‘No. Stay,’ he says, in English. He takes her hand and holds it, and she smiles.
‘I must go. I’m sorry.’ And she is. She wants to stay with him. ‘Ettore,’ she says, just for the feel of his name on her tongue.
‘Chiara,’ he says, and it seems fitting that he should give her this new name, since she is not Clare any more, not the person she thought she was at all. It sounds almost like a sigh as he says it: kee-ahra. She presses her cheek to his, just for the feel of its contours, the roughness where he hasn’t shaved, the hard bones beneath. ‘Will you come again?’ he says.
‘Yes. Soon.’ Clare’s hand is the last thing to leave the trullo, held in his, reaching out behind her. He only lets go in the last instant before his own hand might be seen.
Clare walks across ice towards the white walls of the masseria; it splinters under her feet. When she enters the sitting room Marcie leaps up to greet her.
‘Oh! Thank goodness! You found shelter? That was a real humdinger. But look at you – you’re soaked! And cut!’
‘I’m completely fine, Marcie, really – just this one nick where a hailstone caught me,’ says Clare, when really her body is a secret map of bruises and aches and tender places.
‘But how did you avoid being cut to ribbons? Where on earth were you hiding?’ says Marcie, and a sudden sparkle of warning makes Clare hesitate.
‘I… In a… what do you call it.’ She waves her hand, buying time. ‘In a trullo. One of the old, empty ones.’
‘Oh, good thinking – how lucky you were near one! I’ll get Anna to run you a bath. Anna! And then come and sit with us and have a cool drink to restore you – look! Look how we do it in Puglia!’ And Marcie laughs delightedly as she drops a smooth, round hailstone into her amarena.
Chapter Ten – Ettore
When Ettore’s shift ends he goes to watch the men shovelling the hailstones in the neviera, the snow cave; a stone-lined chamber sunk into the ground behind the masseria, where in wintertime snow is packed in thick layers, with straw in between, and will stay frozen for weeks, even months, to be used to keep meat and milk fresh as the weather warms. The hail won’t last anything like as long – it doesn’t pack down in the same way, and now, in the height of summer, the air is too warm – but for a few days Anna will be able to churn ice cream for Marcie and her guests.
At the thought of them, at the thought of Chiara, Ettore feels the watching eyes of the windows behind him. He feels everything watching him, from the evening sky, clearing now, to the low trees and the men, the dogs and the sparrows washing themselves with manic abandon in the puddles of meltwater. It’s like hands pressing down on him, and he knows that really it’s Livia he can feel watching; she’s the one scrutinising his guilty face and his every guilty move. And the thing that shames him is not that he made love to another woman, but that for a short while he surrendered to her completely; and for that short while he was happy. She was just as she had seemed she might be – a drink of water in a drought; a relief. A complete relief. And he had promised Livia that he would not rest until the man who had raped her to death was dead himself. His anger with himself grows until it includes Chiara as well, and when she doesn’t come to find him later that night, he is angrier still. Angry that she hasn’t come, and angry at how badly he wants her to.
Ettore can’t sleep during the day, even when he’s been awake all night, in the trullo by the gates. His shifts rotate with Carlo and one other man, so that one night shift is followed by two day shifts, and he can’t find a rhythm to it, so that by the end of a night shift he has been awake for twenty-four hours. He lies up on the roof, in the shade of the parapet, or else in his room with the sunlight streaming in through the curtains and the angry buzz of flies, and the slamming of doors and the footsteps and shouts of the household all making it impossible to think, or stop thinking. His anger simmers, and doesn’t cool, and his thoughts are sludgy with sleeplessness. He doesn’t eat with them again – he can’t stand the thought, the pretence. He only went at breakfast, that morning after his first night shift, to see her. To see Chiara Kingsley, and look at her more closely; and now he doesn’t think he could look at her without hitting her. Or kissing her again.
The second day afterwards he emerges from the trullo, crosses the aia and goes under the archway to find the annaroli milling about near the kitchen steps, pestering Anna and demanding food from the cook, Ilaria. He can hear Ilaria’s boisterous protests from within.
‘If one more of you deadbeats comes into my kitchen to ask me what is for lunch and when you will have it, you won’t have it at all! It’s that simple!’
‘What’s going on?’ Ettore asks one of the corporals, a man he doesn’t know, who has an apron of fat hanging over the front of his trousers. The man shrugs, then spits.
‘The shit-eating peasants are on strike again – they want some communist bastard or other let loose from jail. So we’ve nothing to do but cool our heels till it’s sorted out. Or till the starving starts.’ He has a marina accent – he’s not from Gioia – and he clearly has no idea who Ettore is. In an instant Ettore has him by the front of his shirt; his crutch clatters to the ground, and there’s laughter from the onlookers.
‘You’d do better to keep hold of that stick, boy, and use it to batter the man,’ says Ludo Manzo, standing up from a shady spot against the wall. He speaks without taking a thin cigarette out from between his teeth, and squints at Ettore. ‘You’ll have no luck trying to knock that fat pig down with only one leg on the ground.’ The fat man bridles but knows better than to say anything. Ettore releases his shirt, hops back and bends to pick up the crutch. ‘Watch your temper, Ettore Tarano. I don’t care if you’re the boss’s nephew; if you make trouble I’ll whip you myself, same as any other one of these men.’
‘Try it,’ says Ettore, through clenched teeth. ‘Go on and try it.’ Ludo grins at him and chuckles. He puts one hand on Ettore’s chest and shoves him, quick and hard. Ettore stumbles back, fighting for balance. But he doesn’t fall.
‘You see that, men? That’s the goddamned peasant urge to protest, and not to know they’re beaten. That’s what we’re up against here. But sooner or later they’ll learn. They’ll learn or they’ll die. One or the other.’ He keeps a steady, hard eye on Ettore, who doesn’t look away or move. ‘Change is coming, Mr Tarano, and that little shindig at the Girardi place last year was just the start. Soon if you and your friends want work you’ll know to be grateful for the work that’s offered, on whatever terms.’
‘You’re right about one thing,’ says Ettore. He stands straighter; the violence in him makes his jaw ache. ‘Change is coming. Maybe not the kind you’re hoping for, Manzo, but change, all the same.’ He spits and turns his back on them. There’s a chorus of whistles and curse words and jeering.
He’d expected Paola to come back to the masseria to collect money from him, or more food, and when she didn’t he’d assumed Valerio had found a wage from somewhere. Now he knows there’s a strike, most likely for the release of Capozzi, he worries more. There will be demonstrations in Gioia for the duration of the strike, rallying calls, a dangerous air of rebellion that could boil over into rioting as easily as a dropped match could start a grass fire, and Paola would be in the thick of it, like as not with Iacopo strapped to her back. Not knowing what’s going on is intolerable. Once he’s out of sight, up on the roof, Ettore puts his left foot down on the ground, gingerly. The ache is intense, the pulling feeling still there, but it’s bearable now. Keeping hold of the crutch but not using it, he takes a few small steps. If he shortens his stride to minimise the movement of muscles in that leg, he can manage it, and it gives him a flash of triumph.