‘Signora, which one did they seek to kill at Bologna? Angela Fresu, aged three?’
4
For the first time since the outrage I walked again in the early morning, on the roads that now and again turn into dusty-white tracks, among the olive shrubs and the broom. The line of the hills in the distance was softened by a haze that drained the sky of colour. Tiny clouds, like skilful touches in a painting, stayed motionless above the umbrella pines and cypresses that claim this landscape for Umbria.
I wondered about the American professor. As a name, River-smith had a ring to it, but it told me nothing else. Its bearer was the brother of the dimpled, fair-haired woman on the train, which suggested a man in his thirties. When I thought about him, his face became like hers.
‘Buongiorno, signora!’ an old woman with a stack of wood on her back greeted me. Further on, her husband was cutting the grass of the verge with a hook. You don’t meet many on the white roads; sometimes a young man rides by on an auto-cycle; in autumn the harvesters come for the grapes, in November for the olives. It was pleasant to walk there again.
‘Buongiorno, signora!’ I called back. Once I made a terrible mistake in Sunday school when giving an answer to a question, saying that Joseph was God. Someone began to titter and I could feel myself going red with embarrassment, but Miss Alzapiedi said no, that was an error anyone could make. Miss Alzapiedi’s long chest was as flat as a table-top. Summer or winter, she never wore stockings, her white, bony ankles exposed to all weathers. It seemed a natural confusion to say that Joseph was God, Joseph being Jesus’s father and God being the Father also. ‘Of course.’ Miss Alzapiedi nodded, and the tittering ceased.
I dare say remembering Sunday school was much the same as the General having tea in Mrs Patch’s cottage and Otmar recalling the comfort of his parents’ house. It was a way of coming to terms, of finding something to cling to in the muddle; I dare say it’s natural that people would. In all my time at Miss Alzapiedi’s Sunday school there was only that one uneasy moment, before Miss Alzapiedi stepped in with kindness. Otmar similarly recalled being reprimanded because he’d overturned a tin of paint when the decorators came to paint the staircase wall and the hall, and again when he stole a pear from the sideboard dish. There was a moment of embarrassment in the dormitory the old man had spoken of, with its rows of blue-blanketed beds and little boys in pyjamas. But these instances, dreadful at the time, were pleasant memories now.
‘And they spread out palms before the donkey’s feet,’ Miss Alzapiedi said, and while she spoke you could easily see the figure of Jesus in his robes, with his long hair and his beard. The donkey was a sacred animal. ‘You have only to note the cross on every donkey’s back,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘All your lives please note the black cross on that holy creature.’
The General had led his men to the battle-fronts of the world but always he’d returned to the girl he’d proposed to on a sunlit lawn, whose tears of joy had stained the leather of his uniform. He had not looked at other women. Amid the banter and camaraderie of the barracks his desires had never wandered, not even once, not even in the heat of the desert with the promise of desert women only a day or two away. His happy marriage was written in the geography of the old man’s face, a simple statement: that for nearly a lifetime two people had been as one.
‘Isn’t that much better?’ Otmar’s mother said the first time he wore spectacles, when a world of blurred objects and drifting colours acquired precision. In the oculist’s room he couldn’t read the letters on the charts. The oculist had spectacles, too, and little red marks on the fat of his face, the left-hand side, close to the nose. When Otmar asked his mother if he’d always have to wear the spectacles now she nodded, and the oculist nodded also. When the oculist smiled his white teeth glistened. The mother’s coat was made of fur.
It was Mary who began the business about donkeys, riding on one all the way to the stable of the inn. Joseph walked beside her, guiding the donkey’s head, thinking about carpentry matters. Mary understood the conversation of angels. Joseph sawed wood and planed it smooth. He made doors and boxes and undertook repairs. To this day I can see Joseph’s sandals and Jesus’s bare feet, and the women washing them. To this day I can see Jesus on the holy donkey in the picture above my bed.
‘Fragments make up a life, my dear,’ Lady Daysmith says in Precious September. For the General, bodies lie where they have fallen on the sand, sunburnt flesh stiffening, soldiers from Rochester and Somerset. For the General, there are those gentle Cotswold bells, the organ booming, evening hymns. There is the beauty of virginity specially kept, to be given on a wedding night; and drinks beneath that tree the child fell out of. ‘Darling,’ the well-loved wife returns his love. ‘Darling, you are so sweet to me.’
For me, there is the stolid dog, the dampness of the beach, the seagulls coming nearer. There are the searchlights of Twentieth-Century Fox, the soft roar of the lion, Western Electric Sound. In a room a man removes an artificial leg and pauses to massage the stump. Across a street a neon sign flashes red, then green, all through a half-forgotten night. First thing of all, there’s a broken floor-tile, brownish, smooth.
Why is there fear left over in Otmar’s eyes, behind the spectacles? Does some greater ordeal continue, some private awfulness? In the supermarket the girl’s hand reaches again into the shelves. The adoration in the car park and the café is an ecstasy in its first bright moment. Liebe! Liebe! Eyes close, fingers touch. But something is missing in all this; there is some mystery.
Years after her time as a Sunday-school teacher Miss Alzapiedi becomes Lady Daysmith – shortened to a reasonable height, supplied with hair that isn’t a nuisance, given a bosom. Lady Daysmith is old of course, Miss Alzapiedi was scarcely twenty in the Sunday school. But a plain girl can grow old gracefully, why ever not? ‘The peepshow of memory is what I mean by fragments’: I hadn’t been in my house more than a month before I caused the woman who had been the Sunday-school girl to utter so.
In the soft warmth of that early morning I paused on the track that led to the heights behind my house. I looked back at the house itself, in that moment acutely aware of how the malignancy of the act had reached out into us, draining so much from the old man, rooting itself in Otmar, leaving sickness with the child. Then I pushed all that away from me and tried once more, though without success, to find a beginning for Ceaseless Tears. I strolled on a little way before finally turning back.
‘I have always wanted a garden here,’ I remarked to Otmar on the terrace less than an hour later. We smoked together. I asked him if there’d been a garden at his parents’ house and he said yes, a small back garden, shady in summertime, a place to take a book to. You could tell from the way he spoke that his mother and father were no longer alive. I don’t know why I wondered if this fact was somehow related to the fear that haunted him. I did so none the less.
*
‘Where is this?’ the child asked, suddenly, a week after my first walk on the white roads. She had been engrossed in one of her pictures, stretched out on the floor. The blinds were drawn a little down for coolness, but there was light enough in the salotto.
‘Where is this?’ Aimée asked again.
The General was sitting with his newspaper, near the windows. Otmar had just entered the room. Neither of them spoke. Eventually I said:
‘You are in my house, Aimée. I am Mrs Delahunty.’
She did not directly reply, but said that her mother was cross because there’d been a quarrel in the yard. Girls couldn’t be robbers, her brother Richard insisted, because he wanted to be the robber himself. As if speaking to herself, the child explained that she was to be the old woman who hadn’t the strength to get up from her sun chair when the robber walked in and asked where the safe was. But she was always the old woman; all you did was lie there. She continued to draw the foreleg of a dog that did not seem to be alive. She shaded its hollow stomach. She and her brother had tried to guess, on the train-station platform, what two Italians were saying to one another. The woman of the pair was angry. The man had forgotten to lock the windows of their house, Aimée guessed.