Authors: Katherine Webb
‘Can I come in? Men are looking for me,’ he says.
Bianca hesitates for a second before she nods and steps aside to let him into their room, which is every bit as cramped and dank as the Taranos’. She returns to her place on a three-legged stool in front of the stove. She looks twice her age.
‘You weren’t followed?’ says Gianni, a watchful presence in a shadowed corner.
‘No. I would not trouble you but they have been to my house once already, and they mean business.’
‘They are attacking anyone who’s ever been a spokesman, or led a strike, or been at a rally,’ says Benedetto, Livia’s oldest brother, a bear of man with gnarled shoulders and a mass of black beard. ‘Anyone whose name they know. Come in, of course. I heard you were at your uncle’s.’ Space is made for Ettore, though there’s nowhere for him to sit but on a straw-filled mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room. He winces as he sinks onto it, noticing the pain in his leg from all the movement of the afternoon.
‘We’ve only a little black pasta for dinner, with some anchovies,’ says Bianca, poking at the contents of an iron pot on the stove.
‘I’m grateful …’ says Ettore. Then he hesitates. His stomach is rumbling and hot with hunger, though he ate a hearty breakfast at the
masseria
, and he realises with shame that he has got used to being full. ‘But in fact I’ve already eaten, earlier. I would not take from you what I do not need.’ Gianni nods and the atmosphere lightens just slightly.
‘All right,’ says Bianca, sounding relieved. Hospitality dictates that guests be fed, but nobody welcomes an extra mouth to feed.
Far into the night there are sporadic gunshots and shouts of anger, defiance, amusement, scorn. Ettore can’t sleep, because when he shuts his eyes he sees Federico Manzo holding a gun to Iacopo’s head, and the naked terror on Paola’s face. At one point he gets up and looks out through a crack in the shutters, and the sky is orange with burning, and full of smoke. Gioia is built of stone and fire rarely spreads, but equally there is scant water to extinguish it. When a building catches fire, it usually burns itself out. Ettore watches the shifting orange glow for a long time, as sparks spiral up through it, twisting, quick with inhuman life. It strikes him as peculiar that destruction should be beautiful like this.
His mother, Maria, had believed in the three angels that appeared at sunset to guard every home – angels like sprites, like fairies, unrelated to God. She would never leave rubbish right outside the house at night, in case it offended the angel that guarded the door; she made a small bow to the one that sat at the table before each meal; she thanked the one that watched over the bed every night before she slept. Come morning these spirits would dissolve into the sunrise, but Maria Tarano slept soundly in the knowledge that no evil spirits or curses could come upon them in the darkness. For a while, as Ettore watches the burning, he wonders what happens to these angels when a house is ablaze. Do they take fright and vanish, or slink away in shame from their failure, or do they stay and try to fight the flames? Is it their anguish he can see in the swirling sparks, the tortuous coils of smoke? The night is long, and Ettore is glad, for once, that his mother isn’t around to have seen today. He feels so lonely just then that it’s like an ache in his bones, and he wishes he was back at Masseria dell’Arco, curled tight around Chiara Kingsley with her hair in his face and the warmth of her skin on his, and the soft bump of her heart against the arm he would wrap around her.
In the morning Ettore waits for Gianni or Benedetto to bring news, and it’s Gianni who returns first, his hawkish face heavy with care.
‘We’re going back to work tomorrow. Capozzi and Santoiemma will be released today, but … the Labour Exchange is gone.’
‘Gone?’ says Ettore. Gianni nods.
‘Gone up in smoke, and three men dead trying to defend it. All the registers, all the rosters, all the contracts the proprietors signed – gone. We’re back to where we were right after the war.’ Ettore’s heart sinks wearily.
‘New offices can be found, new rosters drawn up. Di Vagno will see to it,’ he says, and hopes that he’s right, and that Gianni will agree with him. Di Vagno is their deputy, their member of parliament, and a socialist. Gianni eyes him with some disgust.
‘Keep your dreams, if they comfort you,’ he says gruffly. ‘Any fool can see which way the wind is blowing here in Gioia. In Puglia.’
‘Would you lie down and let them march over you, Gianni?’ says Ettore quietly. Gianni’s expression blackens.
‘We fight and we fight but we always lose, and I’m tired of pretending it can be otherwise. It doesn’t matter how many speeches Di Vittorio makes, or how many deputies like Di Vagno we manage to elect. None of it matters. I want to work, and I want to eat. That’s all.’ He goes to lie down on the mattress. Ettore thanks them, and gets up to leave. Their hopelessness is infectious; he can feel it seeping into him like the numbness of a January day, and he doesn’t want it. He wants to get his hands on Federico Manzo, and his father Ludo. He wants to punish them. He can’t let them win.
This desire for violence charges him, sharpens him, as he makes his way to Leandro’s house on Via Garibaldi. He has to pause before knocking at the street door, to breathe, to contain himself. The peasants have long known better than to take their troubles to the police, and the police are more partisan now than they’ve ever been; if he attacks Federico, Ettore will be the one prosecuted, and nothing that went on before will count in mitigation. So when Federico opens the door to his knock, and grins at him like they’re old friends, Ettore must let the anger wash through him and stifle it. It’s like eating ashes.
‘Mr Tarano. What a pleasure,’ says Federico, and makes him a small bow, the perfect servant. ‘Your uncle will be pleased to see you.’ Ettore walks past him into the shade of the archway, keeping his eyes fixed on him. He’s dressed in dark trousers, a grey shirt and a faded but serviceable waistcoat; no sign of the gun belts or insignia. ‘It was a troubled night here in Gioia. I think he was worried for you, when he heard you’d come back to town.’
‘Perhaps he has more cause to worry than he knows,’ says Ettore. Federico smiles again.
‘Perhaps so. But you’re safe within his walls. Your uncle is a powerful man, after all.’
‘That he is.’ Just then he hears Leandro’s voice from one of the upper terraces.
‘Is that my nephew, back safe?’ he calls.
‘Yes, sir,’ Federico calls, and as he turns to go back into his little room by the door, Ettore stops him.
‘If you go near my sister again I swear I will cut out your tripes,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t doubt my word.’ Federico’s smile vanishes; his face writhes in anger.
‘We’ll see,’ he says. Then he steps past Ettore and vanishes inside.
‘Ettore! Come on up, talk to me,’ Leandro calls. ‘Why on earth did you come back to town at such a time? Anything you want taken to Paola, I can have taken. I can send one of the servants.’
‘We have no word at the
masseria
of what is happening here in Gioia, and I wanted to see them myself, Uncle.’ Ettore climbs the stairs to the terrace. ‘My father is very ill, Paola has no help.’
‘Ah,’ says Leandro, nodding regretfully. ‘She was always a wilful and resourceful girl, mind you. If any woman could take care of herself …’ He spreads his hands.
‘That she can doesn’t mean she should have to.’
‘Then let her come here and work in the kitchens, since she will not be kept as family.’ Leandro says this lightly, because he knows Paola won’t agree to it.
‘Perhaps she might, if Valerio …’ Ettore feels disloyal even as he says this; treacherous for envisaging the time after his father’s death. Then he thinks that the first thing Paola would do if she came within these walls would be to slit Federico’s throat in the night. He shakes his head. ‘For now, I’m all she has.’
The sky is flat white as Federico drives them back out to the
masseria
; there’s a thick blanket of cloud that traps all the heat, and it’s so still and so stifling the air seems to have clotted. Seven magpies perch in the contorted branches of a dead olive tree, and they watch the car pass with eyes like lead shot, not even crouching to take wing. They have no fear, but also no energy, no animation. They look dead, and Ettore, still thinking of his mother, takes them as a warning of some kind. He’d been thinking how he would approach his uncle regarding the Manzos, how he would ask about Federico’s role in the squads, and whether Leandro is aware that Ettore, his own nephew, is on their hit list. Whether he knows that the well-fed young man driving them that day had, the day before, put a gun to his great-nephew’s head. If the magpies are a warning, they’re warning him against saying anything, but he’s not sure if he can heed it. Mustn’t his uncle choose blood over politics? Mustn’t he choose his own people over those who have persecuted them for countless generations?
My brother has forgotten who he is
; so said Ettore’s mother. Ettore holds his tongue and looks at Chiara’s husband instead.
Boyd Kingsley sits hunched in the front passenger seat, with his knees folded sharply and his head ducked down. He has a flat leather case cradled on his lap, and his fingers fiddle constantly with its buckles. He looks profoundly uncomfortable, but then, that seems to be how he always looks. Ettore can only see the side of his face – one slightly pendulous ear, a thin neck with rough skin like a plucked bird, wisps of colourless hair as fine as a child’s. He must be fifteen years older than his wife, at least. Ettore thinks of the way he engulfed Chiara in his arms when he first came to the farm, as if he hadn’t seen her for weeks, and it makes him slightly queasy. She’s his wife; of course he’s screwed her. He has every right, and Ettore has none. But once the thought of it is in his head he can’t get rid of it, and by the time they turn into the gates at dell’Arco, Ettore despises both men sitting in the front of the car equally; one rightly so, the other unfairly. He wonders if Chiara will come to see him with her husband in residence, and then curses his own stupidity. Of course she won’t. Perhaps she only used him in her husband’s absence, to flatter her, to fulfil her. Picked up and put down, like a toy. Whatever empathy he thought he sensed from her, whatever resonance there seemed to be between them, he might only have conjured out of grief and loneliness. Ettore’s jaw goes tight. The Masseria dell’Arco is not the real world, and neither is Chiara Kingsley.
Because he can’t say any of the things he wants to say, he says nothing. He walks inside with Leandro because he doesn’t want to be out on the farm where he might run into Ludo or Federico; he doesn’t know what he would do. The three men, Leandro, Boyd Kingsley and himself, go into the long sitting room on the ground floor of the
masseria
, where the high ceiling helps to keep it cool, and white voile curtains go some way to keeping out the flies. They sit down on an overstuffed sofa, decades old, and Ettore doesn’t listen as the others talk in English. When the women appear in the doorway he watches Chiara carefully, though it’s Marcie who makes all the noise, fussing him about his leg, and for news of Iacopo. He wants to see which of them Chiara will look at first – her lover or her husband; which of them she will look at the longest. He can tell himself that he doesn’t care, but it’s not true. She keeps her eyes carefully away from him, and as if she can feel him watching her, and his anger, she blushes. She greets her husband with the trace of a smile, and he clasps both of her hands to stoop and kiss her. She offers him her cheek. As they sit back down she glances up at Ettore and meets his eyes for a broken second. A darted glance like the sudden startling of a bird, but in it he reads desperation, and something else. Could it be joy he sees? Joy at his return? Something inside him unclenches. She picks a thread from her sand-coloured skirt, sweeps her hands along her thighs to smooth the fabric, and keeps her eyes down from then on.
Anna brings in a tray of cold drinks, with salvaged hailstones tapping at the glasses. As she puts it down she looks at Ettore with such a stiff, nervous expression that he immediately starts to wonder, and then guesses that this girl is how Federico Manzo knew he’d gone back to Gioia. Federico seems to have a way with women, even if he’s disfigured; he flatters them with extravagant words and gestures. Or perhaps he’s simply paying her. Ettore takes note not to trust the girl. He watches his uncle saying something in English that he punctuates with expansive hand gestures. Hard to believe that this man, in his new light blue suit with the waistcoat buttoned up in spite of the heat, this man with his chauffeur and his wife gleaming and laughing and dripping jewels, is the brother of his mother, Maria Tarano, who believed in curses and angels, and fought her poverty every day, and taught her children that money you didn’t need was a poison. By increments, Ettore feels less and less as though this man is his blood.
My brother has forgotten who he is.
Ettore leans forwards abruptly, interrupting the conversation he has not been following.
‘Uncle, do you know what happened in Gioia yesterday? What actually happened?’ He speaks in the dialect; there’s incomprehension on all faces but Leandro’s. ‘Do you know that these squads are attacking ordinary people in their homes now? Do you know who is commanding them?’
‘Ah, Ettore.’ Leandro shakes his head and sighs in apparent regret, but his eyes are stony. ‘It’s a nasty business. You should remain here, out of it.’
‘Are the proprietors paying for their weapons, and the food in their bellies?’
‘I have made it my business not to enquire.’
‘I don’t believe you, Uncle,’ he says, and Leandro thumps his fist onto the low table in front of him – so hard that the glasses jump, so quickly that his arm barely seems to move. The others fall silent; Ettore feels their nervous eyes on him.
‘This is my house, Ettore,’ says Leandro, softly. He points one finger at his nephew for a moment. ‘You will not be a guest here, so you are an employee. If that’s the way you want it, so be it. But you will be respectful, or you will leave. Those are your choices. I didn’t drag my ass out of the New York gutter to come back here and be insulted by you. Do you understand me?’