Adam's Breed E-Book

Radclyffe Hall

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 682

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Gian-Luca has a rocky start in life, his mother dying in childbirth, his father unknown, and he is sent to grow up with his grandparents amongst an Italian immigrant community on Old Compton Street. He becomes a waiter, where he learns the value of hard work, and soon lands a promotion to head waiter in a fine-dining restaurant. He excels in this position, and it is not long before he meets Maddelena, to whom he gets married. It seems he has found a happy ending. However, despite his marriage to Maddelena and his achievements in his work, he finds he is not happy, after all. Life loses its joy, and he comes to despise those he serves in the restaurant, seeing in the diners the ugly side of society. Disconsolate, he sets out to seek a more fulfilling life, and becomes a hermit, trying to reconnect with nature, and hoping to find peace outside of society. Despite winning awards upon its publication, Adam's Breed sank into obscurity following the censorship of Hall's later novel The Well of Loneliness. An early example of immigrant narratives, yet still relevant today, it is time Gian-Luca's stirring tale found its way back to the canon.

Leseprobe

Adam’s Breed

radclyffe hall

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

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020 8050 2928

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Adam’s Breed first published in 1926

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Edited text and Notes © Renard Press Ltd, 2024

Cover design by Will Dady

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contents

Adam’s Breed

Book I

Book II

Book III

Epilogue

Notes

ADAM’S BREED

Dedicated to

OUR THREE SELVES*

BOOK I

chapter i

1

Teresa boselli stood at the window staring down at Old Compton Street; at the greasy pavements, the greasy roadway, the carts, the intolerable slow-moving vans – those vans that, to Teresa’s agonised ears, seemed to rumble more loudly because of that window. There were men in the street, and women too – mothers – yet they let those vans go on rumbling; they did not know, and even if they knew they would probably continue on their way, uncaring.

Teresa’s whole being, soul, heart and brain, seemed to fuse itself together into something hard, resisting – a shield, a wall, a barricade of steel – wherewith to shut away those sounds. In the street below the traffic blocked itself; protesting horses shuffled and stamped; their drivers shouted to each other, laughing; a boy went by whistling a music-hall song; a dog, perched jauntily on a grocer’s cart, sprang up to bark at nothing in particular; and Teresa shook her clenched fists in the air, then let them drop stiffly to her sides. Her eyes, small, black and aggressively defiant, burnt with a kind of fury.

Turning from the window, she looked about the room, with its horsehair armchair and couch. She herself had crocheted the antimacassars that, slightly out of shape and no longer very white, adorned the slippery horsehair. She herself had chosen the red serge curtains and the bottle-green window blind, the brown linoleum so very unlike parquet and the rug so alien to Persia. She herself had made the spotted muslin hangings over pink sateen that clothed the dressing table, and she herself had pinned on the large pink bow wherewith they were looped together. She herself had fixed the little wooden bracket that held the patient plaster Virgin, and hers were the hands that had nailed the Sacred Heart directly over the bedstead. A battered wooden bedstead, a battered Sacred Heart; the one from long enduring the travail of men’s bodies, the other from long enduring the travail of their souls. In the oleograph the Heart was always bleeding – no one ever stanched it, no one ever worried. To Teresa it had stood for a symbol of salvation; she had sometimes condoned with its sufferings in her prayers, but never – no, not once – in her life. She had seen this particular picture of the Heart in a window near the church in Hatton Garden. She had gone in and bought it – three and sixpence it had cost. That had been six months ago this November, while Olga, the beloved, the only child, the beautiful, had been away in Florence serving as maid to the children of rich Americans, teaching them Italian – Maledetti!*

On the wooden bedstead lay an old patchwork quilt, the labour of Teresa’s fingers, and under the quilt lay Olga, the beloved, the labour of Teresa’s body, and of Fabio, downstairs in the shop below cutting up mottled salami. But when Teresa thought of Olga, the beloved, she tried not to think of Fabio.

Teresa was forty. For forty years she had stared at life out of fierce, black eyes that had only once softened to human passion; for the rest they had softened when she looked at Olga; but when she had prayed to the Blessed Virgin, to whose gentle service she had once been dedicated, her eyes had been frightened and sometimes defiant, but not soft as when she looked at Olga. ‘Mea culpa, Mea culpa!’ she had told the Blessed Virgin – remembering the one hot sin of her youth – ‘Ora pro nobis, Sancta Maria Virgine! Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis.’* And then: ‘Take care of Olga, dear Mother of Jesus; preserve her from temptation and the lusts of men…’

Tall and spare as a birch tree was Teresa – as a birch tree that has waited in vain for the spring. Her wavy black hair was defying time; it shone, and where the light touched it, it bloomed, faintly blue in the light. Her forehead had much that was noble about it, but the brows – thick and coarse as those of a man – all but met above the arch of her nose, a few isolated hairs alone dividing them. A slight shade, more marked towards the corners of her mouth, added to the strong, virile look of her. Her dress was sombre and rather austere; it was fastened at the throat by a large mosaic brooch, and in her ears she wore filigree gold earrings. A purposeful woman, an efficient woman, a woman who knew well that four farthings make a penny; a woman who liked the feel of those four farthings, who invested them with romance. Farthings, pennies, shillings, sovereigns – always the ultimate sovereigns. Golden things! Some people might like buttercups; Fabio did, for Fabio was simple, but Teresa preferred the cold beauty of sovereigns; sovereigns could buy flowers, but flowers could not buy sovereigns: her practical Tuscan mind told her that. And yet she was no miser – there was method in her saving; she saved for a definite reason: for Olga. Perhaps, too, she saved a little for Fabio – Fabio who was stupid where money was concerned. He could cut up salami into fine, transparent slices, but only after Teresa had taught him how to do it, scolding, ridiculing, making him feel humble – Fabio who always replied: ‘Sì, sì, cara.’*

Long ago now, more than twenty years ago, she had said: ‘If you love me, you’ll marry me, Fabio, in spite of what you know has happened.’

And Fabio had said: ‘I will kill him first, Cane!’*

But Teresa had said: ‘No, marry me first.’

And Fabio had replied: ‘Allora…’*

After that he had brought her back with him to England. Fabio had already been a naturalised Englishman at the time of his meeting with Teresa in Florence – he had found it convenient in his business – yet never was man more Latin in spirit. Short flares of temper and infinite patience; the patience that sat for hours waiting for trains in the heat of a Tuscan summer; the patience that suffered the hardships of conscription, and later the heart-breaking sunlessness of England, and later still, Teresa’s cold marital endurance – Teresa, who was always repenting the sin that Fabio had helped her to efface. Once back again in London among his salami, his spaghetti and his Parmesan cheeses, damped down by rain and fog and mud, and a little, perhaps, by Teresa’s endurance, Fabio had forgotten to kill his ‘Cane’, which doubtless was just as well. Only when Olga was born two years later did he remember how often he had prayed to Saint Joseph, the wise old patron of wedlock, that she might not be born too soon.

2

sounds! The room was full of them; the house was full of them! The whole world was full of them – a hell composed of sounds! Footsteps in the shop below, the clanging of the shop bell – voices – Fabio’s voice, then others, unknown voices. A door banging, the shop door, people going in and out. And always that ceaseless din of traffic in the street, now fainter, and now louder, more vindictive. Teresa’s body tightened to do battle once again, as though by standing rigid and scarcely drawing breath she might hope to subdue the universe.

The figure on the bed moved a little and then sighed, and together with that sigh came a more imperious summons, the sharp, protesting, angry wailing of an infant not yet fully reconciled to life.

Teresa hurried to the bed. ‘Olga!’ she whispered. ‘Olga!’

The girl’s eyes opened and closed, then they opened again and remained fixed on Teresa; there was recognition in their gaze.

Teresa bent lower; the nurse had gone out – she would not be back for an hour. ‘Who was he?’ – the same monotonous question. ‘Tell me, my darling – tell Mammà that loves you. Who was it hurt my little lamb?’

Olga’s head moved from side to side; feebly, like some sore stricken creature, she beat with her hands on the patchwork quilt.

Teresa’s strong arm slid under her shoulders. ‘Tell Mammà,’ she whispered close to her ear. ‘Tell Mammà, like a good child, Olga, my darling, and then the Blessed Virgin will make you well again.’

She spoke as she might have done fourteen years ago, when the five-year-old Olga had been coaxed and coerced into making some childish confession.

‘Tell Mammà, Olga tell Mammà.’

But the pale lips remained very gently closed. Olga, slipping back again into oblivion, kept her secret safe in her heart. Then Teresa’s will to know rose up stern and terrible – the will of those countless peasant forbears, creatures of hot suns and icy winds, of mountains and valleys and strong, brown soil; creatures who, finding no man to respect them, had made a god of their self-respect, offering the virtue of their women on his shrine, not for that virtue’s sake but for their own. And against this god in the days of her youth, at the time of the gathering in of the grapes, Teresa Boselli had passionately sinned, and had for ever after hated her sin; but never more hotly than at this moment, when she saw it lifting its head in her child, in Olga, who, having betrayed her mother, would not betray her lover. Teresa’s thin form towered gaunt above the bed.

‘Tell me!’ she commanded. ‘Tell me!’

The girl’s lids had fallen – she was very far away; no sounds from the external world could reach her. Teresa stared down at the drawn young face, and her breast ached, as though it would kill her with its pain. Groping for her rosary she tried to tell her beads, the Dolorous Mysteries,* beginning in Gethsemane, and as each tragic decade came to a close she demanded the life of her child.

‘Give me the fruit of my womb, Blessed Mary.’

Her prayers gathered force as her terror increased; the face on the pillow was changing, changing – it was growing very solemn, very aloof. In a passion of entreaty she dropped to her knees, pressing the rosary against her forehead until the beads scarred her flesh. In her anguish she struck at the gates of heaven; she tore at the garments of the Mother of God.

‘Not like this not like this – you spared me, spare her. I demand it of you – I demand Olga’s life! Why should her sin be greater than mine? You who were a mother, you who knew grief – you who saw death at the foot of the cross – you whom I have served in penitence and love – I demand it of you – give me Olga’s life!’

And Olga, drifting always further away, lay with quiet, closed eyelids and motionless lips, giving her life’s blood, but not the secret of her loyal and impenitent heart.

Then Teresa fell to weeping; she wept without restraint, noisily, heavily – her sobs shook the bed. From time to time she drank in her own tears.

The nurse came back. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’ She laid her fingers on the girl’s thin wrist. ‘I must send your husband for the doctor,’ she said, and she hurried downstairs to the shop.

Fabio lifted his head from his hands; he was sitting on a narrow, high-legged stool behind his sausages and cheeses. A small man, himself as rotund as a cheese, with a mild, pale face and a ring of grey hair that gave him a somewhat monkish appearance, in spite of his white coat and apron.

‘Well?’ he said, blinking at her a little.

The nurse shook her head: ‘You must go for the doctor – any doctor if he’s out.’

Fabio got heavily off his stool; his lips were trembling: ‘You go,’ he suggested. ‘I would wish to be with our Olga.’

‘No, I must go back – I’m needed upstairs – but be as quick as you can.’

3

olga was dying – the doctor came and went; he would call again later, he told them.

‘Fetch me a priest!’ demanded Teresa, calm as a general now before battle. ‘There is yet time enough for a miracle to happen; the Holy Oil has been known to save life.’

She stared across the bed at the kneeling Fabio.

‘Don’t drive me from Olga…’ he pleaded pitifully.

Teresa was relentless: ‘Do as I tell you!’

And, getting to his feet, he obeyed her.

4

that night, in spite of the Holy Oil, Olga went on her journey. After the great love that lay hidden in her heart, after the great anguish that lay whimpering in the basket, the spirit that was Olga slipped silently away to the Maker, who would have no need to question, knowing all things and the reason thereof.

5

teresa demanded to be left alone with her child and the child of her child, and because of her voice and the look in her eyes, Fabio left them alone. The room was shrouded in comparative darkness. Four thin, brown candles guarded the bed. From the little red lamp in front of the Virgin came a fitful, flickering glimmer. Teresa stood over the slender body, gazing down with her hard, black eyes; then she turned and lifted the baby from his basket, a tiny lump of protesting flesh muffled in folds of flannel. From her fumed-oak bracket the Virgin watched with a gentle, deprecating smile. She could not help that deprecating smile – it was moulded into the plaster. Majestically, Teresa turned and faced her, and they looked at each other eye to eye. Then Teresa thrust the baby towards her, and the gesture was one of repudiation.

‘Take him!’ said Teresa. ‘I give him to you; I have no use for him. He has stolen my joy, he has killed my child and you, you have let him do it – therefore you can have him, body and soul, but you cannot any longer have Teresa Boselli. Teresa Boselli has done with prayer, for you cannot answer and God cannot answer – possibly neither of you exists – but if you do exist, then I give this thing to you. Do as you like with it – play with it, crush it – as you crushed its mother over there!’

Fabio came up quietly behind her; he had stolen back to her unperceived. He took the baby from her very gently.

‘Little Gian-Luca, come to Nonno,’* he murmured, pressing his cheek against the child.

chapter ii

1

Fabio reared himself up in bed. It was past midnight, and the candle was guttering prior to its final extinction. Fabio’s hair, a dishevelled halo, stuck out grotesquely above his ears; his nightshirt, unbuttoned, showed the thick, black hairs that gave to his chest a fictitious look of strength; and his eyes, so mild and placid by nature, harboured something very like anger.

‘I will have him baptised!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘And I will have him called Gian-Luca!’

Teresa, her throat modestly concealed by the collar of her cotton nightgown, her hair brushed severely from her brow and plaited, her hands clasped before her on the red coverlet, looked at her husband coldly.

‘Why baptised?’ she enquired, as though surprised. ‘And if baptised, why Gian-Luca?’

Fabio turned to her. ‘Is it you who speak so – you who have always been so pious?’

‘I have done with piety,’ said Teresa quietly, flicking some dust from the bedspread.

‘And you would deny him the rites of the Church?’

‘I have done with the Church,’ said Teresa.

‘Ah! Then perhaps you have done with God, too?’

‘Yes, I have done with God, too.’

Fabio stared at his wife aghast. He had not been a practising Catholic for years; still, he had had his ideas about things, and God had been one of his ideas. Something angry and pitiful was stirring in his heart on behalf of the small Gian-Luca; a feeling that he was not receiving fair play, that for all he, Fabio, knew he was being deprived of some mystical, incomprehensible advantage, of something that he had a right to, and the more his heart smote him the angrier he grew.

‘He shall be baptised!’ he repeated furiously.

‘Forms…’ murmured Teresa, ‘just meaningless forms…’ And she shrugged her angular shoulders. The child began to cry, and, stooping down, she rocked the wicker bassinette. ‘Just meaningless forms,’ she murmured again. And then: ‘Why Gian-Luca, Fabio?’

‘It came to me so – it came to me, “Gian-Luca”, I cannot say more than that.’

‘It came to you so?’

‘Yes, I thought “Gian-Luca” as I took him from you that night.’

‘I see – a sign from heaven, I suppose?’

‘Corpo di Bacco!’* bellowed Fabio. ‘Corpo di Bacco! I will baptise him now – I myself will baptise him!’

He lunged out of bed and over to the washstand, dipping his fingers in the jug. Bending down to the now quiet infant, he made the sign of the cross on its forehead. ‘Gian-Luca, I baptise thee,’ he muttered fiercely, ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ Then his anger suddenly deserted him. He looked up at Teresa; she was watching the proceedings with a little smile on her lips.

Feeling cold and rather frightened, he crawled back to bed and tried to take her in his arms. ‘My Teresa,’ he whispered, ‘be gentle, my Teresa – don’t hate our little grandson so much – be gentle to him for Olga’s sake; perhaps she can see us – who knows?’

‘Fool!’ said Teresa. ‘Olga is dead; it would have been better if the child had died too. I feel nothing any more, neither love nor hate – my heart is broken. Can a broken heart feel?’

‘I will try to mend it for you,’ he pleaded.

‘You!’ she said, turning her face away.

The candle guttered and went out. Fabio stared miserably into the darkness; he prayed a little, but without much hope – he had always been rather hopeless in his prayers, always a little too fearful of God. And meanwhile the newly baptised Gian-Luca had mercifully gone off to sleep: his crumpled face was pressed into the pillow; his round, shiny head, ridiculously bald, was slightly bedewed with sweat. From time to time Teresa’s hand dropped softly and set the cradle in motion; this she did automatically, from a sense of duty and custom. The rocking of the cradle fell into line with a hundred other everyday duties that must and would be accomplished, and presently Gian-Luca would fall into line too. He would never be neglected; like the shop and the house he would always be kept clean and sweet, and like the shop and the house he would come to long at times for the hand that dishevelled, that rendered untidy, in a foolish access of affection.

2

gian-luca, having no one to talk to, and having no language wherewith to talk in any case, found himself, as all infants must, at a great disadvantage in relation to life. Had his mind been a blank, as people seemed to think, it would have been easier not to howl; but his mind was a turbulent, seething muddle, in which colic and darkness and the sudden flare of gas jets and ticklings and prickings and stupid grasping hands and uncomfortable confinement in preposterous positions were all jumbled together in nebulous chaos, impossible at first to disentangle. From this chaos one day there suddenly emerged a creature who was beautifully concrete – a kindly young woman who had always been there and had always borne a relation to hunger and to hunger’s ultimate appeasement. But whereas before she, like everything else, had been part of the haze called life, she now emerged a well-defined being that was capable of arousing anger or approval, capable of being smiled at or howled at – capable, even, of being thumped. She could open her bodice and give you what you wanted, or she could refuse to do so. In the latter contingency you felt blind with rage; in the former you felt much less than was supposed, much less indeed than you appeared to be feeling; in the former you quickly became atavistic, doing what you must, automatically, because something, somewhere, ordered you to live.

The concrete creature was Rosa Varese, the daughter of Nerone, who sold tobacco a little way down the street; she was married and had lost her own baby of croup in the very nick of time to provide you with dinners, but all this, of course, you did not know, nor would you have cared if you had. Your emotions were entirely concerned with yourself – not through any wish of yours, but by order of that something that commanded you, Gian-Luca, to live.

Side by side with the curious mystery of food was the mystery of safety pins; the first inanimate objects, these, to emerge from the nebulous chaos. They could press, they could prick, they could feel hard and cold – in fact, they could fill you with fury; but – and this was what was so strange about them – they could fall into your lap and look very alluring – beautiful, even – when they lay in your lap; so beautiful that you wished to pay homage and in consequence put them in your mouth. Safety pins, no doubt rather humble in themselves, were nevertheless important; through discovering them you discovered other things such as coal and soap and thimbles – in a word you developed your sense of beauty, and your instinct told you to worship beauty by trying to swallow it.

But although you were fast becoming familiar with the joys and sorrows of life, there were still big gaps in your comprehension; for instance, the things that they put on your feet – they caused you a most peculiar sensation; you wanted to cry, you wanted to laugh, you wanted above all to pull them off. But whenever you succeeded in pulling them off, someone was always there to slap your hands, and this, in view of your awakening perceptions, struck you as outrageously unjust. And then there was that thing they put on your head – it tormented you and tickled your ears; you were fastened to it by something soft, something that went under your chin. One day you discovered that the something soft could be chewed, and in consequence you chewed it – you did not try to swallow it like beauty – and since you could make but small impression with your gums, why did they always pull it away, making sounds meanwhile that you disapproved of?

Sounds! You began to listen for sounds; you tried to make them yourself – you began to feel that it was not enough to crow or to howl or to gurgle. You began to feel that, given time, you yourself would make sounds that counted; you were still rather vague as to what they would be, but you knew that somewhere out of the void would come sounds that belonged exclusively to you; others might make them, but that would not matter, for with some sort of magic that you did not understand, the fact that you made them would mean that they were yours, as surely as your mouth was yours. One way and another you were full of curiosity, full of a desire to do things. When you had done them they occasionally hurt you, as when you bit the buckle of your pram strap, and made your gum bleed, but taken on the whole you considered it worthwhile, and the next day you ducked your head and bit the thing again – that was the way to face life, you felt.

3

rosa spoke seldom but cried very often, so that poor Gian-Luca had not the advantage of hearing those consoling expressions of endearment that presumably help the infant subconscious to resign itself to life. Had he not possessed a great joy of living, in spite of colic and other tiresome things, Rosa’s tears might very well have damped him; as it was they only irritated. Her tears had a way of dripping on to his head in the very middle of dinner, and he vaguely divined, as it were by instinct, that they spoilt the quality of the dinner itself, which was of course quite inexcusable.

He could not understand the element of tears – they were wet like his bath, but they tasted different, and they came for all sorts of unexpected reasons – for instance when you bumped your head. Rosa would stare at Gian-Luca in silence, and then there would come a noise in her throat – sometimes a series of noises, even: ‘Mio bambino…!’* And then more noises and something splashing off her on to him. They usually spent the day at the Bosellis’, but every night she returned with Gian-Luca to her father’s tobacco shop down the street, where she and her husband lived. She was young and bereaved; she gave of her milk but not yet of her heart – that was not to be expected; her heart was far away with quite another baby, whose food Gian-Luca was consuming.

Gian-Luca had a queer old wooden cradle beside the bed shared by Rosa and her husband. He liked Rosa’s husband – a handsome young man who roared and slapped his thighs, not so much to please Gian-Luca as to please himself – he had never quite grown up. He did a delightful thing, too, every morning: he smeared a species of foam on to his chin; he smeared some on to Gian-Luca’s one day, and Gian-Luca licked it off. The tobacconist was not quite so amusing; still, it must be admitted that he had a wooden leg… The leg made a most arresting noise when he walked – thump, thump, thump, thump – Gian-Luca would listen, and rock with excitement when he heard it. If it had not been for a tendency to colic, every minute of the day would have seemed worthwhile – but of course, one’s stomach being nearly the whole of one, it is apt to have very large pains.

Rosa’s husband was a waiter at the Capo di Monte, and when he came home, which he did very late, he naturally wanted his sleep. He suffered from a swollen joint on one foot, and this made him angry at times. Between Gian-Luca’s colic and Rosa’s tears and the pain in that joint when he took off his shoe, his nights were becoming decidedly unpleasant, which reacted on them all in the mornings. There were mornings now, growing more frequent of late, when his roaring, even to Gian-Luca’s ears, did not suggest a game; when he and Rosa would settle down to quarrel, which they always did in English, because they both disliked it, and because each knew that the other disliked it. Their quarrel-English was particularly florid and beautifully free from restraint; it largely partook of Saturday nights outside the George and Dragon.

Gian-Luca learnt that certain sounds were ugly; that they made you feel strangely disturbed and unsafe. He also learnt that some sounds might be soothing, as for instance when Mario and Rosa made it up with many soft murmurings and kissings. As the weeks turned into months he became all ears; he became a kind of reservoir for words. The words went filtering into him through his very skin, and finally emerged in one loud, triumphant vocable: ‘Gug!’ said Gian-Luca, and then – ‘Gug!’

But ‘Gug’ was not enough – gratifying though it was, it could only express Gian-Luca, and by the time Gian-Luca had known the world a year, he had come to realise that to make one’s presence felt one might have to express a few other things as well – a bore, perhaps, but there it was. Gian-Luca looked about him for the next most worthy object, and wisely decided that four legs and a tail, to say nothing of a thoroughly soul-satisfying bark, had every right to his attention. ‘Dog!’ said Gian-Luca, staring at the mongrel that wandered in and out of Nerone’s little shop.

‘Doggie!’ said Rosa, as one talking to an infant.

‘Dog,’ repeated Gian-Luca firmly.

‘Poveretto!’* wept Rosa to Mario that evening. ‘That his first word should be “doggie” instead of “mamma”, poveretto – what a world of misery we live in!’

‘You would think so if you had my bunion,’ grumbled Mario; then he kissed her, for of course a dead baby hurt far more than even the most virile bunion.

But though Rosa wept with pity, Gian-Luca did not weep; what the ear has never heard and the eye has never seen, the heart of one year’s beating cannot mourn for. In his vast self-satisfaction he walked towards the coal box, fell down, got up, fell down and finally decided that Nature was not mocked, and that progress on all fours was the only normal mode of locomotion.

4

fabio was told the marvel: Gian-Luca had said ‘Dog’, and Fabio was thoroughly offended.

‘Nonno, Nonno, Nonno,’ he cried, pointing to himself. ‘Little Gian-Luca must say Nonno!’

Gian-Luca eyed him kindly; he liked his funny hair, and, reaching up, he pulled it politely.

‘Ecco!’* exclaimed Fabio. ‘He is as strong as any giant, but all giants call their grandfathers “Nonno”, don’t they, Teresa? They say: “Nonno, Nonno!”’

Teresa looked up from a mound of pale grey knitting, then she dropped her eyes again without speaking. She was always knitting something in her spare time these days – knitting had become her obsession. She knitted in the shop, in her cash desk, during meals, and at night she would knit herself to sleep. She knitted very fast, with a harshly stabbing needle, occasionally raising the needle to her head for a swift, proficient scratch between the stitches.

‘Pearl one, knit two, pearl one,’ murmured Teresa, glancing at a book that lay beside her.

‘Nonno! Nonno! Nonno! Say Nonno!’ shouted Fabio, shaking a finger at Gian-Luca.

‘Poveretto!’ began Rosa, with her apron to her eyes, preparing to burst into tears.

But at that Teresa suddenly looked up from her knitting. ‘Basta e supera,* you hear?’ she said sharply; then, as though she had forgotten Rosa, ‘Knit one, pearl one, slip one.’

Gian-Luca considered ‘Nonno’ for some weeks before he finally said it, and when he did so he made a grave mistake – he applied it not to Fabio, but to the wooden leg of Fabio’s friend and rival down the street. The leg had been particularly active for some time – Gian-Luca had heard it for an hour; and when its owner, balancing himself against the counter, had actually lifted it and waved it in the air – ‘Nonno!’ screamed Gian-Luca, beside himself with pleasure.

It was very unfortunate that Fabio should have entered to buy some Macedonia* at that moment. It was even more unfortunate that Nerone should have laughed, with something like triumph in his eyes. Fabio surveyed the group, thrust his hands into his pockets and left the shop without a word.

‘Ma chè!’* exclaimed Nerone, in an access of delight. ‘Ma chè! I think him jealous of my stump!’

For fifteen years these two had behaved like ageing children: quarrelling, boasting, teasing, and loving – always loving – but quick to take advantage of each other whenever it offered.

‘That salami – very bad – your place is going to pieces, Fabio. You naturalise yourself and then you sell us bad salami – the salami looks at you and then goes bad.’

‘I do not sell bad salami – mine is the best in England. As for you, you talk and talk, then sell rotten cigarettes – all powder – one might as well smoke snuff.’

‘You accuse my cigarettes – straight from Italy they come.’

‘Teresa says they come more likely from the Ark. Teresa says I cough – “That is Nerone,” she says, “with his rotten Macedonia all dropping out one end.” She says: “That is that old fox Nerone.”’

‘Ah! So that is what Teresa says. Well, now, tell me this, my Fabio, you find tobacco in my smokes, is it not? What else do you find, beside tobacco?’

‘The dust from the shop.’

‘Oh, I find much more than that – oh, much more – in your salami.’

‘And please, what do you find?’

‘If I tell you you will get angry.’

‘Not at all – I know my salami; he is prime.’

‘Prime, you say? Santa Madonna! Listen to him – prime, he says! Very well, then, it is prime, but I find a little worm. He looks at me, I look at him, he bows, I lift my hat. I have him in a tumbler – come and see!’

For fifteen years these two had played dominoes together, drinking Amarena* in the evenings. When Fabio lost the game – as he nearly always did – Nerone would openly rejoice; if, however, Fabio won it, Nerone lost his temper, and that made Fabio happy for a week. When both their wives had been alive, before Nerone became a widower, they had managed to quarrel over them:

‘My Lucrezia – what a cook! What a marvellous risotto! Why do you let your Teresa boil her rice into a pulp? You should send her here; Lucrezia will teach her how to boil it.’

‘Then you send us your Lucrezia, and we will show her zabaione – we will teach her not to turn it into lumps like scrambled eggs!’

But when sorrow had come upon them – and to Fabio shame as well – they had ceased to nag each other for the moment. They had turned away their eyes, while their hearts grew kind and shy; neither had wished to see the sorrow of the other. They had found no words, or if they spoke they did so fearfully, timid of saying the wrong thing. And when Lucrezia died, Fabio sent a wreath of iris, so large that it ousted all the other floral tributes. And when Olga died, Nerone sent a splendid cross of roses, and: ‘I will have them white – all white,’ he told the florist.

5

no sooner had Gian-Luca found his tongue than he found his feet with a vengeance – there were setbacks, of course, but to all intents and purposes he quickly became a biped. His adventures increased and multiplied, leading him now into strange, alluring places: the back yard, for instance, where the empty cases stood, festooned with flue and smuts. These empty packing cases attracted him greatly – they were dirty, they were hollow, and queer, fantastic labels, together with all sorts of scrawls and lines and crosses, appeared on their battered sides. To do them justice, they were very wise old cases, having travelled with aplomb all the way from Italy. Gian-Luca, of course, was not aware of this – still, he felt that there was something about them… This conviction of his grew and grew, until he longed for a fuller communion – a communion only to be properly attained by filling the void with himself. Into the lowest and kindest of the cases Gian-Luca heaved his minute proportions, to discover – as occasionally happens – that in life it is simpler to get in than to get out, and this revelation when it came was terrific: he was rescued half an hour later by Teresa; still, there had been that half-hour…

At about this time they weaned him from Rosa, and Gian-Luca made his first acquaintance with sorrow. Rosa came daily to push his perambulator, but Rosa, without the comfort of her breast, was not Rosa to him any more. She seemed cold and aloof; ‘tout passe, tout lasse’* – but naturally Gian-Luca did not know this fact as yet. Though Gian-Luca sorrowed, yet his Rosa rejoiced; she no longer splashed him with her tears; if her lips trembled now they did so with smiles – nay, more, she was constantly laughing. ‘I will bring you a little new friend, one day soon!’ she had taken to whispering in his ear; and sometimes she led him into a church, and sat clicking her rosary just above his nose, while he kicked and protested on her lap. ‘You must not tell Nonna where we have been,’ Rosa would caution, holding up her finger – just as though Gian-Luca knew where they had been, or could have told Nonna if he had!

Sometimes Rosa would stay on and play with him a little in the room that had once been Olga’s, but more often he would be shut up there alone, and this, for some reason, he did not object to – he liked the room that had been Olga’s. There were bars in front of the window now, and a high nursery guard for the occasional fire, but beyond these two drawbacks the room was all his – his to do with as he listed. He could twist the large knobs on the washstand by the window; he could crawl away under the bed; he could climb along the charming, slippery horsehair sofa or toboggan down the seat of the chair. He could stare in fascination at the deep wounds in the walls – one just above the bed and four just opposite. He longed to put his finger into these deep wounds, but found that they were too high up. In the region of the wounds the paper hung torn and jagged – it looked like mutilated skin – and Gian-Luca, all agog with primitive instinct, would ache and ache to tear it away.

‘Gug!’ said Gian-Luca, returning fiercely to his first form of self-expression, ‘Gug! Gug!’ And his small hand would grasp the empty air in its eager will towards destruction. Except for those five wounds the walls were quite bare; Teresa had left them just as they had been on the night when Olga died. Only the Virgin, together with her bracket, and the Heart – whose bleeding no hand ever stanched – had gone, and in their place were the wounds that Gian-Luca longed to prod.

chapter iii

1

When he was four a splendid thing happened: Gian-Luca was given the freedom of the shop. It had been impossible to do other than accord it, short of tying up Gian-Luca’s legs, so Teresa threw open the door from the parlour and said: ‘Go, but do not steal the pickles.’

This occurred one morning in July, when the warmth of the sun was busily engaged in coaxing out endless smells. The street door was also standing wide open, and through it came a series of rumblings and shoutings that expressed the spirit of Old Compton Street.

The shop! All his life Gian-Luca remembered those first impressions of the shop – the size of it, the smell of it, the dim, mysterious gloom of it – a gloom from which strange objects would continually jump out and try to hit you in the face – but above all the smell: that wonderful smell that belongs to the salumeria.* The shop smelt of sawdust and cheeses and pickles and olives and sausages and garlic; the shop smelt of oil and cans and Chianti and a little of split peas and lentils; the shop smelt of coffee and sour brown bread and very faintly of vanilla; the shop smelt of people, of Fabio’s bootblacking and of all the boots that went in and out unblacked; it also smelt of Old Compton Street – a dusty, adventurous smell.

Gian-Luca stared about him in amazement and awe; he had never known before this moment how truly great Nonno was, but he saw now that Nonno distributed like God, and that what he distributed was good. From the ceiling were suspended innumerable coils of what looked like preserved intestines. They may possibly have been intestines at one time, but when Fabio sold them they had beautiful names: Bondiola, Salsicce, Salami di Milano – in other words they were sausages. The sausages varied as much in figure as they did, presumably, in taste; there were short, stumpy sausages; fat, bulging sausages; sly, thin sausages; anatomical sausages. There were regal sausages attired in silver paper; there were patriotic sausages in red, white and green; and endless little humble fellows hanging on a string, who looked rather self-conscious and shy.

‘And the pasta! There were plates of it, cases of it, drawers of it, and all the drawers had neat glass fronts. The glass-fronted drawers were entirely set apart for the aristocracy of pasta. One saw at a glance that social etiquette was very rigidly observed, each family of pasta kept strictly to itself; there were no new-fangled ideas.

There were paste from Naples, marked ‘Super Fine’ – Tagliatelle, Gnocchi, Zita, Mezzani, Bavetinne and the learned Alfabeto. There were paste from Bologna – Cestini, Farfalle Tonde; and from Genoa the conch-like decorative Bicorni and the pious Capelli d’Angelo. There were paste* shaped like thimbles, and others shaped like cushions, and yet others like celestial bodies; there were rings and tubes and skeins and ribbons, all made of pasta; there were leaves and flowers and frills and ruchings, all made of pasta; there were yards of slim white pasta that suggested vermifuge, and many leagues of common macaroni. The common macaroni had to fend as best it could – it lay about in heaps on the floor.

But not alone did Fabio deal in sausages and pasta; he dealt in many other things. Providing as he did a smell for every nose, he also provided a taste for every palate. Huge jars of plump, green olives, floating in turgid juices, stood ready to be fished for with the squat, round wooden spoons; a galaxy of cheeses, all approaching adolescence, rolled or sprawled or oozed about the counter. Tomatoes, in every form most alien to their nature, huddled in cans along a shelf; there were endless sauces, endless pickles, endless pots of mustard, endless bins of split and dried and powdered peas. There were also endless bottles containing ornate liquids – Menta, Arancio, Framboise, Grenadine, Limone* – beautiful, gem-like liquids, that, when a sunbeam touched them, glowed with a kind of rapture – came alive. Chianti in straw petticoats blinked through its thin-necked bottles, suspended from large hooks along the walls, while beneath it, in the shadowy bins, lurked yellow Orvieto, full-blooded, hot Barolo and the golden Tears of Christ. Apples, nutmegs, soups and jellies, herring roes and tinned crustacea rubbed shoulders with the honey of Bormio. A kind of garden, this, a Garden of Eden, with a tree of life on whose long-suffering sides had been grafted all the strange stomachic lusts of modern Adam. And as God once walked conversing with His offspring in the garden, so now the worthy Fabio moved among his customers; a mild-faced, placid deity, himself grown plump with feeding – smelling of food and wine and perspiration.

In the little wooden cash desk sat Teresa at her knitting, with a penholder stuck behind her ear. A black-browed, imperturbably austere, regenerate Eve, completely indifferent now to apples. From time to time she laid aside her knitting, found her pen and proceeded to make entries in the ledger. Gian-Luca, looking at her, felt that Nonno might be God, but that Nonna was the source from which He sprang. Nonna controlled a drawer from which flowed gold and silver; enormous wealth, the kind of wealth that no amount of saving could ever hope to find in money boxes.

Gian-Luca had suspected the omnipotence of Nonna, and now his suspicions were confirmed. He knew, had always known, that Nonna must be worshipped – that, moreover, she was worthy of his worship. For one thing she was beautiful, she had small, black, shining eyes, and hair that reminded him of coal. He often longed to rub his cheek against her glossy hair, only somehow that would not go with worship. He adored her bushy eyebrows – one eyebrow when she frowned – not unlike Nerone’s moustache – and the downy, dusky look just above her upper lip, and the tallness and the gauntness of her. He admired her long, brown fingers with their close-pared, oval nails, and her heavy ears that held the filigree gold earrings. He admired her blue felt slippers and her flannel dressing gown, and most of all the queerness and the coldness that was Nonna in relation to Gian-Luca himself. It would be:

‘Nonna, Nonna!’

‘Yes, Gian-Luca, what is it?’

‘See my horse! Look, I will make him run!’

And the horse would run, would gallop, on his little wooden wheels, but Nonna would go on with her knitting.

Or:

‘Nonna!’

‘Yes, Gian-Luca?’

‘I want to kiss your finger.’

‘Do not be foolish – fingers are for work.’

‘Then may I touch your earrings?’

‘No.’

‘Then may I see your knitting?’

‘Gian-Luca – run upstairs and play with Rosa.’

She was conscientious, quiet and she never lost her temper; Nerone had large rages – even Fabio had small rages – but Nonna very seldom raised her voice. And he loved her. With the strange perversity of childhood, he found her a creature meet for love. Her aloofness did but add to the ardour of his loving, to the wonder and fascination of her. From the room that had been Olga’s, he would often hear her footsteps passing and repassing on the landing; now surely she was coming – she was coming in at last; but she never came – Gian-Luca wondered why. It was Rosa who swept that room and tidied up his toys; it was Rosa who washed his hands and slapped him and caressed him. Rosa would call him ‘piccolo’, ‘amore’, ‘cuore mio’,* but Teresa called him Gian-Luca. Fabio would call him ‘angiolo’, ‘tesoro’, ‘briccone’,* but Teresa called him Gian-Luca; and in this there lay great loneliness, great cause for speculation and yet greater cause for further loving.

2

teresa looked up from her knitting one evening, and her eyes rested long on her grandson.

‘Gian-Luca, come here.’

He slid off his chair and went to her, shy but adoring. The light from the lamp lay across her long hands and fell on one side of her hair. It fell on Gian-Luca and illumined him also – a thin little boy in a black overall with a large smear of jam down the front.

‘You have spilt your jam, Gian-Luca,’ said Teresa promptly, but her eyes were not on the stain; then she did a very unexpected thing: she suddenly touched his hair. For a moment her hand lingered on his head, feeling the ashen-fair mop, feeling as one who is blind might feel, seeking for sight through the fingers. ‘This has nothing to do with us,’ she said slowly.

Fabio put down his paper and frowned: ‘You mean?’

She was silent for a moment, pointing. Then: ‘This hair has nothing to do with us,’ she repeated in her flat, even voice.

Fabio’s frown deepened. ‘What of it?’ he muttered. ‘What can it matter, the colour of his hair?’

But Teresa had turned the child’s face to the light and was staring down into his eyes.

Gian-Luca’s eyes, neither grey, blue nor hazel, were a curious compound of all three. They were limpid, too, like the cool, little lakes that are found high up in mountains. His were the eyes of northern Italy – the eyes that the vast barbarian hordes, sweeping over the vine-clad fruitful valleys, had bequeathed to the full-breasted, fruitful women – the eyes that they would see in their sons.

‘Nor have we such eyes in our stock,’ said Teresa, and she pushed Gian-Luca away.

He stood and surveyed her gravely, reproachfully, out of those alien eyes.

‘It is bedtime,’ she told him. ‘Little boys must go to bed.’

‘Sì, sì,’ agreed Fabio anxiously. ‘They must.’

Gian-Luca went up and kissed Teresa on both cheeks; every evening he kissed her like this, on both cheeks, as family custom demanded. Then he turned and kissed Fabio, also on both cheeks; Fabio was very prickly to kiss, for he shaved only twice a week.

‘I will come and turn out the gas,’ Teresa told him; ‘and do not take too long undressing yourself, and do not eat the orange Nonno gave you until tomorrow – it would make your stomach ache.’

Gian-Luca nodded and went towards the door, but in looking back he felt anxious and perturbed to see that Nonna had dropped her knitting and was staring blankly at the wall.

3

gian-luca was usually quite happy in the darkness, after Teresa had put out the light. The darkness had never held terrors for him; he liked it; he found it friendly. Moreover, when he closed his eyes and lay half dozing, he would sometimes see pictures inside his head – vivid and clear and beautiful they were, like a landscape after spring rain. Gian-Luca knew something of trees and grass – once or twice he had been on excursions out of London with Rosa and her husband – but nothing he had seen then came up to his pictures; the only trouble was that they faded away if he so much as drew breath. In Gian-Luca’s pictures there were wide green spaces, and once there had been running water; sometimes there were low-lying, faraway hills, and sometimes a kind of beautiful gloom – green, from the leaves that made it. The pictures were happy, intensely happy, and Gian-Luca grew happy as he saw them. By the next day, however, he had always forgotten their most alluring details; he would have to wait until he went to bed again, and then the darkness would remind him; back would come memory and sometimes new pictures, and that was why he liked the darkness.

Tonight, however, the pictures would not come, though he shut his eyes and waited. The act of shutting his eyes disturbed him – it reminded him suddenly of Nonna. Nonna had stared down into his eyes; she had felt his hair too, and had said things about it – she had said things about his hair and his eyes, things that he had not understood. For a moment, when her hand had rested on his head, he had thought that she meant to caress him; Nonna was not at all given to caresses; still, for one moment he had thought… Well, then he had realised, without knowing how, that Nonna was not being kind – she was not being actually unkind, either, only – she hated his hair. He lay and pondered these things, bewildered, and his heart felt afraid because of its love. It was dreadful to love a goddess like Nonna – a goddess who hated your hair…

He began crying softly to himself in the darkness, a sniffling, lonely kind of crying. The pictures would not come, and Nonna would not come – why should she come when she hated his hair? Still crying, he drifted away into sleep and dreamt of hair and eyes; quantities of fair hair that blew about him, strangling; two strange, pale eyes that snapped themselves together and became one enormous, threatening orb, watchful, coldly vindictive.

He woke because there were voices in the room; Fabio and Teresa were undressing. From his cot that stood beside their double bed, he could see them moving about. They spoke in hissing, insistent whispers – doubtless lest they should disturb him. He closed his eyes again, pretending to sleep; he did not want Nonna to look at him just then. Her voice sounded different – perhaps because she whispered, perhaps because she hated his hair. The same words recurring over and over – ‘Olga’, and then: ‘But his hair – his eyes…’ over and over again. Long after both of them had climbed into bed they continued whispering together; they always seemed to be whispering about Olga, and once Nonno said, ‘How lovely she was!’ And Gian-Luca thought that Nonna sighed. No, he could not bear it; he put out his hand and tweaked the sleeve of her nightgown. He could hear the swift movement of surprise that followed.

‘Go to sleep, Gian-Luca,’ she said coldly.

After that they did not whisper any more, and he must have obeyed her and fallen asleep, for the very next moment it was morning.

4

that day he said: ‘Rosa, tell me, who is Olga-how-lovely-she-was?’

Rosa went crimson. ‘You listen!’ she chided, frowning at him darkly.

He ignored this remark and clung to his point: ‘Who is Olga?’ he persisted. At the back of his mind was a far, faint memory of having heard that name before.

‘You come quick, or I go tell Nonna! You come quick out!’ scolded Rosa; and then relenting, ‘Oh, look, look, caro!* See those pretty flowers, Rosa buy you a bunch.’

He was not deceived, though he took the flowers and allowed her to stoop and kiss him. For some reason she did not like Olga, that was plain – perhaps because Olga had his sort of hair.

At dinner he looked up from a plate of macaroni and said suddenly, ‘Who is Olga?’

There ensued a long moment of deathly silence while Teresa and Fabio stared at each other; then Teresa said quietly: ‘Where have you heard?’

And Gian-Luca answered: ‘Last night.’

‘Olga,’ said Teresa, ‘was my little girl. She is not here – she is dead.’

‘Olga,’ said Fabio, ‘was your mother, Gian-Luca.’

And getting up slowly he went to a drawer. ‘This is her picture when she was small – this is Olga, Gian-Luca.’

Gian-Luca clapped his hands. ‘Pretty! Pretty!’ he babbled, delighted with what he saw.

Teresa and Fabio exchanged a quick glance, then Fabio put away the photograph. Teresa took up her knitting again – she was knitting a waistcoat for Fabio, Gian-Luca watched her efficient brown hands moving in the bright-coloured wools; he was thinking of Nonna’s little girl. Nonna’s little girl was a matter of importance, was something that he could understand; moreover, it was comforting; it brought Nonna nearer; it made her seem so much more accessible, somehow, and more – well, a trifle more like other people. Rosa, for instance, had a little girl now – a plump, fretful creature of two and a half; her name was Berta, and she grabbed Gian-Luca’s toys with amazing acquisitiveness for one who was so young. Rosa would dump her down on the floor while she swept and dusted his room in the morning, pausing now and then to exclaim in admiration:

‘Bella, mia Berta!’ And then to Gian-Luca: ‘Bella, mia bambina, non è vero?’*

Gian-Luca thought that Berta was cross and fat and ugly – and in any case, he was rather jealous of her: she took up too much of Rosa’s time. But Nonna’s little girl looked neither cross nor ugly; on the contrary: she was pretty and had masses of dark hair. He stared across at Nonna; had she ever played, he wondered – with him she was anything but playful!

Nonna must have felt that his eyes were upon her, for she raised her own eyes and said, not unkindly: ‘We will not talk of Olga, Gian-Luca.’

‘Why?’ he protested.

‘She is dead,’ said Nonna. ‘One does not talk of the dead.’

And after that nobody talked any more, so the meal was finished in silence.

5

in the afternoon Fabio reached down his hat and went in search of Gian-Luca: ‘Come, tesoro, I will take you for a walk. Nonna will guard the shop.’ He held out a friendly hand to the child, and together they turned into the street.

‘Would you like to go and play with Berta?’ enquired Fabio, anxious, as always, to be kind.

Gian-Luca shook his head, but after a moment: ‘I would like to play with Olga.’

Fabio said dully: ‘Olga is in heaven – she cannot play, piccino.’*

‘No?’ Gian-Luca’s voice sounded doubtful. ‘Do they not play in heaven, Nonno? Do they not want to play?’

‘They are with God,’ Fabio told him gently.

‘And will not God play with them?’

‘God does not play.’

‘I do not like God.’ said Gian-Luca.

‘And yet He is good…’ murmured Fabio to himself. ‘I am almost certain He is good…’

They walked on in silence for a while after that; it was hot, and Gian-Luca’s legs began to flag; Fabio stooped down and took him in his arms.

‘Nonno is a horse – you shall ride!’ he said gaily, as though to reassure the child.

Fabio ran a little and Gian-Luca laughed, thumping to make him go faster. In this manner they returned to Old Compton Street; the sweat was pouring down Fabio’s face. At the door of his shop stood Rocca, the butcher, enjoying the balmy air. Rocca saw Fabio:

‘Buon giorno, Capitano!’* Rocca had been a good soldier in his day, and now he used military titles for fun. ‘Buon giorno, Capitano!’ he shouted.

Rocca was much esteemed for his meat, which was usually both cheap and tender. He was also much esteemed for himself – an honest fellow, if somewhat lacking in the gift of imagination. As a rule, his display of edible wares was moderately unobtrusive, but today he had something arresting to show; Rocca had purchased a couple of kids, which dangled outside his window. The kids were very realistic indeed; they hung there complete, pelts and all. Their little hind legs were bent back over sticks, their noses pointed to the pavement. They looked young but resigned, and their patient mouths had set in a vaguely innocent smile. In their stomachs were long, straight, purposeful slits through which their entrails had been drawn. Despite that innocent smile on their mouths, their eyes were terribly dead and regretful, and as they swung there, just over the pavement, they bled a little from their wounds.

‘Belli, eh?’* demanded Rocca.

‘Ma sì!’* agreed Fabio, lifting Gian-Luca higher in his arms, whereupon Gian-Luca burst into tears.

‘Oh, poor… oh, poor…’ he sobbed wildly.

‘Ma chè!’ exclaimed Fabio, genuinely astonished. ‘What is the matter, piccinino?’

But Gian-Luca could not tell him; could not explain.

‘Can it be the little goats?’ enquired Fabio incredulously. ‘But do not cry so, my pretty, my lamb – they cannot hurt you, they are dead!’

‘Ecco!’ roared Rocca in his voice of a corporal. ‘Ecco!’ And, producing some fruit drops from his pocket, he offered them to Gian-Luca.

But Gian-Luca turned away. ‘Oh, poor… oh, poor…’ he wailed, until Fabio, shaking his head, carried him home, still weeping.

‘No doubt it was the heat,’ he told Teresa afterwards. ‘I thought he might be feeling the heat.’