The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Rosalba was watched, too; from time to time, Nunzia stroked her hair, as she used to do, with soothing caresses for the daughter who worried her, but now she murmured, ‘Still waters, shall I drop a penny in your depths, and make a wish for your thoughts?’ Rosalba would force the sweetest smile she could, but feel its sickly insincerity work on her features like a tic, till her mother’s hand would fall to her side, and she’d sigh, ‘You used to tell me what was on your mind.’

  She kept Rosalba busy. In her maternal view, industry was the best remedy for longing. And Rosalba roused her heavy, hollow limbs and submitted to the tasks, finding in the repetitiousness of domestic labours a lulling routine that could still for a time the kind of sickness she had contracted. As she worked the crochet table-mats her mother had ordered, the intricate sequence of stitches could blot out for a moment or two the scenes that daily since that Easter feast she had staged between herself and Tommaso Talvi.

  She had failed to see him again; her family, her brother Davide too, had conspired, she knew, to keep her from going into town until Tommaso had left again for his training barracks. Then her hands would grow hot and she would pause, wipe them with a moist cloth so that she should not smear the finespun white cotton thread as she worked, and her thoughts of Tommaso would return; they were very sweet to her, often enough, though when her daydreaming grew extravagant she would fall again into hopelessness, and fear that none of it might ever come true.

  As she dipped the hook into the web, looped the stitch, drew out the thread, augmented the next stitch to move round the circle of the mat, and repeated the process, sitting in the cool dark room, she considered feats of courage and cleverness. Inside her she felt a power she could never manage to express; it was trapped inside her like water under the ground and she was the only one with the dowser’s twigs who knew where it lay and could bring it to the surface. She thought again of the clever pastry-cook who baked her man to her liking, and of La Carmellina, who lost her true love when he climbed a cherry tree into the clouds and found himself in the lair of the sorceress Zenaida – Zenaida, who had been robbed of sleep by the curse of another fairy, and had stolen Carmellina’s love away and changed him into a songbird. Only his song could do the trick, and float the witch into a dreamless sleep, and so she tied him to a perch by a silken ribbon and put bells on his bird’s feet.

  Rosalba imagined Tommaso as a bird: and saw his pale green eye staring at her from a flurry of golden feathers as his vivid wings beat.

  Undaunted, Carmellina had followed in her true love’s footsteps; she had put a kitchen knife into the bodice of her dress, and hitched up her skirts when she got to the foot of the cherry tree, where fallen blossoms lay from Zenaida’s struggle with her captive. She began climbing, until she too reached the sorceress Zenaida’s hideaway in the clouds. She tiptoed forward, pushing open one door. Nothing. Then another. Nothing. Then another. Zenaida the sorceress jumped on her from behind, one hand at her throat, the other yanking at her hair; she screeched, and the bird flapping over her head screeched with her, but Carmellina could tell from the look in its pale green eye that it was her true love under a spell from the wicked enchantress, and she fell to her knees and clutched the skirts of Zenaida (what was she underneath? A donkey? A goat? Her feet felt sharp and heavy and round; her toes like horn), and implored her to set her any task, she’d undertake any ordeal, in return for restoring the bird to human shape and then setting him free. Zenaida threw her head back and laughed; she had very big, yellow teeth too, donkey’s teeth, strong enough to haul with; and Carmellina abased herself before her to trick her, until her face was on the floor at the dirty and rank hem of Zenaida’s dress, like the pilgrims who drag their tongues along the ground during the Tomb ritual before Easter. Zenaida at last spoke, deliberating what she should do; Carmellina clutched harder, she knew how much bosses love flattery and crawling. She whimpered and covered herself with injuries, saying she could eat shit if that would please the sorceress, eat the sorceress’s own shit, and drink her piss too, if it pleased her.

  So Rosalba dipped the hook, looped the stitch, drew out the thread, and laughed all by herself in the cool dark room. For at last the witch was weakened by Carmellina’s guile, and hoisted her to her feet, and pulled her over to the window and pointed down the stony path that led to one of her lair’s doors, and to the Indian fig cacti growing there in bat-eared monster shapes, and said, ‘I’ve always fancied a new little number, made to measure, of stuff woven from prickly-pear skins, bit of red for excitement, but mainly green, it’s so elegant, don’t you think, with long sleeves and a full skirt sweeping around me, with a bit of a train … Ahah! You said, “Anything”, and are you flinching now?’

  Carmellina stammered, how would prickly pears be woven? Each fruit bristled with invisible barbs, a pin-cushion of spider’s craft and cunning, a defence against predators more efficient than a carapace. The sorceress was relentless. ‘You’ll have to work that out for yourself! If you want your precious bird back again as a man. And if you want him back,’ she added with a final hoot, and a swish of her sluttish robe, ‘you have till the next full moon, and no longer!’

  So Carmellina’s calvary endured a month, of which Rosa followed every moment, eking out her days of pain with love. The brave young woman, with hands blistered and bloated and bleeding from the venomous hairfine spines of the prickly pear, opened the fruit, dried it in the sun, and spun it to a fine thread on a spindle. For thirty days and nights she did not sleep, and throughout she was supported by the bird, who sang to her as well to rally her spirits – and to keep her awake. Once Zenaida was well and truly snoring, Carmellina would slash his jesses with her knife so that he would stay by her, and he would peck at her shoulder if her head began to loll; he would then whistle and coo to divert her and hasten his salvation. When she touched his soft feathers with her poisoned and fiery hands, she could feel the warmth of his body beneath them and the strong beat of his shrunken heart.

  Once she had picked clean the bat-eared tree of the Indian fig, and spun its armoured fruit, she had ten hanks of pale green yarn with a red fleck; and she could begin to weave. Back and forth flew the shuttle, clackety clack went the treadles of the loom, up and down sluiced the heddles, and the cloth grew until she had sufficient yardage for a gown; she plied the scissors, cut out a pattern, sewed the seams and hemmed the border, and she was nearly faint with pain from the cactus pricks festering in her hands and halfway up her arms. The bird brought her food, dropping it into her mouth so that she should not have to stop for the nourishment she needed in order to have enough strength to carry on.

  And at last, Rosalba sighed, smilingly, as she dipped and looped and drew out the thread herself, there was the dress for the sorceress. The moon was sailing in the sky, making her woebegone grimace, when she brought it to her, and Zenaida was torn, you could tell, between disappointment that brave Carmellina had fulfilled the impossible ordeal she had set her, and pleasure in the work of the dress itself, the fine weave, the dashing shape, the fall of the supple cloth, the nimble stitching. She put it on …

  What then? Rosalba stopped crocheting. Did Zenaida burn up, poisoned herself by the robe of prickly pear? Had she had time to free Tommaso from his changed shape? Had Rosalba, no, Carmellina, broken the spell which held Zenaida herself captive? Did she put on the magic dress, the dress made of pain and courage and become herself transformed, into a human woman, lovely and gentle, whom some other wicked creature had once enchanted too? And then what?

  Rosalba saw Zenaida beautiful, glowing in the soft green dress she had made her, with the almond eyes and slender limbs of Caterina … What then?

  Rosalba prayed, often, these days while she waited for Tommaso’s return to Rupe and the walk they would take together, as he had told Caterina they would, and she applied herself to acquiring those skills at crochet, at knitting, at pattern cutting and sewing that Fantina learned from her sisters, who were themselves taught by Auntie Rosa, later,
in America. Rosalba prayed to the Madonna of the Spasm in particular, the statue in the church in Rupe who had once wept real tears in sympathy with someone who had prayed to her with a heart full of sorrow too. The tears had been caught on a piece of gauze, and sealed in a cut-glass phial. On certain feast days, the gates of the inner sanctuary where the reliquary was kept were opened, and it became visible, in its tabernacle behind the statue; when they were shut, visitors had to peep through the bars: the grille was shiny where hands had gripped it on either side to get a glimpse. Rosalba was drawn to her above all the other Marys in the province, far and above the Madonna of the Kneading Board, who had been washed ashore with the face of Our Lady in its grain, and who was her mother’s favourite, and hung in replica above her bed. Rosalba felt that if only she could stop blinking and concentrate totally on the sweet and grieving countenance of the Madonna of the Spasm, she would catch the fleeting flutter of her eyelids and twitch of her lips as she granted Rosa’s prayer. Beyond the trials, there would be no more pain. The Madonna wept; Rosa knew she wanted the sufferings of her children to come to an end.

  She and Cati were born into the same family, went to the same school, heard the same sermons on Sundays and feast days, and often confessed to the same priest; but Cati liked to cover herself in guilt, a kind of protective clothing that her elder sister had once inspected, tried on for size, and then discarded. When Rosa looked at the Madonna of the Spasm, she did not see the immaculate mother, the tower of ivory, the fountain sealed, the spring shut up, the enclosed garden of the Madonna’s perpetual virginity. She did not beg her, as Cati did – Rosa had heard her – to help her be good, help her to be pure, and never have dirty thoughts or put her fingers in dirty places; instead she fixed on the amber doll’s eyes that had gushed, above the hilt of a sword, which was studded with bright glass stones and stuck out from the statue’s brocade costume. It was made with a slit for the blade to pass, like the slits at the back in angels’ tunics for their wings, and was changed according to the seasons’ calendar. The Madonna wore blood-red purple during her son’s Passion, but put on gold and silver for his Resurrection and Ascension and for her own glorious Assumption, when Tommaso would surely come back for the holiday. Rosa looked at the weapon piercing the heart of the Mother of God, around which her finely carved wooden hands, so lithe and brown they too might one day reach out and clasp hers, fluttered as if poised either to grasp it and draw it from her or plunge it in deeper. Rosa would have envied Mary her powers of passion, the open expression of her grief and her love, if she had not been so certain that the Madonna was entirely on her side. Mary protected women of strong feeling; she had known their experience of suffering, from the inside, and she still knew it; women’s passions, not just the Passion of her son, were her province, devotion like Carmellina’s her special knowledge. Her smooth clean hands would one day reach out, one to take Rosa’s face gently by the chin, while the other smoothed her hair, and her eyelids would drop in assent: Mary had gone against the grain, against the world, against custom, thought Rosa, as she dipped in the hook, looped the stitch, drew out the thread in the dark room. She could have been stoned, people would have mocked her as she passed in the street, as they jeered and booed that girl Serafina when she started getting bigger and everyone knew who’d done it but they couldn’t do anything about it, not even kill him, because he was the son of a nobleman – Rosalba shuddered, remembering the way Serafina had thrown up her chin and turned and screamed at her tormentors, ‘And which one of you is so good that you can point at me!’, then dropped her head and run away down the street, holding her heavy breasts as she ran. (In some of the harsh villages of the hinterland, the sheets of the bridal night were still unfurled on the morning after; the spots on them displayed heraldically from the balcony of the house.) Serafina had left, later, with her mother, got a job as a wet nurse in Riba. Or so they’d heard. Rosalba closed her eyes, and beseeched heaven, not for the first time, ‘Dear Lady, Lady who has known tears and cares and the love of God on earth, please help Serafina and give her lots of milk so she can make money and give her strength and stop people being unkind to her. And dear Lady, Mother of God, please don’t let it happen to me.’

  There, another one finished, Rosa said to herself, turning the delicate crochet lace in her hand and gently pulling the knotty circles this way and that to make the mat lie flat With a good heavy hot iron, it would stop belling out here and there, she thought, and she experienced a flash of pleasure at the quickness and deftness of her work. On an impulse, she moved to the glass, set in the doors of the tall heavy dark wood ambry in which the family’s best crockery and linen were stored. She put the mat on her head: its frothy white edge undulated on her dark hair, and in the dusk in the secluded room the effect flattered her plump dark face. She looked at herself, practised an attitude, widening her eyes and sucking in her cheeks, then another, chin up, head to one side, Madonna-like in pious ecstasy, then shaking her head to dismiss the bridal vision she had attempted, plucked the lace mat from her hair and added it to the pile with the others she had finished. She needed to be disenchanted too, from this shape in which she was held prisoner. Come next year, after the closed season of Lent, would there be a wedding? She pushed the thought away, terrified of damaging it by careless anticipation. There were so many women, Serafina wasn’t the only one, who had men, different men, all sorts, and children, different children, all sorts. She’d heard her mother talking with her cousins, exchanging notes. A mother of twelve, just had another still-born, stifled by the caul, he came out feet first and upside down facing up, the cord was around his neck, marks of sinfulness, twelve children with how many men? Five? Six? Who could tell? And one of the little girls was heard to say, ‘Mamma’s last-night husband.’ A man she’d probably never see again. The grackle heads of the gossips would bend closer together, the voices grow sharper; they’d review the ingredients of love philtres used by witches in those barbaric, remote communities. Women elsewhere, different women, living by another code provided them with a common and inexhaustible theme. But all the messages that the parliaments of women busily exchanged among themselves stuck at one figure whom their spate of stories, their laughter and malice, couldn’t break down or wash away, a special kind of other woman, a figure so pitiful and so ludicrous that even jokes couldn’t make her situation spicy, and yet she outnumbered all others, because so many men had gone away alone, to America, both North and South. Rosalba was never ever going to be one of them; never, never. She’d a hundred times rather change last night’s husband on a daily basis, be reviled as a witch in the parliament of women, she’d like to have dead babies in succession – she winced at this, ‘Please, no’ – but pressed on rather than be that nothing, that unbeing, that sump of ribaldry and pity and contempt, the woman-who-had-never-had-a-man, the zitella, the old maid. Old maid. No. Above all, Lady, she entreated, Mother of God on earth, I will do anything, I will crochet a hundred table-mats and wash my hands between every row, and never ever have an ice cream. I will offer up these sacrifices, they’re nothing I know, but what can I do, I want to do something, give me a cart load of prickly pears and I’ll do it, I’ll spin them into fripperies for sorceresses, but please please don’t let nothing happen to me. Make something happen. Something, to me.

  8

  The Snail Hunt 2

  DOLMETTA, MAY 1931

  HIS TURNOUT EXCEEDINGLY elegant, the father was walking on over the hard curd-white earth down the double track of the carts towards the small port on the coast ahead. He kept to the shadows, though the breeze blew freshly, and now and then stopped to wipe the chalky dust from his shined shoes with his handkerchief. Rows of olive trees, mixed with almond, lapsed rhythmically on either side of him, like the falling pages of a book; according to the frugal practice of local husbandry, vines were planted underneath them. In this ‘promiscuous culture’ the triple-canopy growth freckled the earth with green shadows – from the clear young lime of the fruit trees to the
mineral and ancient duskiness of the olive. The road he followed marked the seasonal migration of sheep from the treeless limestone plateau further inland to the watered valleys around; it had led across this terrain since the Romans had farmed there.

  They’d hardly been the first, he reflected. It mattered to him that the people of the south were of ancient lineage, far beyond anything that could have been imagined by the Americans he had known in New York, back in the Tens and Twenties. He tapped with his cane on the track as he walked, remembering the contempt in which he and his fellow Italians had been held. Little they knew, he thought.

  They were descendants of Iapyx, a son of the great Daedalus’s, who’d had the good sense not to fly. He’d never become a household name, unlike his famous younger brother, Icarus, but instead, remaining grounded, had prospered. He had sailed to Ninfania from Illyria, in a big double bass of a galleon, with a prow carved like a volute, and it brought him to the shore in the harbour he then designated Ribaris, after the peak where the Ark had come to rest, once all the waters of the flood had drained out of the plughole of divine fury. No matter others called the place of safety by a different name; the sober Iapyx, who knew not to dare too much, drew on his family tradition to found the new city, Riba. It was Daedalian blood that accounted for the native handiness and wit and industry of the people of Ninfania, the father had always thought. As for Daedalus himself, he had been busy too at the time inventing the Greek alphabet in Cumae, on the other side of the peninsula.

  Davide Pittagora had been born in Rupe, ancient Rubi, a great centre of vase-painting, not quite as cosmopolitan as Taranto on the coast, for the Ionian port could attend a wealthier class of customer, but a distinguished artists’ colony, up in the fresher air of the hills, away from the hot sandpaper winds that blew the trade into Riba and her sister harbours, Dolmetta, Tirrani, and, further south, Brindisi. The quivering line of Southern Italian black figure vase-painting, so different from its counterpart on the Greek mainland in its general insouciance and amiability, was being drawn in Rubi more than two thousand years before Davide was born. In Ninfania, the to and fro of peoples – of troglodytes, Iapygians, of Greeks on their heels, and Romans on theirs – had sown in the pale chocolate-coloured fields a different harvest of pots and glass and coin, and bequeathed to the Ninfanians another occasionally profitable and effortless trade, the traffic in antiquities. And after these peoples, others had come: now and then, Davide passed, in a clearing in the grove, a stone hut, white and conical in shape, like the turbans of the Saracens who were overlords here long ago and who built these shelters for summer days when the heat in the grove swelled too burstingly to bear. The fieldhands used them; animals sometimes broke into them; and lovers used them for trysts.