The Italian Wife (4 page)

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?’

Roberto swung round to find a burly middle-aged policeman behind him on top of the tower. ‘Taking photographs, of course. That’s what Chairman Grassi commissions me to do.’

‘No one is allowed up here, the colonel’s orders.’

The officer was beetroot red in the face, sweating and short of breath from the long climb up the tower steps. He glanced round the ten-metre-square space with its bell-house at the centre as if hoping for a chair to sit on. He removed his bicorn to cool his head but the sun slapped straight down on his bald patch, and the hat was rapidly replaced.

‘There’s nothing here to see,’ Roberto told him. ‘No sign of the woman. She’s left no imprint.’

‘That’s for Colonnello Sepe to decide, not you.’

Roberto inclined his head. ‘Of course.’ He had no wish to cause trouble.

‘So clear off,
fotografo
.’

‘I’m just packing up.’

He started to place the Leica back in his camera box but to his surprise the policeman stumbled over to the far corner and vomited. He remained bent over, his chest heaving. Roberto abandoned his camera box, strode over, and placed a hand on the uniformed shoulder.

‘Are you all right?’

A grunt and a spit of sulphurous bile, then the man righted himself and wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth. His eyes looked anguished but he shook off Roberto’s hand.

‘I’m all right,’ he muttered. ‘It’s just that I’ve never seen a woman’s body damaged like that before. She’s no older than my own daughter and the thought of anything like that happening…’

‘Do they know who she is?’

‘No.’

‘No identification on her? No purse or…?’

‘Nothing.’ The policeman shook his head weakly and propped himself against the parapet. ‘What the hell makes a person do such a thing?’

The question hung in the air high above the steps below.

‘A desire to punish,’ Roberto said softly, more to himself than to the police officer. ‘To punish herself or to punish someone else.’

‘She’s beyond pain now.’

Roberto felt a need to get away from this place, so he picked up his camera box, hitching its strap over his shoulder, and headed for the steps.

‘One thing,’ he said briskly. ‘Tell Sepe to look at her right wrist.’

The policeman suddenly became a policeman again. ‘Why? What’s on it?’

‘A scar.’

White. Shiny. The width of a flat knife blade.

‘A burn,’ he elaborated. ‘By the look of it, not recent.’

The policeman snorted. ‘Women are always burning themselves on the stove.’

Roberto shrugged and ducked into the cool silence within the tower. But as he hurried down the spiral steps, his left thumb could not keep from sweeping over the smooth shiny bar of skin inside his own right wrist.

4

‘What’s that?’ Rosa asked.

‘It’s machinery. For the pumping station.’

Two haycarts were rumbling down the street towards Isabella and Rosa, slowing all the traffic, but instead of hay the vehicles were carrying massive machine parts. A great long screw hung out over the rear of one cart like an iron tail.

‘It must be heavy,’ the girl murmured.

‘It is,’ Isabella assured her. ‘They come by train and are carted out to the pumping station.’

‘They must be strong.’

Each cart was hauled by two well-muscled beasts and Rosa was staring at their long curved horns.

‘Here they use Maremmana cattle instead of draught horses,’ Isabella explained. ‘They can pull from dawn to dusk.’

As the hefty grey animals trundled past, their chests glistening with sweat, Isabella continued to lead the way to the police station. Like the Maremmanas, she was in no hurry. She had no wish to get where she was going. The roads were busy here, the noise of cars filling the air as people ambled along the pavements, going about their business at their usual leisurely pace. The houses in this part of town were smaller and more traditional, nudged up tight against each other under terracotta roofs and intended for lowly office workers. Splashes of colour spilled from their windows. An amber rug was hanging out to air and a vibrant amethyst fuchsia trailed its tendrils from an earthenware window box.

Rosa looked around with interest as she walked at Isabella’s side, as docile as a well-schooled dog – it made Isabella wonder about the girl’s past. It wasn’t that she lacked spirit – she could see it in the dark flashes of her watchful round eyes – but Rosa knew how to keep it curbed. Isabella glanced down at her gleaming curls and at her neat profile that had the beginnings of a patrician nose that promised to be somewhat too large for her delicate face.

She would have to be told. Isabella knew that. She couldn’t let Rosa skip blithely into the police station with no idea why they were there. The words were prepared.
I’m so sorry, Rosa, but a terrible thing has happened…
Yet she could feel a resistance from Rosa, as if she sensed that something bad was about to come out of Isabella’s mouth. When the noise and smell of the carts had died away, Isabella tried again.

‘Rosa, there’s something that you —’

‘Why do you limp?’

Isabella sighed. ‘My back is damaged.’

‘Why?’

Rosa’s attention was on a group of barefoot children playing a game with pebbles in the gutter.

‘I was shot,’ Isabella said.

The dark head whipped round. Now Isabella had her attention.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Why?’

‘My husband and I were both shot. But he died. The week before, he’d been in the March on Rome with Mussolini and…’ Isabella shrugged. As if it meant nothing. ‘Someone wanted us dead because of that. That’s what the police said anyway.’