olive tree, and the crickets hopped about them as if the chalky, parched earth were sprung like a trampoline; as Tommaso talked and talked, Davide’s disquiet grew. In the last months at the barracks near Naples, it seemed that Tommaso had travelled a very great distance from him. He had never fully belonged, not like a native-born, but still, the sharpness of Davide’s sense that his friend was withdrawing into the distance was new, and it gave him a certain kind of pain, mixed with fear. Tommaso, with his opinions, about bosses and generals, about Italy overseas, direct action and union rights, about the workers’ demands and future victory, was working loose from Davide’s grasp. ‘Soldiers can’t begin to match what the labourers in the fields have been saying for years, though their conditions are even more brutal – but this is where we must strike our blow. If we have the army, the rest follows …’ In his imagination, Tommaso had left Rupe, Davide could see. He knew why, too. Davide’s home was comfortable, while Talvi’s family railed at their condition. Davide never remembered his mother providing for him and for his sisters and brother and father and grandparents with rancour, but only with pleasure; Tommaso’s mother provided food, if she provided it at all, as if she had minced it from her own flesh. His own mother licked spoons, she dipped his fingers in mixtures to get his opinion, she hugged the loaves to her chest, saying,’ Like when you were babies, and so small I could fold you into the bib of my apron. Like this, like this,’ and she bent over the hot bread, laughing. There was little laughter in the Talvi household. Nunzia beat egg whites to stiffen her hair to make kiss curb on her cheeks near her ears, ‘to show them off,’ and mixed flour and water to give extra lift to her husband’s and her sons’ collars for the Sunday promenade in Rupe, after Mass. Copying her, he had realised he could sing, and it was she who urged his father to buy the gramopho
ne from the Naples galleria catalogue so that he could play opera records and learn more than Rupe and his own family’s repertoire could offer him.

  But Tommaso’s family seemed to begrudge him everything, his father exuded the dour grievance of the northerner displaced to the despised south, his mother lashed out at her lot without taking hold to change it in the small ways Nunzia understood. Yet military service, the feared ordeal of the boot and the stick and the empty billycan and the flyblown cistern, the lousy mattresses and sweltering quarters, which Davide’s father had spared his son by paying through the nose, had thrown open a window on to a different view and shown Tommaso a way of escape.

  They were granted an evening’s leave a week, Tommaso told Davide. ‘Five o’clock out, ten o’clock back. Just time enough to hitch a ride on a cart into Naples and get back again.’ He’d soon learned to do as others did. In fact, it came easily to him. He was a natural. Just a little uncertainty as to the procedure, but she soon made it all clear.

  ‘She?’ Davide, whose eyes had been idling over the crooked roots of the olive beside him where a file of ants was plying back and forth, lifted his startled face and met Tommaso’s pale grinning gaze.

  He was immediately, furiously, burningly jealous. He reproached Talvi, feeling something of a fool, warning him that he’d probably get a disease and his balls would drop off, that he couldn’t go to confession unless he really meant he was sorry, and as Easter was coming he wouldn’t be able to perform his Easter duty and take communion. And then everybody would know. That he was in a state of mortal sin.

  Talvi snorted. ‘Let them know,’ he said, with relish. ‘That Father has his whore too, you know. You think he doesn’t? He says Mass, and goes home, has a big plate of pasta – can’t do it without – and then humps her on the kitchen table.’

  Davide wanted to tell him that he disgusted him, that he, at any rate, did not admire Tommaso for damning his soul, that he would never do anything like that, for the love of Jesus and Mary and all the saints and also for the health and safety of his cock, to which he was much attached, that he despised and hated Talvi for… for what, for outstripping him when he, Davide, knew he had always been finer, more intelligent, more sensitive, and, by the filthy misery of pigs, happier. Happier. Blessed, too. And fortunate. But now, life was happening – to Tommaso, and not to him.