‘You’re not in Rome any more, you moron. This farm has never had a phone connected. None of the farms have phones connected,’ says Paola, stepping towards him. The man’s lip curls in disgust.
‘A woman? You peasants let your women go out and fight? What kind of worthless terrone are you?’
‘The kind that are relieving you of these weapons. And advising you to honour the labour agreements you signed, whether the Chamber of Labour still stands or not,’ says the bald-headed man steadily.
‘You’ll be punished for this! Every last one of you… you’ll be punished! We know who you are, whether you cover your faces or not! I know who you are!’
‘Careful now,’ says another raider, stepping up to him with a cocked pistol. ‘Don’t give us a reason to shoot you.’
‘You’re finished,’ the tenant mutters, as though he can’t help himself.
‘No,’ says the raider. ‘This is just the start.’ The farmer stays silent, breathing hard, his face blanched and contorted. They gag him, and tie an old grain sack over his head.
The raiders take what they can carry from the masseria, leave the annaroli untouched and march the proprietor out through the embers of his gates, back to Gioia. When he feels paving stones beneath his feet the man starts shouting for help, and is knocked into stumbling semi-consciousness for his pains. Two men drag him all the way to Piazza Plebiscito, where they strip him naked and leave him tied to the bandstand. Then they, like the others, melt away into the dark streets as the bells strike three. Stolen guns are spirited away, tucked under the straw and sleeping bodies of pigs; wrapped in sacking and wedged up chimneys; concealed in piles of firewood. The raiders vanish into their homes, wash the soot from their faces and take to bed. They will be up in two hours and in the square for work, as though nothing has happened – their own safety depends on this. When the police and proprietors hear about the attack they’ll be on the lookout for absentees.
Ettore’s head is throbbing so severely he’s not sure if he’ll make it to work. While Paola checks Iacopo he lies down on the bed, not pausing to take off his boots, and immediately begins to drowse. He doesn’t even object when Paola cleans up the cut on his head, too tired herself to be gentle. She murmurs to him that it isn’t deep, and that a hat, worn low, will cover it well enough in the morning.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wake you in time.’
‘Oh, good,’ he mumbles, and hears her quiet huff of amusement. Then sleep has him, so suddenly and so totally it’s more like passing out.
In the nights after the raid there are more squadrist attacks, more shouts in the dark and sudden scuffles, more evictions and persecution of union men, but despite what the tenant of Masseria Molino claimed, he couldn’t name any of those who’d been amongst the attackers, so the reprisals are random, aimed at anybody deemed to have shown rebellious, socialist or ungrateful tendencies. Ettore is forced to hide in the goat stall again one evening, after a tip-off from a neighbour. After that he takes to sleeping on a dusty pew in the tiny church of Sant’Andrea, not far from Vico Iovia; jimmying the rusty lock open, and finding bolts on the inside to seal himself in. The church is like a cave of soft stone and cool shade that has stood for a thousand years or so, and long been without a human incumbent. It will not do for the winter, but now, in the heat of summer, it’s comfortable enough. The air is fresher than at home – ripe with the scent of the gently chalking walls, desiccated wood and the brittle, decades-old candle wax that cascades down the walls from niches. There’s the musty smell of bird shit from the swallows that swoop in and out through a broken window pane, and have built their mud nests in the rafters. Pigeons roost on the pulpit at night, and launch into their staccato, rushing flight when Ettore startles them. It’s been many years since the bell on the roof was rung.
At dawn Pino bashes his fist on the door to wake Ettore on his way to the piazza, but hidden away in this quiet space at the start and end of each day, Ettore feels time sliding to a stop, growing diffuse like the sunlight at evening time. The wheeling cries of the swallows seem to come from far away, and he could be a hundred miles from all the trouble. It’s so peaceful he has to force himself to leave in the morning, and it seems to him that his head only starts to ache once he has stepped outside. He remembers hearing Livia’s voice in his ear as he dangled, near senseless, over the fire during the raid. Tell me I’m your sweetheart. That lisping, musical way she spoke. He loved hearing it but it bothered him too, because it just didn’t sound right. It hadn’t at the time – sweetheart wasn’t a word he’d ever heard Livia use, before those final fevered hours of her life when she’d repeated the phrase over and over. Ettore called her his darling, his treasure, his fiancée; she called him her love, or just Ettore. Never sweetheart. He wonders where she got the word. But all his wondering and all his questioning, and all the promises he’d made to her memory had got him nowhere. He was no closer to discovering who’d attacked her that day, so callously, so ruinously. In the steady peace of the church Ettore stops making his promise to her. He stops promising he will find the man out, and accepts that he probably never will. Forgive me, Livia. I don’t know what else I can do. His defeat makes him feel small, and tired.
His headache makes him sluggish, and two days in a row he gets no work. Paola says nothing; he can sense her worry in the way she moves, even the way she breathes, as she dips reluctantly into the food she was saving for winter. The tension in Gioia only ever increases; there are rumours amongst the men, guarded carefully from the proprietors, the police and the annaroli, of the fight back that’s coming, that’s already begun. They have a run of cooler days, with a welcome breeze, but there’s no more rain. Out of town, vegetable crops are stunted and failing, and fruit grows slowly, hard and juiceless. In town there’s not much to buy but bread, and the price of that creeps up and up. Meat never lasts in the summer, but it’s still sold even when it’s slimy and off colour. The price of barrelled water rises until none but the rich can afford it, and the workers only have their allotted time at the pump in which to draw any. Wages and hours decrease as the rush of the harvest tails off; the streets are more populous with the unemployed, the unfed, and the anxious.
Ettore relies on Paola to connect him to what’s going on. She is part of the invisible web of quietly passed words that sustains the raiders in between action. She walks to Piazza XX Settembre, or out along Via Roma, with a covered basket on her hip and Iacopo on her back, and returns with news. Ettore has no idea whom she talks to, and simply waits to be told what will happen next, and when. They will wait a few days until things have quietened somewhat – that’s the word she brings. But they can’t wait too long: the proprietors are nervous; they’re strengthening their guard.
While he works Ettore finds it easier to keep his mind from wandering. But when he’s not working, the temptation is to retreat to the empty church and lie in silence inside, imagining himself removed from his life. He tries not to think about Chiara out at dell’Arco, waiting for a message he said he’d send. He tries not to think about her skin or her touch or the taste of her, or what life must be like in her universe. He tries not to think about Marcie, and her blind, hopeful eyes; or Ludo Manzo watching the youngest boys with one hand on his whip and a keen expression on his face. But he can’t not think about them, and he can’t not think about Federico Manzo, with his cocky walk and his criss-crossed gun belts. He’s not sure what’s worse – thinking of him in Gioia, perhaps bullying Paola again, or out at the masseria near Chiara. He hissed at me, she said.