The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (10 page)

Besides, she sometimes wanted to ask him after his death, what is a man to do if he is handed some lusty revolutionary hymn at birth?

It was because she felt as she did that, when she was twenty-three, she fell in love with and married Giuseppe, who was four years older. For Giuseppe seemed to her ‘The Way’. He ranted
and raved, and believed that, yes, society should be changed: but he ranted and raved quietly. He supported the Communist Party, and believed that communism would provide post-war Italy with the only solution to its problems that it was likely to find; but he didn’t object, or not very strongly, to her supporting the Christian Democrats. And though he didn’t
believe
, he had in his quiet, neat way a faith that was just as strong as hers. He was certain of the eventual triumph of justice over injustice, of equality over inequality, of the hungry over the greedy, and looked forward to man’s ultimately being able to live in harmony not only with his fellow men, but with the whole world, animal, vegetable and mineral.

‘Of course it won’t happen overnight. I mean, it won’t happen in our lifetime, nor in Elisabetta’s, nor even in Elisabetta’s great-great-grandchildren’s lifetime,’ he told his wife. ‘But I do believe that one day, one day it will happen, and that when it does, people will look back at this time with the same sort of wonder with which we look back on—I don’t know—the Stone Age. And they’ll say to each other “How
primitive
they were,” and think how difficult life must have been, in those days.’

A speech that conjured up in Maria’s mind a vision of a whole world full of quiet, neat people, and made her first give a wistful smile and then stroke her husband’s hair.

He was a good man, she thought, even if he didn’t believe in God, and even if he sometimes told her that the word ‘good’ didn’t really mean very much anymore. Moreover, while she couldn’t adopt his faith as her own and tried to tell herself, as her Church told her, that it was evil, she knew that had he not had it, she would not have loved him. It was his faith, she told herself, that made him. It was his faith that kept him alive.

It was this faith that Giuseppe made her understand that he had lost that summer. She wasn’t certain how he made her understand it; he didn’t suddenly turn to her and start telling her that he thought all workers who went on strike were traitors to the state and enemies of democracy; nor did he suddenly start
extolling the virtues of the rich and the powerful, reading about the crowned heads of Europe in gossip magazines, or saying that he thought human beings were lazy pack-animals who needed to be kept in line by a strong leader. It was just that a certain strength seemed to have gone out of him, a certain inner tension. Plus the fact that when she looked at him and talked to him, she had the impression that, though the doctor had told him that his newly diagnosed disease wouldn’t kill him for years and years, he had in fact died already.

‘Oh, have they?’ he said, when she told him that ‘his
communists
’ had made some gains in a local election in Sicily. Murmuring, after she had asked him if he wanted to see a television report on this election, ‘No, not really.’ Then, ‘Well,’ he said without interest a few days later, when she told him that some engineer in Nuoro had got away with paying a small fine after a house he had built with substandard materials had collapsed and killed four people, ‘what do you expect?’

‘Oh, please Giuseppe,’ she wanted to tell him, ‘please don’t lose that. Because though of course it’s no longer true that I wouldn’t love you if you lost your faith, you’re going to need that faith to get through the years ahead and to get through your illness. Without it, it’s going to be dreadful, for both of us. You’ll have nothing to hang on to, nothing to stare at,
except
your illness; and if you do that for long enough you’ll go mad, or you’ll become depressed, or—oh, please, please,’ she wanted to tell her husband, ‘don’t lose that.’

Naturally, however, she said no such thing, not being the sort of person to make statements of this nature; and simply watched, in vain, for some sign from Giuseppe that would tell her that she was wrong, or that if loss there had been, it was only temporary and what had gone would soon, in a matter of weeks if not days, be restored.

She was still watching for this sign, and telling herself that of course she wouldn’t stop loving him, or at least caring for him, even if he didn’t regain his faith (how could she, under the
circumstances?) when she realised that she too had fallen under the spell of one of the Cavalieris.

She hadn’t really ‘fallen in love’; not as Giuseppe had with Amelia. Nevertheless, she had formed an attachment that was stronger than mere liking; and she did find herself watching and waiting for the object of her curious passion with something like the same intensity as she had once watched and waited for Giuseppe. Or even, she sometimes confessed to herself, with a somewhat greater intensity. For she had been a sensible, serious young woman at twenty-three, not much given to watching and waiting.

You’ve become stupid with age, she told herself, as she spent longer and longer cleaning The Villa everyday, and found herself making cakes and biscuits more often than was usual for her, in order to take them to The Villa as presents. Stupid, and a little pathetic. After all, at least Giuseppe has fallen in love, if you must put it like that, with an adult woman. Whereas you, you’ve become enchanted with a child. A mere thirteen-year-old boy.

She hadn’t, to begin with, when Dario had first started coming to have his extra maths lessons with Elisabetta. She had thought him just extremely polite, extremely pleasant and left it at that. What is more, she probably never would have, had she not discovered as she was cleaning Dado’s room in The Villa, in the days following the identification of Giuseppe’s illness and her realisation that he had lost his faith, that the great hulking youth, who was mad about sports, already nearly two metres tall and looked far older than his years, was behind with his mathematics, in part, because he wrote poetry.

Maria had never read much poetry, apart from a bit of Dante and Leopardi she’d been forced to learn at school, and she couldn’t make head or tail of Dario’s efforts, which seemed to her so obscure as to be written, almost, in a foreign language. Reading his poems, however, or understanding them, was not the point. What seemed to her wonderful (as wonderful as
Giuseppe’s having a vision of the world and being so convinced that one should or had to rebel, even while wearing, especially while wearing, a suit and tie), was the fact that he did it. And did it neither furtively, as if it were something to be ashamed of, nor too openly, as he might have done had he simply wanted to show off. No, Elisabetta’s now former pupil, Amelia’s
sports-mad
son, wrote poetry and that was an end to the matter. It went without saying, Maria told herself, that there were other factors involved. For a start, her sense that as well as being immensely, yet quite naturally polite, Dario had about him an air of great and equally natural seriousness. That seriousness that one generally finds only in intelligent adults who are at ease with themselves, and that seriousness that, however much it borders on the sombre, does not preclude lightness, or humour, or grace.

Then there was the fact that he was in his grave and, for his age, somewhat overgrown way, a good-looking boy; with the sort of quiet, unassertive good looks she had always admired in men. And finally, there was the fact that serious and
well-mannered
though he was, she detected in him a certain impatience with his mother—as if he considered her constant nervousness a matter for irritation rather than concern—and a quite definite sense of hostility whenever he so much as
mentioned
his father. Feelings she could not and would not go along with, especially as regards Amelia, but feelings which she supposed from a boy’s point of view had a certain justification. They were somewhat akin to Giuseppe’s attitude towards the rich and the powerful, and provided that necessary touch of sharpness to the sweetness of the knowledge that if Dario found his mother tiresome and disliked his father, he found the
Bellettini
family well-nigh perfect. From the beautiful black-haired maths-teaching Elisabetta, through the quiet and dignified
Giuseppe
, to, above all, the pale-skinned, faded auburn haired … well, Maria thought, whatever she was.

As he did find them practically perfect, she knew, and had
from the day he had met them all. Nor was it vanity that prompted her to tell herself this, since she had started to before it had ever occurred to her that the boy might write poetry, or that she might come to think of him as … as hope. ‘I know,’ she told Giuseppe, as soon as she realised—though Giuseppe did too—that Dario seemed to be infatuated with them all, ‘it’s only because he thinks we’re so different from his own family. He thinks we’re more simple or something, or more … I don’t know … down to earth. It’ll pass in a little while, I’m sure, and he’ll soon become like his parents. I suppose he won’t be able to help it, will he? And anyway, Amelia’s so nice, and it’s probably because he’s so big and healthy that he doesn’t like her being so delicate. He’ll probably be laughing at his feelings in a year or two and then’—and then come to think of us as stupid ignorant peasants, she thought but did not, now, say. ‘But I must say, for the moment, he is a very sweet boy, and … well, it’s always a pleasure to be liked, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ Giuseppe nodded, and then turned back to his newspaper. ‘Though I have a feeling,’ he added, with just the faintest air of resentment, ‘that it’s you he really’—he paused—‘admires.’

Yes, there had been other factors involved, and all of them, though especially the last, had contributed to her ‘falling in love’. Nevertheless, had it not been for the discovery of the poetry, she, or her feelings, wouldn’t have taken that decisive last step into an area that was no longer quite that of mere liking. His polite seriousness would have been simply admirable; his good looks simply a pleasure for the eyes. And as for his apparent infatuation with the Bellettinis in general and her in particular, that would have been just something to smile about; as one prepared oneself for the eventual and inevitable hurt when he either decided to drop one altogether, or started to treat one with a feigned and condescending affection. To smile about or to feel guilty about, for feeling gratified, while Dario was showing impatience for the mother who had been so good
to one and of whom one was so fond. The poetry, though, transformed everything and touched everything with magic. So what had been admirable became wonderful. What a pleasure, joy. And what had been a matter for smiles, guilt and eventual disappointment, became a source of happiness, faith in the future, and yes, why not admit it, a certain cruel satisfaction that one had, for all one’s apparent disadvantages, triumphed over a rival whom one would have thought held all the cards in her hand. Honestly, she did like Amelia, Maria told herself: very much. And if the woman was unhappy, she had reasons to be so, none of which her wealth and her three healthy children in any way discredited. All the same, for Dario to prefer her, Maria Bellettini, to such a well-bred, finely-tuned creature couldn’t help but make her want to do a tiny, private dance, and to say, in the direction of The Villa, ‘Ha ha ha, see what
I’ve
got.’

A temptation that made her wonder if her feelings for Dario were simply maternal, and if she saw in him the son she had never had but always longed for. (Giuseppe, perhaps strangely, hadn’t; which was why, she was convinced, after the birth of their first child, a daughter, he hadn’t wanted any more children. In case he wasn’t so lucky next time.) She didn’t think they were however; any more (thank God! she told herself) than they were ‘simply’ the feelings she might have had if, grotesque though the idea was to her, she had wanted Dario as a lover. No, she told herself, she had ‘fallen in love’ with Dario, became stupidly attached to the boy and come to think of him as some sort of knight in shining armour. Yet her feelings were not those of an over-possessive mother, any more than they were those of a sexually frustrated, middle-aged woman. Really, it was just her seeing his poetry as a declaration of faith, a message of hope, that had made her feel as she did. It was also because she saw him as a bearer of faith and an embodiment of hope that she didn’t try to struggle against her feelings but saw them, in themselves, as declarations of faith and hope.

How can such feelings be wrong, she would ask herself, when
without them I’m not sure I could cope with all that’s happened? Of course I have my religion and nothing will ever make me lose it. But somehow, just at the moment, wrong though I know it is, that isn’t quite enough.

These, then, were the events of that summer fifteen years ago. And it was hardly surprising, Maria often repeated to herself as she went through them in her head, that she hadn’t immediately seen them as being associated with Amelia’s offer of a house and a job, and her and Giuseppe’s acceptance of that offer. Indeed, amidst all the distress of Giuseppe’s illness, the promise of the house (and the promise from Amelia that went with it: ‘You must never worry, whatever happens, you’ll always have a home, both of you’) had seemed liked a nest of safety being held out to two exhausted birds. Moreover, they had all, those events, formed such a complete, interlinked block among
themselves
, that she would have defied anyone to see them as
justifying
her sense of foreboding. Giuseppe’s increasing quietness had been caused by his depression at the idea of Elisabetta’s marriage and the onset of his disease. The intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta had also been due to the onset of the disease, though one could have looked at that the other way round and put the onset of the disease down to the intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta. The loss of faith had been a natural result of the actual diagnosis of the disease. And her own strange, to her unsettling, attachment had come about because she too was suffering from Elisabetta’s departure from the family circle. In the gloom that had suddenly settled over the Bellettini household, the poetry-writing schoolboy had seemed like some sort of beacon to her; and all her life she had needed a beacon. That, surely, was all.