The Italian Wife (3 page)

‘Do you like Bellina?’ Isabella asked again.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

But the girl was already back at her ice cream, hunched over it, blocking out all else.

Isabella knew that it must be excruciating to be abandoned with a stranger, so if Rosa wanted silence, that was fine with her. The sun was behind her, throwing soft purple shadows over the mosaic flooring, and Isabella sat back in her chair, letting her gaze drift up to her tower with its brass-faced clock that struck the hours.

Immediately she noticed a figure emerge on to the viewing platform at the top of the tower. She felt a rush of pride that someone liked the town well enough to climb the two hundred and sixty steps to gain a wider view of it. Even from here she could see it was a woman. She had wild dark hair. With surprise Isabella realised it was Rosa’s mother. Rosa was sitting with her back to the tower, so Isabella opened her mouth to say
Look, there’s your mamma. Wave to her, Rosa
, but in the split second it took for the words to travel from her brain to her mouth, she saw the woman in black clamber up on to the parapet.

She teetered there. Her arms spread out sideways, holding her balance on the edge, and a breeze snatched at the folds of her long black dress and tangled the loose strands of her hair. Behind her the empty blue sky seemed to watch and wait in silence. Isabella expected her to shout to Rosa, to cry out across the length of the piazza:
Look at me
. But she didn’t. She dipped her head, stared down at the people far beneath her and without any warning leapt off the top. She performed a perfect swallow-dive to the marble steps below.

No sound emerged from Isabella’s mouth. How she kept her scream inside, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t stop herself from jumping to her feet. Rosa looked up, wary of her, but her attention was distracted by a man’s shout behind her and a woman’s high-pitched scream. The child started to turn towards the group that Isabella could see gathering around the steps.

‘A dog has bitten someone,’ Isabella said quickly, scooping the crucifix into her pocket. ‘Rosa, I’ve just remembered that I have to collect something from my home.’ She reached out, took hold of the girl’s skinny arm and pulled her to her feet. ‘You can come with me. It’s not far. We won’t be long.’

She didn’t know if it was because the girl was used to being told what to do or because she had finished her ice cream and was ready for other amusement, but she allowed herself to be marched out of the Piazza del Popolo without a murmur.

Neither of them mentioned her mother.

Isabella rushed Rosa along Via Augustus. The street of small shops with apartments above was quiet at this hour but in the dusty heat there lingered the smell of
arancini
and fried onions from someone’s kitchen. Everywhere was coated in a pale layer of building dust that didn’t want to shift, but hung in the air. It had a habit of getting between teeth and under fingernails.

Isabella was moving so quickly that she felt her limp grow worse. She was aware of people staring, watching her out of the corners of their eyes, and after all these years she thought she’d be used to it but it still stung. It had taken three years’ hard sweat and seven operations to get her walking again but right now she was more concerned with getting Rosa as far away from the Piazza del Popolo as she could.

How do you tell a child her mother just died?

Isabella was shaken by a deep anger towards the mysterious dark-haired woman who would do this to her daughter. As they approached her home, she eased up on her pace and gently released Rosa’s arm.

‘It’s not far,’ she assured the child, waving a hand towards the elegant apartment blocks that lay ahead. This was the most stylish and expensive part of town. It was the quarter where the streets were widest and where an abundance of young trees had been planted that would one day transform them into leafy avenues. This was where the top government employees lived. There were forty different designs for the houses and apartment buildings in Bellina, the forty designs repeated over and over again in a set order. It gave the town a symmetry and a sense of being part of a greater orderly scheme that Mussolini wanted the people to value.

The layout of Bellina followed the designs of Ancient Rome with a central forum and the town divided into four quadrants. The roads radiated out from the main piazza on a grid system. This made for efficient movement of people and traffic along the ramrod-straight streets, as well as ease of navigation, so that it was hard to get lost in Bellina. Mussolini intended the people of Italy to know exactly where they were going.

‘Do you have relatives in Rome, Rosa?’

‘No.’

‘Your father?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh, Rosa, I’m sorry.’

The girl flicked her head round to look at Isabella, her large almost-black eyes fixing on her with the knife-sharp curiosity that only a child knows how to summon up. ‘Why are you sorry?’

‘Because it’s sad for someone to lose their father?’

‘I didn’t
lose
him. He died.’

‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Aunts or uncles?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Just you. And your mother.’

‘Yes.’

Isabella touched the girl’s curls lightly. They felt warm from the sun and springy, far more childish and boisterous than the solemn face turned towards her.

‘There’s something wrong,’ Rosa said warily.

She was quick, this child. Quick to pick up on what Isabella was trying to hide, but Isabella was saved from saying more by the appearance of a pair of tall metal gates that she reached for with relief.

‘Here we are,’ she told Rosa. ‘This is where I live.’

They walked through the gates into a spacious courtyard that was scorched by the sun and surrounded by three very modern four-storey apartment blocks with long curved balconies and silky-smooth stone exteriors. A yellow-tailed lizard was sunning itself on the stone path, too lazy to move, and Isabella could hear music playing in one of the ground floor apartments, an aria from
Tosca
. So Papa was home.

She found herself inspecting the exterior of the apartment through the child’s eyes, seeing the Modernist beauty of it, the stark and stylish plainness that was such a contrast to the suffocating fussiness of the old cities. Isabella loved its clean refreshing lines but she wasn’t sure what Rosa would make of it. The shutters were half closed against the brilliance of the cobalt autumn sky. The courtyard consisted of stone pathways around a central dolphin fountain but there was not a blade of grass yet to be seen. The seeds had been planted but the town needed time to grow into its own skin. There was just a small olive tree on the left that her father had planted, but its young branches were dry and brittle. It looked no happier here than he was.

‘Here we are, Rosa,’ she said again cheerily. ‘Come on in.’

Isabella’s father was sitting in his favourite armchair, a large ruby-coloured velvet wing-chair that was so old it wrapped itself around him. In his hands, as always, lay a book. Dark, densely carved furniture cluttered the heavy shadows within the room, while on the table beside him stood an open bottle of red wine and a glass. Next to it the gramophone was playing,
Tosca
spinning hypnotically on the turntable.

‘This is Rosa,’ Isabella announced.

The girl flashed Dr Marco Cantini a brief glance before fixing her gaze on the terracotta-tiled floor.

‘
Buongiorno
, Rosa.’ His eyes crinkled into a large smile of welcome under heavy eyebrows. ‘To what do we owe this pleasure?’

Rosa’s mouth remained firmly closed in complete silence, the ultimate weapon of a child.

‘Sit down, please, Rosa,’ Isabella said, and steered her to a seat at the table. She hoped the girl would know better than to touch the gramophone or she would provoke Papa’s wrath. Isabella poured wine into the glass and drank half of it straight down but she was shocked to see the hand holding the glass was shaking.

‘Papa, I need a word with you.’ She glanced pointedly at the child. ‘In private. Outside in the courtyard, please.’

‘Send the girl out there if you want to —’ He stopped. Looked at her hand. Without further comment he exchanged his reading spectacles for his distance ones and strode out into the bright sunlight. Isabella was hot from hurrying through the streets and led her father into a cool patch of shade.

Dr Marco Cantini was a big man with a barrel chest and a large important-looking head. He kept his grey hair cropped short but his moustache and eyebrows remained so stubbornly jet-black and luxuriant that he rarely had the heart to trim them. He liked to laugh a lot. Sometimes Isabella suspected that his patients came to him more for his laughter than for his pills and potions.

‘What is it?’ he demanded.

Isabella wanted to say
Hold
my hand
. Like ten years before. But instead she took a mouthful of the wine she had brought out with her to make the words slide over her ash-dry tongue.

‘I saw a woman kill herself today, Papa.’

His hooded eyes didn’t even widen. Her father had probably seen too many dead people in his time as a doctor.

‘She jumped off my tower.’ Her voice sounded odd, even to herself.

‘Off the top of Party headquarters?’

She nodded. ‘Head first.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘The woman came up to me in the Piazza del Popolo and asked me to watch her daughter. It was Rosa, the young girl inside. She promised to return quickly and I believed her but instead she threw herself off the top of the tower and I dragged Rosa away from the square, so she doesn’t know about it yet, hasn’t realised, and,’ her words were breaking up into fragments, ‘and I understand that I have to tell her…’ She paused. ‘But I am so angry at her mother for —’

‘There is no point in anger at death, Isabella. I learned that a long time ago.’

‘But I can’t stop it, Papa.’

They both stared at the bright splash of wine left in the glass in her hand. It was swirling up and around the curved sides as if it had its own private torment.

‘I have to take Rosa to the police station…’ Isabella started.

But her father took a long stride towards her. He was tall and always held himself upright as if he believed he belonged up there in the more rarefied atmosphere, but he bent down now to peer closely at her face.

‘Are you all right, Isabella?’

‘Yes. But I’m worried about Rosa.’

She didn’t tell him that she kept picturing the mother’s dead eyes at the bottom of the tower, wondering if they were like Luigi’s. Outstaring the sun. But it wasn’t the kind of thing Isabella and her father told each other. There was always a gulf between them, however hard they sought to avert their eyes from it. Her father had never forgiven her for marrying one of Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
Thugs
, Dr Cantini called them, the word ugly in his mouth.

Isabella finished off the wine and swung around to return indoors but Dr Cantini put out his hand as though to hold on to her. It only hovered for a moment without touching, then fell to his side. They rarely touched each other, the two of them. They were very un-Italian in that way. He did so much laughing and touching in his work as a doctor that at times it seemed there was none left for his daughter. She understood that. They may not touch often, but they talked. They both liked words.

‘Isabella, I am going to telephone Sister Consolata. She will be able to help.’

‘I’m not sure that…’

His large face thrust even closer. She could see suspicion in the deep lines that ran vertically down his cheeks and she knew he was assessing her, judging her, the way he would a sick patient.

‘Do you need a shot of something?’ he asked.

She shook her head adamantly. ‘No.’

A flush crawled up her cheek to her hairline. They both knew that her father could remember a time not so long ago when she would be begging him for a shot of something to ease the pain. She wanted to say,
I’m all right now,
I’m
back in control. Rosa is the one with the problem, not me, Papa.
But the words were lost somewhere in the gulf between them, so she hurried out of the courtyard back into the house to find Rosa, and the dimness of the room with its heavy mosquito mesh over the windows washed over her. Rosa was no longer seated on the chair. She was standing on tiptoe in front of Dr Cantini’s marble clock that rested on a dark mahogany cabinet. She had prised open its glass face and had moved the hands, so that it was now striking twelve noon. The chimes rang out in the silent room like a death knell for her mother.

At the sound of Isabella’s footsteps on the tiles Rosa turned her head and gazed at her with mournful eyes.

‘She’s not coming back for me, is she?’ she said.

3

Roberto Falco had never photographed a dead woman. A dead ox once, yes, before it was spitted and roasted. A dead woman, no. She lay inside his camera, upside down and in miniature – only four inches by five – and he found it impossible to look away. As he stalked around the smashed body on the ground with his Graflex in his hands, winding the shutter cloth on its internal spools and popping up the viewfinder on the back, he was disgusted to find himself relieved that she wouldn’t move. He didn’t want her to spoil the shot.

It was only when he lowered the camera to change the film sheet and looked at the scene with his naked eye that the horror of it gripped his guts and he felt a wave of sorrow for the dead woman. She was spreadeagled on her front. Her head hung down several steps lower than her feet, as she lay there in her black garments. Limbs snapped in fifty places. Bones poking up through flesh. Yet the fingers of one hand were curled in a tight fist as though she’d made one last desperate attempt to cling on to life before she hit the steps.

There was blood. Of course there was blood. He dragged his eyes from her body, removed the film holder from the camera and replaced it with another from his leather equipment case with practised skill. His fingers worked smoothly despite the shakes. He craned back his head, squinting up at the milky-white tower, assessing the exposure he would need – most likely 1/20 second at f/16 and the Schneider wide angle lens. The tall white building rose sharp and menacing against a backdrop of wind-swept sky, but as he stared at it the tower seemed to lean over the sad little scene at its foot, watching the people in the square below with satisfaction. Roberto took an instant dislike to it.