‘Where is she?’ I asked, and Talia fished her notebook out of her bag and wrote down Pia’s address for me.
For a while, the lights came on again in the theatre and the figures inside took up their poses again; I thought, I’m not going to write a squalid little scene of violence, not when I can write about a duel, when so many men fought so many duels over women. Anyway, you brought me up to believe this was the story of our family, this was your past, and I am trying to preserve your memories, so I’ll stick to it with you. I like it, I like Davide in the quarry and Tommaso Talvi in tears and Rosa and Cati with their different struggles, their different satisfactions.
My theatre stands in Ninfania, my old found land, harsh white with limestone shining in the sun, and wound in the shrouds of an ancient wisdom and its customs. I can see through you all in the Pasta Pub, through the microwaves and the air conditioning and the TV packs, I can put you back in position on my toy stage, where my grandfather is gallant and gentle and as much a victim of the prevailing code as you, the womenfolk, the custodians of the family name. He carries a scar of honour and writes with an elegant hand, he sings baritone like plain chocolate melting in a copper pan. This is the place I want to be, I told myself. This is my family romance.
You were showing Nicholas how to wind the spaghetti round his fork; he was laughing, as he dangled the heaped end and tipped up his face to suck it off the prongs with a slurping sound. ‘No, no,’ you said. ‘You must do it the Italian way! We can’t have you eating as if you’d never heard of Italy. You’ve got a quarter Italian blood, you know!’ And you parted some strands and, drawing them to the side of his plate, again showed him how to spin a forkful into a neat cocoon. ‘Eight years old and you still don’t know how to eat tagliatelle!’
‘Look, look, Nonna!’ Nicholas held up a knot in triumph.
‘That’s much better,’ you said.
Imma put in, gently, ‘Let’s drink a toast, because we’re all together, and it’s the first time, so many of us.’
Lucia jumped up, and cried out, ‘When I am with you I am happy! To our happiness! To all of us! To Fantina! To Imma, to Talia, to all us girls!’
You looked across at me, and smiled; you were moved, I could see. I couldn’t refuse your feelings, they leaped towards me like the tongue of a flame along a fuse. We both looked back at Lucia, and chinked glasses together, one by one, with smiles assenting to her certainties, easier by far than facing the questions hanging in the light between us.
24
To Ms Pia Jerrold,
Bethesda,
Maryland
9 October 1985
Dear Pia,
I hope you will not mind if I call you by your first name, but since we are cousins, I feel some closeness with you even though we have never met. My mother is Fantina, the youngest of Davide Pittagora’s daughters – and your mother’s niece, though she’s never met you either! I was given your name and address a week or so ago in Parnassus by one of my mother’s sisters, Lucia. I would have liked to make the trip to the East Coast, but I wasn’t able to this time.
I was hoping you could help me with some information about the family. I have been trying to write a memoir of my mother’s childhood, because that period in southern Italy now seems a very long time ago, and so many things have changed, for good or ill, especially in the way families live, and boys and girls are brought up. (I hear you have two daughters – I have one son, he’s just turned nine – I’d love to compare notes one day with you about the difficulties of being a mother. Perhaps you don’t have any difficulties!?) I’m at a very early stage with the book – I hope it will become a book, but at this point who can tell? – and still gathering material, as well as talking to people, principally my mother. Or rather talking with her, as you quite rightly say in America. I wondered if you have any papers of your mother’s, any diaries or photographs you would be willing to let me see? I’d be so grateful. If you let me know the cost of photocopies and postage etc, I’ll reimburse you. I do hope this request won’t be too unwelcome. I think that a history of a family like ours, seen through the eyes of one member, a woman of this generation, who has experienced so many of the social changes of the times, would be really worth writing. I do hope you will agree, and I look forward very much to hearing from you.
My mother joins me in sending her best wishes to you and your family. Like me, she hopes we will all meet one day.
ANNA COLLOUTHAR
November 26
Ciao! Glad to hear from you, Anna. Sorry it took a while. Now it’s Thanksgiving I get a bit of a break, so I could catch up with my mail. Here’s a photo of Liana and Rosa (you see I called her after my mother). She was a terrific lady, and I guess you feel the same way about yours. The kids really loved their Grandma. I haven’t got much to send over, Mamma wasn’t much of a squirrel. There’re some newspaper clippings. She had them in her bureau drawer when she died, so I guess she’d kept them for a reason. They must have meant something to her! My Italian isn’t great. Too bad. Tell me what they say, and send me a photo of you and your boy – and his Dad, or is he out of it? (I’d like to see what the English side of the family looks like!) Come out and visit with us – your boy could have the American experience the way we do it in the east. He could even enroll in my school. It’s a great school, 600 kids. I teach fourth grade. Been doing it for eleven years! And I still love it.
Auguri,
PIA JERROLD
25
From the Noonday Gazette of 23 May 1912
SCENES OF FURY IN RUPE
From our correspondent Vittore dei Neri
‘BEFORE THE VOTING opened, guards surrounded the town hall in a line, with their sabres drawn. Some were on horses, others on foot. In the wings of the piazza, as it was discovered later, the support troops of the squads from the Work and Freedom Club were lying in wait; they have proved themselves champions of the knife before now. During these events they were armed with clubs, hammers, hunting rifles and pistols too. From before daybreak the crowd in the piazza was growing; there were men and women with their children, and they beat on their empty water jars with what they had to hand, spoons and spades and other tools of toil. The harvest has been scanty after the prolonged drought, and many men who must provide for themselves and for their families out of the fieldworker’s meagre daily wage of the summer months will not even be able to discharge their winter debt to the proprietors.
‘When the doors were unlocked and the hour of the election struck, the crowd began to cry out. But they were calm at this stage, indeed their dignity was admirable. A deputation from their ranks delivered a petition drawn up by the League of Labour. Its demands are known to all
Recognition of the union
Increased wages
No more payments in kind
No imported labour from the coast
Formal contracts of employment
Labour exchanges
And finally, an end to the bailiffs’ abuses – most especially the caparra they exact, under the very eyes of the law, before they will choose workers in the piazzas at daybreak.
‘The document, drawn up according to due process of law, was refused at the door of the Town Hall by the guards on duty. The crowd howled its protests when it saw its embassy rejected. The line of armed police then began to advance into the piazza.
‘What happened next defies description or belief, by any man who holds tide to true feeling and respect for humanity.
‘The Mayor of Rupe, His Most Noble and Munificent Excellency Domenico Andrea Spada arrived to record his vote. The faithful readers of these columns will need no introduction to the owner of the vast estates of Corrado, Punta di Stella, and the Tratti di Rupe themselves; the power which drives and sustains the Work and Freedom Club. Its ruffians are recruited principally among his hired hands. Fools! they entertain the dream that if they prove their loyalty to him in this manner they will be rewarded.
‘His Excellency arrived in a car
riage. At the sight of its approach, the crowd’s imprecations grew to a roar as mighty as a cataract in the mountains; the guards, lowering their sabres now, continued to advance. When His Excellency opened the door of his vehicle to alight, men and women – mothers with infants at the breast–surrounded the vehicle and the horses and attempted to seize its inmate. He was seen then to reconsider his decision to set down, and instead cried out to the terrified driver, “Avanti! Avanti! Drive on!” He caused much merriment in the throng with his commands, as he unwittingly gave utterance to the slogan of our movement. Though half-hauled from his seat above, the driver managed to gain control of the panicked horses. They began to pull the carriage away, regardless of who or what lay before them or under their hooves; they scattered victims in the dust.
‘The police were not loth to grasp their opportunity. Seeing the disarray of the valiant foreguard of the crowd who had attempted the assault on the carriage, they plunged ahead, striking to left and right with their blades unsheathed, indifferent as to the age or condition of their targets. The screaming of the women was terrible. Two babies were slashed in front of their mothers’ eyes – Herods are come to live among us again, it seems. Some members of the crowd were hacked where they fell. Others stumbled as they ran and the swordsmen rivalled one another in their frenzy of pursuit. On defenceless people, who ask only to work and be paid honestly for that work, the carabinieri rained blows until the streets of Rupe were splashed with the blood of the inhabitants. The delirium of a civil war was unleashed on the stricken people.
‘This punishment was not enough. The squadristi of the Work and Freedom Club were not to be outdone by the swordsmen. Leaving the police to chastise the workers in the piazza, they instituted searches through the town, smashing the doors and windows of known sympathisers, setting fire to hoardings where announcements of the petition were posted, and hunting out with terror and reprisal the emissaries of the League. Running battles were fought in the streets, the squadristi opening fire with rifles and with pistols. Fugitives were given chase. In the quarry where a group of students had thought themselves safely hidden, the enemy’s fire was answered …’
I remembered that I had written, The quarry was limestone and crumbly; it had been excavated for the stones of the basilica, eight hundred years ago, and it was still being hewn. Davide stopped in it, as if he were barefoot on burning sand in summer. It was chilly between the smooth white walls with their stitched squares marking the saw’s passage; the air was still and cool in the cold stone’s propinquity. He tried to move his limbs normally, but it was as if he were now paddling in oil, heavy and hampering. He longed to be indoors, to be quiet, alone, in wintertime, by the stove in the kitchen with a book or looking at the flames through the glass. So he turned a fraction later than Tommaso at the sound of the signal and shot wild…
‘The Work and Freedom gang ambushed the students in their place of concealment. The comrades in the League, cornered in the quarry where in former days matters of honour were settled in the small hours, stood their ground. There was an exchange of shots…’
I had tried to be with Rosa, when I put down, Rosa in the apartment by the curtain at the window willed her eyes to see the scene unfolding. ‘I want to be there,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t bear being kept indoors. Always in the wings, never taking part. I want to go out there.’ Her nails scraped on the glass panes. ‘I must take part.’
‘Several participants were seriously wounded, including one student of law, who had assisted with the declaration of demands. We regret, with the rage only the oppressed and the silenced can know, that we cannot publish tributes to them here without placing families and colleagues at risk. But their names and their deeds shall live forever, inscribed in the golden annals of our cause …’
Perhaps I’d caught his mood, but missed his motive: As he blacked out he would have smiled if his face had not felt as if it had turned to syrup. It was a rush of triumph he experienced, the ecstasy of the sacrificial, but his features were disobedient and he brought his hand up and touched the warm liquid stuffing coming out of his head. He – Davide Pittagora, tongue-tied, indecisive and withdrawn – had managed to speak out; he heard singing, and the singing was not only the bloodlet from his skull but a wild chorus, giving voice to his joy.
‘Until justice comes to the men and the women who labour the fields and vineyards of the landlords of Ninfania, there will be more scenes like these horrible evils which have befallen Rupe. We call upon the authorities to redress these wrongs! We call upon the Most Excellent Mayor of Rupe to lend an ear to the League’s just cause and to enact the demands of the petition! Or else Ninfania will become a wilderness, uncultivated and untended, for our young men, our strong men, our educated men will continue to depart from the accursed land of their birthright, for Argentina, for America – who would not rather labour in foreign cities than remain and toil on our blighted earth and suffer continued wrongs even to the danger of life and limb?’
26
LONDON, I985
‘IT WAS STARING me in the face. And I missed it.’ I threw down the review section of the Sunday paper – I had only been pretending to read it, anyway. ‘I don’t know how I did, but I did. Do you think I ought to start all over again? I’m not sure I’ve the energy.’
You reached up under the lampshade on the side table beside your armchair and switched on the light. Like embers, the shade glowed red from the bulb, pooling in your lap and lighting up your hands, which barely moved as they plied the needles where a stripy sweater for Nicholas was growing. (‘Though I know he’s not yet interested in clothes …’ you’d apologise.) ‘The fact of the matter is …’ You stopped, and counted the stitches, in order to augment the sleeves symmetrically on both sides. I watched your lips move to the Italian numbers, and I waited. The television burst into flames. Nicholas, lying on his stomach in front of it, drubbed with his feet on the carpet and roared his approval as two burning cars pitched over a precipice.
‘Shut up,’ I shouted at him. ‘Glorying in death and destruction. It’s disgusting.’
‘It’s only a film,’ he scoffed. ‘You’d think you’d know that by now.’
I ignored him, and turned to you. ‘It looks like I missed the equivalent of the Peterloo Massacre, there, right under my nose. That’s “the fact of the matter”.’
I felt quite stunned, but I was spinning too, with excitement. A revolutionary grandfather might be even better than a duelling one, even if he had been led rather than leading, a hero by accident rather than design. ‘It’s a nuisance from one point of view, of course, because I thought I was getting somewhere. But maybe it’s the last piece I need: the one that you hunt for and can’t recognise though it was there all the time. I’m not sure though how to go from here.’
I had produced Pia’s cutting over lunch, a Sunday roast, a tender leg of lamb such as I never buy and cook for just Nicholas and me at home, with wonderful crisp roast potatoes and rich gravy. You’d also opened one of my father’s clarets, so I was in that disconnected state a good wine induces, when the ends of one’s fingers and the tips of one’s toes and the top of one’s head seem to be further away than usual.
You pointed with the bobbly end of a knitting needle at the cutting from Pia’s letter. ‘It’s possible, I suppose, that as a young man, my father got involved in all sorts of things, political and whatnot. But, you know, he wasn’t at all like that later. The very idea of him fighting or taking part in something loud and public – it doesn’t fit with his character at all.’
‘That’s just the point,’ I interrupted. ‘The experience of riots and violence in Rupe put him off for life! It would explain why there’s nothing in the diaries about the past. It says something about his silence – he wasn’t made for battle, he’s no Sandinista, that’s obvious. But he had his moment.’
‘I’m afraid he was always much too shy,’ you replied. ‘Much too ineffectual for that sort of thing. And he liked gloves and the opera an
d – no, it doesn’t make sense to me. Though, as I say, maybe he became caught up – for a time – in a cause. This does happen to the young, I know.’ You paused, and added gently, ‘You were more fiery yourself, once, I seem to remember.’
‘But don’t you think I’ve misread the whole society? I mean, seen sexual struggles where there were other kinds of struggle going on, more important ones, perhaps – social, economic – men and women fighting side by side. For their survival, not their honour. Rosa and Tommaso and Davide in it, together. Not romance, but revolution?’
‘Now, Tommaso, that’s a different kettle of fish. He could have been mixed up in the riots, and Rosa could have kept the cutting because she was still in love with him.’
I chuckled. ‘Yes, that would be a solution – the romantic solution.’ I paused, and shook my head at you. ‘But remember, I made up all the background stuff about Tommaso because you didn’t know anything about him. I got most of it out of a book about the Anarcho-syndicalists and how some of them became Socialists and some of them Fascists. It was all pretty confused then.’
There was a silence, as you laughed, softly, your head still bent over your knitting. ‘It’s actually rather funny – I don’t know any more where your book ends and my life begins.’
The Lost Father Page 34