It would have been simple to find out for certain which couple was staying in the next room, but I preferred to glance around and try to guess each morning when the breakfasts were being brought, while Rennie folded down interesting pages in the guidebook. The only other couple who had stayed longer than a night or two sat at the next table. The man abstractedly massaged his bald scalp with his fingertips while his grey-haired wife folded her napkin in four and ran it between the tines of her fork. When she met my glance she smiled comfortably and began to wipe the napkin round and round her plate. I looked away but knew that she would have wiped everything in front of her by the time breakfast arrived. On those mornings when anguished Italian could be heard from the kitchen, as though someone in there was sawing at their wrists with a blunt knife, the woman had time to wipe all her husband’s tableware as well while he palpated every inch of his skull. I had never heard either of them speak except to say a very loud Thank you to Fabbio when he brought the breakfast.
The two English sisters who blushed so easily had also been at the Piccadilly for some time. Rennie had translated for them once or twice at breakfast — più burro, he had said loudly, pointing at the girls’ plates and making wiping motions with an imaginary knife — and now they both smiled and blushed warmly at the tablecloth when he came in with me, and sometimes whispered hello to him across the room.
In the kitchen something dropped with a crash and there was a short scream. Rennie glanced up and held himself tightly, as if waiting for the shots. When he met my eye he said quickly:
— I’ve just been thinking. What about that market today? You said you wanted a hat.
He nodded, as if a problem had been solved.
— And then tomorrow the roof of the Duomo.
We asked Fabbio about hats.
— Cappello, Rennie enunciated ringingly, and left a large damp thumb-print on the page of the phrase-book.
Fabbio came out from behind the counter wearing a striped pyjama-top under his jacket, beaming as he approached Rennie. He kept dancing forward like a fencer until Rennie, thumbing helplessly through the phrase-book, had backed into me away from the torrent of Fabbio’s Italian. Fabbio darted forward as if going in for the kill, snatched the book out of Rennie’s hands, flipped through it, and jabbed at the word in the dictionary section at the end.
Rennie peered closely. Aspettare, he read aloud. To wait.
Fabbio held up his palms like the Pope blessing a crowd and kept saying to wait, to wait. Each time his pronunciation distorted the words a little more so that he was saying duada, duada, by the time he disappeared backwards into his room off the lobby. He returned at a trot with an armload of different hats, and slapped each one on his head, posed for a moment, then whipped it off. Under a wide straw hat with spotted feathers in the band he looked like a bankrupt peasant, while under the furry winter cap he was like a thug from the Kremlin. For no reason I thought of Viola. I thought I heard someone say my name and turned quickly, but it was only the English sisters fluttering their fingers and whispering bye bye as they set off for a day in the art gallery.
With laborious care, as if he had only just learned to hold a pencil, Fabbio wrote PP on a piece of paper and jabbed at the letters, showing them to Rennie, until they were freckled with dots. He began to draw a map to show the way to the market, but started too close to the bottom of the page. He crumpled the paper up and snatched at another from under the desk, crying Aspetti, aspetti! On the second sheet he started too near the edge and made tiny moaning noises as he tried to cram the sheets together. Finally he whipped the page over like a magician and finished on the other side. The word Mercato, where the map ended, started small but the last three letters were gigantic.
I had become so used to the hissing and sucking noises in the streets that I no longer heard them. Rennie had never heard them before we came to Milan — Just Your imagination, darling, he had always said, and anyway it’s a compliment. Now he heard them everywhere. Several times, as we followed Fabbio’s map to the market, he stopped dead in the middle of the pavement and turned to stare back at the man we had just passed. I prepared myself to restrain him physically if he started to go after someone with his fists up. Just thought I saw someone I know, he would say when I asked him why he had stopped, or, Just remembered something I’d forgotten. We had to pass so close to three men lounging at the entrance to the market that I could see how the lips of one had cracked so that they bled, and how a tiny gold ring gleamed in the hair that curled out of another’s ear. Rennie took long strides past them and gripped my hand until I felt the bones might crack.
In the market, the crowds were so thick among the stalls and twisted trees that it was impossible to move at a normal walking pace. Rennie and I shuffled along with the crowd while stall-owners leaned on their counters and watched everyone. Two fruitsellers attracted custom by tossing their wares over the heads of the crowd, and it did not seem accidental when a peach landed neatly at Rennie’s feet and spattered on the stones. I looked up in time to catch a falling plum but when I wiped it on my shirt and bit into it I found it unripe and bitter. A fat young man with flabby pectorals quivering like breasts under his shirt came up against Rennie in the crowd and they both stepped sideways at the same moment to make way. The man’s chin wobbled as he shook his head and grinned, showing a pair of deep dimples, each time he and Rennie met head-on again. Rennie was panting and smiling and making small fan-like gestures with his hands. Finally both men took a step forward at the same moment, collided, and staggered for a moment in a tottering embrace. The fat man slapped Rennie on the back and laughed, calling out Caro, caro mio so that people turned to look, and Rennie was wiping his palms on the seat of his jeans when he caught up with me again. He whirled around when there was a catcall from somewhere in the crowd as though it was meant for him.
— Nothing, nothing, he said when I asked him what the matter was. Nothing.
He moved out of the current of the crowd into a backwater of clothing stalls and tweaked at a cheap bright dress hanging up.
— Let’s buy you one of these, darling, it’d suit you.
He took the dress down and held it against me, trying at the same time to stand back to see the whole effect. A woman in an identical dress bloomed out from behind the counter, bearing her huge breasts in front of her like a figurehead.
— Prego, prego.
Her smile was speckled with gold. Taking the dress from Rennie, she hung it over my shoulder and prodded me behind a curtain that hung from a tree.
— Bella, sì, sì.
Her breasts shook as she closed the curtain with a dramatic flourish, enclosing me so snugly that there was no room to turn around. The bottom of the flimsy curtain did not reach down even as far as my knees, and the top sagged on its string below the level of my shoulders. Standing looking out, feeling the fabric of the curtain gritty against my skin, I met the gaze of several women inspecting large pink underpants at the next stall, and decided not to bother trying on the dress. Over the top of the curtain I could see that Rennie was enjoying a lively conversation, holding up one of the dresses and pointing at its bodice, then gesturing with both hands like a fisherman describing the one that got away.
— Grande, he said loudly and nodded at the stall-owner. Lei, piccola.
She understood immediately.
— Ah sì! Sono grossa, she said, elongating the word like an opera singer and running her hands down in front of her bosom.
— Lei, piccola.
She jerked her thumb towards where I stood behind the curtain, then snatched the dress from Rennie to demonstrate how the bodice stretched to fit all sizes. Grinning into his face and pressing her breasts together with both hands, she presented him with a deep freckled cleavage and said in English:
— You see? You see now?
I looked away and met the eye of an old man with a bald dog on a leash, who raised his hat and winked elaborately at me. Turning my back and facing into the bark of the trunk, I watched an ant struggle in a crack, and the scar where the tree had grown a black lip around a piece of metal. This sneering mouth must have been working patiently for years to engulf the metal, and would finally succeed in swallowing it as if it had never existed. I wondered whether a human body strapped to the bark of a tree would eventually be hidden in the same way.
When I stepped out from behind the curtain, Rennie was leaning against the counter laughing at something the stall-owner had said.
— No good. Just didn’t look right, I said, tossing the dress on the counter and shrugging at the woman. Rennie seemed reluctant to leave.
— Looks good on her, he said, and for a moment we both stared at where the woman’s breasts strained at the fabric. As she reached up to show us another kind of dress and revealed a bearded armpit, I led Rennie away.
Finding the straw section of the market was more difficult than Fabbio had promised. Several times we found we had wandered in a circle and were in the butchers’ section again, where chunks of bright red meat lay on stained wooden blocks and the air smelled of blood. The third time we stood looking at lumpy sausages and purple-stamped carcasses, Rennie dropped my hand and strode across to where a woman was pointing out the exact salami she wanted. I could not hear their conversation, but saw the woman look suspicious as Rennie said something and pointed to her hat. He came back smiling and took my hand with authority.
— This way.
We were standing fingering hats at one of the straw stalls when a man’s head and shoulders slid silently out from between the mats hanging in front of the counter. His grin at us exposed two missing front teeth, and canines that seemed over-long, as though they had grown down further in compensation. He grinned at me, then at Rennie, displaying his gums with pride.
— Buon giorno, amici!
His words came out in a sibilant hiss that reminded me of Domenico and the daily conversation about the bread. The only difference for him now was that he would collect one loaf of bread instead of two from the village each day. Come back any time, Viola had said. Once in Florence, I was sure I could find my way to San Giorgio, although I would not know quite how to address a letter.
The stall-owner leaned further towards us like someone with a rude secret to whisper and three straw mats slithered down together with a liquid sound. Rennie leapt back as if bitten and the stall-owner snickered behind his hand. His loose shirt made his arms twig-like, and was covered with a pattern of female lips and the word BACI. Slipping out from behind his counter, he picked up one of the mats that lay like an empty skin at his feet and shook the dust off it so hard that it snapped in the air.
— Vairy good, vairy cheap.
He forced the corner of the mat into Rennie’s hand, closing the passive fingers around it.
He was as indignant as if someone had contradicted him. Pressing closer to Rennie, he pointed to the decoration along the mat’s edge, the secrets hidden in the weaving. Rennie backed away and dropped the corner of mat.
— We wanted a hat, actually. Or two, rather, he corrected himself with a gusty laugh.
The man coiled down under the counter and uncoiled a moment later on the other side, holding a mirror. Reaching up so that the sleeve of his shirt fell back and exposed tattoos covering his biceps, he unhooked a floppy hat like a broken paper bag and pushed it onto my head. Rennie stared doubtfully, but the stall-owner cried:
— Oh sì, bella, bella!
Drawing Rennie close to him with a hand on his arm, he muttered out of the side of his mouth as if the two of them were thinking about buying me.
— You like, huh?
His gums, where the front teeth had been, were the grey of chewed gristle.
— You husband? he asked suddenly and gave Rennie a poke in the chest that made him step backwards. Husband?
I had to remind myself that anyone would seem to be leering if they had no front teeth. The man had found a hat of pale straw that he pulled over Rennie’s head, but immediately snatched if off again and began squashing it between his hands like an accordion to demonstrate how it sprang back into shape when released.
— For the voyage. For the travel.
Crushing the hat flat on the counter, he mimed a suitcase being closed on it, then rolled it up into a tight tube of straw and flourished it in Rennie’s face.
— Raffia, is raffia, no straw. Bend, see. Bend and make like little, see?
Rennie’s tolerant smile suddenly changed to an expression of great fear as the man seized him by the hips and began fumbling with his pants. Rennie grunted and strained to pull away, but the man kept him in his embrace until he had thrust the rolled-up hat into Rennie’s pocket.
— Raffia, see, okay.
Rennie grabbed at the hat sticking up from his pocket and jerked it out. In his hand the hat unrolled and opened up like something alive and the man crowed in triumph.
— Very cheap.
Holding up both hands, he opened and closed the fingers in quick mouth-like gestures, signalling the price. Rennie tried to back away but stumbled over a nest of baskets behind him. He stood paralysed then, holding the hat in both hands ready to rip it apart, his eyes wide, one foot jammed in a basket. Although his face was white, his ears were violently flushed.
— Looks good, I said. Might as well buy it.
I watched the stall-owner smoothing Rennie’s money on the counter, caressing the shabby notes, wrinkled as skin. I could remember now where it was that I had recently seen a hat like this one. The stall-owner’s tongue flicked in and out between his lips as he concentrated on rolling the hat into a tight tube to present to Rennie. I was finding it hard to keep looking at those exposed lumpy gums.
— Ciao, Rennie said loudly, grabbing my hand, kicking the baskets out of the way, and shouldering through the crowds away from the stall. Only when we turned a corner and found ourselves in the nut section did he slow to the shuffling pace of the rest of the crowd.
— Like Dracula with those teeth, wasn’t he?
He shuddered.
— Good hat, though.
Letting it unroll in his hand, he twirled it on a finger.
— Handy, really, being able to roll it up like that.
I watched a woman plunge her hands deep into a barrel of glossy hazelnuts, relishing their cool slippery shells.
— It’s very nice, I said. Daniel has one just like it.
I wondered why I had used Daniel’s name when what I was thinking of was the way the hair branched all over Hugo’s body and the way his eyes were invisible under his hat. Rennie stumbled on a cobblestone.
— I never saw it, he said accusingly.
Thinking of that breathless clearing filled with the monotonous whistling of a bird, I said:
— I only saw it once.
Rennie flattened the hat between his hands and crammed it into his pocket, where it bulged oddly. He led the way in silence, gripping my hand so tightly that an unpleasant suction was formed between our damp palms. Finally I thought to stop and buy a bag of almonds.
— Good idea darling, Rennie said, and let go of my hand at last, walking along cracking the nuts loudly with his teeth. He filled his pockets with the shells, waiting to empty them on our return to the pensione, but I dropped mine on the pavement as we walked so that there was an unmistakable trail behind me, through all the streets we had walked down. Anyone who had cared to would have been able to follow me.