Fantina showed her mother.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, giving it a slap to shake out the dust.
Her mother had picked one from the pile, and slapped it too, more gently.
‘Your father’s work.’
Talia took one, opened, and began reading. Then, striking an orator’s pose, she declaimed, ‘“Dear little girl, whose life is a single smile, please accept the good wishes of all who know you, of all who have seen you grow up, good and virtuous and loving. On this day of your birthday.”’
‘Let me see!’ Lucia looked too.
Fantina was listening, and urged Lucia to pick up the thread.
‘“May this feast day, scented like the flowers which we have given you today, and sweet as the smile which lights up your dear face, return over and over and down the long unfolding of the years, may it never be disturbed by a single sad thought …”’
‘Beautiful,’ breathed Imma. ‘I remember how he stood, how he spoke, how he could make everyone listen.’
‘Yes, he was an orator,’ said Maria Filippa.
‘Like the Leader,’ said Imma.
‘Beh.’ Maria Filippa’s mouth turned down and she shook her head. ‘Your father was shy, you know. He couldn’t talk if he didn’t want to; only among friends. Otherwise he wrote it down for others to speak.’ She paused. ‘There was something noble, something lordly about him, to my mind. Not like the Leader.’
‘The Leader barks,’ said Lucia. ‘Like this.’ She began barking, putting fingers in the corners of her mouth and pushing out her chin, ‘Italy! Italy! People of Italy!’ she demonstrated, ‘Now is the time for our history to begin anew.’
‘Shhh!’ said her mother, ‘Don’t do that, or the wind will change.’
She looked at her husband’s things laid out on the bed. How empty the clothes of a dead man were. Especially underthings. His underpants of light white cotton were the saddest sight she had ever seen, she thought. How was she to bring up Lucia, Lucia especially? Fantina was at least docile; and Imma too, a proper woman. But Talia, with her independent spirit, and Lucia, with her clowning?
She could not bring herself to look over Davide’s underpants for wear and tear. Her daughters forbore too, it was more seemly, though his outer garments attracted their touch like furry pets. His shoes held the curve of his feet, the heavier tread on the left, the knobbly long middle toe; Franco could have them. But not even his brother could have his underclothes, she resolved. They would remain here, in the drawer in the bedroom she shared with Imma, until she could find it in herself to burn them.
Then Fantina, rummaging in the recess of the wardrobe, brought out another stack of books; notebooks this time, with blue board covers and cloth spines and inside, on the ruled pages, Davide’s florid handwriting, now in pencil, now in ink, with the deep vertical strokes and interlaced underlinings which had got him work in New York as a scribe in the early days, when he couldn’t find anything else.
Maria Filippa took the notebooks from her youngest child. ‘His diary!’ She gestured towards a handkerchief, and dusted off the exercise books one by one.
Maria Filippa complained that Davide’s script was hard to decipher, even though it looked so splendid. (She could read print only with difficulty.) The things he said, when she heard them read aloud at last by Imma, unsettled her too. She would hand over one of the volumes to her eldest to read aloud when the two found themselves alone, though it felt peculiar to hear his tone of voice mediated through her daughter’s lighter, thinner timbre. Like his face, his voice began to dim too, and her own memories cede before the record he had kept and the account Imma made of it as she deciphered it in her own voice and with her own expression. For she often faltered, at the idiom her fanciful father chose, at the sentiments he uttered.
‘Mamma, do you really want me to go on?’
Maria Filippa nodded.
Imma sighed. ‘Do you really want to remember all these things?’
Maria Filippa said, ‘I do anyway, and I like to hear Papà’s version. He was a great gentleman. He writes like a scholar, doesn’t he? When I think how little we had!’
Imma said, ‘Let’s begin again, another time, I’m tired.’
Maria Filippa insisted, but gently. ‘I don’t want the others to hear it; and they’re out at present. It’s a good opportunity, and they’ll be back soon, so you won’t have long to read to me. I’m not sure they should know about the hardships and the struggle.’
Imma picked up the exercise book, and began, reluctantly, ‘“11 June 1915.”’
‘Your birth!’
Imma brightened, and went on, ‘“We have a baby, a girl, a playmate for Rosa’s little boy. We have put them together for the moment, in a corner of the room. I must find us another home, it has become a matter of urgency. Somewhere where Maria Filippa can be comfortable and where she can wash in privacy, where we can sleep in our own matrimonial bed, not out in the street on the rooftops like vagabonds. But it is hot, hot to asphyxiation, hotter even than it ever was under Ninfania’s lion sun. For we southerners have known for centuries how to build for cold and for heat, with thick walls of good masonry. Here, in America, what do they know about construction? They employ Italians, but then they will not listen to us. We are too numerous in our quarters already – the heat indoors falls upon us like a huge and heavy carpet that a woman sees needs beating and drags outside to freshen and lighten, and we are driven up the ladder to the roof to join the hundreds of others up there, a shameless crowd, who tipple and sing and embrace as if in the seclusion of their own homes.”’
Imma let the book fall; her eyes were full ‘I was nothing but a nuisance to you!’
Her mother remonstrated, ‘Your father was delighted with you, delighted. He writes all that because he loved you from the moment he first saw you and he wanted something better for you than what he had. He said you were as pretty as a peach, you were his soft apricot, his percoco, his special sweet fruit of our own Ninfanian orchards, and he held you and sang to you softly at night, sitting up against the chimney stack on the roof.
‘I used to like the roof, there was life there.’
But Imma was struggling with herself, unconvinced.
‘Continue,’ commanded her mother. ‘Don’t think of yourself, it will only make you unhappy. The people who suffer most in this life are those who think all the time how much they are suffering. Besides, it will show, you will develop a sour look on your face and the devil will pass by and you’ll get stuck with it. We all earn our looks in the end.’
Imma hung her head and sniffled. ‘I will go on, Mamma, another time. I promise. Not now. I’ve read enough.’
She went over to the gramophone and chose a disc. The arm lowered onto the record, she began to move to the jaunty rhythm of Eddie Cantor singing ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, which Papà San had sent from New York in his last parcel. She was shaking out a blanket at the same time over the big table, the one from the old apartment on the Via de Giosa, on which Davide had been laid out for mourning. It looked magnificent in the smaller set of rooms they now occupied. Papà San had wanted to rent out their old apartment, it was too big for them anyway after Davide’s death, he said. He was still helping them, he had issued instructions to his new agent, Davide’s replacement, to buy out Davide’s share in the block and give the family the money. Maria Filippa was grateful for this pension. Apart from Davide’s life insurance, it was their only income. But Franco kept on about Papà San’s trickery. ‘I wouldn’t trust him with the milk in my coffee,’ he said, but he still did what Sandro said. Sandro had included a lump sum for the family plot in the graveyard as part of the settlement for the flat too; yet Franco said he was the kind of man who could turn dirt to his advantage, nothing would stop him, not even respect for the dead. He didn’t even respect family pietas. Maria Filippa objected, Papà San was family, he was married to Caterina, her children and their children were playmates in New York, she’d been a mother to Cati’s tw
o, and vice versa, he had a right to the vault But Franco wasn’t convinced she’d been given a fair price.
Imma smoothed the blanket so that she could lay newspaper on it and cut out a pattern for Lucia’s new dress. With chalk and pins and scissors she had soon pegged out, over some dyed black linen which had once served as a tablecloth, the pieces of a full skirt and a short raglan-sleeved bolero. Wielding her dressmakers’ shears she began slicing into the cloth, taking pleasure at the swift hiss of the blades as they closed and cut, closed and cut.
After Davide died, the family’s wherewithal included the sewing machine that Davide bought for Maria Filippa direct from the manufacturers on Greene Street when she started work at home; their building’s upper storeys were visible among the wooden water huts of the skyline from certain spots in the area around their lodgings on Crosby Street – from the foundation garment manufacturers, for instance, where she and Rosa once worked together making buttonholes in elastic suspenders, and from the big apartment Caterina lived in after she and her children left Crosby Street. It had green ironwork brackets on its cornice, ornate and vegetal, like the golden scrolls on the little machine’s body that emphasised its name, Singer. Maria Filippa liked it being called this, because it made the whirr and chuffing of the needle as she shunted the garment under its step seem the machine’s own song, as false and unmelodious as her own voice, but efficient all the same. It was a reliable machine; it faltered only when she stopped speeding it along to the calibrated spin of the wheel handle under her right hand. Then the list might tug it backwards and break the thread. She had brought it back on the boat from America when she sailed home, following her husband – had she hoped that when Davide had seen Italy again, he would change his mind and come back to her in America instead?
She hardly knew any longer – that had been in 1922, Fantina was just about to be born. And now, with the help of the invaluable pattern books – published in Bitonto up the coast by the Cavaliere Professore Arduino Panaro – Maria Filippa was able to turn out her daughters as trim and elegant as city girls, from fabric ends and cast-offs and rebuilt hand-me-downs. It was a precious heirloom from their days in America; there were few other sewing machines in Riba.
Davide’s Victrola, their other American legacy, caused greater wonder when they first installed it in the apartment in 1923 when they were reunited. They were able to astonish visitors with the music; for the machine had no horn, and no one there had yet seen this prodigy of high fidelity. The sound issued from a round black eye covered with coarse-grained cloth, which was revealed inside the gleaming chocolate-coloured commode at the opening of two small doors; the turntable spun above, but if you put your ear to the needle bouncing along the groove the only sound was a kind of skittering; the music had been snatched away below. Davide had bought a set of opera highlights to which he used to sing along, giving up on the high notes with a burst of laughter. He had medleys of Caruso and Gigli and other special favourites (Navarrini singing in Simon Boccanegra; Merli in La Forza del Destino). He liked to play Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West on New Year’s Eve and shoot off blanks with the family pistols in time to the cowboys’ entry in the opera to celebrate the coming year. Maria Filippa rarely listened to these recordings, they brought Davide back too poignantly. She could see him in the room listening and smoking and singing, and she didn’t like crying, not any more. When Davide had been there to see her tears, he used to touch them with his fingertips and taste them wonderingly.
In America at first she had cried a great deal – but with no pleasure then. Things had been so hard; she was hot with weeping after Pericle. But gradually she had learned to prevent the dirt and confusion of New York bringing on a storm of tears, and now that Davide was dead, she no longer wanted to weep. Her novel dryness was thin and friable inside her; she felt she might turn to dust. But if she gave up, there would be no one then to care for the girls, no one except Nunzia and she was getting old and weak and grumbly in widowhood, or Franco, and he wasn’t dependable, he was a farfallone, a big butterfly. No, they would have to go back to America, to the women of the family there.
They could go back to Rosa – I miss you, Rosa, she thought, you are so strong. I wanted to come with you, often, when you were marching with Pino in protest against the false trials of our compatriots and I wanted to stand by you, I did, in the business of the action against the garment chiefs. But Davide disapproved, you knew that. He was angry when you and Pino didn’t work for all those weeks, and I didn’t tell him that I helped you in secret. But I did, didn’t I? I didn’t think you were right to do what you did, to go against the law – I couldn’t contradict my Davide, I’m an ignorant woman. But I was proud of you too. Davide, who always had his head in the clouds, dreamed the world would become a better place through courtesy. Decorum would be victorious in the end. Ah, what an idealist he was!
It was lucky for Rosa, she thought, looking back, that Pino understood this universe of ours – Caterina had once told her that she would never have believed it possible, but all Rosa’s power of dreaming, that power which she had feared would burn her up, had turned into practical and outgoing energy. It was a kind of miracle, her sister declared, but Rosa deserved miracles. It was lucky, certainly, Maria Filippa reflected – there would have been little chance of Rosa rising in the League in Italy.
Soon, when the laws had changed and the coldness between the Leader and America had come to an end and he’d got over his pique about the Closed Door policy and the quotas, they would make the crossing again, and return to America.
Franco came to visit them frequently, playing Davide’s collection and shaking his head over the operas. He was writing one, the most recent of several, he wanted to be more than a local bandleader, he was hoping for the garland of Niccola Piccinni, Gluck’s greatest rival, Riba’s favourite son, and he needed to consult. More than anything however he loved the swing Davide had brought back; ‘The Peanut Vendor’ and ‘Ten Cents a Dance’ came bluesing out of the big matt round eye of the old Victrola from New York and made Maria Filippa’s daughters known all through Riba as ‘le Americane’ – the American girls.
Maria Filippa was watching Imma slice through the cloth on the table, following the paper sections she had pinned down. She pulled at the gold hoop in one ear, working it round and round, and went on, ‘It’s really a warning to us, Immacolata, not to presume against the Holy Ghost. Your father was a good man, a brave man, but when it came to God and religion, there was something stubborn in him as if the devil had hardened him.’ She let out her breath again, struggling with her emotions. ‘God sent us a test, when our baby died. And Davide couldn’t bend and take it, he fought and kicked, like a young horse in the shafts. I tried, Mercy! I tried. I prayed that he’d open himself to accept God’s decree. But he wouldn’t. That’s why one trouble followed another. Because he just wouldn’t give in and ask forgiveness from God. If only he’d prayed! God doesn’t like it when he’s disregarded. Why should he? Who among the great princes, the big padroni, feels gentle towards the little people when they ignore him or let on they’re cursing him?’ She left off twisting her earring and dropped her hands into her lap; she had small hands, the little finger so slender it looked as if it might snap. Even in New York she had looked after her hands, rubbing them with spent candle wax from the Church of the Most Precious Blood, on Baxter Street. One of the friars let her take the droppings to roll again around new wicks for lights at home. (She had preferred candles, not just to spare the bill, but to imagine the soft and furry darkness of Ninfania again.) Now, she looked down at the wedding band; it still turned freely, though most of the women she knew had grown a callous of flesh under the finger after so many years. She lifted it up to the knuckle, and looked at the skin, white and more finely wrinkled than the rest of the finger. ‘Your father was too gentle,’ she mused aloud. ‘You take after him, Imma, and Fantina too, you have his courtesy – it’s a great quality, never lose it, though you’ll find that it doe
sn’t take you far in the world, it’ll take you to heaven, which is more important. Always take the long view. You should have heard him when he proposed to me! He had written a speech, just as he used to do for other people afterwards. He compared me to lilies and roses and jasmine and the beams of the sun and the rays of the moon. He went very red in the face when he was reciting it. To think, I teased him so much about his writing everything down.’ She twisted her hands together and clasped them tightly. ‘He brought his death on himself, because, in that one area, he would not give in. He hadn’t any sense, none at all. Isn’t that just like a man? Not like you. I’ve made sure you and the others are practical. He was all words and blushes and …’ She seized the diary at the top of the pile and opened it, ‘Blasphemy! Didn’t he understand God hears everything?’
Imma folded the piece she had cut with a rustle of paper, and looked up at her mother in anxiety. ‘No, no, Mamma, nothing Papà did would have changed what happened. You mustn’t fret. Nothing we do or decide or think makes any difference. You know that. Things just happen.’
She held up the long scissors like a stork’s beak and snapped them in the air, once, twice. ‘We’re like air, we’re–well, there, but not there at the same time.’ She put down the scissors, and took her mother’s hands. ‘How many times have you told me, “Don’t do this, don’t do that, it’s unlucky. Spit on your hand if you see a humpback woman and rub her hump. Touch wood if you mention any happiness, however small.”
‘We’re at the mercy of all sorts of things that no one can understand. What happens to us has nothing to do with what we say or do. I wish it had. We’d be able to cut things to our own patterns!’ She laughed. Maria Filippa followed her to the table, and began checking Imma’s layout in the remaining stretch of fabric. ‘At least Papà made us Americans. Born in America – now that’s something that does make a difference.’
Maria Filippa nodded, but sadly, and adjusted one or two of the paper sections to economise on cloth, repinning them. ‘But was that wise? Or another example of his … what can I call it, not foolishness, his unworldliness? He was out of time. He didn’t grasp the present. With the Leader in the mood he’s in?’
The Lost Father Page 23