Authors: Katherine Webb
Ettore
When Ettore tells Gianni and Benedetto that he’s found Livia’s murderer, their silence is long and has a solidity that seems unbreakable. But Bianca breaks it; Livia’s mother. She’s on her stool by the stove, and she makes a little sound like a whimper of fear, but when Ettore looks at her he doesn’t see fear. He sees hunger. Fat black flies buzz around in circles, drowsy after dark. The noise of their wings is almost more than Ettore can stand – he feels he could snatch them out the air with his eyes closed. He’s so on edge his eyes catch every movement, his ears every sound. The air sits high up in his chest; he can’t unknot his shoulders. Not while Federico Manzo walks and breathes and smiles. He doesn’t think about Chiara – he can’t. Livia is enough, and thinking that the same man has touched Chiara might tip him off this point of fine balance, and break his tenuous grip on control. Images of her distended pupils, her bloody lip, appear in front of his eyes now and then, and he twitches his mind away from them. There’s nothing for him to sit on in the cramped room; Livia’s two brothers sit on the mattress with their legs out in front and their backs against the wall; Ettore crouches on one knee in front of them to deliver his message, like a supplicant.
Gianni is staring at him as though it’s Ettore he would kill. He has always made Ettore feel like a boy, ineffectual as a child, and as he draws breath Ettore thinks Gianni will ask if he’s ready for what will come; or tell him to leave it to him and Benedetto. But he doesn’t.
‘And you are sure of this, beyond all doubt?’
‘Yes.’
‘It will be hard to get him by himself. It should be done with as little noise as possible. I’ve no time for a pitched battle with his
mazzieri
scum companions. Can you think of a way? Can you get him to come out of your uncle’s house?’
‘Not without arousing suspicion.’
‘Yes. We must be nameless, faceless,’ says Benedetto, in his bass voice. ‘It only matters that he knows us, in his last moments. That he knows it’s for
her
.’ There’s a dull fire in his eyes; a gleam of famished violence.
‘He goes to and from Gioia to the
masseria
, you say. Does he ever go alone?’
‘Sometimes, but if he did so it would be by car.’
‘Then it will have to be here, in town. You say he attacked your new woman, so he must go around by himself sometimes. We’ll keep watch – one of us must always watch for him, in turn. If the opportunity comes, it must not be missed.’ Benedetto rolls himself a cigarette and lights it calmly; the scratch of the match gives Ettore a shiver.
‘Yes.’ Gianni nods once with the word.
‘You first, Ettore. Then Gianni the day after. Then me.’ Through the haze of his cigarette smoke Benedetto’s face is murky and indistinct.
‘I can get a gun,’ says Ettore, thinking of the pistol Paola took from Masseria Molino.
‘Forget it,’ says Gianni. ‘Too quick.’
‘But to force him to some quiet place?’ he says. Gianni glances at his brother.
‘Yes. Let whichever one of us is watching for him keep hold of it,’ says Benedetto. The three men nod. Then they have nothing more to say to each other and the silence returns, and Ettore can’t stand the buzzing of the flies and the stinging smoke another second. He rises abruptly from the floor and turns to go, and Bianca catches his arm. Ettore looks down into her rabbity face, all scored with years of grief and hardship; her stained eyes are clouding up with trachoma.
‘Don’t stay your hand, boy,’ she says, in her soft, whispery way. ‘Think of my girl, and don’t stay your hand. She’ll have justice no other way.’ Ettore pulls his arm free, nods again and leaves. His flesh feels as raw as the rest of him – he can’t tolerate her touch.
Keeping to the smallest, blackest streets he can, Ettore makes his way to Vico Iovia, where the lights at home are out and the doors are shut, and only the smell of that morning’s spilt sewage betrays that anybody lives there at all. He lets himself in quietly, to not wake the baby or Valerio; lies down on the bed next to Paola and reaches for her hand. When he finds it he meshes their fingers, like he did when they were little and Valerio beat their mother. He squeezes her fingers tightly enough to know it must hurt, but Paola doesn’t flinch.
‘You spoke to them?’ she says, in the lowest of murmurs.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘As soon as we can, we’ll take the debt from his flesh.’ He says this dispassionately, when what he feels is passion, conviction. He has seen soldiers, just boys, blown apart in the war; seen their blood pooling, warm and dark, in pocks of frozen mud. He has seen his fiancée beaten and raped and left to die; his mother killed in two days and a night by cholera – scoured out from the inside. So much death, so many ways to die and no such thing as justice in any of it. Life is not cheap, but death is easy – this he knows. Never before has he actively planned a killing; never before has a killing been so right. His conscience is clear. Murder is just another term, like prosecution, like unlawful, like judicial process, that belongs to the wealthy, not to the peasants. The
braccianti
have always had their own kind of justice.
Paola turns to face him. He can’t see her but he can feel her breath on his cheek, and the weight of her plaited hair as it falls against his arm.
‘Livia can be at peace once it is done. But can you?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says at once. ‘That is, perhaps. Perhaps no; perhaps never. But it wants doing, either way.’
‘Can it not wait just a few days, Ettore?’ she says urgently. ‘Just a few days! We should do nothing to put them on their guard before the raid. Afterwards, there need be no such concern. Three more days, only.’
‘It’s already begun, Paola. From this moment, when I leave here, one of us will be watching for him, and if the moment comes I won’t let it pass. Any more than Benedetto or Gianni will. Perhaps we’ll find him after the raid, perhaps before.’ Paola takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.
‘So perhaps he will be lynched before Sunday, and the corporals will be twitchy, and we must be at dell’Arco at eleven at night to begin the attack – we’ll have to leave Gioia so soon after dark! I don’t like it, Ettore … there’s so much at stake.’
‘This is how it must be, Paola. And we can attack dell’Arco later, if you wish. But not with Chiara’s help.’
‘She’d better do as she says she will.’ Paola is angry, anxious. ‘If she chickens out I’ll skin her myself, and—’ She cuts herself off when Ettore’s grip tightens convulsively. He feels the little bones in her hand shifting. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it,’ she says.
‘She will do as she said she will. She has always done what she’s said she’ll do.’
‘Tell that to her husband,’ Paola snorts.
‘Enough, Paola. Please.’
‘I need you to work! I need your wage. You’re no good to us skulking around Gioia, waiting to ambush this man. He’s looking for you too, don’t forget.’
‘One day of three, I will stay in town. The work is drying up, anyway – nobody’s being hired all week long. And you keep telling me that after Sunday we’ll be rich and well fed. And he put a gun to your son’s head, Paola. Have you forgotten that?’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘Then stop! You can’t always be the boss of everything. This is the way things must go, and I’m not going to argue with you about it.’ There’s a long pause; he relaxes his grip on his sister’s hand and lets their fingers slide apart.
‘All right then,’ she says softly. Ettore grabs her plait and tugs it gently, like when they were little. Then he gets up, tilts his hat low over his face and goes back out into the night.
He spends the next day moving steadily around town: from the castle walls to the Chiesa Madre; from the Teatro Comunale to the market stalls in Piazza XX Settembre; Santoiemma’s wood mill to the bakeries; Via Roma to the station and the slaughterhouse. He talks to a few men he trusts; puts the word in the right ears that Federico Manzo is sought. That he has a debt to pay. The workers know who Federico is – his harelip makes him easily recognisable, and besides, of late he has been prominent, in his black shirt and his emblems. Before that, even, he was famous for being Ludo Manzo’s son, and none of the workers have any reason to love Ludo. But no word comes back to Ettore all day. No useful word – Federico has been seen driving Cardetta’s black car out towards the
masseria
; he hasn’t been seen coming back. Troubled, Ettore asks after his uncle’s whereabouts, and hears that Leandro drove the red car in that direction himself earlier the same day, and has also not yet returned.
Febrile with impatience, Ettore walks the same loose circuit of Gioia again and again. Into cobblers’ shops and scrapyards and blacksmiths and bars. He’s angry, and disappointed – he wanted to be the one to find Federico, and he’d wanted it to be that day. No waiting, no delay; the man should not be allowed to enjoy another day of freedom. The stolen pistol is cool and heavy, tucked into the back of his trousers, concealed beneath his waistcoat. Ettore fantasises about drawing it out and putting the barrel to Federico’s head.
Come with me
, he would say. With all of Benedetto’s stony depth, and Gianni’s emotionless delivery.
Come with me
. And Federico would go with him, and what was coming would come. And after that, he’s not quite sure what he’ll do with all his thoughts.
As night falls he buys some cheap, end-of-day bread and takes it to Pino and Luna. Luna slices it, rubs it with a finger dipped in olive oil and then the open side of a cut chilli pepper. They eat it with mashed fava beans and dark green chicory, and only water to drink, and Ettore tells them about Federico. Luna stops chewing, and can’t seem to swallow. They have stools to sit on, but no table. They eat from cracked bowls in their laps, with their feet tucked beneath them like schoolchildren; tall Pino hunched and folded with the ease of long habit. He has worked all day and has the smell of hard labour on him, and he eats ravenously, regardless of what is said. But when his bowl is empty he clears his throat.
‘When you find him, I’ll go with you,’ he says. Ettore shakes his head, puzzled. Pino always avoids violence.
‘No. Why get involved? It’s not your fight – keep your hands clean.’
‘I saw him, Ettore,’ says Pino, and his face shows his revulsion. ‘I saw what he was doing to Chiara. What he would have done, if I hadn’t put my boot in his guts. A man like that is like a mad dog – the duty falls on all of us to put him down. Or do what? Wait for him to attack my Luna next?’ He casts a glance at his young wife, whose eyes have gone wide in alarm at her husband’s words. ‘Besides,’ says Pino, taking Luna’s hand. ‘We loved Livia too.’
‘We did, poor Livia,’ says Luna. She looks at Ettore. ‘You
must
keep our Pino safe. You must.’
‘Manzo will be by himself. Helpless, like the women he preys on. We will be four strong when we take him,’ he says.
‘Yes. But still,’ says Luna.
Ettore watches the house on Via Garibaldi all through the night; tucked out of sight in a doorway. He sees a gang of blackshirts about their work, armed with pistols and cudgels, but Federico is not with them. The night is long, and mild, and with his eyes fixed on the street door Ettore’s mind wanders, skirting the weird and hazy world between sleep and waking. His thoughts turn into dreams and then jolt back into reality, over and over. He has Chiara in his arms; he is in the trenches at Isonzo; he is listening to Livia and the sweet, slight lisp when she spoke; he is a boy, hunting fossils in the dry stone walls; he is falling into the darkness of the hell mouth at Castellana. He’s made of stone, but at the same time he’s as weightless as the air. He’s smoke and smuts, blowing in the breeze, and Chiara is a dream he once had – a dream of longing, of another life completely.
At daybreak on Friday morning Ettore walks back into the old streets of Gioia and hands the pistol to Gianni, who takes it without a word. Then he goes to the church of Sant’Andrea, lies down on a pew and wraps his arms across his face to block out the light. He sleeps for hours, and when he wakes is on his feet at once, restless and hungry. It’s dark when Benedetto comes to find him; evening but not yet night. Ettore is in the bar opposite the castle, watching men argue and lose money at
zecchinetta
, when Livia’s oldest brother puts his head through the door, catches his eye and nods. Ettore’s pulse triples; he has to force himself to walk, not run.
‘Ready?’ says Benedetto. ‘We got lucky – Manzo was walking back towards town, all alone. Gianni was coming back from Vallarta with some others and saw him. He sent a friend back to tell me. He was walking out in the middle of nowhere, all alone! I think God must want him dead, too.’
‘He must do. Why walk, and not drive?’
‘Who knows – who cares? You want to get a knife? A club?’
‘Gianni has the gun? Then no,’ he says, when Benedetto nods. ‘But I must …’ Ettore pauses, about to say he must fetch Pino. In truth he doesn’t want his friend anywhere near this – it will be brutal, bloody. It will be everything Pino is not, and with anything like this there’s risk. There’s danger for all of them, of being discovered, of there being reprisals. But ignoring Pino’s request would be an insult to him, and the danger is small if they are smart about it. ‘I must go and bring Pino. He was fond of Livia. He wants to help.’
‘Come on then, and be quick,’ says Benedetto. Spoken
sotto voce
, his words sound like the grinding of rocks. ‘I’ll go with you.’
They walk out in darkness, along the south road, and turn off about three kilometres short of Leandro’s farm to go across country. Climbing over walls, trudging across stubble fields, stumbling over rocks. They don’t speak. Benedetto carries a club over his shoulder, as casually as a work tool; Pino and Ettore have empty hands, and none of them speak. Then out of the darkness looms the huge, pale shape of a straw rick, three metres high, waiting to be taken to a barn. With a slight misgiving, Ettore realises that they’re on dell’Arco land. Paola will be furious. But at the foot of the rick is Gianni’s dark, triumphant form, and in the light from his lantern, face down on the ground at his feet, is Federico. Hog-tied, hands to ankles behind his back, a filthy old rag stuffed into his mouth and a cut above one eyebrow oozing blood. Ettore feels Pino hesitate – a hung moment between steps, a quiet intake of breath. He turns to his friend.