Train to Budapest (21 page)

At night Amara settles happily into the solitary bed where she has so often let her mind wander. She quickly falls asleep from accumulated exhaustion. No sooner are her eyes closed than she sees Emanuele reaching out a hand to her from the cherry tree. Come up, he says, come up because bombs are on the way. Here we’ll be safe.

Next morning she hurriedly washes and dresses to go to the Ursulines where her father has been living for nearly two years now, victim of a degenerative illness. The streets are empty. A fresh breeze is blowing from the north. Sister Adele greets her with an abrupt nod, considerate but uncommunicative.

‘How is my father?’

The nun doesn’t answer immediately. Perhaps she hasn’t heard; she heads into the damp entrance hall with its smell of soup for the poor.

‘How is my father?’ Amara repeats, struggling to keep up on the steep stone stairs.

‘You’ll find him a good deal changed.’

‘How changed?’

‘Not really with us.’

‘Is he very ill?’

‘No, he’s well enough, but his mind tends to wander. Sometimes
I hear him singing to himself. He hammers in imaginary nails and beats time by clicking his tongue. He was a shoemaker, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘He thinks he’s still in his shop.’

Turning a corner, she sees him. Amintore Sironi, in a wheelchair, at the end of the loggia. His illness has bent and stiffened him. He has a rug over his knees, and a yellow and black check beret pulled down on his head. She goes up to him and smiles. But he looks at her as if he does not know who she is. When she bends to kiss him he explodes angrily:

‘So you’ve come at last after all this time!’

‘How are you feeling, Papà?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

Amara takes his hand in both hers and lifts it to her cheek. She is suddenly stricken by guilt; he was waiting for me, she tells herself, and there was I busy far away, wasting time when he needed me.

‘Isn’t my Stefania beautiful?’ he says, turning to the nun who nods compassionately.

So he’s mistaken her for her mother. And now what? Go along with it or correct him? She watches him a moment in bewilderment. She feels her father’s strong fingers squeeze her wrist, then slip into her closed fist with a lascivious gesture. The smiling nun moves away. She has other things to do. She leaves Amara alone with her father who thinks she is his wife.

‘Papà,’ starts Amara timidly, ‘I’ve brought you some fresh doughnuts. Do you like doughnuts?’

But he seems not to hear her, perhaps he isn’t even listening. There’s a radiant smile on his pale dry lips. He holds her hand tightly and begins humming.

‘What are you singing, Papà?’ Amara bends over him and tries to catch the notes from the mouth of a sick man who has lost his memory. But perhaps no, perhaps he hasn’t really lost his memory, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his memory has overcome his conscience. A fragile man at the mercy of a powerful memory. Now she thinks she recognises the tune. A song of the Alpine troops, from the time when he was a National Service recruit in the Cadore Mountains: ‘Down in the valley there’s a tavern, And fun and fun, Down in the valley there’s a tavern, Where we Alpine soldiers love to be … And if I’m a girl pale as
a rhinestone, A winestone a winestone, and bottles of wine!’ He’s singing a cheerful hit-song about wine, ignoring the war, the wounds and the fear.

‘I’ve been waiting for you, Stefania,’ he says now in a smooth clear voice. Not like his humming a moment ago, when he was muddling the notes. He squeezes her hand so hard it hurts. ‘I’m always alone. Why do you always leave me alone? But I knew you’d come. So I put up with the nuns, and with all these idiots round me. And that nurse Lucia who keeps telling me you’re dead and buried. Dead my foot! I know you’re alive. And here you are at last. Isn’t this a live hand? And a live arm? Do the dead wear clothes? What lovely material you’re wearing! So soft, so soft. Silk is it? Or percale perhaps? I’ve always liked percale, it reminds me of those white flowers, what are they called? You know, the ones that seem to be ceramic, with a single yellow pistil and a strange smell of dry figs and hydrolyte. Do you remember when I used to add hydrolyte to the water and you would say: more, Amintore, more! And I would put in the powder and then the water would sting the tongue like bicarbonate … In my opinion, hydrolyte is just bicarbonate … Do the dead wear shoes? I can see them, you know, the little red shoes you’re wearing, really beautiful, you could even dance in them, couldn’t you? We should go dancing more often. It’s years since we last went dancing, Stefania darling. Now let me take off this cap which stinks of sickness and wash my hands and we’ll go out together. Here they always force me to eat the same stuff: potatoes and cabbage, cabbage and potatoes. They say there’s a war on but that’s just talk. The war ended years ago, I know that. Sometimes they give me a boiled egg, but what can I do with a boiled egg? What I need is a nice chicken. Next time you come will you bring me a nice little chicken? Do the dead wear silk stockings, eh? Do the dead wear knickers? I can feel them, you know, I can even feel them through your skirt, I can feel the elastic on your knickers. Are you wearing the ones I like? Those black ones with a little ruff round your thighs, is that what you’re wearing? Show me, Stefania!’

Amara pulls abruptly away from her father as he touches her legs and her sex.

‘Papà, it’s me, Amara!’ she says more loudly, angrily. But he doesn’t hear. He gives her a dark look and reaches out to draw her
closer again. ‘Where are you?’ he shouts, worried now. ‘Why are you moving away?’

‘Papà, I’m Amara, your daughter, I’m Amara!’

At last he seems to understand and releases his grip. His eyes fill with tears. With his mouth open he turns a more comprehending look on her, but seems unable to find words.

‘What did you come for? To make fun of me?’

‘I came to see you, Papà. Such a long time since we met.’

‘You’ve always been rather plain and dull. Are you trying to pass yourself off as your mother who was far more beautiful and intelligent than you could ever be?’

‘No, no, Papà, I just wanted to say hello.’

‘I don’t need you or your visits,’ her father says harshly, holding her eye. ‘You’re coming to spy on my death, I know.’

Suddenly Sister Adele is there to help, swift and silent as if she has sprung from a hole in the ground. Who knows where she has been or whether she followed the whole scene? She seems to have been prepared for what would happen. And now here she is, solicitous and maternal. She picks up the rug which Amara’s father had flung away in a fit of rage, and wipes the saliva dribbling from his mouth. She says a few affectionate and reassuring words to him, then takes in both hands the bar at the back of his chair and pushes it, still talking softly to him, towards the end of the loggia. Amara follows sadly. She is not sure whether this is the end of the conversation, or just a brief interruption.

They come into a great hall with high windows reaching up to the ceiling. In it are other wheelchairs and other nuns. In the middle a long table with a flowered cloth. Metal plates with rough edges and metal beakers. A powerful smell of cooking fat and unwashed hair. Two young nuns come and go from the kitchen with steaming cauldrons.

Sister Adele pushes the wheelchair up to the table and arranges the furious Amintore in front of a full plate. She hands him a large spoon made from bright metal and moves away. Perhaps I should go now, Amara tells herself. But something keeps her in that distressing place that reminds her of the year she spent with Ursuline nuns at a convent at Calenzano when she was a little girl. The same brusque, essential gestures, efficient and sometimes even a bit brutal. Yet she had loved Sister Carmela. She had asked her
to be her mother and she had agreed, always with the same no-nonsense efficiency, but not without humour. ‘I’m not really your mother, remember that,’ she had said with a laugh. Her soft eyes had a slight squint; you could never tell where they were looking. Her cheeks, red as two apples, and her smile overcrowded with teeth gave her a slightly clownish look. But Amara became very fond of her. She got her to wash her hair and mend her socks, and ran to throw her arms round her waist when she felt anyone had been treating her badly. Strangely, Sister Carmela, so ready to cut her nails or sew a patch on her jumper, became touchy and sharp when Amara tried to learn more about her life. ‘I was abandoned in a basket on the Nile,’ she would say, giggling. ‘Why the Nile?’ Sister Carmela wouldn’t answer. Or else in a very low voice she would murmur, ‘
Les jardins du Nil.
’ ‘You know French, Sister Carmelina?’ ‘I know nothing, I’m tired,’ the nun would say brusquely, and send her about her business. Then at table she would make sure Amara got a double helping of tomato jam. Amara didn’t at all like the tomato jam the sisters were so proud of. She would end up swapping it for a piece of hard bread or half a glass of milk.

When her father came to take her home again, Amara cried for days. She could not forget the apron with its good smell of basil that Sister Carmela wore over her habit, or the patient hands that lingered over her hair, pulling but never hurting, to loosen the knots. She couldn’t forget Sister Carmela’s raucous, almost aphonic voice. Or how once, when she had a high temperature, Sister Carmela had held ice against her head and stayed up with her all night as she sweated in delirium.

She had looked for Sister Carmela when she returned to the school in the early fifties, but they told her she had gone away, and they didn’t know where or didn’t want to tell her. The Sisters were not allowed to form affectionate relationships with pupils. She had gone back to see the bed where she had slept and the window from which a hundred times she had looked out at the far-off fields and the pile of sheaves that had grown smaller day by day and the low-flying swallows, and where she had smelt the fragrance of field balm and hay. Her life seemed marked by absences: her mother Stefania, Sister Carmelina, and then her Emanuele, always intent on climbing the cherry tree.

As she lies stretched out trying to fall asleep she tries to imagine
Sister Carmelina on a farm looking after the chickens. She remembers hearing her say that her people had a farm in Friuli. Who knows what she told her beloved hens in that raucous voice of hers? Or perhaps she ended up in Africa looking after lepers. That too was something Amara had heard her say: ‘When I leave here I shall go and look after lepers.’ It had been hard to understand at the time how she could plan to dedicate her life to looking after lepers. But now it was different; Amara seemed to understand it had not just been an ideological project, but an imaginative choice. Fantasising about a hospital required in the middle of the desert, where children die of hunger and women give birth standing up surrounded by mud, where water is precious and life not worth a cent; a way of feeling alive and somehow useful. But at the same time Amara shuddered to realise that she might have done nothing but bend over wounds watching them ooze pus and search for disinfectant and bandages where none could be found, and try to bring a little unpolluted water to the lips of a dying man. The power of a ravenous and distant God found expression through the humble Sister Carmelina. But it was precisely because of that voracious appetite for souls and that distance characteristic of all omnipotent beings, that the nuns allotted Carmela/Carmelina her personal destiny and personal suffering with such extravagant generosity. There is something senseless and yet magnificent in self-sacrifice, and that is what Sister Carmelina was looking for: a sign to make her life precious rather than superfluous.

Amara has unconsciously if timidly camouflaged herself against a curtain at the far end of the hall and unnoticed watches the scene: the nuns are helping the chronic sick to take their places round the roughly laid table. There is water in gigantic opaque glass jugs. Bread, weighed out and cut into equal slices, stands before each place. Fishing in the steaming cauldrons with ladles, the nuns serve the boiling soup onto the metal plates. But why metal, as if they are prisoners? So they can’t break them, perhaps? To make them last longer? Or perhaps to humiliate them like prisoners, to make it clear that no one trusts their hands or their movements?

The old people have eyes only for their soup. They count the beans floating amid the islands of fat, and the pieces of carrot and potato that slither through the boiling broth. The elderly
women are wearing ankle-length dark wool skirts, with blue, grey or brown cardigans buttoned at the front. Some have a white blouse with a coloured lace collar under their cardigans, and some a rolled scarf round their necks. Nearly all the men are in slippers and walk badly. A bustling nun gets them to take off their hats and stick their napkins into their shirt-collars. They obey with bad grace.

Sister Adele stands and reads a passage from the Gospels: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the Sermon on the Mount, as reported in the Gospel of the Apostle Matthew, amen.’

The sick people half-listen, fiddling with their bread and crumbling it on the tablecloth. They wait impatiently, not daring to move their faces any nearer to their plates. Finally a nun with a sharp voice proclaims from the kitchen door: ‘
Ora pro nobis,
amen
! You may start eating!’ And suddenly all the spoons dive into the soup to re-emerge full and head for trembling, greedy, clumsy mouths.

Amara watches little Amintore who, even if his head is not entirely under control, behaves with dignity and a certain astute courtesy. He inserts his spoon in his soup nonchalantly as if at the very moment when the others are betraying impatience and greed, he himself has lost his appetite. Then, with a slow movement of the wrist, he dips his spoon into the soup again, fills it and waits for it to cool a little; then lifts it first to his nostrils to breathe in the warm, greasy aroma of the broth, and only then to his lips which he opens slowly and gracefully. With nearly all the others, the rising and falling of the spoon causes a little broth to fall on the table and the cloth, or worse still on trousers or skirt, but Amintore doesn’t lose a drop. With calm, slow movements he bends forward and sucks again and again without ever letting his elbow slip, his little finger raised like that of a minor prince at a
royal table. He never lifts his eyes from his plate, a slight smile on his unmarked face.