The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  So Caterina the next day ran into Tommaso on an errand as if by accident and muttered to him; she was twisting her limbs and quite red with fear, but he followed her as she ducked awkwardly into the church and knelt in front of the Madonna of the Spasm in the votive chapel. She choked out Rosalba’s message, that he should meet her there, in the same place, tomorrow, that he should come, as if to light a candle, and she would be there, doing the same thing, early, before the morning Mass. The child crossed and uncrossed her legs as she gabbled, as if she were dancing to go to the lavatory. Tommaso laughed. As she rose, her eyes, which had flicked from side to side, looked him in the face for the first time.

  He said, ‘This isn’t a good place to meet, too many people come here, especially during the vigil of a feast. Tell your sister she must think of somewhere else.’

  Caterina searched his expression, then gasped out, ‘Where?’

  Tommaso bent down to her cheek and placed his lips against her ear. She tensed; very softly he blew into her ear, until she quivered as his warm breath passed through her. He said, ‘Tell your sister she must send you to me with a message, and I’ll be there.’

  ‘Where will I find you?’ Caterina now faced the weeping Virgin determinedly and moved her lips as if praying; she quailed when she realised that she would have to act the go-between again and seek him out alone once more.

  Tommaso described, rapidly, one of the many round stone shelters scattered in the olive groves outside the town, on the road which led to the sea from the farm where he had visited them last Easter. He gave her precise directions, and made her repeat them. ‘You’re sure now you know the one I mean?’

  Caterina nodded. She moved to leave, the gloom in the chapel oppressed her, she felt the glass eyes of the Madonna on her, grievous, welling, over her stabbed breast. Tommaso took her arm, his hand circled the whole of hers between finger and thumb, and squeezed as he said, ‘No, she shouldn’t come, not there, it’s too dangerous, someone might see. She must consider her honour. I want you to come, instead.’ He paused. ‘You can give me another place to meet her at night-time, a more private place, which site can choose and no one will be able to find out.’

  And seeing that someone had joined them in the chapel, he pinched Caterina’s cheek, and lightly slapping her shoulder, said aloud, ‘Away with you, find someone else to pester.’ He roared with laughter, shaking his head for all the world as if Caterina were some naughty imp and he an indulgent uncle.

  The tingling of Tommaso’s breath in her ear persisted as she made her way home; though she could see no one around her, she felt eyes at her back, sucking out her secrets like cupping glasses burning against her skin. When she turned, there was no one, but she hurried on, though she no longer knew what she should do, what she should tell her sister, if she should report this request for an assignation somewhere more secret than a church, more private than a byre. The wrong he had proposed weighed in Cati’s stomach like undigested food; Rosalba couldn’t possibly do what he asked, it would be madness, if she were found out, God knows what would happen. Besides, when she, Cati, thought that she would have to go again to find Tommaso and arrange a further tryst, she was swept by apprehensions she could not quite name. A different uneasiness, different from the lump of indigestible fear that her sister’s rashness inspired, became lodged in her, more fluttery, indistinct, and nauseous, as if someone had shut out all the air in a bedroom with the closing of the shutters. His ring of bone around her upper arm, the sound waves of his whispering, thrumming gently through her, raising her scalp, warming her ear, the laughter when she first began to speak, his glassy greenish gaze. He was cruel, she thought, that was it. He would do her harm.

  She stopped on her journey, and sat down in the street under one of the sparse trees, to try to let the queasiness ebb away. It was still hot, though the evening was falling, and she lay back against the warm wall, and closed her eyes. With one hand she cleared away from under her the sharp stones of the unpaved road. She was clutching one in her hand; its edge dug into her palm.

  She was glad she had the stone, when he came into the byre; she was waiting for him as he had asked her to, she had made her way across the orchard in the fresh blue morning and let herself in through the wooden door by lifting it off its hinges, since the bolt had rusted fast long ago, and she had looked up at the full moon of the sky in the chimney hole at the centre of the round shelter’s roof, and with her stone which was sharp as a shearing knife with a bright, honed blade – the marks of the whetstone were still visible in pale striations like scouring tracks – she scraped her name into one of the stones on the interior, as many others had done before her, in tall shapely capitals, the only letters she knew. Except that it wasn’t her name that she carved into the yielding stone, but her sister’s. She wrote ‘ROSALBA’, for indeed it was Rosalba who was there, holding the kitchen knife in her hand as Tommaso came through the door.

  She was frightened, and she sank to the ground. There was straw and an old woven blanket some herdsman had left there, with a heap of tools; it smelt savoury and sharp inside, like the smell of a birth; she was melting, the light blinked around him, and there was sheepskin under them; her name, which she found carved on the stone, carved by him during vigils while he waited for her there in the days before she could come, was edged in light. There was an R for Rosalba.

  No, it was a c, for Caterina.

  He came through the door, and he was laughing, he took Rosalba in his arms and kissed her and they went down on to the sheepskin with soft cooing giggles and sucked and licked and flowed together in the nest like a mother cat and her kittens. He came through the door and he backed Cati against the rough wall of the hideout and rammed his pelvis against her stomach and pinned her down with one hand flat against her chest and with the other drew his belt through the loops of his soldier’s jacket and slashed her across the face with the buckle doubled against the leather. He said to her, softly, purring in her ear as the blood flowed into her eyes from the wound in her head, ‘Get down on your knees.’ She fell forward, on her hands; there were thistles growing on the hard chalky earth in the shelter, there was no sheepskin. He said, ‘This is for your sister.’ He came through the door, and he shut it behind him again quietly and turned and gave Caterina a peach. No, it was a candle from the statue of the Madonna where they had met, and then he put his arms around her, each one was long enough to cradle her on its own, and pulled her against him, he was warm and firm like newly-baked loaves, and the taste of his tongue was sweet and salt at the same time. He said, ‘Think you’re a lady? You’re a piece of shit, you’re a she-goat, and the place you need it is where you shit, because that’s what you are.’ She did not know which sister she was, and she took her knife, it was lucky its blade had been sharpened recently. Stars winked from the metal as she faced him across the byre. When he came into her she stuck him like a pig and ripped him from his abdomen up to his breastbone. There, in contact with the bone, there was a scraping sound, and her strength failed. He was all soft and scummy inside, and greenish, like his eyes, and she stood up and pulled the two halves of his torn torso together like a shirt she was going to button up so she should not see the spilling of his innards. And she lay beside him, her limbs intertwined with his, his furry legs lacing her smooth ones, their matted wetness mingling, and he was murmuring, ‘My sweet one, my darling, Cati.’ His mouth was like two halves of a peach when you part them and see the rose-edged pulp inside, before you bite it.

  The droning in her head came nearer, like a colossal bumble bee, then veered away, lightening the pressure on her head, lessening the leak of fluid from her wound; Franco appeared, looming above her as if he were grown up. She heard him from very far away, crying out her name, which was, Caterina. She was glad, she had not wanted to meet Tommaso in the byre. That was what Rosalba had to do. Franco’s hands took hold of her and shook her, he seemed to be moving in oil, and she responded sluggishly, like a loaded boat tugged into harbour, ro
lling as it was edged towards the berth. She could make out, in his pert pointed child’s round face, lines of anxiety. ‘Can’t you get up, Cati, please?’ he was calling to her. The head bent over her was ringed in blackness; the huge singing insect dive-bombed her again, and she closed her eyes and said to her brother, ‘Tommaso, Tommaso.’

  Rosalba was holding a wet cloth on her face, and so Caterina found she was home again; her mother was taking off her shoes and rubbing her feet. The droning in her head swelled and faded, swelled and faded repetitively, and a black halo edged her vision as if she were only allowed to behold her world circumscribed by mourning bands. ‘You fainted,’ said her mother. ‘I used to faint when I was a young girl, just like that. It’s nothing; it’s being a woman. We’ll sew some metal in your hem and you’ll stop fainting; flesh needs iron to be strong.’

  Caterina shuddered. ‘I was there, I was near here … and …’ She reached for Rosa. ‘Were you with me?’

  ‘You’re confused now, sleep.’

  Rosa adjusted the cold compress on her forehead, and settled back on a chair against the wall, watching Cati as she lay.

  ‘Rosa,’ Cati whispered, as soon as their mother had left the room, ‘Don’t go and see him, please don’t go.’ Rosa’s head jerked up.

  ‘Shush, not so loud. What did he say? Tell me everything, every word. When you didn’t come back, I thought …’

  ‘Promise me you won’t get into trouble.’ A wail caught in Cati’s throat. ‘You’re going to get into such trouble!’ And she turned her face to the pillow and sobbed.

  ‘Shut up, stupid, of course I’ll be careful. You’re such a baby, you don’t know anything. You think I’m the first girl ever to meet a man in secret? Tell me everything, come on.’ Rosa advanced on the patient and leant over her, urging. Can’ shrank from her anticipation of pleasure. She said, ‘I led him into the chapel of the Madonna, just like you told me. He was playing cards, but I think he’d finished.’

  ‘No one saw you?’

  Cati swallowed. ‘At the end, yes, someone came into church, too. But he pretended I’d been bothering him for something, he was clever about it, it seemed real.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He didn’t follow me into church straight away, and he knelt down, as if he was saying his prayers.’

  ‘So what did he say?’

  ‘He said, he’d like to see you,’ Cati hesitated, the singing in her head sent waves of sickness through her. ‘In private.’

  ‘In private!’ Rosa’s eyes widened, glowed. ‘Aahah.’ And her chuckle, turning into a sigh, came out as happy, pent-up breath.

  Caterina shut her eyes and twitched.

  ‘So he’ll find me tomorrow, there, by the Madonna? Darling Cati, thank you, don’t be so frightened, please, people have done it before, what harm can come to me? He wants to see me, it’s good news, there’s no reason for you to get upset like this.’

  Rosalba took the rictus which passed over her sister’s features as assent.

  Cati’s eyes opened, gummily, and she watched Rosa as she smoothed the bed, patted her hand, wetted the cloth again and adjusted it gently on her brow. She opened her mouth to speak, but could not force the sounds out, could not manage to say to Rosalba that Tommaso had wanted her to give him a different rendezvous, somewhere where they could be alone.

  Rosalba never went to the trysting place, because Caterina could not bring herself to tell her sister about the assignation Tommaso had proposed in the byre. Nor could she bring herself to go in her place, as Tommaso had asked.

  Instead Rosa waited in church before the eleven o’clock Mass, in the side chapel of the Madonna of the Spasm, and tried to pray through the minutes that seemed to haul themselves onwards through time as if anvils were strapped to their feet.

  Tommaso did go, to the trullo, in the olive grove, with a light step. He expected Caterina to be there to tell him that Rosalba absolutely refused to meet him in such compromising circumstances and considered him a blackguard and a monster even to suggest such an assignation. He took a shotgun with him, to bring home a few birds, as he walked, should he see any. He would be seeing Caterina again, with her sweet face like a ripe apricot and her almond eyes, and he laughed when he remembered her childish stumblings as she tried to repeat the message to the letter. There was something of her brother in her, the light bones and small feet and surprised eyebrows, and Tommaso liked Davide immensely, his gangling generous friend, even though he was a kid by comparison. He liked his family, their ways, their hospitality, their large, excitable company, the father’s outspokenness. They had prospects, their land must yield well, could be made to yield better. But they were weaklings, and disorganised. He would help fructify their holdings, bring them up in the world where they should be. Where he should be, with his cradle boon of green eyes like a magician’s, and his stature that no one in his family had ever had before, his strength and resolve. His officer had recommended him, noticing he was not like everyone else, that he never buckled, and, in life’s battle of wills, could stare down any enemy, overcome any weakness.

  Rosa in the chapel with her head bent over her hands, her legs stiff from kneeling, thought, We will go away together, somewhere different from here, to Africa, he said, he wanted to go there, and I will take care of him, we are like each other, we are both … and she hunted for the word because she did not want to use the word ‘misfit’, and found ‘changeling’.

  Franco arrived for Mass with their mother. Rosa took her place in church beside them and her little brother tugged at her sleeve, and asked, showing gappy teeth like a crone, ‘Are you going to join the sisters, Rosa?’ He hunched his shoulders in glee. ‘Has the Madonna called you? Have you got a heavenly vocation?’ He rolled his eyes to heaven in mock devotion, and intoned, ‘Give me a husband, ora pro nobis. A nice big husband, ora pro nobis?’ Rosa reached out to grab him, but he danced away, ‘You’ll have to join the sisters, they’ve got moustaches too …’

  Tommaso sat down on the straw inside the hut. It was cool inside, and lovers had carved one another’s initials in the white limestone of the interior. He read the letters interlaced with hearts; he lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, watching the smoke nudge across the roof until it found its way out into the sky through the circle in the roof like a full moon; he lifted the door open, and looked across the olive grove. The crickets had begun singing. As he stepped out, they flung themselves out of his reach, all at once, silently, before resuming their sawing song. He heard the bell go for the High Mass, and knew now that Caterina wouldn’t be coming; so he left the byre. As he made for the road, the crickets hopped from him, all around, as if he’d launched them. When he was younger he used to trap them; they were dry and husky to bite, but inside, they made a tender morsel. Shrimps of the field, Davide had called them. A brace of partridge whirred into the air. He took aim half-heartedly, but they were away before he even squeezed. In those days he hadn’t yet eaten shrimp, but Davide had been to the sea, often, and reported. He wasn’t sad. He had half-expected Caterina to fail to turn up, and he wasn’t sure what he would have done with the girl if she had come. He couldn’t touch her, she really was too young; he imagined the pale peach cheeks of her child’s cunt and the runny sweetness inside, and thought he might duck back to the hut and toss himself off. But he stopped, adjusted himself so that his cock lay comfortably upright against his stomach, and made himself walk on; he knew his spirit grew stronger on retention, that he sapped his vital energies when he jerked off. He had no time for the cant of the priests about sin, but he knew, as he lay in the barracks hearing the grunts and panting of his companions, that he was honing himself for a superior form by refusing his body. To have a woman was different, her juices mixed with his and later the recollection gave him zest; but alone it was cowards’ sport. So he walked back into the piazza, while the church bells rang out with a dud sound, for the priest never had learnt how to stop the bell cutting its own resonance on the ret
urn of the clapper, and the musicians of the town who could have taught him were all adversaries of the church, like Davide’s father. ‘Demon anarchists,’ cursed the priest, throwing all his enemies into a single pot. If they chose to greet him in the street, he did not acknowledge them.

  At the thud of the bell another bird rose, wings whipping. A plover. Tommaso recognised its badger markings and the flap of its wings as it climbed; he stuck the gun to his eye, tracked the bird, and fired; the plover’s wings flew back and spread fanwise, in a cancan of swirling feathers, then it spun and came hunting down.

  Tommaso strolled over. The bird’s darting eye sought his frantically before it glazed; he thought as it twitched about on the hard dry clods that he might break its neck to bring its death throes to an end. There turned out to be no need. He picked it up, felt the warm light body under the plumage like a child’s small fist in a soft mitten. There was very little blood from the peppering of shot, and a good plump feel to the breast, so he was well pleased. He was becoming a good shot, in spite of the lack of practice in the army.

  It wouldn’t matter, though, one way or the other, later during the fight in the quarry with Davide.

  At the close of Mass on feast days, Rosalba usually liked the lingering and the chat, the exclamations over new babies, new ribbons, new illnesses, old illnesses, the mutterings about swindles and scandals, policemen and bosses, the rumours of change, the curses and complaints. But today, she could not take part, she pleaded illness, she invoked Caterina, who needed her at home, she said, for she was still poorly. And so she scurried away.