The Dividing Stream (29 page)

Enzo shook his head.

‘‘Anyway you’ll have a square meal this evening.’’ At this moment Signora Rocchigiani was frying the sparrow-like birds. ‘‘You were a fool to get chucked out of that place, though.’’

Ever since Enzo had left Lady Newton’s his family had been telling him what a fool he had been. As if he didn’t know; as if he hadn’t learned that lesson, bitterly, through hunger! ‘‘Yes, I was a fool,’’ he said.

‘‘Can’t your American pals do anything for you?’’ Giorgio asked, inserting a hand into his open shirt and scratching luxuriously.

‘‘They got me the job.’’

The Rocchigianis always spoke of the American family with a mingling of envy, admiration and contempt. ‘‘Well, let them get you another,’’ Giorgio said.

‘‘They can’t.’’

‘‘Of course they can! Have you asked them?’’ Enzo did not answer. ‘‘Well, have you?’’

Oh, leave it! It doesn’t help to talk about it.’’

‘‘As you like.’’

Giorgio shrugged his shoulders and continued to scratch, his eyes fixed, with that same dreamy, half-bemused expression, on the cracks on the ceiling.

The meal was good, and to Enzo, who had not eaten since breakfast, it seemed a real banquet. But his father, who tore at the birds with his fingers and crunched their bones between his teeth, spattering the cloth, the stained handkerchief he had pushed into the collar of his shirt, and his unshaven chin, never ceased to grumble: ‘‘ You should have rolled them in bread-crumbs. And a sprig of salsafi. There’s no flavour otherwise. The little bastards might be fried mice for all the taste they have. Salsafi, bread-crumbs. You knew that, didn’t you? You’ve always done it before. Good God, it’s not as if it were the first time …’’

Through this growl, punctuated by hiccoughs, the crackle of bones, and prolonged sounds of suction, Signora Rocchigiani said nothing but ‘‘I’m sorry.… I’m sorry.…’’ Some indeterminate complaint, for which she would not see the doctor, was turning her sallow skin even more yellow and making her eyes protrude so far that it seemed as if she were in a state of perpetual astonishment.

Fräulein Kohler and her ‘‘niece’’ had been invited to join the party, and the German woman had dressed herself for the occasion in a black silk frock, so unfashionably short that it showed both her podgy knees, a white lace fichu, and a pair of black shoes with diamanté buckles on them. The extra chair which had been brought into the kitchen for her was so low that, although she was a large woman, she looked somewhat deformed as she stooped greedily over her food, her chin, with its wisps of reddish hair, only a few inches from the table. She had contrived to get the largest of the helpings, and was now racing for another; until she looked up to notice that her ‘‘niece’s’’ plate remained untouched. Bella sat, the smooth hands whose fragility contrasted so pitifully with her ‘‘aunt’s’’ resting in her lap; she was staring down at them.

‘‘What’s the matter, Bella?’’ Fräulein Kohler asked, picking a bone from between her teeth. ‘‘ Eat up, there’s a good girl.’’

Bella said nothing.

‘‘Bella!’’ Fräulein Kohler said loudly. ‘‘Eat up your food. It’s good.’’

Bella sat immobile, her head still lowered.

‘‘Bella!’’

There was a splintering of bones in Signor Rocchigiani’s mouth and the sound of his rejecting fragments back on to his plate as his wife said: ‘‘I should leave her, if she doesn’t want to eat.’’

‘‘But I can’t think what’s come over the child.’’

Giorgio nudged Enzo and winked; but the younger boy had reached a state where he could not even bear to look at the epileptic, much less to laugh at her. When he was in a room with her he always now experienced the same mingling of pity and an inexplicable kind of dread.

‘‘Bella,’’ Fräulein Kohler was saying in the voice used by nannies who have decided to be ‘‘sensible’’ with their charges, ‘‘you don’t want to waste all that good food, do you? You don’t want to be hungry tonight? And think of Giorgio who spent hours shooting the birds for us—and of Signora Rocchigiani who cooked them.…
Lebe Gott
! What is the matter with the girl?’’

Two tears had welled out of Bella’s fine dark eyes and were followed by others which came more and more rapidly. Her face remained impassive as if this grief, like her epilepsy, were some divine visitation beyond her control. Without shame or attempt at concealment, she accepted these tears; and that very acceptance had the effect of intensifying the mood of nervous dread which Enzo was suffering.

‘‘Bella, do stop snivelling.’’

With a sudden shudder and a grimace, Bella turned her head aside as if purposely to reveal the red, corrugated scar, its texture that of a coarse piece of horse-meat, which disfigured her so terribly. She said something inarticulate (Enzo heard: ‘‘I can’t … let me go … don’t …’’) and then in a noisy paroxysm of tears she rushed from the room.

Fräulein Kohler sighed: ‘‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the girl. These last few days she’s been even worse than ever. It’s so worrying. And tonight I have to go out and leave her alone again. Ah, well, we all have our crosses to bear.’’ Signora Rocchigiani had been waiting to serve Fräulein Kohler with a second helping and as soon as the German woman realized this, she held out her plate: ‘‘Only a few, dear,’’ she said. ‘‘I might as well finish up what that stupid child has left.’’

After dinner Fräulein Kohler locked Bella in their room and set off for Fiesole; and soon after the Rocchigiani family, with the exception of Enzo, went to an open-air cinema.

‘‘Come, Enzo,’’ his mother said to him as they waited for Signor Rocchigiani who had retired to the lavatory after his meal.

‘‘You know I can’t come, Mother. I haven’t any money.’’ She looked in her purse. ‘‘I’ve nothing either.… Giorgio?’’

‘‘No use asking me, Mother. My pension isn’t due until next Friday.’’ Giorgio drew deeply on his stump of cigar and then began coughing.

‘‘Why do you smoke that shit?’’ Signor Rocchigiani demanded, doing up his braces as he appeared. ‘‘No wonder you can’t stop coughing.’’

Giorgio did not answer.

‘‘I wish you could come, Enzo,’’ Signora Rocchigiani said, looking with her painfully protruding eyes in the direction of her husband.

‘‘Oh, I’ve told you, Mother,’’ Enzo began impatiently.

‘‘It would have been so nice, all the family together. We don’t often all go out like this.’’ She looked back at her two sallow, lanky girls who stood silent behind her, and then said mechanically: ‘‘Wipe your mouth, dear.’’ They were children who had, prematurely, something of their mother’s air of suffering, and this set them, as it set her, apart from the menfolk. They spoke little and were always playing quiet, adult games or reading comic papers.

‘‘Let the boy earn some money and then we can think of nice family parties.’’ Signor Rocchigiani raised his hand as if he were going to yawn, but it was a belch he delivered. ‘‘Let’s go,’’ he said thickly.

‘‘Couldn’t we—wouldn’t we perhaps lend—?’’ Signora Rocchigiani began, but she was cowed into silence by a massive:

‘‘No, damn you, no!’’

Giorgio stamped out his cigar under his shoe, and smiled at his brother, while the others went on: ‘‘Tough luck,’’ he said; and he put his hands in his pockets and followed them whistling.

Enzo lay on his bed for a while attempting to read a copy of
Picture Post
which Colin had given him. He was trying to learn English but, unlike Rodolfo, who picked up phrases with the same facility that he picked up belongings, the Florentine made little progress. He ran a slow finger under a line and then scrabbled the pages of a dictionary, which had also once been Colin’s. Physically, he felt sated after a meal of such unaccustomed grandeur, but spiritually he was experiencing a complete sense of emptiness. When he had worked for Lady Newton, though he had often to do unpleasant and even degrading things, he had felt that he ‘‘ belonged’‘; he had his place in the world and in his own family. Each week he had surrendered the major part of his wages for his father to drink; and though he had resented this, it had bought him his rights. Those rights no longer existed. Once again he was loose, like a vessel so worthless that no one goes out to retrieve it; and until he again bound himself, he knew that he would suffer from this perpetual sense of unreality and waste.

But with Colin he sometimes escaped this feeling and that was odd, for the English boy puzzled the Florentine as much as if he belonged to a totally different species. Enzo did not even know if he liked Colin, and the kindnesses he performed for the English boy seemed sometimes to be performed out of a compulsive sense of duty rather than as acts of friendship. Perhaps, after all, he felt happy when he was with Colin because he guessed that the English boy needed him; though how great was that need Enzo must never have realized. If he had analysed their relationship (which, of course, he never did) Enzo would have discovered that it was at once more, and less, than a mere matter of liking or disliking. They ‘‘belonged”; the English boy needed him, if only to help him to hobble on his crutches, and he, more subtly, needed the English boy to give him the assurance he existed in a world where his apparent uselessness had made him doubt that fact. Colin was the first person to whose happiness he had been a vital necessity; and being that, Enzo had recovered a long-lost belief in his own powers.

Now he decided to go and see his English friends, and having plastered his hair with water, and splashed more water over his face and his arms, he took up the
Picture Post
and the dictionary and went out to the landing.

From above a voice shouted: ‘‘
Chi è? Enzo
?’’; and the face of the upstairs tenant, a small, vitally garrulous woman with neat features and grey hair, was looking down at him.

‘‘Yes, it’s me,’’ he said. ‘‘What are you doing?’’ He ran up the stairs two and three at a time, and found that at this already late hour she was scrubbing the encrusted tiles before her front door. Those she had not already washed were grey with dirt, but the others glowed red, as if inflamed into that colour by her ceaseless friction.

‘‘I want it all to look nice for the wedding.’’ The next morning her only daughter was going to be married at Santa Croce church and for weeks past she had been working at her preparations. ‘‘See, I’ve polished the knocker. It looks a treat, as if it were gold. I can’t tell you how long it took me. And inside I’ve got a whole heap of flowers my brother-in-law brought me from Antella.’’

They talked for a few minutes more, though no doubt she would have liked to go on talking for the rest of the evening, and then Enzo left her, once again hearing, as he jumped down the stairs, the hiss and scrape of her brush on the tiles and the ring of her bucket. But when he passed Bella’s door he heard another sound too. The girl was making an inhuman kind of moaning, one low, prolonged cry following rhythmically on another, like the keening of women at a funeral. A chill came over him, as he stood by the door, irresolutely wondering whether he should call out and ask her what was the matter. Probably nothing, he decided, for he had long since decided that there was no logic in anything she did. But it was eerie, and he felt that he wanted to run far, far away. ‘‘Bella!’’ he called. ‘‘I say, Bella!’’ No answer came.

He shrugged his shoulders, turned back once as if to make another attempt, and then ran on.

He picked up Rodolfo by the Uffizi, where he was slouching in the hope of cadging a cigarette or a meal from some foreigner, and together they made their way to the Palazzo d’Oro. They found the children in, playing cards in one of the lounges, while Maisie played patience separately on a small table. She threw each of the Italians a cigarette out of her tortoise-shell case and then, peeling off a piece of cigarette-paper which had stuck to her lower lip, asked Enzo: ‘‘Any luck with a job?’’

‘‘None.’’

‘‘I wish I could think of something.’’ She rested her spidery, heavily ringed fingers on the edge of the table, the skin round the thumb-nails gnawed and chewed from nervousness, and at last said: ‘‘ Haven’t you any ideas?’’

‘‘Plenty,’’ Rodolfo grinned, with the kind of pertness he knew that she liked.

‘‘Such as?’’

‘‘If we could go to Tunisia,’’ he said, thinking of the idea for the first time. ‘‘We could run away together and begin a new life. But it needs money—plenty of money,’’ and he rubbed the finger and thumb of his right hand together.

‘‘I thought your family was turned out of Tunisia,’’ Pamela interrupted. ‘‘I thought Italians weren’t allowed to work there any more. I thought that was what you said.’’

Rodolfo grinned, making a weaving movement with his left hand: ‘‘Everything is possible,’’ he declared enigmatically.

‘‘You mean you could go back?’’ Colin asked.

‘‘If we had the money.’’ Rodolfo used his little finger to flick the ash off his cigarette into the glass bowl which stood at Maisie’s elbow, and then peering over her shoulder at the patience said: ‘‘Everything can be arranged.’’

‘‘His breath is something terrible,’’ Maisie said in English; but she was enjoying the proximity.

‘‘How much money?’’ Colin pursued.

‘‘A hundred—a hundred and fifty—thousand.’’ Rodolfo was about to pick up one of the cards and place it somewhere else, but was stopped by Maisie who gave his hand a slap as she exclaimed: ‘‘Leave it alone, boy. I want to do it myself.’’

‘‘For the two of you?’’ Colin said, with a tense kind of persistence.

‘‘For the two.’’

Later Mrs. Bennett joined them, leading Nicko by one hand and carrying one of his fairy-stories in the other. ‘‘Read, Granny,’’ he said; but she sighed, ‘‘No, dear, I’m really far too tired,’’ and sinking on to a sofa in the shade of a distant corner, she at once closed her eyes and appeared to fall asleep. But there was no relaxation in either her face or her body. She slept like a soldier waiting for an attack. A nerve throbbed incessantly in one of her eyelids and every line seemed to be drawn taut, almost to breaking-point. Her chin was tilted upwards, her hands were clasped tight; and her whole body, erect on the sofa, gave the impression of a monumental straining forward, as if life were struggling in a vast piece of statuary.