Authors: Katherine Webb
‘This is not how men are hired any more,’ says Ettore, unable to help himself.
‘It’s how I’m hiring you,’ says the overseer stiffly. He has shifty eyes and a mobile expression. He’s trying for implacable neutrality but little tweaks of nervous excitement keep spoiling it; little spurts of glee. ‘We’ll hire at street price, or not at all. Now do you want to work or don’t you? Not you,’ he says, to one man with sombre grey eyes and shoulders knotted with muscle.
‘Why not me?’ he says uneasily.
‘Because of that,’ says the overseer, and he sneers as he lifts his stick to poke at the man’s pocket watch. ‘I’ve no use for clock-watchers.’ This is what the fascist squads have achieved, already, in so short a space of time – the foremen feel invincible again; they hate the workers all the more for the gains they made after the war, and they are jubilant now those gains are being reversed. Their hatred makes them scornful, and ruthless. Behind each man are thirty more wanting work, so Ettore and his small band of colleagues take the terms, shaken, and start walking.
It was like this before the war – decades before the war – and suddenly Ettore sees how right his sister is. The backward slide towards the bad old days is happening at breakneck speed, so fast that the
giornatari
are bewildered, scrabbling to keep up. It might already be too late, and that thought puts the taste of metal in Ettore’s mouth, and makes his hands curl into fists. If they do not resist, what then? He stares at the overseer’s back, riding at the head of the men with his meaty arse filling the saddle and his spine in a comfortable slouch. He remembers the moment of simple, primeval joy when he managed to get his hands around Ludo Manzo’s throat; he takes a slow breath in and lets this memory pump his blood until it’s racing through his body. It feels like waking from a daze in which he’s been aware of words and movement around him but has registered nothing, reacted to nothing. More than ever at that moment, Chiara Kingsley seems insubstantial, dangerously vulnerable; he is desperately afraid for her even as he warns himself not to care deeply for such a friable, breakable thing. He can’t let himself be crippled by that softness, that sinking. He will not lie down.
The threshing is done by hand on the farm he’s been hired to. They use old-fashioned flails – two lengths of wooden pole joined by a metal chain – to beat the grains from the stalks of each wheatsheaf. Bent backs and the circular spin of the flail end, sweat blooming through their shirts at neck and back and belly; the constant sibilant thump of each blow landing, and behind that the rattle of the winnowing machines, each turned by hand by one man who stands in place the whole day long, cranking the wheel around and around. Husks and dust fill the air, getting inside the seams of their clothes and itching, bringing up a rash; the men wheeze and wipe their streaming eyes on their cuffs. The process seems to dry out the insides of their noses, their whole bodies, drawing out the moisture until they’re like the husks that blow away, the hollow stalks of straw left behind.
Ettore works the flail with unblinking intensity, with sweat stinging in his eyes and making his hands slide on the wooden handle. He has to hold it with a grip every bit as intense as his focus on the task. The muscles in his forearms scream at him; by noon his bruised ribs have built up an ache that feels like a spike lodged in the bone. The man next to him tells him about three men who died of heatstroke the day before, threshing in full sun. The day is one of the longest Ettore can remember. His time at dell’Arco, on guard duty or just waiting for it, dozing on the roof, eating when he feels like it and meeting with Chiara, have taught his stomach to be full and his mind to wander; he’d forgotten the monotony, the exhaustion, the crushing, mindless drudgery of farm work. Stepping out of life as his leg healed makes him notice its patterns anew, and now he can see the days stretch ahead of him to the day of his death: hard, hungry and unchanging. It’s maddening. Lunch is bread and a cup of well-watered
primitivo
. Work doesn’t stop until the sun hits the horizon towards seven, and the pay is less than half what it should be. The men take the money and stare at it. Some of them are furious, some are resigned, some are panicky, shocked to have earned so little. But all are silent, so it makes no difference.
By the time Ettore is back in Gioia he can’t remember the exact colour of Chiara’s eyes, or the precise feel of her hair between his fingers, and he knows that the part of him mourning the loss of these things must be stifled, and pushed far down inside. Tenderness has no part in what he needs to do. He’s so tired, so distracted that he goes home without thinking, forgetting the need to hide. Paola feeds him his dinner in silence. She seems to be waiting. When he’s eaten he wets a cloth with a splash of water from the urn and wipes it over his face. He pulls his shirt off over his head to be rid of the prickling fragments of husk trapped in it. He rubs away some of the dust and sweat from his chest and arms, and the back of his neck. He peers down at the bruise on his ribs, which has gone from blue to black in a splayed shape like a handprint.
‘When is the attack on Masseria Molino?’ he says at last.
‘Not tomorrow night, but the next,’ says Paola, with no inflection, no surprise or gloating.
‘How many men?’
‘Twenty-five.’ She keeps her eyes on him, unblinking. ‘Perhaps twenty-six.’
‘So few, this revolutionary army of yours?’
‘When we have guns, more will join us. You’ll be with us?’ she says. Ettore looks over at her, standing straight, evenly balanced, with her arms at her sides and her chin dipped down. A fighter’s stance he’s too weary to emulate. But he nods in answer to her question, and when he sleeps that night, it’s dreamless.
Farm raids are frequent, more so since the massacre at the Girardi place. They are normally about stealth, in the black of night; about taking what food can be carried, or destroying something in some outlying part of the
masseria
, away from the guarded main house. A short and ugly act of desperation, hunger and vendetta. Farms where the overseer is cruel and a man has been beaten or humiliated; farms where the wages are lowest and the hours longest; farms where the proprietor is known to hire brute squads – these are at greater risk. But all are at risk when the men are starving. Sheep and cattle might be killed or stolen; barns or grain stores razed; anything movable or edible taken by a handful of men, and a few women too; with no weapons but rocks, cudgels, whatever farm tools are actually owned rather than borrowed each day. Living in sunken rooms with no electricity, and the long pre-dawn walks to work, begun in childhood, have given Gioia’s
giornatari
excellent night vision. Their faces and hands are steady when they raid; they are set, even if their hearts race and stumble with the thrill and the danger, all unseen. They dart in and dart out, leaving fire and curses in their wake; corpses very rarely. But this new scheme is something different; something far more dangerous. They will fight their way inside the
masseria
’s buildings; it will be a pitched battle.
Ettore has not been on a raid since Livia died, but even before that he went rarely. He has always said he wants to work, not to take.
And if they won’t let you work?
Paola’s same argument, over and over, from when they were twelve and fourteen years old. They wear black; she has her knife tucked into her belt, Ettore has the twisted length of olive wood they’ve kept by the door since Federico’s visit. The wood is ancient, sun-baked, as smooth and hard as bone. He rubs his thumb over its knots and close grain as they wait for the midnight bells of Santa Maria Maggiore. Valerio watches them from the alcove, his eyes blank, as though all of this is some staged drama he’s not quite following; as though they are someone else’s children, and he is far, far away. Before they leave Paola leans over her sleeping son and traces one finger down his face, wearing the expression of hopeless love and care that she wears at no other time. Then the bells begin to strike and Ettore’s heart leaps up, thudding at the back of his throat. His sister pours two small cups of wine, bought for this night, and they swallow them down, not breaking eye contact. They tie scarves across their faces, masking everything from the eyes down.
‘Ready?’ says Paola, and her voice is a fraction higher than normal, a fraction tighter. That’s her only concession to fear.
They walk fast, in silence; slipping through the shadows with no lantern. Before long other silent figures are ghosting at their sides, until they leave Gioia to the north, twenty-two men and four women; a pack with one purpose, saying nothing. An owl whistles in alarm at the sudden passage of this grim band, the scuff of their feet in the dust, the muted rush of their breathing, the sloshing of the precious can of kerosene one of them carries. Masseria Molino, named for the ruins of an ancient windmill that sits beside the small complex, is five kilometres distant, a walk of under an hour. They mass beyond the reach of the lantern above its gates, where a single guard stands with a rifle in his arms and a pistol on each hip. Ettore almost feels sorry for him. There’s no outer wall or perimeter, there are no dogs. The
annaroli
sleep inside but besides this gate guard only one other is young, and fit. The rest are women or youths or old men; people the tenant can get away with paying the least. The raiders watch for a while, checking for anything out of the ordinary. Waiting for some indefinable right moment. Ettore feels outside of himself, one more anonymous organ of a fighting body. He remembers this feeling from the trenches; this protective disassociation of thought from action, of mind from flesh. He has no fear, only a fatalistic sense of the possibility of death, and underneath this single-minded will to act and not think are the remnants of himself, quiet and distant.
With a quick glance around and a nod, the first man rushes forwards. He is small, thin, bald-headed and rat-faced; he’s been chosen for his violence and the quicksilver way he moves. He sprints forward, alone. In a heartbeat he’s within the circle of light and the guard jerks as though he’s been slapped, swinging the rifle up and drawing in a deep breath as if to shout. In his surprise he forgets to make a sound. The bald man is on him in seconds, taking a flying leap and planting both heels in the guard’s guts. The guard drops with a ragged tearing sound as all the air rushes out of his lungs, on the ground he’s kicked again, and again. A kick to the head leaves him boneless. The bald man picks up the rifle and both pistols, checks for signs of consciousness and then nods at the waiting darkness. The rest of them surge forwards. Still silent, no cries of attack; they are all business. The pistols are handed out, checked for ammunition. The kerosene is sloshed around the lock of the wooden gates, a match is lit and the darkness boils into orange light. The gates are ancient, the wood tinder dry. The flames burrow hungrily into the wood. Soon there are shouts from within, but by then the wood is weakened. With coats and blankets around their heads and shoulders, a knot of the biggest men rush the gates, ramming their full weight against them, and the lock surrenders with a scream of nails and splintering wood. Then the night erupts into gunfire.
One of the men who rushed the gates drops with a yell, grabbing at his thigh. When the first volley from within is spent the bald man fires his rifle through the gates and the attackers run in behind the bullets, spreading out at once, screwing up their eyes against the smoke. Ettore tries to keep Paola in his peripheral vision but she’s gone, darting away like a cat. They all know exactly where they are supposed to be. More guns are fired from the upper windows of the building, and from the arches of a ground-level colonnade around the courtyard. A bullet zips past Ettore’s ear and explodes into the stone behind him with a shower of chips and dust; a man rushes him with a snarl and Ettore ducks, swinging the olive wood cudgel. His assailant is shadowy in the smoke but there’s a satisfying crunch and a grunt as the cudgel connects. Not waiting to see if the man is down Ettore dodges to one side, through a narrow doorway, and goes up a twisting stair to the roof. The stairwell is pitch-black. He runs hard into a closed door at the top and curses, breathing hard. He can’t know for sure how many men are on the other side – it’s a curtain wall, narrower than at dell’Arco; a walkway, not really a roof. It would be easy to be thrown off, easy to be shot, and by colliding with the door he’s announced his arrival. Ettore puts his ear to the door and hears shots fired close at hand. There’s at least one armed man on the other side, and no good way to proceed, so he puts his shoulder to the door, grits his teeth and bursts out onto the wall, into the whistling swing of a rifle butt.
In the sudden quiet stars wheel across his vision – a juddering array of lights careering through his skull, distracting and puzzling him. For a moment he can’t remember where he is or what the lights mean, then an obliterating pain crumps through him so he can’t react when he feels hands on him, hauling him up, dragging him; there’s only room in his head for the pain and confusion, nothing else. He has no idea what’s happening to him. He feels hot air on his face, choking smoke and the stink of burning hair. On instinct, he resists. He strains with every muscle in his body and in the next breath he realises that the burning smell is him. He opens his eyes and sees flames, swirling sparks, the dark ground and sky wheeling dizzily beyond – he has lost all sense of up and down, of which way round things should be. The sense of it all is tantalisingly close, but trying to unravel it is exhausting. The fire has a hypnotic beauty; Ettore stares down into it and decides not to bother fighting any more, and suddenly he hears Livia’s voice in his ear.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
, she whispers. Ettore frowns, and tries to answer her.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
. The smoke fades to pale grey, or perhaps he does. He’s in a soft, light place and he thinks he can smell a woman – her hair, her skin, the ready wetness between her legs. A spike of longing shoots through him but then the sense of her is gone. There are no more whispers in his ear, no more tender scents; there’s darkness and burning, and the longing turns to ire.