Читать книгу Roman Daze - Brontè Dee Jackson - Страница 9

Francesca and Rita are our neighbours. Were our neighbours. Today is a sad day, as it is the first day without them. They moved out yesterday, after renting here for fifty years. It is the end of an era and everyone in the whole apartment block is sad.

Francesca moved here with her parents when she was nine. Her playmates are still mostly living here too. Their parents all knew each other, and she and her playmates stayed here even after they were married, with their husbands and wives. They had their own children, who are now also friends.

Antonio and Gianni played together as small boys. Antonio still lives in the same apartment underneath us and has lived to see Gianni marry Antonella, who became Francesca’s best friend. Marianna’s mother and Francesca’s mother were best friends when Marianna and Francesca were children. Marianna helped Francesca nurse her dying husband, who introduced Marianna to hers.

We live in a tightly knit neighbourhood. It is unwise to get annoyed at anyone, as they are usually related to someone you know quite well or depend on: the pharmacist, the mechanic, the owner of the local trattoria (Antonio’s brother owns ours). Many people live within walking distance of where they grew up and where their extended family lives. The inhabitants of this suburb are polite to, though a little wary of, outsiders. They are fiercely proud and protective of their suburb, and find it a little unusual that anyone would voluntarily come to live here. For generations the traffic has been going the other way.

It probably explains why I get stared at a lot. If I lived in one of the suburbs that are popular with foreigners I wouldn’t get a sideways glance, but here people have the look of ‘but why would you choose to live here, with us?!’ It explains partly why, when your neighbours do get to know you, they embrace you with the fierceness of a mother about to be separated from her firstborn. In fact, you can’t get away from them ever again.

We have a well-kept, shady garden area as part of the apartment complex we live in. Our apartment complex is not public housing but was built for employees of the post office just up the road. Marianna is one of the only post office employees that still lives here. The communal area consists of a rather large space surrounded by trees and grass, shaped by hedges and containing three separate sitting areas, complete with benches. It is astounding to have this kind of facility in Rome. Most apartment blocks are built one right up against the other, with barely a wall between them. The last one I lived in I didn’t need an alarm clock – the man on the other side of the wall had one and it always went off at the time I needed to get up.

I was overjoyed when I first saw the garden. I imagined myself sitting there at any time of the day, relaxing in my own bit of green space. But the reality is I go there stealthily. First I scout from my balcony to see if anyone is sitting in it, then I run there as quickly as possible to avoid being spotted by anyone else. I sit in the part farthest away from the buildings and bury my head in a book, scowl or close my eyes and chant if anyone comes close.

This amount of preparation and strategic planning is necessary. I discovered early on that sitting there by myself was a beacon for anyone else in the apartment block to come down and join me. Apparently, what I am communicating by sitting by myself in the garden is, ‘Help! I am lonely and would like some company, please come and talk to me.’

Francesca often watched me when I was in the garden, waving and smoking from her balcony. She folds boxes for a living and is also a sarta (dressmaker). The boxes are the staple part of her income in a country where there are no unemployment benefits or pensions for widows. Her husband knew the man she folds boxes for. Out of charity, the work was passed on to her after her husband’s death. She is a woman who always manages to look elegant, from her fingernails to her hair. She has a rasping cough, never walks anywhere and has laughter always on her lips. She is a chain-smoker, so there is always a cigarette on her lips as well. The entire house smells of smoke. She is always at home, as is her twenty-five year old daughter, Rita. Rita is tiny, like most Italian women at that age, and could pass for fifteen. She is beautiful and has the dark features of her Arabic father.

As I often worked from home, Francesca was always coaxing me over for a coffee or a chat. It was a welcome relief for me, from a day spent concentrating in front of a computer. Nothing much happened in their lives from one day to the next, or in mine, so our conversations went like this:

Francesca: Well then, what have you got to tell me?

Me: Well, nothing much.

Francesca: Is everything okay?

Me: Yes. Is everything okay with you?

Francesca: Yes. Well that’s good then. It is better that way. What more can one ask for?

Smoke, smoke, sip, sip.

Francesca: Yesterday I ate [name of dish] for dinner.

Me: Did you? I had [name of dish].

Francesca: Yes, I cooked it in [method of cooking] way.

Me: Well I always cook it in [method of cooking] way. How was it done in [your method of cooking] way?

Francesca: Well, you know, okay I suppose. It was missing [ingredient]. Next time I will put in more [ingredient].

Me: Ah yes, [ingredient] is often missing. Apart from that is everything okay?

Francesca: Yes. With you?

Me: Yes.

Francesca: Well we can’t ask for more then, can we?

Smoke, smoke.

Francesca: More coffee?

What first attracted me to Francesca was that she would often ring my doorbell wearing only her pyjamas. At midday. I would usually still be wearing mine, and the relief to find someone else that not only thought that was okay, but that it was okay to go calling in them, was enormous. Sometimes Rita would poke her head out of their door and she would be wearing only her pyjamas too. Sometimes we would spend quite a bit of time chatting together from our doorways, drinking coffee, in our pyjamas. Francesca would always invite me in, but I refused to cross the threshold of my house wearing only my pyjamas. I find it hard enough to get dressed some days as it is. This never stopped Francesca though, or Rita, who would regularly come visiting in their pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. It was a private, female world we had on the top floor of our apartment block, where we knew no-one would ever appear unless we knew about it first.

I first met Francesca and Rita a few months after my husband and I had moved in, during a violent rainstorm. Water had come streaming down the stairs from the roof and was forming a small lake in the entrance hall of our apartment. Both my husband and I stood helplessly in the corridor outside our apartment, watching the flow and not knowing what to do. Next thing I knew, two women had run out of their apartment and were in mine, mopping the floor and laying towels on the stairs while shouting for the man downstairs to come and unblock the drains on the roof. They mopped and sopped and then went back into their apartment, leaving my husband and I staring at each other and wondering what we would have done without them. We had met them once before.

* * *

Yesterday, we helped Francesca and Rita pack and said goodbye to them as they drove their car out of the compound one last time. We were all crying, and smoking. Many of the residents had come out to say goodbye, and for each hug there would be fresh tears and a fresh cigarette. Francesca did not want to go. The landlord wanted to sell the property and had offered her a substantial amount of money to move, two years before her lease was up. It was more than she could hope to earn in a year. She was entitled to stay in the apartment, even if it sold, for another two years but then she could be given notice without any compensation. So Francesca had chosen a new rental place in a seaside town about an hour south of Rome. She would be close to her brother, who also lived there. She could not afford to rent in Rome any longer. With the compensation she could afford to furnish the new rental place, and the furniture would be hers and not the landlord’s.

Although I often declined Francesca’s daily invitations over the years, it was comforting to know she was there. If I ever wanted company, a cigarette, an egg or to know that someone would hear me scream, she was there. I had lived some hard and sad times in this apartment and spent a lot of time alone as a result.

I rarely spoke that much when I visited, as I usually found it a stretch speaking Italian, let alone the Roman dialect that she spoke. I rarely offered much of myself, and gained a lot from being with her. Hanging out the washing together on the roof, talking about whether it would rain or not that day, whether the supermarket was open, what kind of tomatoes were in season, what I was going to eat for dinner, gave me a well-needed sense of normality. Having a two-minute connection with someone living in the same space and time as me was grounding, and somehow kept me connected to life at a simple and basic level. I felt not alone.

I wasn’t really on my own; I had my husband, I had friends. But in day-today living, Francesca made me feel not on my own. I understood then how all the women in the palazzo got on with things. Antonella, who worked two jobs and never had money for luxuries, such as annual holidays. Marianna, whose husband left her after childbirth nine months after they were married, twenty-five years ago. Rita, Francesca’s daughter, who could not find work. And Francesca, whose husband died after a few short years of marriage, who eked out a living and who was never going to be able to afford her own home. They were always together, the women of this palazzo. Those daily visits of minutes at a time made sure none of them felt on their own.

In the weeks leading up to their departure we spent most evenings with them, eating with them, going over for a chat or just sitting together. One evening, Rita read out a letter which was addressed to my husband and I. In the letter, she told us that the thought of leaving her home where she was born and where she had nursed her father until his death, had been continually traumatic and at times paralysing over the past few months, but that throughout it all she had not felt alone because of us. She told us, through her poetic writing, that just our presence across the hallway, our hellos and other greetings, and our smiles, had helped ease the burden for her and that she was grateful.

* * *

We didn’t see Marianna the day that Francesca and Rita left. We saw her the next day as we were driving our car into the compound. Her face was haggard with grief and when she saw us she lurched towards us, almost slamming herself onto the windscreen, like a leaf in a tornado. Luckily, my husband had seen her and wound down the window in anticipation, so she did not have to bang on the glass with her fist.

‘They’ve gone, they’ve gone!’ she bellowed. ‘It is the end of an era! It is not just them, it’s the end of an era. Our mothers were friends; they knew each other. Who is left to remember my mother now? We left these apartments as brides, both of us, and returned as wives. It’s a piece of our history that has gone. That bastard that kicked them out, he’s a criminal without a heart! It’s a piece of our shared history that has gone!’ I didn’t get the rest as she subsided into tears, leaning on our car door.

They call Rome ‘The Eternal City’. It refers to the fact that it is timeless, changeless, always there. It has indeed, in many ways, resisted much of the change that has occurred in other post-industrial, European capital cities. Maybe that’s why, when it comes, it is such a shock and so hard to adjust to. It seems that when things change in The Eternal City, they do so in a big way.