Power to Burn (6 page)

Dio
, how I hated him sitting there, his face so earnest, so pompous, as if he knew everything there was to know about the world. I fixed my eyes on his fat black moustache so neatly trimmed and thick, it looked like a shiny slug on his lip.

‘How would you know?' I jeered. ‘You've never trusted me. Never trusted me to do what I want with my life. You stamp on me and suffocate me before I even know what I
think
. But you won't crush me like you did Mamma. Where is Mamma's power? What has she done with her life? She's just cooked your dinners and washed your clothes and run your errands. You think she's ever done what
she
wanted?'

A red blush of rage crept over Papà's face and he strode toward the bed. He clenched his fists but then he shoved them down deep in his pockets. His voice was as hard and dead as stone.

‘Your mother chose to live like a decent woman, with her husband and her family. That is what a woman wants most.'

‘And in exchange for that she crushes the magic inside her. Because you say so. Because she's too tired and defeated to know anymore
what
she wants. Sounds like a great bargain to me!'

Papà leaned over and grabbed my hands. His teeth were gritted behind his lips as if he were swallowing something bitter. He looked at me for a long time and then released my hands. When he spoke his voice was quiet, but it was a controlled kind of quiet.

‘I'm going to tell you a little story, Lucrezia. A true story. You haven't lived long enough in the world to know it yet. But your mother does, and she heeds it well.'

Papà took a deep breath and I felt that old depression sink over me.

Papà is always telling ‘little stories' that go on until you want to scream. And they always end with a moral, like a full-stop.

‘Centuries ago,' he began, ‘women with the power were hunted. They were called witches and they were hated and feared as agents of the devil. It is said that when a witch was caught, she was tortured until she was so thin, the sun shone through her. She was chained like a dog and hung up in a tower to suffer cold and starvation. When she was almost dead, but not quite, she was roasted over a slow fire.' Papà paused, and I waited for the moral. As if I didn't know.

‘That, Lucrezia, is how much people hate
la magia
. These are the terrible consequences of the power.'

I stared at him, and suddenly I laughed, flinging my loud brash laugh like a coloured scarf right into his face. Look at that mouth of his, ringed by the moustache, twisting into that righteous grimace of disgust. I'd like to rub and rub and rub at it until it disappeared.

‘Let
me
tell you a little story, Papà.' I made my voice low and even. ‘And this is how the
true
story goes. Yes, those women were burnt all over Europe, thousands and thousands of them. I
have
been around long enough to read a few history books. And the books will tell you that those women were innocent. They were executed just because they were a little bit different – maybe they were too smart or too beautiful, they had red hair, a long nose, a humped back. They became scapegoats for anything that went wrong. But they were no more witches than you! No, real witches would have escaped, and hurray for them! Then they wouldn't have had to live with frightened little men of no power, like you!'

Even before I saw his hand move I felt the ringing slap on my cheek. But what he said next was worse than the slap or any of his nasty stories.

‘How could you ever expect to catch a husband?' His voice was a sneer. ‘Do you think even Fabio, the son of a thief, would love you if he really knew you? Knew what an
animal
you could become?'

He walked out the door and slammed it behind him. I didn't turn around. I would never forgive him. Never.

During that week Cornelia brought me my dinner, and my homework. She talked to me, telling me little jokes and things that happened at school. But she never mentioned Fabio. And neither did I. A gulf of silence was growing between me and my family.

It was like being on a boat, drawing away from a headland. The stretch of water grew larger with every day. The land, a small pinprick of light, was shrinking until it was almost invisible.

Finally, they decided to let me out. I know it was Mamma who forced the decision. Cornelia said she even threatened to leave Papà if he didn't relent. But I couldn't feel grateful to her. Too much had happened. The gulf was too deep.

But when I walked down the steps and into the morning light, it was like walking into another life. There was hope in the buttery sunshine and cooing pigeons, and the people bustling to work. I started to feel strong again, and my
self
, as if someone had drawn a bright orange circle around me and inside,
there
, nothing could touch me. I felt free and as light as the wind.

I hopped on my bike and flew down the street towards Fabio's house. He wouldn't have left yet, I was sure of it. The breeze rushed at my face, lifting the hair off my neck.

I was growing hot in my cotton blouse and I was glad because my cheeks would be red and shiny, and Fabio always pretended to bite them when they were like that, as if I were a round delicious apple. Oh I couldn't wait to feel his arms tight around my waist, I would tell him everything.

As I turned the corner into Fabio's street I saw a crowd gathering near his house. Men and women were hurrying along, dragging children, calling to each other. I pedalled faster and a heavy feeling of dread began to sink and spread inside me.

There was an acrid smell in the air. I came up to the crowd and dropped my bike in the road. The smell of smoke was strong now and ashes were floating in the air.

I pushed past people, knocking into shoulders and backs. A man shouted at me. And then I was in the front line and it was like stepping into a war.

Fabio's house was gone. Smoke rose from the jagged rafters of the roof, standing like a skeleton in the haze. Just the row of stone steps led crazily up to the empty sky.

A
carabiniere
pushed past me and I grabbed on to his sleeve.

‘What happened? Where is Fabio?' I cried.

‘There was a fire early this morning,' he said. ‘The house was completely gutted before we arrived. Nothing we could do.'

‘But the family? Where are they? Who did this?'

‘We don't know that yet,
signorina
. It's too soon. We only know that there were no survivors. Investigations are under way.
Pazienza
.'

I looked at the stairs and the side of the front door that was still standing. The brass door knocker that Fabio's mother used to polish so religiously was blackened with smoke.

I saw one of Fabio's skis near the stairs. It lay like a broken spear. Once ordinary, now nightmarish.

I couldn't believe it.

I pushed my bike back along the street. I tried to think about Fabio's face the last time I saw him, what I should have said, where I could go – but it was all a jumble, and made no sense.

The only thought that kept hammering in my head, over the din of every other thought, was that if my parents hadn't locked me in I could have been with Fabio now. I could have saved him. We could have been hugging and laughing and kissing, maybe in the mountains somewhere, far away, huddled together, warm against the cold.

I left my bike in the garage and went up to the apartment. Mamma wasn't there, I supposed she had gone to the markets. I didn't care. I never wanted to see her or Papà again.

I packed a bag with warm jumpers and pants and my new woollen overcoat. It would be cold in the mountains. And I knew I would be there for the winter.

For the last time I looked around the room, at Cornelia's bed and mine, at the rosewood wardrobe and the little desk. I went over and traced the L loves F with my finger, and now a piercing sadness like the point of an icicle plunged through my body. Fabio's face and eyes and smell flooded my mind, and there was only emptiness ahead.

I bit down on the sadness and strapping my bag to my back I ran out the door. I wanted to keep running, running forever away from the emptiness, and the hate. I decided to go north, to Limone, where there was snow and mountains and no one I knew. That was where I would have taken Fabio.

I looked at the ring on my hand and the tears welled up again. I couldn't live with it on my finger, as if our love was still alive. When I got to Limone I'd bury it, in a spot only I knew about, perhaps under a chestnut tree. I'd put flowers over it and say a prayer, a song of love. It would be our grave.

I walked the two kilometres to the station. My body was heavy. I dragged it along like an old suitcase. Where there used to be light and wind and sun there was now only the cold. I shivered, and the frozen hatred sat in my heart like a lump of dirty ice.

I
had just about finished packing my bag, so I sat on the bed for a moment and looked around for the last time at the room where my mother grew up. We were going to stay in the Tuscan house in the country where Mum and Lucrezia, Nonna and Nonno had spent their summer holidays.

I was interested in seeing the country – Nonna had told me a lot about it, about people like old Maria who keeps the place for them while they are away, who says ‘Bless me, that's an incredible thing' every five minutes, and not much else.

But I felt sad about leaving this apartment. Living here, in the intimacy of this small space with the white tiles on the kitchen walls where Mum had (daringly) drawn her first cat. Nonna told stories after dinner, about Mum, and I was seeing a new part of her that I couldn't have imagined before. I had posted a letter to her yesterday, and somehow I'd wanted to write something close and new, but I ended up just asking her for a cat when I got home, seeing she knew how to draw them so well.

I really liked Nonna. She had a sparkle, a kind of mischievousness that I hadn't expected to see in our family. She laughed at my jokes(!), even the rude ones, and could she cook! Her speciality was the
bugie
, little pastries that were so light they melted on the tongue and after you'd eaten ten it was as if you'd only just started. I guess that's why they are called ‘little lies'. Nonna played tricks on me sometimes and once, when we were out, she threw a snowball that hit me right on the back of the neck. (I got her on the ear for that.) It was hard to understand how Mum could have grown so serious, after living with a person like Nonna.

And it was hard to understand how she could have ever left this place, with all its treasures. In this one week we'd visited the Medici Palace, where Lorenzo the Magnificent was born, the Uffizi Art Gallery and the house where Michelangelo had lived.

And I had seen Michelangelo's ‘David'. Wow. As I stared up at the five-metre giant, I felt the tears coming into my eyes. Imagine having someone like this living just around the corner! I guess it was the pure beauty of him – the satin finish of his skin, the strength in his face. (And he didn't even look as if he did weights.) I was dying to stroke the marble, he seemed so real that under my fingers he might wake up and smile. And yet the power of him was more godlike than human – I thought a lot about that, and decided that perhaps this is what Michelangelo's art was about, showing us what we can be, not just what we are.

Nonna said that Mum came here often to visit ‘David'. They used to joke that he was her only boyfriend, but she said one day she would find a man just like him and marry him. I couldn't help laughing at that, thinking of poor old Dad in his grey cardigans and the bald patch at the back of his head. Maybe Dad
does
have a certain air of authority, I'm thinking of that quelling glare he gets when someone has hidden the TV guide.

‘Roberto, sei pronto, are you ready?'

Nonna is the fastest packer I've ever seen. All the food she was taking was gathered like a small mountain on the kitchen table this afternoon – chilli peppers in jars of oil, huge hunks of parmigiano cheese, sun-dried tomatoes as wrinkly as walnuts and home-made biscuits. It all stood in boxes now near the front door, waiting to be carried out (by me). How we were going to load all this onto the bus was a mystery, but I decided to look on this as my weight-training in Italy.

‘Take that new overcoat, Roberto, it will be cold in the country,' Nonna called out. ‘No central heating there!'

She went on about the weather again, how she'd never known it to plummet like this in Florence till it froze the water in the taps. It seemed that this was all anybody talked about here – in the streets people walked rigidly, as if any extra movement might let in a sudden rush of cold air, and Nonna laughed when I told her that they looked just like
stoccafisso
, the stiff, dried fish that hung in the
alimentari
shops in town.

At night, even with central heating, I slept with a jumper on over my pyjamas and woollen socks on my feet. It
was
strange, it seemed to be getting colder if anything, and Nonna said that if the weather didn't break soon, they would have to drop food by helicopter to villages that were snowed in.

Personally, I quite like the cold. It makes this place seem even more different from home, even more of an adventure. But I wouldn't tell that to Nonna and her chilblains.

‘Come on, Roberto,
sù
, check you haven't left anything, and let's go. The bus won't wait for us!'

I took another quick look around and spied the photo of Lucrezia. Quickly I stuffed it down the bottom of my suitcase. I took Mum's (or Lucrezia's?) ivory comb and the perfume, too, and put them with my bathroom things. I reckon I'm entitled to own something of my mother's past. Especially as
she's
never really told me anything about it.

The bus was full when we arrived puffing and laden with our bags and boxes, but no one seemed to mind as we pushed past. I guess we didn't cause as much trouble as the man sitting in front of us whose old dog was taking up two seats and every now and then made dreadful smells, especially when we went over a bump.