The door swings open and Paola comes in with Iacopo in a sling on her back. She hesitates when she sees him sitting up, and for a moment relief floods her face. Then she sees his leg and rushes forwards.
‘For God’s sake, Ettore – I just got it to stop bleeding and the first thing you do is start it up again?’ Ettore tries to say sorry but he can’t make his voice work. Paola drags a small stool across to him and plonks his leg up on it. She ties the cloth back over the wound, and then squeezes it. Ettore chokes a little, coughs in shock at the pain, and Paola looks up at him. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry for your pain.’ His blood squeezes up between her fingers and he sees her pale, and her lips press tight. Over her shoulder Iacopo gazes at Ettore with an inscrutable expression, and Ettore reaches out his finger. The baby grasps it at once, with his whole hand, and opens his mouth to suck it. The strength of his grip makes Ettore’s stomach clench in pleasure. Some days Iacopo’s grip is weak, some days strong; some days he doesn’t even reach for the finger. Today the baby has a calm, businesslike demeanour, and his grip is steadfast.
‘I’ll be all right. It’ll be all right,’ Ettore manages to say.
‘Will it?’ says Paola. She pushes him back onto the straw mattress, then lifts up his damaged leg and lays it out. She wipes her hands angrily on a rag and won’t meet his eye. She wears a scarf over her hair, like always, tight to her head and tied at the nape of her neck. Her hair is rolled into a knot there so that no stray strands escape. It makes her look severe, older than her twenty-two years; it accentuates that hardness she’s had since Iacopo’s father died. She shakes her head. ‘If you can’t work, we’re finished.’ Ettore can’t remember when he last heard his sister sound frightened, but she does now.
Lying down makes the room spin again, and Ettore shuts his eyes to still it.
‘Of course I’ll be able to work. How did I get back here?’
‘On Pino’s back, of course. All the way from Vallarta.’
‘Pino always was a big ox. I could go back now and finish the day. I’m fine.’
‘Go back now?’ Paola is trying to clean the blood out from under her fingernails.
‘It’s still light. There’s still time. I worked nine hours or more before it happened, I think…’
‘Yesterday. That was yesterday, you idiot; you’ve been asleep since then, nothing would rouse you. Who knows if they’ll pay you for an unfinished day… You were bleeding so much when you got here… You needed to rest.’ Paola can’t help but sound a tiny bit resentful. They all need to rest, after all.
‘I’ve lost a whole day’s work today, then?’ says Ettore, his eyes snapping open. Paola gives a curt little nod. Never once, since he was ten, has he missed a day’s work when work was available. He feels like a man left stranded; he feels traitorous and betrayed all at once. He sits up again but Paola stops him with a curse.
‘It’s too late now! You might as well rest. Luna is trying to borrow a needle and thread, to close the wound.’ Paola undoes the sling and deftly gathers Iacopo into her arms. She smiles wearily at him, and his little face broadens in delight. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I… I lost my balance. I was thinking about… something. I just lost my balance, I think.’
‘Didn’t you get a meal?’
‘A little bread, but no wine.’
‘Those miserly bastards!’ Paola suddenly barks, and Iacopo’s eyes go wide. She quickly puts him over her shoulder and sways him, rolling her eyes anxiously to the ceiling.
‘Paola, please don’t worry. I can work. It will be fine.’ But Paola shakes her head.
‘You must go to our uncle. Ask him for an easy job while you heal.’
‘I will not.’ They glare at one another, and Paola looks away first.
Ettore stays still for a few hours, taking in the strangeness of seeing their one room in daylight. He watches the beam of light from the single window as it glides slowly across the floor. Paola comes and goes. She brings him a cup of water and then a cup of acquasale, thin soup made by boiling up stale bread with salt in water, with a little olive oil or cheese added in times of plenty. There is mozzarella in the soup she gives him; Ettore glances up but doesn’t ask how she got it, because he knows she won’t answer. A man called Poete has a crush on her; he works at the small mozzarella factory at the far end of Via Roma. He has hands like paddles, a chinless face, and always smells of milk. The workers at that factory are allowed to eat as much mozzarella as they like inside the factory, but they aren’t allowed to take any home for their families. That way, the workers gorge themselves once or twice, but are then too sick of the stuff to want it any more. A few months ago a man tried to smuggle home a whole mozzarella – a knot the size of his fist. When it looked as though he would be caught he stuffed it into his mouth and tried to swallow it, and choked to death. Poete got his job, and there’s not much he wouldn’t attempt, it seems, for the things Paola will then do to repay him. She chose him carefully. Poete has subverted one of the lads who brings the milk from the farms every morning, in heavy pails swinging from the handlebars of his bicycle; so Paola regularly gets pilfered milk for Iacopo, since her own is never quite enough for him. Clearly, Poete has also found a way to smuggle out cheese sometimes. It tastes impossibly good, impossibly rich. Ettore shames himself by wolfing it down, and not sharing it with his sister.
It’s hard for Paola to get paid work because of the baby, and because of her reputation. If there is an outbreak of violence in Gioia, a protest – like the stoning of a shop where the baker has been mixing dust into the loaves and selling at high prices – Paola is at the front. She makes her voice one of the loudest, and she does not defer to authority, or to the Church. When she was fifteen there was the scandal of the priest who had been discovered interfering with the little orphan girls in his care. Paola claims to have thrown the torch that finally set his house on fire. The peasants have little enough use for the Church, anyhow – the priests say the droughts and hardships are the result of their godlessness, and they continue to charge for funerals, weddings and christenings, when none can pay. Last year, when the government ordered rationing to help with the post-war shortages and women were frequently made to grant sexual favours to officials in return for their flour, oil and bean coupons, Paola took steps to protect herself. On the day one such randy official made his intentions plain, she let him lead her to a quiet place then she put a knife to his scrotum, got all the coupons she was due and some extra ones as well. She laughed about it, and said the man would be too embarrassed to tell anybody, but Ettore worried for her, then and now. The officials know her face, and he fears that they will mark her out, and make a point of finding her. Sooner or later. She goes about with Iacopo strapped to her back like a talisman, but that won’t deter them when it comes to it.
By afternoon Ettore is on his feet. He can’t put any weight on the cut leg so he hops, using the walls for balance. From their door a short flight of stone steps leads down to a tiny courtyard, an offshoot where the narrow street, Vico Iovia, makes a ninety-degree turn. Beneath their room is a stable, where their neighbour sleeps with his mule and an elderly nanny goat. Ettore picks up the wooden pole with which the double door is barred at night, and uses it as a crutch. There’s no water for Paola to wash their clothes, but she hangs what spare things they own out on a line anyway, to try to air them. Flies settle on the stiff fabric, like they settle on everything else. Paola comes along the alley with a basket of straw on her hip – fodder she collects for their neighbour’s goat, in return for a cup of her milk now and then. She opens her mouth to scold him but Ettore forestalls her.