Train to Budapest (19 page)

‘At twenty-six you should be thinking of the future. Are you going back to Vienna?’

‘In three days.’

‘What on earth can there be for you to do in that half-dead city?’

‘You and Luca seem to think with one brain. You say the same things.’

‘I bet you’re chasing a man. A blond?’

‘I’m chasing a child who disappeared in 1943.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘I’m also writing articles for the papers. It’s my job.’

‘Do they pay much?’

‘Very little.’

Amara is fed up with repeating the same things. The pasta al forno is excellent. The sauce contains a touch of fried aubergine and salted capers. Amara tells Suzy she cooks really well. Suzy smiles with satisfaction. She has always liked messing about with pans.

In the street afterwards it strikes Amara her visit has been pointless. In the end they had little to say to one another. And Suzy seemed to be under pressure from her brother Luca to win her over. Amara is not sure about this but it could be possible.

Walking through a Florence in the throes of reconstruction disturbs her a bit. The old shops on Via dei Calzaioli do not seem happy with the gigantic new machines pushing, excavating and levelling the city and filling it with cement. She loves the scent of fresh coffee boldly mixed with a light smell of cat’s piss, fresh
straw, hanging melon and cut leather that lingers in the little streets of the centre. The smell of her childhood. The time when holding the hand of her mother, the beautiful Stefania, she would go out to look for something to eat in a Florence darkened by war. Sometimes they had to queue for hours to buy a bag of flour or a packet of lard. To make a pudding, Stefania would soak hard bread in milk and cook it over the fire with a little sugar. All very precious ingredients that could only occasionally be found, and when they were there would always be a party. Her father’s bicycle was very important to him and he would carry it up and down the stairs rather than leave it in the street. Everyone knew a bicycle could disappear in the time it took to go through the front door even if it had been chained and elaborately locked up. The bicycle thieves were so quick and skilful that no one ever managed to catch them. So if he did not want to lose his bicycle he virtually had to glue himself to it and even carry it into his shop and home, never leaving it unattended for a minute.

Two young parents: Stefania famous for her beauty and elegant walk, her long legs, narrow waist, flexible neck, light shining hair, gentle eyes and kindly smile. Amintore, known as the ferret for his small strong agile climber’s body, his high cheekbones, powerful and extremely white teeth, neat little moustache and lively, inquisitive eyes. Stefania would often tell how he had won her with the obstinacy of a mule, no matter how hard she had tried to reject him. When they met, she had been teaching at a school run by nuns while he had been working as a shoemaker in his father’s shop. Then, in an impulse of independence, Amintore had escaped from his shoemaking family and found work in a bakery. This involved staying up all night to control the rising of the bread and sleeping when he could in the morning, while his two fellow-workers took the round loaves out of the oven and carried them by bicycle all round the district stacked in baskets and protected by a check cloth. Stefania had been engaged to a certain Mario, a collector of patents, an unusual job that took him far afield. But his work must have been well paid because he was one of the few in the district to own a red Lambda that went like a rocket and was held in awe by everybody. Stefania had many admirers in Rifredi and even further afield. Her bold beauty and couldn’t-care-less walk made men want to ‘grab her and dominate her’ as one sarcastic
youngster put it. But, ever fresh and fragrant, she would move on with a great toss of her nut-brown shoulder-length hair. People said she washed her hair with flower-water and went up into the hills to gather wild roses and buttercups which she would steep in a basin of water. But these were just stories. In Florence, in those hard times, if you picked flowers it was to eat them, not to perfume your hair. You would brown them, stalks and all. ‘You can even eat paper if you fry it,’ her grandmother would say, then still working as a washerwoman.

Stefania would go out early in the morning to buy fresh bread at the bakery. Then, holding it close to her chest, she would meet her fiancé Mario on the shingle by the Terzolle River. He would bring a thermos of barley coffee and she her bread baton. After they had gone down the steps to the shingle, they would follow a prickly path till they reached a clearing among the brambles. There, under the leafy branches of a stunted acacia, Mario would spread his raincoat on the arid, fissured earth and make her comfortable, so they could both enjoy consuming that exquisite chewy freshly made bread. Then they would kiss and cuddle. They never did more than that, partly because someone might have seen them, and partly because she had made it clear from the beginning that she wanted to come to her wedding a virgin and would rather die than change her mind. He had accepted this condition and they would spend hours kissing with great gusto. But only on holidays, because on weekdays, after kissing Mario, Stefania had to run quickly to school.

Amintore the baker was already in love and would make eyes at her. But she never even looked at him. She knew he was in love with her, but the short, thin boy always covered with flour, with his starched cotton cap and little Latin-lover’s moustache, was not to her taste. If anything, if she had had to leave her Mario who hunted all over Italy for patents, she would have gone to Muzio, a tall, polite young man who sometimes took her to the cinema. Mario made jealous scenes about this Muzio. Who is he? What does he want? Why do you go out alone with him? But she didn’t care. She was determined to be free and no one could give her orders. This is how it is, and if you don’t like it you know what you can do! So he put up with it. Even if he occasionally threatened her with extreme punishments that had to remain unspecified, since
she was not afraid of losing him, and if he had dared to hit her she would never have looked at him again.

One day Stefania found Amintore was spying on her. She noticed him pretending to be passing by chance as she left the cinema. He was neat and clean, in a dark obviously new suit with his moustache quivering like a cat’s whiskers. He looked at her in such despair that she burst out laughing. And perhaps felt a touch of curiosity for the short sturdy young man suffering for her in silence. But she continued her usual routine, every morning passing the bakery where he would be ready shaven in a clean shirt, keeping awake to serve her freshly baked batons and following her with his eyes as she set off, proud and self-assured, for the shingle by the Terzolle.

Amintore had told all this to his daughter Maria Amara during the years when he used to walk her to school, carrying in a jute bag the tin that held her bread-and-omelette snack lunch. She asked him how he had got to know mother and how they came to get married. She had been a child with the curiosity of a sleuth, ‘almost like a police officer’, he would laugh with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was not good for little girls to be too inquisitive. There were many things it was not suitable for them to know. But nothing could put her off. She was nothing like as proud and self-assured as the untameable Stefania, and to tell the truth less beautiful and so less sure of herself, more closed and introspective, but in no way less obstinate than her mother.

Even when Stefania died just after the end of the war from poorly treated typhus, Amara had persisted in asking her father about their young days, and about how it happened that her mother, who had turned so many heads, finally chose him.

There was a part of that story that Amintore had been reluctant to tell Amara. He had always changed the subject when he reached a certain point in the love triangle. But Amara had been so persistent that finally one day he told her everything.

23

‘Well, Papà, how come Mamma picked you? Wouldn’t that Mario who collected patents have been more suitable?’

‘You don’t even know what patents are, what are you chattering about.’

‘I do though, they’re a sort of stamp of ownership when you invent something.’

‘Good girl! He collected them to offer them to the industries that were coming into existence in Tuscany at that time.’

‘A special sort of corkscrew, a cork-and-wood machine for making coffee, a kind of soap made with sand and lard …’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘Aunt Miriam told me.’

‘Yes, that’s just how it was. He was a strange type, that Mario. I never liked him.’

‘Of course not, you were jealous. If he had married Mamma, what would I have been like? Taller and more beautiful?’

‘You’re very beautiful as you are.’

‘Tell me about Muzio who used to take her to the cinema. Were you jealous of him too?’

‘I always followed her. Even if I was so exhausted I was half-dead, I would slip into the cinema after them and sit at the back and see some film that didn’t interest me at all. Perhaps I even came to develop a special taste in films from watching American ones. Stefania liked Marlene Dietrich, she really adored her. She knew by heart the names of her lovers, who in any case were her directors or those who worked with her: the great von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Gary Cooper, Jean Gabin, Burt Lancaster. See, I remember them perfectly. In her room Stefania had photos of Marlene in every possible pose. I can see them to this day. In one Marlene was standing, arrogant and utterly beautiful in a black tailcoat, with a top hat on her head and a white carnation in her buttonhole. In
another she was the exact opposite, very feminine, her body barely hidden by transparent voile crossed by silver branches that glittered in the lights of the set, a white mink stole over one shoulder and a very long cigarette-holder in her black-gloved hand. What a vision! Even I sometimes stood there bewitched, admiring those photographs. I don’t know where Stefania got them. She had so many and had pasted them up on the wall above her bed.

‘Sitting in the cinema I would often drop off because I had so little time for sleep. Sometimes I’d wake up to find myself alone in an empty auditorium. I would get up stiffly and go out to look for them. I might catch a distant glimpse of them saying goodbye outside her home in Piazza Dalmazia. My heart would stop as I waited to see if they would kiss. She would hold out her hand. He would seem to touch her hair with his lips, then casually go off. I would hide. I had become a real idiot for love.’

‘But why did she choose you if she wasn’t attracted to you?’

‘Things went on like this for nearly a year. With Mario taking her to the shingle by the Terzolle in the mornings and Muzio taking her to the cinema in the evenings. There was another one too, one I hated because he was twice her age and I thought him repulsive. A businessman, always smart, always wearing a tie. He would wait at the entrance of the school where she worked in Via di Casa Murata, and take her to the Cascine for a cup of cream with wafers. I could have killed him. She flirted with him, laughing shamelessly, but he was of no importance to her. I would watch her from far off eating that cream as voraciously as if she was gobbling up the man himself.’

‘And you were there all the time spying, Papà?’

‘Well, I was trying to understand. But the more I watched the less I understood. One day I saw them shut up together in a car having an argument, her and the businessman, at the corner of Piazza Dalmazia. He was waving his hands about and shaking his head again and again; his red cheeks really annoyed me. She was quiet and didn’t move. Now and then she would shake out her hair which was lying loose on her shoulders. She was so beautiful that even from a distance I was utterly overwhelmed. I thought: now I’ll go and save her from that brute, now I’ll go. But I was afraid she might turn on me. And what could I have done if she had stopped coming to the bakery?’

‘But what were they arguing about? Did Mamma tell you later?’

‘Yes, she told me. The tapir was trying to get her to marry him. She said no, she was engaged to Mario. But he went on and on. He said he wanted to marry her before the new fascist law taxing singles became operative. He even wanted to give her a child.’

‘And in the meantime she fell in love with you?’

‘Oh no, not at all. She wanted to marry Mario, the one with the patents, and she very nearly did.’

‘But why didn’t she then?’

‘Now that you’re a big girl I can tell you. Something happened so terrible that your mother never recovered from it.’

‘Tell me, Papà.’

‘If I tell you will you promise to forget what I say as soon as I’ve said it?’

‘How can I make promises if I don’t even know what you’re talking about?’

‘Just promise.’

‘I’ll try. But what happened?’

‘What happened was that Mario once saw her kissing Muzio and was so angry he went to ask a friend of his, a certain Nanni, to help him take revenge. Nanni was a fanatical fascist and one of a gang of thugs. He was very happy to get such a job. He said: Just leave it to me! Mario said, don’t hurt her too much; it would be enough if they tied her to a tree in the country and left her there for the night. That was what he wanted and his friend promised to do it. So a couple of mornings later, Nanni took some of his friends to wait for Stefania outside the Madonna del Bambino elementary school where she worked as a teacher. They pushed her into a car and drove her into the country where they tied her to a large oak tree. Stefania was confused, she didn’t understand. She asked in the shameless manner so typical of her: who are you? who sent you? And despite the fact that Mario had begged them not to mention his name, they blurted it out: your fiancé sent us because he saw you kissing another man. And they laughed as if they were doing a noble deed. She was furious and began showing her contempt for them, telling them they were cowards: four men against one woman, you disgust me! First they teased her, then they got angry. One of Nanni’s friends, a great fat boy who was always with them, thinking to impress his leader, slapped her face
so hard her nose started bleeding. Despite the blood and the lamp-black from her eyebrows mixing with her tears, Stefania refused to give in to fear and went on shouting at them that they would regret it, and that she would hunt them down and kill them one by one with her father’s rifle.