The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘Do they leave their houses behind them when they die?’ asked Fantina, inspecting the entrance to the shell in her hand. ‘We could put the shells back after we’ve eaten them so that another one could come along and use them.’

  ‘Stupid,’ Lucia answered. ‘They’re born with their houses on their backs and they die if they’re forced to leave them.’ She hunched her shoulders and tucked her head down between the jutting blades.

  ‘It brings luck,’ she added, ‘humpbacks bring luck.’

  ‘Only if you’re a man,’ said Fantina. ‘You know that? Women hunchbacks are witches.’

  ‘Snails aren’t like people. Both are lucky, gentlemen snails, lady snails, they’ve got houses of their own, they pull their little door tight shut, and you can’t poke them out, not even with a needle. Not until you’ve boiled them.’ A frown appeared between Lucia’s brows and she made as if to stamp on a snail. Fantina winced. Lucia lifted her threatening foot and, mutinously, said, ‘I wish I could take my home with me, wherever I go, always. Then I would still be home if I wasn’t here.’

  Fantina began, ‘Now, now…’ She sensed one of Lucia’s impending storms, one of her fits of fury and pity, as she keyed herself up, imagining herself an orphan, without a roof over her head, without means of support. At night, in their room, Lucia would begin to cry, whimpering at first, then more and more sobbingly, as she pictured herself bereft, abused, cruelly dealt with by strangers. Fantina never could see where her terrors came from; but she rather envied her sister’s capacity to elaborate such dramatic eventualities at all. ‘I think they make their houses,’ she added, gently, to coax Lucia into hopefulness.

  Lucia looked, and took the cue; for a moment, she was lit up, improvising, ‘Their shells are a kind of spider’s web? They spin it out of their bodies, a little bit at a time? To make room as they get older and bigger? How do you know that’ Who told you?’

  ‘Nobody told me. I just said it. I wanted you to feel it wasn’t the end of the world if you had to leave your shell. You could always go and make another one. If you were a spider. Or even a snail.’ She looked as convinced as she could. Not with complete success. Now Lucia announced, unwaveringly, ‘I will too, I’ll take home with me, always.’ She hunched again, ‘And I’ll crawl into it and feel safe.’ She grinned suddenly at her sister, then relaxed, and straightened. ‘And I’ll be the fastest snail anyone’s ever seen.’

  Fantina wondered, Will we be going away? Will we go away again to America, to New York where Mamma got her best pair of stockings which she wore on special days? She was the only one of the sisters who had been born at home, who did not share the others’ American birth – like the height, the aberrant height you got from your father who was Ninfanian-born too, it made you feel distinct from them, even then.

  Immacolata joined them, holding up her basket of snails. ‘More than three kilos, I should think, imagine, we’ll be eating them till midsummer…’ Talia rubbed the rain into her arms, and turned her face up to the sky and patted it ‘Aaah,’ she exhaled, pleasurably. But the rain’s brief spell was over, the shadow lifted as the sun came out from behind a small scurrying of clouds now travelling out to sea on the wind – the libeccio – which rises in Africa and blows towards Ninfania from Naples and was now prevailing against the sea breeze.

  ‘There, we’ve got lots and lots too,’ said Lucia, handing Fantina the old tin can to hold. Some snails were sliding down the outside, but Talia picked them off and dumped them back in the mesh basket, closing the sepals of its lid to stop them escaping again.

  Lucia, taking Fantina’s hand, began running with her, down the pasture, through the olive groves, back to the road where their father was expected, soon, in time for the evening meal, as he had promised that collection day. The elder sisters followed, more soberly, scrupulous of their harvest.

  For at least three days they would keep the snails in shoe boxes, punched with holes to ventilate them and poke in herbs to nourish them – thyme and hyssop and rosemary and comfrey – to make sure that when they came to be eaten, any poisons previously digested had been excreted and the snail flesh was nourished on aromatic green stuff only. Then Maria Filippa would brew them up in a white froth for hours before she served them with chopped garlic and olive oil and salt.

  ‘Will Papà be getting back soon?’ Fantina questioned Imma, when the two had caught up with her and Lucia. ‘Let’s stay and wait for him.’ Imma shrugged. ‘You stay. He won’t be long.’

  ‘I remember,’ you told me, ‘how my father could whistle so loud that we could hear him, from wherever we were.’ I looked sceptical, and you smiled. ‘No, really.’ You can still imitate his call, blowing the air in and out of your cheeks so that you look like a wind in the corner of an antique map. He’d come down the road towards home and if he were riding in the cart he’d get off on the slope down towards the house to spare the mule and the carter too, who’d otherwise have to haul on the brake, heaving at the big heavy handle until it shrieked against the felloes of the wheel and there was a smell of burning. So the weight in the trap on a downhill run made a big difference. He’d begin whistling as he walked down the road. ‘That’s how we knew,’ you said, ‘And we’d run and meet him halfway.’

  Lucia and Fantina kicking along in the dust already drying after the rain were practising Lucia’s turn in the Declamation class:

  ‘Italy! O Italy!

  Sacred to the new dawn

  Of the ploughshare and the prow!’

  The wind caught the cloud bank and pushed it out to sea, to hang over the wooded peninsula of the Gargano for a while and then float further out to the islands – beautiful like dolphins breaking the line of the waves – where high risk prisoners were secured. For a moment or two those revolutionaries, Anarchists, Socialists, enemies of the Leader also felt the soothing coolness of the rain.

  ‘He’s been kept, it’s much later than usual,’ Lucia interrupted her own oratory. ‘Maybe someone gave him a big case to work on. Maybe the culprit can’t be found, there’s a trail of blood from the body of the victim, the police are following it, following it, but it leads nowhere. Then what? The murderer has vanished, into thin air, where can he be? This is what happens, I heard Papà say so – he was talking to Zio Franco – people are found dead here and there and no one knows who’s done it But today, Papà has had an idea…’ She tapped her temple, knowingly. ‘He pulls at one of the policeman’s epaulettes, and, yes, it snaps off. It’s not real! It comes from a carnival costume! He’s a fake, he’s unmasked, Papà’s applauded… everyone acclaims him!

  Papà, Papà,

  Sacred to the new Dawn

  Of the law and the pen!’

  ‘Where is he?’ Fantina came to a standstill, uncertain whether they should walk further in the heat of the afternoon. She searched the road ahead for the approaching shadow of her father, and Lucia tugged at her, impatient to turn back; but Fantina silenced her, trying to pick out the sound of the cart through the chirring of the crickets, who’d started up raucously in the dried ground once again.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed, with reluctance.

  You were disappointed not to see him, but not yet unhappy that he had not returned. Your father never let you down. On the white road where the rainfall was curling up and vanishing in the renewed heat of the sun, you had no forebodings, just the pervasive suspense of his continuing absence. It was different for Maria Filippa, but she kept her anxiety from you.

  Later in life, you trusted your premonitions. But in those days, when you were eight, you had only heard of people with such powers of foresight, and marvelled at them. Your mother spoke of the twin gates of sleep, the one made of ivory through which false dreams stream to trick the sleeper with false fears and, worse, false hopes. But the other entrance to the realm of sleep, the Gate of Horn, opens to release shades who always tell the truth when they appear in dreams. The problem is, said Maria Filippa to her daughters, listening, and learning with solemn faces, that m
ost people can’t tell which gate their dreams have used. Not until things turn out as they must. Only a few seers, gifted with a third eye, can distinguish them at the time of dreaming.

  ‘There were unlucky omens, which everyone knew,’ you said. ‘It was bad luck to dream of butchers’ shops, or of spilt wine or oil, for instance. Now, as soon as my father died, my mother remembered that she had had a dream: she’d gone to the butcher’s and asked for six pieces of veal to cook for the family. It wasn’t her usual butcher who appeared to her, but someone she’d never seen before. He was serving in the familiar small marble cabin she knew though, with the rattling curtain against the flies. He took the haunch of rosy meat from the big cool wooden safe behind him in the darkness of his shop and laid it on the stone slab of the counter, and began paring off the thin slices for scaloppe. She was feeling very happy that she had such a fat purse for once, when he said to her, “You won’t be needing six today. Only five.” It was only later that she knew that this dream had come through the Gate of Horn. At the time she had forgotten she’d dreamed it.’

  Maria Filippa shivered when the libeccio brought its meagre offering of water to the cracked earth and the momentary shadow passed over the farm. It was unseasonal, she muttered, even as she rushed her children out to gather the snails.

  As they trudged back, disappointed at their father’s continued absence, Lucia commanded Fantina, ‘Answer me this one:

  “There’s a little little window

  Where an old lady’s sitting

  When she pulls out a tooth

  And calls out, ‘Prepare!’”

  Lucia paused, head on one side, like a bird at work on a morsel.

  ‘Give up?’ She was imperious.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Fantina. She didn’t grumble.

  ‘A bell, a bell,’ cried Lucia. ‘And this one? Someone told it to me, someone from the boys’ school:

  “I put it in hard

  And take it out flabby.”

  Do you get it? He thought it was very funny.’

  ‘I give up,’ said Fantina again, after a solemn moment of concentration.

  Such a charade was essential, if Lucia was to be satisfied.

  ‘Macaroni, macaroni! You bean-head, you need salt on your marrow. Of course it’s macaroni. It’s obvious. Now answer me this one. Try.

  “Everyone goes to church

  With his hat in his hand

  Except me.

  Who am I?”

  ‘I don’t know. You know I never know any of the answers to riddles.’ Fantina was beginning to moan.

  ‘I’m a dead man, a dead man,’ sang out Lucia. ‘A dead man in my coffin and I don’t wear a hat.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Fantina. ‘Mamma always wears a hat at Mass. I like wearing one too.’

  ‘Quite the lady! But it says, in his hand. Why don’t you listen?’ Then Lucia slipped her arm through her lanky sister’s, as a lump of silence wedged itself between them. Together, they turned to look over their shoulders, hoping now to see their father walking towards them, as usual when he came back from the city with the money from the apartment block on the Via de Giosa.

  It’s hard to tell in a heat shimmer if the moving limbs of a walker are approaching or withdrawing, unless you blink and hold the blink and remember how big he looked, then open your eyes again to gauge if he has grown or shrunk. But there wasn’t anybody on the road that afternoon, nor later that evening either. The way stretched ahead on an upward incline as the shadows of the olives crept across it sideways, and it flowed into the sheeny mirage hanging at the commissure of earth and heaven. You imagined your father materialise in this aureole, his ruddy and laughing face, with the high cheekbones, his lips pursed to whistle and the cheeks blowing in and out below mischievous eyes, making his moustache waggle at the waxed tips. His trousers always seemed a little short, you said; it was the fashion then, but as it had changed when you grew up and there were fewer photographs then to record the vagaries of taste of the past, so your memory of his thin ankles showing beneath the end of his dandyish tight trousers gave him a poignantly incompetent air, as if your father were still a boy, growing too fast for the family budget.

  In fact Davide was not quite forty when he died; when the cousins gathered to mourn and made loud laments that he was young to pass on, you thought to yourself, ‘Is that young?’

  Later, Maria Filippa remembered other malign auspices; indeed with hindsight, the whole day appeared a web of warnings that Nunzia and she had heard but failed to grasp. For instance, the evening of the snail hunt, Talia was sent to fill the lamps before dusk. She was crossing the yard with a chair in one hand to stand on so that she could reach up to the saucer of the Madonnina over the gateway; as she climbed up, she swung her brimming jar of oil by its handle until it slopped. Your mother saw the jar tip and the oil spill over the rim and drip onto the ground, and she cried out against the foolishness of her daughter. But Talia straightened the jar and said, ‘There’s not much lost, and there’s more where it came from.’ Of the four girls, Talia looked on the world with the most even temper, and your mother’s fearfulness set off a certain firm practicality in her in defiance.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Maria Filippa put in, dropping her head into her hands to pray swiftly to avert the bad luck such a spillage brings, and bring her man home without accident, to where his women waited for him, the lamps full, the lamps lit Yet she never reproached herself for not preventing Davide from leaving as usual, only for not making her farewells more carefully. Fate could not be circumvented, not when her scissor blades were on the string.

  The car sounded at first like the shaking of the big brass gong in Franco’s band; the gate was still open because you were expecting. Davide back. But you were waiting for the sound of the trap. You ran out, but hung back at the sight of the throbbing engine. The orbs of the carriage lamps shone yellow quadrants across the road outside as it jerked to a stop. You stepped up onto the running board and looked in. Your father wasn’t there, and the driver, who only looked half-familiar, asked, ‘And your mother, Signorina, fetch her, please.’

  You were so thrilled with the novelty of a big black saloon arriving at your door that you still did not cotton on that something was up; on the way to Riba down the coast road you prattled, twisting on the seamed leather seat with its rich aroma. It was your first ride in a motor, and the speed intensified everything, the olive tree stands turned like the leaves of the big gospel at Mass as you dashed by, and gashes of deep darkness opened thrillingly in the surface of the road ahead like troughs in the sea that might engulf the car. But Luck chewed the edge of her collar, starting at the shadows, and the others were mute. Nunzia held a handkerchief to her face, pretending to you the car was making her sick to cover up her crying. They were saying nothing, to spare you, the youngest, the most tender, they thought.

  They had put Davide to bed in the apartment where you lived most of the year, on the piano nobile of the block which provided the family with its livelihood. Maria Filippa went in first, on the arm of the driver (he was a mechanic, it turned out, and he’d borrowed the car from the garage where he worked; his mother lived in the street). She didn’t shout or keen, her tears fell quietly, as she dropped her head over Davide’s hand on the sheet, and placed her left hand in his hair. He was snoring, you thought, as you nudged in after your sisters. They hung to the side of the room as if their father and mother were on a stage set across from them over the orchestra pit; they kept silent as if the performance had begun. You told me, ‘It wasn’t snoring, of course. It was il rantolo della morte. And it went on for days; he took three days to die. I’d fallen asleep when the moment came. I woke up to the sound of loud crying, sobbing, and howling – not from Mamma but others – and soon there was a strong smell. No, not what you’d think, no, a smell from the caldaia on the stove. Friends were helping Nunzia to dye everything black. They were heaping wood under the cauldron in the kitchen, the dye smelled of tar. They w
ere putting our clothes in and Sabina was crying while she turned them round and round with a big wooden spoon.

  ‘Yes, Sabina. She was ancient then, still working hard. People expect to, in the south, you know. I was shocked here, when I first came, the English are so lazy. You’re slovens, I’m sorry to say.

  ‘The froth was blue. The steam got into everything, the whole house smelled of the dye, and they hung sheets which had been turned black too out of the apartment block’s windows in festoons …’ You described the shape of the swags in the air – ‘so that everyone should know there had been a death inside.’

  In death, Davide was laid out on the dining-room table, in his best suit, his moustache waxed in the most stylish way, with his patent leather boots on. While Fantina kept vigil, sitting between her mother and her eldest sister Imma, who would now and then squeeze either hand and smile softly across at her to encourage her in the long hours of respect to the dead father, she tried to remember him, his way of moving, his way of talking, his way of laughing and whistling now that he had become so still and yellow and shiny, like sweating cheese. She tried to keep him lively and merry in the life he had now gone to, and ignore tile speechless corpse in front of her. But however hard she tried to follow in her mind images of endurance, or of thriving, or of plenty and burgeoning, of sap and root and springs and juice, her thoughts kept wandering, and, to her shame, she’d find herself remembering instead something Lucia had mocked her with, or the crickets they’d managed to catch and race against each other, though when they’d let them out they couldn’t identify which was which any more. Or she’d find her head drooping, her lids closing, and hear her mother remarking from a remote place, ‘She’s exhausted, poor little stringbean.’ Then, struggling with her tiredness, Fantina saw the blotches on her mother’s face and behind her misted glasses, her swollen eyes. And there came at last, through her numbness and her distraction, the memory of her father, and the ache that had lodged itself in her throat like a piece of apple too big to gulp down dissolved and she found herself crying. They had gone to Riba, one summer night, to hear La Colomba Bianca at the Petruzzelli. It was one of his favourites, he sang the role of the father in it all the way through under his breath. At the finale, he had guided her gaze away from the stage to the fresco in the dome where angels in dresses the colours of sweet peas frolicked in pastel-pink and blue tufted clouds. He whispered, ‘Watch, my star,’ and to the wild scraping of violins, they loosed doves from the stage into the dome, where they roosted, white feathers whirring in the gaslights, with urgent cooing as they scrambled for a perch on the stucco frames around the painting and tried to settle, far far above, as high above as she had felt that day by the sea, when he lowered her into the water in her cork belt and the sea accepted her weight and held her up, even though the thick woollen casing of her swimsuit was soaking up water and getting heavier and heavier. She was kicking and flailing with her arms out of fear of the dark cold emptiness underneath, but he held her from a crouching position at the end of the bathing pontoon they had rented on the beach at Dolmetta that summer and encouraged her; his head was dark against the sky, but she could see he was smiling, and she relaxed and found herself floating in the calm and transparent sea. When she saw her limbs underneath, bent crabwise and absurdly stunted, she laughed aloud and let go of her father’s hand and began to enjoy looking down.