The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (9 page)

‘What?' he muttered. ‘No, no … you were five or six, maybe, the first time we climbed up there … they thought you were addled in the head … pazzo!' A laugh cracked in his chest. Lucio stopped to stretch his aching shoulder. A hum of remembering sounded in his grandfather's throat. ‘We were a pair, you and me — the drunk and the mute. But I'd catch you with your little fingers in my paints and brushes, see?' His grandfather held his arm, not for support now, but to stop him walking on.

‘Padre Ruggiero wanted that fresco finished for the feast day … and the snow lying thick all through the woods, and the quiet …' He stopped and cocked his head as if listening to their steps through the white forest. ‘Cold as an unpaid whore that grotto was … needed a few nips to get the blood back in my hands. But you? You squatted outside in the snow all morning. Wouldn't budge. You'd spied an owl in the chestnuts, remember?'

Lucio shook his head. He'd never heard this story before and he didn't recall the day at the saint's chapel. He remembered going with his grandfather to paint other frescoes or church panels sometimes, waiting patiently through the hours of preparation, hypnotised by the pencil lines and brushstrokes when they came, forgetting the image itself until it burst upon him like a magician's trick, confounding, yet somehow inevitable. But it had been a long time since Nonno Raimondi could keep a brush steady, a long time since his grandfather worked his magic.

‘I had a rest, see. Just a quick siesta on a pew,' he continued, animated now, telling the story like he was back in the osteria playing briscola. ‘When I wake up, Gufo's standing in front of me, brush in his hand and paint on his face. I jump up to the fresco and then I see it: knee-high to Santa Lucia — the owl on my mural. Holy Christ, it was so alive I thought it might spread its wings and fly through the chapel grille!' His voice crumbled and he coughed, hovering to inspect the phlegm at his feet as if he was reading a portent. ‘Hard to believe it was you … so young for work like that. You have to wonder if something else … some darker spirit was involved.'

Nonno Raimondi pulled him close again, examining his face. Confused emotions seemed to blossom and wither in his grandfather's eye — awe, then fear, then … was it jealousy? Lucio couldn't tell.

‘On the way back down the mountain, I found that owl dead on the path, like a bad omen. The next day I went back and painted over its likeness. That's why, see?' His grandfather raised two fingers in the sign of the cornuto to ward off the evil eye. ‘Better to be on the safe side, eh?'

‘Be on the safe side if you went to bed, Papa, don't you think?'

Lucio glanced up to see his mother, propped on the window ledge above their heads. She sat very still, barely giving them her attention, as if they had disturbed her in some other more important vigil.

‘I'm telling Gufo his story, is all,' Nonno Raimondi said.

‘He doesn't need your fairytales and superstition. And he doesn't need that stupid nickname. What's the point of naming a child if this village insists on giving them another name?' His mother was in a black mood, blacker than her loose hair and even that, Lucio thought, made the starless night above her seem a lie. She stood and stretched out her arms beyond the window casement for a moment, before pulling the shutters smartly, unafraid of the clatter in the alley and the sleeping neighbours.

Nonno Raimondi wrestled a peptic hiss from his throat. ‘A force to be reckoned with, that woman. Her mother used to sit like that on the sill.' His mouth fell ajar at the memory. ‘She'd snap the shutters on me in that very same way.' He gave a rare smile, strangely fragile and rueful. ‘But she was just a little bird, really … a little bird, waiting to be let out.'

‘Keep track of the old man,' his father told them the next morning. They were in the cellar under the house in Vicolo Giotto. Lucio leaned against the walls of the bowed stairwell that smelled of mould and vinegar and overripe fruit. His mother and Vittorio were filling two baskets with clusters of grapes. ‘If you leave him to it, he'll throw in the eating fruit and skimp the pressing to make richer vinacce for his grappa. And don't mix up the vinegar barrels.' He rapped on the casks. Leaving the task of winemaking in their hands seemed to trouble his father more than leaving them. Or perhaps it was a distraction, his way of not saying goodbye.

His mother didn't speak. She straightened and regarded the baskets brimming with fruit on the hewn floor of the cellar. His father hovered close beside her, and Lucio saw him reach for his mother's hand behind the folds of her skirt. When she avoided his touch, his father caught hold of her wrist, pressing his thumb into her skin, until he appeared to think better of it and pulled away.

Lucio had once thought there was no love between his parents. In the villages, marriage was a matter for the marketplace, for trading goods and land. The Montelupinese had a saying:
On the scales,
love is a lot lighter than potatoes
. And yet there were times, such as this one, quiet and fleeting, when he sensed his father betray something. It might have been love, but to Lucio it seemed more like a dull pain, some gnawing ache cosseted deep within. It reminded him of the way Nonno Raimondi looked sometimes when he held up a bottle of Gold to study its colour and concentration — that aching need, that terrible dissatisfaction blunting his gaze. Perhaps that was how his father loved his mother: compulsively, without joy, and hating himself for it.

His grandfather had passed out in the chair by the fire the night before. When Lucio brought the baskets of grapes up from the cellar, Nonno Raimondi was awake, leaning to spit in the empty grate. At the fireplace, Lucio took up the poker and stirred the ashes, careful to avoid the jangle of the iron. The first hour of the morning was always the most dangerous around his grandfather.

‘I heard your father. Self-righteous prick,' he was muttering. ‘What would he know about my grapes anyway? Wait till he's tasting weak Fascist beer and poxy Libyan whores. Then he'll appreciate my grappa and my daughter.'

With the toe of his boot he nudged at one of the baskets Lucio had set on the floor between them. ‘He's asked you to take these up to the Don, has he?' Lucio didn't answer. He knew what was coming. His grandfather was the only person in the village who called Padre Ruggiero
the Don
like he was saying
the devil
. The grapes were the last of the eating fruit from the Vigna Alba, the smallest and sweetest of the harvest, picked even while the leaves were shrivelling on the vines. His father always gave them to the priest, and Nonno Raimondi couldn't bear it.

‘
I
planted those vines, you know,' his grandfather said, raising his voice and angling his head towards the open cellar door. ‘
My
planting and
my
pruning — that's what makes them fruit so late.' He grunted and put up one foot on the edge of a basket, as though staking ownership of it. His hand, hanging from the arm of the chair, trembled violently.

When the others came up from the cellar, his father walked to the fireplace and pulled the basket away, making Nonno Raimondi's leg clunk to the floor. ‘Something to say, old man?'

Nonno Raimondi hocked into the grate again. ‘I said, I used to bring those grapes home to sweeten my wife, not some paunchy priest.'

‘So I understand,' his father said, like he was humouring a child. ‘But perhaps if you'd stayed sober once in a while you wouldn't have needed to sweeten her. And you could have given the Church the proper share of the yields from
their
land.' Lucio saw his brother glancing between the two men, his face alight with the prospect of the argument to come. Their father glared at Vittorio and thrust a basket into his chest, sitting down to lace his boots. ‘Don't fool yourself, Barilotto. Any work you ever did in that vineyard was for your precious grappa. Do you even remember what an unfermented grape tastes like?'

‘And do you? Does your family? As soon as anything is ripe you offer it up to that fat friar like a good little serf.' Nonno Raimondi was surprisingly quick off the mark, given his state the night before. Lucio wondered if he'd been rehearsing a farewell speech of his own. ‘All your talk about Italy and the
new era
, but in the end you're just like your father. You Onorati understand nothing but rules and work and duty. The Church's, Mussolini's — you can't live without someone telling you how.'

His father didn't look up. Lucio could tell he was furious, but it was not his way to let others have the satisfaction of seeing it. Instead he tugged at his laces and laughed. ‘The biggest Communist pisspot and freeloader this side of Rome, and I had to make him family.'

‘Lucia's tits, I'm a Communist now, am I? You want to work your fingers to the bone to widen the Don's arse? Be my guest.' His grandfather ran his tongue under his bottom lip. Yellow spittle had crusted at the corners of his mouth. ‘Who was the freeloader when your father stole my vines from me, eh? Five generations of Raimondi worked the Vigna Alba and that son-of-a-bitch snatched it from me in a single game of scopa.
Onorati,
you call yourselves? Beh! Any honourable man would have offered me the chance to win back my land.'

‘It's the Church's land, old man. Your family were only given the right to work it, remember? And my father didn't make the bet. Raimondi Gold did that for you.' His father's voice was dangerously calm. ‘You pissed away your grapes. That's what galls you so much, face it.'

Nonno Raimondi lowered his chin and smirked at the grate. ‘And what galls you is that you'll never be certain, will you?'

His father sighed. ‘Certain of what?'

‘Whether she married you for love or for the land!'

At that, their eyes darted as one to his mother, standing by the open credenza in the kitchen. She shook her head tiredly at his grandfather, but she would not meet his father's gaze. They were silent, apart from the soft wheeze of Nonno Raimondi's lungs.

It was an old, shameful grievance, the loss of the Vigna Alba to the Onorati, one that always reared its head at harvest time. But his grandfather had never pushed the argument so far before, had never sunk so low as to toss the slops of washhouse chitchat before his mother just to spite his father. The whole village knew that only the grapes of the Vigna Alba produced the vinacce essential to Raimondi Gold. The whole village knew that only Nonno Raimondi had the exact recipe for the grappa, passed down and guarded as it was by the eldest Raimondi heir for over two centuries. The whole village knew that in marrying Aldo Onorati, Letia Raimondi had got the vines back for her father. Everybody saw this — except perhaps his father, who didn't want to admit it. Lucio realised that Nonno Raimondi had played his trump card.

His grandfather pulled a bottle from his pocket and drained the last of it. He tossed the empty bottle in the grate without satisfaction. Lucio could see he would need to stay up very late that night to bring him home from the osteria.

‘Come here, boy,' Nonno Raimondi grumbled. With a trembling hand he reached for a bunch of grapes from the remaining basket and held them along the length of his wrist. He blew on the fruit, twisting the cluster to consider their colour and shape, before laying them in Lucio's hands. ‘Here. Give these to your mother.'

Nonno Raimondi's eyes were fixed on his father, who was putting on his jacket and kicking his kit bag to the door with one foot. As he threaded his arms in his sleeves, he looked up at Lucio with a face grey as stone. Outside, the clip of boots sounded on the cobbles. A man's voice called out. It was Urso. Lucio still held the fruit, plump and heavy in his hand. He hoped his mother might provide a clue, but she was staring through the window, her back to them, and she would not turn around. A loose grape fell from the bunch and rolled across the ashy floor towards the hearth. He felt a sense of panic at the loss of it, as if he was a shepherd seeing a stray animal separated from the flock. He glanced again at his father, at Vittorio holding the basket bound for Father Ruggiero, at his grandfather rattling the poker in the grate. He set the fruit in the centre of the kitchen table and stepped away from it.

The voice in the alley called again. His father slung his bag over one shoulder and paused at the door. He angled his head in the direction of the credenza and said something, but it was so quiet that Lucio wondered whether his mother could have heard, even if she'd wanted to. She didn't move from the window. Lucio heard the echo of boots in the stairwell. His mother's breath fogged the pane.

When he stood beside her, he could see Urso in the alley, clasping hands with his father. He had the urge to call out, to rattle the glass, but he felt as impotent as he had on the day of the hunt. He watched the two men leave, but only the butcher glanced back, raising the palm of one vast hand up to the window. Perhaps it was the shaft of morning light that made Urso squint, as if he was focused not on them but somewhere far beyond; perhaps it was the way his hand lingered in that lazy salute, or the momentary uncertainty of his step — but in that instant Lucio knew he would never see the butcher again.

Leyton
1949

Aunty Bea was poking a spoon into the pot, mashing the last life out of the tea, her silence deafening and indignant, as always. Connie let her fork idle like a pendulum over her tea plate and listened to the sounds of her aunt and uncle eating, cutlery scraping on plates, the exhausting perkiness of the clock on the mantel, the monotonous score of her own existence. She had tried to forget the image of the dead cat on the Italian's back, but it had bled into her thoughts, tingeing her moods subconsciously, the way ominous, half-remembered dreams did. She saw again the carcass hanging in his fist, a reminder that all of life hung on little more than a sinuous thread.