The Italian Wife

  They walked through the gates into a spacious courtyard that was scorched by the sun and surrounded by three very modern four-storey apartment blocks with long curved balconies and silky-smooth stone exteriors. A yellow-tailed lizard was sunning itself on the stone path, too lazy to move, and Isabella could hear music playing in one of the ground floor apartments, an aria from Tosca. So Papa was home.

  She found herself inspecting the exterior of the apartment through the child’s eyes, seeing the Modernist beauty of it, the stark and stylish plainness that was such a contrast to the suffocating fussiness of the old cities. Isabella loved its clean refreshing lines but she wasn’t sure what Rosa would make of it. The shutters were half closed against the brilliance of the cobalt autumn sky. The courtyard consisted of stone pathways around a central dolphin fountain but there was not a blade of grass yet to be seen. The seeds had been planted but the town needed time to grow into its own skin. There was just a small olive tree on the left that her father had planted, but its young branches were dry and brittle. It looked no happier here than he was.

  ‘Here we are, Rosa,’ she said again cheerily. ‘Come on in.’

  Isabella’s father was sitting in his favourite armchair, a large ruby-coloured velvet wing-chair that was so old it wrapped itself around him. In his hands, as always, lay a book. Dark, densely carved furniture cluttered the heavy shadows within the room, while on the table beside him stood an open bottle of red wine and a glass. Next to it the gramophone was playing, Tosca spinning hypnotically on the turntable.

  ‘This is Rosa,’ Isabella announced.

  The girl flashed Dr Marco Cantini a brief glance before fixing her gaze on the terracotta-tiled floor.

  ‘Buongiorno, Rosa.’ His eyes crinkled into a large smile of welcome under heavy eyebrows. ‘To what do we owe this pleasure?’

  Rosa’s mouth remained firmly closed in complete silence, the ultimate weapon of a child.

  ‘Sit down, please, Rosa,’ Isabella said, and steered her to a seat at the table. She hoped the girl would know better than to touch the gramophone or she would provoke Papa’s wrath. Isabella poured wine into the glass and drank half of it straight down but she was shocked to see the hand holding the glass was shaking.

  ‘Papa, I need a word with you.’ She glanced pointedly at the child. ‘In private. Outside in the courtyard, please.’

  ‘Send the girl out there if you want to —’ He stopped. Looked at her hand. Without further comment he exchanged his reading spectacles for his distance ones and strode out into the bright sunlight. Isabella was hot from hurrying through the streets and led her father into a cool patch of shade.

  Dr Marco Cantini was a big man with a barrel chest and a large important-looking head. He kept his grey hair cropped short but his moustache and eyebrows remained so stubbornly jet-black and luxuriant that he rarely had the heart to trim them. He liked to laugh a lot. Sometimes Isabella suspected that his patients came to him more for his laughter than for his pills and potions.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

  Isabella wanted to say Hold my hand. Like ten years before. But instead she took a mouthful of the wine she had brought out with her to make the words slide over her ash-dry tongue.

  ‘I saw a woman kill herself today, Papa.’

  His hooded eyes didn’t even widen. Her father had probably seen too many dead people in his time as a doctor.

  ‘She jumped off my tower.’ Her voice sounded odd, even to herself.

  ‘Off the top of Party headquarters?’

  She nodded. ‘Head first.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘The woman came up to me in the Piazza del Popolo and asked me to watch her daughter. It was Rosa, the young girl inside. She promised to return quickly and I believed her but instead she threw herself off the top of the tower and I dragged Rosa away from the square, so she doesn’t know about it yet, hasn’t realised, and,’ her words were breaking up into fragments, ‘and I understand that I have to tell her…’ She paused. ‘But I am so angry at her mother for —’

  ‘There is no point in anger at death, Isabella. I learned that a long time ago.’

  ‘But I can’t stop it, Papa.’

  They both stared at the bright splash of wine left in the glass in her hand. It was swirling up and around the curved sides as if it had its own private torment.

  ‘I have to take Rosa to the police station…’ Isabella started.

  But her father took a long stride towards her. He was tall and always held himself upright as if he believed he belonged up there in the more rarefied atmosphere, but he bent down now to peer closely at her face.

  ‘Are you all right, Isabella?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m worried about Rosa.’

  She didn’t tell him that she kept picturing the mother’s dead eyes at the bottom of the tower, wondering if they were like Luigi’s. Outstaring the sun. But it wasn’t the kind of thing Isabella and her father told each other. There was always a gulf between them, however hard they sought to avert their eyes from it. Her father had never forgiven her for marrying one of Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Thugs, Dr Cantini called them, the word ugly in his mouth.

  Isabella finished off the wine and swung around to return indoors but Dr Cantini put out his hand as though to hold on to her. It only hovered for a moment without touching, then fell to his side. They rarely touched each other, the two of them. They were very un-Italian in that way. He did so much laughing and touching in his work as a doctor that at times it seemed there was none left for his daughter. She understood that. They may not touch often, but they talked. They both liked words.

  ‘Isabella, I am going to telephone Sister Consolata. She will be able to help.’

  ‘I’m not sure that…’

  His large face thrust even closer. She could see suspicion in the deep lines that ran vertically down his cheeks and she knew he was assessing her, judging her, the way he would a sick patient.

  ‘Do you need a shot of something?’ he asked.

  She shook her head adamantly. ‘No.’

  A flush crawled up her cheek to her hairline. They both knew that her father could remember a time not so long ago when she would be begging him for a shot of something to ease the pain. She wanted to say, I’m all right now, I’m back in control. Rosa is the one with the problem, not me, Papa. But the words were lost somewhere in the gulf between them, so she hurried out of the courtyard back into the house to find Rosa, and the dimness of the room with its heavy mosquito mesh over the windows washed over her. Rosa was no longer seated on the chair. She was standing on tiptoe in front of Dr Cantini’s marble clock that rested on a dark mahogany cabinet. She had prised open its glass face and had moved the hands, so that it was now striking twelve noon. The chimes rang out in the silent room like a death knell for her mother.

  At the sound of Isabella’s footsteps on the tiles Rosa turned her head and gazed at her with mournful eyes.

  ‘She’s not coming back for me, is she?’ she said.

  3

  Roberto Falco had never photographed a dead woman. A dead ox once, yes, before it was spitted and roasted. A dead woman, no. She lay inside his camera, upside down and in miniature – only four inches by five – and he found it impossible to look away. As he stalked around the smashed body on the ground with his Graflex in his hands, winding the shutter cloth on its internal spools and popping up the viewfinder on the back, he was disgusted to find himself relieved that she wouldn’t move. He didn’t want her to spoil the shot.

  It was only when he lowered the camera to change the film sheet and looked at the scene with his naked eye that the horror of it gripped his guts and he felt a wave of sorrow for the dead woman. She was spreadeagled on her front. Her head hung down several steps lower than her feet, as she lay there in her black garments. Limbs snapped in fifty places. Bones poking up through flesh. Yet the fingers of one hand were curled in a tight fist as though she’d made one last desperate attempt to cling on
to life before she hit the steps.

  There was blood. Of course there was blood. He dragged his eyes from her body, removed the film holder from the camera and replaced it with another from his leather equipment case with practised skill. His fingers worked smoothly despite the shakes. He craned back his head, squinting up at the milky-white tower, assessing the exposure he would need – most likely 1/20 second at f/16 and the Schneider wide angle lens. The tall white building rose sharp and menacing against a backdrop of wind-swept sky, but as he stared at it the tower seemed to lean over the sad little scene at its foot, watching the people in the square below with satisfaction. Roberto took an instant dislike to it.

  What made her do it?

  A young woman, judging by the skin of her hands. Yet so eager to embrace death. Why would she do such violence to herself?

  There must be someone who knew. Someone, somewhere, whose world would be rocked to its core by this supreme act of selfishness. In death he felt the force of her, and it filled the sun-drenched piazza in a way she could never have done in life. Roberto knelt and brushed his fingers against the unknown woman’s clenched hand, full of regret for a life thrown away.

  ‘Falco! Get away from there,’ a man’s voice snapped.

  Roberto’s hand recoiled. Abruptly he became aware of people and sounds around him. A crowd had gathered on the steps, voices wailing, a woman sobbing quietly, a man on his knees praying and others crossing themselves in the presence of death. The click of rosary beads started up.

  ‘Falco! Give me that camera!’

  Roberto turned to see a large fleshy man in a well-cut suit advancing on him, chest first, shoulders back, his broad shadow leaping ahead of him as if it couldn’t wait to get its hands on the camera. Signor Antonio Grassi, chairman of the local Fascist Party. Roberto rose to his feet with no intention whatever of giving up his camera. It would be like giving up a limb.

  ‘Chairman Grassi,’ he acknowledged with a cool nod of his head. ‘A tragic incident here on your own doorstep.’

  Grassi’s arrogant brown eyes did not even glance at the woman on the steps as he held out his hand.

  ‘Give me that camera,’ he ordered again.

  ‘I think not,’ Roberto replied softly. This was not the moment for a shouting match over a camera. ‘The carabinieri need to be informed.’

  ‘I am already here, signor fotografo.’

  A uniformed figure, thin as a blade, stepped out from behind Grassi, and Roberto had to suppress a shudder at the sight of the distinctive dark blue uniform with silver braid on collar and cuffs, and the distinctive red stripe of the carabinieri police down the side of the trousers. The wide bicorn hat gave his head the look of a cobra as it flares its hood ready to strike.

  ‘Hand over the camera to Chairman Grassi.’

  ‘Colonnello Sepe, it’s not necessary. I am just doing my job as official fotografo of Bellina – taking photographs.’

  Behind him police officers were beginning to push back the crowd to the bottom of the wide steps and take up positions like a dark blue wall around the body.

  ‘Signor Falco, you are employed by me,’ Chairman Grassi pointed out with irritation, ‘to record the creation of this new town. Not to take ghoulish pictures of death.’ The volume of his voice was rising.

  Roberto let his gaze fix once more on the black smear of life that had been ended on the steps of the Fascist headquarters. He was under no illusion as to why Chairman Grassi wanted no photographs of it. He flipped up the catches on his Graflex and, cursing under his breath, removed the film holder from the back of the camera and held it out at arm’s length to Grassi. The chairman took it from him and ripped it open, exposing the film on both sides to the light.

  At that moment a tall man walked briskly through the crowd. He was dressed in a long winter coat and was carrying a medical bag. The doctor had arrived with that ineffable air of distinction that seemed to stick to members of the medical profession closer than their own shadow, but he was too late to be of the slightest use. Roberto’s eyes were drawn to the woman’s mane of untidy hair that still seemed to shimmer with life, as the doctor knelt at her side.

  He snapped shut his own equipment case and before Chairman Grassi thought to ask for possession of any of the other film holders in there, he moved away. The taste in his mouth was sour and with a sudden change of direction he headed for the door to the tower.

  Roberto stood in silence on top of the tower, his heart beating fast from the climb. Before him stretched the long narrow flatlands of the Pontine plain, bare and bleak, all vegetation uprooted. A few kilometres off to the west glinted the silvery ribbon of the Tyrrhenian Sea, while inland to the east of the plain rose the purple ridge of the Lepini mountains with the ancient trade route of the Appian Way.

  A sluggish wind from the sea was stirring the air that hung heavy with dust over the town of Bellina. Though only thirty kilometres south of Rome, it was a barren and godforsaken place in Roberto’s opinion. Flat and lifeless, as well as too hot and humid in summer.

  But he had to admire Mussolini’s audacity. His gross arrogance. His sheer strength of will in believing that he could succeed where Roman emperors, popes and even Napoleon had failed before him. It was a mammoth task – to drain the malarial swamp that was the Pontine Marshes. The trouble was that the dunes along the coast lay at a higher level than the ground at the foot of the Lepini mountains to the east. This meant that the rivers that drained off the mountains had pooled and stagnated on the plain for centuries and turned it into an unhealthy mosquito-ridden marshland. Not only was Mussolini draining the marshes, but he was also replacing them with the construction of six perfect new towns on the reclaimed land. It took breathtaking hubris and yet Il Duce was succeeding. Against all the odds. Delegations flocked from all over the world to inspect this eighth engineering Wonder of the World and Roberto was obliged to photograph each one of them who came.

  Bellina was the first of the new towns to emerge from the swampy ground. God help the thousands of peasants who were being rounded up from the north, from Veneto, Friuli and Ferrara, and shunted on trains down here to be cooped up in the little blue farmsteads like experimental mice in glass cages. They would be watched. Every move they made.

  Roberto pictured the woman breathing in the dusty air, drawing it deep into her lungs, trying to calm her nerves as she stood on the tower. What made her jump? Had her spirit been torn out of her, the way the heart of the marshes had been torn from the land?

  Not long ago this land had seethed with animal life, with wild boar sharpening their tusks on a dense forest of trees. Dangerous brigands used to hole up here for the winter and shepherds brought their sheep and goats down from the mountains to graze during the winter months, when the mosquitoes were dormant. But for most of the year the swampy plain had been impenetrable because of the vast suffocating clouds of mosquitoes that infested the swamps, as black and vicious as the shadow of death itself.

  They were anopheles mosquitoes. One bite and the bastards could pump tertian malaria into your blood and you’d be dead and buried within forty-eight hours. Or if you were really lucky, you’d get one of the slow kinds of malaria that crept up on you as silent and stealthy as a Medici assassin, with bouts of fever and an inexorable poisoning of the liver. The mosquitoes had to go, Mussolini was right about that. Il Duce was intent on dragging Italy to the forefront of modern Europe, hand over fist, whether it wanted it or not, and in his Great Battle for Grain there was no room for this black plague.

  The parapet of the tower was chest height and Roberto ran his hand over the warm white marble edge. He pictured it, the woman hauling herself up on top of it, her feet scrabbling to find a toehold. Will it hurt? That thought must have stuck in her head, that question pounding against her skull as she balanced on the edge. Will the fall feel like for ever?

  Who was she? What had driven her to this?

  Roberto flipped open his camera case, slipped a new film holder into the Graflex
and took his time focusing on the spot on the bare white wall where there were definite scuff marks. Then he looked down over the edge of the parapet and immediately wished he hadn’t. The drop was giddying. What kind of desperation did it take to leap off solid stone into nothingness?

  An ambulance had pulled up at the base of the steps. Roberto snatched the Leica from his case – it was less unwieldy than the Graflex, though the picture quality was nothing like as sharp – and focused it on the scene below, where the body was being shuffled on to a stretcher. The church bell abruptly started to toll at the far end of the piazza, sounding slow and regretful, as a figure in loose black robes appeared on the steps of the church. It was a priest, standing in front of his plain and angular house of God. Even from this distance Roberto could feel the mood down below change as the priest’s shadow spread its arms in the shape of a cross and stretched out into the square.

  ‘What the hell are you doing up here?’