When he saw Nenna again, in the summer of 1935, suddenly it was all different again. He practically threw up his hands in submission. Jesus, the beauty. What is a man to do. Jesus.
And now, apparently, she was old enough to be taken on trips. Out for the day, by bicycle or train: ‘Just keep her out of trouble,’ Susanna said. But more often, it was out for a few hours with the baby.
The baby! There it was, fully formed, a calm, fluff-headed infant with saintly ways, a knowing look, hands like starfish and a dirty laugh which made everybody about her laugh too. Her name was Marinella, and even Tom acknowledged her qualities: he played the drums on her tummy which reduced her to fits of giggles of such charm that he stuck his finger in the honeypot and let her suck it, gurgling and smiling her curly smiles.
‘It’s so unfair,’ Nenna murmured, taking her sticky little sister in her arms and blowing raspberries on her. ‘I can never have one of my own without having some husband, some boy, to be its father—’
‘You could have your choice of boys,’ Tom said. ‘They all love you. When you’re not shouting at them to behave.’ Signorino Seta had disappeared. His aunt, the chirpy saucepot next door, seemed rather disappointed. Ha!
When they took Marinella out with them, strangers thought she was theirs. There was a particular approving look that came with all the cheek-pinching and cries of ‘ma che bella’ and all that. They were stopped thirty-three times on one day alone in Campo dei Fiori by people needing to admire the baby.
‘In Campo dei Fiori, son già trentatré!’ sang Nenna, to the tune of ‘Ma in Spagna son già mill e tre’, Leporello’s song about how many women Don Giovanni slept with in Spain.
It was as if they both retired a little from the previous times, and for a while a strange apologeticness was on them, as if they could almost acknowledge what had disrupted them the summer before. And then that dispersed like morning mist, and they looked at each other anew. Anew, but all the ballast of the past. Everything to play for. Nineteen and sixteen. Sixteen, actually, was not too young.
But if that was true, another territory opened up for Tom, the gist of which was: did he mean it? This wasn’t something he could do anything about. He couldn’t tell her, or kiss her, or anything like that. This wasn’t some bold-eyed Girton twenty-one-year-old with her own fags and plans for a flat in London next year. This was family. Marinella, smiling up at them, demonstrated exactly where all this stuff led.
But it had lurched back. He glanced at her and she looked away. She glanced at him but he was thinking about something else. He thought, She is not even on the same page as me. She is too young. I should not be thinking these things. Feeling these things.
Damn.
They sat out in their old spots on the low walls of the island, the river rumbling away beneath; they retreated into the house, to Susanna’s cool and respectable rooms where they had to sit upright in respectable chairs. And then they wanted to go out out out. Being out was the real involvement. Being in the house was a limitation; being out was really being in – being in the world, in what really mattered. In the great human reality of it all.
When the family left Rome for the lake, Tom and Nenna broadened their expeditions: to Tarquinia to see the towers and Etruscan tomb paintings; up to dusty Tolfa for the Donkey Palio. Two lakes north, at Bolsena, they ate their lunch in a miniature Palladian temple on an island of miniature Palladian temples and dived off a small boat to a sunken sarcophagus. Back on shore they sneaked in to the church of an ancient nunnery, where Nenna sang arias and showtunes – Puccini and Verdi and ‘Stormy Weather’, and ‘Indian Love Call’ – and Tom was surprised at how strong and real her voice had become, echoing in the dome. They ate ice cream, read each other’s diaries, and plotted itineraries for when they could go to Florence and Venice, when Tom had his motorbike, when they could go anywhere. They swam in new lakes, Bolsena and Vico, and the bewitching indecency of her swimsuit contradicted him very effectively when he tried saying to himself, still, she’s too young.
Their eyes caught, from time to time. He wanted to kiss her, all the time. All the bloody time. Well, most of the time. He had not the slightest idea what she wanted.
*
Nenna, of course, recognised Tom’s perturbation immediately. She had been wondering when, rather than whether, Tom would start behaving like every other moo-faced idiot male she met, whose inability to ignore her bella alta bionda body in favour of her interesting mind and sarcasm and capacity for shenanigans she was starting to find quite … cramping. After Daniele Seta – which was nothing, really, nothing! – Aldo and Susanna had forbidden her from going round with boys at all. Not even the dull cousins from the ghetto were allowed, so Tom’s arrival was a blessing dropped straight from heaven – but if her parents were to notice that Tom was also starting to moo, then no doubt he too would be banned – but thank God, he was English and so repressed that no one had spotted it. Apart from her.
She responded as she did to them all. Let’s see what you mean by it. Is this just you being male? Or is it about me, in particular, me? Let’s wait and see. Meanwhile the admiration soaked in, and was transformed by that alchemy of adolescence into a self-confidence which in turn radiated out again, shone like the sun in her hair and her walk and her look – and drew more admiration in.
And then, when they were back in Rome, a ludicrous upsetting thing happened.
They were heading out to meet Carmichael and go to the cinema. La Moglie di Frankenstein! They hadn’t told Susanna that was what they were going to see. Strolling through Piazza, passeggiata time, a girl Nenna knew from about the place appeared on the other side of the road: Stella, pale, broad-browed, black-haired, with her eyebrows plucked like a movie-star’s and her pouty, droopy cupid mouth.
‘Stella!’ Nenna called out, and she looked up, like an animal hearing its name and looking around, a little sleepily, for the caller.
‘Stella! Over here!’ Nenna cried, and as Stella identified her, her unfocused face lit up with a slow smile, a little twist to the plump lip. Nenna had reached her by now, and was saying, ‘Ciao, amore, what are you up to?’ Stella’s smile spread to her creamy cheeks. ‘Walk with us?’ At this Stella beamed; silently she tucked her hand behind Nenna’s upper arm, and hugged it a little. She turned to glance at Tom, and gave him a coy flash of her big eyes.
‘Salve, Stella,’ he said. ‘Sono Tommaso.’
Stella didn’t reply. She just glanced up again, like a celluloid doll: painted irises, up/down eyelids, and a brush of thick lashes.
‘Stella doesn’t talk much,’ Nenna said. ‘Do you, darling?’ Stella kept her smile, her eyes down.
They walked like this as far as via del Portico D’Ottavia, where it seemed to be time for a little ritual.
‘So d’you want a bun, Stellina?’ Nenna asked. And Stellina did – they smiled complicitly – so they went to the bakery on the corner to get one of the really hard ones that Tom practically broke his fine English teeth on, but that everybody else loved.
Stella grabbed it and laughed, making a sideways head-wobble denoting joy, gratitude and affection. Nenna felt the satisfied glow of a person who has done a simple kind thing on a sunny morning, when Stella, after a moment of hesitation, suddenly reached up and, putting the bun-holding hand round the back of Nenna’s neck, kissed her, on the mouth.
It was sweet, gentle – a little open, a touch of breath. Nenna jumped in her skin, recognising it instinctively for what it was: sexual. She was electrified. Stella retreated a little, smiled demurely, and batted her great lashes, as if waiting.
Nenna was rigid, with shock, outrage and an undercurrent of thrill running all over her. She pulled herself together with a little shakedown and said: ‘Stella, no. You mustn’t do that. That’s wrong.’ She looked as if she wanted to laugh. Or something. She wiped her mouth.
‘No, Stella,’ she said firmly.
At the word ‘No’, at the insulting wipe of the mouth, Stella’s face clouded. Eyebrows and mouth drooped, the chin went back and under. Hurt gathered. Then she pouted her lower lip and gave an actual little hiss at Nenna, like a cat. For a moment Nenna thought Stella was going to thrust the bun back at her, but instead she clutched it closer to the front of her dress, and turned, and stalked off.
‘Oh dear,’ said Nenna, shaken. Tom, having no idea what to do with a girl who has just been kissed and then hissed at by another girl, went to put his hand on her shoulder, then didn’t.
Nenna turned to him, a little breathless, and said: ‘My first kiss! Dio mio – but she really mustn’t – oh dear …’
‘She’s presumably not all there,’ said Tom, looking worried, as if concerned for Stella’s moral vulnerability, which he was, and so was Nenna, but Nenna said ‘Don’t change the subject! That was my first kiss. That! So much for young love!’
And she did start laughing, shaking her head, and then she had to sit down.
Around them the street was neither crowded nor empty, but nobody seemed to have seen the moment, for which she was grateful. ‘It’s lucky nobody noticed or I would have to marry her!’ she said, and her laughter turned into the choking, teary kind, so Tom was able to pat her back helpfully, and her arm, until she said ‘Do stop that, Masino.’
‘She is going to get into trouble, though,’ he said.
‘She’d always do anything for a bun,’ Nenna said. ‘It didn’t really matter when she was a little kid.’
‘She is a little kid,’ said Tom.
‘She’s about fourteen.’
‘A child,’ said Tom.
Nenna rubbed her mouth again. It felt as though she was rubbing the kiss in, not off.
Tom thought: I could kiss her now.
It might help.
God no of course I couldn’t.
But he looked at her and thought: there will be a first kiss for us though. It will happen. I will do it.
*
Aldo took Tom with him to see the new towns. They stopped outside Cisterna, at the edge of the hills, and looked down over the plain, wide and smooth, divided in quadrants by roads and canals, flat as a tablecloth carefully laid. Graceful eucalyptus trees, small and floaty in the distance, lined the banks and ditches. Beyond lay the blue sea, no flatter than the land. Tom smiled.
‘Before we made our bonifica, our reclamation work, it was dinosaur country,’ Aldo said. ‘Weeds and reeds and pools and swamps to the end of the eye. You imagine diplodocus and brontosaurus walking about. We found a mammoth skeleton … But now it is just frogs – do you eat frog?’
‘No,’ Tom said.
‘You should try it. It’s delicious. We’ll go and see Olivieri, and buy a few. He’s been trapping them here for years. Eels too …’
Aldo pointed out the towns. From this height they were star-shapes and circles, geometrical urban paradises set in the chequerboard of green fields and brown. Littoria, opened in 1932; Sabaudia, 1934, and Pontinia, which was still in progress. ‘It won’t take long,’ Aldo said. ‘We built Sabaudia in two hundred and fifty-three days. Littoria – look at it now, how beautiful it is – was a mess hours before the opening. There was a terrible storm, mud and flooding everywhere.’
‘I thought the bonifica had stopped all the flooding,’ Tom said.
‘Mostly. That night, not. The men worked all night, and they have a tale that the ground underneath the piazza opened up and swallowed a tractor whole. Every man working on the town,’ he said, making the expression that means indulgent disbelief in the face of peasant cunning, ‘was holding on to the rope, and saw it fall. They tried to save it but it was too heavy, and they had to let go.’
‘Is that true?’
Aldo shrugged, made a moue with his mouth. ‘Beh,’ he said. ‘Everything was nice by morning when the Duce came to make his speech and plant some trees. They do say the driver had a kitten, and it couldn’t be saved, and you hear it mewing on stormy nights …’
‘So is the tractor still under there?’
‘So they say. Or maybe someone sold it. It was just a tractor – not one of the huge Tosis with all the buckets – oh, you haven’t see the Tosis – come, let’s go and find one.’
Aldo grinned and gleamed as he drove Tom down on to the great tablecloth, taking him on a brand new road along a brand new built-up bank to where a great dinosaur of steel and electricity leant its long neck over into a wide vale of water and mud. It was festooned with a row of vast buckets, which constantly moved along like beads on a gigantic necklace, shunting each other into the mud and water below, and in turn scooping, scooping, scooping, and then dumping, dumping, dumping. Farther away, in a canal bed of thicker mud, sinewy brown-faced men in shirtsleeves and caps dug, and dumped, and dug, and dumped, and dug, and dumped. In the distance, hovering almost above the plain, Tom saw three more diplodoci, leaning their long necks, buckets scooping, dumping, scooping, dumping, and crowds more men, digging, and dumping, and digging, and dumping. The smell was revolting and the noise tremendous. The dance lurched on, both primeval and industrial. Tom was entranced.
Aldo was saying something about explosions, having to blow up rocky outcrops. Tom pictured volcanos of mud bursting into the sky.
‘The workmen are from the north,’ Aldo was saying, his face misty with pleasure at the rightness of it all. ‘Ex-soldiers. They will have a house and land of their own; quinine every day against the malaria. They are building Italy, and Italy is building them.’
Turning back, leaving the raw landscape where the men and machines were still slogging to win land from water, they came to the salvaged land, flat and perfect with tiny fruit trees, fields that had yet to see their first harvest, new houses, blue with red tiles, pretty and neat, dotted about regularly on the empty land. Aldo waved at people as they passed: women working in the fields, children. They waved back. ‘Every house has mosquito nets built in,’ Aldo said, and for a moment he looked as if he was going to cry.
‘Come,’ Aldo said. ‘I’ll show you the pumps. They’re down at Mazzocchio; six of them as big as aeroplanes, and as noisy. They pull nine and a half thousand gallons of water a second, and send it through the canals down to the sea.’
‘What would happen if they broke down?’ Tom asked.
Aldo gazed about. ‘All under water again,’ he said. ‘One week maybe.’
‘It all looks so perfect,’ Tom said. ‘Like a toytown.’
Aldo smiled.
‘Did anybody live here before?’
‘Not really,’ Aldo said. ‘Maybe a few.’
‘What happened to them?’
Aldo didn’t know.
Heading back up the via Appia to Rome, Tom asked, ‘Have you met the Duce?’
Aldo glanced at him in surprise. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘All the time! He comes down to admire the works – and to help. Shirt off, digging, helping get the harvest in. Also’ – and he gave Tom a look – ‘he has a girlfriend down this way. He comes on his Moto Guzzi to visit. Then we pretend not to know it’s him.’
‘Have you talked to him?’
‘Of course!’ Aldo said. ‘Everybody talks to him. He listens to everybody. And what’s more he gives you a straight answer, and he keeps his word.’
*
When boys yelled at foreign girls in the street, ‘Eh, bionda!’ and so forth, in not at all the same way that their grandmothers used to coo the same words to Kitty, Nenna yelled back with a mouthful as dry and salty as anchovies. They did not yell at her twice. Word got round.
It’s a great big hokey cokey, Tom thought. Yes and no, to and fro.
‘It’s because they get a cheque for seven hundred lire when they get married,’ he teased. ‘They want you for the money.’
Tom did not shout at girls in the street. He was, like it or not, an English gentleman. He wasn’t sure, now, that he did like it. He could tease her, and make her make that face, the one she was doing now, narrowed eyes, pouty mouth, the ‘Yes, yes, I know what you’re up to’ look, but he could not – cannot what? he thought. If I were not an English gentleman, he thought – but the thought stopped there. He was an English gentleman, and there was nothing he could do about it.
But English gentlemen touch women. They father children. They hold girls too close at dances. They go out on to the verandah with them, they kiss them in cars, and stay for hours in the carpark outside the tennis club. They cuddle up with barmaids and town girls and – he’d heard about this – they give money to girls they meet in stations and pubs, to do the kind of thing some of the chaps at school did for each other …
None of this was anything to do with Nenna. Nenna was – well, she was nothing to do with any of that.
‘They want those blondies for their lovely Aryan genes,’ Nenna said. ‘And men with plenty of children get better jobs, so they have to start young. I suppose I’d better marry one now, and get a good start.’
‘You’re far too young,’ Tom said, bringing out his mocking tone, which would make all his dirty thoughts go away. ‘A mere child.’
‘Younger than I are happy mothers made,’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘But don’t worry Tomaso, I’ll wait for you. We can marry when we’re old enough to know no one else will have us. When we’re twenty-five.’
‘But if we leave it so late how will we fit in our seven sons?’ Tom asked, grinning gaily as his mind filled up suddenly with fantastic images, shocking images, of him and Nenna creating sons, images of golden thighs and coiling hair and breasts and mouths … ‘Five thousand lire apiece, don’t forget!’ he cried. Dear God, I am becoming a lunatic. ‘But what if we have seven daughters too?’
‘Life insurance!’ said Nenna. This was another kindness from the Duce to his people: if anything happened to the patriotic mother there would be an insurance payment for the upkeep of her seven fine Italians sons. ‘You know the signora with twenty-four children? She’s pregnant!’
‘Imagine!’ cried Tom. ‘Twenty-five children dressed like Vittorio and Stefano in their little shorts and their hats like acorns, marching across a desert to invade Abyssinia, singing’ – and he sang – ‘“Ti saluto, vado in Abissinia, cara Virginia, ma tornerò.” If they’d invaded somewhere else, of course, they’d have put in some other girl’s name … I’m going to America, dear Angelica; to Albania, dear Grainne – it’s an Irish name, Nenna.’
This is better. Sort of. At least it’s changing the subject.
‘Bulgaria, Maria,’ Nenna said.
‘Haiti, Katie,’ said Tom. ‘Uganda Amanda.’
‘Bolivia Olivia,’ said Nenna.
‘Tanganyika Veronica!’ cried Tom.
‘Nigeria Valeria!’ from Nenna.
‘To Guinea, dear Minnie,’ said Tom, ‘and Chile, dear Millie’ – at which they fell about laughing.
By the end Tom was physically sitting on his hands, red-faced, and Marinella was watching them with huge eyes and an expression of vast wisdom.
*
Was it because I was so engrossed in her? Was I just blinded?
*
Tom wrote to Nadine and Riley.
Dear Old Folks. Everyone’s well. The baby is very sweet, though everywhere is festooned in urinous cloths as a result, which is not really my cup of tea, talking of which I’m longing for one. The autarchia thing is getting really quite extreme. Nenna has a particularly nasty coat which is apparently made of milk. It’s called Lanital. Sounds like a medicine or something to clean the bathroom with. Aldo is very keen on it all and quite believes that coffee is not good for us and chicory is not revolting – also leather shoes are not necessary, we must wear cork or rubber. I feel quite privileged to be allowed my English brogues which are of course not unpatriotic because they are English and so am I. I managed an entire week at the lake before term began and have elongated my capacity for staying underwater, unfortunately as I have not invented a way of reading a stopwatch underwater or of persuading Nenna that timing me is an interesting project I still don’t know how long exactly I can stay there. I was about to start training up Stefano as my assistant in this experiment but alas he had homework and now everyone has to go back to school, so my ignorance remains intact. Having had a look at Tiber water under a microscope last summer – positively oodling with life forms hitherto unknown to man, or at least to me – I don’t think I’ll be continuing my research when we get back to the island. Been to a couple of rallies and so forth, all jolly stirring but somebody said the tanks were made of wood, so—
Anyway, Aldo etc send their regards – it is now dinner time, so accubituri te salutant – those who are about to lie down and scoff salute you. I won’t say I’ll write again because I probably won’t— Yr lvg Tom
A conductor had left the country because he wouldn’t play Giovinezza before his concerts.
‘Idiotic,’ said Nenna. ‘Why not play it? It’s his job and it’s a lovely song.’
Tom said he had read in the paper that a senator had slapped the conductor’s face once for not playing it.
‘Well, he felt strongly about it,’ said Nenna. ‘Songs can be very strong. You remember how we used to march up and down …’ They remembered: Nenna and Kitty singing Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza … Youth, youth, springtime of beauty … You couldn’t sing it without marching up and down.
Nenna was back at school. One weekend her gymnastics troupe took part in a display: Tom went along with Susanna and Aldo and the boys, to watch. Johnny Carmichael, also on the new course, came along.
The Duce was up there somewhere, thumbs tucked into his belt no doubt, swaying his stout chest around, being adored. They peered and craned but they didn’t get a glimpse. So many ranks of people passed by! Young men with charms dangling from their hats; boys from the Balilla walking with their bent arms swinging alternately right across their bodies so their elbows pointed at their shoes. Everyone so very much in time. So much saluting. Aldo and the boys cheered and stamped their feet, and as Nenna’s troupe came cartwheeling by, bouncing and spinning along like great white flowers, Tom’s spirits rose – with the general enthusiasm, of course. And, yes, with the sight of her legs flying, long and strong. Her hair was tied up tight around her head. He realised, seeing it tied so tight, how glad he was that she didn’t cut it short and hold it in place with clips, like the other girls – and her face was bright with exertion and pride as it flashed by, upside down, spinning. Her arms, flexible and brown, were curved with muscle, her belly stretched and smooth under the white shirt.
‘There she is! There she is!’ shouted Stefano and Vittorio, and Susanna, beside Tom, put her hand on his arm and turned to smile at him with a maternal pride which made him flush with shame. On his other side, Carmichael whispered, ‘What do you think of all this? Rather ridiculous, don’t you think? But impressive.’
‘Mussolini is a great statesman for Italy!’ Tom said. ‘Every Italian knows they need discipline and a strong leader. They’re not like us English, naturally hardworking, and reasonable.’
‘Stop that,’ said Carmichael, giggling.
‘Stop what?’ Tom said.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘You sound like Papà,’ said Stefano.
Carmichael fell silent.
*
Tom was bemused about what was going on in Abyssinia. There was some disagreement, and Mussolini had sent soldiers, and the League of Nations had got involved. Tom wasn’t convinced about invading other countries. How was it fair?
Aldo, just back from another rally, bluff and cheerful, laughed and laughed at that. ‘From a son of perfidious Albion!’ he said. ‘The country which – have you heard of the British Empire? Dear boy, allow me to quote.’ He turned to the bookshelf, and took a paper from the pile. It took him a moment to find the right thing.
‘Here,’ he said, and read: ‘“As soon as the British have sated themselves with colonial conquests, they impudently draw a line across the middle of the page in the Recording Angel’s book, and then proclaim: ‘What was right for us up till yesterday is wrong for you today.’”’
Tom thought for a second, and supposed he had a point.
‘But Anthony Eden is brokering for peace,’ Tom said. ‘Peace is better, surely?’
‘Arms embargo!’ said Aldo, and snorted. ‘You lot are trying to tell us what to do. Listen. The Duce wants to take back what is naturally ours, that you lot – Albion! – messed about with at Versailles. And it is the duty of a powerful country to spread civilisation. Don’t we all have empires? France? Russia? Germany? And if we invade, the darkies will benefit from Roman standards! They will be delighted.’
Tom thought for another moment, and supposed that he was proud of the Empire, and supposed, in a way, that of course Italy would want one.
‘There is slavery in Abyssinia!’ Nenna said. ‘It’s terrible! These things have to be challenged.’ Her eyes were wide and shocked. ‘Don’t the English newspapers tell you these things?’
He hardly heard the words, her eyes were so beautiful.
‘You lot watch out,’ Aldo said. ‘Inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato.’ The Englishman Italianate is the devil incarnate.
*
Tom really tried to settle to work. For several weeks he persuaded himself that he was revelling in the deeper involvement: working hard, seeing more of the chaps from the college. He’d be back in England for university early in October, but wanted to stay as long here as he could. He read the papers – English or American ones if he could get hold of them: Joe Louis the Brown Bomber beat Max Baer, the former champion (Aldo wouldn’t like that: in June Joe Louis had beaten Mussolini’s boy, Primo Carnera the Ambling Alp, despite being 9 inches shorter and 65 pounds lighter). Howard Hughes had flown the plane he himself designed, at 352.46 mph. Hitler has put through the Nuremberg Laws depriving German Jews of citizenship; aviator Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the Black Eagle of Harlem, had volunteered for the Ethiopian air force, and was on his way to meet Haile Selassie – that gave Tom a pang. He had loved Hubert Fauntleroy Julian ever since reading about his flights and parachute jumps in New York, years ago, where he wore a red suit and played the saxophone as he descended, crowds rushing up and down the streets of New York as the wind blew him this way and that. One time he had landed on the police station in Harlem. Or something.
Aldo was a little moody. The latest phase of the bonifica at the Agro Pontino was finished, and everybody had been laid off – thousands of men. ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘They were getting restless with the sacrifices that have to be made. As if you can achieve anything without suffering.’
Tom asked, ‘What have the men been suffering?’
‘Oh, the usual complaints. The camps are too crowded, the wages are too low, the food is bad, things are dirty, there’s not enough doctors—’
‘And is it true?’
‘Of course it’s true! It’s not the Dopolavoro! They can’t expect to sit about playing briscola all day! But anyway, now they’re all sacked, so they’ve nothing more to complain about. For the next phase, they’ll employ men with more enthusiasm. Me for example!’
*
One evening early in October Tom was reading when Nenna came and grabbed him, saying, ‘There’s a big speech at Palazzo Venezia, come on.’ He let her drag him. Vittorio and Stefano, smelling excitement, followed in tow.
It wasn’t far, just through Piazza and up via dei Delfini. The crowds were out en masse, pushing and scurrying in expectation of good news. All Rome, it seemed, was filling the streets, up the steps of the Vittoriale/Vittoriano/Typewriter/Wedding Cake/Vittorio Emmanuele monument – the vast white building with the parades of columns, and flying chariots on the roof, Tom never knew what to call it – and beyond. Everyone was moving in the same direction, moths to the same flame: soldiers and contadini, sailors and matrons, children and old men, girls and youths, Fascist badges, ribbons and medals, soup-stained ties and worn-out shoes, black shirts and breeches, skirts and nylons, soft hats and suits, three-legged dogs and squalling babies. Tom grabbed the boys by the hand so as not to lose them as they craned and wriggled to see. Above by the famous balcony on the first floor of the red palazzo, the loudspeakers swung with echo and delay as the Duce appeared, trim and strutting, and raised his voice above the chants of DU-CE! DU-CE! DU-CE! Nenna glanced across at Tom, her eyes aglow, eyebrows raised in complicity, then turned her bright face towards the palazzo and the man.
‘Dux, mea Lux!’ wailed a woman beside them, holding out her arms in something between the Fascist salute and a yearning reach for a lover. Leader, my light. ‘DUX, MEA LUX!’
‘Steady on, old girl,’ Tom murmured. But everybody was lit up. A kind of pride and clarity illuminated them, all looking the same way, bound together in certainty, all calling the same phrases, the bass line of DU-CE! DU-CE! DU-CE!, the ecstatic free-flying cries above of DUX MEA LUX!
They all fell quiet as he started to speak.
‘Blackshirts of the revolution!’ the Duce cried out. His manner was as usual brusque, friendly and strong – relaxed, like a school teacher who knows he is loved. ‘Men and women of all Italy! Listen’ – and listen they did, as if their dad had called them together to tell them something important. ‘Listen. A solemn hour is about to strike in the history of the fatherland. Twenty million Italians are at this moment occupying piazzas in every corner of Italy – twenty million people, one single heart.’ Cheers erupted. ‘One will.’ Cheers. ‘One decision. It is not just an army which is moving towards its objectives, but an entire people of forty-four million souls.’ Cheers! ‘A people against whom attempts have been made to commit the blackest injustice: that of depriving us of a little place in the sun – we have been patient for thirteen years, during which the noose of selfishness that has stifled our natural energy has been drawn ever tighter! With Ethiopia we have been patient for forty years! – Enough!’
The ripples ran over and through the crowd; the deliciousness of being one heart, one will, under one leader. Tom glanced around at the faces. They weren’t hysterical. They just loved him. It must be rather nice, he thought. You wouldn’t get the English all out in the streets like this for the King …
‘It’s all your fault, you know!’ Stefano cried naughtily, when the speech was done. ‘Britain is so selfish! So rich and greedy, and won’t let Italy have what it needs in Abyssinia.’
‘You know why?’ said Vittorio. ‘Because England is afraid! Because England is old and weak, and Italy is so young and strong! The Duce is Julius Caesar and we conquered you before!’
‘Shut up, you little beasts,’ cried Tom, putting on his evil face and tickling them exactly as they liked him to do. They were still just small enough for him to keep both of them in place, if Nenna helped.
‘We’re going to show you!’ the boys yelled. ‘We’re going to show everybody!’ as Tom swung Stefano on to his back in a fireman’s lift, and galumphed him down the street, scattering and annoying the dispersing crowds, leaving Vittorio and Nenna laughing like fools.
*
The young boys went on home, cutting across to the island, like feral creatures with their own pathways through the city, their own adventures to have. Nenna didn’t want to return immediately.
She said, ‘Come on.’ She wanted to walk along the river. ‘You’re leaving so soon,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you properly for ages. All this work – I’ve been thinking perhaps you were avoiding me.’ Her eyes were sparkly and the evening was drawing in, a little damp and misty, a sense of chill off the water, and the scent of dying leaves.
She looked, to Tom, as if she knew everything, understood everything, and forgave everything.
A terrible thought came over him: I’m going to kiss her.
I’m going to kiss her. This is terrible, I’m going to kiss her.
Resisting that became his only responsibility. He could move his feet, in this ostensibly innocent stroll, and he could resist this thought.
He didn’t kiss her. After only a few yards of strolling, she, overcome by how much she was going to miss him, flung her arms girlishly around his neck and kissed him, on the cheek, and rested her head against him, hugging him tight as she would Marinella, or a beloved dog, and saying, ‘Give me a proper hug, you’ve been so offish with me.’ And he, poor Tom, overwhelmed by the innocence of her gesture, indeed the innocence of her entire person, was simultaneously overwhelmed with the most unavoidable, the most inconvenient, the purest, hardest flood of male desire. His body could not but thrill to it, while his mind said, You sneaky shit; his body revelling, coiling in response, and his mind shouting, You are required to ignore this! He tried desperately both to glory in and not to notice the soft, irresistible impression of her breasts against his chest; her thighs, God help him, against his, her breath on his neck. Meanwhile his hands spread wide and stark as starfish inches from her flesh, trying not to land on her back or her – oh God – and his voice strangled, trying not to gasp her name.
It was not possible—
This was the situation when Aldo walked up, tapped Tom on the shoulder, turned him round, and punched him in the face.
Tom reeled. It was a good punch.
Nenna shrieked: ‘Papà! Papà what are you doing!’
Aldo, without looking at her, advancing again on Tom, bovine, his arms swinging, said, ‘No, what are you doing, puttana? Go home and tell your mother.’
Nenna yelled. Her outrage was magnificent. From the still centre of his spinning head, Tom heard and admired. But something was said that he missed, and when he was able to look up and see, she was not there. Clutching a handful of blood, from his nose? His mouth? – Tom coughed and tried to say, that’s not it, Aldo, it’s not what you think – but something in him knew that Aldo had recognised what Nenna had not, and that Aldo was right, and Tom stank of lust and was guilty, and therefore could not hit him back.
‘It’s not her fault,’ Tom said, to which Aldo replied, ‘Of course it’s not, you goat, you tramp,’ before hitting him again.
Tom found himself on the road, suddenly, a horse going by clip clop clip clop very loud, the bones of his arse jarred, his eye shut, his head ringing. Looking up he saw Aldo swaying about – two Aldos, and some other people – men? They dissolved back into individuals under the streetlight. Aldo, and two men, one of whom was swinging a cudgel.
‘Don’t want to go messing with Fascist girls,’ said the cudgel man, in a wheedly voice, and fear bit into Tom deeply – but Aldo, his eyes on Tom, had his hand out towards the man, low, in a gesture of ‘we won’t be needing that’. He put his other hand out to Tom: an offer of assistance.
Tom eyed it, and got up on his own, his fingers delicate on the cobblestones. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and Riley came into his mind: dignity, pride, he thought. He put the handkerchief to his nose, breathed gently – through his mouth – and said, carefully: ‘This was not what you think, Uncle. However. I won’t mention it to my mother. And Nenna has done nothing wrong. I’ll go for my bag now, if you don’t mind.’ Then one of his teeth fell out.
They all looked at it. Tom carefully folded himself down to pick it up: a gob of bloody pearl on the slate-black cobble.
‘Hm,’ he said, and put it in his pocket, and unfolded himself upwards, carefully.
He pushed past Aldo, tempted to bash him with a disrespectful shoulder as he passed, but resisting. His head hurt to buggery.
Just go back to the house. No more damage here. Hardmen with a cudgel! Jesus.
*
Back at the house, Susanna insisted on cleaning up Tom’s face, and he let her. He was still so surprised! Aldo coming at him – but we’re family!
While washing out his mouth with salty water at Susanna’s instruction, he had a slow and important thought: he retrieved the tooth from his pocket, rinsed it in the glass of water, and carefully put it back into the gap it had left. Somebody – Nadine? – once said this was the thing to do. It was an upper tooth; gravity was not on its side. He clenched his jaws to hold it, grinned and said to Susanna, unclearly but very politely, ‘Thank you for everything, I must leave now.’ He collected his things, and said, through his teeth, to anyone who came near him, ‘Nenna is not at fault. Aldo has misunderstood. Nenna is not at fault. Nothing improper has occurred.’
Nenna was standing like a ghost at the door when he stood. He said to her: ‘I believe I may be in love with you. I’m awfully sorry. And really it is a terribly bad idea for Italy to invade Abyssinia. They only have thirteen planes, you know, and four pilots. And one of them is Hubert Fauntleroy Julian.’
*
There was a night train going north; he just got on it, and off it rattled, and his head, his teeth, his thoughts, his feelings. I’m being churned, he thought. A lovely mozzarella of clarity will emerge from this milky mush. Fetid thought will drain away leaving islands of good solid intelligence …
He had thought it was good strong nationalism, with a touch of the buffoon. But it was not.
What would she be thinking now?
Thirteen planes! Not even a rugby team. And four pilots.
‘Don’t want to go messing with Fascist girls.’
Dux Mea Lux.
A folksy, charismatic, dangerous brute.
Building Italy – into a stinking mess of corruption, violence and wrongness. Power is dirty – but that dirty? It wasn’t as if he had never heard of the squadristi and their violent ways with people who didn’t play their game.
Matteotti, Matteotti, Matteotti …
He did know that Mussolini loathed democracy (two foxes and a chicken discussing what was for dinner, Riley calls it – and himself a complete democrat, a Fabian even). It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen the faces of Blackshirts before.
Aldo! So unnecessary—
Yes it’s all very manly, national strength is good, patriotism is a natural urge. Those little blue houses are very clean, those fields very big—
Look at it. Actually look at it.
There were swamps in his mind from which he could salvage nothing. Uncomfortable, he fell asleep, head jolting against the seatback, images of Riley, Nenna, Aldo, and the Duce bobbing through his dreams.
He woke with a start, God knows where, to the mighty shunts and jerks of train and carriages coupling or uncoupling. He was thirsty.
Jesus! I told Nenna I love her!
Also—
The compartment had filled with young men; their strong legs, their canvas bags, their five-o’clock shadows, their stertorous sleepy breathing building up a fug. Some pools of light from outside illuminated their faces. They’re my age, he thought. Born into it. It’s normal for them; they know nothing else. It’s different for me. I should know better …
Being young is no excuse. This has been self-deception.
In London, it had seemed obvious to him that the English didn’t understand the Italians. In Rome, he usually only saw Fascist newspapers, anyway, because there was nothing else.
There has been a thick layer of scales over your eyes—
When are you meant to realise?
—and each person’s scales are stuck on with different glue, and each glue is soluble in a different moment of truth. And time passes and things add up and sooner or later you look up, you grow up, and you realise. You see how tidelines have shifted and boundaries flexed; the lighting has changed, the angles tilted. What was is no longer. A turning was made which you didn’t notice, and in the trick of the eye strength became tyranny, determination became bullying, patriotism became xenophobia, self-respect became arrogance. Aldo swore obedience to a noble-looking little plant. He could not know the man-eating jungle it would grow into.
Would Aldo swear himself to Mussolini now? If he saw him now for the first time?
But so what. Here we are: Uncle Aldo, Nenna, and the whole lovely family—
Fascist to their teeth, proper Fascist—
And you know, Tom, what Fascism is.
*
Do I love her?
He was so ashamed to have been concealing the obvious from himself. In the low, debilitating way we know things we cannot bear to know, he had always known. Strange the veils which hide the obvious, when you grow up in the middle of them. And how very cold it felt, suddenly, without those veils.
He pulled his jacket round him. He could hear voices shouting outside, but he couldn’t remember where the train was going. The spot on his head where he had landed on the cobbles was seething with pain. It felt very late.
The train started to move again, very slow, halting.
Was it the cudgel? Was it just that this man was all ready to dole out a punishment with a weapon like that, for no reason, that the violence and the instant judgement was so close under the surface they could be called up, just like that—
No, it’s Hubert Fauntleroy Julian.
It’s the combination. It’s everything.
He did not blame himself for not having recognised earlier what was going on, just as he did not blame Kitty, who was a kid, or Nadine, who was a woman. Or Nenna, who was born into it. Or—
You couldn’t expect them to know – could you? But then, what do you do about it?
He couldn’t think how to point it out to them.
Or indeed how not to. Should he?
What, when it might very well break their hearts?
But the hypocrisy burned under his skin. Truth once unveiled cannot be dismissed. Even if he wanted to dismiss it. Which he didn’t.
I want … to have the courage to do something about it, and some inspiration as to what that something might possibly be. And I have neither.
He feared – a terrible fear – that Nadine had understood all along, and didn’t care.
Well. There was a further paralysis in that thought.
There’s only one question, really, he told himself, though the moment he phrased it that one question sprouted another three and each of those sprouted further ones of their own. He couldn’t get comfortable. The side of his cheek was against the cold glass of the window. In the darkness beyond, half his own face looked back at him. He whispered his questions to himself:
Question: Do I speak to Aldo about the fact that Fascism has gone horribly wrong and Mussolini is a fucking villain?
Sub questions:
Do I tell Nenna?
Will they care in the slightest what I think?
Why would I say it?
Do I want to convert them from this love of the Duce?
What good would that do them?
Is it my business?
Will Aldo shout at me?
Will Nenna hate me?
Will Nenna hate me?
Will Nenna hate me?
I’m nineteen years old, I’m at university, I should be able to say what I think.
They won’t care. They’re so … soaked in it. It’s been Nenna’s whole life, her normality. It’s their blood and bones. They have nothing else.
This was not how he had wanted to leave Rome. It seemed so far away already. He wondered if he would ever go back.
*
When the young men got off at Milan, a magazine was left behind on the seat. Tom stared at it for quite a while. He recognised it: La Difesa della Razza, Mussolini’s Hitler-pleasing racist rag. He had never read it.
He sighed, leant over, flinched at the pain in his mouth, picked it up. A drivel of anti-Semitism greeted him. His stomach churned.
But they’re Jewish.
How can they—?
He didn’t understand.
*
He woke up again: the land outside hilly, early morning sun.
It was simple, really. At the beginning Mussolini had looked like Italy’s saviour angel, and he had turned out to be something else. Mussolini didn’t used to be anti-Semitic, and now, ganging up with Hitler, he was.
The mistake, he thought, is not to realise that things change. From which it was only a tiny leap of thought to I have changed. Or perhaps even, I am changing.
The worst enemies don’t come dressed up as monsters, yelling their threats. They come as friends, helping you, and when you are in their debt of course you forgive them. You’ve given up your sense of proportion.
I’ve been bamboozled.