The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  But if this is what we have become in America, what can we do?

  19

  The Education of Fantina

  RIBA, OCTOBER, 1935

  ‘YOUR FATHER NEVER saw any good in Rosa.’ Maria Filippa pulled her hair smooth over her skull, tightening her bun at the back. ‘She was strong, too strong.’ She paused. ‘I suppose now I might never see her again.’ She looked at the thought and it cast a shadow back. ‘Oh, I miss her!’

  ‘Oh, Mamma, you shall see her again. We’ll all go back to America, and everything will be different, easy, comfortable!’ Imma waved her hand at the pile of her father’s diaries. ‘Those were the old days. It’s all different now. Look at the films, at Gary Cooper! At Bing Crosby!’

  Maria Filippa said, quietly, ‘Don’t show disrespect to your father. He was a good man. Look at Cati, what she had to put up with. Papà San, imagine. He bought anything exactly when he wanted and never asked anyone. He even bought his licence, when he could hardly drive. But he wanted a car and he wanted everyone to ride with him.

  ‘And look at Rosa. Her husband was on strike whenever he could be. He wasn’t a shirker, no, he was acting for the best. But still. Your Papà, now, he was too good for this world, that was the trouble. He was too innocent – he wanted everything to be perfect.’

  Imma said, ‘You touched him, and he pulled his horns in.’

  ‘Never talk like that about him. Your father, like a snail? We must always remember his high standards of conduct – he was a rare spirit, and we should honour his memory. By never departing from his wishes.’

  Imma sighed, and her eyes slipped sidelong, unable to look at her mother. Maria Filippa continued, ‘He didn’t fit in, in America, he was unhappy because he wanted to keep to the old ways, and it was impossible. So we came back home. Do you remember?’

  ‘I had shiny boots for the journey, yes, I remember.’

  ‘I stayed behind because I wanted the new baby to be born in America, to have citizenship too, like you. But I couldn’t manage without him, even with Rosa and Cati within reach. I felt I was betraying him by not being with him, and – imagine – I sent him a telegram all the way from New York to Rupe, where Nunzia was looking after all of you, and said I was coming back too.’

  In death, Davide was enshrined; Maria Filippa brought up her daughters in the reflection of his wishes, and they could no longer be challenged; now that he lay on the narrow shelf in the family vault, transformed by prayer into an icon, he was more deeply imbued with the sacred mana of paternal power than ever the man Davide Pittagora had been when he was alive. But for both Maria Filippa and Imma, the man Davide had been spoke too clearly in the diaries. He allowed his weaknesses and his tics and gaps to show, he left a record of infringements on his authority, his entries stirred uneasy memories of feints successfully used to circumvent his power, of the resourcefulness Maria Filippa had shown to avert the misery she had endured. (Yes, she had continued to call at the back door of the low-class hotels.) The gradual withdrawal from hearing him speak through his diary set a limit on the rebellion of Davide’s women; they offered his memory worship, but found that in order to continue doing so, they must not examine him – the person inside the image of the father – too closely. Instead, they colluded in commemorating him in their own manner; indeed, though at first Maria Filippa insisted on Imma’s reading out his diaries, she began to find less and less time for the reverent sessions until the custom fell away altogether and the several volumes were never read in their entirety by any of them.

  After Davide himself, I was the first person ever to read them through, in order, day by day, and it fell to me to translate them, to include in the family memoir. You enjoyed them, or at least you told me you had when I sent you a copy of the diaries neatly typed and you read them in my version. You said it caught him as you remembered him.

  Would Davide, my Italian grandfather, have appreciated this migration of race memory, of the spirit of the southern patriarch into the voice of the English granddaughter? He was so lost, I wanted to fill up the emptiness. And yet I wonder, would he have preferred silence?

  ‘Maybe Papà would like America now. It has changed,’ urged Imma.

  Maria Filippa rose from her chair, and stood, silent, for a moment. ‘Perhaps, but he was always too good for it – it is never the good ones who win the race, you know. But that does not mean we should not pay attention to the ones who trail behind. They may know things the strong and the victorious will never know. That is why we must try and meet your father’s desires. He was aware of wickedness, but he never let it stick to him.’

  Yet, indoors, Maria Filippa hardly reined in her daughters; it was only in relation to law and society beyond their door that she was vigilant. It was understood that the small, shuttered apartment on the Via Calefati was a precinct set apart from the outside world, where particular rules obtained. It was their secret and private domain, and within it they were free because so securely sequestered. If a visitor came, Maria Filippa cautioned against playing the records from America, until they knew their caller was to be trusted; the young women were not – certainly not – to demonstrate the dances they were learning by themselves. When their Uncle Franco came, they felt safe with the only man who wasn’t an outsider in their lives, now that Papà San had finished tying up their ‘business problems’ and had returned to New York. Fantina would show him her Charleston, perfected from lessons with Talia; she kicked up her thin legs to either side like a water boatman spinning on the surface of a cistern, and screamed with giggles as she did so, while Franco clapped in time and laughed.

  Indoors, there were lessons to be continued, haphazardly.

  From her mother, Fantina learned the best way to wash gloves: wear them and soap them to a lather as if washing your own hands, then rinse them when on, leather ones included. That way, they won’t shrink.

  She learned: stale bread, heated up in the oven till crisp and toasty can be spread with butter or dripping or dipped in oil and garlic for bruschetta without shattering into crumbs if it’s laid back to back with another rusk. If not wanted, hammer it in a cloth into fine breadcrumbs. She learned: cigarette ash, mashed with a drop or two of olive oil brings back colour into furniture bleached by wet rims of glasses or cups or hot dishes. (None of the women in the family smoked, though Talia had tried it, but Franco could always be counted on to produce this essential ingredient for home repairs.)

  She learned: metal does not tarnish if it’s packed in a handful of rice. That if you add rice to containers of sugar and salt, they won’t grow lumpy or crystallise in the dank winter months. That you clean an iron by rubbing a candle-end all over the warm underside, and then pressing it down firmly on a sheet of brown paper until all the wax and the dirt have been absorbed.

  She learned: a pair of new shoes must be scored on their soles with a sharp knife before they are safe to walk in. If they’re too tight, fill them with soaked paper and pack them in ice in the very bottom of the meat safe where it’s coldest (the new refrigerators were just arriving, but the family didn’t have one). The shoes will expand in the cold. That to measure socks for the right fit, you can fold them around your fist; if the toe and heel meet, they’ll be the right size.

  She learned: a rough metre measures from the tip of your nose to the ends of your fingers, facing forwards if you are a woman, turning profile, towards your fingertips if you are a full-grown man. She also learned always to wear gold, in order to ensure good eyesight in old age.

  Fantina would sit with her mother twisting torn strips of surplus cloth around wire frames to make lampshades, she unstitched the clothes Maria Filippa gleaned, she discovered how to turn shirt collars and cuffs, to patch and darn. ‘Out of respect for your father,’ said her mother, ‘we must cut a good figure.’

  From Talia, the expert in movement, she heard that when dancing the woman should let the man lead, as if she were a life-size doll or an empty coat. He’ll not step on her feet because she’ll
be at one with him, pliant and following. They practised together, and Fantina danced the man more often than her sisters because she was so much taller. She didn’t mind, she held Lucia tight, stooping to put her cheek against her sister’s warm hair, with its smell of beer from the rinse she used to set her new shingled curls. Lucia smooched round the big table to the dull blind eye of the gramophone, and she’d lay her hand on her heart after their dance and roll her eyes to the ceiling, playing rapture. Who could tell where her pretences began and ended? Not Fantina, who had taken up the role as Lucia’s straight man long ago. Since she was small, she had been marched and drilled by her sister. When Lucia, as a little girl, heard the brass band coming down the street, she took up wooden spoons from the kitchen and drubbed her naked tummy, pushing it forward to stretch it like a drum, and gave out orders to her younger sister while marking time with her spoons. Nowadays, now they were older, Fantina stood flattened against the wall as Lucia spun round the room to the last turns of the record, laughing and laughing as she decelerated in time to the music, hands spread, in imitation of the dead-leaf trundle which the young pilots were demonstrating in their dragonfly aeroplanes from the north. Dashing over to change the record when the song ended, she’d continue imitating the motion with her hands. The pilots were the élite of the new army of the Leader. A squadron of seaplanes, more like nightflying moths than the acrobatic fighter craft, had flown the Atlantic without halt, direct to Chicago in unbroken formation the whole way. And America had hailed them, stupefied at such a feat of daring, at last forced to become aware of Italy’s cleverness and strength. The Leader told the Italians, ‘We will blot out the sun with our numbers; we will lord it over the air. Air is our element, the element of heroes, the Upper Air; the stratosphere is ours!’

  Franco would call on them in the afternoon to play music on the Victrola. Cranking the handle, Lucia would lower the S-shaped arm onto the gleaming black disc and run back to place herself erectly in her sister’s clasp, her chin tipped up to find a niche on her shoulder, and they would be off in a foxtrot, Fantina bending to accommodate Lucia’s shortness – slow, slow, quick quick slow – slow, slow, quick quick slow, turn, turn, back, forwards, slow, slow, quick quick slow. They hummed the while to themselves, in their throatiest torchiest voices,

  ‘Don’t know why

  There’s no sun up in the sky

  Stormy weather

  Since my man and I ain’t together

  Keeps rainin’ all the time…’

  To Lucia fell the task of teaching English; she was the quickest at learning, and passed on Imma’s greater knowledge with enthusiasm. It was Imma who had the certificate from the parish school of the Church of the Most Precious Blood, which said ‘Immacolata Pittagora has been in attendance for 125 hours at the class for learning English. She has successfully completed a standard course in English for Citizenship.’ But Imma was too unassertive to coach her sisters.

  ‘K,’ said Lucia. ‘Kay for keeps. Don’t forget the Americans have more letters than we do. They have Kay and Double U and Jay and Ex and Greek Why. They have more of everything!’

  ‘Can’t go on,’ sang Ivie Anderson to the trumpet of Duke Ellington,

  ‘All I have in life is gone,

  Stormy weather

  Since my man and I ain’t together

  Keeps rainin’ all the time.’

  Lucia stood over her sisters as they copied down the lyrics. ‘Picture a little love nest / Down where the roses cling,’ she’d mouth along to the record on the Victrola, then lift the handle carefully and dictate to Fantina, sitting at the table with paper and pencil. Fantina would write, and Lucia gingerly place the arm back in the groove.

  ‘You’ll scratch it,’ said Talia. ‘Just play the song to the end; we can write what you can remember.’

  Lucia gave in and Eddie Cantor began again,

  ‘Picture a little love nest –

  Down where the roses cling –’

  ‘Don’t forget, Haitch after the Double U!’ she commanded them.

  ‘Think what a year can bring!

  He’s washing dishes and baby clothes,

  He’s so ambitious, he even sews!

  But don’t forget folks,

  That’s what you get folks

  For makin’ whoopee!’

  ‘Whoopee! W-H-O-O-P-E-E,’ pronounced Lucia, leaning over Fantina’s shoulder. ‘Double U, Haitch, Oh, Oh, Pee, Eee, Eee. That’s right. Oh Kay!’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Love! Of course, silly. American songs are always about love. Like ours,’ she added, laughing.

  Imma took part in the English lessons, but with dwindling attention. She was making other plans, for though to her mother she held out hope of their escape from Riba, she inwardly despaired of it. The scissors Imma had used for her sister’s dresses were sharpened later that year on the grinder’s wheel, in a fiery spouting of sparks, for her to begin her wedding dress from a set of curtains Maria Filippa had procured. She told her daughter, ‘Marriage is a sealed envelope. You never know what’s inside until you open it.’ Imma felt she should be encouraged by this: you could win the lottery, after all. She was marrying to ease the money problems at home; her mother gave her fifty dollars she had saved from their family fortune, such as it was, telling her not to tell her fidanzato, but to keep the money safe against the occasion when it might become necessary. Emilio Agnese was twenty, and he had been enlisted; he was good about sending his salary home to his mother.

  One of the guests at the wedding examined Maria Filippa’s soft round face quickly for suspicious signs of unduly rapid recovery from widowhood; Maria Filippa had not seen her since a Sunday in the summer five years ago when they had passed one another outside the cathedral in Dolmetta. Prilla was a cousin on Maria Filippa’s mother’s side; she was a small darting woman, with a smooth dark neat head and a pointed, stabbing nose, like a blackbird singing. In 1914 she had married the man Maria Filippa had jilted two years earlier when Davide had proposed to her after the duel. Prilla introduced her three daughters (she had left a son at home, she explained) and proffered silvered and sugared almonds in a pink and gold confectioner’s carton, half a kilo of them, far in excess of what was customary. The two women exchanged compliments, deprecations, effusions, Prilla’s head bobbing with especial activity. During Mass five years ago when Davide was still alive, Maria Filippa had caught Prilla’s eyes on her, appraising the quality of her hat, her shoes, and her handbag, and then assessing her daughters’ endowments with similar avidity. But Maria Filippa had put from her mind the slow bitter pressure on Prilla’s mouth and set aside the jealousy that she had noticed piercing her relative. For once she had been glad that Davide had not come to Mass with them for Prilla to see. Maria Filippa needed to be safely out of reach of other women’s envy.

  It gave her no pleasure that Prilla might measure her husband, Maria Filippa’s reject, against Davide and find him wanting – as Maria Filippa knew she must – and then hold it against her. It inspired in her nothing but distress. The triumph that other women might feel made her writhe with discomfort. Yet her present escape from Prilla’s rancour had been achieved at such cost – the very death of Davide. For she saw that the woman who had once seen her as a rival was finally freed from the humiliation of accepting publicly a man whom another woman had turned down. She saw, when Prilla arrived with her exaggerated gift and her careful daughters and their schooled manners, that the anxiety and fury had fallen away from her, now that Davide was dead.

  It was odd, thought Maria Filippa. For now she was on her own again, maybe, who knows, she might still cast a spell over her old bellone; she was only thirty-eight when Davide had died, though she’d aged. Davide always said she was his dove, his columbine, his flower. Her hands were rougher, true, and the knuckles more knobbly now, but her feet were still the same small pink feet, good to nibble like nuts themselves, as Davide used to say. But Prilla knew none of these secrets, and Maria Filippa, accept
ing the almonds with enough surprise to outface her condescension, she hoped, recalled with a pang of unexpected desire the sensation of Prilla’s husband’s tongue, hot and wet and doggy, working in her ear in lieu of the kisses he was not permitted. Prilla was radiant, her bird head danced with pleasure that she had made so much the better choice in the end, now that her husband was still alive and flourishing, working in the Civil Guard, and rising too. He had a sinking uniform to wear, in the Year IX of the new Italy, and carried a pistol in a white leather holster. Whereas Davide Pittagora was dead and Maria Filippa a widow with four girls to bring up on her own and the eldest marrying herself off to a nothing boy, an army recruit, just for the sake of it, it was plain to see.

  As soon as the modest festivity was over, Emilio was detailed to report for training at Caserta. Imma was not sure that she would recognise him when he came back. She tried to summon up his face in her mind, but the features in their wedding photograph materialised instead, where he appeared blurred because he’d moved. She could recall far more vividly, with a flash of pleasure, the furry feel of his legs wrapping round hers in their first clumsy contact. But apart from the small portion from his pay which his mother handed over to her, Imma’s démarche did not achieve what she had intended; within a month after his departure, it became clear that Imma would have more room than she had in Emilio’s home if she went back home to share with her mother and Talia again. They had given the couple their own high matrimonial bed with the soft fluffy quilt for the first night together, but afterwards they were quartered in the kitchen, on a folding bed. Emilio’s father could see Imma asleep there whenever he went through at night. The intimacy made her uneasy, being so unused to the company of fathers. Besides, to add to the expense, she sensed a seedling inside her, tiny, hair-rooted, but germinating with unmistakeable vigour. The thought made her flutter pleasantly deep inside, she imagined its small hands, the soft fingernails like tiny pink sea shells, the vulnerable domed head like translucent alabaster, yet warm to cradle in the palm of her hand. And she smiled to herself.