The war of Carmine Borelli was fitful. Called up on his eighteenth birthday, the papers instructed him on which barracks in the town he should report to, and the day after he went into hiding, courting Anna while he was on the run and dodging raids by the Fascist police, coming out of hiding for the day, his marriage to Anna in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, being informed on, and arrested the following evening. A question never asked and therefore never answered: how was Anna Borelli so skilled in lovemaking, after one night with her nineteen-year-old husband, that she could so successfully entertain the American lieutenant colonel? After two years in Poggioreale gaol, he was freed by Allied forces after he had woven a tale of a young, persecuted liberal democrat imprisoned for his beliefs. He had found the first employees of his wife in cubicles wide enough for a bed, a chair and a narrow table for a washstand, and had shaken the hand of the lieutenant colonel in the hallway, ignoring the man’s apparent intimacy with his wife. They had, together, not looked back.
Within weeks, she had opened two more brothels. Within months, he had become a king in the black-market sale of goods brought by the Americans into the Naples docks, and he had started his mercato nero with those stockings, cans of food, packs of cigarettes, coffee, sugar and chocolate that the first customers had given his wife by way of a gratuity. First a handcart, then a small closed-sided van, then a flat-bed lorry, then many lorries, and always protection from the military government – and the question he never asked of his wife.
It was in the bloodstream of both: the search for power, authority and wealth bred microbes in their veins, which they had never lost.
He had walked down the street from the church, past the shops that were now familiar to him, past the men who sat and played cards or dominoes, and past the Madonna figures in niches in the stonework where candles burned and flowers drooped. He had paused beside the fish-seller’s stand and had watched water from a fine spray fall on the swordfish. He had never seen a swordfish, and this one was more than five feet long, its sword another four, and… he realised the outer door was open. He could have sworn on oath that it had been closed the previous times he’d gone by. He had known then that the kids or the scooter rider had forewarned them.
He said simply, ‘I came to find Immacolata.’
The old man had American-accented English. ‘You knew her in London? You knew her well?’
The old woman had a crow’s croak, and spoke English. ‘Do you sleep with her? Do you do fuck-fuck with her?’
He blushed. Eyes pierced him. The coarseness of the question neither unnerved him nor seemed peculiar – almost, in this place, natural. They were both, he estimated, in their eighties. He sensed that they moved with difficulty, were in pain, and near the door there had been a stand of walking-sticks. The room he was in was furnished, Eddie thought expensively, but with hideous taste – chrome, plastic, fluffy, pinkish. The PhD man in the house in Dalston would have called it kitsch, and his mother’s lip would have curled in disdain. He noticed there were no photographs. Not a picture of Immacolata, or of a man who would have been her brother, or of her parents. Everyone his mother knew, all her friends, had homes littered with photographs of grandchildren, shelves and surfaces groaning under them.
The question, its vulgarity, almost amused Eddie, but the eyes of the old woman pierced him with a brightness that suggested she harboured a degree of humour. He would not have dared to lie to her. ‘Yes.’
The old woman shrugged. ‘There are many girls. Why come to find Immacolata?’
‘I think… because I love her. You know… what I mean. Yes, I love her.’
She said something to the old man, Eddie didn’t know what. She reached up from her chair, caught the collar of his shirt, tugged his face down and spoke into his ear, then moved her head to let him speak into hers, but her eyes stayed on Eddie.
The old woman asked if Immacolata loved him. He thought she used the word ‘love’ as if it was strange to her, but he reckoned that was because she was struggling with the language. He wondered how she had learned English, what call this peasant woman had had to speak it. He repeated and amplified. ‘I hope she was in love with me – at least, very fond of me. We were very happy together.’
She tugged again at her husband’s shirt collar.
Her small spider fingers scratched at the material of his shirt, pulled and jerked his head down. She was, like him, in her eighty-eighth year, but her memory was as sharp as the day he had come back to her from the Poggioreale and she had told him – without a balance sheet to read from – the finances of the brothel. She murmured the numbers given her by Salvatore. He would have had to write them down. Her mouth to his ear, her ear to his mouth as he repeated the numbers. She told Carmine that it was equal to a gift from the Virgin – and ignored his shock at what he considered inappropriate, almost blasphemy – that leverage against the bitch had walked through the front door, presented itself, gift-wrapped. He understood. Anna would go to the kitchen, make coffee and take cake from the tin. He, Carmine, would go into the hallway and telephone. He repeated the number again.
What they knew of the English language, American, was from the days when the troops had been in Naples. Good days, the best, he a king and she a queen. The fingers loosed his collar. He smiled at the young man, hoped it a smile of friendship, and there was a girlish charm about his wife’s smile, which he thought as insincere – and sweet – as the smile she had used for her customers more than sixty years before. The same smile and no truth in it. She said she would make coffee and bring cake, and she said that Carmine would go and telephone, that there was a man who knew where Immacolata was and, please, would the young man wait a little. There was an image of long ago, never forgotten. A shared cell in the south-west block of the Poggioreale. A spider, huge, whose territory was the angles between the brickwork, the bars and the grimy glass of the window. It had a web that extended nearly a metre across and half a metre high and the prisoners bet each evening, in cigarettes, how many new flies would be trapped in the daylight hours and eaten at night. The spider was esteemed and admired, its body the size of a matchbook. It trapped the ignorant and the innocent. She went to prepare coffee and bring cake, and Carmine went into the hall, leaving the young man alone. There was excitement on the young man’s face.