The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (39 page)

It was later than usual when he climbed down to the lake that afternoon, the cicadas thickening the air, the itch of summer in his throat. He'd had mixed luck that morning: one of his traps offered him a large buck, fresh and intact; another only a severed paw, already alive with flies. It wasn't the first time he'd seen it — an animal turning on itself, simply to survive. But the residual image always griped at him throughout the day like a bad dream, an ill omen.

He laid the hare at his feet and stripped, diving into the green water and staying there, submerged, his toes buried in the silt between the silky weeds. Below the water the engine of his own pulse sounded in his ears, like the sea in the shell Fagiolo kept on his bar. He had never seen the ocean up close. He thought of his father's journey from Africa to England and tried to chart his route across the seas, based on his memory of the world map pinned by the chalkboard at his old school. He tried to picture his father's face, to conjure him at some task, cutting maize or spraying grapes in the Vigna Alba. But he could not. In nearly five years, he had become as much a number to him as he was to the Allies, the number always written on his sporadic postcards and letters:
POW 27366
.

Floating on his back, he felt weed brushing his hand and tangling between his fingers. He stood up to find it was a cloth, a grubby length of cotton. At first he thought it was one of the baby's rags, drifted loose from his mother's washing. But as he lifted it, trailing it behind him to the water's edge, he saw it was too narrow, too long, and he knew it wasn't theirs. He studied the colour of the fabric, the loose weave as it fanned in the water at his knees, and he remembered the scarves wound around the necks of the turbaned soldiers in the woods. He lowered his hand and dropped the cloth in the mud, feeling cold, despite the warmth in the air. He began to grapple with his clothes, stepping into them wet. Across the water he could see the overhang of the cave through the variegated shadow of the trees. All seemed serene and silent: too still. No smoke rose from the fire, which had burned down to its embers, and the pot that hung above was upturned in the scree. He saw two ravens land to forage and peck in the spill of its contents.

He wasn't sure how much time passed as he stood watching. He couldn't seem to move. He didn't want to move, didn't want to look. He only heard the sound of the water, its cool murk stirring, calling him back to the quiet depths so he wouldn't have to see, wouldn't have to remember. But the ravens interrupted, mocking him, and he heard Viviana's incessant bark somewhere in the scrub, until he forced himself to go, edging around the lake to the place where she was waiting.

He found Fabrizia squatting against a holly oak, clutching at the neck of her dress with one hand and pulling her skirts over her legs with the other. He stopped and half spun away, thinking he had come upon her doing her business or about to wash herself in the lake. But her expression was vacant and her eyes seemed to have become so small, the pupils were no more than pinpricks in her face. Slowly he understood the swelling of her cheeks, the blood on her teeth, saw where her earrings had been pulled from her ears. A red trickle glided down her neck, glossy in the afternoon light. He lifted his hand to her, but she flinched from him and went to her hands and knees, her dress falling open as she did so, turning loose a brawny breast.

‘Don't look,' she hissed at him. ‘Don't look at me. Go away!' He stumbled back as if she had struck him, and began to trample aimlessly through the scrub, suddenly remembering his mother. Panic took hold of his throat, so that he couldn't call out to her, could barely breathe. He found her under a burst of yellow broom near the lake's edge, her skirts still snared on its branches, its petals shaken through her hair, reminding him of the fireflies in the meadow at night, the swing of lanterns answering each other on the ridge.

She was sleeping, he told himself. She'd had a seizure and was climbing through that tunnel back towards the daylight. And soon she would wake up and find her head in his lap, her mouth wiped clean. But try as he might, he couldn't wipe away the marks from her neck, or staunch the blood that ran from her ears and mouth, that smeared her thighs and saturated the hair between. He pulled down her skirts and stroked her head and whispered to her, waiting for the relief of her open eyes. But it didn't come. Not this time. And as the dusk started to settle around them, he began to understand, to tell her to sleep, to sleep on. He took off his shirt and wrapped it about her breasts, where blood and milk had curdled, and she felt all wrong, pliant in his hands, heavy and slack, already just the carcass of something.

It seemed a week or a month or a year might have passed before he felt Fabrizia squeezing his wrist in her fingers, mouthing something through her split lips. Perhaps he didn't hear the words, or perhaps no sound came out. All he knew was that he stood too quickly and the blood banged in his ears like a blow to the head. He lost his sight for a second, and the exploding darkness became the flares and shelling that lit the cave at night, his sister's milky stare, the bright petals trapped in his mother's hair. His tongue was dry and felt too big for his mouth. When his vision returned, he had the sensation of shrinking, of everything becoming distant, so that when he saw the bundle of rags in the shallow water beyond the brush, it seemed he would have to walk very far to get there. Fabrizia was already ahead of him, standing over it, a cloud of silt billowing about her calves. He tripped into the water, pushing himself in front of her to reach the baby first. He fished her out and held her to his chest, showing his back to the butcher's wife so she couldn't see. Couldn't see the mud on his sister's cheeks, the silt clogging the tiny hollows of her nose, the weed that threaded about her ear, like a question mark or a lock of his mother's hair when she nursed her.

The night that came was clear. He felt naked and numb under it. He washed his mother and sister slowly, carefully, working over them with fingers that seemed to belong on the hands of someone else. Fabrizia kept the fire stoked and helped him wrap them in a blanket, the baby curled upon his mother's stomach as if she had never been born. They kept a silent vigil, until the din of his thoughts became too much to bear.

He stood up and Fabrizia rose too, as if she had only been waiting for him to move. They began to walk, aimlessly at first, but then with a purpose that seemed inevitable, across the plateau to the grotto of Santa Lucia.

Lucio stood next to the butcher's wife as she peered through the locked grille, squinting at the glowing outline of the effigy inside.

‘They brought her back up the mountain strapped to a mule — Berto the goatherd and Polvere,' she muttered, like she was talking in her sleep. ‘The Germans wouldn't allow a ceremony this time.' She didn't take out her rosary or kneel to pray as he had seen her do so many times with the other village women before the shrine. Instead she turned her back to the chapel and pulled her shawl about her shoulders. ‘Strapped to a mule,' she said again. ‘Like firewood.'

They stood on the rock ledge. The valley below brooded in darkness, devoid of lights now that the powerlines had been bombed. Montelupini clung grimly to the mountain. Far down the range, the intermittent beam of headlamps from a jeep convoy followed the scribble of the bends past Carpeto. And, beyond that, flares blossomed from time to time, like so many green sunrises.

‘She gave up on us,' Fabrizia said. He thought she meant his mother, but she said, ‘Lucia. She deserted us, didn't she?'

He was silent.

‘Maybe your grandfather was right all along. Barilotto always knew she was a fraud. And we were never special. We just wanted to believe we were.' She gave a grunt or a laugh; he couldn't tell which.

A breeze stirred up from the valley and the trees behind them sighed. He heard the beating of wings, caught the sulphurous flash of an eye in the darkness.

‘She always knew,' Fabrizia went on. ‘Your mother always knew it was nothing but wishes and superstition.' Lucio tried to make out her expression in the light of the lantern hanging at his side, but her face was veiled in shadow. ‘That's why she took the crown,' she whispered. ‘Took it to feed us. She gave me supplies before you left.'

His gut cramped and the weight in his lungs felt doubly heavy now, as though he was sinking under the accumulation of grief, of regret, of realisation. He'd never wanted to admit that his mother had stolen the crown. The stores of food they'd bought with Otto's money had been used up so quickly, and the old folk, the children kept coming to their door in Vicolo Giotto. She had never sent them away, had she? It occurred to him now that of everyone in the village, only she was fearless enough, stealthy enough, practical enough to do such a thing. Only someone who owed Santa Lucia nothing, who had already died a hundred deaths before and seen the emptiness beyond, who knew that life was something to fight for at all costs, only a person like that would have had the courage to do it. Even so, he found himself wishing it hadn't been her: he wished it had been him.

He thought of the paw left severed in his snare that morning and he began to understand. It was all they could rely on, after all: their own desperate will. Not God's, not a saint's or a foreign army's, but their own. Even if what life had dealt pushed them to their very limits, made them into something they were not.

Fabrizia reached into her skirt pocket and took out a bundle of cloth: it was the scarf he had found in the lake. The skein of it was so much more recognisable now as those worn by the soldiers he had seen in the woods. He heard the rosary fall from her other hand into her pocket. ‘No one's coming to save us,' she said. ‘We've just got ourselves now.' He watched her handling the cloth, twisting and untwisting it as if she wanted to wring it clean. ‘The Allies haven't delivered us. They've brought us down the final steps to hell.' And she spat on the ground, her cut lips shining wet and broken in her face.

She unwrapped the scarf and took something from it, pressing it into his palm. Her breath was fast and close beside him. He snatched back his hand and squinted at what she had put there, bringing it nearer his face so he could better see it: the hoop of a silver earring, nestled now in his palm. He wanted to ask her what he was to do, wanted her to put words to it so he could be certain, but she had already started back towards the cave.

In the hours that he sat alone on the rock ledge, waiting for the morning to reveal the blue sediment of the hills, to drain night from the valley, he made himself understand. And he wondered whether there would ever be a sunrise again that could drain the darkness now settled in his heart.

He didn't remember how long he spent climbing through the mountains, sleeping when he was tired, scavenging with Viviana when he was hungry. He found it difficult to think of time, the future or the past, of anything but his body's immediate needs, as if he had returned to that winter existence in the cave, his mother still expecting his return with a squirrel or a rabbit to skin. But he knew he was following them, for he would find himself standing in circles of flattened ferns while the rain dripped down from the broad canopy, or lighting a fire from their embers, even tossing Viviana bones already picked over and discarded in the ashes.

The husk of a new moon was low in the sky on the night he caught up with them. He could smell their camp: the foreign pungency of their fire, their piss and meaty sweat. They were sleeping when he saw them, all but one, who was squatting, his knees crutches to his arms. His hands hung limp, illuminated by the fire, surprisingly small and shrivelled, like a pair of bats nesting in the trees. He rocked on his heels, and Lucio could hear his moan, more a keening than a song.

Viviana started up a whine, as if in accompaniment. He clamped her muzzle with his hand and led her back through the forest, tying her up at some distance. When he returned to his vantage point, the soldier was pacing with a torch from the fire, his striped hood lowered from his turban. Lucio drew back towards a tumble of limestone boulders. They teetered on top of each other like the petrified eggs of some vast prehistoric creature, and he climbed them, wedging himself in their gaps, where the moss and lichen were hairy under his fingers, the stone so cold he found it soothing. Below him, the camp flickered between the black totems of the trees. The watchman sat again at the fire and began his ruminating song, otherworldly, strangely meditative. Lucio felt time slow, felt his senses strain to every tiny stimulus of the night. He heard each pop and spit of the fire, each breath catching in the throats of the sleeping men, the phosphorous flare of the watchman's match, the first crackle and singe of tobacco in the bone of his pipe. He felt the night air on his neck, the wind that rose over the precipice to his right and made the leaves flutter and clap. And at a distance, he could pick out a fox's rasp, and the pennywhistle piping of an owl over the ridge.

Finally, dawn broke above the mountain. The sun's rays sliced through the trees, and the sleeping men stirred and woke almost as one. Lucio could see them stretching and dressing and wandering through the undergrowth to piss. He scanned each one until he spotted the French officer in the dirty white hat. He was tipping his head to drink from a flask, and beside him the same yellow-eyed soldier was rolling blankets. He watched this man's lithe body as he packed up his camp, the efficient purpose of his dark hands. Lucio caught the metallic glint at his ear, saw where one of the rings had been torn. He felt for the silver hoop lodged upon his thumb and twisted it.