The Dividing Stream (3 page)

‘‘What are those white scars?’’ Max asked, saying the first thing that came into his head and then realizing that, even to an Italian and a boy of this class, the question might seem personal.

‘‘Football,’’ Enzo muttered, his voice so husky now that it was almost inaudible. ‘‘I play in goal.’’

‘‘It looks as if football in Italy were a battle, not a game.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Oh, nothing.’’ He couldn’t be bothered to repeat it. ‘‘Another cigarette?’’

‘‘No, thank you.’’ Enzo adjusted one of his ankle socks and then, with a deep sigh, brushed a bare forearm across his forehead so that it returned to his lap gleaming with a number of minute, golden beads of sweat.

‘‘Go on.’’ Max held out the packet.

‘‘Thanks.’’ But the boy fumbled for so long that in the end Max had to shake the cigarette into his own palm and then give it to him. ‘‘Thanks,’’ the boy repeated again.

Max rose to his feet. ‘‘ Come out on to the terrace,’’ he said. ‘‘Come.’’

They leant over the balustrade and were silent for a while, watching the crowds sauntering beside the Arno in the last fume of dusk. Max pondered and at last said in an Italian that was vitiated only by his use of the English open
o
: ‘‘ I suppose you’re unemployed.’’

‘‘Yes, unemployed.’’

‘‘For how long?’’

‘‘Two years.’’

‘‘And your family?’’

‘‘My mother works. Here.’’ He pointed down between his feet. ‘‘In the hotel laundry.’’

‘‘She probably pressed my shirt,’’ Max said. ‘‘ But the rest?’’

‘‘All unemployed.’’

‘‘And you can’t find work—work of any kind?’’

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

‘‘Surely, as a labourer—a farm-worker or a builder or a road-maker——’’ Max pursued, submitting the Florentine to the kind of slow, logical cross-examination which always irritated his wife. ‘‘Surely——’’

‘‘I can’t do very heavy work, unfortunately. It makes my back worse. But even if I could, I’d probably not find anything. My father and my elder brother can’t find anything, and they’re much stronger than I am.’’

‘‘What unemployment benefit do you get?’’

‘‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’’ Max explained and the boy laughed: ‘‘Why, nothing, of course. My brother gets paid by the State, but he’s a
mutilato di guerra
. Oh, I have this.’’ His hand dived into his shorts and, after a certain amount of scrabbling, he produced a green card marked out in squares with numbers printed on them. He handed it to Max as if, in itself, it were an explanation.

‘‘What’s this?’’

‘‘My food card. I can get three free meals a week with it, not very good meals, just bread and a
minestra
, but it’s lucky because I’m not allowed to eat at home. Well, I do eat there,’’ he added with a smile, ‘‘when my father is out. But my father says that if I don’t work, I can’t expect to be fed. Not that
he
works.’’

‘‘And where do you sleep?’’ Max asked.

‘‘Oh, at home. He doesn’t mind that, because I share my brother’s room.’’

‘‘If you can’t do heavy work, how is it that you can play football?’’

A deep flush covered the boy’s face at a question on which he had so often argued with his family, and Max thought: ‘‘Yes, I knew the story was all too glib’’; his attitude suddenly changing from complete credulity to a no less complete scepticism.

Enzo put out his cigarette on the stone balustrade, and then carefully hoarded the stub in the breast-pocket of his shirt, before he answered. ‘‘Football is my only hope,’’ he said at last, with a slow, painful intensity,
la mia unica speranza
—my unique hope. The grandiose adjective ‘‘unique’’ made the announcement appear even more pathetic in Max’s eyes. ‘‘Perhaps in the end I shall be able to make money with my football—a lot of money. Next Sunday I’ve been picked to play in the Coppa di Toscana—it’s a chance, my big chance. My back hurts when I play, but somehow when I play—that doesn’t matter. I feel it, but I don’t really notice it, if you see what I mean.’’ He added, after a moment: ‘‘My whole future’s in my foot ball.’’

Now, no less abruptly, Max felt his sympathies shift back; he put one hand on the boy’s shoulder, and let it rest there. Then he drew out his wallet: ‘‘Your friend told me that you needed three thousand lire for an X-ray. I’d like to give it to you.’’

Enzo stared at the three notes and once again the deep flush mounted to his face as he attempted, but failed, to say something. He was mystified; that was his predominating emotion at that second. Surely there must be something he should do in return? Something must be required of him? There must be some catch? And it was this feeling, not habit or avariciousness, which led him surreptitiously to examine the water-mark on each note when he thought Max had turned away; but the American had seen, and had wondered, with a sense of extreme helplessness, if he might not have been deceived after all in someone who so blatantly looked a gift horse in the mouth.

‘‘Remember,’’ Max said sternly, ‘‘that’s for the doctor, so don’t spend it on anything else. For the doctor,’’ he repeated. ‘‘For the X-ray.’’

‘‘Yes, yes,
signore.… Grazie
.’’ Enzo added this first word of thanks in an almost inaudibly husky whisper.

‘‘Would you like to join your friend now?’’

‘‘If you wish.’’

Max led the way along the terrace to the french windows which opened out from his mother-in-law’s room. ‘‘You, Max?’’ Mrs. Bennett said without turning round. ‘‘ He poses beautifully. A bit stiff at first but he soon got the idea. Pity about that shoulder; you’ve probably not noticed it but the collar-bone couldn’t have been properly set when it was broken.’’ Enzo, standing on tiptoe so as not to come too close, had begun to peer at the drawing; then he looked at his friend, and as soon as they exchanged glances, they both began to giggle. ‘‘Now you’ve upset him—and you’re in my light too,’’ Mrs. Bennett murmured, once again in English; Max drew Enzo to one side. ‘‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s stopped going right.’’ She tore off the sheet of cartridge-paper, crunched it in one hand and then, on an impulse, threw it at the Tunisian. At once he picked it up, unfolded it, and began to smooth it under his hands; Enzo hurried across. Again they were both swept with giggles. ‘‘ I agree. It’s extremely funny.’’ Mrs. Bennett began to scratch one of her unstockinged legs, on which the veins were swollen like bunches of small blue grapes. ‘‘Oh, these bites! I suppose they must be mosquitoes. Surely they wouldn’t have bugs in an hotel like this? Would they, Max?’’

‘‘It’s the mosquitoes.’’

‘‘Oh, they look charming like that.…’’ The two boys were lying horizontally across the bed, their legs dangling and their heads propped against a peculiarly ugly dado of woods inlaid in a Walt Disney pattern of reindeer among pine-trees. The fingers of Enzo’s right hand were laced in the fingers of Rodolfo’s left, and from time to time their bodies were convulsed with a brief spasm as one attempted to twist the other into submission. ‘‘Hungry?’’ she asked, and then in her dreadful French: ‘‘
Vous avez faim? Faim, faim
?’’ she repeated as if she were talking to someone who was deaf.

‘‘
Toujours faim
,’’ said Rodolfo.

‘‘Give them the chocolate on the dressing-table, Max.’’ But Max had already wandered back on to the terrace where, arms on balustrade and face on arms, he stood looking for his wife’s return with a concentration that excluded all thought of his visitors. ‘‘Where’s he got to? Oh—he’s not there.’’ She got up, threw a slab of chocolate over to them, and then watched, once again scratching her swollen legs, as they broke the slab in two, tore off the paper and began each to devour a half. She was smiling, as she often did when there appeared to be little reason for amusement, and the smile was accompanied by a nervous tic which, fluttering her left eyelid, gave to her whole face a look of almost idiot
bonhomie
. ‘‘Now be still,’’ she commanded. ‘‘
Restez tranquille. Tranquille
.… No, I can’t draw you if you giggle. Stop giggling,’’ she commanded, and attempted to translate the phrase into French. But there was no need. All at once the smile had vanished from her face, the idiot winking of the left lid had ceased, and the strange, gaunt woman, with the enormous hands and feet and the penetrating, faded blue eyes, was once again as terrifying as when she had first sent Enzo running in panic from the terrace. ‘‘ Oh, but that’s charming.’’ she was murmuring. They could hear, like a finger-nail scratching wall-paper, the decisive strokes of the charcoal, until suddenly she jumped up, caught Enzo’s bare leg, and pulled it out at an angle of forty-five degrees. ‘‘That’s better. You’ve got the better thighs. He‘s too thin, the other; wouldn’t surprise me if he’d had rickets at some time.’’ It was all extraordinary, they had never seen anything like this, never experienced anything such as this, and yet that unconquerable desire to giggle had all at once left them and they felt (yes, each admitted it to his own secret self) curiously alone, unguarded and afraid. The fingers which had been linked so that they could contest against each other’s strength now remained linked because, from that contact, each drew a confidence without which he felt he might suffer some obscure, yet terrible, disaster.

… No, but it was no good. She sighed, put the block aside and replaced the charcoal on the table at which she had been attempting to write letters to her children ever since she had arrived, more than a week ago. The marriage between execution and conception, it never came off. She was too old, she had left it too late; or perhaps the gift had never been there, and what she had all along regarded as a sacrifice—her sacrifice to her husband, the children, and the school—had been a sacrifice of something which, in fact, had never existed. A discouraging thought; for it was true, certainly true, that all those years she had got a secret, slightly shameful satisfaction out of telling people: ‘‘Yes, I used to paint. But I haven’t much time for it now, none at all really.’’ And they would think how plucky she was, running a boys’ school to support an invalid husband and five children, when she had had such artistic gifts. And she herself had believed in those artistic gifts, had never for a moment doubted them. Never, until now—coming out to Florence, with the last of the girls married, the school sold, and an annuity to keep her for the remaining ten or fifteen years of her life. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come; but it was at Florence that, as a young art-student, she had met the middle-aged schoolmaster for whom, with one of those reckless gestures so dear to her, she had sacrificed the life to which she had already made a somewhat naïve self-dedication.… Seven months later they were holiday-making in the Dolomites, in the village to which her husband, on another holiday, was to be brought groaning and screaming on a stretcher (his physical courage had always been scant) with his spine fractured from a fall of something less than five feet.…

The boys’ inexplicable flurry of panic had long since ebbed, and they now slept, their fingers still interlaced, their legs still dangling above the high and gleaming bed. Enzo’s cheek had slipped on to Rodolfo’s shoulder, and the mouths of both of them were smeared with chocolate. The Florentine’s flesh seemed to have hoarded, like phosphorus, the sun which it had drunk during the long afternoon’s sleep in the dust by the Arno, and now it gave its treasures back to the apartment, glowing warmly against the cool glow of the coverlet. In comparison, Rodolfo’s body lay dim: but the stir of his breath gently trembled the hair at Enzo’s temple, from time to time a shudder ran through him, as through a sleeping animal. They were like animals, Mrs. Bennett thought, falling asleep in a strange room, on a strange bed, with a strange old woman scratching away at a block of cartridge-paper in front of them. She admired their beauty and their careless, unselfconscious grace; but above all she admired that ability to shut their eyes, to let go, to drop off over the precipice without a struggle.… She thought of the last night she had spent and its confused terrors and anxieties, appeased only by the transparent orange phial which she had at last fetched from her daughter’s room. On an impulse she got up and crossed over to the two boys, and lowering one hand, ran it slowly up the cheek of the Florentine. How smooth, how warm it was; and here she could feel some invisible vein throbbing rhythmically against the dry surface of her finger-tips. She gazed at the leaning head for many seconds, her hands still at his temple, and did not notice that all the time the Tunisian was watching through half-closed lashes.

With a sigh she turned from Enzo, once again looked at the block on which she had sketched two sleeping bodies, and then, with a sudden, almost tearful irritability, threw it on the floor. Oh, it was hopeless. In England, when the whole family went on their holidays (to that farm-house in Montgomeryshire or camping at Studland Bay) between nursing Eric, minding the children, and doing the household chores, she had somehow found time to sketch; and she had always sketched with an intense pleasure, and the results, apart from regrets that she could do it so seldom, had always seemed satisfactory. But now.… Perhaps it was just Italy, or just Florence, the different light, the heat, or the fatigue of the journey. No one would think from that piece of paper that she had once won the Prix de Rome. But that was forty years ago; and so many people had won the Prix de Rome and never been heard of again.…

She wandered out on to the terrace, in the hope of finding Max; but he was gone, and all she found was an incredible, brilliant sunset which filled her with despair. The Piazzale Michelangelo lay like a gutted fortress, with the David an avenging angel. The Arno, shrunk to a narrow gold thread, half lost itself in dense and dusty vegetation until suddenly at its furthest visible point to the west it seemed to swell upward like a vast gold bubble. How warm the balustrade was from the afternoon sun; like that child’s skin, and how cool the evening air. The long day had burnt itself out into a healing dew and a faint odour, as of bruised violets. For a long time she stayed there, the risen breeze shaking the folds of the old, shapeless, blue-cotton dress and stirring her grey hair so that occasionally a hairpin slipped, with a faint click, to the floor of the terrace. She no longer cared that she would now never paint anything worth while, and she had forgotten that in her room she had left two boys neither of whom might be trustworthy. Further down the Arno, beyond the Grazie bridge, was the
pensione
at which, forty years ago, she and her companion had been greeted by Mrs. Jennings crying: ‘‘I know just what you want, dears—a nice cup of tea’’; and that same evening, in the stuffy dining-room they had disagreed with the officious English man who had told them how unwise it was to drink the Florentine water. And he had proposed to her four evenings later; no, not on an evening as romantic as this, but in the Boboli Gardens, during a thunder-storm. And after wards he had confessed that nothing terrified him so much as thunder; but that was not true, for she had learnt that he was terrified of most things in life.