A squat big-bellied man, with mottled red cheeks that puff out and fold over the ends of his moustache, squeezes past the queue and out of the doorway, clutching his precious bloodied package to his chest. There is some muttering as the queue shuffles forward. Did he get more than his fair share?
Chiara, queuing outside in the street on a cold, bright January morning, watches him waddle away at high speed. She would like to ask him a question. Every whisper on the street of food supplies–beans, dried vegetables, twists of salt, sardines in oil at Piazza Vittorio, sometimes coffee in an underpass near there, flour and sugar at Tor di Nona, canned goods and rice laid out on provisional stalls, no more than bits of cloth on the pavement, in the streets behind Termini–sends her hurtling from one part of Rome to another. She spends half her life queuing. She joins queues even if she doesn’t know what the goods on offer might be. Often there is nothing at all, or it is gone.
She would like to say to this scurrying man, ‘How come you are so fat? What’s the secret?’
She glances down at Daniele–he is wearing an old pair of Nonna’s chamois leather gloves, several sizes too big, giving his hands a crinkly, ancient-looking appearance. He resembles a ragamuffin but so many people do that it doesn’t matter. Hardly anyone lives in their own homes here in Rome any more. He is holding onto the edge of her coat pocket, clutching the cloth. Not flesh on flesh, never that.
She follows his gaze across the road to a poster pasted on the window of the cobbler’s opposite. It depicts a red-lipped black man, head thrown back and mouth open, laughing maniacally as he crushes a captive maiden in his massive, muscular arms. The maiden is draped in classical robes, with a smooth, alabaster breast, chaste thighs pressed together, an image of pale purity.
‘The liberties … of the liberator!’ reads the caption. A Stars-and-Stripes banner protrudes from the man’s rifle. Rome is full of this lurid propaganda.
The queue moves forward. They are under the crimson oval sign with the protruding horse’s head now. She can see through the window. Nothing hangs from the hooks above the butcher’s head, and the metal trays she can glimpse between the waiting people are empty, scrubbed clean, but there is definitely meat left on the block, and perhaps the butcher has something else hidden down behind the counter. Afterwards, if they get some meat, she will call in at the cobbler’s and see whether anything can be done about Daniele’s burnt shoes. The toes curl up at the end, like a clown’s. If she gets meat, if she cooks something tasty and nutritious for them today, other things can perhaps be mended too.
She thinks of the chickens she has acquired from Gennaro, flapping and scratching around the dining room, shitting on Nonna’s oak sideboard. She thinks of how she has plundered Nonno’s wine store, trading his Treviso and his precious Barolo for pasta, Parmesan, scraps. She thinks of the salon, where bolts of Cecilia’s cloth are strewn just as she left them, when she heaved them up and spilt them out on that last day; where she and Daniele sleep in among them, as if there were no bedrooms and they had nowhere else to go. They are like refugees inhabiting the apartment in a temporary kind of way, as if always on the verge of leaving. It is all a muddle.
The apartment misses Cecilia, tidying, keeping it in order, being there as a living presence to come home to, sewing things together so they seem to make sense. Making it into a home.
Chiara presses her fingers against her eyelids. Let her not start weeping in the street, in front of the child.
The word ‘unremarkable’ surfaces in her mind. The nun who handed her the fake identity documents said it.
‘If you are out alone, you take your proper documents. But when the boy is with you, take these other ones that make you into a family, and that way you arouse less suspicion. You are unremarkable.’
Those words have stayed with her. There is a truth in them and a bleak kind of comfort. Because these times are so extraordinary that their story is just that. They are bereaved, orphaned, hungry, haunted, fearful. They are unremarkable.
Another customer leaves. The line moves forward. She and Daniele are through the door, past the threshold, properly inside. She gives her pocket a tug to catch his attention.
‘I think we might be lucky today,’ she says.
The cold blood smell is in their nostrils. There seems to be just one piece of meat on the slab, but it’s a good size. Chiara prays it won’t run out before they get to the counter, that none of the customers in front has any kind of special deal. The cleaver falls through the air, slicing through the slab of dark-red flesh. She watches the arc of its movement to see where it falls. They all do. They are worshippers at the altar of the chopping block, the butcher their high priest.
She feels a hand on her shoulder and a surge of adrenalin shoots up her spine. She makes a shrugging movement as if to slide the hand off.
‘Chiara?’ a woman’s voice says.
She half turns to look up into the face of a tired-looking, middle-aged woman.
‘Chiara Ravello?’
The woman grasps both of Chiara’s shoulders, swivelling her so that they face each other square on, and Chiara, instinctively, unthinkingly, without even glancing at him, ushers Daniele behind her back and out of sight. She cannot yet place this tall person, who is gazing at her in disbelief and wonder and something else, some other emotion. She finds herself being drawn into the other’s arms. She breathes in the other’s scent, that unmistakable blend of roses and vanilla, together with something else she could never name when she was a child or an adolescent–something that she used to smell in her father’s hair and in the crease of his pocket-handkerchief–but that now she recognises. Musk.
She tries to pull away, but her knees are trembling, and the other woman is holding her firmly. Simone Gauchet, her father’s mistress.
‘Call me Simone,’ she remembers her saying the last time they met. ‘Come and see me whenever you want.’
But Chiara hadn’t ever wanted.
Any port in a storm, she thinks now, and allows herself to be held a bit longer. It is so long since she has been embraced by someone bigger and sturdier than herself. She has been the hugger, not the hugged, the comforter and not the comforted. She struggles not to weep. She can feel the other’s bosom heaving.
The woman lets her go and as she takes a step back, tucking Daniele more tightly behind her, Chiara notices that the years since she last saw Simone Gauchet soon after her father’s funeral in 1938 have not been kind. She has lines around her mouth, her skin is pale and blotchy. She looks haggard. She is a big-framed woman, built to carry some flesh.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ Simone says. ‘I feared for you in the San Lorenzo bombing.’
Her voice, unlike her face, seems immune to the ravages of time, husky, musical and low. A man might call it seductive.
It would be rude beyond measure to turn away. Chiara has to say something. ‘We weren’t living there. Cecilia and I moved out of the San Lorenzo apartment a few years ago,’ she says. ‘After my father died.’
‘I was worried,’ Simone says. ‘When I saw those pictures on the newsreel with the pope there praying in the rubble, I thought, Oh no. Not Alfonso’s girls. My darling Alfonso. His lovely girls.’
With the tip of her middle finger she smoothes tears away from her powdered cheeks.
‘But you are fine. You are here. Oh,’ she sighs a great sigh. ‘You cannot imagine the relief.’
Chiara stares at Simone Gauchet saying his name, her father’s name, out loud in the middle of the butcher’s shop, as if he were hers, as if the wound of his loss were hers. Claiming some kinship with Cecilia and Chiara when she didn’t even know them. Smiling at her now as if all is right with the world.
‘You’ll be sorry then to hear that my mother was there,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ Simone says, as if winded. Her smile disappears and her tired face sags again. She looks sadly at Chiara. ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ she says.
Chiara can detect no evidence of sarcasm in the other woman’s tone, no sign of ill-will or latent satisfaction that her rival is dead.
She hates me, Chiara’s mother used to say, that trollop, she can’t bear the fact that I’m prettier than she is.
‘Your poor mother,’ Simone says. ‘Poor you.’
Chiara, abashed, stares down at the floor.
‘And your sister?’
‘She’s fine,’ Chiara says quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent an image of Cecilia, her pale sleeping face, like a child’s in its unknowingness, from surging up in her mind. She does not want to be reminded of her sister. ‘She’s in the countryside, at our grandparents’ farm,’ she says firmly.
She is not going to tell this woman that Nonna is dead, that she has left Cecilia in the care of virtual strangers. That she said she would return within two weeks and circled the day on the calendar with a red pen. That the circled day is long past.
‘It’s safer for her there,’ Simone remarks.
‘Oh, much,’ Chiara agrees.
And the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this is actually true, enters her mind for the first time. Perhaps her guilt at leaving Cecilia is a self-indulgence, and her sister is thriving in her absence. Beatrice and Ettore, who were to move into the farmhouse for the duration, had promised to care for her as if she were their own. Perhaps she, Chiara, held Cecilia back.
Another customer leaves. Chiara moves a step closer to the butcher’s counter and, in the movement, Daniele is revealed.
‘You have a child,’ Simone exclaims in a loud, astonished voice.
Daniele has the hat with earmuffs pulled down so far that it covers his forehead entirely. His dark eyes peer out and up at Simone as if from the shadowy space under a low bridge.
Chiara resists shushing her. She reminds herself that the false identity documents are in Daniele’s inside jacket pocket. She is Signora Chiara Ravello Gaspari, as if she were Carlo’s widow, and he is Daniele Gaspari.
Family, she thinks, clutching at the nun’s words. Unremarkable. Even so, an urge to fill a silence, to pre-empt comments and questions, sets her talking.
‘It’s the chickens,’ she hears herself saying. ‘We were going to go back to the countryside but we were given these chickens and so, we, um… ’
‘Excuse me?’ Simone says, but she is not really paying attention. She is smiling down at Daniele. ‘I knew you were engaged. Carlo, wasn’t it?’ she says. ‘But I didn’t know you had got married!’
The realisation that Simone does not even know that Carlo is dead, that he died a month after her father, helps her control the urge to babble.
‘This is Daniele,’ she says.
She does not have to explain herself to this woman. It is no business of Simone Gauchet’s that she has broken the eternal promise she made her sister that she would return. Always and forever. Neither does she have to tell Simone Gauchet why she might be exposing a child to the dangers and privations of the occupied city when she had a choice.
But in a way it was the chickens, she thinks. The chickens showed her that it was here in Rome that she could keep the boy safer. That here among the ruins was their best chance.
She had gone to see Gennaro for advice on procuring false identity documents. Not at the bar, which was all closed up in the ghost town of the ghetto, but at his house off the Janiculum where he grew vegetables and kept poultry. People had chickens on roofs and in their backyards. They grew vegetables on tiny plots of terrace and on the verges.
Gennaro told her about the nuns at Santi Quattro Coronati who provided fake documents. As she was leaving, he also told her that he had joined a different resistance group now, one that was planning an attack on an SS regiment.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not any more. I have to put the child first.’
She thought he might reproach her. Other people with children still took such risks, but instead he nodded and said, ‘Do you want a hen? Then you will have eggs for the boy.’
‘But where would I put a hen?’ she asked. ‘And how would I feed it?’
‘They eat anything,’ he said. ‘Scraps. Give it scraps.’
‘That’s what we eat,’ she said.
‘You’ll think of a way,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t, you can kill it and eat the meat. You know how to kill a chicken, don’t you?’ He tied its legs together and packed it in her basket. ‘Take another one,’ he said, putting a second in beside it, ‘to keep the brown one company. For the boy,’ he added.
So she cycled home, hurtling at high speed down the Janiculum hill, with the two hens tied up in her basket, so quiet and still she thought they had died of shock and she mightn’t even have to bother wringing their necks. She unloaded them onto the kitchen floor and, after a trance-like second or two, they started rocketing round the room, in and out of the table legs.
‘Look what I’ve brought,’ she said when Daniele came into the room.
At the sight of the squawking birds he clapped his hands together. It seemed to be a gesture of delight. She thought he might be afraid of the flapping, but he wasn’t at all, and she remembered how he had been with the donkey up on the farm, an easiness in his relationship with animals. He looked up at her, and she nodded, although she was not sure what the unspoken question was. He pointed to the smaller one, with creamy tail feathers and a speckled back.
‘You like that one, do you?’ she said.
He nodded again. She bent and caught it, pinned its wings to its sides to stop the flapping, held it to show him how and then decanted it into his out-held arms. Hugging it to him, nestled under one arm, he stroked its downy back with his other hand.
They were rapt. Boy and chicken.
‘We need to give them names,’ she said, scooping up the brown one. ‘I am going to call mine Winston. What about you?’
Daniele tipped his head to one side.
‘Cluck,’ he said.
He spoke as if speaking were quite normal. As if he had not been utterly silent for three months. He rested his cheek on the chicken’s back.
‘You’re called Cluck, aren’t you?’ he said.
She thought of it as the miracle of the chickens. In the midst of their makeshift, hand-to-mouth existence, a miracle.
‘Pleased to meet you, Cluck,’ she said and pretended to shake its claw.
‘Pleased to meet you, Daniele,’ Simone says.
‘She’s not my mummy,’ Daniele whispers.
Chiara shoots him a warning look. Inside she cringes. He speaks only rarely, even now, but this is his refrain: You’re not my mummy.
Simone has crouched down in front of Daniele and envelops the boy in her arms. ‘Little darling,’ she says.
Chiara watches the other woman bypass all the taboos, squeezing the child against her body, the foxtail around her neck swinging down and dipping into the sawdust on the floor, Daniele’s feet in the ruined, misshapen shoes lifting momentarily off the ground.
‘Signora?’ the butcher says.
Chiara swivels towards him, shutting her mouth. It is her turn. There is one piece of meat remaining. The butcher wraps it for her.
‘Finished,’ he calls out, clanging his cleaver onto the block, and the message goes down the line, which quickly disperses. There is a rumour of tripe in Testaccio.
‘Sorry,’ Chiara says to Simone as they cross the road.
‘Don’t be,’ Simone says. ‘I don’t have a child to feed.’
The cobbler’s is shut. Closed for holidays a sign on the doorway reads. Perhaps the owner has fled. Or been taken. Perhaps he was a Jew and is in hiding.
The occupied city, she has discovered, hosts a network of convents, churches and safe houses that conceal Jews who escaped the round-up on 16 October and the subsequent sweeps. And not just Jews. Resistance fighters too. The news now, though, is that some of them got too bold after the Allied landing at Anzio a few days ago; they thought that the liberation of Rome was imminent, and many of the leaders have been arrested. Not Gennaro, though. His group is still in operation.
Chiara turns her back to the shop and gazes down the street at a bare wintry tree and the eruption of cobbles at its base. The only thing to do is to say goodbye to Simone and go their separate ways, and she can’t think why they’re standing here, pointlessly postponing that moment, as if they have anything more to say to each other.
Simone nudges her. She has her shopping bag open and is displaying its contents.
‘I have rice and two tins of tomatoes,’ she says. Her hair, streaked with grey at the front, shines like honey where the sun hits it.
This is the woman, Chiara thinks, who stole away my father from the family home with her honeyed ways, her mellifluous voice, her charming French lilt. The shameless hussy, trollop, husband-snatcher. The Algerian whore.
Chiara remembers her mother screaming at her father, ‘Go to her then, your Algerian whore.’ Chiara knew Simone by repute long before they came face to face.
She shakes her head.
‘And a small sack of charcoal,’ Simone says. ‘I’ve got charcoal.’
Daniele has drifted over to stand next to Simone, where he is fluffing the fox fur. He might think that it’s a toy.
The first time she saw Simone, at her father’s funeral, she was wearing fur. A different sort. Swathed in it, muffled by it. Something dark. Mink, perhaps. Simone was on the outer edge of the mourners, a black veil over her face. She had not been invited, of course, even though Chiara’s father had died of a heart attack in her arms. Still, she had come to the church and stood at the back and then gone on to the cemetery. As they were leaving the graveyard, she had stepped out from under the trees and called out Chiara’s name. Under the veil, Chiara had caught a glimpse of heavy swollen eyes, the face of someone who has cried non-stop for days. She asked Chiara whether she would like to come and pick something of her father’s to have as a keepsake, and some days later Chiara had gone.
Simone’s eyes are puffy now too. She has disguised it with make-up, but the skin beneath them is purplish and bruised-looking.
‘I’m glad you still wear Alfonso’s beautiful ring,’ she says. ‘I think of him every day. I miss him every night. He was my beloved.’
Chiara takes a step back. She does not want this woman appropriating the memory of her father. ‘Come on, Daniele,’ she says.
‘I know that it’s dreadful. I am ashamed of myself. I am.’ Simone starts speaking fast in her low, accented voice. ‘But I just can’t be bothered. I think, what’s the point? And it is very cold in my apartment. The wind seems to rattle through it. It is like being up the mast of a ship. I think the building is swaying in the wind. It never used to sway, but now it does.
‘And downstairs has been taken over by the SS. The second floor. And bad things, unspeakable things are happening there. I know they are. And so every day, every night, I imagine breaking in and rescuing whoever is there. But I can’t and I don’t, and every day that I allow it, pass that door, lie in the same building with whatever it is going on, I think what’s the point of me, then?’
This is the woman who loved her father unstintingly for more than twenty years.
‘Take the charcoal anyway,’ Simone says, thrusting the bag at Chiara. She has a weary, desperate air as if, once relieved of the burden of charcoal and the necessity it implies of keeping herself warm, she might go and throw herself in the river.
This is the woman whom her father loved.
Chiara sighs. ‘You’d better come to our house,’ she says. ‘It’s not far.’
‘Divine,’ Simone comments, as she lifts another forkful of stew to her lips. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ She shakes her head in wonder across the table at Chiara. ‘To the cook,’ she says, raising her glass.
And Chiara, raising her own glass in response and unable to help smiling back, asks herself, How did this happen? That her dead father’s mistress is not just sharing a meal, but is staying the night with them. And that she is glad.
She wonders whether it is to do with the way Simone exclaims in amazement and delight at everything. How she adores the great echoey apartment with its old-fashioned furnishings and is so pleased finally to see the place where her beloved grew up. How when they stood in the hen-pecked wasteland that used to be the dining room, in among the pushed-back furniture, with the netting over the balcony rail to stop the chickens escaping, Simone actually laughed out loud at the arrangement, pronouncing it ‘genius’. Or how Chiara’s grandfather’s depleted wine store is ‘an absolute marvel’, but the use Chiara has made of it as a trading commodity, exchanging the odd bottle with the sommelier at a restaurant off Piazza Navona for Parmesan, pasta and leftovers (scraps for the chickens), is ‘so resourceful’. Even the makeshift bedroom is ‘extremely sensible.’ It is, Simone pronounces, ‘very practical to heat only one room’, and they can ‘expand outwards again when better times come’. It is as if Simone has flicked open the book that is Chiara, and it has fallen open to some brightly illustrated pages in the middle that Chiara herself didn’t know were there.
Or perhaps it is something to do with the assumption of being utterly welcome that seems to govern Simone’s behaviour, a kind of ease and confidence that calls up a corresponding feeling of generosity in Chiara’s suspicious heart.
Or perhaps it is the way Simone lifts Daniele onto her knee to read a story and nestles her head into his neck, then picks him up and puts him down again, sending him off to play with the chickens as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and then says, ‘What a sad little boy. Where did you get him from?’ and how, when Chiara tells her, she weeps.
Spezzatino di cavallo is not a dish that can be rushed, and the meal has been a long time coming with an extended gap between the first course–a simple risotto bianco knocked up within fifteen minutes of their arrival–and this one. Over the course of the afternoon, while the spezzatino has been slow-cooking and the apartment filling with its nourishing aroma, the two women have discussed the state of Italy, the climate of suspicion in Rome, and the best place to get stockings on the black market. They have listened to the news and heard that an ‘unbreakable German line’ is preventing the Allied forces from progressing and is even pushing them back, agreed that this is Nazi propaganda and that the Allies will arrive before the end of February and, to celebrate, have drunk most of a bottle of Frascati from the precious wine store.
While Chiara has been busy in the kitchen, Simone and Daniele have spent time in the chicken run where they have witnessed the laying of Cluck’s first ever real and proper egg (the previous one came out without a shell), which Simone has beaten into a sort of zabaglione for Daniele, who has eaten it with the smallest spoon that could be found.
Daniele has done a whole page of drawings of Cluck. Chiara has told the tale of Cluck’s first attempt at an egg, imitated the strange constipated noises and movements the hen made while she was attempting to get it out, clucked around the kitchen table and made herself laugh out loud, actually snort with laughter. Daniele has looked at her aghast, and she wonders whether he has ever heard her laugh before.
‘It was funny, wasn’t it, Daniele?’ she says, but he shakes his solemn head.
She has been amazed to discover that she is enjoying herself. Not in an edge-of-the-abyss-tomorrow-we-die sort of way, but genuinely. So that when Simone all of a sudden looked up at the clock and announced that she would have to leave to get home before the curfew, Chiara rushed to put some of the stew in a bowl and cover it with a cloth for Simone to take home, explaining how long it would need to cook, with Simone smiling and nodding and pulling on her gloves. And only when she was at the door did Chiara suddenly remember that Simone had no fuel.
‘Come back in,’ she said, almost tugging her. ‘You can’t cook it, can you? Stay the night.’
The meal has taken so long that Daniele has fallen asleep with his head on the table.
‘And to the cook’s father,’ Simone adds, ‘Alfonso Ferdinando Ravello. The love of my life.’
She looks steadily at Chiara as if daring her to contradict, but then she smiles. The wine and food have revived her. The colour has returned to her cheeks, and her hair is honey-hued. The grey streaks don’t show in the dim kitchen light.
‘Babbo,’ Chiara says, raising her glass.
And then they both speak at once.
‘Excuse me?’ Chiara says.
‘I am so glad to be here,’ Simone says, ‘that’s all. I can honestly say that you have brought me back to life.’
She looks around the kitchen, at the leftover stew in its dish (Enough for tomorrow, Chiara thinks), at Daniele’s hand lying on the table with the horseshoe birthmark, his grubby fingernails, his hair flopping forward, and then back at Chiara.
‘You have saved my life,’ she says, ‘and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Chiara feels herself blush under the other’s ardent gaze.
‘I’d better put the little man to bed,’ she says. She shakes Daniele sufficiently awake to stand and bustles him, eyes half closed, out of the room.
Simone sleeps in Cecilia’s room. She says she doesn’t mind the cold because she is hot-blooded and produces a lot of excess heat.
‘Your father used to say he didn’t need a hot-water bottle when he was sharing a bed with me,’ she says when Chiara leaves. ‘Sorry,’ she says when she sees Chiara’s face. ‘I overstep the line sometimes, I know.’
‘I don’t really mind,’ Chiara says, surprised to discover that this is true. ‘It’s nice to hear his name, you know.’
‘He was more of my life than I was of his,’ Simone says. ‘He had you and Cecilia and your mother. He even had his own mother and father still. I just had him.’
Chiara steps back into the room, tugging at the ring on her finger. ‘I’m sorry I made you give me his ring,’ she says. ‘It should be yours, really.’ She slides it off and holds it out.
‘You didn’t make me. You asked me for it, and I gave it to you.’ Simone closes her own, much bigger hand around Chiara’s. ‘Willingly,’ she says.
In the morning, with hardly any discussion, Simone goes across Rome to her own apartment, gathers a few belongings, comes back and moves in. Until the situation improves, they agree.
Simone has a gift for scrounging and wheedling, and Chiara for making something out of almost nothing. Life with Simone moves up a notch from mere survival.
‘We are more than the sum of our parts,’ she likes to comment when yet another ingenious meal is put on the table, or another bag of charcoal somehow procured.
Sometimes they laugh, and it’s as if Daniele is the adult, an old man bowed by the cares of the world, and they the children. He looks at them reprovingly, as if they are being disrespectful of the solemnity of the times. Our little memento mori, Simone calls him.
‘I do admire you,’ she says to Chiara one day.
Chiara eyes her warily. Admiration is not how she would describe the look on Simone’s face.
‘It must be difficult to live your life with Daniele, knowing that it could end at any moment.’
‘It’s the same for everybody,’ Chiara says. She wants to say ‘for every mother’, but she stops herself.
‘I didn’t mean bombing and raids and all the… ’ Simone waves her arm towards the horizon.
‘Rubble,’ Chiara suggests.
‘Yes. You have to be careful with him, but also with yourself. You have to live with him as if you will have to give him back.’
‘What do you mean?’
Chiara hears a dangerous rise in her own voice. She feels something slide within her.
‘Just a minute,’ she says.
She gets quickly up and goes out of the room, stands just the other side of the door and takes a breath. Not now. She will think about this later. When she is alone, she will ponder when it was that she started to love him more than anything else in the world. Not now.
She returns to the room but she doesn’t sit down again.
‘I can’t talk about this,’ she says. ‘You mean well, I’m sure, but I do not want to discuss this. I cannot see what good it would do.’
Simone ignores her. She lowers her head and holds her hand up, palm towards Chiara, like a traffic policeman holding back a lorry at a busy crossroad. She speaks fast and low. She brooks no interruption.
She says that she understands that Chiara has made it her life’s work to keep this child safe, that she has risen to this task that was thrust upon her. That it is admirable, noble even. That she can see it is Chiara’s contribution to the better world they hope will come afterwards. And that she knows it is difficult to live beyond the day, in these hard times, but that is exactly what needs to be done. When this war is over, they will come for him, not his family perhaps, but his community, when whatever is left of it returns and there is some kind of judgment, some elders perhaps, gentlemen with beards and little hats on the backs of their heads, women wearing scarves, they will come and they will claim him and they will thank her for keeping him safe, but they will take him back. And unless Chiara prepares herself, it will rip the heart out of her.
Chiara hears the words as if from under a waterfall.
‘I can’t love him only halfway,’ she says. She is shouting to be heard above the thunderous noise. ‘And what do you know about it? You gave all of your love to a married man. You didn’t keep anything back, did you?’ Chiara’s fists are clenched, and tears are streaming down her face.
Simone’s head moves again. It is more like a tremor than a shake.
She didn’t like that, Chiara thinks.
‘We’re not talking about me,’ Simone says. She lifts her head, looks up now at Chiara and raises her eyebrows.
Chiara is vaguely aware that Simone has said something else, something mild and deflating. Let’s have a row, she thinks. Let’s splatter the room with the mess of all these unsaid things.
But while she is calculating how best to goad Simone, another part of her mind is chasing another strand of thought, something she knows that Simone doesn’t, something she has been holding in reserve that will clinch the argument. She clutches it and says it aloud.
‘Nonna baptised him,’ she says.
Simone wrinkles her nose. ‘So?’ she says.
‘It means he is a Christian. He has to be brought up a Christian.’
Simone bites her lower lip. Chiara has seen that look before.
Chiara was there when the doctor came to see Nonno and listened to his wheezing old chest. She saw Nonna’s face as she took in what he was saying. The realisation that the prognosis was worse than she had thought. That is how Simone is looking at her now.
Neither of them speaks for a minute.
Simone takes a breath and opens her mouth. She has the air of one about to impart bad news. ‘If you are saying—’
Chiara lifts her hands as if in surrender. ‘Don’t,’ she says.
But Simone is relentless. ‘—that because your nonna splashed water over the boy’s head and muttered some arcane words, you won’t have to give him back?’
Chiara lifts her hands to her face and presses her cold fingers into her cheeks, staring at Simone over her fingertips.
‘I’m not saying half love him,’ Simone goes on. ‘Love him with all your heart. What other way is there to love? And let’s face it, the poor little bugger needs it. But just, somehow, hold the idea too that it probably isn’t for ever. That when this is all over and better times come, you can get on with your life, marry perhaps, have children of your own.’
‘What if I don’t want that?’
‘Of course you want that. We all do. We don’t all get it.’ She gazes intently at Chiara. ‘I am not just thinking of you. I am thinking of the boy. He doesn’t need to be in a ghetto, that one; he carries it about with him.’
Chiara stops protesting. She lets what Simone is saying sink in. ‘What can I do?’ she says.
The answer comes so promptly it is obvious Simone has been thinking about it.
‘I wondered,’ she says, ‘about getting him to write letters to his mother?’ She holds her hand up again as if Chiara is about to interrupt, which she isn’t. ‘You could supervise him and you–we–can ask him where his mother used to take him, if she had a favourite place, and then you could go with him and hide the note and, I don’t know,’ she shakes her head, ‘I don’t know if it will do any good or if it will help that sad little boy or you, but… ’