The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (13 page)

Lucio studied the limestone under his hand, the holes weathered into it like honeycomb. The whites of Nonno Raimondi's eyes were the same colour, almost the tone of the Gold itself. They became hard and narrow whenever anyone became too curious about the grappa and the Raimondi method. ‘That's for me to know and you to drink,' his grandfather would growl. When Lucio collected him from the osteria some nights, Nonno Raimondi would pinch his cheek and slur cryptically, ‘Gufo knows though, don't you, boy? The quiet ones have all the secrets.' The men would frown at Lucio in disbelief, unable to see in him the next great alchemist of Raimondi Gold. And outside, when they were alone, his grandfather would say, ‘Tomorrow, eh Gufo, tomorrow. We'll do it soon.' But tomorrow never came.

‘Don't even think about not asking him, Guf,' Vittorio interrupted his thoughts. ‘You get onto him, OK? Or else I will.'

Lucio looked up at his brother mulling on the grape skins and spitting them out, like he was chewing tobacco. ‘Do you think Mamma really married Papa only to get the vines back for Nonno?' he said, partly as a way of changing the subject, partly because he was thinking of his mother, the sound of her breath at the window that morning as she watched his father leave.

He knew what his brother's response would be: Vittorio rarely questioned the common knowledge of Montelupini, even when its logic was dubious. ‘Yep. Everyone knows Papa got the arse end of the mule in that deal, but they say he was a fool about her in those days. Just imagine, if he'd married a Ronzoni or an Ippoliti girl we'd be ten times richer, and he'd probably be mayor by now.'

Lucio gazed at a remnant haze of summer heat pooling in the valley. ‘We wouldn't be us, though, would we?' he answered, but his voice had no substance and felt like nothing more than the itch of cicada song in his throat.

‘Come on,' his brother said. ‘Let's get the Don over with.'

Padre Ruggiero was asleep in a chair on his verandah. Through the kitchen window Signora Mazzocchi, his housekeeper, called for them to take the baskets down to the cellar and not to wake him. The screech of her voice alone, however, was enough to rouse the priest.

‘Ah, boys,' he called to them, folding back his rug. They approached him and ducked their heads.

Vittorio drew a shy smile from his repertoire. ‘Sorry, Padre. We didn't mean to wake you.'

‘Never mind,' the priest said, but as he replaced his biretta, its red tassel wagged at them like a reprimand.

‘Papa sent us with the last of the grapes.'

He took the basket and felt carefully between the fruit. ‘Yes. Good. Did they have a safe start this morning?'

Lucio knew very well that Padre Ruggiero had already been told every detail of the soldiers' departure before they'd even disappeared around the bend to Montemezzo. Signora Mazzocchi, who reported to the priest on every prayer and peccadillo of the Montelupinese, was not known as La Mula for nothing. She could make the steep track between the village and the priest's house faster than anything on four legs, including Padre Ruggiero's Esperian mare.

Vittorio lowered his eyes at the priest's question and didn't answer. Lucio heard him conjure a faint sigh.

‘Well, Primo. Good boy, good boy,' the priest murmured, reaching for their shoulders and prompting them into a kneeling position. He placed a hand on each of their heads, saying a short prayer for the speedy return of their father. Vittorio whispered a fervent
amen
.

‘He'll be back before you know it,' Father Ruggiero said, pushing their heads away as permission to rise. He reached down and pulled out a large bunch of grapes from one of the baskets. From it he pruned two stems of bruised fruit that had been crushed against the bottle. Lucio expected him to toss these to the ground and scold them, as he often did, for their careless packing. But instead he opened Vittorio's fingers and placed the weeping clusters in his palm.

‘There. Now off you go, boys. Off with you! And make sure you help your mother. Signora Mazzocchi tells me there are still some late figs rotting on the tree in the Vigna Alba. But I'm sure Letia will manage the land very well without your father. She has you two to help her, after all. So I won't need to ask another family to take over, will I?' His smile was rigid and he did not blink.

They left him swatting at a fly, and passed under the trees of his orchards, taking the shortcut home. When they reached the chalk track, Vittorio broke into a run and Lucio struggled to keep up. On the stone platform of Rocca Re, his brother stopped and bent over, breathless. ‘Prick … arsehole,' he yelled, his neck bulging with the effort of it, ‘fuckwit!' A trickle of grape juice dribbled through his fingers onto his dusty boots. He jerked his fist up, knifelike and obscene, hurling the mashed grapes into the air. They stood for a while, and Lucio could almost feel his brother's anger crackling like static about them.

‘Come on,' Vittorio said at last, gazing at the drop in front of them. ‘Come on. Fuck it all. Let's do it … Do it. Jump!' The words became a chant in his mouth, something tribal, to satisfy the raging in his blood. ‘Jump! Jump!' It had always been his dare, ever since they had first climbed there alone — to leap from Rocca Re into the scree twelve or fourteen feet below. There the mule track snaked back on itself, continuing down to the village. Jumping Rocca Re would have saved them walking time, but that was never his brother's motivation. ‘Just to jump,' Vittorio would explain. ‘Just to do it, that's why. To be the king of the mountain.' But he had never actually taken the leap. Not until then.

Before Lucio could put out a hand to stop him, Vittorio had flung himself over the ledge, his wild shriek the only thing left behind. Lucio teetered on the rock's lip, craning to see: his brother was lying on his back in the loose shingle, a rip in the arm of his shirt blossoming red, his eyes open but vacant.

‘Primo!' Lucio cried. ‘Pri?' A chill surged up his neck and through his hair. He heard a soft groan from below, and another that became a shuddering cough. Finally Vittorio surrendered to a belly laugh, writhing with it as he drew up his cut knees. ‘Your face,' he wheezed between convulsions. ‘Your face, Guf … peeping over the edge … like I was dead!'

Lucio sat down, his legs dangling over the drop, listening to the thrum of his heart through his whole body.

Vittorio brushed himself off, fingering the cut in his elbow. ‘Come on then, Guf. Jump,' he called up. ‘Do it. Do it! Challenge the king of the mountain!'

Lucio peered down at his brother's face — that grin like a spell, the creases at the corners of his eyes half-encouraging, half-critical. He got up and balanced on the edge of the precipice, feeling his fear in the grip of his toes, the weakness of his knees and stomach, the adrenalin that threw every detail into relief and made him weightless with anticipation. His love for Vittorio was exactly that contradiction: the soaring thrill of possibility and the crushing need to protect himself, to protect them both.

He pushed back his hair with his wrist and made his way slowly down the slope of the mule track.

That night Fabrizia, Urso's wife, was waiting for him under the battlement wall. Her legs were planted wide, her arms crossed over her brawny breasts. ‘Come down,' she called into the night. ‘Yes, you, Gufo. I know you're up there.' He considered the line of her broad jaw, the angry quiver of her shawl in the moonlight. The butcher's wife was not a woman to refuse. She grunted at him as he dropped down from the shadows into the piazzetta, but once he was in front of her, she hurried away towards her house in Via Allori, her shoes darting like fish under the oceanic sway of her backside.

At the door to her house she paused and sniffed, checking him over. He began to regret following her. Perhaps she was brewing one of her famous scoldings, like the time she stormed into the osteria and dished Urso their anniversary dinner straight onto the briscola cards. The other men had spluttered and sniggered, but when she was gone, the quiet left behind was the worst kind of reprimand, like the hot, grubby calm that follows a sirocco wind, and Urso had squirmed in his seat until enough time had passed for him to slink home.

‘Well, come in, then,' Fabrizia complained, as if he had asked to follow her. ‘I haven't got all night.' He had no idea what he was doing there. Inside the kitchen, she lit the oil lamp and motioned to the scrubbed table. On it was a basket with his jacket folded inside, washed clean of Valeriana's blood. ‘Take it. There's a pork knuckle in there, too — for your mamma to make stock.'

He felt the urge to reply, but she waved her hand before her like she was shooing a mosquito. He picked up the basket and stepped back towards the door. As he passed her, she took hold of his arm. ‘Urso —' She stopped and bit her lip. In the lamplight her skin was downy, pinkly veined about the nose and cheeks. ‘He was quite specific about it,' she said. ‘Told me it was you and only you who should have it, being the special one, the one to make it.'

He didn't understand. He wanted to ask her about Urso, to have her ease his mind, but she sucked in her breath and pushed him over the threshold.

‘And make sure you bring that basket back,' she said. He turned to nod, but she had already shut the door in his face.

In the piazzetta of the old village he squatted under the streetlamp. The cat with the broken tail picked its way over the battlement walls. Draughts funnelling along the alleyways carried the chill of winter that night, and the men at the osteria had gone inside. He heard a cry of ‘Scopone!' from within, followed by murderous yells and groans. The basket at his feet creaked. At first he thought it was the draught that made his jacket stir, but when he put his hand upon it he could feel warmth, a wriggling underneath. A paw jutted out from under the collar. He pulled back the fabric to find a puppy, stretching from sleep. It was tan all over, its ears too big for its body, its belly swollen with worms. Next to it was a bottle of milk and a glass medicine dropper, like the ones his mother used to measure out herbal tinctures to add to the grappa. Urso must have gone to her to borrow it, for no one else in Montelupini used such an instrument. He began to understand why he had never seen the butcher in the days after the hunt. He had been nursing Valeriana's puppies, keeping them alive with goat's milk, drop by drop, or trying to, at least. That was an indulgence the men at the osteria would never let him live down. So this shivering runt was all that was left of the seven, the lone survivor of the great cane corso's litter? It was so small that its entire body was curled within the circle of Valeriana's spiked collar. He fingered the rusted nails driven through the leather. Beside the collar lay the hard bone handle of Urso's skinning knife. He drew the blade out of its sheaf and weighed it in his hand. The puppy squirmed again. They had big shoes to fill. Both of them.

The donkey was discovered missing long before Nonno Raimondi. Lucio had thought he was at the osteria all night, but when he checked, Fagiolo shook his head.

‘Barilotto's not been in all day.' The innkeeper rubbed at his chin, looking at the end of the bar, where Nonno Raimondi's stool was vacant. ‘Has your mother checked up at Prugni?'

‘There was a little widow in Gavignano he used to visit in the autumn,' Polvere called from his spot at the bar. ‘He used to talk about her truffle pig, you know. And her big …' The baker cupped his hands before his chest.

‘Santa Lucia, Polve, I think those days are past for the old boy,' Fagiolo said. ‘He could hardly get his leg over a donkey, let alone …'

‘Wouldn't stop him trying.' Polvere shrugged. ‘I know Barilo.'

Lucio left them still debating and went home. His mother was on the floor, beside the crate where they had made a bed for the puppy, running its ear between her fingers and thumb. She glanced up. He hated to see the disappointment on her face as he entered alone.

‘It's typical of him to do this to me.' She got to her feet and paced the kitchen. ‘He's only got the one bottle of Gold in his pocket. I checked the cellar. He can't last a day on that. He should have been home by now.' She snatched her shawl from the back of the door. The lines of her face had settled from anger into worry.

Lucio picked up the lantern and followed her as she started along Vicolo Giotto, going down towards the vineyards, in the direction of Prugni. A young moon hung over them, weak and nearly transparent. His mother headed beyond the last plot and through a shortcut of waist-high grasses before joining the thin track where the rugged rise of the mountains began again. When she turned to him, her face was pale in the glow of his lamp, her hair loose down her back. She might have just risen from sleep. Or from death, he thought. He knew where she was heading: the single hoary chestnut tree that whistled its lament between the ruins of the old settlement. There, the eerie quiet of the ancient foundation stones made the villagers tell ghost stories of massacred Volsci, the mists clinging to the mountain, scented with the smoke of funeral pyres.

‘He used to go to the ruins to drink himself to oblivion,' his mother said. ‘He's crafty. He knows no one ever dares go up there, so he won't get disturbed or brought home.' Lucio looked at her. She dared though, didn't she? She had always been fearless like that. He sometimes believed it was her seizures that made her so. Walking constantly along an abyss would make any other track seem easy.