The Night Falling (30 page)

‘It was just over a year ago now, and all this … violence was just beginning – rumours and whispers. The harvest was a disaster – farmers were torching their own crops because the insurance money was worth more than the wheat!
This
is what the peasants don’t see!’ Leandro thumps one fist into the opposite palm. ‘If they drive us out of business, there’ll be nobody to pay them whatsoever! But the workers were starving, and they had the
right
to work – that’s what changed after the war. They believed they had the right, and
masserie
that refused to hire were attacked. The Girardi farm had been raided, stolen from. Then the men came and worked Girardi’s fallow fields and demanded pay, and Girardi says he saw amongst them the face of at least one man who’d been in a raiding party. And so he hit back. He filled the farmhouse with his neighbours, and with his own guards and
annaroli
. They all brought their guns. And when the workers came at the end of the next day, to return the tools, and Nettis – the man who spoke for them – asked to be paid … they opened fire.’

One of the dogs out in the
aia
barks, and there’s the sudden stutter of wings as pigeons in the courtyard launch up in fright. Clare has a hollow feeling beneath her ribs.

‘They opened fire on unarmed men?’ she says. Leandro nods heavily.

‘A shameful thing, but Girardi would say he was driven to it. It was a situation with no resolution … no good outcome.’

‘How many men were … killed?’

‘Six. Only six. Which is miraculous, really. Many, many more were injured. They fled on foot, and the guards chased after them on horseback. The youngest to die was sixteen; the oldest seventy. It was an evil day. A sad day for this country.’

‘And Ettore was there? He was one of the workers?’

‘He was there.’ Leandro nods again. ‘He wasn’t injured, but he lost friends. He lost his friend Davide, who was his sister’s lover – Paola’s lover. They’d have wed if they’d had any idea whether or not her husband was still alive. But New York swallowed him up.’

‘And the men who did it? The men who opened fire?’

‘Nobody knows for sure who was inside the
masseria
, except those that were there. Some have been arrested, some are on the run. Some were lynched by the
braccianti
in vendetta. Then men from the lynch mobs were arrested …’

‘The peasants know who was there?’

‘They think they know. They thought they knew well enough to seek revenge. Ludo Manzo knows; I’m sure he was there. I can see him itching to say something about it to me, in an offhand way, as he loves to do, but he’s not wholly sure where my loyalties lie, you see. Not completely sure. I pay him handsomely to keep this place running but he still sees a
cafone
when he looks at me. He hasn’t the wit to realise that I own him now. Him and his son. There are so many scores to be settled here, Mrs Kingsley. We’ll be picking away at this mess for generations.’

Clare turns to look out at the perfect blue sky and the sunlight glaring on the high white walls. She half expects to see some sign of the violence, like smoke in the sky. She half expects to feel the ground shudder with the ponderous footsteps of sorrow, hatred, death.

‘I should be afraid to be here. I was afraid, after what I saw in Gioia,’ she says softly.

‘And you aren’t now?’

‘I don’t know why not. I feel powerless, I feel weak. But not afraid. Not for myself, at any rate. Perhaps that’s a surrender of some kind.’

‘You’re safe inside these walls, Mrs Kingsley.’

‘Marcie’s planning a party. We’re to drink, and dance, and be merry.’

‘Marcie is frightened. I shield her from what’s happening here as much as I can, and she chooses not to look at the rest. All I want is her happiness. I’m helpless, Mrs Kingsley. Helpless. She has my heart – every last part of it. I’m not blind – I know she married a rich man first, and Leandro Cardetta second. But I married for love.’ He smiles wistfully. ‘Like a fool.’

‘Then why don’t you take her and go? Go until this has passed? Go somewhere safe!’

‘No man and no circumstance will take this from me, Mrs Kingsley. I may hate this place, I may hate its people – those who’ve done nothing to improve themselves for ten generations; those who scorn the poor from positions of ease that they’ve done nothing to earn – I may hate it all, but I belong to it. There’s nowhere else I belong. Nothing I’ve done would have any meaning elsewhere.’

‘And Marcie?’ says Clare, bewildered. ‘What of where she belongs?’

‘Marcie belongs at my side,’ says Leandro intransigently.

‘How can it end, a war like this? How can it ever end?’ she says. Leandro shrugs.

‘We may be about to find out, Mrs Kingsley.’

Boyd is back at his desk, stooped and miserable, but since all his drawings are still in the sitting room he’s stooped over nothing. Pencil shavings and his paring knife, and the slotted shadows falling from the window. This time he doesn’t look up when Clare comes in behind him. He runs his thumbnail along a crack in the wood, gouging out a twisted worm of the dust and dirt of ages.

‘He’s calmed down now,’ says Clare, staying where she is by the door. For some reason she can’t go any closer, she can’t touch him. He doesn’t seem like anyone she knows.
Your husband and I have a complicated past
. ‘He knows you weren’t trying to insult him.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ Boyd’s voice is strangely hollow, hopeless. Clare has the sudden urge to shake him. Shake something out of him. ‘But I’ll have to start again. It could take weeks.
Weeks
, Clare.’

‘He told me he might not bother.’

‘He what?’ Boyd turns to her; his cheeks are mottled, his thin hair limp in the heat.

‘With all the trouble in Gioia, he said he might postpone the project. He said we might be able to go soon,’ says Clare, and wonders what Boyd might make of her dispassion. But his face lights up, breaking into radiant hope.

‘Oh, I hope so! That’s wonderful, Clare …’ He blinks rapidly, casts his eyes around the room and smiles. ‘If only I’d known at the start that all I had to do was produce a design he
didn’t
like … We could have gone weeks ago.’

‘Perhaps we should wait to see what he decides before we start packing,’ she says coolly. ‘He’s the boss, after all. In more ways than one, it would seem.’ Boyd looks crestfallen.

‘Clare, what is it? What’s wrong? There’s a distance between us that was never there before—’

‘Is there? Wasn’t it?’

‘Clare, please – talk to me!’ he says, still wretched and hunched at his desk. ‘Please don’t withdraw from me. I … I need you so terribly much.’ The sight of him is somehow unbearable – she wants to pity him but even that urge makes her restive, irritable. He’s like the ant bites around her ankles that she wants to scratch. She can’t explain the feeling; she doesn’t know if it’s him causing it, or if it’s taking her over of its own accord.

‘I’ve nothing to say. Really,’ she says quietly. She leaves him there, shutting the door behind her and gripping the handle for a moment, as if she might keep him inside that way, away from her.

Some nights Clare leaves her husband sleeping to slip through the dark hallways to Ettore’s room, letting fear burn out the somnolence of all the sleep she’s missing. The risk is huge, but so is the reward, the feeling she has with Ettore that everything – the world, her life, herself,
everything
– is better, and will be well. They are quiet during these night-time meetings; there are few words. She doesn’t think about what she will say if Boyd is awake when she returns to their room. She doesn’t think about what she will say if she encounters anybody on the way there, or on the way back. She doesn’t think of them at all, and usually she sees nobody. So she’s wholly unprepared on the one occasion she nearly runs into Pip, coming up from the kitchen with a jug of water, his bare feet slapping gently on the stone stairs. Clare presses herself into a dark doorway and hopes he won’t hear her heart thudding. His face is in shadow, his hair, wild with sleep, gives him a strange silhouette. When his door clicks shut she has to wait for two minutes, three, four, before she trusts her legs to carry her; before she’s sure that he, the one other person she loves, isn’t going to re-emerge. And then the thought intrudes on her again, that these two people she loves are from different planets, and she can never have them both. It stings like the cut of a cold, sharp blade. But she carries on to Ettore’s room.

Another time, she pauses at the foot of the stairs that lead up to Marcie and Leandro’s room on the third floor. Their voices drift down to her and stop her in her tracks, first with the fear of discovery, then with the irresistible thrill of trespass, of watching unseen. Muffled words, stifled volume, but it’s unmistakably a bitter argument; one with its own energy and momentum, that rises and falls in waves as it gets the better of them and then is forcibly hushed. The hairs stand up along Clare’s arms. She doesn’t want to listen but she does, just for a few seconds. She hears Leandro say:

‘Marcie! I’ve told you, it’s impossible.’

‘No! What’s impossible is that you can expect me to stay here in this godforsaken desert for weeks on end without going
completely
insane
!’ Marcie replies. Her voice is frayed, like Clare has never heard it before; so ragged with feeling that the words are distorted.

‘What would you have me do? Well?’ Leandro barks. Then there’s something like a wail from Marcie, a thin sound, drenched in misery, almost childlike. With a shiver, Clare moves away, and doesn’t hear anything else.

Many days pass like this – days of held breath and waiting, at once transient and ponderous. Sometimes Clare and Ettore meet far out in a distant field where the wheat has been cut and the stubble burnt, and nothing more will be done until ploughing in the early weeks of autumn. One day they hunker behind a wall with a view of the blackened ground, beneath a sky like scalding milk; there’s the tired cheep of crickets and the far-off whistle of a kite, and the prickle of smoke in the air. Ettore sits with his back to the wall and his square, bony knees drawn up; Clare curls at his side, leaning into him, and he holds her there with one hand at the back of her neck and the other reaching across to clasp her upper arm in a grip that almost hurts. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s doing it; he is distant, more preoccupied than ever. His thoughts, in their silences, slide away to things she can’t know. He no longer needs the crutch to walk; he has a limp, lessening all the time.

‘Tell me about Livia. What was she like?’ she says. The name makes Ettore breathe in sharply. He blinks, turning his head to look away across the field.

‘What was she like? She was …’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s hard to describe her, when it should be easy. It’s like talking about a dream.’

‘Try. I’d like to know.’

‘She was young, younger than me. Full of smiles, even when life was bloody. She was like Pino in that way – such a good heart, nothing could crush it. You know? Do you know anybody like that?’

‘No,’ says Clare truthfully.

‘She had dark hair, dark eyes; not like yours. She had this musical way of talking … I always loved to hear her talk, the sound of her voice. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t afraid to be hungry, to go without. She wasn’t afraid of what anybody said. She was only afraid …’ He pauses, swallows laboriously. ‘She was only afraid at the end. After … after she was attacked. I think she was afraid to die. I think she knew she was going to die, and was afraid. I wish I hadn’t seen her fear.’

‘I’m so sorry, Ettore. I’m sure … I’m sure she was glad you were with her. It must have been so hard, but I’m sure she was glad. I would be.’

‘At the end she barely knew me.’ Ettore curls his hand around her head and pulls it tighter to his chest, and Clare isn’t sure if this is just a reflex, an instinctive reaction to thoughts of the girl he lost. ‘She … she had a terrible fever. She hardly knew me.’

‘You’ve suffered such loss. You and Paola. Your uncle … Leandro told me that she lost her husband; that he disappeared to America, and then her lover was also killed. Did she love him very much?’

‘Yes. As much as I loved Livia, I think. But she’s … braver than me. Stronger than me. She doesn’t let it show. Is that wrong, do you think? Shouldn’t a man be the stronger one?’

‘No. Not always. I only met her so briefly but that was how she seemed to me – strong. Like she was wearing armour. Perhaps a person can be … too hard.’

‘Not here. You can’t be too hard here. You have to be hard.’

‘And she has her son, of course. She has part of her lost lover in him, something to love and care for, and distract her from her pain.’

‘Yes, that’s true. Many women are waiting – waiting to hear from their husbands or fathers or brothers who have gone to America. Perhaps they still write, perhaps they still send money, perhaps not. Still, they wait. Not Paola. She gave her husband two years, after he went there. Two years to send her a letter, or some sign he was still alive, and if he was still alive, that he still wanted her. Nothing came. So she said to me, “Life is short,” and she let herself love another. She heals herself; she doesn’t … let herself sink. I can’t seem to stop.’

‘It’s only been half a year since you lost her,’ says Clare gently. She sits up, away from him, and Ettore turns to look at her. He seems tired and vulnerable, like there’s no fight left in him, and she wishes she knew a way to sustain him.

She looks away across the burnt land, across the parched remains of wheat stalks; it’s a devastated landscape, empty as a broken heart.

‘I’m starting to see how strong you have to be to survive here. Why you need to be strong. Working for men like that overseer, Ludo Manzo …’ She shakes her head. ‘I saw him … I saw him doing something terrible to a man. Making him graze from the ground like a sheep.’

‘Ludo Manzo likes to humiliate people. Young boys especially, but anybody he can.’ Ettore’s voice turns hard. ‘Any excuse … he will use
any
excuse to punish a man.’