She wondered aloud to Federico about the absence of people who were actually born in Turin. It’s as though they were all in hiding, she said.
Torinesi
don’t live in the centre, he said, certainly not in this part of it. It’s been taken over by immigrants. But they’re all Italians, aren’t they? she said and he kissed her and told her he adored her, which wasn’t much of an answer.
She’d never planned to live and work in Turin, a city she’d barely heard of six months before. Throughout her last year at Cambridge, she’d dreamed of some sprawling chaotic southern city with palm trees and a port; Naples, Palermo. She’d looked forward to pizza and mozzarella, not steaming hunks of boiled meat and the sharp, anchovy-scented green sludge that everyone served with it. But Federico had found this short-term research post at the university and the idea of being separated was inconceivable. They hadn’t lived together before: it had always been furtive somehow, sneaking in and out of each other’s rooms before other people woke. In some ways, small but significant, they barely knew each other.
Their first night, in the still-unpainted flat, they ate a spit-roast chicken and potatoes out of the tinfoil container they’d come in, drank cheap red wine from a plastic bottle and went to bed too drunk and exhausted to make love. Federico was asleep the minute she turned off the light but Helen, despite her weariness, was restless and couldn’t settle. There were still no curtains or blinds at the windows, nothing but the wooden shutters that let the streetlight into the room. She lay beside Federico, turned to her side and resting on one elbow, to watch him breathe, the almost imperceptible movement of his mouth, lips parted, half-pressed into the pillow, his soft fair hair curling into his neck. She lifted a curl and let it drop, then kissed the edge of his ear as gently as she could, not wanting him to wake, finally at peace with herself. This will never happen again, she thought, our first night in our first home.
Next morning, after coffee and an aspirin, they walked along the part of town they knew best, the run-down, shabbily exotic porticoes beside the station, jostled by strangers with suitcases and boxes tied with string, contraband cigarette sellers every few yards, the early shift of whores, not all of them women. Helen held onto Federico’s arm. They sat outside a bar in a small square, where the road opened up. They drank cappuccinos and shared a brioche, dipping the pointed ends into the froth.
For Helen, the first few weeks in Turin were filled with novelty and with love, the habit of which was the greatest novelty of all. Sometimes she found herself smiling as she worked at her decorating and realised she’d done nothing but think about Federico for the past half hour, or longer. This is what I’ve always wanted, she told herself. I’m living in Italy with the man I love.
It was hard, though, to reconcile what she’d wanted from Italy with what she heard on the radio, tuned constantly to a local radical station Federico had recommended as one that
told the truth
. It was hard to believe the news that stared up at her from the papers, dense with print and grainy photographs that she’d strewn to protect the floors of the flat from paint. Murders, arrests, kneecappings, hostages, bank raids. So many new words, so few of them in her dictionary, as though the language were being remade to fit. Would she ever catch up?
In the streets below the flat, in the old-fashioned grocers and bakers where she did her little bit of shopping, nervously and using too many gestures, at the stand where she bought her copy of
La Stampa
, the local newspaper she was expected to read, everywhere she looked she saw graffiti, political, violent, often witty as far as she could tell, like the slogans people had coined in Paris nine years earlier. Helen both knew and didn’t know what was happening. She was in the middle of a war, it seemed, a civil war in which lives were actually being lost, while people in England were sticking safety pins through their earlobes and calling it revolution. She read the stories and listened to the news reports with an anxious, growing diligence that left her in some uncertain place she did – and didn’t – recognise; she had a sense of numbers but not of lives.
In the evenings, back from the faculty, Federico cooked and talked while Helen listened. He talked about others, his parents in Rome, whom Helen had still to meet, his research colleagues, writers and thinkers he admired; anyone but himself, the only one she cared about, or her. More than anyone, he talked of his best friend, Giacomo, who was travelling in South America. Inside his wallet he had a strip of photographs of them both, taken in a booth. Giacomo’s face was Italian in a way that Federico’s wasn’t: large, strong features, deep-set eyes, a mass of curling black hair – a romantic face; a brigand’s face. Federico’s was classical, fine-featured, fair, with a northern, slightly priestly, look to him; he might have been her brother. Helen hadn’t even realised he was Italian when they’d met at the Dante Society in St John’s; she’d thought he was just another English graduate student looking for language practice, and anything else that might be available; glamour, romance, even love, if they were lucky. Well, she’d been right about that.
Federico and Giacomo had met in Pisa, at the
Normale
, where they’d taken their first degrees. They’d done their military service together in Civitavecchia, their doctorates in Yale. Then Federico had come back to Europe, to Cambridge, and Giacomo had gone south, on the road. You’ll love him, Federico said whenever he mentioned him. I know you will. Everybody does. Helen examined the small creased strips of photographs and other photographs of him Federico showed her, always surrounded by people, and wondered if she would like him as much as Federico expected her to. She didn’t like doing what everyone else did, or feeling what they felt. Besides, there was something over-masculine and swaggering about him she didn’t take to. Always standing in the centre, the largest smile, the others more often looking at him than at the camera, to see what he wanted from them. She wouldn’t give him what he wanted, she decided, whatever that might be.
One morning, a few weeks after she’d arrived, Helen was spoken to by a woman in a queue at the small, subterranean supermarket nearest the flat. “Isn’t this so-called supermarket dreadful?” the woman said, in English, when she heard Helen’s accent at the till. “We foreigners need to stick together.” Helen disliked this attitude and was defensive about her pronunciation at the best of times. She would have ignored her if she hadn’t felt, at the soft burr of the woman’s voice, a fleeting sense of loneliness, as crippling and acute as a physical cramp in her stomach, as though it had been waiting to catch her unawares. The woman, whose name was Miriam, offered her coffee. Helen accepted.
Miriam wasn’t Helen’s type. If she hadn’t spoken, Helen might not even have recognised her as non-Italian; she had bouffant coal-black hair and too much make-up, a salmon-pink cashmere pullover knotted round her neck and a tailored silk blouse beneath it. Her fingers were covered with rings, her wrists with charm bracelets. They left the supermarket and went to the same bar Helen had had coffee in with Federico after their first night in the flat, but she kept this to herself; she didn’t want the conversation to be about men. Miriam told her to sit down, then brought the coffee over; she drank hers with extra water and pulled a face when Helen said no to sugar. “How can you drink it like that?” she said.
Miriam turned out to be an ex-au pair, who was now teaching English at the Fiat headquarters on the outskirts of the city. Before Helen could ask her how she had found the job, Miriam wanted to know if Helen had a boyfriend. This was the conversation Helen had hoped to avoid; she had no desire to talk about Federico, not yet, she wasn’t sure why. She was naturally secretive, she supposed. She said no, not really. But Miriam was shocked.
“We can’t have that,” she said, “a lovely-looking lassie like you. We’ll have to find you someone suitable.”
“To be honest,” said Helen, “what I really want someone to find for me is a job. I’ve been going round all the schools, but they don’t need anyone.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Miriam.
The following day Helen was driven out in a two-seater sports car to meet Miriam’s contact, an expensively dressed, middle-aged man in a large sunlit office with whom she was clearly having an affair. Three days after that, she was introduced to her first group of students, executive secretaries on the top floor of the main Fiat building, the heart of the empire.
She started the following Monday. She had classes at 8 o’clock every day. Each morning, while Federico shaved, she left the flat and caught the tram at the corner of her street; she sat on the hard wooden benches of the tram until it had left the centre and then walked the last part of the journey down Corso Agnelli and along the windswept dual carriageway of Corso Settembrini as it carved the Mirafiori plant into monolithic blocks, rehearsing what she would teach that day. The first few lessons, she was nervous in front of her class, her voice over-loud and tremulous; the confidence her four-week course should have given her had deserted her in the first few minutes. But she needn’t have worried. Her students treated her like a child, although some of them were no more than two or three years older than she was. Perhaps it was because they were married already, and mothers. They bought her coffee from one machine and fed her crackers and chocolate biscuits from the one beside it, as though she would otherwise starve to death. When they discovered she owed her parents a letter, they pressed an office telephone into her hand. “
Sta parlando con la mamma
,” they sighed to one another, entranced by the soap opera of her life, while she apologised to her startled mother for not having been in touch. They were the only Italians she came across in those early months who never talked about politics. Miriam said it was a national disease, like football in Scotland, and religion. “I just turn off,” she said, “and wait for them to stop.”
One morning Federico received a postcard from Giacomo, from Rio de Plata. The picture, a Technicolor-tinted image of a baroque church, had been scribbled across in red biro, digging deep into the cardboard. Federico held the card at an angle to read what was written, then laughed.
“
Vinceremos
. South America’s gone to his head. He’ll be full of liberation theology when he gets back, you’ll see. He spent two weeks in eastern Turkey a couple of years ago and all he could talk about when he came home was the Kurdish struggle. He wanted to bring one back with him, adopt him. Any Kurd would have done. I’ve seen him pick kittens up from the street and find homes for them with people he doesn’t even know. He persuades, you see. He won’t take no for an answer.”
Helen took the card from him and turned it over. The writing was small and neat, indistinguishable from the handwriting of Federico. “He sounds a bit of an enthusiast,” she said, not liking her tone; she sounded disapproving. It reminded her of her mother’s tone when she’d heard that Helen was moving to Italy, as though she were throwing her life away. Federico, though, didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Well, yes. He can’t just sit in his armchair and theorise, as he puts it. What he means is that he can’t behave the way I do. He doesn’t say that, of course. He always pretends to be talking about someone else when he says it. Never me.” Federico smiled, with a fondness that Helen couldn’t bring herself to trust, or like.
Giacomo bounded into the flat one morning in late October, unannounced, dropping his rucksack and half a dozen bags of various sizes and materials on the floor. Before anyone had a chance to speak, he ran from room to room, opening and closing doors, darting across to windows, looking down into the street, leaping back as if avoiding snipers. He turned on taps and thumped beds and stood in front of a wardrobe mirror, his face appalled. “God, I look awful!” he said, then burst into delighted laughter. “It’s Giacomo,” said Federico, but Helen hadn’t needed to be told.
He was right, he did look awful. His clothes – a parka pulled over a khaki T-shirt and combat trousers – were faded and grubby, with ingrained dirt at the seams. The trousers hung off him; she’d never imagined him so thin. He smelt of old dried sweat and something she couldn’t identify, a dusty spicy scent, oddly pleasant. When he grinned, she saw he’d lost his canine tooth on the left. Above the tangled beard, his eyes looked wild and big; hanks of hair matted into semi-dreadlocks hung over them. The lines in his forehead, the lines at each side of his mouth, were etched with grime, but he didn’t, despite this, give the impression of being dirty. There was something startled and alive about him, she thought, like a large dog fresh from the sea. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see him shake himself dry. He took Helen’s face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth, a warm dry kiss, then leapt across and seized Federico’s face and did the same to him.
“It’s just so good to see you both,” he said, in odd Spanish-American accented English. “So good.” He hugged them both, leapt back, rubbing his hands together like a child.
“
Non devi parlare inglese per me
,” said Helen. She listened to herself, appalled. You needn’t speak English for me. How prissy she sounded, how middle-aged. She heard her mother’s voice again. Already he’d rubbed her up the wrong way.
Giacomo grabbed her round the waist and dragged her into a stumbling dance around the kitchen. “
Parli un italiano perfetto
,” he said, grinning with delight. But he continued in English. “You’re wonderful. Fede’s lucky to have found you.” He held her so close his breath was in her face; it smelt of coffee and aniseed. She wanted to let him lead her, but also to push him off. Already, he’d begun to scare her. She didn’t know what he’d do next.
They stayed in that evening. They ate pasta with oil and garlic, and bread and salami, and drank Barbera from plastic bottles. They listened to Giacomo, who seemed possessed, crouching forward, hands clasped together in earnestness or spread out with the palms turned up, as if he could weigh the world; swinging back until she thought the chair would collapse beneath him; laughing at odd intervals, his eyes bright with tears he didn’t bother to wipe away. When they’d eaten, he emptied his bags on the kitchen floor to show them what he’d found. Music tapes, painted flutes, scraps of embroidered and woven cloth, those peg-like worry dolls, sweaters of heavy musty-scented wool with geometric designs and tassels. Helen had thought, disappointed, but this is tourist stuff. You’re nothing more than a tourist. And then he dug down deeper. Beneath his screwed-up T-shirts and underpants were posters and pamphlets, cyclostyled on coarse grey paper, crumpled and ripped, books with their covers torn off and their dog-eared pages scored with question marks, exclamation marks, doodles. He pulled it all out, the fabulous mess of his last nine months, waving it in their faces until Helen was exhausted.