Authors: Katherine Webb
Clare
It’s always a shock to see how much Pip has grown during term time, while he’s away for weeks on end, but this time it seems like something more fundamental has changed. Something more than his height, the length of his face or the width of his shoulders. Clare studies him, and tries to put her finger on it. He has fallen asleep with his head against the dusty window of the train and his dog-eared copy of
Bleak House
resting against his chest. Fine strands of his hair have fallen forward onto his forehead, and shake with the movement of the carriage. With his eyes shut and his mouth drooping slightly open, she can still see the child he was. The little, lonely person she first met. His face is more angular now – the jaw stronger, the brows heavier, the nose slightly longer and more pointed. But his light brown hair is as flyaway as ever, and he doesn’t need to shave yet. Clare looks closely, checking. There’s no shadow of whiskers on his chin or top lip. Her relief at this is profound, and makes her uneasy.
She turns to look out of the window. The landscape is unchanging. Mile after mile of farmland; wheat fields, for the most part, interspersed now and then with orchards of faded olive trees, and gnarled almond trees with their trunks twisted and black. When Pip is a man, an adult, when he finishes all his schooling, when he leaves home for good … Clare swallows, fearfully. But she can’t prevent it, of course. She can’t cling on to him. She won’t let herself. Perhaps this is what has changed, this time: he’s become enough like a grown man that she can no longer deny it’s happening, and that one day soon he will separate himself from her, and start his own life. She’s not his mother, so perhaps she should feel the wrench of this a bit less. But a mother has an unbreakable bond, the bond of blood and heritance, of knowing that her child was once a part of her, and in some ways always will be. Clare doesn’t have that. Her bond with Pip feels more breakable, more delicate; perhaps every bit as precious, but also with the potential to melt away without trace. She fears that most of all. He is only fifteen, she reassures herself. Still a child. The train gives a lurch to one side, and Pip’s head bangs against the glass. He starts awake, snapping his mouth closed, squinting.
‘All right there, Pip?’ Clare says, smiling. He nods affably.
‘We must be nearly there.’ He yawns like a cat, unashamedly. His teeth are just starting to crowd at the front, jostling for space.
‘Pip,’ she protests. ‘It’s like staring into the abyss.’
‘Sorry, Clare,’ he mumbles.
‘We are nearly there.’ Clare gazes out at the bleached grass of a field, blurring past. ‘We
must
be nearly there.’
Her mouth feels as stale as her crumpled clothes and her sticky skin. The train is stuffy, airless – it’s no wonder Pip keeps nodding off. She might have done so herself, but Boyd cautioned her about the Italians and their light fingers, so she’s too worried about their purses and possessions, and what Boyd would say if they were robbed after he’d warned her. She wants to stretch her legs and wash her hair, but at the same time, as a few scattered buildings come into view, she suddenly doesn’t want to arrive at Gioia del Colle. There’s something wonderful about travelling – about being moved across the long miles of the earth with no sense of responsibility, their aim achieved purely by waiting patiently. And, because she and Pip are alone in the compartment, there’s only the ease and pleasure of his company. No manners to be minded, no struggle to find small talk. Their long silences are thoughtful, companionable, never uncomfortable. And she’s also nervous about what waits at the end of the journey.
Boyd has committed them to spending the entire summer with people she has never met, and knows precious little about. No amount of protest would sway him from the plan; and she couldn’t even write down her reluctance in a letter to him, as she preferred to – to make sure she kept her argument straight and her tone of voice even. Not when he was already out in Italy, and the instruction for her and Pip to join him came faintly down a rustling phone line. In desperation she’d suggested a fortnight, rather than the whole season, but Boyd hadn’t seemed to hear her. And just like that, the restful summer at home she’d been looking forward to – alone with Pip, watching the sweet peas climb their bamboo canes and playing whist in the shade of the high garden wall – had vanished. The Italians who will be their hosts are clients of Boyd’s; Cardetta, an old acquaintance from New York, and his wife, who is charming. Beyond that, she knows only that they are rich.
The train has passed cone-shaped huts built of rock, like strange hats discarded by stone giants. It has passed fields full of working men, swinging scythes; dark, thin men who did not look up as the train clattered by. It has passed small carriages pulled by donkeys, and farm wagons pulled by oxen, and not a single motor car. Nothing, beyond the train itself, to betray that the year is 1921, not 1821. Clare is struggling to picture what rich might look like, this far south; it worries her that there might not be electricity, or indoor plumbing; that the water might make them sick. In the north they say that the country south of Rome is best avoided, and that the country south of Naples is a barren no-man’s-land, peopled by sub-humans – a godless, under-evolved race too base to drag itself out of poverty and dissolution. Pip’s school had been happy to release him early for the summer break when she wrote to say that they would be taking him to Italy.
What better way for Philip to finish the academic year than by visiting the very treasures of art and civilised thought he has spent the recent months studying?
wrote the master. Clare let him picture Rome, Florence and Venice, since that was the conclusion he’d leapt to, and left it at that. She herself has never heard of any of the major towns here in the south: Bari, Lecce, Taranto. And the town where they are headed, Gioia del Colle, was difficult to find on the map.
Just half an hour later the train creeps into the station, between two near-deserted platforms. Clare smiles at Pip as they stand and stretch and gather themselves, but it’s she who wants reassurance, not Pip. Hot, heavy air is the first thing to greet them, and it has the smell of blood on it. The unmistakable metal reek of gore. The deep, fortifying breath Clare had been taking sticks in her throat, and she looks around, repulsed. The sky is an immaculate blue, the sun low and yellow in the west. They move away from the hissing train, and the buzz of insects fills their ears.
‘What’s that smell?’ says Pip, holding the creased sleeve of his blazer to his nose. But then they hear a shout, and see a figure waving from the window of a car.
‘Ahoy, dearly beloveds!’ Boyd’s voice is tight with excitement. He waves his hat and laughs, and when he emerges from the vehicle it’s with an unfolding of long limbs, the unfurling of a long spine. He is tall and narrow and, ever fearful of appearing clumsy, he moves with exaggerated grace.
‘Ahoy!’ Clare calls, relieved. She has brought them this far, and has the soothing feeling of handing control back to her husband. She and Pip cross quickly to the car, and Clare turns to wave the porter over with their luggage.
‘Make sure you’ve all your bags. I wouldn’t put it past them to miss one and carry it all the way to Taranto,’ says Boyd.
‘No, this is all of them.’ Boyd hugs Clare, hard, then turns to Pip and hesitates. This is new, too – this slight awkwardness between them. It tells Clare that Boyd can see his son’s encroaching adulthood just as clearly as she can. They shake hands, then smile, then bashfully embrace.
‘Philip. You’re so tall! Look – far taller than Clare now,’ Boyd says.
‘I’ve been taller than Clare since the Christmas before last, Father,’ Pip points out, slighted.
‘Have you?’ Boyd looks troubled; his smile turns strange, as though he ought to have known or remembered this. Clare is quick to deflect him.
‘Well, you do spend most of your time sitting in a chair, or on a bicycle, or in a boat. It’s hard to tell your height,’ she says. Just then the breeze blows and brings the tang of blood and violence anew. Boyd pales; what’s left of his smile vanishes.
‘Come on, climb in. The slaughterhouse isn’t half a mile south of here, and I can’t bear the smell of it.’
The car looks brand new, although there’s a fine veil of dust dulling its crimson paintwork. Pip examines it at appreciative length before they climb in. The driver, dark and inscrutable, barely nods at Clare as he and the porter secure their bags, but his eyes return to her, again and again. She tries not to notice. He would be handsome but for a harelip; a neat divide in his upper lip, and in the gum behind it, where his teeth are twisted and uneven.
‘You might get a few looks, dear girl,’ Boyd tells her in low tones, as the car pulls away. ‘It’s the blond hair. Rather a novelty down here.’
‘I see,’ she says. ‘And do you get looks, too?’ She smiles, and Boyd takes her hand. His hair is also fair, though now it’s filling with grey it looks more silvery, and seems to have an absence of colour. It’s thin across the top of his scalp; his hairline has crept back and back from his forehead and temples, like an ebb tide slipping from a shore. This is what Clare notices about him when they have been apart for a while, though this time it has only been a month: that he is growing old. He asks how their journey was and what they saw, what they ate and if they slept. He asks how their garden in Hampstead looked, before they left it, and when Pip’s school report is due. He asks all this with a strange desperation, a kind of manic neediness that immediately puts Clare on edge, at some bone-deep level where memory and experience reside.
Not again
, she begs silently.
Not again
. She sifts hurriedly through her mind for something she’s missed – some sign, something he might have said on the phone, or before he even left; some hint of what the problem might be. She has done as he asked, and brought herself and Pip all this way to him, and yet there’s something wrong. There’s clearly something wrong. They leave the station behind in a cloud of pale dust, and though fresher air comes pummelling in through the windows, Clare is certain she can still smell blood.
Ettore
Piazza Plebiscito is full of men dressed in the typical black. These are the
giornatari
, the day labourers; men with nothing to their name, and no means to feed themselves but the strength of their backs. In the shadowy dawn they are a dark scattering against the pale stones of the pavement. The murmur of voices is low; the men shuffle their feet, cough, exchange a few low words. Here and there an argument starts, shouts ring out and there’s a scuffle. Once he and Valerio are in their midst Ettore can smell the grease in their hair, the sweat of all the days before on their clothes, the hot, stale fug of their breath. It’s a smell that has been with him, all around him, since the first days he can remember. It’s the smell of hard work and scarcity. It’s the smell of men as animals, muscle and bone made hard by graft. The overseers are there, on their horses or standing holding them by the reins, or sitting in little open-topped carts. They hire five men here, thirty there; one shepherd wants a pair of men to help trim his flock’s feet. It’s easy work but he can pay next to nothing, and the men eye him in disgust, knowing that one or other of them will have to take his low wages.
This is how it was always arranged, until the Great War. Those that want work come to the piazza, those that want workers meet them there. A wage will be offered, and men selected. There is no negotiation. Then, after the war, things changed. For two years, things were different – the worker’s unions and the socialists won some concessions, because during the war men like Ettore and Valerio, who had so little cause to fight, were promised things to keep them in the trenches. They were promised land, better wages, an end to the unending hardship of life, and afterwards they fought to make the landowners and proprietors keep those promises. For a few febrile months, it seemed like they might have won. They established a closed shop of labour, in which only union men could be hired, and no one from outside the county. Wages and hours were fixed. The labour exchange kept a roster to make sure each man got his fair share of work, and there was to be a union representative on each farm, to make sure conditions were met. This was only the year before, towards the end of 1920. But somehow it’s all coming unravelled again. The tide in this simmering feud, which is generations – centuries – old, has turned again.
It’s a strange conflict – one around which everyday life keeps moving like a river around rocks. It has to, because the men must eat, and to eat they must work. So life must go on, even when the rocks in question are things like the massacre at Masseria Girardi Natale, the summer before, when workers armed with only their tools and their anger were shot down by the proprietor and his mounted guards. Now the contracts all the proprietors signed are being ignored, and men who protest aren’t hired. There are rumours of a new type of brute squad: teams of thugs led by veteran officers – captains and lieutenants tainted by the madness of the trenches, who remember the peasants’ reluctance to fight, and despise them for it. The peasants are used to hired gangs –
mazzieri
, named after the
mazza
, the cudgels they carry – but these new ones are something else. They are being armed and abetted by the police, unofficially of course. And they have a new name – they are the
fasci di combattimento
. They are members of the new fascist party. And they have a single-mindedness that’s scaring the men.
Some nights Ettore goes to a bar and reads the newspapers out loud to the unlettered. He reads from the
Corriere delle Puglie
, and from
La Conquista
, and from
Avanti!
. He reads of attacks on syndicalist leaders, on chambers of labour, and on socialist town halls in other towns. In Gioia del Colle, the old way of recruiting has slowly crept back into the piazza, and the two sides stare at one another across this bitter divide – workers and employers. Each waiting to see who will blink first. In February there was a general strike in protest at the massing and arming of the new squads, and their brutality, and the breaking of the contracts. The strike held for three days but it was like a finger pressed to a widening crack in a dam; a dam behind which the tide is rising inexorably.
Ettore and Valerio push their way towards the overseer from Masseria Vallarta; a man well into his sixties with drooping white moustaches and an immobile expression, as solid and unreadable as the trunk of a tree. Pino is already there; he catches Ettore’s eye and jerks his chin to greet him. Giuseppe Bianco; Giuseppino; Pino for short. Pino and Ettore have lived shoulder to shoulder since they were in the cradle. They are the same age, have seen the same things, suffered the same hopes and hardships; they’ve had the same patchy, soon-curtailed education, and had wild times at Saint’s Day festivals more pagan than holy. They’ve been to war together. Pino has the face of a classical hero, with enormous soft eyes, warm and brown rather than the usual black. He has curved lips, the upper protruding slightly over the lower; curling hair and an open expression far out of place in the piazza. His heart is open too; he’s too good for this life. There’s only one thing the two men do not share, and it’s driven a wedge between them this year: Pino is married to his sweetheart, but Ettore has lost his. All the girls used to quarrel to catch Pino’s eye. They knew a soft touch when they saw one, and fancied waking up next to that face for the rest of their lives. Now that he’s wed some of them try just as hard, but Pino is faithful to Luna, his wife. Little Luna, with her buoyant breasts and her hair hanging right down to the broad spread of her buttocks. Pino is the only man Ettore knows who can find a real smile before dawn in the piazza.
He smiles now, and thumps Ettore’s upper arm companionably.
‘What’s new?’ he says.
‘Nothing at all.’ Ettore shrugs.
‘Luna has something for the baby. For Iacopo,’ says Pino, and looks proud. ‘She’s been sewing again – a shirt. She’s even stitched his initials into it for him.’ Luna works in fits and starts for a seamstress, and carefully collects whatever scraps of thread and fabric she can spirit away. There’s never enough to make clothes for adults, but Iacopo now has a vest, a hat and a pair of tiny slippers.
‘She should be setting such things by for when you have your own baby,’ says Ettore, and Pino grins. He longs for babies – a herd of them, a flock. How or whether they’ll all be fed is not something he lets worry him. He seems to think they’ll be self-sustaining, like hearth spirits or will-o’-the-wisps, like
putti
.
‘Iacopo will have outgrown them by then. I’m sure Paola will lend them back.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘You mean she’ll want to keep them, to remember how little he was?’ says Pino. Ettore grunts. What he’d meant was that he’s not so certain Iacopo will outgrow the little things so soon. His nephew is reedy and too quiet. So many babies die. Ettore frets about him, frowns over him. Whenever Paola sees this she shoves him away, and curses. She thinks his anxiety will coalesce and bring some grim prophecy down on her son.
The man from Masseria Vallarta takes a sheaf of paper from his pocket, unfolds it. The waiting men focus their attention on him, watching with steady expectation. It’s a strange ritual – the farm has a harvest to bring in and the men all know it, but even so, they do not trust the man. They do not trust that they will have work until they are standing in the field, working. They do not trust that they will be paid until the bailiff puts the coins into their hands the Saturday after. The overseer catches Ettore’s eye and gives him a hard stare. Ettore stares right back at him. He is a union man, and the overseer knows it; knows his name, and his face. Some have led the strikes and the demonstrations while the others followed, and Ettore is one of the first kind. Or he was – in the six months since he lost Livia he’s done nothing, said nothing; he’s worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, ignoring his hunger and his exhaustion. In all that time, he has spared not a single thought for the revolution, for his brothers, for the starving workers or the ever-present injustices, but the overseers don’t seem to have noticed his change of heart. The absence of his heart.
So there’s a black mark by his name that nothing will shift, but he also works without pause, and attacks the ground with the heaviest mattock; he presents them with a conundrum: a troublemaker who works like a Trojan. The corporal with the white moustaches hires him with the merest nod of his head, marking down his name. Then he flicks his gnarled finger at the others he’s chosen, including Pino, and those men file away to begin the long walk to the farm. Valerio is not chosen. Years of wielding the mattock have shaped his spine, bending him like an overblown tree, and though he’s tried not to cough since they got to the piazza, you can see the effort of containing the spasms in the way his body clenches and shakes from time to time. He cut about half as much wheat as some of the other men yesterday, and the immovable overseer has an infallible memory for such things. Ettore grips his father’s shoulder in parting.
‘Go now to the shepherd, over there. Go now, before others take his lire,’ he says. Valerio nods.
‘Work hard, boy,’ he says, then gives in to his cough. Ettore doesn’t bother to reply. There is no other kind of work, after all.
The sun is rising in a gentle riot of colour by the time they reach the farm. Pino turns his face to it for a minute, shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath, as though, like a plant, the sun will give him the energy to work that day. When the sky is alight like this Ettore thinks of Livia, shielding her black eyes with one hand. When it rains, he thinks of Livia squinting up at the clouds, and smiling as the water hits her skin. When it gets dark he thinks of the times they met beneath the arches of Gioia’s oldest streets, when they would know each other by touch and smell alone, and she would take his questing hand and kiss his fingertips, and send thumps of desire straight to his groin. He knows that his thoughts of her show on his face, and he can tell from Pino’s expression that he sees it – that subtle sinking, a creeping mix of sorrow and frustration; he can see that his oldest friend doesn’t know what to say to him, as long as the moment lasts. They are each given a drink of water and a chunk of bread before work starts. The bread is fresh, which it normally isn’t, and the men tear into it like dogs. The water has the stone grit taste of the cistern. They start work straight afterwards, wriggling their fingers into the wooden hand-guards that are meant to protect them, but which the farmers really like because they extend a man’s grasp, and mean he can gather a bigger sheaf of wheat each time. One man wields the scythe – the taller, stronger ones, with the longest reach – and behind him comes another man, tying the cut stalks into sheaves.
For hours there’s nothing but the swing of blades, the crunch of the cut stalks as they fall and are gathered up. High above their heads black kites ride the hot air, circling; curious about the smell and movement of the working men. From a distance it looks as though the harvest will be good: field after field of golden grain, rolling in the scorching
altina
wind from the south. But up close the men see that the stalks are sparser than they should be, shorter, with too few grains on each ear and too much space between them. The yield will be less than hoped for, and their wages to match. At midday the sun is debilitating; it crushes the men, it weighs them down like chains. The corporal’s horses wilt, hanging their heads and letting their eyelids droop, too fagged to even shake the flies away. The overseer calls a halt and the men rest and have another drink of water, just enough to wet their parched throats. As soon as their shadows have crept two hand spans to one side the overseer checks his watch, rouses them, and work continues.
Pino and Ettore pass each other, working within earshot for a short while as their lines coincide.
‘Luna is trying to buy beans today,’ says Pino, conversationally.
‘I wish her luck. I hope the grocer doesn’t rob her.’
‘She’s smart, my Luna. I think she will get some, and then we’ll have a fine dinner.’ Pino does this a lot – talks about food. Fantasises about food. It seems to help him beat his hunger, but it does the opposite to Ettore, whose stomach writhes and mutters at the thought of fava beans boiled with bay leaves, and maybe some garlic and pepper, and mashed up with strong olive oil. He swallows.
‘Don’t talk about food, Pino,’ he pleads.
‘Sorry, Ettore. I can’t help it. That’s all I dream about: food, and Luna.’
‘Then dream quietly, for fuck’s sake,’ says the man working behind Ettore.
‘I don’t mind if he talks about his wife as long as he doesn’t spare us the details.’ This is from a lad no more than fourteen, who grins lopsidedly at Pino.
‘If I catch you dreaming about my wife, I’ll cut your prick off,’ Pino tells him, angling his scythe towards the boy, lifting its wicked tip; but he isn’t serious, and the boy grins wider, showing them his broken front teeth.
The
altina
picks up, smelling of some distant desert, humming over the grey stone walls of the field and through the leathery leaves of a fig tree in one corner. The ground is dust-dry, the wheat parched, the sky mercilessly clear. The men lick their lips but can’t keep them from cracking. Flies buzz brazenly around their heads and necks, biting, knowing that the men won’t spare the effort to swat them away. Ettore works and tries not to think. He comes across a patch of wild rocket leaves, bitter and mean. He picks all he can find and eats them when nobody is looking, feeling his throat clog with saliva and the hot taste of them. The guards are extra vigilant at this end of the day – eyes sharp for signs of the men slowing down, of surreptitious rests being taken, of the scythe being leant upon, not swung. The man gathering the wheat Ettore cuts has dropped far behind – he keeps straightening up, pressing his fingers into his spine and wincing. The overseer has a long leather whip, coiled at his hip. His hand strays to it, time and again, as though he’d love to use it. Ettore’s stomach clenches even tighter after the snack of rocket leaves; his head starts to feel light, strange, as it often does towards day’s end. His body keeps working, regardless; shoulders swinging the weight of the scythe, back muscles tensing to stop its momentum, twisting him from the waist, hands gripped tight. He can feel every tendon as it rubs over bone, but his thoughts drift away from him, away from the heat and the toil and the suffocating wind.