The Missing Italian Girl (25 page)

“Séverine! She’s quite notorious.”

“Notorious? Really?” Once again, with teaching duties, the household, and Jean-Luc, Clarie felt she was missing out on things she should know.

“She published a newspaper with an old anarchist Communard. She’s had more than one husband. Left her children with one of them. Then she was caught with her lover—or so they say—in a public restroom. When there was a mining strike, she, a woman, went down into the mine to report ‘first-hand’ on the conditions—”

“But surely that’s a good thing,” Clarie interrupted, “standing up for the workers.”

“Yes, but a woman.”

“Why not?”
Why not, indeed.
Clarie was not about to defend Séverine’s relationships with her husbands or lovers, although had she been a man….

“Well,” Bernard said with a wry smile, “more recently her fame has come from columns begging alms for the poor during the winter. They earned her the nickname ‘pity on wheels.’”

“I take it you don’t like her or her work,” Clarie commented dryly.

“Well, she did raise quite a bit of money for charity,” Bernard conceded. “Anyway, what about her?”

Clarie brought the article over to Bernard. “She asserts that the bomb Angela Laurenzano’s friend is accused of planting was actually the work of an agent provocateur.”

“Hmmm.” Bernard hardly glanced at the article before handing it back to her. “She’ll always say she’s on the side of the poorest, most despised people. That’s her brand of anarchism.”

“But isn’t that what you’re doing? Seeking justice for poor workers?”

“Yes, as long as they stand up for themselves and
don’t commit violent crimes.
We’re building unions, institutions. That’s the way to go.”

There was so much more Clarie could have said. Wasn’t beating and abusing a young girl, practically a child, a violent crime? What about women who sewed alone in their rooms for hour after hour for a pittance, with no unions to protect them, no one to be on their side? But she didn’t say any of this. It was almost dinner time, and she did not want to revisit a futile disagreement in front of Jean-Luc. Besides, if the authorities had every legal right to hold the Russian girls and Francesca would not go to the police in search of Maura, there was little that Bernard could do, even if he wanted to. Clarie sighed and got up to put the paper back on the fireplace. Behind her she heard Bernard talking to Jean-Luc about how they were all going to see plays and hear music at the Labor Exchange to celebrate Bastille Day. She opened the
L’Echo de Paris
again and stared at Séverine’s byline, wondering what kind of woman would stand up so courageously against common opinion.

10

M
AURA TRIED TO HELP
N
ICO
. Really tried, although she found picking through the stinking refuse of Paris thoroughly disgusting.

On Sunday night, she carried the lamp as Nico scoured his assigned territory in the eighth arrondissement, where the city conscientiously collected garbage from rich mansions and apartment houses. Since it was a wealthy and relatively clean neighborhood, it was much less profitable than poorer districts, like the Goutte-d’Or, where municipal collections were less regular and fastidious, and whole families of ragpickers scavenged for rags, bones, fat, metal, cork, and glass to sell and, if they were lucky, some discarded food for their shanty-households.

Maura learned about the territories and routines quickly because there was little to learn, except how nauseating and humiliating life could be. Ragpickers could not begin work before ten
P.M.
and had to be off the streets by four in the morning, lest they offend the eyes and noses of their fellow citizens. And so before every dawn, this army of malodorous souls returned to their hovels, where they sorted their spoils into piles to be sold to a master ragpicker, an enterprising man or woman who had made it to the top of the heap. Whatever they could not sell or consume was strewn, in rotting mounds of filth, along the cobbled road outside their shanties, making Maura grateful she shared Nico’s oasis by the vineyard. She at least had the consolation of knowing that after the revolting task of cleaning, sorting, and selling, she’d be able to wash in the well water and sleep on the pallet that Nico had fashioned for her on the packed earth floor of his shed. She might have found the routine almost bearable, if it hadn’t been for Mme Florent.

In their northern district, this loud, fat harridan in turban and pantaloons was the Queen of Garbage, the General of the Scavenging Army, the High Priestess of Just Rewards. Except she was neither royal nor pious nor just. Standing on one side of Mme Florent’s huge receiving tent, Maura quickly perceived that the ragpicker mistress had favorites among the pushing and yelling men and women eager to get their pay. With those who brought the biggest piles, she carried on a bantering bidding war, which always ended up in her favor. With the old and the weak, like Nico, she was stingier and nasty. She even threatened that if he and “his new helper” didn’t do better, she might not do business with him anymore.

“Does she always talk to you that way?” Maura asked as soon as they were out of the hearing of others.

“She is not a nice woman.”

“She doesn’t have to be that mean.” Maura hated seeing the kind old man treated that way.

Nico shrugged.

Maura continued to press. “That quivering piece of flesh stands on that platform! Her helpers do all the dirty work. She’s got a purse full of money. She only pays you for what you bring. What difference is it to her how much you collect?”

“I believe,” Nico said patiently, “that she wants to become richer than she already is. Besides, what do I need? Only to eat, to wash, to sleep, to keep warm in the winter.”

Clenching her fists, Maura strode ahead of her companion. She wasn’t sure what made her angrier, the uncalled-for spitefulness of the ragpicker mistress or the resignation of the old man. Resigned, like her mother. Except, Maura slowed down, he was so peaceful, not a martyr like Maman, always asking for your pity. Maura did not understand Nico, but she could not forsake him either. She stopped, closed her eyes and waited for him to catch up. Offering a lopsided smile to show she had calmed down, she lifted the basket from his shoulders and strapped it on hers. They trudged the rest of the way, across the vineyard, in silence.

Her quiet demeanor during their washing up and preparing for bed apparently made the soft-hearted Nico believe that she was sad and in need of consolation. “The first days are the hardest,” he told her. “I remember. It can break your spirit, this work. But you are strong. And you’ll soon be going back to your mother.”

These words did make her sad. She hadn’t realized how much she would miss Maman. But she couldn’t go home, not as long as the police were after her and there was a killer lurking about. “How did you become a ragpicker?” she asked. She wanted to think about something else.

“That is a story.”

“Tell me,” she said, as she lay down on the rag-and-straw mat he had set on the floor for her. She moved the bag packed with her belongings under head, using it as a pillow.

Nico pulled a dark cloth across the window above her head. He limped to his bed and lay down with a sigh that seemed to say that there was an aching heart inside his old aching bones. “You want to hear?”

“Yes.”

“It might put you to sleep.”

Maura smiled. That’s what she had been thinking, remembering her father’s bedtime tales. She hadn’t realized his story would be all too familiar.

When Nico was only six years old, a man had come to his Italian village, offering to teach the skills of a musician to young boys and girls. Nico’s father signed a contract with the man and told his son that he would be coming home in a few years, after he earned enough to pay for his training. Nico was sent to Marseilles where another
padrone
took over, teaching him to beg and to play the violin. If he didn’t make enough money by the end of the day, he was beaten and not given his dinner. Eventually the padrone taught him the concertina. As Nicoletto, he became somewhat famous in the streets and parks of the port city, and made a great deal of money for the padrone. But the beatings did not stop, so he ran away. “Like you,” Nico said to Maura, “I had to run. I was twelve.”

“Did you ever get to go home?”

“No, I never saw my mother or father again.”

“That’s what my father used to say,” she whispered. “He was abandoned in Paris because they said he was getting too old and too big to beg.” She stared at the rag-covered ceiling, wondering if her father had ever found his way back to his native village.

“A man who had often brought his children to see me play,” Nico continued, “found me wandering in the streets. When I told him that I was afraid of being caught, he took me with him on a trip to Paris and asked his brother, who ran a restaurant, to take me in. For years, I was afraid to show my face. I worked hard in the kitchen, washing and cleaning. It was the kindness of these two men that saved me.”

“Then what happened, how—”

The sigh was even heavier than before.

“Gradually I learned to cook, and one day when I was sent to buy meat, I met my sweet, dear Jeanne. I thought my loneliness was over. She owned a shop. We sold beautiful sausages hanging from the ceiling. She taught me to make them. She was so kind. She liked to laugh. But she got a cancer. Oh, how my dear one suffered! After she died, her relatives took back the shop and told me to leave. I called her my wife, because she was my love for many years, but we never married, never had children. And in the end, I was only an old Italian who no one wanted.”

Maura rolled over. She shouldn’t have asked him to tell his story. She already knew how unfair life was. Pyotr and Angela were dead, and everyone thought that they were violent criminals.

“Maura? Maurina?”

“Yes.”

“I do still have my concertina. I used to play it for my Jeanne. It made her happy. I can play it for you tomorrow.”

“All right,” she said, although she wasn’t sure what tomorrow meant in the world of night-time ragpicking. Was it when they woke at dusk or when they went to bed in the daytime? A piece of straw poked through a rag and tickled her nose. She brushed it aside as she tried not to think about Nico’s story. Part of him was happy, she told herself, the part that loved the patches of beauty that he wove into his tattered life: music, color, the vineyard, the well, a fresh egg or two every week. She could feel from the way he talked to her that, because she was a companion, because he thought of her as someone like the boy he had been, a young person in need, she, too, brought him some happiness. Comforted by that thought, she closed her eyes, determined to stay at least for a while.

The next day their collections were even sparser. Unable to bear seeing Nico humiliated again, Maura offered one of the treasures she had brought from home, her hair to sell to a wigmaker. At first he refused, but Maura insisted. Yet even this bounty provoked a reproof from the harridan. “At last,” Mme Florent said, as she held up the little string bag bursting with Maura’s black curls, “something worth buying. Too bad I can’t give the old limper a full price, since I’ve been giving him charity for months.” And with that, to laughs of derision from her helpers, she dismissed him with a ten sous, only half a franc.

Maura was fuming. She knew the hair must be worth much more, a good meal for the two of them at the very least. If she could, she would have snatched it back. Instead, she grabbed Nico’s basket, strapped it on her shoulders, and hurried through the crowded ragpickers’ neighborhood. She pushed her way through the street as men, women and children scurried over the mounds in front of their doors like a colony of ants, gathering scraps for their bedtime meal. By the time Nico caught up with her, she had pulled up the bucket of water from the vineyard’s well, and was washing her hands and face.

“I’m sorry about your beautiful hair,” he said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“I thought at least we could get something good to eat.” She had squandered part of herself. It was silly, but she was almost in tears because they had sold her hair for a pittance.

“We will eat well today,” Nico assured her. “Today is the day of the anarchists’ soup kitchen.”

“I don’t care.”

“It will make you feel better.” His cloudy, dark brown eyes grew large as he tried to convince her. “They sing and make good speeches. They say that everyone should eat well and be free, that we don’t need governments or churches to tell us what to do. They say all work has dignity, even this, as long as we help each other.”

“I know that!” Hadn’t she told him about Pyotr?

“Come,” he urged. “You know I like to wander a bit and think of different things.”

“Like a better world?” she asked sarcastically. When was that going to happen?

“Yes, Maurina, a better world. Come, my child. You’ll feel happier.”

If she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have never agreed. But, then, she would have never found a way to tell the truth about Pyotr and Angela.

The anarchists distributed soup in a dusty field which lay somewhere between the ragpickers’ quartier and Nico’s territory. As Maura and Nico, empty tin bowls in hand, lined up for their soup, a man accompanied by an organ grinder sang revolutionary songs. They were meant to inspire, but Maura tried to ignore the music until she heard the words “She was young and beautiful. He was strong and full of worth. Everyone remembers them. The Fiancés of the North.” She liked the words and the melody.

“Do you know that song?” she asked Nico.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It really happened. Two young lovers killed by soldiers because they were marching for freedom.”

It had really happened. It was true. Two pure, young lovers, like Pyotr and Angela.

Maura settled down next to Nico under a scrawny tree. Listening to speeches was the price a few score bedraggled men, women and children paid for their “free” meal.

Today the speakers complained about tomorrow, Bastille Day, a holiday which should honor “the people” who rose up against the King, the Queen and the rich. Instead, they said, the so-called Republic was showing its true colors by parading its military power down the Champs-Elysées. “Down with the army! Down with the rich!” they cried. “Let us make our own celebration!”