Authors: Katherine Webb
Lying down makes the room spin again, and Ettore shuts his eyes to still it.
‘Of course I’ll be able to work. How did I get back here?’
‘On Pino’s back, of course. All the way from Vallarta.’
‘Pino always was a big ox. I could go back now and finish the day. I’m fine.’
‘Go back now?’ Paola is trying to clean the blood out from under her fingernails.
‘It’s still light. There’s still time. I worked nine hours or more before it happened, I think …’
‘Yesterday. That was yesterday, you idiot; you’ve been asleep since then, nothing would rouse you. Who knows if they’ll pay you for an unfinished day … You were bleeding so much when you got here … You needed to rest.’ Paola can’t help but sound a tiny bit resentful. They all need to rest, after all.
‘I’ve lost a whole day’s work today, then?’ says Ettore, his eyes snapping open. Paola gives a curt little nod. Never once, since he was ten, has he missed a day’s work when work was available. He feels like a man left stranded; he feels traitorous and betrayed all at once. He sits up again but Paola stops him with a curse.
‘It’s too late now! You might as well rest. Luna is trying to borrow a needle and thread, to close the wound.’ Paola undoes the sling and deftly gathers Iacopo into her arms. She smiles wearily at him, and his little face broadens in delight. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I … I lost my balance. I was thinking about … something. I just lost my balance, I think.’
‘Didn’t you get a meal?’
‘A little bread, but no wine.’
‘Those miserly
bastards
!’ Paola suddenly barks, and Iacopo’s eyes go wide. She quickly puts him over her shoulder and sways him, rolling her eyes anxiously to the ceiling.
‘Paola, please don’t worry. I can work. It will be fine.’ But Paola shakes her head.
‘You must go to our uncle. Ask him for an easy job while you heal.’
‘I will not.’ They glare at one another, and Paola looks away first.
Ettore stays still for a few hours, taking in the strangeness of seeing their one room in daylight. He watches the beam of light from the single window as it glides slowly across the floor. Paola comes and goes. She brings him a cup of water and then a cup of
acquasale
, thin soup made by boiling up stale bread with salt in water, with a little olive oil or cheese added in times of plenty. There is mozzarella in the soup she gives him; Ettore glances up but doesn’t ask how she got it, because he knows she won’t answer. A man called Poete has a crush on her; he works at the small mozzarella factory at the far end of Via Roma. He has hands like paddles, a chinless face, and always smells of milk. The workers at that factory are allowed to eat as much mozzarella as they like inside the factory, but they aren’t allowed to take any home for their families. That way, the workers gorge themselves once or twice, but are then too sick of the stuff to want it any more. A few months ago a man tried to smuggle home a whole mozzarella – a knot the size of his fist. When it looked as though he would be caught he stuffed it into his mouth and tried to swallow it, and choked to death. Poete got his job, and there’s not much he wouldn’t attempt, it seems, for the things Paola will then do to repay him. She chose him carefully. Poete has subverted one of the lads who brings the milk from the farms every morning, in heavy pails swinging from the handlebars of his bicycle; so Paola regularly gets pilfered milk for Iacopo, since her own is never quite enough for him. Clearly, Poete has also found a way to smuggle out cheese sometimes. It tastes impossibly good, impossibly rich. Ettore shames himself by wolfing it down, and not sharing it with his sister.
It’s hard for Paola to get paid work because of the baby, and because of her reputation. If there is an outbreak of violence in Gioia, a protest – like the stoning of a shop where the baker has been mixing dust into the loaves and selling at high prices – Paola is at the front. She makes her voice one of the loudest, and she does not defer to authority, or to the Church. When she was fifteen there was the scandal of the priest who had been discovered interfering with the little orphan girls in his care. Paola claims to have thrown the torch that finally set his house on fire. The peasants have little enough use for the Church, anyhow – the priests say the droughts and hardships are the result of their godlessness, and they continue to charge for funerals, weddings and christenings, when none can pay. Last year, when the government ordered rationing to help with the post-war shortages and women were frequently made to grant sexual favours to officials in return for their flour, oil and bean coupons, Paola took steps to protect herself. On the day one such randy official made his intentions plain, she let him lead her to a quiet place then she put a knife to his scrotum, got all the coupons she was due and some extra ones as well. She laughed about it, and said the man would be too embarrassed to tell anybody, but Ettore worried for her, then and now. The officials know her face, and he fears that they will mark her out, and make a point of finding her. Sooner or later. She goes about with Iacopo strapped to her back like a talisman, but that won’t deter them when it comes to it.
By afternoon Ettore is on his feet. He can’t put any weight on the cut leg so he hops, using the walls for balance. From their door a short flight of stone steps leads down to a tiny courtyard, an offshoot where the narrow street, Vico Iovia, makes a ninety-degree turn. Beneath their room is a stable, where their neighbour sleeps with his mule and an elderly nanny goat. Ettore picks up the wooden pole with which the double door is barred at night, and uses it as a crutch. There’s no water for Paola to wash their clothes, but she hangs what spare things they own out on a line anyway, to try to air them. Flies settle on the stiff fabric, like they settle on everything else. Paola comes along the alley with a basket of straw on her hip – fodder she collects for their neighbour’s goat, in return for a cup of her milk now and then. She opens her mouth to scold him but Ettore forestalls her.
‘Did Valerio find work today?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘And yesterday – he was with the shepherd, yes? How much did he earn?’
‘He stank of sheep, so I suppose that’s where he was. He wasn’t back until after dark, then he slept, and said nothing to me. He …’ She pauses, repositions the basket on her hip. ‘His cough is worse. Always worse.’
‘I know.’ Ettore sets off in the direction of the castle.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To check he’s earning, since I’m not, and not busy pledging yesterday’s wages on wine.’
The castle looms over him as he emerges from Vico Iovia. Crows line its rooftops, bickering and looking down at the mess of life at street level. It looks out of place, almost ridiculous. There it sits, empty, a monument to one man’s wealth and power; and to the peasants of Gioia, who live sometimes ten, twelve, fifteen to a room, it’s hard to think such things were built and belong in their own world, and not in some fairy land. Ettore’s leg throbs harder and harder. It sounds so loud in his own ears that he starts to wonder if other people can hear it too. It begins to bleed again, and leaves a trail of drips so that a stray dog comes to follow him with its nose twitching. When it gets too close Ettore flails at it with the wooden pole. The dog has a hungry, speculative look in its eye. On the Via del Mercato is a bar, a simple place with stools in front of a pitted countertop, and big barrels of wine behind it. It’s the first one Ettore tries, and he curses when he sees Valerio at the far end of the room, sitting there stooped and unshaven, playing
zecchinetta
with a man who looks considerably happier than him.
Ettore limps over and slams his hand down flat on the bar in front of them. Neither man is startled, so he knows at once that they’re drunk. The playing cards are yellow and dog-eared; there are sticky rings of spilt red wine all around them, and the scent of it sour and pervasive in the air. Valerio looks up at his son, and Ettore sees that he has drunk so much he can’t keep his face straight. It veers from shock to guilt to anger to resentment, all in a few seconds. Valerio swallows, and finally settles for a sort of sickly, listless expression.
‘Something you want to say, boy?’ he says.
‘Yesterday’s money? Is there any of it left?’ says Ettore. He sounds cold and hard to his own ears, when what he feels is a kind of debilitating urge to surrender waiting to swallow him – a deep black well of it, like the hole at Castellana, into which he might fall and never emerge.
‘
My
money, you mean? My money, boy.’
‘Mine now, in truth,’ says his companion, who Ettore has never seen before. The man grins a mouthful of gappy brown teeth at him, and Ettore would like to knock them out of his mouth. He sees at once that this man is nowhere near as drunk as his father.
‘He has lost it all to you?’ he says.
‘What he hasn’t tipped down his throat,’ says the barman, who has run the place for as long as Ettore can remember. ‘And he still owes me twenty-eight lire from the winter.’ Twenty-eight lire, in summer, is a good month’s wages.
‘Why aren’t you working?’ Valerio says then, glaring at his son.
‘I cut my leg. I’ll work tomorrow though … why aren’t
you
working? What will Paola eat tonight, since you’ve pissed it all away?’
‘Don’t
accuse
me, boy! Mind your own damned business!’ Valerio thumps his fist on the bar and nearly slides off his stool. Raising his voice makes him cough.
‘Ah, leave your old man alone, why don’t you? Pleasures in life are few enough for you to deny him a drink and a game with an old friend,’ says the brown-toothed man.
Your old man
. Ettore stares bleakly at his father, stooped and sunken and coughing; his hair is salt and pepper, grizzled; there’s dirt in the bags beneath his eyes. He is an old man indeed. He is forty-seven years old. Ettore takes the man’s wine glass and drinks it empty.
‘You’re no friend of his. And if I see you with him again, you’ll wish I hadn’t,’ he says.
That night, as Valerio snores on his ledge, Ettore is woken by the movement of Paola getting up from the mattress beside him. She’s as silken as a cat when she wants to be, but he is sleeping fitfully, with the way his leg itches and thuds. He hears her finding shoes, shawl, knife and matches. He almost asks her where she’s going, but since he wouldn’t like the answer, he stays silent. When she’s gone he reaches out, softly, softly, until he finds his nephew’s sleeping body beside him. He rests his fingers lightly on Iacopo’s ribs, and feels the reassuring flutter of air in and out, in and out. It seems faster than it should be, but he’s still so tiny that Ettore isn’t sure. His cheeks are a little rough – some rash or irritation. That Paola has not taken the baby with her tells him where she might be going.
While he waits, because he can’t sleep until she’s back, he lets himself conjure Livia. Her father brought the family to Gioia six years ago, from a village in the
marina
– near the sea – where they had once worked on a vineyard that was then eaten whole by phylloxera bugs. Livia came with her parents and two brothers, to face the hatred and the resentment of the Gioiese workforce, who had no time or goodwill for people coming from beyond their own borders to take work. For over a year they lived in the street, camping out beneath the ancient arcs of Gioia, or the portico of a church, or the canopied doorways of the rich and absent, until Livia’s father finally made some friends in the peasants’ union and got enough work to rent a room. Ettore first saw Livia when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two. Just two years ago, but he can’t seem to remember what his life was like before she walked into it; just like now he can’t quite work out how he’s supposed to carry it on without her.
Livia had waves of deep brown hair – a dark chestnut colour, not true black – that matched her skin tone and her eyes almost exactly, creating a harmonious whole, a sort of soft blurredness that was irresistible. She had a dimple in her chin that was his undoing. She would sit in the market place with her mother and the other women with a bucket between her knees and knife in her hand, scraping the husks from nuts, or shelling peas or fava beans, or grinding coffee – whatever was needed. In times when farm work was slack, in November, and January through February, Ettore would steal moments to watch her, and the way she smiled that gave a glimpse of her lower teeth, and the upper ones that were in a strange formation – the canines and premolars longer than the incisors – that gave her a slight lisp when she spoke. It wasn’t that she was the most beautiful, or had the best figure or a provocative way of walking. Ettore couldn’t say why, exactly, but to him she looked like how heaven might be, and he didn’t dare approach her in case he was wrong, and got woken from his dream. Her heart-shaped face had an intelligent expression, her eyes were bright and she had a way of cocking her head to listen that reminded him of a bird; some small, rounded, self-contained bird – a woodcock, or a golden plover.
Pino made him go and talk to her, finally, and the last thing Ettore wanted was to have his friend at his side when he introduced himself – tall, beautiful, devastating Pino. But he never would have done it without Pino’s elbow in his ribs, and as it turned out Livia only looked at Ettore. Only at him, right from the very beginning. She didn’t blush, or simper, or sneer. She put one hand up to her lips and stared, and said his eyes were the colour of the sea, and reminded her of home; so straight away she baffled him, because Ettore had never seen the sea. Nor a mirror. He found out quickly that she only ever said what she actually thought, and had no guile, no patience for games or dissembling. In the time he’d spent watching her he’d never seen her talking to a man, so he’d assumed she would be shy of him, and afraid of what he wanted. But in the end it was she who kissed him first, with all the simplicity and directness he soon came to expect. And she never did spoil the idea that she was like heaven. She had the power of life and death over him from that first exchange.