The Italian Wife (2 page)

‘She’s lucky,’ the nurse commented quietly.

‘Lucky! You call this lucky!’

‘Yes, Dottore. She was lucky that you were in the market beside her and you restarted her heart when she was shot. You pumped God’s good life-giving air into her lungs. Our blessed Virgin Mary was watching over your daughter today and the good Lord is giving her strength now to stay with us.’

Papa grunted. He was never one to argue against blind faith, though he possessed none himself. He claimed it did more good for his patients than any number of pills and potions.

‘So why wasn’t your Virgin Mary watching over her dead husband too?’ he muttered sourly.

Luigi. Luigi.

The sight of my husband’s eyes, blank as a doll’s, came into my mind and sucked the breath out of me.

‘Oxygen!’ my father bellowed. ‘Get her oxygen!’

There was a flurry of hospital noises around me and the soft sound of the nurse intoning a prayer for my soul.

‘Don’t, Isabella.’ I could feel Papa’s hot anger crushing my chest. ‘Don’t you dare die on me,
cara
mia
.’

Papa, it’s all right. Don’t grieve for me. I love you, but I want to be with Luigi and my baby. Let me go.

But he didn’t listen. Papa never listened. A mask was pressed to my face and oxygen was pumped into my lungs. This was my second chance. A new life. Whether I wanted it or not.

2

BELLINA 1932

Ten Years Later

The air vibrated to the sound of pigeons and the sun streamed down on the newly constructed buildings in the piazza. To Isabella’s eye some were a little too grand. Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, had decreed that this brand new town of Bellina must display the past glories of Ancient Rome in its architecture. He wanted its people to revel in the fact that Italy’s Roman eagle had once dominated the world.

But all those arches. And columns. And marble colonnades. All adorning the Fascist Party headquarters. Did they really need to be quite so massive? Or quite so grandiose? Isabella’s fingers itched to redesign them. She was an architect, but was only one of the many lowly assistants to Dottore Architetto Martino, the chief architect here in Bellina, so what did she know?

Very little, according to Martino.

She sipped her scalding coffee, stretched her bare legs into a patch of autumn sunlight and looked around at the people crossing the huge piazza. There weren’t many of them and they didn’t linger. A few were idling outside the cream curved façade of the elegant cinema. The film
L’Armata Azzurra
was showing there today – an Air Force adventure. Mussolini was a great believer in cinemas. Keep the populace entertained and they won’t bother you. That was his theory and Isabella wasn’t going to argue with it. But she suspected that the people of Bellina weren’t quite as docile as Il Duce liked to think they were and that they didn’t like the sense of being watched from the Fascist headquarters which was raised up above the piazza by a dozen sweeping steps. She didn’t like that feeling herself.

Every year Isabella took this day in October off work. She would sit, sunk in silence, wearing the sleeveless peach dress that Luigi used to like so much, the breeze raising the small hairs on her skin. During the past week, as this day drew nearer she’d started to get jumpy, and by the time this morning dawned, she was wide-eyed and sleepless.

It was ten years to the day. The day that she and Luigi were shot. It had been hot that day and was hot again now. She had taught herself self-control for the rest of the year, but on this one day each October she allowed herself to cry. Not so that anyone could see. Of course not. But deep inside herself. Something split open, she could feel it, and the tears flowed unseen. She cried for Luigi. For her unborn child. For that young easy-going girl she used to be. That October day had ruptured the fabric of her. It was that simple.

She had no idea that a decade later her life was about to be disrupted again.

She was sitting in Gino’s café, the only permitted café in the piazza because Fascists didn’t like people to gather anywhere in large numbers unless they’d organised it themselves. She was sipping coffee – strong and full of bite, just the way Gino knew she liked it – and all around her she could spy touches of her handiwork in the grand municipal buildings that bordered each side of the square. They sparkled in white marble, interspersed with intricate terracotta brickwork, their arches and their columns and wide spacious steps dwarfing the people who used them. These buildings were designed to impress. To remind each person, who stopped to admire them, of the power of the State.

Isabella found it hard to explain – even to herself – exactly why she loved pouring so much of herself into these buildings. All she knew was that it filled with warmth a place within her that was stark and cold. Sitting here in the sunshine she could laugh at her passion for injecting life and breath into the stone and mortar of this town, knowing it was this passion that always had the power to bring her back from despair. Even on this dark day it made her happy, and she exhaled a string of curling coffee steam with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

The important thing to remember was this: for that moment she was happy and it was that brief sliver of happiness that made her vulnerable. If she had been in her usual rush, her brow creased in a frown of concentration, her mind churning over her next piece of architectural work and her eyes preoccupied with whatever was taking form within her head, the woman with the wild hair who hurried into the piazza dragging a child behind her would have chosen someone else to approach. And if not, Isabella would have said
no, I’m too busy
. Nor would the child have been willing to remain with her, a stranger who had lost her smile somewhere along the way.

So it was that moment of happiness that Isabella blamed for what happened next. But how could she not be happy when she was looking at the tower? It was so beautiful. Of course she was biased because she had designed it herself. It towered the way a tower should, square and tall, surmounted by a great bronze bell, its pale travertino marble shimmering like a shaft of light, sending out a message of dominance to the whole region. It was attached to the Fascist Party headquarters. Oriolo Frezzotti, the architect in charge of the whole project of constructing Mussolini’s six new towns, caught sight of Isabella’s design on one of his lightning visits from Rome and gave Dottore Martino, her immediate superior, no option. Frezzotti had overruled his objections with an extravagant wave of his hand.

‘Don’t let it go to your head,’ Martino had growled at her.

‘No, dottore.’

And to make sure she didn’t get ideas above her station he’d stuck her to work on gutterings and facings for the next few months. But Isabella didn’t mind. She loved her work as an architect, all aspects of it, and from her office window she watched her tower grow block by block.

‘
Scusi
, signora.’

Isabella looked at the woman. She didn’t know her or her child. She put her coffee cup down on the table and inspected her, squinting against the sun. The woman was slight and dressed in black shapeless clothes with a face it would be easy to overlook, except there was an urgency about her that made Isabella pay attention. She wore an anxious expression, her eyes darting around her as she stood beside the café table and stretched her hand out to Isabella, palm upwards. For a moment Isabella thought she was begging. But she was mistaken. The woman was offering something. It was a brass crucifix on a chain that was dull and grimy. Isabella shook her head. She didn’t want it.

‘No,
grazie
, no.’

The woman looked a few years younger than Isabella, maybe no more than twenty-five, and the child, a girl, could have been anywhere between eight or ten. Both possessed unkempt black hair and a nervousness that was unsettling to be close to. Isabella wanted them to go away. She looked over at her tower, hoping they’d be gone when she looked back. She was more at ease with buildings than with people. Ten years ago she’d lost her trust in people, but buildings were solid and dependable. You knew where you were with a building. That’s why she’d worked so hard to put herself through architectural college after her recovery from hospital, to give herself something she could depend on.

‘Signora,’ the woman said, ‘I have to go somewhere for just a few minutes. It is very important. Will you please watch my child for me while I am gone?’ Her eyes flicked a secretive glance at her daughter. ‘She will be good.’

The child stared at her own feet. She was dressed in a simple blue cotton frock and had sunk her hands deep into its patch pockets. She didn’t seem any keener on this idea than Isabella was.

‘Well, I’m not sure…’ Isabella said uneasily.

She looked for help at the next table but the man seated there with his pipe didn’t lift his nose out of his newspaper. If it had been any other day she would have said a firm no, and maybe things would have turned out differently for all three of them. But it had to happen on the one day of the year when she was not her usual self-contained self.

‘Please, signora,
per favore
?’

The mother placed the crucifix on the metal table where it clattered noisily.

‘I don’t want your crucifix,’ Isabella said immediately.

‘I will be quick. Very quick.’

Isabella saw sudden tears fill the woman’s eyes and her pleading face loomed closer as she leaned down to Isabella.

‘You are a good person,’ the woman told her. ‘I see it in your face. You are full of resolve. Be kind to me.’

Isabella opened her mouth to object. She didn’t want to be told she was good or full of resolve, not while she was sitting quietly minding her own business over a coffee, but the woman leaned closer and said in a low intimate hiss, ‘They know who killed your bastard husband.’

Isabella saw the tremor in her own hand as she put down her cup and heard it rattle in its saucer.

‘Who do you mean? Who are “they”?’

The woman pulled back and jabbed an accusing finger in the direction of the Party headquarters. ‘Them.’ She spat on the ground in disgust. ‘Those Fascist murderers.’ Her mouth took on a strange shape that Isabella only recognised as a bitter smile when she heard the laugh that came from it. ‘
They
will pay for it now.’

‘How do you know that my husband died?’

But the black-clad figure was already striding away, almost running down to the far end of the piazza, scattering the pigeons. Isabella stood up, aghast.

‘Wait!’

‘Mamma won’t wait.’

She looked down at the child’s mass of dark curls. She was too thin, all elbows and collarbones.

‘What do you mean, she won’t wait?’

Her narrow shoulders shrugged, her face didn’t look up. ‘She told me I must wait here with you.’

Isabella sat down again. She wasn’t certain what had just happened. She didn’t know anything about children. Since the bullet she couldn’t have any
bambini
of her own and she’d gone out of her way to avoid them, though in Italy she couldn’t help but be surrounded by them much of the time. She tried to keep them at a distance when she could, but this time she had no choice.

‘Please, sit down.’ She waved a hand towards the chair opposite.

The girl slid into it, taking up no space.

‘I’m Isabella Berotti. What’s your name?’

‘Rosa.’

‘So, Rosa, do you live in Bellina?’

‘No.’

‘Just visiting?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘Rome.’

Her voice was so slight, Isabella had to prick her ears to hear her.

‘Did you come by train with your mother?’

She nodded. Or rather, her curls nodded. She still wasn’t looking up. They reached a brief impasse and Isabella finished her coffee to cover the awkward pause. She felt sorry for the child. Stuck with a woman who could find no words for her. In desperation her gaze returned to the figure of the mother racing across the sunlit piazza towards the Fascist Party headquarters. Isabella couldn’t bring herself to abandon the child and chase after her, but she was shaken by the woman’s words.

‘How about something to drink, Rosa, while we wait?’

‘No.’ But the girl added a polite, ‘
Grazie
.’ It was almost drowned out by the cooing of the pigeons that drifted around the tables.

‘An ice cream then?’ Isabella called out to Gino before Rosa could refuse again. ‘
Uno gelato
,
per favore
, Gino.’

When it arrived at the table with a flourish from Gino, the girl gave Isabella a direct look for the first time. Her deep-set brown eyes were as wild as her hair and in a panic. Isabella felt a jolt of dismay for the pale-skinned face.

‘I can go,’ the girl said quickly. ‘If you want me to.’

‘No, Rosa. Of course not. I want you to stay. Your mother has left you in my care.’ Isabella smiled at her.

She didn’t smile back, but the panic in her young eyes seemed to die down a fraction. Isabella had an urge to hold her small angular body, to tell her not to worry so much. She was too young to worry. Isn’t that what Italian mammas do instinctively? Provide hugs and kisses? All Isabella had to offer her was ice cream.

‘Eat up,’ she encouraged.

The girl took up the spoon and steadily consumed the ice cream with quiet concentration. The warmth of the day was beginning to build and the sun was picking out the
fasces
, the symbol of Fascism that was carved above the entrance of each of the municipal buildings in the piazza, painting them golden. Isabella’s gaze shifted back to her tower.

‘Rosa, do you have any idea what your mother meant when she said “They will pay for it now”?’

The child remained silent.

Isabella hunted for another topic of conversation, swapping to an easier one. ‘Do you like Bellina?’

Rosa frowned and glanced around the beautiful piazza that was the heart of the town. Its pavements were a mosaic of marble, of pinks and greys and unexpected bands of speckled white in geometric designs that gave endless pleasure to the eye of pedestrians. In the centre rose a fountain – not one of Rome’s baroque monstrosities, but a simple, yet powerful, vast globe of black granite with a circle of water-jets surrounding it. Bellina had risen from the watery marshes and this was the symbol of the glorious new world that Fascism was creating for the workers of Italy.