Very few gypsies want to be seen as poor, although many are. Such was the case with old Angelina’s sons, who possessed nothing other than their caravans and their gypsy blood. But it was young blood that coursed through their veins, a dark and vital flow that attracted women and fathered numberless children. And, like their mother, who had known the era of horses and caravans, they spat upon the very thought that they might be pitied.
The camp was on the eastern edge of the town; they moved, driven by evictions, from place to place around this unromantic periphery. It was a landscape of small houses and council blocks, interspersed with rubbish dumps and empty plots. The past beauty of this part of the country was long forgotten – it had once been a huge wheat-covered plain, but the last farm lands had disappeared to make way for urgent housing needs. The sky was the only source of light, providing, even on dull days, a chiaroscuro which flattened the damaged buildings. Only the end of the school day brought this desert to life; there was none of the normal conviviality of village life. Nobody, apart from the inhabitants, could distinguish one street from another. The streets were named after flowers, as though the official in charge of naming them could thus provide some of the poetry that was lacking (or perhaps these mean urban developments were merely unworthy of the names of the great men of the nation).
An old vegetable garden still remained at the corner of the rue des Iris and the rue des Lilas. The owner, a retired schoolmistress, refused to sell it to the town. The ground was full of potholes and was encrusted with broken glass, pieces of rubber tyres, and bits of scrap iron. Old car doors served as bridges over big rain puddles. An overflowing municipal dustbin was sealed onto a cement pedestal, and an apple tree was slowly dying in the scorched earth, surrounded by detritus and rotting wood.
The end of summer that year felt more like the end of autumn. The empty house in the country where the gypsies had been squatting had been walled up before their eyes. Moved on by the police and the bailiffs, Angelina’s tribe began occupying the vegetable garden at the beginning of September. It was private property, but there was nothing to indicate this, and anyway they were used to settling in forbidden places. The long hair of Angelina’s daughters-in-law blew in the sea breeze, and the women hugged worn cardigans around their chests. Children ran around them. Every now and then the women would catch one of them, give him a clout and then let him go, shouting at him to keep quiet or go and help his father, they were fed up with having them under their feet. The children ran off, screeching and shouting. With their dry, stick-like bodies they could shin quickly up the apple trees.
“Bring some kindling!” Angelina would shout. She was more cheerful than the others, as though she had discovered, with advancing age, that happiness comes from within. The children were swept up in her high spirits, and brought her sticks and twigs in their dirty little hands. Angelina laughed. Yes, children were the greatest joy. Thinking this, she looked around for her sons. They were moving the lorries, avoiding the ruts. “Where shall we put the old mother?” the eldest shouted to his brothers.
Soon the wind was warmed by a blaze, and they sat by the fire together, chewing bread and bacon and watching the scudding clouds. The children kicked each other for fun. Misia, as usual, was crying in her husband’s arms.
“You’ll see, my Miss,” he whispered to her, “you’ll see, we’ll be fine . . .”
“I know,” she said quietly, and one could see that she believed the opposite.
He caressed her, and that made her cry even more. She was pregnant and approaching her term; her swollen red ankles looked like those of an old tramp.
“You’re exhausted by the journey,” said Angelina, looking at her tired young legs. “You must go to bed early, my girl.”
The young woman didn’t answer; she had stopped crying. The child inside her had begun to move.