The Night Falling (23 page)

Marcie smiles when she sees him, and then laughs lightly.

‘Ettore – did you shave with a scythe, honey? You’re all chopped to hell!’ She touches her fingers briefly to the dried blood on his chin, so that he understands what she’s laughing at. He shrugs and follows her into the room. She’s dressed and made-up but hasn’t done her hair yet – it’s messy, not set in its perfect wave, and somehow the disarray makes her look both older and younger at once. There are blue damask curtains, lifting gently in the breeze, and a matching counterpane on the bed. Marcie has made a dressing table out of an old carved console – there’s a folding mirror on top, and all her make-up, perfumes and hairpins scattered over it on silver trays; her jewellery too. The huge diamond in the engagement ring Leandro bought her sends little rainbows flickering up the wall. She has gold chains too, and earrings that sparkle like the ring. He steps on something slippery and looks down to find his cracked boots dirtying a glossy, buff-coloured cowhide. He thinks of the room in Gioia he shares with Paola and Valerio. He thinks of Livia and her family, sleeping under an archway for weeks, months. His heart ices over.

‘What’s eating you?’ says Marcie. She sits down at her dressing table, facing towards him. He can see her long back in the mirror behind her.

‘I am going,’ he says.

‘Going?’ Her eyes widen. ‘You can’t mean
going
going?’

‘To Gioia. I take the money to Paola. So they eat.’ He stares hard at her, until a little shame comes into her face.

‘If they’d just come here, if they’d just be a bit sweet to Leandro, he’d take you all in – you know he would! Then they’d eat.’

‘And Valerio?’ he says brusquely. Marcie looks down at her hands, examines the nails, pushes at a cuticle.

‘But you can’t walk properly yet – you can hardly do a day’s work, can you?’ she says. ‘In fact, how will you even get there? We’ve no car here.’ From this Ettore can pick enough of the salient words.

‘I walk. I come back tomorrow.’

‘Oh, good!’ says Marcie. ‘It’s just a visit then – I understand! Listen – don’t try to walk, for heaven’s sake. I’ll send Anna on some errand in town – go with her in the trap. And Leandro will be back tomorrow with Boyd Kingsley, so you can come with them in the car. Do you understand? Oh, where’s Clare when I need her? Go with Anna, Ettore. Don’t try to walk.’

‘Yes,’ he says at last, thinking of the blisters on his hand that the crutch would give him during the fifteen-kilometre journey.

‘And, here,’ she says. ‘Wait a moment.’

Marcie takes something from a trinket box, gets up and goes to the wardrobe. She’s wearing a tubular dress of fine white linen that almost reaches her ankles, and shortens her steps; it rests on her hips with a belt stitched all over with turquoise beads. Ettore wonders what she sees when she looks out at the dry ground and the starving animals; the filthy, starving people. He’s not at all sure. She kneels to unlock a metal strongbox in the wardrobe, and Ettore glimpses what’s inside it. He stares. The box is piled high with money; tightly wadded stacks of notes. Thousands and thousands of lire. The sight gives him a strange fluttering in his gut; he has never seen anything like it. Marcie looks back over her shoulder.

‘Ridiculous, isn’t it? Leandro says he doesn’t trust the man who owns the bank – that Fiorentino fellow. And why not? I said. He still uses the bank in New York, after all, for all his business dealings there. But he only shrugs, and I think I know the answer – he doesn’t trust rich men. He
is
a rich man but he still doesn’t trust them. In his heart, he’s still the poor peasant he was born. And if you let on that I let you see this, he’ll skin me. You understand?’ She smiles, and Ettore says nothing. He swallows; he can’t tell what he feels. Marcie peels off several notes and presses them into his hands. ‘Don’t tell Leandro I’ve given you this – let me, it would be better. Take this for Paola and the baby. I know how worried you are. Take it.’ She pushes his hands away when he tries to give it back. ‘Just take it! Damn it, Ettore, don’t be so proud! Take it.’ He knows the word
proud
; she often uses it to describe him, to berate him. She can’t grasp that pride is all he has, sometimes. But he takes the money, even though it makes a mockery of him. It’s ten times what he’s earned as a guard in the past week, and she hands it over like it’s nothing, and smiles at his obedience.

Anna waits for him in the courtyard, sitting decorously in the little trap with a rein in each hand and her hair tied down beneath a scarf. She eyes him warily as he climbs up beside her. The mule’s knobbed hip bones and scarred knees speak of years of hard labour. It stands with its ears back and its eyes diffuse, entirely disengaged from its surroundings, not even flicking its tail at the biting flies that crowd it. Marcie waves down from the terrace as they move away, and on the far side of the archway, Chiara stands with Filippo beside her, holding her hat by its brim, coming back from a walk with dust up to her knees. She stares up at him and he can read her incomprehension and her hurt. If he could he would tell her he’s coming back but there’s no time and no way to, so he sets his expression and lets his eyes linger on her for just a second. Filippo waves with his non-bandaged hand and Ettore waves back at him. The dogs chorus them out of the gates, straining at their chains to get at the mule; the mule ignores them completely. All trace of the hail and its meltwater are gone, the only signs of the deluge are subtle: a greener colour to the fig tree leaves; a clarity to the air which will soon be taken back by the heat and dust and the sun’s flat glare, which will build and build until the next storm.

Ettore feels better as soon as they are clear of the
masseria
, and the road to Gioia is laid out in front of them; he’s on edge, but for different reasons. He looks around him for signs of workers in the fields they pass, but it seems that the strike is holding. The mule slopes along with flat strides that cover the ground, and before long they’re in the outskirts of Gioia del Colle. Ettore’s mood lifts further. He knows where he is in these streets; he knows who he is, and what he should do. He knows his place.

‘Let me down here,’ he says to Anna before they reach the centre, and she tugs on the mule’s mouth to halt it. Leandro’s buggy is modest enough but he still doesn’t want his neighbours to see him arriving in it.

‘You’re coming back with me later? How long will you be?’ says Anna.

‘No. I won’t go back today; don’t wait for me.’

‘All right.’ She nods and flicks the reins, and moves away. Ettore takes a deep breath and notices, in a way he normally doesn’t, the stink of Gioia. Sewage and rotting vegetables; sickness, unwashed bodies, horse shit and cigarette smoke. It’s familiar enough to be almost comforting, but at the same time it sticks in his throat. He heads towards Piazza Plebiscito, moving almost as quickly on the crutch as he could have walked normally. The square is crowded with people – all the workers, not working; a throng of black dotted here and there with the paler blouses of women. Some young men have climbed the lamp-posts to see better, and the bandstand is hung with socialist banners. At the edges of the square are groups of men who stand tight together and talk to each other rather than listening. They have the tense, watchful air of men who are waiting, and they give Ettore a warning prickle of unease. Some are in police uniform, some in the remains of army officer uniform; some wear black shirts, with insignia stitched or pinned onto them. Ettore stares into the crowd but there’s little hope of finding Paola in amongst it.

He makes his way around the outside, looking, just in case. The speaker is an old solider himself, but an infantry man, like Ettore was. Like all the peasants were. His voice comes through a loudhailer, with a metallic echo.

‘We asked them, why should we fight for Italy when we may not own even the smallest part of it? Why should we fight for Italy when we have no rights within it? When we are treated worse than the cattle? When we are reviled? Why should we go and die on the orders of men who despise us?’ the speaker shouts. His voice resounds in every corner of the square, and causes a stir of outrage in the listeners. When they are on strike, when they are not working, the men are restless to begin with; now they are hard, wound tight with stress. They are the dry grass into which a match might fall. Ettore can feel it coming, like a loud noise far away but getting closer, and closer. He moves faster, searches harder. ‘But Cadorna still sent us forward at Isonzo, again and again; still he watched us die in misery. Still he lined up entire regiments and shot each tenth man if we dared to disobey. My brother was one of those men – and he was the bravest of his unit. Shot like a dog. Like a
dog
!’

The crowd mutters in outrage, and the mention of Isonzo halts Ettore. He waits for a wave of horror to subside, as the word crowds his mind with a remembered terror so great it almost drove him mad. Twelve battles were fought at the Isonzo front, against the Austro-Hungarian army. Twelve battles over two hellish winters, that left three-quarters of a million soldiers dead in the frozen mud, and yet the lines did not move an inch. Ettore was drunk almost all the time. To be sober was to be too terrified to breathe, too hungry to live. To be sober was to risk madness; to risk opening a permanent crack in the mind. Drunkenness was the only way to survive those trenches, and Valerio isn’t the only one who’s tried hard to stay drunk ever since. Ettore thinks briefly of Leandro, safe in New York all that time; rich and dirty enough to buy his way out of the draft.

He takes a deep breath and carries on around the square. The speaker’s voice is laden with bitterness and anger. ‘And all the while the gentlemen shirkers stayed here at home, safe and protected on their farms. Why should we fight? We asked them, and they answered. You will have
land
, they said! You will have the respect and love of your country! You will be able to feed your families, plant your own crops, and work for the future! You will not be hungry any more! You will not be crippled by the winter’s debt, or robbed for the rent on an infested basement room a year in advance! I ask you, my brothers, have we got any of the things they said we would be given? Have we?’ Almost as one, the crowd roars out:
No!
‘In Russia, they have taken what they were promised. Brothers, the time has come for us to take what we were promised!’ In the cacophony, Ettore hears his name called.

‘Ettore! Ettore!’ He spins about, searching, and sees Pino pushing towards him through the throng.

‘Pino! My friend, it’s good to see you. Are you well?’ They hug roughly, pounding each other’s backs.

‘Well enough, but how are you? It does me good to see you home, and walking! Are you back? Are you fit?’ Pino eyes the crutch doubtfully.

‘Not fit enough yet, but soon. I’ve come back to see Paola; I have money for her. Have you seen her?’

‘She was here but she went back – she didn’t want to bring the baby, and she didn’t want to leave him for long. Come, I’ll go with you.’

‘How long will the strike last?’

‘I don’t know. It’s been forty-eight hours … the men are hungry, and angry, and nobody dares patrol the farms for blacklegs any more, because of the squads. More squads all the time, Ettore. But if the proprietors want the harvest in and threshed, they must capitulate … and they must be getting frantic. But Capozzi and Santoiemma are still in jail, so …’ he says, with a shrug.

‘This meeting could go bad. Can you feel it?’ says Ettore, and Pino nods.

‘Best you get away before it does, with your leg still weak.’

They go into the small, ancient alleyways that lead to Vico Iovia, and the speaker’s ringing words and the answering roar quieten behind them. A mishmash of houses, built and rebuilt and patched and added on, crowd in on either side, close enough to touch; stairways and downspouts and crooked shutters, and here and there the stone flowers that let air into the rooms within, napped with age. The shadows are deep and there’s filth in the gutters.

‘Pino, I must thank you,’ says Ettore.

‘Must you?’ Pino grins at him.

‘If you hadn’t taken me to Masseria dell’Arco when you did, I might have lost this leg. Or died. Thank you.’

‘I didn’t do it for you, brother,’ says Pino seriously. Ettore glances over at him. ‘It was the smell – Mother of God, the smell! I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I had to get rid of you,’ he says, and Ettore chuckles.

‘Well, thank you, Pino,’ he says, and Pino gives him a slight shove that nearly knocks him off balance.

‘Stop thanking me for something you would do for me, just the same. In fact, just stop thanking me. It makes me nervous. So, how is it there? Is your aunt still living like a queen?’

‘Yes. It’s … incredible. It’s like she can’t see what’s around her. Like she looks out and still sees New York, and so she lives just as she must have done there.’

‘Maybe not quite as she must have done. Perhaps she doesn’t want to see. After all, what can she do to change it?’

‘Nothing. But she could at least acknowledge it … It insults us all, her deliberate obtuseness. I can’t work out if she’s stupid or just …’ He shrugs.

‘What?’

‘Crazy, I guess.’ He pauses, releases the crutch and stretches out his fingers to ease the ache in the heel of his hand. ‘She’s got her jewels out on display, for anyone to see – gold and diamonds. And there’s a strongbox of money in the wardrobe – more money than you or I have ever seen, Pino! She says my uncle doesn’t trust the bank. So it just sits there. She gave me this from it.’ He takes the folded notes from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Handed it over like she was giving me pocket money. Pino, I think she’s crazy.’

‘Jesus!’ Pino swears, his eyes going wide. ‘Still crazy about you, perhaps. Don’t flash that around, for God’s sake. Someone might carve out your liver for that money.’

‘I know.’

‘Maybe she’s not so crazy. She lives in a house with walls fifteen metres high, surrounded by dogs and guards. Why shouldn’t she wear diamonds? What good would it do us if she hid them away?’