The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Tommaso was coming towards her. She tried to turn; she felt her face, flushed already with her wasted waiting, and by Franco’s teasing, turn a deeper red. Her heart emptied itself out, you could have tolled her and she would have sounded hollow and cracked. He came abreast her, and smiled, showing his disconcerting teeth, and said: ‘I have something for you.’

  He opened the buckles on his bag, and took out a bird, a small grey plover, its crest still dancing over its open eye, and held it out to her.

  ‘For your family,’ he said.

  Rosalba wanted to say to him, ‘I love you, I’ll cook it. Just for you. I love you.’ She felt choking in her throat, and tears pop from her eyes onto her burning face. She said only, ‘Thank you.’ Her fingers closed tenderly around the soft grey feathers of the bird, the other hand found her own breast and covered it, in a gesture of self-offering.

  Franco appeared at her side, frolicking. She shooed him, and he skipped away, but not without hooting behind his hand.

  She could think of nothing more to say, because she wanted to say so much and it was all forbidden.

  She wanted to ask, Why had he not come? Above all, she would have liked to ask, When could they meet again? She would so like to speak to him of all that was inside her. But her jaw had locked, as if she had been bitten by an animal that kills its prey by robbing it of the ability to eat or hunt, pant or lick, or even howl.

  10

  From The Duel

  RUPE, 1912

  ‘ARE YOU SURE you gave him the message right? Why didn’t he come? Why did he leave me there?’

  In the bedroom Caterina and Rosalba shared in the apartment in Rupe, smaller than their room in the farmhouse, Rosa questioned her sister, whispering, the night after Tommaso had made her a gift of the bird in the street in sight of everyone coming out of Mass. ‘I thought he was laughing at me, that he didn’t want to see me, but then he stopped me and he made me a little bow, just like a real gentleman, and gave me a present, as if he did care. Oh Cati, tell me again, what did he say when you saw him? What did he do?’

  She prodded Caterina in the bed beside her, but her sister remained hedgehog-tight Rosa flung herself over to the other side of the bed. ‘You’re a hopeless go-between.’

  Cati said, ‘I’ve told you, he gives me the shivers, I think he made a spell and did things to my head. He’s dangerous, I know he is.’ She had spoken too long to pretend any longer to be asleep, and so she twisted and touched Rosa’s back, softly, with a hand on her shoulder to make her face her. ‘Rosa,’ she began, ‘Think of someone eke, I don’t know …’ She mentioned, haltingly, one or two other names in the town. ‘They’d be better for you. Besides, you know Mamma doesn’t like Tommaso. Look what happened when you lied about the bird.’ Cati sounded snivelly, and Rosa smiled beatifically and shook her head on the pillow, in possession of a rare wisdom. The more of a villain or a lout Tommaso Talvi appeared to others, the sweeter she found her task of siding with him, of divining the exceptional qualities in him, of standing by his side. This was the proper enterprise of the loving wife, to defend her man; the men performed their acts of authority and occupied the seats of visible influence, but you didn’t have to be especially keen-eyed to see that behind the card-players and the drinkers, the officials in their pompous uniforms, the clerks with their mounds of bureaucratic forms, the farmers and the peasants, women were standing. Without the services of their women, how would they survive the day-by-day attrition of factions and envy and corruption and ambition, the quotidian burden of poverty and grind and illness? Women were used to such things, they could bear it more easily without giving way. (Who ever heard of a mother falling so ill she could not take care of her household, whereas everywhere there were men – drunk, mad, gaoled, old, worn out – who had become as children again to their wives?) She thought of Africa and its special ordeals with greedy excitement; she set herself against its vast and glorious horizons. She would be drinking coffee as if it cost less than water, wearing alligator shoes made to fit her pretty feet, and watching at Tommaso’s side a parade of half-naked girls with bracelets round their legs, whirlng to a drummer’s flying hands, while a group of handsome, grinning soldiers stood by. These images came to her from the metal engravings of the conquest of Libya which had appeared in the illustrated journals; she did not remember the different countries of the Italian empire in question, for all of Africa – Libya, Somalia, Eritrea alike – beat out a rhythm of adventure and spoils and heroism. The pictures showed her overseers standing by ant-files of ‘natives’ doubled over as they hacked the roads of progress through mountainous desert; more grinning Italians cheered soundlessly under the joined twin arcs of a new bridge. A gang of black workers wearing white loincloths faced the camera gravely, looking as if it were something they might be given to eat. On other pages, she had seen a village of huts set in the lee of a bluff, where mothers – Italian mothers with babies on their laps – were sitting in the sun on chairs, just like at home. They would achieve great things together, Rosa swore to herself, she would help him bring about his vision of converting the army to the cause of justice and equality.

  ‘I should like to go to Africa,’ said Rosalba drowsily.

  Caterina cried out, ‘Don’t go away, Rosa, please.’

  Rosa said, ‘Perhaps he’ll take me to Africa!’

  Cati put out a hand again and touched her sister’s flank, ‘Rosa, you’re dreaming.’

  ‘I’m not!’ said Rosa, ‘I’m wide awake.’

  ‘You know recruits never take their families.’

  Rosa stared, unmoving, at the ceiling. She would make up dreams to fit her life with Tommaso, no matter what. She willed her eyes to remain open until she felt her sister drift away from her into sleep, and then she prodded her; Caterina groaned, but did not wake. Rosa slipped out of their bed, and, imagining herself on water, trod as lightly as she could; her feet left moist imprints on the coldness of the tiled floor which shrivelled up as quickly as she made them, until she too vanished through the door.

  She liked the nights in the country better; the mixed smells of the town contained more human corruption: the health of animal dung’s pungency was missing in the ammoniac whiffs from the town culvert, and the touch of the air was never quite as lively as in the yard. Besides, there was safety in the farm enclosure after the gates had been barred at night, whereas in the street below their apartment the way lay open in either direction, and presences palpitated unseen in the arches of the carriage doors under each house.

  She stood still for a moment and looked up and down the street; it seemed to shine; the light the sun had poured onto the packed dirt of the road glowed back pewter under the stars; there was no longer any moon, it had set earlier that night, and the dimensions of the scene had expanded, creating a vacancy which made Rosa feel her pulse quicken, as if she too were growing, becoming less stubby, less compact, stretching upwards and turning silvery herself like the leaf of an olive when the breeze lifts it and shows its metallic underside. She was in her night clothes, but, unnoticed by Cati, she had kept her dress on underneath. She lifted her nightgown over her head; her feet were still bare, she wanted to make contact with the ground.

  She waited, she felt sure he would come; it was the custom. He had given her a token, and he must come to add speech to his gift, according to the rules of gallantry. But he must come soon, or else she’d have to go back in, for her mother might wake and sense her absence and go in and check. The sweat that had begun in anticipation of what she might encounter in the street now ran in fear of her mother’s rage; Nunzia’s eyes had gone hard and wrinkled like black olive pips when Rosa had produced the plover, and she had clucked impatiently with her tongue when Rosa lied and said her grandfather had shot it and presented it to her. She’d snatched it away, and it fell on the kitchen floor, where blood had trickled from its beak. Sabina had intervened between them: rescuing the bird from her mother, she cupped it, appreciatively.

  ‘We’ll
wrap it in cabbage leaves, overnight, with some peppercorns and a little laurel and thyme,’ she had said, evenly. ‘Then tomorrow, you can take it down to the oven and tell them to put it at the bottom, so it cooks really slowly, to keep it moist.’ From the yard where the cart was kept, Rosa heard the small splosh in the bucket after Sabina had placed the bird between her legs and slitted it to pull the guts.

  Rosa had been crying then, with the pieces of the plate her mother had tried to smash over her head in front of her at the table, and her mother had put the back of her hand to her daughter’s cheek, as if to test her for fever. She had said, and her eyes had softened now, ‘Be careful, darling, there’s no jewel as precious as you know what,’ – with a finger pointing to the belly of her daughter. ‘An honest woman is above rubies, and an evil one – her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell.’ ‘Shush, Mamma,’ Rosa had said, and then Sabina had come in again with the bird – it would make only a bite to eat.

  ‘What heat down there,’ Sabina blew out, as she sat down and stuffed the handful of down she had pulled from the plover into the bag of feathers Nunzia kept for plumping pillows.

  When we returned together to Ninfania, you and I, in the late Fifties, there was litter in the streets of southern Italy, and it made them look more unfamiliar to you than the new buildings put up after the war and the bombing. But at first you didn’t realise that was what it was, that it was the novelty of ice cream wrappers and sweet papers and carrier bags and plastic bags strewn about that had changed the appearance of your childhood home, where nothing was ever discarded, but all returned into the cycle of sustenance.

  The innermost southern shore of the peninsula had been the chosen land of Pythagoras, your namesake, perhaps your ancestor, the apostle of eternal return: it was in the market square at Crotone on the Gulf of Taranto south of Riba that he exposed his thigh and showed that it was golden, and so was honoured by the inhabitants as a special favourite of the gods, quasi-divine himself. Did he have a birthmark there? How could a birthmark, even tawny, convince the onlookers in the piazza two thousand years ago that it was gold, the metal of the gods, the stuff of ichor which flows in their ivory veins?

  Some pragmatists have suggested that the philosopher was suffering from jaundice. But even superstitious southerners can tell illness from health, and besides, the yellowing of that disease hardly gleams with imperishable health like gold. The symptoms fade, moreover, whereas Pythagoras rejoiced in the peculiarity of a golden thigh until he died.

  His followers were frugal. They wouldn’t eat anything living – who knows who the scrappiest fowl might have been? For reasons nobody knows, they even included beans among prohibited foods. Although southern Italians ate meat when they could afford it, gratefully, and quantities of beans when they could not afford it, it still gives me pleasure, at least, that the philosopher who established the doctrine of migrant souls taught in my mother’s homeland, where corks and bottletops might renew their lives as children’s toys, magazine pictures provide wallpaper, and tins turn into percussion instruments. In Ninfania, no one threw away the feather of a bird or the peel of a fruit or the seed from a melon, let alone such durable items as the buttons and hooks and eyes from a worn-out item of underwear – I’ve seen you still snip them off an old bra, even today, and drop them into a little box in your sewing basket. All things were returned into the rushing stream of change. The very poor even sold the combings of their hair, to hawkers who came by crying for it, and passed it on to the dollmakers in Naples where it would stuff the turban of a king or tassel the tail of a donkey for a Nativity crib at Christmas.

  I didn’t mind the new litter in Italy; trash in cities makes me feel comfortable, as increasingly its absence from the streets indicates money, lots of it. In London, you can index the mean income of the households by the state of the gutters outside; in the area where the archive of Ephemera lies in boxes, waiting for its eventual home, there’s a kind of mangy green lozenge next to the local church where the derelicts hang around, propping themselves up on the park bench in a drift of beer cans and double strength cider bottles and blown crisp packets. I sometimes join them, if their smell isn’t too gamey, and exchange the time of day during my lunch hour, just to make sure that I still have the use of my voice if I’ve been feeding the archive into the computer all day. I’ve even considered picking up litter in different parts of London – or even different parts of the country – to include in the archive, as historical specimens of the varied treatment meted out to ephemera: the flyers with the coupons torn out, worth 15 pence off the next purchase in high-street supermarkets; the junk-food cartons, the ketchup sachets and tiny envelopes of pepper and salt outside the fast-food places, and, by contrast, the pristine copies of Vogue, the printed dress boxes, emblazoned with trademarks and royal coats of arms, tossed into the dustbins of Kensington. But provenance, as yet, hasn’t been demanded for ephemera, except of course their immediate origins, the publisher, the manufacturer. Maybe the day will come when Mark will ring me from the museum and tell me that it’s been decided that I must add to the catalogue the pedigree of the wrapping or package in question: Ice lolly wrapper ‘Captain Marvel’, Walls, 1985, found, Whitechapel Road, EC, condition: poor. It’d add to the lengthiness of the business of cataloguing, but it would enrich the archive’s use, I think, increase its importance as a socio-historical source.

  You looked at the streets of your home province and you exclaimed, ‘We used to be a spotless people, sweeping, polishing, tidying, setting things in order. When I first came to England with your father, I was shocked at the women’s laziness here. And you still can’t get a good daily woman now to clean, not for love or money. To think that I would live to see such squalor, here, in Italy. We were corrupt before, there were dishonest people, black marketeers, hoarders, bad priests, but dirty-never!’

  But I felt at home; and I made a splendid collection of Italian café napkins, their corners printed with emblems of the past glory of Ninfania: the Cupid stringing his bow to let fly his darts from the prow in the café of the old harbour, and a selection – even I was defeated by the variety – of ice cream wrappers: ‘Cooky Delight’ and ‘Bikini Manhattan’ and ‘Magnum Astoria’ and ‘Désirée’, ‘Party Craze’ and ‘Magic Cola’, ‘Oasis’ and ‘Grand Carré’, ‘Card Game’ and Tiffany’. There is no language barrier in the snacks market.

  ‘My father used to bring us ice cream,’ you told me then, for the first time, ‘When we were all asleep …’

  Rosa saw no one from her hideaway in the dark arch of their carriage door and so she stepped out into the gleaming street, which felt good and solid, under the warm soles of her feet; her heart was thumping, but that too felt good. She loved to be alone, to be brave, to go out into the arms of her destiny fearlessly, like a knight into the lists. She got to the other side, making for the piazza, and again hugged the shadows. Surely he would come down the street from this direction, she would soon see him, turning his head from left to right to make sure nobody was there to witness their assignation. She heard a footfall, she pressed herself back, keeping an eye on the street; in a doorway, further on, a silhouette detached itself for a moment, and she saw a man throw his head back and shake it as if intoxicated, while holding his arms extended, and she fancied she heard him speak to his own fidanzata of that evening, she imagined him murmuring about her hair – as dark as a raven’s wing, perhaps? With the light in it blue like the shadows pooling in the sea on either side of the moonlight’s path, when the fishermen go out? She thought she heard him praise the tinge of blood rising in her cheek, like the breast of chaffinches, and smell her skin like peach blossom and orange together. For it was in such fashion that lovers talked, Rosa knew, from the Mass on certain feast days: King Solomon became languid with love as he searched up and down for his beloved, whose breasts were like a young doe and her belly a heap of wheat. Then she saw the woman’s arms reach out from the doorway and pull the man back to her, and take
him with her into the shadows again. She stepped out herself then, hoping to get nearer; she would like to see what he was doing to her, for she had no clear idea, in spite of the expert descriptions she provided for Cati in their vigils. The Virgin bent her head to the dove in pictures of the Annunciation, and it pierced her through the ear, bringing her the Word that was life itself, down into her womb; that was what Rosa wanted, Tommaso’s mouth next to her ear, until she, like the woman with her lover in the doorway, would wriggle and gasp.

  She had to cross the road again to get back to their apartment; now that her eyes were used to the darkness it seemed as bright as day out of doors, and her blue cotton dress incandescent white. The nightie she was still carrying over her arm became a beacon; so she ran, holding her breath. Did the lovers see her? She couldn’t tell, she hoped he had remained pressed against the woman, unconscious of all else. But maybe he did see Rosa run heavily for the door of her home; maybe he was one of the men in the café who knew, who corroborated Tommaso’s insult later with their laughter, and made it impossible for Davide to ignore it and fail to issue his challenge.

  Your father did what was expected. When the moment came, he could not do otherwise, though it wasn’t really in his nature at all to pick a fight with anyone.

  You didn’t like being woken in the middle of the night for ice cream, but you sat up and ate it in bed before it melted to please your father. He stood smiling, licking his own with relish, and wiping the ends of his moustaches where the ice clung to them, and you and Lucia, befuddled from your interrupted sleep echoed his gurgles and grunts of pleasure at the taste; he’d brought back a tub, filled with a variety of ice creams: ‘A macedonia!’ he’d call out, a fruit salad of ices. Immacolata tried to refuse one time, pleading her figure; but Talia, who could eat anything without putting on weight, she was so lithe and quick, tucked in to her heaped comet, running her tongue happily round the sides to catch the melting drips of rose, green, cream. In the morning, you’d never be quite sure if you hadn’t dreamed of his presence in your bedroom, laughing, holding out his dripping gifts.