The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘You must have got it wrong,’ Caterina was saying. ‘God couldn’t possibly have organised things like that. I wasn’t born like caca, out of Mamma’s bottom. I know I wasn’t. It’s revolting.’ She’d forgotten about whispering now, and her voice was rising in remonstration. ‘I think you’re horrid to tell me lies too, and make out that when you’re married you’re going to get up to horrible … such disgusting… with that man who looks like a fish with cold yellowish eyes and greeny-yellow skin …’

  ‘He hasn’t,’ said Rosalba, but then caught herself, seeing her sister’s need, and admonished her. ‘Wake up, Cati, for crying out loud. You’ve seen Micia have kittens – Mother of God, she has them four times a year. You’ve seen the sheep’s afterbirths, lying in the fields after the lambs are born. Well, we’re no different. That’s nature, and we’re part of it. How can you grow up here and not know all this?’

  Caterina clapped her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear this. I’m not a cat. I’m not a sheep. I’m not an animal, I’m, I’m a… soul, I’ve got a soul, inside, and it makes us different, that’s what the priest says, and I believe him. I’m not natural, not like animals are natural. Nor are you, Rosa.’ She was begging her. ‘Rosa.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ said Rosalba, taking her sister’s head against the fall and swell of her warm body. ‘Darling, darling, I was only teasing…’

  Caterina twisted and beat on her sister’s back with her fists. ‘Tell me the true story then, and stop being so horrid.’

  ‘The truth is,’ Rosa began, in her most teacherly tones, ‘that when you want a man, and you look around and you can’t see the one you like, you go into the kitchen, and you take a pound of the whitest flour, a pound of the whitest sugar, a pound of the most refined fat you have, and a flask of rosewater and a handful of raisins, another of currants, half a pound of almonds ground to paste, a squeeze of lemon-juice, a pinch of cinnamon and a sprinkle of powdered clove. Making sure your hands are clean and cool, you rub all the ingredients together between your fingertips until you have a soft, crumbly dough, like a semolina. All the while you imagine as hard as you can what he would look like, your dream lover.’ Caterina giggled. ‘If you’re rich – not like us – you shake in some rubies for his lips, some sapphires for his eyes – or topazes, if you like them yellowy –’ Caterina shifted, resisting ‘– some diamonds for his fingernails and so forth, all the treasures you like, to make him beautiful as the sky, as the sea, as the earth, and then you murmur the secret formula …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not telling.’

  ‘You don’t know it, that’s why.’

  ‘It goes something like this,’ Rosalba replied, improvising,

  ‘By garlic and mushrooms,

  By weasel and hare,

  By starlight and moonlight,

  My darling! Appear!’

  ‘What nonsense! Nothing but nonsense!’ said Caterina. ‘You just made that up! Go on,’ she continued, as Rosalba seemed to pause.

  ‘You’ve made me lose track of the story, silly, with your endless questions. Now be quiet. You don’t say the magic formula until later. First you mix the dough, then you pat it into shape, like a figure in a Nativity crib, with all his fingers, and little fingernails, you make them with a toothpick, and his face, not forgetting ears and nostrils and eyebrows, and you put in his navel, making a little indentation, and you roll some dough for his thingamajig.’

  Caterina drove an elbow into her ribs.

  ‘Ouch! What was that for? And then, only then, when you’ve stood him up on the kitchen table, and he’s all bejewelled and perfect, a knight crusader just like you’ve dreamed, do you mutter the magic words. Like the statue of the Virgin who put her arms round the young man and put his wedding ring on her finger to be his bride for ever, this pastry man, so scrumptious, sweet-smelling, so delicious to taste, comes to life as you speak and puts his arms around you and you put yours round him… And that’s it!’ She clapped her hands together, as if dusting off the flour.

  ‘Yes, and then … what about the baby?’

  ‘I tell you one thing, and you don’t want to know. Then I tell you another, and you go on asking question. Really…’ Rosalba harrumphed, and pulling Caterina up with her, swayed to her feet, one hand on her stomach.

  ‘My tummy knots have gone!’ she exulted. In her new, unanticipated access of confidence, she pushed Caterina ahead of her to bed. Cati allowed herself to be pushed, reluctantly.

  ‘Tell me another, Rosa, please. Tell me the story of the Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘No, I’m going to sleep now. I’m tired.’

  ‘Please, Rosa, tell me again, about how she walked in the water, but it was a mirror and they looked at her, she didn’t know it was a mirror, she thought it was a stream. They tricked her. Please.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’

  Laying herself down beside Cati again in the hot room under the single sheet, she instructed her sister carefully, how she was to find Tommaso Talvi in town the next day, to come across him as if by accident, and then, if no one was listening, she was to give him a message.

  7

  From The Duel

  RUPE, 1911

  HE SAID HE would be back at the Ascension, if he could find a ride; failing that, at Pentecost. So Caterina reported to her sister. Failing that, and she gave a little giggle, Rosalba’s face was such a picture of attention, at the Assumption. ‘He also said he was going to try and get a bicycle, and that he would give us a ride on the handlebars.’ Rosalba laughed, and covered her face. She would never be able to get on a bicycle, she couldn’t possibly, she’d fall off, and make a spectacle of herself. But perhaps, if it was securely held, by Tommaso, perhaps. She looked up, her face expectant still, interrogating her sister, wanting more.

  Franco put in, ‘And he bought us ice creams! I had mine in a cone, with wafers stuck in the top that I used to eat it with, but Cati sat down and she had hers with a spoon, out of a glass, sitting up on one of those stools …’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rosalba. ‘Ohoho.’ She sounded as if she were panting.

  ‘If you’d been there, he’d have got you one too, I know he would.’

  ‘But I wasn’t, was I?’ Rosa’s lip wobbled.

  ‘I see,’ said her mother, ‘Tommaso, the hero of the hour! Throwing money about like dung on a field. I’d like to know where he gets it.’

  Rosa’s look cut her short, and turning stoutly to the children, with quite uncharacteristic toughness towards her mother, she demanded, ‘What’s it like?’

  Caterina’s tongue travelled slowly across her lips, trying to recapture the taste of her first ice cream. ‘It’s a bit like snow, except it’s sweet.’

  ‘You can’t bite it,’ put in Franco. ‘I tried to, but it’s hot when you bite it, it burns your teeth and your tongue. Ouch! Ouch! You have to blow,’ he puffed to demonstrate, ‘to cool it down. But it’s good if you lick it. You have to take little licks. Tommaso showed Cati how to.’ The child imitated the sipping movements his sister had been schooled by Tommaso to make at the café, like a small bird at a fountain.

  ‘I had pistachio and strawberry,’ she said. ‘Green and pink.’

  ‘I had cherry and vanilla,’ said Franco. ‘It made my mouth bright red.’ He stuck out his tongue and squinted down to look at it.

  Rosa’s fingers were twisting the ends of her belt.

  ‘We’ll all go in and try this miracle,’ her mother said, now gentling the eldest of her daughters.

  ‘Did it turn your mouth green?’ said Rosa to Caterina, ignoring her mother’s placatory offer, ‘Or did it make your lovely lips pink?’

  ‘Oh Rosa,’ said Caterina, squirming under her elder’s nastiness, ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’ She hadn’t, either; she had sensed, in Tommaso’s treat, something that she could not identify, but that she wanted to smother, keeping it from her sister’s knowledge: so she
pinched Franco really hard on the arm until he cried out, ‘What was that for?’ Though she still knew she was obscurely to blame, that when Tommaso lifted her onto the bar stool with his big hands which almost met under her rib cage, the current was live in the air around them, and Rosa would not have liked it. ‘You should have come with us. Anyway,’ she added, ‘he said he hoped we’d go for a walk with him, soon.’

  Rosa looked hopeful, then puzzled, then downcast, then bright again. Her mother was adding, ‘Rosa is older than you, she can’t gallivant about like a girl, showing herself off in bars. It’s not the custom. Cati, my little wild lion cub, you’ll have to act like a woman soon. You will refuse to accept ice cream from a man again. Or anything else.’

  Cati made a face, seized her brother’s hand. ‘Only when Franco has to be a man,’ and looking at him carefully, she burst into a fit of laughter. ‘Not till then!’

  Rosa muttered to Caterina, ‘You’re too young to understand.’

  As she gathered up the bedding and cushions she had hung out of the windows to air before the evening earth began to exhale dew, she wondered whether she should fetch out her best mantilla, the white lace her mother had given her for her first communion, which she never wore because it seemed so showy, and hadn’t worn even yesterday for the Easter Mass. She could tell her mother she had begun a novena to the Madonna of the Spasm in the Cathedral; she might come across Tommaso then, somewhere in town, in the square, by the bocce game, and ask him if he would get her an ice cream too. She saw herself, her head a foam of lacy white like the shining tumbleweed caught in the evening light as it floats through the air, handed on to the bar stool, her little feet – her good point – showing beneath the hem of her skirt where it rode up as she adjusted herself. She saw the bar, with its gleaming mahogany counter and polished brass fittings; the enamel levers of the soda pumps, the array of ratafias and rosolio liqueurs behind the bar, and the new wooden chest, like a coffer with brass hasps in which the aluminium pails of pastel ices were kept in ice brought by dripping cart from the icehouse in the harbour at Dolmetta, where the fish were packed and then chipped off the block. She had been to the bar many times on errands, to fetch tobacco for her father, or give one of his fellow musicians a message about a rehearsal, but to sit there, how different, how enfranchised that would be. Young women of conspicuously marriageable age never sat there. And to eat there – how she longed to, to drop the few years that made her different from Cati, to lose the ripeness and rotundities that would always make her different from Cati, who was, really, almost boy-like with her stringbean limbs, yet not quite boyish either, angelic rather; she was not afflicted with the need Rosa felt, the gap opening inside her, where a longing for something other than what lay within her sights sat in occupation, banging her drum and marking out a new rhythm and new steps for Rosa’s spinning wants, calling down the corridors of Rosa’s body to her innermost inguinal life, till her blood rang to the beat.

  ‘I don’t care which one Tommaso likes,’ Davide’s mother told him. ‘He’ll never lay a finger on her. No matter he might stop being a soldier if something changes in that family to bring him back (though I can’t see that happening, the Talvi are the kind who never have a change of heart). No, he’s the sort who’ll run around all his married life, you can see it. He’s godless, where he comes there’s trouble. You can see it in his eyes. His funny eyes. Looking at him, I can see why the ignorant give credence to the Evil Eye. I really can. And he’s probably an anarchist.’ (Hard as Davide might try and interrupt, and put his mother right on one or two aspects of the matter, she wasn’t having it.) ‘He has no manners, eats like a peasant, talks like he needs salt on his marrow, and is as free with his smile as a tinker cheating you at a fair on a saint’s day. I don’t care how different he is underneath,’ she cut through Davide’s protests, ‘how much bluster it is, blusterers make poor husbands, never could make a woman happy for more than five minutes, and anyway, Caterina can do better and I’ll see to it that Rosalba does better too. It’s different for your father to have certain ideas. Your father is a saint. He wants well-being and justice for everyone and everything because he’s too good himself to see what ruffians and cowards and cheats most people are. Your father’s too lenient to people like Tommaso. He sees him as an idealist, likes his “spark”. He talks of the “undefeated ones” in the midst of so much defeat. But to my mind the boy could begin by showing more respect altogether to people like your father who have been listening to what the League says about the problems of the land and the bosses and the conditions of the men and women who work on it. I know he’s an inspiration to a boy like Tommaso. But that doesn’t put Tommaso himself on a straight path. The boy is trouble, believe me. And besides he repels me, so clumsy and big with his cat eyes. And I’d think he’d repel any true woman, who had any sense.’ She looked sternly at her son. ‘It doesn’t matter that he’s not perbene by birth. I’m not a bigot. But it matters that his soul isn’t perbene.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ Davide began, but words would not come to his help. ‘I know you have good instincts, Mamma, but in this case, you don’t understand …’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she shook her head with grim significance. ‘And doesn’t Our Lord heal what is shattered or faulty? Why hasn’t He put His hand to Talvi, then? For women, it’s different. It’s a cross and a blessing to be plain … It’s virtue’s face.’

  They would all be returning to town in the autumn to meet some sons of good families in Riba; she’d been saving for years, money from the pigeons, money from the cheeses, the almonds, her mother’s money when she died – may she rest in peace and perpetual light shine on her – she’d hidden it from that villainous landlord who’d strip everyone of their surplus if he knew how much they’d hoarded, but they’d never find out, the folk were far too tight to let anyone know, and he, Davide, must not breathe a word. There’d be dozens of suitors for her children, anyway, this was a little trouble, it was bound to happen now they’d grown up. Grown up! She looked as if she were about to cry. Davide gaped, ready to utter words to console her, but already her mood had shifted, and she was running before another wind. How could she make sure of her Rosalba, the other was too young, but Rosalba? She mustn’t let her out of her sight, not until Tommaso’s leave was over and he was safely back in Caserta. If he came sniffing round, Davide was to take him off somewhere. Else she’d call in their father, who mustn’t be alerted. That would be a catastrophe, a scandal would surely follow his knowing anything and he mustn’t be allowed to suspect any danger at all, not for the moment, otherwise they’d probably murder the boy.

  ‘Surely not. Mamma?’ But no, she wasn’t attending. ‘I could sink my claws into his flesh too,’ she was saying instead, ‘even thinking of making advances to my family!’ She seemed again on the verge of tears, which quickly turned to rage, as she spat out, ‘His smile! It’s manic, it’s evil, it’s some devil’s work.’

  Davide put his arms around his mother, to restrain and comfort her.

  Rosalba had questioned him about Tommaso, about his family, his prospects. She was struck by his energy, she said, the vigour of his point of view, his grown-upness – he makes you look like a boy still, she had said to Davide, mocking him with the sharpness she was showing all of a sudden. ‘I like hearing him talk, about everything, the war, the League, the future of Italy.’

  ‘But if she really loves him? If it’s the bolt of lightning, the thunderclap?’ he asked his mother, as gently as he could, trying to make her laugh.

  ‘Love!’ she responded crossly, pushing him away. ‘Love lasts, what, a couple of weeks. Thunderbolts go out, phut, like candles; marriage goes on. Has to go on, forever. Don’t talk to me about love.’

  Davide hung his head in mourning. His mother sometimes sounded like the Talvi parents, so harsh, so unhopeful. ‘But you think like that, and that’s why…’

  ‘Yes…?’ She was sharp.

  He persisted, ‘That’s why there are other women �
��’

  It was a glimmering he had, but no more than that, and she cast him down from the height of her knowledge.

  ‘There will always be “other women”, even if you let “love” as you call it come first, come before money and manners and being perbene, before breeding, and education. Men need those “other women”. You have probably already…’ – she looked viciously at her son, for a moment, making him flinch from her temper – ‘Women do not need more men than they have to put up with.’ She struck an attitude, held it, hand on hip, chin set, then slumped, threw her arms wide and laughed. ‘Except our sons,’ she said, ‘our beautiful sons.’ And she hugged him tight, tight, as she had not done since he was much younger and liked to squeeze her back until she protested that she couldn’t breathe. But his arms were limp today, though he did not resist her.

  Tommaso did not call again at the farm that leave, and after the Easter holidays, Davide went back to Rupe for the short summer school term before the dog days drove most people indoors to keep cool, and some venturesome spirits down to the coast, to the white sand beaches at Dolmetta and Tirrani, where sea bathing was just becoming popular among adults. The Pittagora women did not yet swim, and airless midsummer found them sequestered in their shuttered, marble-floored apartment in Rupe, emerging only before the sun gathered strength to go to market or to Mass, or after its heat had dimmed in the evening to stroll under the acacia trees with the rest of the town’s gentry, while their servants sat in doorways on wooden chairs, commenting aloud.

  Tommaso had not come back at Ascension, though some others who’d been called to military service at the same time walked into town one afternoon. Rosalba baked special almond biscuits, hoops of crumbly nuts and fine sugar, intending to wrap some in coloured papers and offer them to Tommaso’s mother as a gift for the feast; but could not, because, as she was about to set off, she realised that she did not know her well enough to call and give her a present Had she mentioned her plan to her mother, she knew she would have snapped, ‘It’s impossible, it’s not the custom.’