It was in the Insect House with Nicholas one wet winter weekend that I found out about these animal disguises. He was spotting stick insects in their glass box of identical greenery and I was reading the wall chart on Mimicry. It’s not exactly a masquerade when you survive by putting on brave colours and other disguises. It goes a bit deeper than that. You’re changed too, like the swallowtail. Her wings and size and weight are all made different by her imitation, you can only tell she’s the same by looking at her larvae. Or if you ate her. Then she’d turn out to taste the same, delicious as ever, mewling and baby-blue underneath after all.
When I was married to Nicholas’s father, I refused to wear a wedding ring after a while, because he didn’t wear one, being an Englishman. I rebelled against the property tag, as it seemed to me. In Italy husbands and wives exchange them, they actually call a wedding ring la fede, faith itself. Mussolini was taking their faith – which is somehow right, isn’t it? – when he called for the sacrifice of gold. But I sometimes wear my old wedding ring now, especially when I’m travelling with Nicholas. I get tired of fending off certain looks – from clerks at hotel reception desks especially, and other twitchy-nosed strangers. Also, to ward off propositions. It used to annoy me when I was first married to see men holding off when they noticed the ring (one even said to me, ‘Pity about that ring, and so new and shiny too’). So that was partly why I took it off, because I wanted to make my own decisions, not have them made for me. But when I was alone again I liked the protection the ring gave me, though I was in bad faith of course. I was travestied, too, sitting in the staff-officer’s car, pretending to belong.
21
The Queen of Sheba 2
RIBA, 1936
THE SEA BREEZE ruffled Lucia’s curls, set the night before and caught under a pale blue ribbon, and freshened the dust in the narrow street of the old city. It blew away the smells of frying and roasting and scalding and charring from the vendors’ carts and stalls and lifted other less savoury odours from the foisty angles of the alleyways. The crowd was surging on, towards the square, drawn by the loudspeakers shouting out prizes in the tombola.
‘One whole kid for the lucky winner, donated by the Prince of Acquaqueta.’
‘One case of Moscato Trani, from the vineyard of the Marchesa!’
‘One brace of woodsnipe, donated by the Marshal!’
Children climbed up lamp posts to get a view until the Civil Guard ordered them down with a poke of their cudgels. Franco was there, on the dais, keeping an eye on the chairs, before they were borrowed by the spectators. The band could play standing up, he wasn’t bothered, but it seemed more ceremonious to sit.
Imma set down her mother’s chair at the side, and took up a position behind her, one hand resting on the chair’s back. Lucia and Talia, arms laced, strolled around laughing, nodding, in the waltzing circles of young women on show that evening before the clumps of waiting young men at the edge, against the walls. Fantina could still move between them freely; though she recognisably wore the colours of the women’s side, her youth flew a flag of truce, as Cati had done twenty or more years ago in Rupe when Rosa loved Tommaso Talvi.
The old women watched the gathering from their own chairs. In the sooty suits of mourning, shiny over the bumps of their bodies, and musky from long wear in pitiless summers, they had a look of carrion birds mustered in a time of drought. The few strangers who made their way to Ninfania would remark on the sour, sable-hued matriarchs at their conspiracies in doorways and shudder at their cunning, their maleficia. But Maria Filippa was numbered among them, quiet and patient, her only witchcraft the arts Of thrift and compromise.
Lucia dipped and clasped Talia, who laughed at her, trying to restrain her as she teetered on purpose. ‘I went to borrow some sugar,’ she was saying in her counterfeit whisper, ‘and I came back with a hundred grams, do you remember that time? Well I’m sure that there was someone there she didn’t want me to see. I wanted to go in, to the kitchen, it seemed more polite than just asking for the sugar and waiting at the door for her to fetch it, but she wanted me to stay outside. She was holding her hand to her throat too, like this …’ Lucia imitated her, ‘I felt sure I’d interrupted something.’
‘You see love anywhere,’ Talia put in, though she was only half paying attention.
‘Who mentioned love?’ Lucia squeezed Talia’s arm. ‘It’s a child, a child she wants to hide from the world, because it’s sick or mad or something. Maybe it was love. Yes, yes. Only nowadays, she’s frightened someone will come and take it away from her.’
Talia heard her sister, and, cottoning on, pinched her hard.
‘Ouch, aie,’ Lucia was theatrical. ‘Why did you do that?’ She wanted all eyes upon her. Talia gave her a look.
‘Lucia,’ she muttered, ‘if she’s hiding someone, she’s hiding someone. Don’t tell the world.’ Lucia understood, and her grip tightened on her sister’s arm, and she gave her a look of intimate conspiracy.
After a moment, she cried aloud again, but for another reason. ‘We must go the other way, so it doesn’t look as if I want to bump into him.’ She wheeled them both around.
They made off in the other direction. The loudspeakers were calling to the audience, the ceremonies were about to begin, the Bishop was arriving, and the Mayor and other functionaries would be taking their reserved seats in the front for the performance. After they had passed through, the crowd pressed in close, so close that the carabinieri gave up trying to dislodge the children from their precarious perches.
To a signal from Franco, the Leader’s anthem began, as the dignitaries bowed one another into their places. Franco brandished a fast tempo, and the crowd sang out,
‘Giovinezza, giovinezza,
Primavera di bellezza…’
But in his head there passed the words they had once sung as students in the conservatory – when the song had been the Socialist League’s rallying cry, before the Leader had ordered the new words. He began mumbling them as he conducted, making himself feel better. There had been hope then of defying the Leader and his gangs; now Franco knew his defiance was a sickly thing, not even a gesture worthy of the name.
To the first barrelling chords the chorus of children in the livery of the Queen of Sheba trooped in, and, marching to the front of the platform, began to sing out, the audience with them. Then, as the chorus fell silent, Franco took the band, with an elegant modulation to the dominant, straight into the overture (though he knew better than to call it by that name – the Fascist Union of Professionals and Musicians had outlawed Gallicisms in protest against the sanctions France had imposed on Italy).
The marching runs on trombone and trumpet of the Sheban children’s chimneysweep song built up to the full-throated melody he’d composed for the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He’d set it for mandolin and trombone – so he could accompany the voice of the King – and chosen F sharp major, a key he revelled in for its fruitiness. The children, silent after their unison singing of Giovinezza, wriggled and nudged one another and tightened their paper sashes till they tore. The spectators commented over the music, calling out to their own offspring to encourage them.
The low sun slanting across the square flashed on his instrument as Franco blew, and the other players were caught up in the pleasure of their bandleader and they strummed and fiddled and beat and blew with a will until Franco could almost imagine he was jamming up near 113th Street again, only now and then the plangent vibrato or lamenting tremolo from the mandolin and the other strings recalled him to Italy, where Puccini was still king. Then the prelude was over, and one or two people in the crowd whistled and cheered, singly. He was about to give the beat for the first song when the loudspeakers woke up with a hiccup and through a sudden blizzard of interference called for the purchase of more tombola tickets.
Lucia and Talia were joined by Guido Salvatore; or rather, he hung in their orbit, not quite acknowledging that proximity was his purpose. Lucia kept her eyes fixe
d on the spectacle, as if it were the most fascinating experience, until, at last, Guido Salvatore managed a small bow, and greeted her, begging permission to remain in the position he occupied. With a pink cheek, Lucia granted it, then returned to her passionate absorption in the scene. What presented itself to her gaze, though in her sense of Guido’s nearness she hardly registered it, was the side view of the Mayor and his wife, with their daughter Fiordiligi, who was wearing her cherry gloves, the Bishop beside them, and beside him the Marshal of Police. In the centre sat the Provincial Commissioner. The officers of the state, encased in the ornamental vesture of their roles, looked like professional effigies, erected for display at carnival time. She giggled, and caught Guido’s eye, and coquetted with her hand in front of her mouth to quell her laughter. He smoothed his moustache, and turned his eyes on her with the knowing wolfishness he, a man of the south, had practised in the mirror, in shop windows, in railway compartment reflections and even jugs of water, from the age of fourteen. He put a peanut between his teeth and cracked the shell, still looking at Lucia, then shucked it, and, carelessly dropping the husk, popped the nut into his mouth and snapped down on it. She let her gaze fall, but couldn’t help a peeping smile through her eyelashes. He came and stood closer, compressing the air between them until she felt it like a live sheet of energy, trapped lightning, as the children began to sing her song, the chimneysweep chorus, and broke into the magnetic field between them. The Queen of Sheba made her entrance, warbling at the top of her range in response to the children’s cries; she was carrying a silver spear (a broom handle wrapped in chocolate papers, saved by the nuns at the convent school of Santa Chiara), and a linen towel wrapped round her head to suggest her origins in the Horn of Africa. Her plump feet were bare and blacked up with shoe polish. The soprano had drawn the line at blacking her face like the children, and it shone out under the white headdress, brick red with stage make-up.
The Sheban children shifted to get closer together for their song, and faced the band. She sang,
‘My kingdom is but tiny,
My people are so needy,
I must find a way to save them,
A way to save them!’
The children chorused in turn, singing out to the audience,
‘Though our faces aren’t white like yours
We’ve a heart that’s as good inside.’
And they fell to their knees and held out their hands in entreaty. The Sindaco nodded, and so did the Bishop, approving the affecting sight; others continued regardless, bargaining, chewing, chattering and splitting peanuts and seeds of sunflower and melon. The Queen sang now,
‘Who, Oh who will come to our aid
In our desperate distress,
Our desperate distress?
We are poor, we are hungry,
Some of us are savages,
And most of us are slaves …’
A few people heard her trilling message – she could not let go of those Puccini cadences, thought Franco glumly – through the crackle of the loudspeaker which was clearing its throat for an announcement. They nodded, and hummed a note here and there to show appreciation of the Queen of Sheba and her fluting wobble. The children came in again, to a downstroke of Franco’s trombone, then, to a brilliant burst from the top end of the brass section (Franco, and his colleague on trumpet), King Solomon strode onto the platform. In a crunchy baritone – Maria Filippa, shivering, longed for Davide with a pang which passed like a bolt through her eardrum to deep down inside her – he held out his hand to the Queen of Sheba and responded to her call for help. He was wearing tall black boots, a military jacket with a leather belt, and decorations. No one could miss the allusion to the glory of Addis Ababa.
‘My dearest Queen, I cannot bear
To see your people suffer!
From cannibals and slave drivers –
From the flail and the yoke –
From drought and famine –
From plague and poverty –
Will I deliver you!’
Some crone in the audience, so feeble she could speak her mind without danger, muttered, ‘And what about here first?’ under her breath. He sang on, sincerely. He was fat, his jowls framed his features like a child’s bonnet, and his cheeks quivered with the effort of drawing breath; so did other parts, less visible, under the casing of his overheated costume. He drew in sharply, before plunging down to the lowest notes so that he could expel them with romantic conviction. But the upper register was giving problems, on certain notes a wheeze gripped his vocal chords which he couldn’t clear. But it wasn’t San Carlo, where the audience loved to be ruthless; here no one booed if a singer went flat, they were starvelings, rustics, Ninfanians, and he inhaled with flaring nostrils, and executed Franco’s final flourish with style. There was no mistaking his Solomon for a subtle and slippered Eastern potentate; he was the spirit of Italy, the chivalrous succourer of maids, through and through, a Princeps, a Dux, from his rich vibrato to the clamorous hand he flung on his decorated heart.
Fantina saw him redden with the haul of it and she remembered her father’s suffused face, singing. But Lucia saw only the baritone’s passion, and heard only the accents of masculine wooing, and she looked shyly across at Guido, who returned her look so boldly her eyes flew sideways, in giddiness, and the song ratified some pact between them. He came nearer, he held out the newspaper twist of seeds and nuts to her. She took one, and nibbled it. He urged her to take another, and she did so. He put a hand on the back of her perch so close that the warmth of their bodies mingled in the lively air still leaping between them. She felt dampness in her hollows. Solomon was a stranger to the Queen of Sheba, he was someone she hadn’t known before they met, and she was an outsider, her manners were foreign, she was black (but comely: Nigra sum sed formosa, it said on the inscription at the bottom of the Black Madonna of the Kneading Board her mother had over her bed). Yet she had inspired love in Solomon.
Lucia was not going to settle for half-measures, not like Imma, who had married just like that, without ardour, without splendour, for a union that never was, really, not unless you counted the loss of her baby as a sign of its occurrence. But she had no dowry, Papà had believed times were changing, he had decided it was one of the most sensible aspects of America, that they didn’t believe in the dowry system. Mamma had tried to keep her own together, so she could pass it on, but she’d had to swap certain pieces for provisions and materials, and other necessities, and it had gradually been dispersed. Lucia heard the baritone’s avowals and fought the turmoil rising inside her, masking it with a tilt of her head and a droop of her lashes; she took another melon seed.
A messenger flourished a scroll as he made his entrance on stage and ran to the Queen to deliver it; then, with a roll on the drum, she read it, flying upwards in delighted arpeggios. By and by, to a tumult of percussion, the tenor appeared at King Solomon’s side, and, supported by scurrying notes at the dark end of the strings, issued a grave warning to the King:
‘The Queen of Sheba is monstrous–
A woman truly monstrous–
If you were Adam now, would you trust Eve?
O wickedness, your name is woman!
O foolish heart to trust her kind!’
The old men nodded, and glanced across approvingly at the old women, to acknowledge in public how seriously they had placed themselves in danger at their hands. The women smirked, some of them shaking their heads in dissent at such attributed powers, others more rueful, as if it were a regrettable matter of fact over which they had no control. Lucia cast an anxious eye at Guido. He caught it, wagged a finger at her, and, moving closer, whispered in her ear. She couldn’t catch his words, as the band exploded in cymbal clashes and drumrolls and joyous thrumming of the mandolin, but his breath furled in her ear, fatty and salty with peanuts, and she shivered.
Solomon, from the dais, burst forth:
‘But the Queen of Sheba is beauty herself –
Her radiance the radiance
of the sun in spring –
Her scent the perfume of oranges in well-watered orchards –’
‘You are lost, O majesty!’ sang the Vizier.
‘When you are with a woman like my Queen of Sheba –
Your heart stops in its beat and starts to fly –
To fly-y-y …’
‘You are wise, O lord of lords, you are the wisest of men,’ sang the Vizier,
‘But she has tricked you with her magic arts –
Like all women she is falsehood and treachery–
Who can plumb the abysses of her wicked heart?’
He grimaced, he capered, and he lifted the gown which covered him and pointed to his feet,
‘She has ass’s hooves, and legs like beasts’…’
Spectators began to laugh; one or two men heckled, and on her makeshift throne to the side – the orange crate was showing as the breeze lifted its paper drape – the Queen of Sheba shrugged, then mimed disgust at the ribaldry with a tuck in the corners of her lipsticked mouth. Fiordiligi giggled; only the Mayor and his wife, fanning themselves to a faster rhythm than the spring evening required, sat impassively, as the Commissioner beside them remained unmoved.
Then, with emphatic gesture, King Solomon came forward, leant over the rostrum, and called out,
‘I must put it to the test, I will see her legs!’
The audience roared, the Queen stuck her nose in the air, and from behind the chorus of children there appeared Fanfaniello, the clown with the deep bass voice, whom everyone who had ever been to Riba knew for his street miming. He was in cream-coloured crumpled Pulcinella pyjamas with a squashed cap on his head flopping over into a soft rude peak, and his socks were falling down over his flat white slippers. He took giant steps, rocking on the balls of his feet towards King Solomon and the Grand Vizier, and bawled out till the stage planks themselves vibrated to his low pitch:
The Lost Father Page 29