“Everything goes on, doesn’t it?” she says, taking the knife once again and chopping more garlic and chilli, pouring some oil into the same small pan. His pan, thinks Giacomo, his knife. “As if nothing has happened. But I’ve already said that, haven’t I? I can’t remember what I’ve said and what I haven’t. Giulia says I’ve got the brain of a pea-hen.”
“She has a way with words.” He pours red wine into glasses.
Helen sighs. “She thinks I’m completely incapable, she always has. She’s never forgiven Federico for choosing me, when he could have had one of her cronies’ daughters. One of the daughters of the revolution. Her revolution, that is. She’s responsible for all this,” she says, with surprising venom. She shakes the pan. “Mustn’t let this burn as well.” When Giacomo offers her the glass, she takes it, then looks at him.
“What was that Yvonne said about you having to see the magistrate?”
He hoped she’d forgotten. He sips his wine. “He wanted to know what I knew about Federico,” he says, “which, these days, is almost nothing. As I said. He asked me about the old days, in Turin. I think he may have had a personal interest.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He grew up there. You didn’t notice yesterday because he was speaking English. His accent in Italian is pure
torinese
.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“No,” he says. “Surprisingly, he didn’t.”
She lifts a thread of pasta from the pan. “
Al dente
all right?” she says.
When they have eaten their pasta and the bottle is finished, Helen asks him what he intends to do.
He laughs. “What with?” he says. “My life?”
“I was thinking about this evening,” she says. “Yvonne must be wondering where you are.”
He shrugs. “I’ll sort Yvonne out later,” he says. He plays with his empty glass for a moment. “I know what I want to do.”
“Yes.” She glances at his hand and then, more intently, into his eyes. She looks tired, a little scared, younger than she has seemed for years, despite her exhaustion, as though some patina has been rubbed off and left her exposed. She looks the way she used to look in Turin, he thinks, wary, bare, without resources or subterfuge, needy in a covert, antagonistic way. No wonder he loves her.
“If you’ll let me.”
8
Half an hour later Helen is naked in bed, the sheet pulled up around her. Normally she’d read a novel from the stack beside her, knowing that Federico won’t be coming to bed until he’s finished whatever work he’s brought home. But this evening she lies and listens to Giacomo in the bathroom, brushing and spitting, peeing and flushing, as Federico did, as all men do. She lies there, thinking that she has never felt so alone, so distant from herself, when the dream she had that morning comes back to her and she remembers where it came from, as vividly as if the scene were being played before her eyes. It was one Sunday morning almost thirty years ago, when she and Federico had gone to the station in Turin and taken the first train out. The train passed through an area with shallow hills and lines of trees as windbreaks, poplars maybe, and there were low square farmhouses with arches and porticoes along one side, some built from brick and others plastered over with ochre, rose pink, lemon. The sun had come out and they were hot enough to take off their jackets, although it was still early spring. Federico’s shirt-collar was sticking up at one side, which made Helen want to reach across and tuck it in; some fluff from his jacket collar had snagged on the stubble of his neck. They were alone in the compartment, and the sunlight was pouring in as they headed towards some town whose name she has forgotten, and then there was a tunnel, quite unexpected in that landscape, as though someone had placed a hill in that precise spot, purposefully, to create a theatrical effect, perhaps of detachment. They came out of the tunnel, the train moving slowly as if approaching a station, and there was the finest house they had seen up to then, with tall symmetrical windows and a squat tower at the centre and a wide arch that ran right through the structure so that they could see the fields beyond. They were sitting opposite each other, staring out through the window like children, when Federico turned to Helen, his face radiant with sunlight, and said: “We could buy that house and live there, just the two of us,” and Helen nodded, too moved by happiness to speak, not even daring to look at Federico any longer, deliberately looking away, just staring out as the house went slowly by. When people have said they thought their heart was going to burst with happiness, Helen has thought of that house, disappearing behind a line of poplars, and the figure of a woman she saw at a window, reaching out to close the shutters against that unexpected late-winter sunlight, her white blouse and her naked arms suddenly closed away, enveloped by the darkness of the room behind.
That was her dream, she thinks, that day, that journey, that house, that happiness. But she can’t see Federico in the dream. She can’t remember who she was with, however hard she tries.
During the night, she wakes to find Giacomo beside her in the bed, in Federico’s place. For a moment, feeling the heat of another body, she thinks it
is
Federico, and rolls into him, forgetting that he’s dead. Then, with a shudder of revulsion and fear, she cries out, pushing herself away with all her force. But Giacomo catches her shoulder and moves against her, his naked chest against her arm, his stomach brushing hers. “You’re all right,” he whispers. “It’s all right. It’s me. I’m with you now. It’s going to be all right.” And she falls back onto her pillow, unresisting. “What time is it?” she says. His fingers touch her lips. “Hush now,” he says. “Help me,” she says, not knowing what she means. How on earth can Giacomo help her?
It takes her an age to get back to sleep.
PART THREE
1
Rome, Thursday, 3 June 2004
Fighting an almost manageable hangover, Martin struggles to conclude the English desk’s daily round-up of the national press. Federico’s assassination is yesterday’s news by now, replaced on most front pages by images from the latest video of the Italian hostages in Iraq, the statement by their families that they won’t be taking part in Saturday’s anti-war demonstration, despite the kidnappers’ demands that they show themselves as a gesture of solidarity with the people of Iraq. Well, yes. Quite. This hardly bears reporting, thinks Martin, but taps a brief sentence out to round off the piece. Nobody cares about other countries’ hostages in any case. Japanese dying by the cartload, Filipinos too, and barely a peep in the western press. Yesterday’s military parade went off smoothly, as expected. There are photographs in some papers of Federico’s mother standing beside the defence minister, comments that range from the admiring to the affronted. No mention of Helen, thank God. Fifteen teenage girls arrested for climbing over a barrier. Balloons banned from Rome air space. Worth a mention? Hot air against imposing show of military force? No, better not tempt fate. Government talk of pulling the troops out of Nassiriya, immediately contradicted by government talk of a strong Italian presence in the province, the having-it-both-ways strategy that satisfies no one, but is always more newsworthy than silence. What else? Research shows fewer cases of clinical depression in Italy than elsewhere in Europe. Research shows Italians have fallen in love with hole-in-the-wall cash machines. Some connection worth making perhaps? Martin writes, deletes, writes. And so the muck mounts up. Agency statements by MPs no one has heard of to pay off private debts to lobbyists. Disagreement among leaders and would-be leaders of the centre-left. Martin sighs, reads on. A talking head on one of the PM’s channels, now Euro-candidate for the boss’s party, comes out as “homo-affective”, whatever that means. Claims to have Alexander the Great syndrome. Too “local”? Church slant? Why not? Go for it, boyo. All at once, Martin feels better. After a burst of anticlerical energy he calls down to the bar for coffee. Double espresso. Writes his concluding paragraph, his Italy in a nutshell, worms and all. Bangs
Enter
and off it all goes, as it does every morning, onto a thousand, a hundred thousand blinking screens. The truth. The news.
Finally, Martin picks up the phone. Time to call in another favour. For Helen.
Alina hasn’t called.
2
Giacomo is woken by what sounds like a bell. He lies on his back, holding his breath, waiting for Helen to move. But Helen is fast asleep, her mouth pushed open by the position of her head on the pillow, which makes her look vulnerable and slightly infantile, the puckered cherry-like mouth of a china doll, so unlike her mouth awake. Her hair is damp with sweat and broken into strands on her cheek and forehead. Giacomo raises himself on one elbow and is about to lift the hair away from Helen’s face with the tip of a finger when he hears a noise from somewhere in the flat.
A woman’s voice calls out, in Italian. “Helen. Helen. Are you here?” Then, more quietly, but still loud enough for him to hear: “Where on earth can she be? That stupid girl.”
Beside him, Helen stirs, mumbles. Giacomo shakes her shoulder gently. “There’s someone in the flat,” he says, his voice as low as he can make it. Helen’s eyes start open in a look of absolute terror; he wonders for a second if she’s forgotten he’s here. “Don’t panic. It’s a woman,” he says, adding, to reassure her: “She knows you. She thinks you’re stupid.” When the bedroom door swings open, they are both sitting up, Helen with the sheet clutched across her breasts like a Victorian heroine, Giacomo bare from the waist up, his hands in his lap. An old woman, slim, with dark grey hair twisted up into a tight ballerina’s chignon, wearing pearls and a neat black dress, walks into the room, her heels click-clicking on the wood. I know you, Giacomo thinks.
“Good morning, Giulia,” says Helen, in Italian.
“I expected something, I must admit, but not this,” the woman replies. “Not this degradation.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Helen’s voice is icy. Giacomo fights back the impulse to laugh. He slips a hand beneath the sheet and grips Helen’s thigh.
“You were never fit to be Federico’s wife. I knew that of course.” Giulia is stiff with contempt. “You never made any real effort to be his wife. And now this. This filth.”
“How dare you,” Helen says, pushing Giacomo’s hand away, letting the sheet fall down from her body. It sticks for a moment to the damp skin of her breasts, then slides into her lap, where she lets it lie. With a shiver of disgust, Giulia turns to leave the room.
“Wait a minute,” says Helen. “Where are you going? Who gave you permission to walk in here like this? This isn’t your house. Who do you think you are?”
Giulia has changed her mind. She stalks across to the chest of drawers and picks up Giacomo’s lighter, plays with it, weighs it in her hand, an expression of grim satisfaction on her face. For a moment, Giacomo thinks she’s going to burn them all alive. “You don’t imagine you can get away with this, do you?”
“Did Federico give you a key? He never said anything to me.”
Giulia puts down the lighter with a brisk slap and turns once again to leave the room. “We’ll discuss this when you’re decent.” As if to emphasise the unsuitability of the word, she repeats it: “Decent.” When she can no longer be seen from the bed, she adds, in a louder voice: “I won’t leave, you know. Not until I’m ready. You might be free of my son, but you won’t be free of me that easily.”
“You’d better deal with her,” Giacomo says. “What do you want me to do? Shall I leave?”
“For God’s sake, no. Did you hear what she said? Don’t leave me alone with her, whatever you do. Make us some coffee while I talk to her.” She scrambles out of bed, pulling the top sheet away with her, her back and arse exposed as she crosses the room towards a chair. Giacomo lies naked on the mattress, his penis half-erect. He’d pull her back if he could. “You’d better put something on,” she says. “You’ve shocked her enough as it is.” She slips on a short cotton skirt and singlet, taking a towelling robe from a hanger and throwing it across to him. “Put this on,” she says. “I’ll go and sort her out.”
Giulia is waiting at the table, the house key beside her hand. Helen sits down opposite the older woman, resisting the urge to reach across for the key and slip it into her pocket. The ridge of varnished wood at the front edge of the seat is hard and cool against her thighs. She has decided that she will see what Giulia wants to say before speaking; she doesn’t want to pre-empt or misdirect her. Perversely, she feels a sort of gratitude. After years of evasion and patrician indifference on the part of the older woman, after all those words not said or not quite said, the haughty silences and callous asides, Giulia will finally tell her what she really thinks of her. And then she will do the same to Giulia.
“The telephone’s off the hook. Your mobile’s turned off. You don’t even answer the doorbell. I hardly like having to enter the house like this, like some common thief, but you do realise that you can’t just disappear, Helen,” Giulia says. Her tone is unexpectedly conciliatory. “There’s so much to be done. I don’t know where to start.”
Helen stretches her arm out for the key, but Giulia is too fast for her.
“This doesn’t belong to you,” she says, slipping the key into the pocket of her dress.
“Well, it certainly doesn’t belong to you.”
“I won’t pretend to like you,” says Giulia after a thoughtful pause, as though she has just been asked to do this by someone else and has needed a moment or two to consider. Well, Federico must have asked her, thinks Helen, and Federico is there before her, the abrupt and dreadful absence of him, for the first time this morning. Federico must have given his mother the key. She feels that she has been woken by a slap across her face.