The Gulf Between

by Maxine Alterio

  I rolled over to face him. ‘Why did you lash out?’

  ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Was Sergio violent?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Not now, I have to get up. Ernesto has lined up a job for me.’

  ‘What does it entail?’

  ‘I won’t know until I get there.’

  ‘Rage has a source, Ben. Matteo and I deserve an explanation.’

  Mid-September, I coaxed Ben into revealing snippets of Sergio’s illegal but profitable activities.

  ‘We were spared the worst hardships in the lead-up to and during the occupation,’ he said while we changed clothes in our room. As a birthday treat for Matteo — and I think Ben’s way of apologising to him — we were going to St Lucia to visit Alphonse, the owner of a fishing fleet and the chap who had taken Ben under his wing in the early stages of the conflict. ‘As the action heated up, Sergio employed Ernesto as his driver. He must have been about twenty-two at the time. I worked with Alphonse and his crew. They paid me in fish. Sometimes I had to take out a motorboat and pick up boxes from freighters waiting beyond the break-line. I had no idea what was in them or where they were sent, and I never asked questions.’

  The idea of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old doing dangerous jobs in wartime shocked me. But I didn’t let it show because I wanted him to keep talking. ‘What else did you do?’ I asked, ferreting in a drawer for a silk scarf to shield my neck from the elements and impress the fishermen’s wives at supper. If two or three had children similar in age to mine, we might hit it off. Meet occasionally.

  He walked to a window, gazed towards the bay. ‘I kept my head low and my mouth shut, worked hard. When Napoli fell to the Allies in ’43, Alphonse recommended me to the Americans who took over the port facilities. He thought I’d be safer there.’

  ‘Safer from what, from whom?’ I asked, knotting the scarf at my neck.

  He picked up his hairbrush from the bureau, moved to the mirror and ran the bristles across his head in methodical strokes. ‘It was a precarious period for anyone with links to fascism or the black market.’

  I assumed he meant Sergio. ‘Ernesto came out unscathed,’ I said.

  ‘He never ventured anywhere without protectors.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was referring to religious keepsakes or actual thugs. Best not ask.

  He put on a shirt the shade of glacial ice. I rolled the sleeves up halfway between his wrists and elbows. When I was done, he kissed the tip of my nose. ‘I don’t want to make you nervous, Julia. Just put you in the picture. Alphonse and his men are bound to reminisce.’ He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me and put on his sandals. ‘The weak and sick died like flies. A third or more of the women turned to prostitution to feed their kids.’ He slid his hands over his temple down to the base of his skull, where he interlinked his fingers. ‘One way or another we all sold our souls.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me when we first got together?’

  He looked over his shoulder. The cleft above the bridge of his nose contracted and his eyes tapered to stony slits. ‘I wanted to leave the miseries behind, start afresh. Even that wasn’t straightforward.’

  If we hadn’t been in a rush, I would have asked what he meant. As it was, both children were waiting in the Lancia, and Francesca had found the horn.

  The sirocco, blowing in from the southeast, had dropped sufficiently for us to go to sea in Alphonse’s boat. This bear-sized man, his brother and two cousins, all adept at catching sardines and anchovies, demonstrated their technique of slapping paddles to scare the tiny fish into the nets.

  ‘Please, Mr Alphonse,’ said Francesca, ‘take me upfront to watch for a shoal.’

  ‘You’ll get drenched,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied, and broke into a canter.

  He grabbed her. ‘Little octopus,’ he teased as she wriggled free.

  ‘Catch a real one for me, Signor Alphonse,’ she pleaded from a safe distance.

  ‘You have your work cut out with her,’ he said to Ben, who was teaching Matteo to lower a net without tangling it.

  Ben had taken off his shirt. Sweat glistened on his chest. He kept in shape, an obsession I had attributed to vanity, but now realised was linked to the occupation. The physically fit had a better chance of surviving.

  ‘My daughter has energy to burn,’ he said.

  Alphonse gave a belly laugh, causing Francesca to sidle up to her father to find favour again, freeing me to study the weathered tuff cliffs, a feature of the dramatic landscape skirting the gulf. While I daydreamed about conquerors from various eras passing through this stretch of water, the men and children freed fish from the nets and sorted them according to size and species.

  ‘Have we plenty, Papa?’ Matteo asked, throwing a tiddler overboard.

  ‘I think so,’ Ben said, looking at the flapping harvest in the crate. ‘Though this is nothing like what Alphonse hauled up in the old days. When it was safe to do so he carried lamps at night to attract the fish. His nets filled to breaking point. Sometimes we found scorpion fish among the catch.’

  Alphonse, who was steering the boat towards shore, walloped his ample stomach and smacked his lips. ‘Tonight the women will cook for us a big feast. Matteo, take the wheel. Use both hands. That’s right. Head for the big tree.’ He put his cap on Matteo’s head.

  It was easy to tell from Francesca’s sour expression that she was hurt as well as annoyed with Alphonse for giving Matteo this privilege over her. She poked a length of pipe into the barrel where he had thrown an octopus. The slithering bog-eyed creature wrapped its tentacles around it. ‘Careful,’ Ben told her, ‘it has teeth.’

  ‘Everything has teeth,’ she said.

  ‘Not plants,’ Matteo called out. ‘Excluding the Venus flytrap.’

  ‘Smarty-pants,’ she said, and threw a dead crab at him.

  Moments later, the fuss forgotten, she extracted a live one from a net and put it in a bucket she found on the deck. ‘Can I keep it for a pet, Papa?’

  ‘As long as you don’t complain if it nips you.’

  We took our places at a table on the porch of our host’s house. Alphonse’s wife, Lena, served up a delicious fish stew, and handed us slabs of freshly baked bread to mop up the broth.

  After we had eaten, I asked for the recipe. Lena said, ‘I tell, you write.’ It crossed my mind that she might be illiterate.

  The sky darker than raven wings and a warm breeze rolling over the sea provided the perfect setting for Alphonse and his male relatives, well lubricated with wine, to launch into tales of their adventures. I overheard segments as I cleared the table and took the empty dishes through to the kitchen.

  ‘When he was not much older than you, Matteo,’ Alphonse said, ‘your papa and a gang of tearaways rowed a dinghy to Pietra Salata.’

  ‘Is this a special place?’ Matteo asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s a reef with Roman structures encrusted beneath it.’

  ‘What did Papa do, Signor Alphonse?’ said Francesca, her eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘Was he naughty?’

  ‘I’d call him adventurous. He and his pals treated the rock as a diving board.’

  ‘Was it risky?’ she asked.

  Alphonse boomed, ‘Downright dangerous.’

  Ben butted in at this point. ‘We stayed clear of the ferries and motor launches dropping day-trippers on Capri, Procida and Ischia, but we struck an unseen hazard.’

  Francesca’s eyes widened further. ‘What Papa, what?’ She jumped up and down in front of him. He flattened her curls with the palm of his hand. ‘Our dingy sprang a leak on the return journey. A lone fisherman hunting for squid pulled me from the sea long after sunset.’ His voice had a pensive quality, as if he were back there, not here with us.

  Alphonse picked up from where Ben had left off. ‘Your papa had battled an outgoing tide for hours. He was exhausted, upset, too, about a friend who had
drowned. Another boy, the son of a mayor, rescued by a speedboat, claimed that going to the rock had been Benito’s idea. Word reached Sergio by sunrise.’

  Alphonse lit a cigarette and poured him and Ben another drink.

  ‘He gave me a thrashing,’ Ben said, ‘with the buckle end of his belt.’ He ran his knuckles over the scar tissue above his knee.

  I hadn’t known the scar’s origin, although I’d asked for an explanation early into our relationship when we were constantly exploring each other’s bodies. He’d changed the subject. Yet in the presence of these men he was lowering his guard. On one hand, I understood why with them in this setting he was lulled into reliving what had happened before I came on the scene. On the other, I couldn’t comprehend why he hadn’t told me the truth.

  ‘I’m glad you weren’t that mean to me, Papa,’ Matteo said, rubbing his ear.

  ‘Life was harder then, son.’

  Francesca tipped her face upwards to look at him. ‘Did girls dive off the rock, Papa?’

  He widened his eyes in mock horror. ‘Certainly not. They cooked and cleaned with their mammas.’

  Francesca wrinkled her nose. ‘I wish I was born a boy. You will teach me to swim, though, Papa, won’t you? Please?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And to dive?’

  ‘We’ll see, Francesca.’

  I caught Ben flexing his jaw, which meant he was running out of patience with her, so I said, ‘Matteo, take Frannie to play in the moonlight with the other children.’ He cast an irritated glance in my direction, but did as I asked.

  ‘Good lad,’ Ben said. ‘And Julia, you’re expected to join the women.’

  Dismissed again. I entered the kitchen, where I found the senior wives, sisters, sister-in-laws and mothers seated at a table laughing and chatting while the younger females washed and dried the supper dishes. A woman whose nose bore the lumpy evidence of two breaks said, ‘Julia, have you been to the catacombs?’

  ‘Are they worth seeing?’

  She tittered behind her hands, letting me know I had failed some kind of a test. Alphonse’s wife, who was seated beside me, lowered a veiny hand onto my wrist. ‘The body of our city’s protector saint is laid to rest there.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ I said, my face growing hot.

  I was grateful when she moved the conversation on to the ‘uncles from Rome’, professional mourners who for a price attended the funerals of strangers. ‘It doesn’t matter if they’re recognised, as long as they don’t give the game away,’ she explained. ‘A big crowd shows the popularity of the dead person and allows their family to keep face.’

  ‘My brother-in-law is terrified of the sea, so instead of fishing he mourns for a living,’ said a thin-lipped woman with mischievous eyes. ‘I tell him he’d be better off making coffins, but he likes to get out and about, even if it’s only to cemeteries and churches.’

  Her sister, who had mountainous cheekbones and creases on both sides of her mouth to her chin, spoke almost too fast for me to follow. ‘Yesterday he attended a service for …’ she began exuberantly. And then in a quieter tone she gave the details. Un uomo che quasi soffoca le donne durante il sesso. ‘A man who liked to semi-suffocate women during sex.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Really?’

  More tittering.

  The bright-eyed woman said, ‘Some deluded females view this as proof of their man’s passion.’ She recited a list of names. Two were in the room. ‘Yet they frown upon anyone who beats them.’

  I dipped my head in sympathy, and abandoned all hope of finding a compatible companion among these women of St Lucia.

  Winding up Corso Vittorio Emanuel, the children dozing in the back seat, Ben concentrating on driving, I weighed up whether to ask him to introduce me to more people from his youth, if in their company I might learn what else he had kept from me. However, while searching for the right words, I realised no Neapolitan who had survived the occupation would fully lift his or her mask for an outsider like me. Silence and forgetting weren’t confined to this city, or this country. Wiggin had once said while presiding over a murder trial involving ex-soldiers, ‘We’re all as sick as our secrets.’

  As Ben swung the Lancia around the last bend, I reached the conclusion that the acts desperate people perform to survive carry the most shame, and shame is the most potent of silencers. Little did I realise that soon I, too, would succumb.

  12

  I enrolled Matteo and Francesca in a Catholic school within walking distance of the villa. Not ideal, from my perspective. I’d sooner they attended a state-run institution. No point digging in my heels, though. I’d won the main battle. So I suppressed the snide remark I had thought of making about the requisite separate classes for girls and boys, an outdated notion that appealed to the men. What’s more, Ben insisted that Matteo, who had the previous month turned eleven, start at the same institution as his sister, even though he could go to a middle school. ‘To keep an eye on her,’ Ben said. ‘If we’re still here after Christmas, and she’s behaving and Matteo’s managing the classwork, he can transfer.’ I begrudgingly accepted these terms to ensure that the children received some form of education while we were on the Vomero.

  They looked smart setting off in their grembiuli, black smocks, ribbons in the three colours of the Italian flag tied at the neck. Rosa packed biscuits into their schoolbags, and I small wooden cases containing pencils and rubbers.

  ‘If we don’t like it, can we leave?’ Matteo said, jabbing the toe of his shoe into a crack in a flagstone on the kitchen floor.

  Francesca took his hand in hers and pulled him towards the hallway. ‘Hurry, Mattie, or we’ll be late.’

  ‘Mamma, answer me,’ Matteo said.

  ‘If you have any valid gripes, I’ll listen.’

  Half an hour after delivering them to their respective teachers and returning to assist Rosa with the laundry, I overheard Ben and Ernesto arguing outside. I was in the washhouse near an open window above the tub, rinsing their mother’s urine-stained sheets, the result of a wretched coughing attack.

  ‘Fucking moron,’ Ernesto sneered. ‘You and your high-and-mighty principles caused this mess.’

  ‘Quit hassling me,’ Ben said.

  ‘Your offshoot lost more over the past two years than it made. What were you doing? You put us in jeopardy!’

  What on earth was he on about? Ben’s business had nothing to do with him.

  Next came the sound of scuffling feet, and a whack, bone on bone. I jumped, knocking an elbow against the wringer. It stung like crazy.

  ‘Get your hands off me, Ernesto,’ Ben said. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re no damn use unless you do as you’re told.’

  In a state of shock, I yanked out the plug. Water gurgled into the drain. The men fell silent and moved off.

  Their mother ignored the dark shading on the left side of Ben’s chin and Ernesto’s puffy knuckles as we dined that night on fish baked with sliced lemon and tomatoes. I was too flustered to comment. No one in my family had ever laid a finger on anyone. Now, in a matter of weeks, Ben had hit Matteo and Ernesto him. I didn’t know what to do. So I tried not to think about it, but that proved impossible.

  Ben’s mother had not yet given me permission to cook an evening meal with Rosa, but she allowed me to make dessert. I was proud of tonight’s effort cooling on the bench.

  The men talked as if nothing untoward had happened between them. They raved on about checking the olive grove in the morning and sourcing better-quality, though cheaper, cans. Everything revolved around money. They even had me at it. ‘Reasonable price,’ I said, tapping the sole on my plate with the tines of my fork. ‘And there’s apple tart made from windfalls and ice cream to follow.’

  Francesca perked up. ‘Nonna, if you don’t want your serving, I’ll have it.’

  My mother-in-law said, ‘Ice cream calms my mouth ulcers. Take my share of the tart, though, Francesca. Your mamma
is clueless at making pastry.’

  I wanted to scream ‘Be grateful!’ but held my tongue. Rather than my life expanding as I’d envisaged, it was becoming restrictive and bewildering.

  The following day Ernesto went earlier than usual to the second floor, swapped his business suit for casual trousers and a cotton shirt open at the neck, exposing a thicket of black hair, and headed to his photography studio. Rosa offered to fetch the children from school after she had been to the farmacia to buy plasters for her bunions, leaving Ben and me free to take our coffee out to the terrace while his mother rested indoors. As we watched Ernesto leave, I said, ‘Does he photograph models?’

  ‘No idea,’ Ben said, ‘although I’ve heard he calls into a certain café and flirts with the proprietress, a woman as well stacked as Sophia Loren. I guess he also visits her for favours in her apartment above.’

  ‘You think so?’ Ernesto didn’t strike me as an ordinary man. He had an unsettling habit of moving catlike into a room. Occasionally he entered the kitchen when I was alone and fixed his unblinking eyes on me, not uttering a word unless someone joined us. Then he became the affable brother-in-law, dousing me with praise for assisting his mother and Rosa, polite as pie.

  I had treated these switches as a harmless game until I heard him lash out at Ben. Since then, I was certain that Ernesto’s efforts to get his brother home had more to do with business than their mother. I also wondered if Ernesto feared that Ben would usurp him in their mother’s affection now that we were here, especially since she was letting me do more for her.

  Once our coffees were finished I put this notion to Ben. He flicked a strand of hair flopping over his forehead to the side. ‘Ernesto is the eldest son. He has his place and I have mine. That won’t change.’ Tapping two fingers on my forearm, he added, ‘Besides, I have absolutely no interest in knocking him off his perch, even it were possible.’

  ‘He doesn’t see Matteo and Francesca as threats.’

  Ben clicked his tongue. ‘No, he puffs up when they laugh at his stupid jokes.’

  I rolled my eyes skywards.

  ‘Humour him, Julia. He’s always been a spoilt brat. And his biggest fan has a terminal illness he can’t fix. He has to take his frustration out on someone.’