Ettore’s stomach gets used to being empty again, his muscles to being weak for want of fuel. He lies in a shaft of dusty sunshine from the derelict window, both present and absent from the world, in one moment drifting listlessly as though none of it pertains to him, in the next beset by fears and anger and doubt and wanting. When it gets too much he clenches his fists until the knuckles crack, and his conscience bothers him constantly about something else entirely, until at last he has to speak.
He waits until Paola is nursing Iacopo. It’s a dirty trick, but he has to know she won’t run off at once and do something dangerous. The room is full of steam; a small pot of dried beans is boiling to softness on the stove. Paola sits on the edge of the bed to nurse, with a shawl draped over her shoulder and her breast, for modesty’s sake. Ettore doesn’t tease her about it, though they’ve had to use the prisor in front of each other since they were old enough to sit on it. Dignity must be enjoyed where it can be got.
‘What is it, Ettore?’ she says, as he works himself up to speaking. ‘You’ve obviously got something to say. What is it?’
‘It’s bad, Paola,’ he says carefully. She gives him a steady look.
‘How bad can it be? Just spit it out.’
Ettore takes a deep breath. ‘You must promise me to think before you do anything. Think before you act, once I’ve told you. You must promise me that, first.’
‘Then I promise it,’ she says, tension in her voice.
‘Ludo Manzo was at Masseria Girardi that day. He was one of the shooters.’ He says it in a rush, to have it over with. Paola stares at him for a long time, and a ripple of anguish passes over her face, filling her eyes with tears. She blinks them back.
‘The mozzarella told you?’ she says at last. Ettore nods. Paola clears her throat and looks down, peeking around the shawl at the baby. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘Because I didn’t want you to get yourself killed for a vendetta. I wasn’t going to tell you at all, for just that reason, but you… you have a right to know.’
‘How did that man get so full of hate, I wonder?’ she says softly. ‘It must plague him. It’ll be a mercy when I put a bullet in him. A mercy to him and everyone else.’
‘You won’t go out there alone and try anything? Promise me!’
‘No, I won’t go alone.’ Paola detaches her son, calmly turns him to her other breast; her hands and her movements are automatic, deft and tender. ‘But you wanted an honourable reason to attack dell’Arco and there you have it – Ludo Manzo is an enemy to all of us. We’ll go to dell’Arco next; when I tell the others he was there that day, they’ll agree with me. We’ll go there next, and if you want to be sure we don’t lose anybody you’d better talk to your woman. You’d better get her to open the doors for us.’
‘She’s not my woman.’
‘She is your woman. She’d do anything you asked, I saw it.’
From the alcove in the wall there’s a sudden slight movement, and they’ve got so used to there being none that it startles them. Valerio props himself up on one elbow, shaking visibly. He tries to speak, has to clear his throat and try again, and his children watch on in amazement.
‘Is this true, boy?’ he says to Ettore. ‘What that woman who was here said about Manzo?’
‘She had it from Uncle Leandro,’ says Ettore. Valerio nods slowly, just once.
‘Then you must go there, and he must die. This is the way of things. And if that woman who was here can help, then make her. This is a war, and no time for your soft heart, boy.’ With another nod Valerio collapses back down into silence, like some oracle that has spoken incontrovertibly, and is spent. Paola and Ettore share a glance, and say nothing more for a long time. When Iacopo has fed himself to sleep Paola wraps him and puts him down in his wooden box.
‘Don’t be long about it, Ettore. Can you get word to her? Get her to meet you? We must keep the momentum of this; we mustn’t let the men lose heart.’
‘You need to decide what night we will attack, and at what hour. It won’t be easy to get messages to and fro. It won’t be easy for her to come here, and I can’t risk going there. If she comes here again, I must be able to tell her everything.’
‘All right. Send a message that she should come. I’ll find out what you need to know.’
In the morning Ettore tears a slip of paper from a mouldy hymn book he finds on a shelf in Sant’Andrea. He has no pen or ink, so he uses a fragment of charcoal to write, in laborious Italian, where he is, and that she must come as soon as she can, then he gives the note to Pino and watches anxiously as his friend shoves to the front of the crowd near Ludo Manzo, and is hired to feed the threshing machine at dell’Arco. The sight of the overseer fills Ettore with a caustic, gnawing hatred. He glances around the square, half expecting Paola to come running out of nowhere and fly at him with tooth and nail. But she doesn’t. As he moves away Pino looks back at Ettore and gives him a tight nod, and Ettore can see how nervous he is of the task he’s been given; how he curls in on himself when Ludo is near, as delicately as a scorched leaf. Ettore sends a silent prayer to any watching angels for Pino’s success, and safety, for if anybody deserves to have a watching angel, surely it’s Pino.
The day is long; Ettore gets work breaking rocks to build a wall, and by the end of it there are rings of salt on his clothes and his arms have the tremor of exhaustion. But in the safety of the church in the deep of evening, Pino stops in to see him.
‘It’s done, brother,’ he says, with a smile, palpably relieved.
‘You gave it to Carlo?’
‘Yes. I said it was a love letter from you – he grinned like a little boy. Nobody saw me do it, I’m sure.’
‘Well done, Pino. Thank you,’ says Ettore. Pino lingers in the dark doorway of the church.
‘She… she won’t be hurt? The English woman? You’ll be sure to keep her safe in all this, won’t you?’ he says. ‘None of it is her doing, after all.’
‘I know it’s not. And I… I’ll do my best,’ says Ettore, ashamed that his friend feels the need to say this. That he’s getting Chiara involved in the raid. Pino has never been on a raid, and would never go on one. There’s no violence in him, not even enough to keep watch while others perpetrate. ‘I’ll do my best. The danger will be far greater if we don’t have her help.’
‘The danger will be great, regardless,’ says Pino. ‘Your sister scares me sometimes, you know that?’ A quick grin as he says this.
‘The times I’m not frightened for her, I’m frightened of her,’ says Ettore, nodding. Pino clasps his arm for a moment, and then he’s gone.
Ettore expects her to come in the evening again, like the last time, or even in the deep of night, stealing into town like a thief. Instead it’s pure chance that he’s in the church, far gone in thought, when she appears in the middle of the morning, two days later. He’s so distracted that he doesn’t react when the door creaks open, and for a moment he stares at her there, golden in the light, unable to make sense of the sight of her. Her smile is uncertain but irrepressible; he can see the breath high up in her chest, her ribs at their widest arc. A swallow flits in and sees her, circles and flies back out, but Chiara only looks at Ettore as he sits up, and it’s so incongruous that she’s there, and that they have this soft, lucent place to themselves, that he smiles. He bolts the door behind her; takes hold of her without reservation. There’s something so inexpressibly poignant in the smell of her hair, warm from the sun, that his heart aches a little, and when he kisses her he’s almost reverent, and gentler than he has ever been. Footsteps outside, back and forth past the door; the swallow comes in again and there’s the tiny scrape of its claws as it lands, the descant piping of its young – rammed into the nest, fat and silly, ready to fledge. Ettore takes off Chiara’s clothes and lets the sun fall, incandescent, on her skin. He turns her this way and that to see, touching her here and there – the notch at the base of her throat where there’s a gleam of sweat; the line where buttock joins thigh; the smooth protrusions of her elbows and knees. She has long toes and pale, narrow feet. He examines every inch and he lays her down, and he wonders if the tingle of heartbreak is in the feeling he has, right down at gut level, that this will be the one and only time he will see her like this. Glowing in the sun like one of his mother’s spirits; beautiful, untenable, not of this world.