Ettore takes Valerio’s hat, a worn-out brown felt fedora, shiny around the band with sweat and grease, and wears it low over his forehead to throw his distinctive eyes into shadow. He wears his father’s jacket as well, which is too long in the arm for him; anything that might help him go unrecognised in the opalescent early dawn. His limp is harder to conceal, but many men limp. The piazza is as crowded as ever, and the mood is blacker than the long shadows lurking in the east end of the square. Fear and anger and confusion, violence and uncertainty; the group of men is like one body – one hungry, belligerent, frightened creature keeping its head down when it wants to fight; keeping quiet when it wants to roar. They are on a knife edge, with capitulation on one side and savagery on the other, and it’s a sickening choice because death waits in both directions. Ettore wishes he felt as certain about it all as he did before Livia, before Chiara. He wishes he knew which way was best, he wishes he knew which way the others would jump, but most of all he wishes he was far, far away. He wishes for things he doesn’t really believe in – justice and peace and fair treatment. Fantasies every bit as alluring as that of a fair-haired women waiting for him at home, and loving him.
Ettore walks right up to Pino to check his anonymity, and it seems to work quite well. He gets close enough to smell spilt machine oil on his friend’s sleeve, and a trace of wine on his breath, and Pino takes a second to notice him when Ettore bumps his arm.
‘What’s with the hat?’
‘It’s Valerio’s. To give me a chance of being hired.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Do you tell your wife everything, Pino?’ he says pointedly. He can tell from Pino’s guilty look that his friend knows exactly what he’s talking about.
‘Sorry, Ettore. I kind of do tell her everything. I forgot that women also tell each other everything.’
‘Paola can’t get the idea of Leandro’s money, or Marcie’s jewellery, out of her head. The way she goes on you’d think there was a cave full of treasure over at dell’Arco, which will somehow solve all our problems.’
‘Well, it could solve some of them.’ Pino shrugs.
‘And it’s every bit as well guarded as you’d expect. She wants me to… to make Chiara open the door for us.’ Ettore rubs his index finger across his brow, an unconscious anxious tic. Pino says nothing. ‘Leandro would shoot her without hesitation, if he knew, if he saw her. I know that much. Strip off the suits and the American accent and he’s the same ruthless bastard he ever was, and his temper’s no better.’
‘She means something to you then, this woman?’ Pino smiles at him; he has always been in love with love. Ettore is about to deny it, on reflex, but then he nods.
‘She does.’
‘So, don’t ask her.’
‘And when my sister joins the raid regardless, and gets herself killed?’
‘So, ask her.’
‘You’re no bloody help, Pino.’
‘If I could help, I would.’
‘Can you get yourself hired to dell’Arco? Pass a message to her – give it to that young guard with the snub nose, you know the one I mean? His name’s Carlo; he’s simpatico. He would pass her a message, if you said it was from me.’ At this Pino looks nervous. He has a ground-in fear of stepping out of line when Ludo Manzo is anywhere near.
‘I don’t know, Ettore.’
‘Just a slip of paper. I’ll write it out. I want to tell her to go. To get out and leave.’
‘I don’t know. Can’t you just tell your uncle?’
‘Warn my uncle that my sister and my friends are going to attack his farm?’
‘Well, no. Perhaps not.’
In the end only ten men are hired to continue the threshing at dell’Arco that day, and Pino isn’t one of them. Ettore joins a work gang headed west from Gioia, to a farm only three kilometres away. The overseer refuses to say what hours they will work; he refuses to say what pay is being offered. They are told that there is work; they are told to step forward if they want it. They are told they will be paid at the end of the day, and they must take that on trust. There is to be no negotiation.
‘This is not how men are hired any more,’ says Ettore, unable to help himself.
‘It’s how I’m hiring you,’ says the overseer stiffly. He has shifty eyes and a mobile expression. He’s trying for implacable neutrality but little tweaks of nervous excitement keep spoiling it; little spurts of glee. ‘We’ll hire at street price, or not at all. Now do you want to work or don’t you? Not you,’ he says, to one man with sombre grey eyes and shoulders knotted with muscle.
‘Why not me?’ he says uneasily.
‘Because of that,’ says the overseer, and he sneers as he lifts his stick to poke at the man’s pocket watch. ‘I’ve no use for clock-watchers.’ This is what the fascist squads have achieved, already, in so short a space of time – the foremen feel invincible again; they hate the workers all the more for the gains they made after the war, and they are jubilant now those gains are being reversed. Their hatred makes them scornful, and ruthless. Behind each man are thirty more wanting work, so Ettore and his small band of colleagues take the terms, shaken, and start walking.
It was like this before the war – decades before the war – and suddenly Ettore sees how right his sister is. The backward slide towards the bad old days is happening at breakneck speed, so fast that the giornatari are bewildered, scrabbling to keep up. It might already be too late, and that thought puts the taste of metal in Ettore’s mouth, and makes his hands curl into fists. If they do not resist, what then? He stares at the overseer’s back, riding at the head of the men with his meaty arse filling the saddle and his spine in a comfortable slouch. He remembers the moment of simple, primeval joy when he managed to get his hands around Ludo Manzo’s throat; he takes a slow breath in and lets this memory pump his blood until it’s racing through his body. It feels like waking from a daze in which he’s been aware of words and movement around him but has registered nothing, reacted to nothing. More than ever at that moment, Chiara Kingsley seems insubstantial, dangerously vulnerable; he is desperately afraid for her even as he warns himself not to care deeply for such a friable, breakable thing. He can’t let himself be crippled by that softness, that sinking. He will not lie down.
The threshing is done by hand on the farm he’s been hired to. They use old-fashioned flails – two lengths of wooden pole joined by a metal chain – to beat the grains from the stalks of each wheatsheaf. Bent backs and the circular spin of the flail end, sweat blooming through their shirts at neck and back and belly; the constant sibilant thump of each blow landing, and behind that the rattle of the winnowing machines, each turned by hand by one man who stands in place the whole day long, cranking the wheel around and around. Husks and dust fill the air, getting inside the seams of their clothes and itching, bringing up a rash; the men wheeze and wipe their streaming eyes on their cuffs. The process seems to dry out the insides of their noses, their whole bodies, drawing out the moisture until they’re like the husks that blow away, the hollow stalks of straw left behind.
Ettore works the flail with unblinking intensity, with sweat stinging in his eyes and making his hands slide on the wooden handle. He has to hold it with a grip every bit as intense as his focus on the task. The muscles in his forearms scream at him; by noon his bruised ribs have built up an ache that feels like a spike lodged in the bone. The man next to him tells him about three men who died of heatstroke the day before, threshing in full sun. The day is one of the longest Ettore can remember. His time at dell’Arco, on guard duty or just waiting for it, dozing on the roof, eating when he feels like it and meeting with Chiara, have taught his stomach to be full and his mind to wander; he’d forgotten the monotony, the exhaustion, the crushing, mindless drudgery of farm work. Stepping out of life as his leg healed makes him notice its patterns anew, and now he can see the days stretch ahead of him to the day of his death: hard, hungry and unchanging. It’s maddening. Lunch is bread and a cup of well-watered primitivo. Work doesn’t stop until the sun hits the horizon towards seven, and the pay is less than half what it should be. The men take the money and stare at it. Some of them are furious, some are resigned, some are panicky, shocked to have earned so little. But all are silent, so it makes no difference.