The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Fantina, carrying on pinning. ‘Talia’s are good too. Yours are very good.’

  She was reiterating what she’d heard in the reckoning sessions when they all sat on the balcony of the apartment at dusk, breathing in the pine tree’s amber sap, looking out over the street and discussing the vital assets of friends, neighbours, passersby in the passeggiata, keeping the tally of points.

  Lucia stuck out one leg and shifted her weight to the other, leaning back to elongate her torso like a fashion plate.

  ‘But you, Fantina, you have long, beautiful long legs.’

  Fantina shook her head. ‘Don’t remind me. I’m a freak.’

  ‘It’s wonderful to be tall like you. It’s aristocratic. It’s like Gary Cooper.’

  ‘But Gary Cooper is a man,’ Fantina was near wailing, spitting out the pins, ‘I don’t want to be like him. Besides, he’s an American. And it’s all right to be tall and have long legs in America. Here no one is bigger than Uncle Franco, and he’s not much higher than me. And he’s fully grown.’ She indicated a span with her fingers – another centimetre or two to go. ‘If Papà were alive, there’d be two of us, even if he was a man too. But now, I’m the only giraffe. “What’s the air up there like?”’ she whined.

  ‘You have the loveliest face of all of us,’ soothed Imma, coming across and touching her with light, mothlike brushings of her hands against her hair. ‘Someone will come along, who’ll see that too. When you’re older. You’ll break hearts!’

  ‘It’ll have to be some stranger. No one from here,’ Fantina frowned.

  You used to say to me, when I was the age you were then, that it didn’t matter that I was plain. Pretty girls, you said, were much more likely to suffer from love; they had more chances at it.

  But I still wanted to be like them, though I tried to be brave and agree.

  Fantina stood back and signalled to Lucia to turn, slowly, while she and Imma inspected the hem. Talia, crouching, fetched the pins she had dropped with a magnet and picked them off to put them back into Maria Filippa’s sewing box. ‘It’s straight! At last,’ Imma pronounced.

  The sisters’ kindnesses were unremitting: they wound one another in a soft armour of compliments and reassurances, like caddis flies accumulating oddments and sticking them together around the emergent pupae in improvised bristling cases. Their wishes were fulfilled by proxy, through their dreams on one another’s account, weaving cottony skeins of words and touches, as they strolled hand in hand in the street, or arm in arm, giving each other squeezes of comfortable pressure, to boost one sister here when some gaze rested on her, when the assessors in the rank crow uniforms of manlessness – the mothers, the widows, the future mothers-in-law – turned the young women’s parade into a formal inspection drill, or when, with a different cupidity, young men also sized them up with the blatant privilege to which they held tide because there were so few of them. Young men belonged to a precious and fugitive minority, still dispersing to points north and south and east, even if the widest door – to America – had closed.

  From the depths of her dreams of catastrophe, Lucia demanded the most. She needed to be lashed to the tall masts of her sisters’ fabulations on her behalf, as she proceeded through tempests of her own making. No bonds were tight enough to keep her from bursting into a fresh crisis of despair. With regard to this sister, her nearest, with whom she shared a bed, and nearest to her too in affection if not in resemblance, Fantina’s principal task was to listen attentively and presently oppose all Lucia’s ingenious suggestions about her desperate future fate. The services of hemming and curling were light in comparison.

  She was brilliant, thought Fantina, always making up new eventualities, brimming over with emotions Fantina could never have imagined. Her own reveries were concerned mostly with the rising price of soap, the decreasing supply of their home-dried tomatoes, the making of candles. But then, she was sometimes genuinely grateful – and she routinely thanked the Madonna and all the saints, even when she was feeling less than grateful – that she had been given such a steady level temperament. She saw herself in monochrome, because Lucia dazzled her; it is hard to judge the depth of tone in black or the pearliness of white beside vivid reds and greens, and so Fantina could not see her own shades of colour. But she could see how Lucia suffered from her fantasy.

  Yet Fantina sometimes also wished for less humdrum daydreams, for a nature more elaborate and finespun and intricate, like Imma’s. She saw her eldest sister, in her pallor and her delicacy, like a spreading white fan of coral under a tossing sea, rooted fragilely in a rock, torn at by currents but still intricately ramified, adding to the exquisite lacework of her being tiny increment by tiny increment. Lucia was rougher, and so much more vigorous; clownish and friendly, a porpoise; Talia was systematic, as she was, methodical, and reliable. They were two patient cormorants, bobbing on a mooring, waiting for the flash of a fish, almost imperceptible specks in the shot blue Adriatic, buoyed up and down, up and down. Though Talia was more contrary than Fantina: she had even practised riding a bicycle in the country, and when the farmworkers had hooted and catcalled and cursed, she had paid no attention, or at least refused them the pleasure of showing her confusion.

  By five o’clock, the four sisters were ready to join the crowd. Fantina, with a yellow ribbon tied flat around her forehead, added a flurry of bows over one ear like the cockade Maria Filippa had made in white satin for her Confirmation. She had new white socks too, in honour of the festa, rather than bare feet in sandals, and she was carrying the chair her mother would sit on to watch the performance. Behind her Maria Filippa, on the arm of her only married daughter, Imma, followed slowly. Her best shoes seemed to have shrunk since she last wore them. She had put on her velours cloche hat, which had been a voluptuous deep cinnamon when Rosa had bought it for her in New York on 22nd Street and Fashion Avenue, but had been stirred into the cauldron along with everything else from her wardrobe and had turned a rusty black. As wives, their husbands absent in different ways, she and Imma were properly sombre beside the next two daughters who walked behind, their jaunty display permitted now that five years’ mourning had elapsed. For Imma the living Emilio seemed farther away than her dead father; she had not been able to bring herself to talk to him about the baby.

  Lucia, stepping high to swirl her rick-racked skirt, was walking arm in arm with Talia, who was wearing the polka-dotted blouse Imma had altered for her from a cast-off a neighbour had bequeathed to Maria Filippa. Imma had sewn with her gentle assiduity until the fall of gathers from the yoke and the set of wide contrasting lapels of sky-blue fell with the crispness and the fullness shown by the magazines in the new hair and beauty salon which had opened on the Via Sparano. The daughter of one of the women who took in laundry on their street worked there. The atmosphere in Da Nino Nespola, Salone di Bellezza was moist and stinky: on entry, hydrogen peroxide, oxygenated water and other chemicals to straighten and frizz pricked the eyes and nose with their pungency. The new beautician wielded her spatula and crucibles of pink and greenish pastes and applied the stuff to the bristling heads of her subjects, ridged like the terraced slopes of vineyards, and knobbly as in August before the rains. Imma had stayed to watch her one afternoon when Nino himself had gone for supplies, and she had carried off at the close of service that evening a pot of the acrid pink unguent, which looked so stable but when sniffed seemed fizzy as if it were fermenting. Furtively, at least with regard to her mother, Imma had shown her spoil to Talia, and then to the younger ones, and before it dried up she’d shown them how to apply it with the flat end of a tea spoon, and the three eldest sisters had spread it cautiously on their upper lip, as the magazine from the salon recommended. The mixture tingled as it did its work; they were too young for the down there to show, but the absolutely latest Torinese rivista, La Moda della Donna, made it clear that moustachioed matriarchs must become a thing of the past. Raffinatezza, along northern lines, was advancing across boundaries, pene
trating the outlands; perms, dyes, curls would spread the glory of Italian beauty nationwide (to the greater credit of the glorious fasces). After three minutes, which Lucia counted under her breath as the cream on their upper lips gradually dried and cracked and slipped out of place until she could taste it, sour as the rind of chestnuts, they wiped it off and inspected one another. The fine hairs gleamed against their skins, which were pale – Imma the palest, her blue veins threaded her temples like her father – for the fashion of suntanning had not yet arrived and would not move south down the peninsula for a decade or more, and weathering was still a sign of the peasant, of toil in the sun. Depilatories too were slow to catch on. But Imma and her sisters weren’t called ‘le Americane’ for nothing.

  Imma would never have reported the advice of the magazine from Turin to her sisters if she had known how the editor had hoped to finagle the new fashion past the barriers of custom by claiming good Fascist patriotism as a motive. The defenders of true womanhood were not taken in. The editor in question had found soiled and sometimes reeking missives in her morning post. Her correspondents called her the farrow of her mother’s cunt, and wished on her gang rape and other suitable penalties. The unspoiled natural woman did not need Jezebel’s tricks to cheat her man, or, when his back was bent to honest labour for his family, to ensnare another.

  If Imma had known any of this, she would have controlled the fascination she felt for the alchemy of the beauty salon. She was never one to go against the grain.

  Criticism intimidated her; never talkative, she was muted by censure altogether; and she found complaining repugnant. She never raised a sound when she lost the baby, but she had not once returned to her husband’s home since. Her evasions remained unspoken, yet as skilful as another’s outcry. In New York, she had learned she would do almost anything to avoid raised voices or, worse, raised fists, anything to keep the peace. Her father had brought back such moments to her in his diaries, and today, when she recalled them, she shrivelled. ‘Where did ya get that suit, dago?’ They were walking together, on the shore of the East River, which was sludgy and slow in the swelter of a New York summer; it was an outing, for all five of them, they’d taken the El uptown to 53rd Street, to see something Papà wanted to see, and they were nearing the brick tower Papà had in mind to visit. Imma was walking beside him, with Mama and the others behind, and Papà was explaining, it was a tower for making lead shot; using a strange method, one never heard of in Italy: you took the lead and heated it up and then dropped it from the top and on the way down it passed through a sieve which turned it into pellets and then at the bottom fell into a tub of water. He was explaining this, enthusiastically – firearms and all their paraphernalia were marvels of design to him, objects of beauty, worth attentive examination and praise where praise was due – when the man shoved in front of Papà and stood up against him, saying, ‘Where did ya get that suit, dago?’ There was another man with him, who sniggered. Papà lifted his hand with his cane and the vein stood out in his temple and throbbed; his whole face was bright red, and his hair which always stuck up straight en brosse anyway looked stiff like hackles, and his eyes bulged, but Imma screamed and hung on to his jacket, for the man was a slab, a stevedore type in worker’s overalls, and he looked as if he alone could crack her father like a nut. Papà said, ‘Imma, go to your mother,’ but she clung on, to protect her father with her childishness; he couldn’t fight if she were attached to him. Her own blood thumped, she was repeating to herself inside, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers Blessed are the peacemakers … they shall inherit the earth.’ Papà was tongue-tied and red, stammering English in his terrible accent, trying to get past. The man squared up more bullishly, and jerked up his chin, but the sniggerer beside him muttered, ‘Aaw, come on, Eddie, leave it alone.’ Her mother and the other two children, Lucia clasped to Maria Filippa’s hip, now reached them. ‘What’s the matter?’ Maria Filippa asked Davide, speaking in Italian.

  ‘Scram, lady, before we make ya.’

  Imma’s fear rose, she thought she might burst into flame with it, she pulled at her father, tried to turn him. Davide resisted, he faced the man, he was fixed like a stalker, he looked all wrong in his best suit, with his elbows out, his hands spread, watching to pounce and giving only now and then a twitch of his pricked head to shake Imma off, and silence Maria Filippa, but they persisted in interrupting to save the situation as the man’s huge lowering face seemed to grow bigger and more ogreish and just as he was saying, ‘You guineas’ll knife a man in the back, won’t ya? Comes easy to ya, right?’ Davide struggled out of his trance and with dignity took Maria Filippa’s arm, by one elbow, and Imma’s by the other, and stepped sideways, choking out in his stumbling, thick accent, ‘In Italy we do not fight when there are ladies present,’ and walked on. The man muscled up again and pushed him in the chest; Papà staggered and Maria Filippa begged him to turn back. They did so at last, with the fleering voice behind them, which, in spite of her terror that it would bore into their backs until they dropped out of view, did not come any closer.

  Anything, to keep the peace.

  Fantina scanned her sisters’ faces, and fancied she could detect a halo of a sallower shade on their lips where they had swabbed. Also, lacking any emollient, they were unable to soften the chapping effect of the bleach. But they were glad at the results: their cosmetic secret even made them feel a little superior.

  They swung along the street leading from their apartment block to the old city, down past the stationer’s where the woman who gave change in pink blotting paper had shut up shop for good in the last year – why, no one really knew, though there were rumours she’d been to the Questura for interrogation – past the bandstand and the soft-drink kiosk and the War Memorial – a recent sculpture to honour the dead in campaigns of nearly twenty years ago. A boy and a girl were holding hands aloft with a burning torch between them: they were cut out of sheet metal, which was then curled over to mould their hollow limbs. Like cutting out biscuits, thought Fantina, then rolling them over the spoon.

  They were now a part of the crowd, malting for the basilica and the old harbour and the piazza with its back to the sea. Lucia’s heart began to knock under her ribs as if it were working loose. She knew he would be there, she would see him, and though she kept her eyes down or else fastened intently on her sister beside her, she was vigilant in surveying, on the outer periphery of her vision, the passersby, the gathering groups. She was scanning for green, green for the uniform of the bersaliers, and for the cock feathers of his helmet, magnesium black with moiré in it like the pearling on the surface of puddles in the new petrol station.

  Guido, she said to herself, Guido Salvatore, please notice me, today.

  Talia felt her steps shorten, and at first she matched her stride to her sister’s curtailed rhythm. Lucia was clinging more tightly too to her arm, hinting at a mincing motion with a new swivel to her hipbone at Talia’s side. But soon Talia began to find it difficult to keep in step with Lucia and wanted to let go of her arm to break their syncopated progress. But Lucia would not release her. At the same time, the pitch of her sister’s voice rose, her usual low hectic patter, sometimes interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter or by comic, self-dramatising yelps, gave way to a high, monotonous whisper, accompanied by lowered lashes and a dropped lower lip. Talia poked Lucia and teased her, but could not make her resume her ordinary manner. Her sister’s new allure made Fantina feel horribly awkward as well; she’d have liked to persuade herself that this was another form of clowning, that Lucia’s face would soon split into her familiar mischievous smile and she would taunt other women’s siren efforts. But Lucia believed in her public manner and its efficacy. It was by means of this masquerade that she gained enough aplomb, she maintained, to face the passeggiata at all. ‘With my roasted peanut face,’ she cried aloud from her pillow at night, ‘my face that’s already wrinkled and crumpled here, and here,’ (she tapped her forehead, she tapped her eye sockets) ‘from all the monke
ying about I do, I have to be different when I go out, I have to be a woman, like other women, a grown-up.’ Armoured with new speech and a new step, she was able to face the throng ahead.

  It’s often necessary in life to wear camouflage, even if it means assuming the look of the enemy. When we’re playing ‘Escape from Colditz’, Nicholas understands the rule that to get out of the prison and win the game you’ve got to draw the disguise of a German officer. His favourite way of escaping is a full masquerade – taking the staff car and driving out of the front gate. If I’m playing the German guards, which I usually am (because someone has to), I can’t help notice when he draws that Chance, his eyes shine so brightly. Then I have to decide whether to regroup near the staff car garage or pretend I don’t know.

  I often feel that life is someone else’s staff car and to take your seat you have to put on their costume. My disguises are different from Lucia’s, but I understand what she felt she had to do.

  There are butterflies and beetles, and even toads, I think, which change their colouring and their markings to confuse predators; the little creamy brown and yellow swallowtail with horned and scalloped wings turns herself into a quatrefoil of tangerine and buff to look exactly like one of her really foul-tasting neighbours in the rainforest. (Lucia wasn’t intending anything of that sort, of course; but as for me, I do, sometimes.) The swallowtail changes when she’s laying eggs, and later, while she rears them, she goes on impersonating the deadly little tangerine and buff species. And those scarlet and black beetles like warriors out of a Kurosawa movie, they come in all shapes and sizes. They’re imitating some Ur-model of revoltingness, too, to warn off spiders and hedgehogs or whoever’s coming after them. Their bright armour bristles and signals to the enemy: savage bold colours give warning throughout the animal world of savagery and venom within. A powder-pink or baby-blue bug, by contrast, is just as harmless as an infant.