‘Did Valerio find work today?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘And yesterday – he was with the shepherd, yes? How much did he earn?’
‘He stank of sheep, so I suppose that’s where he was. He wasn’t back until after dark, then he slept, and said nothing to me. He…’ She pauses, repositions the basket on her hip. ‘His cough is worse. Always worse.’
‘I know.’ Ettore sets off in the direction of the castle.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To check he’s earning, since I’m not, and not busy pledging yesterday’s wages on wine.’
The castle looms over him as he emerges from Vico Iovia. Crows line its rooftops, bickering and looking down at the mess of life at street level. It looks out of place, almost ridiculous. There it sits, empty, a monument to one man’s wealth and power; and to the peasants of Gioia, who live sometimes ten, twelve, fifteen to a room, it’s hard to think such things were built and belong in their own world, and not in some fairy land. Ettore’s leg throbs harder and harder. It sounds so loud in his own ears that he starts to wonder if other people can hear it too. It begins to bleed again, and leaves a trail of drips so that a stray dog comes to follow him with its nose twitching. When it gets too close Ettore flails at it with the wooden pole. The dog has a hungry, speculative look in its eye. On the Via del Mercato is a bar, a simple place with stools in front of a pitted countertop, and big barrels of wine behind it. It’s the first one Ettore tries, and he curses when he sees Valerio at the far end of the room, sitting there stooped and unshaven, playing zecchinetta with a man who looks considerably happier than him.
Ettore limps over and slams his hand down flat on the bar in front of them. Neither man is startled, so he knows at once that they’re drunk. The playing cards are yellow and dog-eared; there are sticky rings of spilt red wine all around them, and the scent of it sour and pervasive in the air. Valerio looks up at his son, and Ettore sees that he has drunk so much he can’t keep his face straight. It veers from shock to guilt to anger to resentment, all in a few seconds. Valerio swallows, and finally settles for a sort of sickly, listless expression.
‘Something you want to say, boy?’ he says.
‘Yesterday’s money? Is there any of it left?’ says Ettore. He sounds cold and hard to his own ears, when what he feels is a kind of debilitating urge to surrender waiting to swallow him – a deep black well of it, like the hole at Castellana, into which he might fall and never emerge.
‘My money, you mean? My money, boy.’
‘Mine now, in truth,’ says his companion, who Ettore has never seen before. The man grins a mouthful of gappy brown teeth at him, and Ettore would like to knock them out of his mouth. He sees at once that this man is nowhere near as drunk as his father.
‘He has lost it all to you?’ he says.
‘What he hasn’t tipped down his throat,’ says the barman, who has run the place for as long as Ettore can remember. ‘And he still owes me twenty-eight lire from the winter.’ Twenty-eight lire, in summer, is a good month’s wages.
‘Why aren’t you working?’ Valerio says then, glaring at his son.
‘I cut my leg. I’ll work tomorrow though… why aren’t you working? What will Paola eat tonight, since you’ve pissed it all away?’
‘Don’t accuse me, boy! Mind your own damned business!’ Valerio thumps his fist on the bar and nearly slides off his stool. Raising his voice makes him cough.
‘Ah, leave your old man alone, why don’t you? Pleasures in life are few enough for you to deny him a drink and a game with an old friend,’ says the brown-toothed man. Your old man. Ettore stares bleakly at his father, stooped and sunken and coughing; his hair is salt and pepper, grizzled; there’s dirt in the bags beneath his eyes. He is an old man indeed. He is forty-seven years old. Ettore takes the man’s wine glass and drinks it empty.
‘You’re no friend of his. And if I see you with him again, you’ll wish I hadn’t,’ he says.
That night, as Valerio snores on his ledge, Ettore is woken by the movement of Paola getting up from the mattress beside him. She’s as silken as a cat when she wants to be, but he is sleeping fitfully, with the way his leg itches and thuds. He hears her finding shoes, shawl, knife and matches. He almost asks her where she’s going, but since he wouldn’t like the answer, he stays silent. When she’s gone he reaches out, softly, softly, until he finds his nephew’s sleeping body beside him. He rests his fingers lightly on Iacopo’s ribs, and feels the reassuring flutter of air in and out, in and out. It seems faster than it should be, but he’s still so tiny that Ettore isn’t sure. His cheeks are a little rough – some rash or irritation. That Paola has not taken the baby with her tells him where she might be going.
While he waits, because he can’t sleep until she’s back, he lets himself conjure Livia. Her father brought the family to Gioia six years ago, from a village in the marina – near the sea – where they had once worked on a vineyard that was then eaten whole by phylloxera bugs. Livia came with her parents and two brothers, to face the hatred and the resentment of the Gioiese workforce, who had no time or goodwill for people coming from beyond their own borders to take work. For over a year they lived in the street, camping out beneath the ancient arcs of Gioia, or the portico of a church, or the canopied doorways of the rich and absent, until Livia’s father finally made some friends in the peasants’ union and got enough work to rent a room. Ettore first saw Livia when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two. Just two years ago, but he can’t seem to remember what his life was like before she walked into it; just like now he can’t quite work out how he’s supposed to carry it on without her.
Livia had waves of deep brown hair – a dark chestnut colour, not true black – that matched her skin tone and her eyes almost exactly, creating a harmonious whole, a sort of soft blurredness that was irresistible. She had a dimple in her chin that was his undoing. She would sit in the market place with her mother and the other women with a bucket between her knees and knife in her hand, scraping the husks from nuts, or shelling peas or fava beans, or grinding coffee – whatever was needed. In times when farm work was slack, in November, and January through February, Ettore would steal moments to watch her, and the way she smiled that gave a glimpse of her lower teeth, and the upper ones that were in a strange formation – the canines and premolars longer than the incisors – that gave her a slight lisp when she spoke. It wasn’t that she was the most beautiful, or had the best figure or a provocative way of walking. Ettore couldn’t say why, exactly, but to him she looked like how heaven might be, and he didn’t dare approach her in case he was wrong, and got woken from his dream. Her heart-shaped face had an intelligent expression, her eyes were bright and she had a way of cocking her head to listen that reminded him of a bird; some small, rounded, self-contained bird – a woodcock, or a golden plover.
Pino made him go and talk to her, finally, and the last thing Ettore wanted was to have his friend at his side when he introduced himself – tall, beautiful, devastating Pino. But he never would have done it without Pino’s elbow in his ribs, and as it turned out Livia only looked at Ettore. Only at him, right from the very beginning. She didn’t blush, or simper, or sneer. She put one hand up to her lips and stared, and said his eyes were the colour of the sea, and reminded her of home; so straight away she baffled him, because Ettore had never seen the sea. Nor a mirror. He found out quickly that she only ever said what she actually thought, and had no guile, no patience for games or dissembling. In the time he’d spent watching her he’d never seen her talking to a man, so he’d assumed she would be shy of him, and afraid of what he wanted. But in the end it was she who kissed him first, with all the simplicity and directness he soon came to expect. And she never did spoil the idea that she was like heaven. She had the power of life and death over him from that first exchange.