Ettore doesn’t wake when Chiara leaves, and in the morning when he sits up and puts his head in his hands, he can smell her on his own skin. He holds his head over the washstand basin and pours the whole contents of the jug over himself, gasping at the coldness of the water. He can’t pin his thoughts to any one thing, to any one need or wish or action. He feels stupid, vacant; hollowed out by her and frustrated with lust. He shaves messily, cutting himself, then dresses in trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and goes to find Marcie. He tries the sitting room first, and then goes to knock at the series of private rooms she shares with Leandro. After a pause she opens the door rather than calling him in, and he remembers something his mother once said, about never trusting a person who did that. About the multitude of things that could be hidden in the interim.
Marcie smiles when she sees him, and then laughs lightly.
‘Ettore – did you shave with a scythe, honey? You’re all chopped to hell!’ She touches her fingers briefly to the dried blood on his chin, so that he understands what she’s laughing at. He shrugs and follows her into the room. She’s dressed and made-up but hasn’t done her hair yet – it’s messy, not set in its perfect wave, and somehow the disarray makes her look both older and younger at once. There are blue damask curtains, lifting gently in the breeze, and a matching counterpane on the bed. Marcie has made a dressing table out of an old carved console – there’s a folding mirror on top, and all her make-up, perfumes and hairpins scattered over it on silver trays; her jewellery too. The huge diamond in the engagement ring Leandro bought her sends little rainbows flickering up the wall. She has gold chains too, and earrings that sparkle like the ring. He steps on something slippery and looks down to find his cracked boots dirtying a glossy, buff-coloured cowhide. He thinks of the room in Gioia he shares with Paola and Valerio. He thinks of Livia and her family, sleeping under an archway for weeks, months. His heart ices over.
‘What’s eating you?’ says Marcie. She sits down at her dressing table, facing towards him. He can see her long back in the mirror behind her.
‘I am going,’ he says.
‘Going?’ Her eyes widen. ‘You can’t mean going going?’
‘To Gioia. I take the money to Paola. So they eat.’ He stares hard at her, until a little shame comes into her face.
‘If they’d just come here, if they’d just be a bit sweet to Leandro, he’d take you all in – you know he would! Then they’d eat.’
‘And Valerio?’ he says brusquely. Marcie looks down at her hands, examines the nails, pushes at a cuticle.
‘But you can’t walk properly yet – you can hardly do a day’s work, can you?’ she says. ‘In fact, how will you even get there? We’ve no car here.’ From this Ettore can pick enough of the salient words.
‘I walk. I come back tomorrow.’
‘Oh, good!’ says Marcie. ‘It’s just a visit then – I understand! Listen – don’t try to walk, for heaven’s sake. I’ll send Anna on some errand in town – go with her in the trap. And Leandro will be back tomorrow with Boyd Kingsley, so you can come with them in the car. Do you understand? Oh, where’s Clare when I need her? Go with Anna, Ettore. Don’t try to walk.’
‘Yes,’ he says at last, thinking of the blisters on his hand that the crutch would give him during the fifteen-kilometre journey.
‘And, here,’ she says. ‘Wait a moment.’
Marcie takes something from a trinket box, gets up and goes to the wardrobe. She’s wearing a tubular dress of fine white linen that almost reaches her ankles, and shortens her steps; it rests on her hips with a belt stitched all over with turquoise beads. Ettore wonders what she sees when she looks out at the dry ground and the starving animals; the filthy, starving people. He’s not at all sure. She kneels to unlock a metal strongbox in the wardrobe, and Ettore glimpses what’s inside it. He stares. The box is piled high with money; tightly wadded stacks of notes. Thousands and thousands of lire. The sight gives him a strange fluttering in his gut; he has never seen anything like it. Marcie looks back over her shoulder.
‘Ridiculous, isn’t it? Leandro says he doesn’t trust the man who owns the bank – that Fiorentino fellow. And why not? I said. He still uses the bank in New York, after all, for all his business dealings there. But he only shrugs, and I think I know the answer – he doesn’t trust rich men. He is a rich man but he still doesn’t trust them. In his heart, he’s still the poor peasant he was born. And if you let on that I let you see this, he’ll skin me. You understand?’ She smiles, and Ettore says nothing. He swallows; he can’t tell what he feels. Marcie peels off several notes and presses them into his hands. ‘Don’t tell Leandro I’ve given you this – let me, it would be better. Take this for Paola and the baby. I know how worried you are. Take it.’ She pushes his hands away when he tries to give it back. ‘Just take it! Damn it, Ettore, don’t be so proud! Take it.’ He knows the word proud; she often uses it to describe him, to berate him. She can’t grasp that pride is all he has, sometimes. But he takes the money, even though it makes a mockery of him. It’s ten times what he’s earned as a guard in the past week, and she hands it over like it’s nothing, and smiles at his obedience.
Anna waits for him in the courtyard, sitting decorously in the little trap with a rein in each hand and her hair tied down beneath a scarf. She eyes him warily as he climbs up beside her. The mule’s knobbed hip bones and scarred knees speak of years of hard labour. It stands with its ears back and its eyes diffuse, entirely disengaged from its surroundings, not even flicking its tail at the biting flies that crowd it. Marcie waves down from the terrace as they move away, and on the far side of the archway, Chiara stands with Filippo beside her, holding her hat by its brim, coming back from a walk with dust up to her knees. She stares up at him and he can read her incomprehension and her hurt. If he could he would tell her he’s coming back but there’s no time and no way to, so he sets his expression and lets his eyes linger on her for just a second. Filippo waves with his non-bandaged hand and Ettore waves back at him. The dogs chorus them out of the gates, straining at their chains to get at the mule; the mule ignores them completely. All trace of the hail and its meltwater are gone, the only signs of the deluge are subtle: a greener colour to the fig tree leaves; a clarity to the air which will soon be taken back by the heat and dust and the sun’s flat glare, which will build and build until the next storm.
Ettore feels better as soon as they are clear of the masseria, and the road to Gioia is laid out in front of them; he’s on edge, but for different reasons. He looks around him for signs of workers in the fields they pass, but it seems that the strike is holding. The mule slopes along with flat strides that cover the ground, and before long they’re in the outskirts of Gioia del Colle. Ettore’s mood lifts further. He knows where he is in these streets; he knows who he is, and what he should do. He knows his place.
‘Let me down here,’ he says to Anna before they reach the centre, and she tugs on the mule’s mouth to halt it. Leandro’s buggy is modest enough but he still doesn’t want his neighbours to see him arriving in it.
‘You’re coming back with me later? How long will you be?’ says Anna.
‘No. I won’t go back today; don’t wait for me.’
‘All right.’ She nods and flicks the reins, and moves away. Ettore takes a deep breath and notices, in a way he normally doesn’t, the stink of Gioia. Sewage and rotting vegetables; sickness, unwashed bodies, horse shit and cigarette smoke. It’s familiar enough to be almost comforting, but at the same time it sticks in his throat. He heads towards Piazza Plebiscito, moving almost as quickly on the crutch as he could have walked normally. The square is crowded with people – all the workers, not working; a throng of black dotted here and there with the paler blouses of women. Some young men have climbed the lamp-posts to see better, and the bandstand is hung with socialist banners. At the edges of the square are groups of men who stand tight together and talk to each other rather than listening. They have the tense, watchful air of men who are waiting, and they give Ettore a warning prickle of unease. Some are in police uniform, some in the remains of army officer uniform; some wear black shirts, with insignia stitched or pinned onto them. Ettore stares into the crowd but there’s little hope of finding Paola in amongst it.