The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Had it been a lark on the dead man’s part? The talk of the south picked at the Don’s motives – naïvety, malignancy, folly, even hitherto unsuspected Anarchist sympathies had been suggested. Davide hit the paper with the flat of his hand, distracting the others from their journals. He commented aloud, with a delighted laugh, ‘You know, I’m more and more convinced that the illustrious Don, the genial thinker, wasn’t taking a revenge on his family, or plotting the downfall of the house of Beatillo, or shaking the structure of property and power in these parts, or thumbing his nose at you-know-who. I think he meant every word of what he wrote. He thought he was going to come back.’ Davide paused, marvelling. ‘Someone like him, someone with everything, someone for whom life was so sweet, so flawless, how could he die? How could he? He considered himself beyond death!’ And again, Davide’s genuine laughter filled the room; the others listened. Pittagora was rarely so communicative.

  ‘Ah, even princes die,’ said one communicant at the morning ritual of black coffee, with a dash of caraway and a twist of lemon-peel.

  ‘Death with his scythe,’ echoed another, and swung his torso, mowing.

  ‘Do you remember,’ put in another, ‘the Prince of San Severo, in Naples? He didn’t want to die either. He was possessed with the desire to discover the very secret of life itself. He distilled an elixir.’

  ‘Yes,’ put in a fourth, an old man with gold in his mouth and gold on his groomed fingers, ‘from the bodies of his servants. He extracted their blood and their vital juices and boiled them up with mercury and potassium and other, secret ingredients. Then, using some ancient formula he had recovered, he injected the concentrate he obtained back into their veins.

  ‘I have seen them,’ he added solemnly. ‘In the vaults of the chapel of the Palace of San Severo. I bribed the sacristan to take me down. And I was frightened, I tell you, when I was left alone in the crypt, with a single candle to light my way, and discerned gradually, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, the subjects of the Prince’s experiments, stading upright, sentinels at each wall of the chamber, with glittering eyes and teeth. He had changed everything, every particle, every organ to white gold!’

  ‘Beh,’ said Davide. ‘If they were gold, they’d not have lasted undisturbed so long.’

  ‘You can scoff,’ said the visitor of San Severo, ‘but I’ve seen them with my own eyes.’ He tapped those rheumy orbs with emphasis.

  ‘There’s plenty seen with men’s own eyes that’s never been heard of in heaven,’ said Davide. He was quoting Maria Filippa, though to her face he usually took issue with her credulity, as he called it.

  ‘Granted, granted,’ the old man gestured with his gracious ringed hands, ‘Gold, silver, where’s the difference? Even tin – imagine, just imagine, my dear and most esteemed Advocate, one of those medical illustrations, those écorché figures showing the skeins of muscle, the ropes of veins, in three dimensions, and then transmuted into metal, so that the tissues and channels and ducts and gristle’ – the speaker’s hands traced intricate forms in the air in his morbid enthusiasm – ‘look as if they have been made out of silver wire.’ He dropped his hands and shuddered. ‘It’s all long ago. Terror and terribilitas!’

  ‘But still, princes all must die,’ another voice chimed in.

  ‘Yes, pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,’ echoed another.

  ‘He didn’t practise on himself, did he? Where’s his silver corpse, I’d like to see that!’ interposed another, younger, courageous spirit.

  ‘Nor did he succeed in restoring his servants to life,’ Davide said drily.

  ‘True, true,’ another took up, ‘preservation is not resurrection, no, no. The Prince didn’t turn himself to silver. He tried the process out on others who couldn’t say no.’ He almost stopped before he reached the end of the sentence, flicking his black eyes over the company to make sure no strangers were present to overhear, report, misrepresent his little blow against hierarchy. Hierarchy, catch-word of the Leader, never to be spoken of without the implication of obedience, uninquiring, instant obedience.

  There was a tap at the window, through the curly apertures in the lace; Davide started, turned, and saw the knobbly tarsi of a cockerel with the talons attached, crooked and stiff like arthritic hands; above, the solemn face of a child informed him that it was a gift from the little one’s grandmother, in gratitude. Davide beckoned the girl in. She came, shyly; her knees under the hem of her dress seemed huge, like boles, for her limbs were emaciated with rickets and sallow from malaria. She handed him the woebegone bouquet, the bird’s head dangling, its coxcomb a broken-stemmed blossom; he took it, bowed his head, and pinched the child’s cheek as he showed his teeth gritted in greedy affection, the expression that says to children, ‘Aahah! You’re good enough to eat!’ He laughed at her look of long-suffering, and let her go.

  ‘Tell your Granny that Signora Maria Filippa will be very honoured to be able to cook us her beautiful and renowned hunters’ chicken dish tomorrow. But tell her too: never again.’ He chuckled, as the child’s face changed. ‘I’m not angry, but enough is enough.’ He would have liked to add, In America, they are trying to put an end to all this nonsense, to all these gifts. They’ve made it illegal. Of course, it still goes on, but it’s against the law. That was one good thing about the Americans.

  It was disquieting how many aspects of America he found praiseworthy, once he had returned home.

  He had mediated between the child’s grandmother, a laundress, and the priests of the Cathedral of San Corrado whose garden adjoined the laundress’s yard. When the grassy and aromatic undergrowth of spring where she spread out her work to dry had balded and turned to dust in the summer, she hung out her clothes in the enclave at the back of her small house. The priests had a mulberry tree, which last year had come near to ruining the woman’s trade, spattering the linen of the town with a roan signature, as the pulpy fruit fell from its higher branches, or was dropped by feasting birds or even wasps; in fact, she did not know how so much staining happened, but it was the devil to scrub it out, and she risked wearing out the cloth itself with ammonia or other solvents. Davide had seen the priests, who had shrugged and thrown up their hands indolently at the laundress’s problem. He had mentioned to them the possibility of a deal and even the likelihood of profit, and proposed that one of the laundress’s sons come with a ladder and pick the tree clean this autumn, before the mulberries matured to that soft ripeness that threatened any laundry hanging near. If he’d provide the ladders, the baskets, and do it for nothing, the reverend fathers would give their consent. They were lazy, smiling at their own Christian charity. ‘Not the baskets,’ said Davide. ‘You must provide them, as you will be keeping the fruit for sale.’ They thought it over and suggested a percentage to the labourer if he provided the baskets and made the sale. Davide haggled; he got him five per cent, and knew that the man would be able to claw back some more, as well as keep some of the harvest. So the laundress was grateful; she had killed a rooster for him.

  This was the work he did in Rupe; seignorial business, not the punishing labour of property suits in the city.

  ‘My Granny says, she would like this back, please.’ The child held out a cloth, and took the fowl and wrapped it in the napkin, and handed the package back to Davide. Again, he bowed his head to the child, and when she’d run off, he tapped again on the wall, and when the boy from the café appeared, he handed him the bird and asked him to keep it in his cellar for coolness until he returned from Riba on the train that evening, after he had collected the rent.

  With such small settlements of difference, Davide could cope; but he did not like his work. When he thought of the law, his chosen profession, his head filled with the savour of dust; he could taste it on his tongue, mousey and dry, and smell the foist of the archives where he had to pore over the huge books of cases, statutes, precedents. The law seemed to him a mountainous cloud, compacted of these rank and ever increasing hyphae, sprawling over the building
s in which her exigences were met, pouring herself into every drawer, lying on every shelf, saturating every ledger, every record with her must, coating all like a mould and growing by eating that on which it grows. She wasn’t blind, like the stiff-backed goddess of Justice whom he remembered from the pediment of the courthouse in New York, beside the flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. The law he knew was hundred-eyed, prying, and wakeful. When he was a young man, before he went to America, the law’s cloud billowed over everything, fomenting quarrels to her advantage until anything the litigants had to spare, peasants and rich men alike, was swallowed up. Davide had no stomach for such greed. Southerners say, ‘When two people fight, the third rejoices,’ and that third man was usually a lawyer. The lawyers walked at the elbow of the landlords: a dispute about a ditch, a border, rights of way, and the landlord stood by, the peasants fought, the lawyers on both sides charged, delayed, charged some more, until the double ruin of plaintiff and defendant delivered up both sides into the proprietor’s hands. In the old days, before the Leader, thought Davide, the law swelled up through chronic feuding and the only respite came in the prelude to the great feast days, when families had no more money to pay lawyers’ services because the priests were taking it instead. It was pinned in banknotes on the robes of the local thaumaturge as his statue – or hers – was carried through the village, or dropped into the collecting pouches the sacristan poked into the pews. Often, the giver would toss in the money with nonchalant munificence, hoping to cut a handsome figure by making a public demonstration of wealth, and of contempt for that wealth. ‘Why don’t you keep it?’ Davide would say, when he was first starting as a lawyer in Riba, on his return from America, and could speak up against the potlatch inclinations of his clients. ‘Put it in a bank, it will grow. Use it for some land, maybe here, in the city, as an investment.’ This is what Sandro had done for him. But the winegrower, the sheep farmer, the cowherd, the undertaker, the teacher, or the cobbler would grip the table and dig in. No, they would rather lick stones for salt than let that villain, that coward, that son-of-a-jackass and a sow get away with … The law had them in her cloudy embrace and was spilling out of their eyes and lips her deathly must. Davide’s client snapped finger and thumb together at any ignoble suggestion of peacemaking, at such a dishonourable way of going about life, and insisted on justice. Only a civil suit, at the very least, could wipe away the stain on family honour. Public reparation, whatever the cost, must be made.

  Justice! And Davide could almost fancy he could smell again the stale vaporous emanations of the law in the room as he began to take down details of the wrong that had been done. But litigation was better than private settlement by witchcraft; though of course they weren’t mutually exclusive. He waved a hand at the company in the circolo, this time higher, but still with the palm towards his breast in farewell, and laid a tip for the boy on the varnished wooden table. In the shade of the buildings on the square, he began walking to the station. The train wasn’t late, and he got in, choosing as was his habit a seat on the side with a view of the sea, for the track ran along the Adriatic and he liked to have it in sight, the elating expanse, ringing bright in the sun.

  In one of the first cases he had taken, in 1923, it must have been, the year after he came back – Fantina was still a baby – a widow had accused her neighbour of killing her cow out of spite. You could see the blood in her neighbour’s yard, she said, though she had tried to cover it up with dirt. But her wickedness could not be concealed, the earth had turned red to cry out against it.

  The neighbour denied the killing, of course. She talked darkly of witchcraft, of wolves with eyes like opals, and fiery breath which left scorch marks on the ground; and countercharged. She accused the widow of stealing her husband’s love away from her by dosing the milk of the dead cow and giving it to him to drink. It was the widow’s custom to leave a jug of milk for them each night after milking; she gave it as a gift in thanks, she said, for their support of an unfortunate woman on her own. Her neighbour scorned her: nothing is given freely, she said.

  At the time, Davide found the two women funny; they shrieked at one another and squealed like animals at the slaughter themselves. The neighbour who denounced the cow’s owner for casting a spell on her husband gripped the dock with her hands till her brown knuckles went white. She was lean, dark-skinned, and ancient and wizened as the baccalà, the salt cod pegged out in the harbour to dry. She was, in terms of the law, the better witness, did not rail or curse as wildly as her opponent and rival – the widow, at one point, fell to the ground in convulsions, twitching and flailing. The husband agreed that he had been bewitched; he spoke like a somnambulist, in tones of grief. A poor figure of a man, no one could see why anyone would fight for him. He had sores on the backs of his hands which he picked with his black, horny fingernails. Both Davide and the plaintiff’s lawyer chuckled afterwards that he was definitely on to a good thing.

  The widow had lost; she had to pay the costs and the fine and she began falling behind in the rent to the landlord since she no longer had a cow and its milk to sell. She had to give up her land, Davide remembered, and move out. The man she had spellbound stayed behind; her enchantments had been pitted against an energetic opponent, who exulted when she left, cursing her as she trudged away pushing a small cart with her possessions. If she had found a man, life would have turned out differently for her, he knew. Women left behind by the emigrants, ‘widows’ who had not heard from their husbands for decades, daughters growing up without fathers, without grandfathers, without brothers – once they too were old enough to leave – were hungry for men, everyone knew that, and the law made its profits from the devils – Greed and Lust and Envy – that scampered among humans playing a deadly tag in which all the players are caught and brought down, one by one.

  The widow’s case inaugurated Davide’s career in justice. Was it better to turn to the law than settle by other means? Davide was still committed to preferring it to the alternatives, the vendettas, the feuds, the bloody score – these ways were for barbarians, for people like Sicilians, or Neapolitans, people whose own blood was all mixed up with Spaniards’. Cruel people, not like the Ninfanians.

  And duelling? Was the hazardous code of the duel a greater injustice than the unfairness of the law? He fingered the warning vein in his temple; it was a warm ripple under his touch. He wondered when he would die and if it would be soon, as people said he must. But they had been saying so for years, for more than a decade now. Perhaps they were wrong; perhaps the spoke of the wheel on which he was clinging would never be swung over so hard by Lady Fortune that he would be prised loose and fall, limbs sprawling, like the figures on the rose window of the cathedral, while others – Tommaso, where was Tommaso now? – rose up to be garlanded at chance’s whim.

  The Leader, so he told his people, had lifted this distempered fog, this old corruption of Italy, and shone a bright blazing torch into the darkness of the bosses’ law, sweetening it as if it were a malarial swamp, squashing the mosquito lawyers and owners and priests breeding in it. He was purifying the system; he was scouring the channels of their old faith; he was the surgeon removing the decaying parts, the foul growths, and lancing the boils of the former régime’s putrefactions. ‘I believe in action,’ he shouted from his palace balcony, his roar rustling on the radio, as if the radio were bristling at him, ‘in violent action against the old ways. They brought poverty and degradation to the people of my country! I believe my violence will cure their ills! Heroic surgery is what is needed! I am that heroic surgeon! Weakness will not bring about change, only strength, only strong measures will bring the new world into being!’

  That was the year the city’s deputy was found beaten to death, in a village near Riba; the landlords had paid a gang to kill him, just as they did in the old days, before Davide left for America. Though now – as then – no one dared say it aloud. The deputy was a Socialist, he had been speaking out against the old work conditions that were being re
imposed. That was in September 1921, just after they came back from New York. There were outcries throughout the province, and in Ninfania again there were running battles against the gangs, in the old quarter of Riba, in some of the hill towns which had a tradition of dissent. In his own Rupe the league had protested bitterly. But the Leader had indigent Ninfania in the grip of golden promises; he had bought the proprietors and the landowners with his forecasts of authority and profit, and he had bludgeoned the powerless. His men had taken power in the province that summer of 1922, just around the time Fantina was born, a few months before the Leader reached the capital on his famous march.

  Davide began to enjoy his work even less than before; he applied himself to property transactions. Conveyancing provided a certain tedium that he found soothing. The new law’s brutal surgery, the promises – the menaces – the indomitable energy, inspired in him a profound torpor. Maria Filippa understood his lassitude, condoned his inertia; and for that he felt an overwhelming gratitude, because he knew other wives who would have grown impatient with such a husband, who had begun so promising, so full of the future and then… what with headaches, lack of nerve, had found he no longer had the energy, the stomach for getting on.

  ‘I’ve seen them – women like that monstrous Gabriela – push their husbands to ingratiate themselves with the Leader’s henchmen here, I’ve seen the feasts they’ve laid – like traps – very effective traps – those men, they’re nothing but walking bellies with fists – they grab, hit, grab, swallow, hit, the scum, I wouldn’t lower myself to share a table with them. The bosses looked bad enough in the old days; but now, they’re looking good. The old landlords were gentlemen, at least, they knew the courtesies, crooked and greedy as they were. This new lot have come up because the landowners are fools. Though they knew how to live. But these ruffians, these cheats and thugs… They could make a woman feel a lady. The new bosses are so lower class, so uncouth, such vulgarians –’ Davide would put a finger across his lips, but without emphasis, for he loved to hear her anger, it healed his own affliction, the binding fatigue which came over him when he contemplated his work, and made his legs drag across the shiny floors in the clanging corridors of the new Law Courts, Town Hall and Police Headquarters in booming Riba, concrete inside, dead white marble outside, sprouting confident towers of glass and statuary of muscular naked giants, Order clubbing Chaos, Force cracking Cowardice’s skull underfoot. Davide had also known the old proprietors, Maria Filippa’s ‘gentlemen’, and he didn’t share her feelings about the past. It was strange how she loved him for that business with Tommaso so long ago, how she had such a feeling for the intricate conventions of the old code, and saw him as a man of honour, a duellist.