Half an hour later, Giacomo and Helen leave Rome along the Via Pontina in a car Giacomo hired at the hotel. Helen has taken some sunglasses from her bag and put them on. This dress she’s wearing does her no favours, thinks Giacomo. With the glasses on, big wraparound things with D&G on the side in glittering paste, she looks like a typical Italian widow. As, of course, she is.
“Did I tell you I had a premonition?” she says. “Not really a premonition, because it wasn’t pre anything. More of a vision, I suppose. I saw Federico the morning he was shot. He was standing in front of me, smiling in this odd puzzled way as though he’d been told a joke he didn’t understand, you know, when you smile without knowing why. I looked at my watch, I remember thinking: I’ll have to ask him exactly what he was up to at 9:27. He was shot at 9:27. It makes no sense.”
“I didn’t know you believed in that kind of thing.”
“I don’t.” She sounds upset. They are driving along an avenue flanked by maritime pines and oleander that makes Giacomo think of travelling into the warmth of the south. Perhaps we can have a holiday later this summer, he thinks, when it’s all blown over. Somewhere in Sicily. He still has relatives there.
“But I think Federico did,” says Helen. “I know it sounds stupid, but I think he may have had the strength somehow to make me see him, I don’t know how.” Giacomo, who hates this sort of thing, is about to tell her not to be so foolish, but before he has a chance he hears a stifled gulp and a sob. He reaches across and touches Helen’s knee, his hand on the bare skin where the dress has ridden up.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about you,” she says, not moving his hand, or her leg, perhaps waiting for him to do so.
“Do about me?” He laughs, but removes his hand. “There’ll be more than enough time to think about that.”
“Oh,” she says. He can’t tell if this has satisfied her or not. She’s tired, shaken by the events of the morning. Either way, he thinks, it is true. There will be time for everything, for them, if not for Federico.
“Are you sure you want to go and see this woman?” he says, swerving to overtake an
Ape
. “We can just go home if you’d prefer.”
Helen shakes her head. “No, no. I need to speak to her. It won’t take long.”
Half an hour later, she tells Giacomo to turn off to the left. The new road winds uphill, zigzagging as it goes, with the sea some distance beneath them, first to the right and then to the left. The higher they go, the wider the green-blue line of it becomes. Finally, Helen says: “Here we are. It’s down this road.”
They pull up outside two houses, the first one fine old stone and semi-abandoned, the second constructed out of concrete blocks plastered over and painted mud brown, with bronze-coloured aluminium frames at the windows. They hear a dog bark and a door being opened and closed as they walk across to the second house. Three other cars are parked on the unpaved area outside the houses.
When they are still some yards away, the front door is opened by a young man.
“He’s Massimo’s brother,” Helen whispers. “He must be. He looks just like him.” Holding out her hand, she says, in a slow, slightly formal Italian, as though she has been practising the phrase in the car: “My condolences for Massimo. I’m deeply sorry.” She pauses. “I’m the widow of Federico, Federico Di Stasi. Helen. I wanted to speak to your mother.” Giacomo is startled to hear her say
widow
.
The young man takes her hand, then lets it go. He doesn’t appear to have noticed Giacomo. His eyes are red from crying. “My mother isn’t here,” he says. “What do you want?” His tone is surly. He looks back into the room and shouts at a dog to be quiet, at someone else to take the dog away.
“Where is she?” asks Helen, clearly hurt.
“They took her away somewhere safe, where she won’t be bothered,” the man says, his face set, staring with inexplicable hostility at Helen. He isn’t going to ask us in, thinks Giacomo. He is wearing black trousers, part of a suit, black shoes, a V-necked T-shirt, as though he has just come back from a funeral and taken off his jacket and shirt to relax. Perhaps he has. Giacomo wonders if Massimo has been buried that morning. Would they have known? Would Helen have been told?
“They?”
“The
senatrice
,” the man says.
“
Senatrice
?” says Helen, her voice low and shocked.
“Your husband’s mother,” he says in a tone that mixes scorn and respect, as though there is only one
senatrice
in the world and Helen has no right not to know. “She said that she’d help us and she did. She sent a car.”
Helen covers her face with both hands, then rubs her eyes.
“When?”
“After the funeral. This morning. My mother didn’t want any visitors. There have been too many people here from the television, journalists, they wanted photographs of Massimo when he was a boy, photographs of his bedroom, they wanted to…” The young man’s eyes fill with tears. “They’re jackals.”
“Where have they taken her?”
He shrugs.
“You have a number for her? A mobile number?”
“No.”
Giacomo takes Helen’s arm to lead her back to the car, but Helen pulls herself free. “Your mother said something about a plot. Do you know what she meant?”
“She didn’t mean anything. She was overwrought.”
“She said that Massimo had told her something might happen. That they were in danger. She must know something.”
He flushes with anger. “My mother’s an old woman, she’s confused, she’s just lost her first-born son. It’s natural she’d blame someone.”
“Is that what Giulia said? That she was confused?”
“The
senatrice
? I don’t know what you mean. At least she said she’d look after us.”
“The funeral?” says Helen. “I didn’t know. Why wasn’t I told?”
“They said you knew. We thought you’d be there. My mother asked after you.” The young man is silent for a minute or two, considering. “There was no one, no one from your family. Massimo used to talk about you all the time. He worshipped the ground you walked on, you and your husband. My mother couldn’t believe it. It broke her heart a second time.”
“But I love Massimo. I love your mother. I wasn’t told, you must believe me. Nobody told me.” To Giacomo’s astonishment, Helen flings her arms around the young man, hugging him to her. He resists for no more than a second, then lets himself be held, returns the embrace. He is at least a head taller than Helen. Giacomo sees them together: the man’s brown arms against Helen’s dress, her fine pale hair pressed up against his chest, and is unexpectedly jealous, when the young man’s eyes meet his. He looks away, with a sense of shame he doesn’t understand. He isn’t to blame. But someone must always be to blame, he thinks, isn’t that what the young man just said? It’s natural to blame someone.
They are about to leave when a teenage girl runs from the house and presses a jar of olives into Helen’s hands.
“She’d want you to have these,” she says.
7
Once she’s checked no one is waiting outside the house, Helen asks Giacomo to drop her at the edge of the square. “I’ll call you later this evening,” she says. “There’s something I have to sort out.” Giacomo seems happy with this. It makes such a change to have someone doing what I want, she thinks. She’s always imagined Giacomo would be the last person to be manoeuvred into doing things he didn’t want for someone else. Does he love her? she wonders. Does she love him?
She lets herself into the flat, kicking her shoes off, unzipping her dress as she closes the door behind her. Her first thought is to take it off, to free herself of the shroud-like dress, to let her skin breathe. She drops the dress to the floor, pushing it into the corner with her bare foot. She stands there in her bra and knickers, forcing her elbows far enough back for her to feel the strain, then lifting her hair away from her neck and letting it fall.
Silence. How odd though to find the empty flat so full, so airless. She’s spent so much time in it alone these past few years, with Federico increasingly absorbed by his work. She’s resented it, she’s felt betrayed by Federico; her rival has been a cabinet of files, a schedule of meetings that left him no time for anything else, a sense of duty that made her feel shallow and inconsequential. She’s been alone so much here it ought to feel no different. But now, as she walks from hall to kitchen to living room to bathroom, aching in every limb, it’s worse than it’s ever been. As though room after room of silence were itself a sort of presence so dense she can hardly push her way through it.
Don Giusini sits down at the table without being asked. Helen has pulled on a skirt and T-shirt and is barefoot behind the kitchen counter, making tea for them both. He is waiting for her to finish, not speaking. She can sense him looking round the room, at the pictures and the books, at the blackboard with OLIVES written on it in Federico’s hand, looking at her, in the same slow way, as though it is only by looking carefully at everything that he can reach an understanding of it. He held her hand at the door with both his hands, and she let him, wondering if it would help, if he possessed some healing power. I’m so fragile, she thinks, resenting him a little, so needy; I’ll take my help from any source that’s offered. But she hasn’t done him justice, she sees that now. What he does, as she has learnt to say from American TV, is
calm
. Don Giusini does calm. The sheaf of papers from Giulia’s desk is now slipped into the drawer of her desk, some of it still unread. She isn’t ready yet, but she will be soon. She carries the teapot across to the table.
“Milk or lemon?” she says, then corrects herself. “No, I’m sorry, it’ll have to be lemon. I don’t have any milk.”
He smiles. His front teeth are chipped and slightly crooked, she notices; his parents couldn’t have had the money to have them fixed.
“In that case, lemon. And sugar. Sugar. I have a sweet tooth.”
She pours the tea out, fetches a lemon from the fridge, and sugar. The knife she uses to slice the lemon is Federico’s.
“I didn’t know you existed three days ago,” she says, discomfited by the silence. “And now here we are together in my kitchen. Drinking tea.”
He smiles more broadly. For a moment she wonders if he is making fun of her.
“Together in your kitchen,” he says, looking round. “To talk about Federico.”
She doesn’t know what to say. What she wants to do is listen.
“I spoke too soon this morning,” he says. “I was cruel, my words were cruel, but I wanted to be heard. You didn’t know me; you might have sent me away. I didn’t want that.”
“I understand,” she says, waiting.
“Federico met me at a conference some months ago. It was a small thing, a handful of people against the war. I suppose you could say that Federico was the star.” Don Giusini looks at her to see if this makes sense. When she nods, he carries on. “I was a little in awe of him and also, to be honest, a little distrustful, but that soon passed. He helped us see what needed to be done because he understood his world. As we did ours. But Federico’s world was also their world, the war makers’ world. He helped us see what might be effective and what not.” He pauses. “And then we met again, the two of us alone, sometimes in Rome but more often in my home. It was easier for him to travel than for me. My parish is in the Abruzzi, near Teramo, and one weekend he came without warning to my house. He was tired, I thought he wanted a place to rest, no more than that. A refuge. But I was wrong. He wanted to confess.”
“I didn’t know,” she says.
“He told me straight away that he had played a part in the death of a man in Turin. Almost thirty years ago now. It happened when he was stealing money from a bank for what they called the struggle. Someone else was arrested. They knew it was Federico, but no one said. He let the other man go to jail for him.” He looks at her, puzzled. “You were there – not at the bank raid, I know that, but in Italy at that time – this will make sense to you in a way it can’t to me.” He spreads his hands out in despair. “I wasn’t born when it happened. It isn’t my place to judge, but I’m a human being, I can’t not judge. I listen and try to understand. I try not to judge. I do my best, Signora Di Stasi. Helen. May I call you Helen? What Federico told me shocked me, because I couldn’t understand. He tried to explain how it was, but I had the sense that he didn’t understand either. Not any longer. But that didn’t stop him judging himself. He couldn’t forgive. He didn’t seem to want my forgiveness, in a way. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. He wanted to talk. He’d done other things at that time, he said, and told no one.”
“He could have talked to me,” says Helen.
“He couldn’t do that, I don’t think. Not after so long.” Don Giusini stirs sugar into his tea. “He could have talked to you then, perhaps, after it had happened, but he didn’t. I think he was scared at first, that you might not love him, or talk to someone else. And then he was too ashamed to talk to you. He’d lied to you for so long. I think perhaps he was most ashamed that he’d lied.”
“He never said a word about it. Or anything else. He didn’t tell me everything, I didn’t expect that.”
“Silence is also lying.”
“I know it is,” she says. She sips at her tea. “This morning. You said he was dying.”
“Yes. He told me some time ago. He said he had spoken to no one else. He’d only found out a few days earlier, although he’d suspected something for some time. He had a tumour in his brain, in his frontal lobe. He’d been suffering from headaches. You’ll have noticed?”
With tears in her eyes, Helen nods once more. “I thought he was working too hard. I didn’t realise.”
“He found out three months ago. He was told he had four, maybe five months to live. The tumour was fast-growing, inoperable. It was beginning to affect his behaviour; it would continue to do so, unpredictably. To remove it they would have had to remove a part of his brain. He would have been a vegetable.”