The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Maria Filippa pulled at her wedding ring; a surge of the marching melody of the soldiers greeted her as she tugged.

  Imma was crying, quietly, without sniffing or otherwise alerting anyone, certainly not Fiordiligi in her goddess costume. But the sight of so many men’s and women’s faces in a commotion of patriotic sentiment struggling with personal memory brought a burning in her throat; Talia on her mother’s other side was grim, not choked. She disapproved, she thought widows should be spared the sacrifice of gold. But Maria Filippa knew Davide was wearing his ring in his coffin on the marble ledge in their family vault in the cemetery in Riba, and it made her feel they were still plighted even if she were parting with her troth now. Inwardly, she asked Davide to understand, as finally, with the help of a slimy piece of soap one of the officials handed to her, she got the ring off her finger over her knuckle, and dropped it into one of the helmets. It fell among the heap of others’ rings, so that she could no longer distinguish it. The Leader had cried out from the balcony on high in the square, ‘Italy, O Italy! Your people will become a single human mass, a single engine of might, and more than a mass, more powerful than an engine, you will become a shooting star, a shooting star to be hurled against anyone, anywhere!’ But he needed gold in the soldiers’ helmets to work this prodigy and hammer out the starry missile.

  The rings which had shone so bright on the fingers of their wearers looked tawdry all together. A man in a suit with a splash of medals on his chest handed her another ring to replace the one she had relinquished. She did not recognise him: he had come from Rome to encourage the Ninfanians to participate in the Leader’s drive. He gave her the Leader’s promised Ring of Iron, like the hoop of steel, the band of strength Italy was forging around her empire. Maria Filippa took it on her finger, and told him, ‘Thank you, sir.’ Imma beside her mumbled quickly, ‘Your Excellency, Your Excellency,’ fearful of her mother’s mistake. She did not have to give up her ring: expectant mothers were exempt, not by decree, but by unspoken agreement. Maria Filippa looked at the new ring, and thought, Curtain hoops, brighten them in salt and vinegar, giving the bowl a good shake now and then. The official jogged her to get her going, there was a press of women behind her – and some men too, but comparatively few. When she turned to walk down the broad steps, the white handmaids were singing,

  ‘Hail Goddess Rome! Sparkling before your brow

  Stands the sun born of the new History!

  On the last horizon, resplendent in arms,

  Victory awaits!’

  Fiordiligi’s teeth were chattering, though she kept smiling and nodding, as Puccini’s unctuous strains floated towards her.

  Imma and Talia looped their mother’s arms through theirs once again, and Maria Filippa put her hand in her pocket and let the ring fall off. It was far too big anyway. She kept talking on the way home, of a sauce of beet tops and pine nuts and capers she was thinking of preparing for the midday meal. Talia could not bring herself to respond; bile lay shallow inside her, at the root of her tongue, and she feared it might spill from her mouth if she spoke; but Imma joined in her mother’s ordinary conjurations against their pain.

  When Imma woke up the next morning she found moistness between her legs. She was bleeding. She told her mother; soon the branching pains inside her were grappling-hooks on her spine and squeezing her in bands of fire. They put her to bed, and she bit down hard onto a twisted handkerchief and held onto her mother’s hand on one side and Talia’s on the other as she miscarried her baby.

  ‘It was small,’ you said. ‘About this size.’ You laid your fingers on the edge of the table, about six inches apart. ‘Everything was perfect. You could see it would have been a boy!

  ‘She was very ill afterwards. We took in it turns to hold ice packs on her stomach to stop the bleeding and bring down her fever. She was burning for three weeks on end. But she didn’t have a clue what was happening. Thank God.’

  When the priest came, he looked at the scrap of child in the sheet and shook his head. ‘The sacrament of baptism cannot be performed on a corpse.’ Maria Filippa pulled out a twenty lira note and laid it under the plate of cakecrumbs left in front of him. The priest looked at it and continued. ‘An unbaptised infant cannot be laid to rest in consecrated ground.’ He put out two fingers and prised the banknote loose from under the plate. ‘I will say Mass for the repose of its soul, in limbo or whatever place the good God chooses to accord him.’

  You gathered up the tiny swaddled form, and put it in a shoebox. It was naked, grey and limp like an unfledged nestling found tumbled to the ground. Lucia ordered you not to say anything to your mother; Maria Filippa was anyway so exhausted with staying up round the clock nursing Imma that you could leave the apartment without her noticing. You weren’t frightened; an anger you couldn’t voice aloud lit your limbs and filled your head as you made your way through the darkness down the Via Calefati and into the Via Sparano and down to the southern end of the town where the cemetery stood. In spite of the night you found your way to your family vault without difficulty. You had visited your father’s remains so often to pay him respect. There was silence all around like a solemn chorus; you liked it, against your nature, for you felt it was showing proper awe at your enterprise. Lucia took Imma’s dressmaking scissors out of her belt, and unwrapped the handkerchief she had used to cover their sharp blades. She began digging into the dirt around the door of the vault: when you came to pray at Davide’s grave, you stood in a group outside the stone tomb inscribed ‘Pittagora – Lux perpetua luceat eis,’ and laid your flowers at the narrow wrought-iron double doors which closed upon the chamber with its shelves for the dead. It had not been so very long, five years only after all, since the entrance had been opened by the undertakers to carry Davide through. You said to her, ‘Why did you bring those, you’ll ruin them.’ Lucia replied that she was afraid of carrying a naked knife blade in the dark. You chuckled when you recalled this. She was always melodramatic. Soon, she had eased the gates, and opened one over the wild marjoram and withered weeds clinging around the jamb at that late season. The scent of the herb rose in the air, in spite of the clenched cold around. Then you both took the shoebox and opened the lid, and dabbed at the little mummy inside to make sure it was as comfortably positioned as possible, and properly wound in its cerements, then kissed it fastidiously and closed the lid again. You put it deep inside one of the topmost shelves, because you could reach up there, where no one would see it from the gate (Lucia verifying, standing outside), then you swung the gate to again and ruffled up the weeds to hide your intervention and stood still a while under the cypresses.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Lucia, ‘We know you cannot be so unkind. Please take Imma’s baby to heaven to be by the side of the Madonna and Jesus and all the angels. Your priest would not baptise or bury him, so please forgive us if we have done wrong and gone against your wishes…’

  ‘What could we do, God?’ Fantina interrupted. Her sister’s theatrical sense was making her desperate. ‘Did you want us really to throw him away? Just like that? You ought to know that in our house we never throw anything away.’

  When Imma was at last better, Maria Filippa took the train to visit Davide’s mother Nunzia in Rupe. Making conversation over a plate of taralli and marzipan fruits designed to fatten up Imma, Nunzia asked what Maria Filippa had done about the required sacrifice of gold; she looked at her daughter-in-law’s finger for the ring given in exchange. Maria Filippa had lost it almost immediately after. She told Nunzia it was worthless, that there had been no point keeping it. Nunzia’s lips narrowed.

  Imma looked down at her ring, but did not speak. Her mother glanced over at her, and put out a hand to her daughter, to describe a caress in the air like the motions she had made at Imma’s sickbed, when she damped down her daughter’s flaming body to ease her. Imma did not take her hand; indeed, her mother did not require reciprocation, but she half-smiled back, while Nunzia, after a pause, said aloud, ‘If that Talvi boy was still
around, we could’ve asked his father to let you off giving up Davide’s ring. He’s a commissioner now you know. In the Party. Maybe he’d have turned a blind eye. I didn’t realise then.

  ‘Let’s hope that these will be old stories soon. Let’s hope.’

  20

  The Queen of Sheba 1

  RIBA, MAY 1936

  IT WAS THE Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, and Italian troops were set for victory in the empire barely six months after the invasion from Eritrea. The news was out: Addis Ababa had fallen. King Victor Emmanuel was on his way to Abyssinia. The King in person was to greet the champions of the Fatherland, to heap in praise the aviators who dropped fire from the clouds as they pirouetted above the plains, to garland the warriors of the Fatherland. The native army was on the run under the divine and elemental fury of the conquerors. In their white nightshirts, waving their matchstick spears, they were yielding perforce before the might of the unconquered fasces. Soon, the fruits of civilisation would be theirs.

  ‘Glory to the sons of Italy!’ shouted the generals. ‘And to the invincible fasces!’ shouted the Leader. ‘The greatest colonial war of history has been won!’ Or as good as, the soldiers were told.

  Glory to the troops of the fatherland! And more glory.

  ‘Eia eia allalà!’ whooped the soldiers.

  A sea breeze was blowing in, tugging at the awning over the rostrum which had been hammered together overnight; every now and then, to an irregular beat, the material flapped out a dull note. Franco himself jerked, listening, each time it pulled the canvas out and threw it down with a slap. There was no rhyme he could pick up in the wind’s work on the awning, it moved out of a force in nature and yet seemed unconfined by the law of proportion, of instance and echo; it simply jabbed and worried at random. Without such law, without order, there could be no music, he told himself, no rhythm, no syncopation even, just noise.

  The stacked chairs had not yet been set out for the Mayor and his party, but an area to the left of the platform was cordoned off for the singers’ use. It adjoined the little basilica of San Giorgio Armeno, where the performers in the farsetta that night would be changing into costume – a matter of sashes and cut-out crowns of confectioners’ gilt paper, cones of coloured card to fit over ordinary shoes, and some insignia borrowed from the priests’ cupboard of vestments for the saints’ statues. Their helpers would be able to run to and fro unobstructed, Franco hoped, to adjust the chorus’s quick changes from Sheban children to Solomon’s devils, and from Solomon’s devils to angelic choristers for the finale. He scanned the setting: the Adriatic shone in the milky light of the early morning through the arch between San Giorgio and the basilica; white chevrons peaked on its surface under the stroke of the warm wind. The cubic mass of San Nicola itself, across from the makeshift stage on the other side, cast a sharp diagonal shadow across the flagstones. At this early hour the blond tufa of the basilica’s façade had a wormy and battered look, the weird beasts poking out from capitals and pedestals rendered yet more brutish by weathering which had distorted their features and lopped their limbs; San Nicola needed the curative westerly evening sun to repair its ravages and gild its fabric. But the performance was timed for dusk, the piazza’s best hour, when the itinerant vendors could count on business, even though most of the crowd wouldn’t have a soldo for a squirt of syrup into a cone of scraped ice, let alone for the luxury eggy ice creams truffled with tutti frutti at the top of the confectioners’ range.

  Franco was inspecting the rigging of the loudspeakers behind the platform on either side of the Byzantine palace where the catapans had lived who once governed Riba. His own music was going to be performed live without amplification, with himself conducting, mainly from the trombone. But there would be announcements over the system. He’d have liked to play alto sax, but in the present climate, with esterofili denounced on all sides (even the crazy Futurists, he’d heard, were insisting on exclusively Italian-bred music), the fewer foreign instruments he used the better. So he’d scored The Mystery of the Queen of Sheba for a band Verdi himself could have managed, though rather more modest. He was taut with anticipation. It was the first time anything he’d composed had got this far, indeed had achieved a public performance at all. Not even at the Academy in Naples had he managed to organise a concert of his compositions, though he’d submitted quite a few works, and afterwards, when he’d followed Davide to New York (just squeaking past before the bill which stopped Italians getting in), he’d enjoyed the Italian-American Citizens’ Band and their Friday night sessions, but he couldn’t get them to play anything he’d written. It wouldn’t have been suitable for the receptions – the weddings and anniversaries – where the band was in demand. They had to stick to the tunes everyone knew, the tunes of the old country, the audience was so loyal – and often, so homesick.

  Franco was shorter than his brother, without the long thin neck that had given Davide a gazelle look of startled withdrawal, with well-knitted limbs and a small waist which he liked to show off by wearing the widest trousers he could find, nipped by a narrow belt. As he hitched the wire of the loudspeakers to the bracket of the telegraph poles, he hummed happily the song of the Sheban children greeting King Solomon’s advent in the throne room. As Lucia had sung the chimneysweep song, he had visualised the newsreel children lined up to greet their new emperor at the landfall of the King of Italy, in Massawa or Asmara or wherever, had conjured their black faces, their rags, their dusty black feet, and thought, This is the song they sing, with an extra bit of swing, now that Italy is saving them from squalor and extortion and slavery and cannibalism. For so even Franco believed, he who before had not been so easy to persuade. After twelve years, the footage in the cinemas, the news reports on the radio, the coverage in the magazines and the exhortations in the newspapers combined in eulogy of the Leader and all his doings; Franco too was adapting, though he had not yet altogether acquiesced to a mollusc’s existence, eyes to the wall, face to the rock face, surviving by sticking fast through doldrums and through gales, or, when a storm burst at close hand, keeping safe only by retraction.

  ‘You hit me, it’s because my face

  Isn’t white like yours, I know –’

  hummed Franco, jumping down from the wooden chair he’d used to reach the loudspeaker; surveying the empty stage with a dreamy eye, he peopled it on the instant with a chorus in gorgeous Sheban livery, the children’s piping rousingly backed by a full complement of richly timbred male and female voices, a Gospel choir, like the ones he’d heard through the closed door of the Tabernacle of the Lord on 121st Street one Sunday morning, swelling to the beat as if with the gravitational pull of the planet. ‘Aah,’ he sighed, with satisfaction. It had taken so much to come to this little event; it was going to be the most brilliant, memorable pageant Riba had ever seen, not even Naples had its like. Maybe at last he’d be able to get away from the bandstand on the Via Sparano under the acacia trees – Mascagni had managed it, after all, and he’d only been a bandmaster too. The letters, all copperplate effusions of rejection, from academies in Siena, in Naples, in Rome, spoke of ‘intellectual co-operation’: so he had joined the National Fascist Union of Musicians, got his card, avowed to his new colleagues his enthusiasm for the Fatherland, professed his utmost. Yet the experience of New York and of music in New York had burrowed into his inner core. Though he didn’t admit it, it would be folly to admit it, with the sanctions against Italy, with the hostility still fierce. Eyeties, a Bunch of Wops. Guineas are cowards, right? Dagoes are dagger-happy, right? Quick to draw when the enemy’s back’s turned. No foreign labor here. And yet. And yet.

  He went back to humming as the light sharpened and the shadow crept closer to the basilica’s front; it was eight o’clock and women were waiting by the water pumps in the alleys of the old city as he went by, on his way to school for a rehearsal of the children he had called. They were catching the piddle from the water pipe; he nodded greetings, lordly, with a light step, dancing to t
he beat of his operetta.

  ‘I need my beauty sleep,’ groaned Lucia, turning her face to the wall as Fantina climbed out of bed. ‘I didn’t sleep at all, the pins were sticking into my scalp all night. It was torture.’ Fantina murmured sympathy, combing out her own long, walnut-bright hair. At fourteen she had not yet gained entrance to the rites of apparel and coiffure, but was dedicated to giving her sisters due credit for their efforts, however bizarre and horribly uncomfortable. On the eve of the great festa, she had helped Lucia skewer hairpins through the rolled curls at the back of her head, and adjusted the hem on the swirl of skirt – they’d adapted the circular cloak of a Piccolo Italiana uniform a neighbour’s daughter had grown out of, but with the addition of rickrack in rows of white and yellow from Maria Filippa’s salvage basket, they were pretty sure no one would recognise the change of the Fascist Youth outfit. Getting a circular hem level is a harder job than setting waves in straight hair, and Fantina had edged round her sister on her knees adjusting droops here and there until she was so dizzy she nearly swallowed the pins in her mouth.

  ‘You want to see your legs, but not so much of the knee, that’s the new length,’ decreed Imma, who, as a married woman, was not able to participate in the conspicuous self-adornment of the next two sisters, but was confined to appraising them from across the other side of the room.

  ‘Why don’t you get up on the table?’ added Talia. ‘You’d get a better view.’

  ‘You’ve got beautiful legs,’ said Fantina, straightening to continue her ministrations at eye level now that Lucia was up on the table. ‘You’ve got the neatest ankles in our family.’

  ‘No,’ said Lucia, ‘Talia has. All that gymnastic she does, it’s made her really – lissom.’ She flounced, to set the skirt in different folds.