Authors: Katherine Webb
‘What is it, Ettore?’ she says, as he works himself up to speaking. ‘You’ve obviously got something to say. What is it?’
‘It’s bad, Paola,’ he says carefully. She gives him a steady look.
‘How bad can it be? Just spit it out.’
Ettore takes a deep breath. ‘You must promise me to think before you do anything. Think before you act, once I’ve told you. You must promise me that, first.’
‘Then I promise it,’ she says, tension in her voice.
‘Ludo Manzo was at Masseria Girardi that day. He was one of the shooters.’ He says it in a rush, to have it over with. Paola stares at him for a long time, and a ripple of anguish passes over her face, filling her eyes with tears. She blinks them back.
‘The mozzarella told you?’ she says at last. Ettore nods. Paola clears her throat and looks down, peeking around the shawl at the baby. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘Because I didn’t want you to get yourself killed for a vendetta. I wasn’t going to tell you at all, for just that reason, but you … you have a right to know.’
‘How did that man get so full of hate, I wonder?’ she says softly. ‘It must plague him. It’ll be a mercy when I put a bullet in him. A mercy to him and everyone else.’
‘You won’t go out there alone and try anything? Promise me!’
‘No, I won’t go alone.’ Paola detaches her son, calmly turns him to her other breast; her hands and her movements are automatic, deft and tender. ‘But you wanted an honourable reason to attack dell’Arco and there you have it – Ludo Manzo is an enemy to all of us. We’ll go to dell’Arco next; when I tell the others he was there that day, they’ll agree with me. We’ll go there next, and if you want to be sure we don’t lose anybody you’d better talk to your woman. You’d better get her to open the doors for us.’
‘She’s not my woman.’
‘She
is
your woman. She’d do anything you asked, I saw it.’
From the alcove in the wall there’s a sudden slight movement, and they’ve got so used to there being none that it startles them. Valerio props himself up on one elbow, shaking visibly. He tries to speak, has to clear his throat and try again, and his children watch on in amazement.
‘Is this true, boy?’ he says to Ettore. ‘What that woman who was here said about Manzo?’
‘She had it from Uncle Leandro,’ says Ettore. Valerio nods slowly, just once.
‘Then you must go there, and he must die. This is the way of things. And if that woman who was here can help, then make her. This is a war, and no time for your soft heart, boy.’ With another nod Valerio collapses back down into silence, like some oracle that has spoken incontrovertibly, and is spent. Paola and Ettore share a glance, and say nothing more for a long time. When Iacopo has fed himself to sleep Paola wraps him and puts him down in his wooden box.
‘Don’t be long about it, Ettore. Can you get word to her? Get her to meet you? We must keep the momentum of this; we mustn’t let the men lose heart.’
‘You need to decide what night we will attack, and at what hour. It won’t be easy to get messages to and fro. It won’t be easy for her to come here, and I can’t risk going there. If she comes here again, I must be able to tell her everything.’
‘All right. Send a message that she should come. I’ll find out what you need to know.’
In the morning Ettore tears a slip of paper from a mouldy hymn book he finds on a shelf in Sant’Andrea. He has no pen or ink, so he uses a fragment of charcoal to write, in laborious Italian, where he is, and that she must come as soon as she can, then he gives the note to Pino and watches anxiously as his friend shoves to the front of the crowd near Ludo Manzo, and is hired to feed the threshing machine at dell’Arco. The sight of the overseer fills Ettore with a caustic, gnawing hatred. He glances around the square, half expecting Paola to come running out of nowhere and fly at him with tooth and nail. But she doesn’t. As he moves away Pino looks back at Ettore and gives him a tight nod, and Ettore can see how nervous he is of the task he’s been given; how he curls in on himself when Ludo is near, as delicately as a scorched leaf. Ettore sends a silent prayer to any watching angels for Pino’s success, and safety, for if anybody deserves to have a watching angel, surely it’s Pino.
The day is long; Ettore gets work breaking rocks to build a wall, and by the end of it there are rings of salt on his clothes and his arms have the tremor of exhaustion. But in the safety of the church in the deep of evening, Pino stops in to see him.
‘It’s done, brother,’ he says, with a smile, palpably relieved.
‘You gave it to Carlo?’
‘Yes. I said it was a love letter from you – he grinned like a little boy. Nobody saw me do it, I’m sure.’
‘Well done, Pino. Thank you,’ says Ettore. Pino lingers in the dark doorway of the church.
‘She … she won’t be hurt? The English woman? You’ll be sure to keep her safe in all this, won’t you?’ he says. ‘None of it is her doing, after all.’
‘I know it’s not. And I … I’ll do my best,’ says Ettore, ashamed that his friend feels the need to say this. That he’s getting Chiara involved in the raid. Pino has never been on a raid, and would never go on one. There’s no violence in him, not even enough to keep watch while others perpetrate. ‘I’ll do my best. The danger will be far greater if we don’t have her help.’
‘The danger will be great, regardless,’ says Pino. ‘Your sister scares me sometimes, you know that?’ A quick grin as he says this.
‘The times I’m not frightened for her, I’m frightened of her,’ says Ettore, nodding. Pino clasps his arm for a moment, and then he’s gone.
Ettore expects her to come in the evening again, like the last time, or even in the deep of night, stealing into town like a thief. Instead it’s pure chance that he’s in the church, far gone in thought, when she appears in the middle of the morning, two days later. He’s so distracted that he doesn’t react when the door creaks open, and for a moment he stares at her there, golden in the light, unable to make sense of the sight of her. Her smile is uncertain but irrepressible; he can see the breath high up in her chest, her ribs at their widest arc. A swallow flits in and sees her, circles and flies back out, but Chiara only looks at Ettore as he sits up, and it’s so incongruous that she’s there, and that they have this soft, lucent place to themselves, that he smiles. He bolts the door behind her; takes hold of her without reservation. There’s something so inexpressibly poignant in the smell of her hair, warm from the sun, that his heart aches a little, and when he kisses her he’s almost reverent, and gentler than he has ever been. Footsteps outside, back and forth past the door; the swallow comes in again and there’s the tiny scrape of its claws as it lands, the descant piping of its young – rammed into the nest, fat and silly, ready to fledge. Ettore takes off Chiara’s clothes and lets the sun fall, incandescent, on her skin. He turns her this way and that to see, touching her here and there – the notch at the base of her throat where there’s a gleam of sweat; the line where buttock joins thigh; the smooth protrusions of her elbows and knees. She has long toes and pale, narrow feet. He examines every inch and he lays her down, and he wonders if the tingle of heartbreak is in the feeling he has, right down at gut level, that this will be the one and only time he will see her like this. Glowing in the sun like one of his mother’s spirits; beautiful, untenable, not of this world.
Time passes like this, distorted and dreamlike. Time disconnected from anything outside the tiny church. Later Ettore watches Chiara dress again. She does it in a leisurely way, with no sense of impropriety or indecent haste. Like a woman in her own boudoir; languidly at ease.
‘Come here,’ he says, when she’s finished buttoning the back of her skirt, and the front of her blouse, and her bedraggled stockings into her garter belt. She puts on her shoes before she obeys him, coming to sit beside him on the pew. She sits close; he puts an arm behind her shoulders and lets his fingers rest in the hair at the back of her neck. The width of her neck fits his hand exactly, and it’s satisfying. ‘My sister says you’re in love with me.’ At this she stiffens for a fraction of a second, but then surrenders.
‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, but of course he did. He denied it to himself because of the bewildering way it pleased him in one second and angered him the next. There’s a hung moment in which she doesn’t ask him if he loves her back.
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t love me back. It doesn’t change anything,’ she says simply.
‘I don’t know if I can still love anybody. Or anything. Not properly. Not as I would wish to,’ he says, and this is truthful enough. He can feel his own pulse in his fingertips, resting against the skin of her neck.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.
‘How … how are you here? How did you get here?’
‘Carlo gave me your message the day before yesterday, but I couldn’t come any sooner. Then I said I wanted to come and see Boyd. My husband, here in Gioia. Anna brought me in the little cart, and I told her I was going for a walk before I went in to see the men … I don’t think she believed me.’ A defiant jerk of her chin. ‘But why shouldn’t I go for a walk, to stretch my legs after the ride?’
Troubled by this, Ettore thinks for a moment.
‘Anna is close with Federico. You must be careful; she might tell him and he would know why you have really come.’
‘He doesn’t know you’re here, in this church, though. Does he?’
‘No. No, that’s right. But you must go to Via Garibaldi before you go back to the
masseria
. You must see your husband.’ Saying this is like needlessly pressing a bruise.
‘Yes. And Pip … Pip knows,’ she says, in a mournful voice, rich with guilt. She shuts her eyes. ‘There was the most awful scene. When I got back from here last time … It was awful. He’s so hurt. I … I don’t know what to say to him.’ She looks down and a tear lands on her skirt; a small dark mark on the fabric. Ettore almost says
it will be over, soon
, but then he realises it would sound cruel, not kind as he means it.
‘Will he tell his father?’
‘I don’t know.’ The words are spoken on a sigh, soused in misery. Something else occurs to Ettore, something possibly more dangerous.
‘Will he tell Marcie?’
‘What? Why should he?’ she says, puzzled. ‘And what would it matter?’
‘Never mind. Listen to me, Chiara. I have to ask you to do something for me.’
‘Whatever it is, I’ll do it.’
‘Don’t say that until you’ve heard me. It … could be dangerous for you.’
There’s a pause, and in it Ettore has the choice. He can tell her the raid is coming, tell her to get out of the
masseria
, her and the boy and Marcie, and be far away when it happens. Or he can ask her what he must ask her. He keeps his jaw tight shut for a moment more, a moment in which she is not in great danger, and he is not the cause of it. It’s a soft, elastic moment, like the time they spent making love – the luminous space between seconds, impossible to preserve. ‘There will be a raid,’ he says at last, and the darkness creeps in. ‘On Sunday night there will be a raid on my uncle’s farm. He is in Gioia, not on the farm, so he will be in no danger, and it will go easier. I … I will be one of the raiders. My sister with me, and many others. I need you to ask the guard to open the main door for you, at exactly one in the morning. And then you must go into the main building and lock yourselves in a room – the three of you together, Marcie, the boy, and you. Can you do that?’
He can hear her breathing, high up beneath her ribs again, like when she first arrived. He can sense his words sinking into her, being absorbed, and he waits to see how she will react – if she will panic, if she even understands what he’s said. When she looks up her eyes are fearful, but there’s no panic, no refusal.
‘One in the morning is too late. They would never open the door for me then. It must be earlier. I’ve never been out after midnight before, and they were very reluctant to open the door even then.’
‘Then, you’ll do it?’
‘If I begged you to be safe … if I begged you not to do this, would it make any difference?’
‘No.’
‘Then I will do it.’ She tips her head, lets it rest on his shoulder for a moment, but she’s too agitated and lifts it again, fiddling with the frayed cuff of his shirt, running the threads through her fingertips. ‘But it must be earlier. And I must hope and pray that Carlo is on the door.’
‘What time?’
‘Eleven? Sometimes I’ve walked before bed, to help me sleep.’
‘It’s risky.’ Ettore shakes his head. ‘Gioia won’t be fully asleep … the squads will be about …’
‘Later would be impossible, even if Carlo is on the door. You won’t … you won’t hurt him, will you? If it’s Carlo? He’s so young; he’s harmless …’ she says, and Ettore agrees with her. But he’ll make no empty promises.
‘Don’t stay to see. Do you hear? You run to your room, and you lock it. That’s all you do.’ Her face clouds at this obvious skirting of her question. Ettore looks away.
‘I did not want it to be this way,’ he says. ‘But they leave us no other way. You must say nothing of this. To anyone.’
‘If you’re hurt …’ Chiara shakes her head; tries again. ‘If you’re hurt—’ Ettore lifts her chin with a crooked finger and stares into her eyes to press home his command, and make her obey.
‘Don’t stay to see.’
He keeps her there as long as he dares, after the sun has gone past noon and she’s long overdue at the house on Via Garibaldi. He has the feeling that she wouldn’t leave at all if he didn’t make her; that same inseparable mix of bravery and stupidity he’s seen in her before, that same blind urge to follow her heart against all better sense. She would stay with him in that little church, and pretend that they could live that way. At the door she turns.
‘You could come to England,’ she says; a sudden flare of reckless hope. ‘With me. You could come back to England with me. I’ll divorce Boyd … we could marry. Pip would come around … he’s almost a man. You could come away from all of this.’ He can hardly bear the look on her face, the fragility of her. In the time it takes him to reply, in the time it takes him to frame the only answer he can give, he sees her collapse into herself, and the hope burn out as quickly as it flared. In the end she slips away before he’s said anything else, dipping her chin, pulling her hand away from his.