Authors: Katherine Webb
Ettore arches his body violently, shoving back against the man who was about to wrestle him over the wall into the fire below. The pain in his head is incandescent but he shuts it out. He’s stronger than his assailant, and angrier. He braces his hands against the hot stone parapet and pushes them both back from the edge, then lets his weight drop to throw the man off balance, and break his grip. Ettore turns, swinging a fist and landing a glancing blow on the man’s jaw. The man grunts and it’s an oddly high-pitched sound. Grimacing, Ettore hits him, again and again. There’s a clatter as his assailant staggers back and kicks the rifle he dropped, spinning it on the stone.
‘You should have fucking shot me,’ says Ettore. He can hardly hear his own voice above the booming inside his skull. ‘You should have just fucking shot me!’ He knocks the man’s legs out from under him, reaching down for the rifle and wrestling it from his attacker’s hands when he grabs for it. But the man’s resistance has crumbled; he curls into a ball and covers his face with his hands, and makes a strange noise. Ettore brings the rifle up, his finger on the trigger, sleek black barrel not a metre from the guard’s head. But that noise makes him hesitate. High-pitched, familiar, incongruous. Ettore blinks, scowls, tries to organise his thoughts around the pressure building in his skull. Then he bends down and pulls the guard’s hands from his face. The man is sobbing. The man is a boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, and he’s weeping in sheer terror.
Swaying and shocked, Ettore lowers the rifle. He puts one hand up to the place on his head, near the temple but mercifully slightly higher, where the pain is worst. His fingers come away bloody, and his own touch is intolerable.
‘Jesus,’ he mumbles, sitting down abruptly next to the boy. Vaguely, he pats the boy’s arm to soothe him. ‘Jesus,’ he says again. ‘I almost shot you … I almost …’ Ettore can’t make the thought or the sentence finish. The night is thudding as though the whole world has a heartbeat. From below there’s more shouting but fewer gunshots; the fire roars as it devours the gates, and from the barns come the startled noises of animals as they smell the smoke. Ettore tries to gather himself. He looks down at the quivering boy curled, fetal, beside him. He has hair the colour of earth, fair skin and a small mouth, bloodied and contorted with fear; a dark patch of urine is spreading around the crotch of his trousers. ‘Boy,’ says Ettore. He clears his throat, tries again. ‘Boy, enough. It’s over. Nobody’s going to kill you,’ he says. The boy shows no sign of having heard him. ‘You fetched me one hell of a crack around the head. Would you really have thrown me over? Perhaps you would. Fear can make us strong, can’t it? Well.’ He looks down at the prone figure. ‘To a point, it can.’ With the rifle’s help Ettore stands, gingerly, his stomach churning in protest. ‘Stay up here. Don’t come down until we’ve gone. And for God’s sake don’t attack anyone.’
Down in the courtyard the fight is over. The
annaroli
are in one corner, standing in a resigned huddle. Only one of the raiders needs to watch them, with a pistol in each hand – there’s no fight in them. Ettore staggers over to where most of his comrades are gathered, in the far corner of the courtyard where an arched doorway leads down into a cellar. They’re passing out weapons – rifles and pistols, belts of ammunition, even a few old officers’ swords. The drumbeat in his head is still making Ettore slow, but his eyes search out his sister. It’s hard when their faces are all covered, but he can tell her by her build and the way she moves, and when she sees him she comes over at once, her eyes bright with worry until she’s sure it’s him, and that he isn’t shot.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘I got into a fight with a child,’ he says thickly.
‘You did what? Is it just your head?’
‘Yes – ah! Paola! Don’t touch.’
‘All right. But I’ll need to clean it when we get home. You big baby,’ she says, and he can tell how relieved she is that they’ve both survived. She herself is not only unscathed but seemingly unruffled. The skin of her forehead, the only part of her face that shows, is smooth and clean, with a slight sheen of perspiration, and Ettore marvels at her, even as he feels slightly removed from her. He pictures her as the cross-legged child he once knew, and it’s clear that she’s transmuted herself somehow; that she’s had to. From flesh to iron; from girl to soldier.
There’s a shout of outrage from the proprietor as he’s disarmed and brought out at gunpoint. He’s dragged into the courtyard by a man on each arm, dressed for bed in his drawers and a long linen shirt. A young man, in his thirties; good-looking and well fed, with a rosy pout of a mouth and fine, straight hair. Not a Gioia man; not even a Puglian. The cracked, sunburnt skin across his nose and cheeks is clearly not used to the southern sun.
‘Show your faces, you cowards! You pieces-of-shit bastards!’ he shouts. There’s a low chuckle from the assembled raiders. ‘I called for help as soon as you got here. I telephoned for help – the
carabinieri
will be here, and others – I think you know which others I’m talking about. So you’d better give up.’ The tenant’s eyes are wide, popping out of his head. He looks like he could run to the moon on the excitement.
‘You’re not in Rome any more, you moron. This farm has never had a phone connected. None of the farms have phones connected,’ says Paola, stepping towards him. The man’s lip curls in disgust.
‘A
woman
? You peasants let your women go out and fight? What kind of worthless
terrone
are you?’
‘The kind that are relieving you of these weapons. And advising you to honour the labour agreements you signed, whether the Chamber of Labour still stands or not,’ says the bald-headed man steadily.
‘You’ll be punished for this! Every last one of you … you’ll be punished! We know who you are, whether you cover your faces or not! I know who you are!’
‘Careful now,’ says another raider, stepping up to him with a cocked pistol. ‘Don’t give us a reason to shoot you.’
‘You’re finished,’ the tenant mutters, as though he can’t help himself.
‘No,’ says the raider. ‘This is just the start.’ The farmer stays silent, breathing hard, his face blanched and contorted. They gag him, and tie an old grain sack over his head.
The raiders take what they can carry from the
masseria
, leave the
annaroli
untouched and march the proprietor out through the embers of his gates, back to Gioia. When he feels paving stones beneath his feet the man starts shouting for help, and is knocked into stumbling semi-consciousness for his pains. Two men drag him all the way to Piazza Plebiscito, where they strip him naked and leave him tied to the bandstand. Then they, like the others, melt away into the dark streets as the bells strike three. Stolen guns are spirited away, tucked under the straw and sleeping bodies of pigs; wrapped in sacking and wedged up chimneys; concealed in piles of firewood. The raiders vanish into their homes, wash the soot from their faces and take to bed. They will be up in two hours and in the square for work, as though nothing has happened – their own safety depends on this. When the police and proprietors hear about the attack they’ll be on the lookout for absentees.
Ettore’s head is throbbing so severely he’s not sure if he’ll make it to work. While Paola checks Iacopo he lies down on the bed, not pausing to take off his boots, and immediately begins to drowse. He doesn’t even object when Paola cleans up the cut on his head, too tired herself to be gentle. She murmurs to him that it isn’t deep, and that a hat, worn low, will cover it well enough in the morning.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wake you in time.’
‘Oh, good,’ he mumbles, and hears her quiet huff of amusement. Then sleep has him, so suddenly and so totally it’s more like passing out.
In the nights after the raid there are more squadrist attacks, more shouts in the dark and sudden scuffles, more evictions and persecution of union men, but despite what the tenant of Masseria Molino claimed, he couldn’t name any of those who’d been amongst the attackers, so the reprisals are random, aimed at anybody deemed to have shown rebellious, socialist or ungrateful tendencies. Ettore is forced to hide in the goat stall again one evening, after a tip-off from a neighbour. After that he takes to sleeping on a dusty pew in the tiny church of Sant’Andrea, not far from Vico Iovia; jimmying the rusty lock open, and finding bolts on the inside to seal himself in. The church is like a cave of soft stone and cool shade that has stood for a thousand years or so, and long been without a human incumbent. It will not do for the winter, but now, in the heat of summer, it’s comfortable enough. The air is fresher than at home – ripe with the scent of the gently chalking walls, desiccated wood and the brittle, decades-old candle wax that cascades down the walls from niches. There’s the musty smell of bird shit from the swallows that swoop in and out through a broken window pane, and have built their mud nests in the rafters. Pigeons roost on the pulpit at night, and launch into their staccato, rushing flight when Ettore startles them. It’s been many years since the bell on the roof was rung.
At dawn Pino bashes his fist on the door to wake Ettore on his way to the piazza, but hidden away in this quiet space at the start and end of each day, Ettore feels time sliding to a stop, growing diffuse like the sunlight at evening time. The wheeling cries of the swallows seem to come from far away, and he could be a hundred miles from all the trouble. It’s so peaceful he has to force himself to leave in the morning, and it seems to him that his head only starts to ache once he has stepped outside. He remembers hearing Livia’s voice in his ear as he dangled, near senseless, over the fire during the raid.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
. That lisping, musical way she spoke. He loved hearing it but it bothered him too, because it just didn’t sound right. It hadn’t at the time – sweetheart wasn’t a word he’d ever heard Livia use, before those final fevered hours of her life when she’d repeated the phrase over and over. Ettore called her his darling, his treasure, his fiancée; she called him her love, or just Ettore. Never sweetheart. He wonders where she got the word. But all his wondering and all his questioning, and all the promises he’d made to her memory had got him nowhere. He was no closer to discovering who’d attacked her that day, so callously, so ruinously. In the steady peace of the church Ettore stops making his promise to her. He stops promising he will find the man out, and accepts that he probably never will.
Forgive me, Livia. I don’t know what else I can do
. His defeat makes him feel small, and tired.
His headache makes him sluggish, and two days in a row he gets no work. Paola says nothing; he can sense her worry in the way she moves, even the way she breathes, as she dips reluctantly into the food she was saving for winter. The tension in Gioia only ever increases; there are rumours amongst the men, guarded carefully from the proprietors, the police and the
annaroli
, of the fight back that’s coming, that’s already begun. They have a run of cooler days, with a welcome breeze, but there’s no more rain. Out of town, vegetable crops are stunted and failing, and fruit grows slowly, hard and juiceless. In town there’s not much to buy but bread, and the price of that creeps up and up. Meat never lasts in the summer, but it’s still sold even when it’s slimy and off colour. The price of barrelled water rises until none but the rich can afford it, and the workers only have their allotted time at the pump in which to draw any. Wages and hours decrease as the rush of the harvest tails off; the streets are more populous with the unemployed, the unfed, and the anxious.
Ettore relies on Paola to connect him to what’s going on. She is part of the invisible web of quietly passed words that sustains the raiders in between action. She walks to Piazza XX Settembre, or out along Via Roma, with a covered basket on her hip and Iacopo on her back, and returns with news. Ettore has no idea whom she talks to, and simply waits to be told what will happen next, and when. They will wait a few days until things have quietened somewhat – that’s the word she brings. But they can’t wait too long: the proprietors are nervous; they’re strengthening their guard.
While he works Ettore finds it easier to keep his mind from wandering. But when he’s not working, the temptation is to retreat to the empty church and lie in silence inside, imagining himself removed from his life. He tries not to think about Chiara out at dell’Arco, waiting for a message he said he’d send. He tries not to think about her skin or her touch or the taste of her, or what life must be like in her universe. He tries not to think about Marcie, and her blind, hopeful eyes; or Ludo Manzo watching the youngest boys with one hand on his whip and a keen expression on his face. But he can’t not think about them, and he can’t not think about Federico Manzo, with his cocky walk and his criss-crossed gun belts. He’s not sure what’s worse – thinking of him in Gioia, perhaps bullying Paola again, or out at the
masseria
near Chiara.
He hissed at me
, she said.
Ettore’s stomach gets used to being empty again, his muscles to being weak for want of fuel. He lies in a shaft of dusty sunshine from the derelict window, both present and absent from the world, in one moment drifting listlessly as though none of it pertains to him, in the next beset by fears and anger and doubt and wanting. When it gets too much he clenches his fists until the knuckles crack, and his conscience bothers him constantly about something else entirely, until at last he has to speak.
He waits until Paola is nursing Iacopo. It’s a dirty trick, but he has to know she won’t run off at once and do something dangerous. The room is full of steam; a small pot of dried beans is boiling to softness on the stove. Paola sits on the edge of the bed to nurse, with a shawl draped over her shoulder and her breast, for modesty’s sake. Ettore doesn’t tease her about it, though they’ve had to use the
prisor
in front of each other since they were old enough to sit on it. Dignity must be enjoyed where it can be got.